Kingdom of Shadow and Light (Fever) Page 8

  Somehow, when Mom and Dad decamped to Dublin years ago, I never got around to wondering what they did with our house. I certainly never thought they might have sold it—sacrilege! In my mind, the historic Lane manor remained untouched by time, sitting there, ready and waiting for the day we decided to go back for a visit. And of course, we would, at some point, right? Things would return to normal, and we’d want to take a walk down memory Lane—pun intended.

  They hadn’t sold it. They’d done worse. If they’d sold it, at least someone else would have been taking care of it. As it was, Nature was owner and occupant and, in the Deep South, she’s a voracious bitch.

  My folks battened the hatches and walked away. Abandoned Casa Lane. Closed the pool, shuttered the windows, locked the doors, and left.

  Kudzu—known as the vine that ate the south for good reason; it grows as much as a foot a day—encapsulates the sugar pines, creating a forty-foot wall of cloaked green blobs that spans the entire perimeter of our two-acre yard. What neighbors? I can’t see a thing beyond the towering hedge.

  Impenetrable curtains of wisteria drape the pool house, turning the one-bed, one-bath studio into a purple-and-green hump that lurks menacingly on the south side of the pool. Shingles are missing from our roof, and paint is peeling from our lovely corniced trim. Green algae, from the eternal high humidity in Georgia, stains the white frames of our windows, railings, and doors. The place looks positively derelict. Waist-high thistle and milkweeds fill the yard. I can’t even see the pool.

  I press a hand to my heart, dismayed.

  This is my beloved home. My sunny kingdom across the sea where nothing ever changes and, despite the pervasive, lushly decaying southern clime, we Lanes always beat back the elements with panache, vigor, and a smile.

  This is my happy place—obliterated by the relentless march of time. Forgotten. Fallen to disrepair. Never to be mine again. One more thing taken from me. Now when I reflect on my childhood home, this is what I’ll see. Abandonment and neglect.

  It’s an affront to my senses, an insult to my history, a slight against the good Lane name. What do the neighbors think of us for letting our home decay to such an egregious degree? We’re right off Main Street, for heaven’s sake! Our yard is featured in the annual Christmas Tour. I form a vision in my mind and erase the offensive one, restoring the house and lawn to its glory, even going so far as to fill the pool and turn on the fountains, because Mom is always the happiest when the pool is sparkling in the sun, and Alina and I are home with friends and she’s baking one of her—

  Mom. Abducted by the Fae. Alina. Dead. Again. What the hell am I doing?

  I scan the lovely view, disgusted with myself. I can’t believe I actually wondered what the neighbors might think. Being in Ashford regressed me. How swiftly I capitulated to longing for a past that was gone and would never be again, casually, selfishly using the power of a Fae queen to re-create it.

  And for what?

  To make myself feel better.

  Which is precisely what the Fae are infamous for: escaping into illusion to make their existence more tolerable.

  No longer will I decorate my world, accessorizing the rotten parts, the better to conceal them. Things are what they are. And aren’t what they aren’t. Illusion will define neither my rule nor my legacy.

  Squaring my shoulders, I restore my home to its appalling, dilapidated state (I even knock off a few more shingles and make the kudzu several feet thicker just to emphasize my point) then stand several long moments, drinking deeply of reality, before sifting back to the bookstore.

  * * *

  When I materialize in the rear of Barrons Books & Baubles, Barrons is reclining on the chesterfield in front of a softly hissing gas fire. He saturates every atom of air in the seating cozy, from polished hardwood floor to eighteen-foot ceiling with carnal, electrifying presence, which tells me he fed, and well. We stare at each other a charged moment, wordlessly acknowledging there’s no time for us, but when there is, we’ll definitely be taking advantage of it. Feeling his arms around me, his body against mine, takes me to a sacred place. In the meantime, just looking at him again is drug enough for me. Some see him as barbaric, stamped by genes too primitive to ever be handsome, possessed of a decidedly autocratic, even despotic demeanor, but to me he’s grace in motion, the finest of beasts and men.

  “What were you doing in Ashford?”

  “How do you know I was?” Although I wear his brand, I’m fairly certain the Nine haven’t managed to eradicate the IFPs, or interdimensional Faery potholes, while I was absent, and their presence on our world skews his ability to precisely pinpoint me.

  “Pollen, sunshine, wisteria. A whiff of algae and chlorine.”

  Of course. He can probably smell the stench of nostalgia on me, too, as keen as his beastly senses are. “I was thinking about home and ended up there by accident.”

  “Work on that.”

  “Agreed.” Vanishing inadvertently in the midst of a showdown with the Fae could prove disastrous. He’d changed clothes while he was out. Customarily clad in impeccable, expensive Italian suits, Barrons is slumming in faded jeans, a black T-shirt, and black boots. “Are we going down into the sewers again?” I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen him in anything but expensive suits (skin excepted), and each time, we’d ended up doing something disgusting or disturbingly dangerous, usually both.

  “Fae court. Sewers.” His shrug makes it plain he sees no difference. “What’s your plan, Ms. Lane?” He uses the same aloof, challenging tone he employed during our earliest weeks together, a rebuffing of intimacy, a resurrection of distance and formality.

  There’s a time it would have rankled, but I’ve come to understand his methods and appreciate them. He does nothing without reason. Calling me Ms. Lane instead of Mac instantly jammed a steel rod up my spine, squared my shoulders, and hardened my attitude. It kicked me back to those days when I’d been determined to prove him wrong about everything he thought of me, and, right now, I needed to do the same with the Fae. They thought they could take from me? They thought they could openly declare war?

  It was time for them to pay the piper. I would kick them so hard in the teeth they would never bare them at me again. “Kat filled me in on what happened at the Fae club, Elyreum, and how viciously the Winter Court preyed on our city while I was gone. They’re also the ones that tried the hardest and most inventively to kill us while we were in Faery. I have no doubt Winter took my mother to force me to return so they can try to kill me again.”

  He stretches his arms along the back of the sofa, muscle and tattoo rippling. “Assumption.”

  “Got something better?”

  “Ryodan said the woman leading Winter had nearly completed her transformation into a princess the night Dani killed a recently transformed Fae prince. That was months ago.”

  His point: She’d be fully a princess by now. And unlike me, fully Fae. “Dani was still racking up Fae kills, despite my edict, eh?” Kat hadn’t told me that part.

  “It was necessary.”

  I bite my lip and smile. Kat protected Dani through omission. Barrons just openly defended her. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard him defend anyone. Like Lor, he has a soft spot for the fiery, fearless, loyal-to-the-grave-and-beyond hellion. Good. Though not my blood sister, she’s my heart-sister, my family, and everyone in my life should have a soft spot for her.

  Barrons studies me through narrowed eyes. “He would have killed her otherwise.”

  “Uh-huh.” I’m still smiling. And it’s pissing him off. He’s lived millennia untold in the midst of humanity, holding himself rigidly apart, never connecting, remaining a blank, emotionless enigma to everyone around him for eons, yet now there’s a woman who knows him well enough to spot the nuances of emotion he meticulously conceals. Ah, yes, it chafes, and I’m not above enjoying it. It takes a lot to get under Barrons’s skin. I’m good at it.

  Midnight eyes narrow further, and crimson sparks flicker to life. “Your plan, Ms. Lane?”

  My smile turns glacial as I let rage chill my blood to ice. “We burn Winter the fuck down.” If they’ve harmed her, I’ll burn the entirety of Faery the fuck down. But I strongly doubt they have. Fae aren’t stupid. Abducting my mother is a play for power. They want me to come to them while they hold a trump card, and they know if they harm one hair on her head, and I arrive to see it, I’ll use every queenly power I have to obliterate their species, which means Mom is safe for now. Once they send word of what they’ve done and demand I meet them, her clock will begin to run, encouraging me not to delay. Until their message comes in whatever form it does, we have time.

  “And if you’re wrong and the Winter Court didn’t take your mother?”

  “Then it’s payback for attacking Dani and preying on Dublin while I was gone, and a message to whichever court did take her,” I say without hesitation. “They’re either on my side, by my side, or in my fucking way. It’s time to make that clear.”

  Barrons says nothing. There’s no faint lift at the corner of his mouth, no gleam in his eye that tells me he concurs with my plan.

  “What?” I say irritably. Why isn’t he backing me? Why aren’t his dark eyes alight with anticipation at the thought of a war long overdue? “I can tell you want to say something. Just bloody say it.”

  “You’re their queen.”

  “Precisely my point. It’s time they accept that.”

  Another long silence.

  “Elucidate,” I grit.

  “You’re behaving as if you’re queen of the humans.”

  I toss myself down on the chesterfield across from him and drum my fingers on the tufted arm, punctuating my words. “They. Took. My. Mother.”

  He leans forward, elbows on his knees, templing his fingers. “You say. Maybe. Maybe not. Regardless, they’re your subjects now. The True Magic was passed to you. You pledged to guide them. If you want them to accept you as their queen, you must act like their queen.” A weighted pause lends emphasis to his next words, “Not your mother’s.”

  “You expect me to choose the Fae over my mother?” I explode.

  Again, he says nothing.

  I fist my hands and stare daggers at him and contemplate testing a few of my newfound runes on him. Why isn’t he saddling up to ride hell-bent-for-leather at my side? He’ll rise to Dani’s defense in a heartbeat but betray me when all I’m after is justifiable revenge for—

  I sigh, close my eyes and rub them. “Justifiable” and “revenge” are two dangerous words to fuse into a single bomb. Not that there’s never such a thing, but those cases are exceedingly rare. I’d vowed to wield logic over emotion, yet I’d returned from Ashford with a single priority: protect my family. I’d returned in the grip of a rage fever, ready to reduce Winter to a wasteland.

  My heart wants war.

  My head knows better, as Barrons just reminded me.

  There’s so much more at stake here than my mother, than either of my parents, than any one or two or even three dozen people I love. No less than the future of both Fae and Mortal worlds rests in my hands. I have to persuade them to peacefully co-exist, or figure out how to wield the Song of Making and keep them permanently apart. I’d been thinking like a human, a daughter, not queen of the Fae at all.

  So…back to my original conundrum: How to govern savages without savagery?

  “I have learned that neither kindness nor cruelty, by themselves, independent of each other, creates any effect beyond themselves, and I have learned that the two combined, together, are the teaching emotion,” Barrons murmurs.

  I open my eyes, startled. That pretty much sums up our Voice lessons. And my humiliating, lunch-spewing introduction to pages torn from the Sinsar Dubh. And our first “hunting trip” together, when he left me hanging by my hair, suspended by the Gray Man’s talons, while pedantically—and at great length—lecturing me on the techniques of a proper kill. “Did you just explain how you trained me? You never explain anything.”

  “Zoo Story. Edward Albee.”

  Kindness and cruelty. He’ll get that in bed next time.

  Dark laughter rolls. “Bring it on.”

  I snort. The day Aoibheal passed the True Magic of the Fae to me is scarred into the flesh of my brain, seared with painful permanence into my bones. It’s the day I finally escaped my psychotic hitchhiker, the day I curled on the floor of my shower and wept myself to a dry husk, gutted by the horrific things I’d done in the clutches of the Sinsar Dubh.

  It’s also the day I sought the source of my power and ended up on another world, with an ancient, alien presence that felt so vast and wise, gentle and pure, I decided the Fae couldn’t possibly have always been monsters while still managing to attract the support of such a sage, benevolent being. I’d searched my files for clues about their origin, who they’d been before they’d become soulless immortals, with no luck.

  What have you come for? the bodiless voice had demanded.

  The True Magic of the Fae, I said strongly.

  What will you do with it?

  My answer was instant and effortless. Protect and guide.

  How will you achieve it?

  With wisdom and grace.

  I sigh. “They might be savages, but they’re my savages. I accepted them.”

  He lifts a brow. “As I recall, argued for them. Permitted an ancient being to slip inside your soul and analyze the purity of your motives. Proved you meant it. But you could always renege on that,” he says mildly.

  Mildly from Barrons is never a good thing. It means I’m being such an ass he isn’t even motivated enough to bother rubbing my face in it. He might as well say “bless your heart.”

  The Fae killed my sister, Alina. Nearly destroyed my beloved Dublin, time and again. Wiped out two thirds of the world’s human population and preyed cruelly on millions more. Now they’ve taken my mom.

  And I’m the queen pledged to rule them, prevent their extinction, and guide them with wisdom and grace.

  Those things don’t fit together at all.

  I have to find a way to make them fit.

  I lock gazes with him. Thank you.

  For what? Dark eyes gleam as he milks the moment. He can count on one hand the number of times I’ve thanked him and, believe you me, I made him work for it.

  For pushing me to do better. Try harder. See things more clearly. Jericho.

  He catches his lower lip in his teeth then flashes me one of those rare, full-on smiles that always feel to me as if a white-hot sun just exploded unexpectedly, dazzlingly in a black velvet sky, warming my heart in the darkest of hours. It’s sexy as hell and slays me every time.

  Always. Mac.

  10

  All I really want is deliverance

  LYRYKA

  Mortals had a saying—actually, from what she’d read, mortals had many sayings, most of which were inane—but “you attract more flies with honey than vinegar” was one she might do well to employ the next time the Unseelie prince–hybrid thingie/whatever-the-blue-ice-hell-he-was released her from the hideous, smelly bottle.

  The issue that signified was that he could release her.

  Another issue she wasn’t quite ready to think about, now that her original flask was broken, was that she had two pressing problems. One was merely a living condition—although, admittedly when one lived inside a flask, one’s living conditions were everything—while the other was simultaneously too chilling and oddly thrilling to dwell upon, so she filed those matters away for later.

  For the first time in her life, something had actually happened.

  To her. She’d had an event.

  She’d met an actual being from one of her books.

  Several.

  They existed!

  And if anything that had recently transpired was real, she’d just encountered the High Queen of the Seelie herself. (Although Lyryka had worried she might be able to penetrate her glamour and see what she really was, she’d not found the queen nearly as impressive or half as horrid as she was in books. The Unseelie prince, on the other hand, not only met but exceeded her expectations for masculine sexuality and attractiveness, making her a bit light-headed and perhaps more tart than usual. She was, as far as she knew, the universe’s oldest living virgin.)

  There were beings in existence besides her and her father!

  Although this Unseelie prince was a new thing in her life, her situation was old all the same for, once again, a male had ironclad control of her existence. He’d broken her flask and released her, then, before she’d even had enough time to begin thinking clearly (like about being honey instead of vinegar), he’d stuffed her back into a disgusting replacement.

  She wondered if perhaps that was the only reason she existed—to serve at a male’s beck and call—or if there was once some other reason, perhaps a critical choice that had been hers at birth, stolen from her before she’d even known it was her power to wield. The mere idea that all the stories she’d read were true—and what that implied about the story of her life—was almost too dreadful to contemplate.

  The problem with being honey, not vinegar, was that she was profoundly irritable. She’d been irritable for as long as she could recall. Irritable might be her nature for all she knew. She knew very little about herself. And being in this smelly, sloshy-at-the bottom bottle was making her even more irritable.

  Everything she knew about the world, she’d learned from the Library. Yet she didn’t know if the stories she’d studied to pass the millennia were true or made-up fictions about a made-up reality. She’d only ever seen one person, periodically over three quarters of a million years. Eventually, she’d started to doubt even her father’s existence, wondered if he was a hallucination, a bit of self-deceptive conjuring she’d done to leaven the monotony.