The voice was straight out of a nightmare. And surely it was not talking to me.
“You. Sidhe-seer. Run.”
It had called me sidhe-seer.
It knew I was one by sight.
The only Unseelie who knew my face were the Lord Master’s minions, which meant he was back from wherever he’d been—and looking for me.
I’d believed any Hunters in the city tonight were there by coincidence, not design. I’d been wrong. They were there to capture me. I could fight, I had the spear tucked securely in my holster, but with the numbers of dark Fae I’d been seeing and no backup, I needed no encouragement to be a coward. I glanced over my shoulder. The street was packed with Rhino-boys, two abreast, stretching back farther than I could see.
There are times when brave is just stupid: I ran.
Down one street. Up the next. Through an alley. Across a park. I vaulted benches and splashed through fountains. I ran until my lungs burned and my legs were weak. I got turned around by the old brewery and tacked on an extra six blocks to my journey.
I ran.
I ran as if my feet had Dani’s wings, and finally, blessedly the footsteps behind me faded and there was silence but for the pounding of my shoes on cement.
I spared a glance over my shoulder.
I’d lost them. I’d really, truly done it. Rhino-boys might be strong, but with their stumpy arms and legs, they were neither swift nor lithe of limb.
I turned a corner and drew up just short of plowing into a brick wall. Dead-end alleys spring up as unexpectedly as one-way streets in this city. I had to get out, before the soldiers tracked me down again. There was no way I could scale the wall. It was twelve feet of sheer brick and there were no convenient Dumpsters piled in front of it.
I was three blocks from Barrons Books and Baubles. It was just over this wall and down two streets. Close, so close.
I turned.
And froze.
It was as if a giant freezer had opened in the sky above me. The temperature plunged bitterly. Tiny, glistening bits of ice began to pellet my skin.
It was there. I knew what it was. Every cell of my being knew what it was. And not because I’d read about them, or Barrons had told me about them, or I’d seen sketches of them.
The beast above me hovered darkly. I could feel the great whuf-whuf of giant wings beating air. The scent of brimstone and ancient dusty things filled my nostrils. If Hell had dragons and they smelled, this was their scent.
Sidhe-seer, it said, without speaking at all. The voice was inside my head, in that hot, alien place. Slave. We own you.
“Get out,” I snarled, and lashed out at it with all the hot, alien fire in my head.
It was gone from my mind, but not from above me. I could feel the air moving. I could smell its acrid stench.
I gauged the distance to the end of the alley, mentally calculated my run from there. How fast was it? For that matter, how big was it? The descriptions I’d read had varied widely. Could it fit between buildings? Could it swoop down and pluck me from the sidewalk in its talons? Might it rip the bookstore apart, rafter from eave, looking for me? Summon all its dark brethren to demolish the building? Would anyone even notice, or did Hunters have the same “cloaking” effect as Shades and Dark Zones? Did I dare lead it to Barrons? Did I dare not? If I got inside somewhere, anywhere, would it leave me alone or assume an eternal dark perch on my eave like Poe’s raven, only far more macabre and deadly? Could it shift? Simply materialize wherever I was?
“Fuck,” I said emphatically. Sometimes there’s just no other word for it.
I had to know what I was trying to outrun. Knowledge is power. That is one truth I’ve learned that has never failed me.
Brushing ice flakes from my face, I looked up.
Straight into eyes that glowed like twin furnaces from Hell, staring malevolently back at me from a swirling fall of black ice.
The books I’d read had compared the Royal Hunters to the classic human depiction of the Devil.
The books had been right.
Somewhere in our ancient human past a sidhe-seer, or a few, must have had something to do with recording religious myths and the Bible. They’d seen the Hunters, and had used their memories to scare the hell—literally—out of humanity.
For a moment it was hard to separate the thing from the night; they were both forged of blackness. Then my vision cleared and something in my genes kicked in, and it was clearly visible. Great, dark, leathery wings flapped from a great dark leathery body, with a massive satyrlike head, cloven hooves, and a forked tail. Its tongue was long and bisected down the middle. It had long curved black horns with bloody tips. It was black, but it was more than black; it was the absolute, utter, and complete absence of light. It absorbed the light around it, swallowed it up, took it into its body, devoured it, and spit it back out again as a miasma of darkness and desolation. And it was cold. The air paddled by its slow-moving wings churned with glittering black ice flakes, swirling beneath the great, leathery sails. It was the only Fae—besides V’lane, that first time we’d met—whose presence in our world altered our world around it. V’lane, too, had iced the air, though not so overtly or dramatically. It was powerful. It was making me feel so sick to my stomach that I almost couldn’t breathe.
It laughed inside my head. I closed my eyes and forced it out again; this time it wasn’t easy. It knew where to find me inside myself. Was that why we feared them so deeply—because these Fae could get inside our heads?
Would a sidhe-seer that wasn’t as strong as me be able to withstand it, or would it rip her mind to shreds, one memory or personality trait or dream at a time, sift its talons through the tatters, before destroying her body as almost an afterthought?
I opened my eyes.
My personal Grim Reaper stood in the alley, directly in front of me, a dozen feet away, dark robes rustling softly in the unnatural wind generated by the beast’s wings.
It stood in silence, as always, regarding me from beneath its deep black cowl, though it had no face, no eyes, nothing beneath that hood I could discern, with which to regard me. It was shadows and night, like the Hunter above me, only it wasn’t there, and the Hunter was. What an absurd time to torture myself for my failings.
Ignoring it, I pushed back my jacket, slipped my spear from its holster, and fisted my hand around the hilt. It wasn’t my problem. Dragon-boy from hell was.
Black hail began to fall, tiny pellets stinging my skin. The Hunter was incensed; its displeasure iced the night.
How dare you touch our Hallows? roared in my head.
“Oh, screw you,” I snapped. “You want me? Come and get me.” I focused on that foreign place in my mind, stoked the strange fire, and boxed up my mind as securely as I could. The thing’s roar had nearly split my head.
Could the Hunter cram itself into the tight alleyway? Could it sift or resize itself?
We would see, and if it did, the moment it got close I would freeze and stab it.
I waited.
It hovered.
I looked up … and smiled.
Fury blazed in its fiery eyes, yet it made no move toward me. It wasn’t about to risk getting near my spear, and we both knew it. I could kill it. I could take forever from it, and the thing’s arrogance was immense as its wingspan; it didn’t consider any master it might choose to serve worth dying for.
I realized then, or had some surfacing of a shred of collective memory, that the Hunters were feared even among their own kind. They had something … I wasn’t sure what … but something that even their royal brethren didn’t mess with. They were of the Fae … but perhaps not completely. They served whomever they wished, only if there was something in it for them, and stopped serving whenever they felt like it. They were mercenaries in the purest sense of the word.
It feared the spear. It would not risk death. I had a chance.
I broke into a run.
So long as the soldiers didn’t find me, so long as more Hu
nters didn’t show up, I would survive tonight. I could make it to the bookstore and Barrons would have some plan—he always did. Perhaps we could get out of the city for a few days. Perhaps, loath though I was to consider it, we would hook up with other sidhe-seers. There was safety in numbers.
As I sped past my Phantom Reaper, it did something so utterly unexpected and incomprehensible that my mind failed to process it.
It swung out its scythe and the blunt of the wood caught me in my midsection.
In my mind I screamed—but you’re not real—even as I doubled over and lost the breath in my lungs.
Real or not, its scythe was.
For the second time tonight, my paradigm was brutally shifted: My Grim Reaper was corporeal.
Impossible! I’d thrown a flashlight through it, had watched it tumble end over end before crashing into a wall. It had no substance!
Laughing, it moved toward me. Now that I knew it was real, I could feel its malevolence, a dark, pulsating hatred, barely contained beneath the voluminous black shroud. Directed at me, all for me.
I stared in disbelief, laboring to suck air into my lungs. I’d exhaled to a painful point. My chest was locked down tight, my lungs deflated.
I’d been played. Lulled into believing my enemy wasn’t an enemy, until it had been ready to make its move. Had it been spying on me all those times? Watching and waiting for the right moment?
I’d talked to it. I’d confessed my sins to it! What was it?
I wheezed violently, sucking down air.
It approached, dark robes shifting as it glided forward.
I sensed Fae—I didn’t sense Fae. Perhaps I could nullify it, perhaps I couldn’t.
It swung its scythe. I leapt. It whirled and parried, I ducked and jumped. The wood staff zinged as it sliced through air, and I knew if even one of those blows landed on me it would turn bone to dust.
It wasn’t trying to get me with the curved blade. It wanted to pulverize, to maim. Why? Did it have a special death planned for me?
As we danced our macabre waltz, suddenly the alley was flooded with Rhino-boys; the rank and file soldiers had found us.
I was moments away from being hemmed in by dozens of Unseelie. Once they did that, I was doomed. I could freeze them but there were too many. Eventually they would overwhelm me. I needed Dani, I needed Barrons. I’d be absorbed into a horde of soldiers, borne on the crest of their dark wave, delivered to their master.
I did the only thing I could think of: When all else fails, try to take out the top dog. At this point, I was pretty sure Mr. Grim—heretofore utterly underestimated by me—was top dog, remaining innocuously in the background until now.
I charged the specter.
It parried my spear arm with inhuman speed, and the flat of its scythe caught me. I felt the bones in my wrist powder. As I crashed to my knees, in spite of blinding pain, I managed to slam the palm of my other hand into its dark robe.
It didn’t freeze.
In fact, what my hand encountered wasn’t … quite … solid.
When I was five, I found a dead rabbit that had somehow gotten itself trapped in our playhouse. I guess it starved to death. It was spring, not too hot yet, and the animal hadn’t begun to smell or show visible signs of decay—at least not side-up. It had looked so pretty lying there on my blanket, with its silky bunny fur and cottony tail and pink nose. I’d thought it was sleeping. I’d tried to pick it up to take in the house and show Mom, ask if we could keep it. My tiny hands had slid deep into its body, into a warm yellowish stew of decomposing flesh.
I’d hoped never to feel or smell such a thing again.
I felt and smelled it now.
My left hand slid straight into its abdomen, buried in its flesh. But the thing wasn’t entirely rotted. Its arm wasn’t soft at all when it snaked around my throat, but hard and unyielding as a steel cord.
I kicked and screamed, I fought and bit, but the thing’s strength was unbelievable. What was it? What was I fighting? How easily I’d believed what it had wanted me to believe! How it must have been laughing when I’d tallied the sins of my guilty conscience for it. Where was my spear?
For the second time in as many minutes, I couldn’t breathe. It was choking me.
I stared up at the leathery underbelly of a Hunter as I died.
SIXTEEN
As I’m sure you’ve figured out, I didn’t really die, twin to my sister’s fate, alone in an alley, run down by monsters, in the dark heart of Dublin.
My parents would not have to claim another body from airport officials. At least not yet.
I’d thought I was dying, though. When the blood is being cut off to your brain in a choke hold, you don’t know if your assailant plans to keep the pressure on your carotids for ten seconds—long enough to knock you unconscious—or longer still, until your heart stops and your brain dies. I’d assumed the specter wanted me dead.
It wouldn’t be long before I would wish it had.
I came to with a sour, chemical taste in my mouth that made me suspect I’d been drugged, a burning pain in my wrist accompanied by a peculiar immobility and heaviness, and the dank odor of wet, mossy stone in my nostrils. I kept my eyes closed and my breathing even, trying to assess as much of myself and my surroundings as possible before betraying to anyone who might be watching me that I was conscious.
I was barefoot and cold, dressed only in my jeans and T-shirt. My boots, sweater, and jacket were gone. I had a dim memory of losing my purse in the alley. So much for the cell phone Barrons had given me. Speaking of Barrons—he would find me! He would trace my cuff and—
My heart sank. I couldn’t feel the cuff on my arm. In fact the only thing I felt was something stiff and heavy around my wrist. I wondered when and where my cuff had been removed, where I was now, and how much time had passed. I wondered who or what the specter was. Although the Lord Master had worn a similar hooded robe of crimson the one time I’d seen him, I didn’t believe these villains were one and the same. They shared some aspect of their nature in common, but there was something very different about the specter.
I lay perfectly still and listened. If someone lurked nearby, they were taking pains not to betray their presence.
I opened my eyes and stared up at stone.
No one said anything ominous like Aha, you’re awake, let the torturing begin, so I risked a glance at my wrist. I was wearing a cast.
“I almost ripped your hand off,” a voice said conversationally, and I nearly jumped out of my skin. “You were bleeding to death. It made repairs necessary.”
I sat up slowly, carefully. My head was muzzy, my tongue thick. My wrist was a mass of screaming nerves, burning all the way up to my shoulder.
I looked around. I was in a cell of stone—an ancient grotto—behind iron bars, on a thin pallet on the floor. Beyond those bars my specter stood.
“Where am I?”
Its hood rustled as it spoke. “The Burren. Beneath it, to be precise. Do you know what the Burren is?” Its voice held a smile. Where had I heard that voice before? Sibilant, silky, it was familiar … but different … tone fluid, words loosely formed.
Yes, I knew what the Burren was. I’d seen it on my maps and read about it during the recent learning binge I’d gone on in an attempt to dispel my provinciality. From the Irish Boireann, which meant great rock or rocky place, it was a karst landscape in County Clare, Ireland, a limestone area of roughly three hundred square kilometers, with the famous Cliffs of Moher at the southwest edge. On cracked limestone pavements chiseled by grykes, or fissures in the stone, one could find Neolithic tombs, portal dolmens, high crosses, and as many as five hundred ring forts. Beneath the Burren were active stream caves and miles of labyrinthine passages and caverns, some open to tourists, the majority unexplored, undeveloped, and far too dangerous for the casual potholer.
I was beneath the Burren.
It was a hundred times worse than being in the bomb shelter. I might as well have been entombed aliv
e. I hate confined places as much as I hate the dark. The knowledge that there were tons and tons of rock above my head, dense and impenetrable, separating me from the air, from wide-open spaces and the ability to move freely about made me feel wildly claustrophobic. My face must have betrayed my horror.
“I see you do.”
“Where are my things?” I couldn’t think about where I was or I’d have a meltdown. I had to focus on getting out. Specifically, where was my cuff? Had it been removed here? Or back in the alley? I could hardly ask. I desperately needed to know.
“Why?”
“I’m cold.”
“Cold is the least of your problems.”
Undoubtedly true. Even if I managed to get free, how would I find my way out of this place? Down dark tunnels, through flooded caverns, with no compass, no sense of direction. As desperately as I wanted more information about my clothes, cuff, and spear, I was afraid to press; afraid too much interest might make my captor suspicious, and the last thing I wanted to do was cause the specter to dispose of something it might otherwise have left lying around—a thing that could save my life. How did the cuff work? Would Barrons be able to track it beneath the ground? “Who are you? What do you want?” I demanded.
“My life back,” it said. “In lieu of that, I’ll take yours. The same way you’ve taken mine. One piece at a time.”
“Who are you?” I repeated. What was this thing talking about?
It raised a hand and pushed back its cowl.
I flinched violently. For a moment I was too horrified to do anything but stare. I searched the face for something, anything that I recognized. It took me several long moments to find it in the eyes.
They were dead, citron, inhuman.
Mallucé!
I’d been grossly premature in swiping him off my playing board. I’d been wrong, so wrong! The vampire wasn’t dead.
He was worse than dead.
All those times I’d glimpsed the specter, seen it out a window late at night, or in the alley, or in the graveyard with Barrons, it had been Mallucé, watching me. All those times I’d discounted my Grim Reaper as a figment of my imagination, the vampire had actually been there, somehow. I shuddered. I’d been so close to him so many times, with no awareness of the danger I was in. He’d been in my back alley the night the Shades had gotten in, the night I’d broken into Barrons’ garage. He’d been watching me since shortly after I’d stabbed him. I wondered why he’d waited so long to take action.
Karen Marie Moning’s Fever Series 5-Book Bundle: Darkfever, Bloodfever, Faefever, Dreamfever, Shadowfever Page 46
