Faefever

by Karen Marie Moning

  And the blasted, idiotic Book was still coming. I began foaming at the mouth, wondering what would happen if it passed within a few feet of me. Would I die? Would my head really explode?

  It stopped.

  I collapsed against the steering wheel, gasping, grateful for the reprieve. My pain wasn’t decreasing but at least it was no longer increasing. I hoped the Book’s next victim would hurry along and tote it off in the other direction, fast. Hardly sidhe-seerlike, but I had problems.

  Barrons kicked open the door, stalked to my side, and yanked me out. “Which way?” he snarled.

  I would have fallen to my knees but he held me up. “I can’t,” I managed to say. “Please. ”

  “Which way?” he repeated.

  I pointed.

  “Which way?”

  He’d Voiced me. I pointed the other way.

  Grabbing a fistful of my hair, he took off, dragging me behind him. Closer, closer still. “You’re going . . . to. . . . kill . . . me,” I cried.

  “You have no idea,” he growled.

  “Please . . . stop!” I was stumbling, blind to everything but the pain.

  He released me abruptly and I fell to my knees, gasping, crying. It hurt so bad. Shrieking in my head. Ice in my veins. Fire under my skin. Why? Why did the Book hurt me? Surely I was no longer that pure and good! I’d been lying to everyone. I’d killed a sidhe-seer—granted, it had been by accident, but it was still innocent blood on my hands, along with all of O’Bannion’s men. I’d been thinking lustful thoughts about men no sane woman would think lustful thoughts about. I’d been carving up other living creatures to eat to steal their . . .

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  Strength. That was what I needed. Unseelie strength and power; the darkness that was kith and kin to the Book, living inside me.

  Where was my purse?

  I fumbled for it through the pain. It was in the car. I’d never make it there. I couldn’t even stand up. I whimpered with the agony of simply trying to raise my head. Where was Barrons? What was he doing? The air was ice. The pavement beneath me frosted, and I felt it move up my knees, and creep over my thighs. An arctic wind whipped at my hair, tore at my clothes. Debris battered me.

  What was Barrons doing? I had to see!

  I sought the sidhe-seer place in my head. The mere existence of the Book inflamed it. It was everything we feared in the Fae. Everything we existed to defend against.

  I inhaled fast and deep, sucking down breaths so icy they burned my lungs. I tried to embrace the pain, and convince myself I was one with it. What had Barrons said? I overmuscled things. I had to relax, quit fighting it. Let it crash over me and ride it like a wave. It was easier said than done, but I managed to push back on my knees, and raise my head.

  In the middle of the cobbled street, thirty-five feet away, was the Beast.

  It looked at me. Hello, Mac, it said.

  It knew my name. How did it know my name? Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

  The shrieking in my head stopped. The pain vanished. The night stilled. I was in the eye of its storm.

  Barrons was five feet from it.

  I wish I could describe it to you. I’m glad I can’t. Because if I could find the words for it, they would be stuck in my head forever, and I don’t want anything about it stuck in my head. Its visage is terrible enough, but once it’s no longer in front of you, your brain can’t quite hold on to it. The way it moves, the way it looks at you. The way it mocks. The way it knows. We see ourselves in other people’s eyes. It’s the nature of the human race; we are a species of reflection, hungry for it in every facet of our existence. Maybe that’s why vampires seem so monstrous to us—they cast no reflection. Parents, if they’re good ones, reflect the wonder of our existence and the success we can become. Friends, well chosen, show us pretty pictures of ourselves, and encourage us to grow into them.

  The Beast shows us the very worst in ourselves and makes us know it’s true.

  Barrons was leaning.

  The Beast became the innocent hardcover.

  Barrons bent to one knee.

  The hardcover became the Sinsar Dubh, with bands and padlocks. It waited. I could feel it waiting.

  Barrons reached.

  For the first time in my life, I prayed. God, no, please, God, no. Don’t let Barrons pick it up and turn evil because if he does, we’re all lost. I’m dead, the walls are down, and the world is a bust.

  I realized, then, that the reason I’d been so conflicted since the night I’d watched Barrons step out of the Unseelie mirror was because, in my heart, I didn’t really believe he was evil. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t think he was good, either, but bad is potential evil. Evil is a lost cause. I hadn’t been willing to trust my heart because I’d been afraid I’d make Alina’s mistakes, and as I was dying, the bodiless narrator of my life would remark, Gee, there goes the second Lane girl, dumber than the first. The most confused we ever get is when we’re trying to convince our heads of something our heart knows is a lie.

  His fingers were inches from the Sinsar Dubh.

  “Barrons!” I shouted.

  He flinched and looked back at me. His eyes were black on black.

  “Jericho,” I cried.

  Barrons shook his head, once, a violent jerk from side to side. Moving like a man with bones fractured in every limb, he pushed himself slowly to his feet, and began backing away.

  Suddenly the Book morphed into the Beast and rose, and rose, and rose until it towered over us, eclipsing the sky.

  Barrons turned then, and ran.

  The pain was back, crushing, crucifying. The night turned cold and life-sucking, and the wind returned, screaming with the voices of the unavenged dead.

  I felt myself scooped up.

  I flung my arms around Barrons’ neck and held on as he ran.

  At four o’clock in the morning, we were sitting in front of a fire in the bookstore, in the rear conversation area, behind bookcases where no passersby might see us, not that any were expected at four o’clock in the morning on the edge of a Dark Zone.

  I was snuggled in a nest of blankets, staring into the flames. Barrons brought me a cup of hot cocoa he’d microwaved, using two packets of instant from Fiona’s old stash behind the cash register. I accepted it gratefully. Every few minutes, I jerked with a convulsive chill. I doubted I would ever get warm again.

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  “She’s with O’Bannion, you know,” I told him through lips that burned with cold. Even Barrons looked chilled, pale.

  “I know,” he said.

  “She’s eating Unseelie. ”

  “Yes. ”

  “Do you care?”

  “Fio is her own woman, Ms. Lane. ”

  “What if I have to kill her?” If she came after me now, I’d have no choice but to stab her.

  “She tried to kill you. If her plan had worked, you would have been dead. I underestimated her. I didn’t think her capable of murder. I was wrong. She wanted you out of the way and was willing to sacrifice anything I might want, or need, to accomplish it. ”

  “Were you her lover?”

  He looked at me. “Yes. ”

  “Oh. ” I swirled the cocoa with my spoon. “She was a little old, don’t you think?” I rolled my eyes at myself as soon as I said it. I was going by appearances, not reality. Reality was Barrons was at least twice her age; who knew how much more?

  His lips curved faintly.

  I began to cry.

  Barrons looked horrified. “Stop that immediately, Ms. Lane. ”

  “I can’t. ” I sniffled into my cup of cocoa so he couldn’t see my face.

  “Try harder!”

  I gave a great sniff and shudder, and turned it off.

  “I have not been her lover for . . . some time,” he offered, watching me carefully.

  “Oh, get over yourself! That
’s not why I cried. ”

  “Why, then?”

  “I can’t do it, Barrons,” I said hollowly. “You saw it. I can’t get . . . that . . . that . . . thing. Who are we kidding?”

  We stared into the flames for a time, until long after my cocoa was gone.

  “What did it feel like to you?” I said, finally.

  His mouth shaped a bitter smile. “All this time I’ve been hunting it, I’ve been telling myself I would be the exception. I would be the one who could touch it. Use it. I would be unaffected. I was so certain of myself. ‘Just get me within sight distance of it, Ms. Lane,’ I said, convinced I’d all but have it in the bag then. Well, I was wrong. ” He laughed, a sharp bark of a sound. “I can’t touch it, either. ”

  “Can’t? Or won’t?”

  “A fine distinction. Irony, perfect definition: That for which I want to possess it, I would no longer want, once I possessed it. I would lose everything to gain nothing. I am not one for exercises in futility. ”

  Well, at least I no longer had to worry about Barrons or V’lane getting the Book before I did. V’lane couldn’t touch it because he was Seelie, and Barrons wouldn’t touch it because he was smart enough to realize that whatever purpose he wanted it for would be instantly forfeit to the Beast’s all-consuming nature. “Was it coming after us?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It certainly looked like it, though, didn’t it?”

  I nestled deeper into my blankets. “What are we going to do, Barrons?”

  He gave me a dark look. “The only thing we can do, Ms. Lane. We’re going to keep those fucking walls up. ”

  FOURTEEN

  When I unlocked the front door Thursday morning to open for business—a measure of how desperately I wanted to be a normal girl in a normal world—Inspector Jayne was waiting for me.

  I stepped back to let him in, closed the door, then, with a gusty sigh, ceded the absurdity of my actions, and flipped the sign back to CLOSED. I wasn’t normal and it wasn’t a normal world, and pretending wasn’t going to accomplish a thing. It was time to call yet another of my own bluffs. The bookstore lulled me with temporary comfort that I had no right to. I should be anxious, I should be afraid. Fear is a powerful motivator.

  I took the inspector’s damp coat and motioned him to a seat near the fire. “Tea? Er, I mean, normal tea?”

  He nodded and sat.

  I brought him a cup of Earl Grey, took a seat across from him, and sipped at my own.

  “Aren’t we the pair?” he said, blowing his cup to cool.

  I smiled. We certainly were. It seemed a year ago that he’d dragged me down to the station. Months since he’d accosted me in the alcove with his maps. “It has downsides,” I told him, meaning eating Unseelie. He knew what I meant. It was what he’d come here for.

  “Doesn’t everything?”

  “It makes you superstrong, but the Fae can’t be killed, Jayne. You can’t engage them. You must be satisfied merely seeing them. If you start trying to kill them, they’ll know you know, and they’ll kill you. ”

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  “How strong does eating it make you? As strong as one of them?”

  I considered it. I didn’t know, and told him that.

  “So, it might?”

  I shrugged. “Regardless, you still can’t kill them. They don’t die. They’re immortal. ”

  “Why do you think we have prisons, Ms. Lane? We’re not allowed to kill the serial murderers, either. ”

  “Oh. ” I blinked. “I never thought of imprisoning them. I’m not certain anything would hold them. ” Except an Unseelie prison woven from the fabric of the Song of Making. “They sift, remember?”

  “All of them?”

  He’d made another good point. I’d never seen a Rhino-boy sift. I supposed it was possible only the more powerful Fae could do it; the princes and the one-of-a-kinds like the Gray Man.

  “Isn’t it worth a try? Maybe we lowly humans can come up with a few surprises. While you do your thing, others can be doing theirs. The word in the street is that something bad is coming, soon. What’s going on?”

  I told him about Halloween, and the walls, and what would happen if they came down.

  He placed his cup and saucer on the table. “And you would have me go out there defenseless?”

  “It has other downsides, too. I’m not sure what they all are, but one of them is that if you get wounded by one of the immortal weapons, you’ll . . . ” I described Mallucé ’s death for him. The decomposing flesh, the dying body parts.

  “How many of these immortal weapons are there, Ms. Lane?”

  “Two. ” How far he’d come from denying missing parts of the maps to so casually speaking of dining on monsters and immortal weapons!

  “Who has them?”

  “Uh, me and someone else. ”

  He smiled faintly. “I’ll take my chances. ”

  “It’s addictive. ”

  “I used to smoke. If I can quit that, I can quit anything. ”

  “I think it changes you somehow. ” I was pretty sure eating Unseelie was why I’d been able to get closer to the Sinsar Dubh. There was a lot about eating Dark Fae I wasn’t clear on, but something had made the Book perceive me as . . . tarnished, diluted.

  “Lady, you’ve changed me more than an early heart attack. Quit stalling. No more tips, remember?”

  For the time being, I didn’t want tips. I had no desire to know where the Book was, other than as a means of avoiding it.

  “You didn’t give me a choice when you opened my eyes,” the inspector said roughly. “You owe me for that. ”

  I studied his face, the set of his shoulders, his hands. How far I’d come, too. Far from seeing an enemy, an impediment to my progress, I saw a good man sitting in my store, having tea with me. “I’m sorry I made you eat it,” I said.

  “I’m not,” he said flatly. “I’d rather die seeing the face of my enemy than die blind. ”

  I sighed. “You’ll have to come back every few days. I don’t know how long it lasts. ”

  I went to the counter, rummaged in my purse. He accepted the jars a bit eagerly for my taste, revulsion married to anticipation on his face. I felt like a supplier to a junkie. I felt like a mom, sending her child off to face the perils of first grade. I had to do more than pack his lunch and put him on the bus; I had to give him advice.

  “The ones that look like Rhinos are watchdogs for the Fae. They spy, and lately, for some bizarre reason, they’ve been doing utility work. I think the ones that fly prey on children, but I’m not sure. They follow them, behind their shoulders. There are dainty, pretty ones that can get inside you. I call them Grippers. If you see one coming toward you, run like hell. The shadowy dark ones will devour you in an instant if you stumble into a Dark Zone. At night, you’ve got to stay to the lights. . . . ” I was half hanging out the door, calling after him. “Start carrying flashlights at all times. If they catch you in the dark, you’re dead. ”

  “I’ll figure it out, Ms. Lane. ” He got in his car and drove away.

  At eleven o’clock, I was in Punta Cana, walking on the beach with V’lane, wearing a gold lamé bikini (me, not V’lane; tacky, I know; he chose it) with a hot pink sarong.

  I’d released his name to the wind and summoned him shortly after Jayne had left, desperate for answers, and not at all averse to a little sunshine. I’d been thinking about the walls all night and most of the morning. The more we knew about them, the better our odds were of fortifying them. The surest bet for information was a Fae Prince, one of the queen’s most trusted, and one who’d not drunk from the cauldron for a long, long time.

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  First, he demanded to know the latest about the Sinsar Dubh and I told him, withholding the fact that Barrons had been with me to avoid a potential pissing contest. I told him there was no point in my continuing to pursu
e it right now, because I had no clue how to get close to it, and since he couldn’t, either, there was no way to get it to the queen. As I said that, a question occurred to me that was so obvious I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it before.

  “You said the queen can touch it, so why doesn’t she come after it herself?”

  “She dares not leave Faery. She was attacked recently, and it left her severely weakened. Her enemies in the mortal world are too numerous. She has fled court and sought an ancient place of refuge and protection within our realm. It is also a place of high magic. There, she believes she can re-create the Song. None but those few she trusts can enter. She must be kept safe, MacKayla. There is no other to lead in her place. All the princesses are gone. ”

  ”What happened to them?” In a matriarchal line, that was a disaster.

  “She sent them searching for the Book, along with others. They have not been seen or heard from since. ”

  And they thought I could do this? If Fae Princesses couldn’t hold their own against the many dangers out there, what chance did I have?

  “There’s something I don’t understand, V’lane. The walls of the Unseelie prison were put up hundreds of thousands of years ago, weren’t they?”

  “Yes. ”

  “Wasn’t that a long time before Queen Aoibheal erected the ones between our realms?”

  He nodded.

  “Well, if they existed independently once before, why can’t they now? Why will the prison walls go down, too, if the LM succeeds in bringing those between our worlds down? Why will all the walls fall?”

  “The walls have never existed independently. The walls between our worlds are an extension of those prison walls. Without the Song, the queen was unable to fabricate barriers on her own. Separating worlds requires immense power. She had to tap into the magic of the prison walls, and entrust a portion of the new walls’ fortification to humans. A pact of magic inevitably yields stronger results than a solo undertaking. It was risky, but over the protests of her council, she deemed it necessary. ”

  “Why did the council protest?”

  “When first we came here, you were like the rest of life on this world: savages, animals. But one day you developed language. One day the dog did not wag its tail and bark. It spoke. She felt that made you higher beings. She granted you rights and ordered us to coexist. It did not work but, rather than exterminating you—which two thirds of her council was in favor of—she separated us, as part of your new rights. ”