Suddenly I sensed him, a maelstrom of decay and fury, gusting down the tunnels toward us.
“He’s coming this way,” I told Barrons. “I think he needs food. He said he has to eat constantly.”
Barrons gave me a sharp look.
I knew exactly what he was thinking. “Not because it’s addictive,” I defended, “but because parts of him had turned Fae from eating Unseelie and the spear poisoned those parts.”
Barrons stared at me. “Parts of him had turned Fae? And the spear poisoned him? And you knew this before you ate Unseelie?”
“Bear in mind the alternative, Barrons.”
“That’s why you left the spear in the box and tucked it beneath your arm. You’re afraid to carry it now, aren’t you?”
“Before, I had a weapon. Now I am a weapon.” I turned and stalked from the cavern, not about to reveal how deeply it disturbed me that I might have gained the power of a Fae—and the weakness of one. I never wanted to touch the spear again. If I accidentally pricked myself, would I, too, begin to rot? What had I become? Kin to my enemy in how many ways? “He’s on the way,” I tossed over my shoulder. “I’d rather he didn’t eat again.”
Barrons stepped through behind me and closed the door. He slipped a vial from his pocket and I realized he’d been pilfering some of the vampire’s things. He splashed a few drops on the door and spoke again in that language I didn’t understand. He glanced around, and I could tell he didn’t like what he saw. “A good soldier chooses the terrain of his battle. You’ve shared the same flesh with him. If you can sense him, I’ll bet he can sense you. He’ll follow.”
“What are we looking for?”
“A place with no way out. I want this over with fast.”
The cavern we chose was small, narrow, and spiked with stalactites and stalagmites. There was a single entrance that Barrons planned to bar once Mallucé had entered. I handed him the box with the spear. He gestured for me to conceal it behind a fall of rubble. There was no way I was giving Mallucé the opportunity to use the weapon against me. Besides, I’d already established that it only killed parts of him, and parts weren’t enough. I wanted all of him dead.
“How do I kill a vampire?” I asked Barrons.
“Hope he’s not.”
“I really don’t like that answer.”
He shrugged. “It’s the only one I have to offer, Ms. Lane.”
I could feel Mallucé approaching. Barrons was right, somehow the meal we’d shared had linked us. I had no doubt he could sense me as clearly as I could him.
The vampire was incensed … and hungry. He’d been unable to enter his larder. Whatever Barrons had done had successfully sealed the entrance. I told you my inscrutable host has a bottomless bag of tricks. I’m really beginning to wonder where he gets them.
He was near. My body hummed with anticipation.
Mallucé stepped into the opening. His hood was down and his smile was beyond gruesome. “You’re still no match for me, bitch.”
He was framed in the doorway, backlit by torchlight, his dark robes rustling, and I could smell the emotions wafting from his rotted flesh. He smelled as fearless as I felt. He believed what he’d just said. I would prove him wrong. I narrowed my eyes, assessing him. He might think himself my superior, but my escape bothered him and he wasn’t going to step into the cavern until he knew how I’d managed it.
I taunted, “Come and get me then.”
“How did you get out of your cell?”
“You left it unlocked,” I lied.
He considered that a moment. “There’s no way you could have moved. I broke both your legs. And your arms. How did you get the Unseelie?”
“The same way I spelled your little ‘refrigerator’ down there. I did a good job, didn’t I? You couldn’t get in. I know a little black magic of my own. You underestimated me.”
He studied me. He knew how powerful the spell on his larder was, and if I was capable of performing black magic to that degree, I was capable of a great deal. I felt him relax infinitesimally. “This makes things much more interesting. You know, I toyed with this idea. Now we’ll rot together. I’ll feed you more and stab you with your own fucking spear.”
Obviously he didn’t know it was missing yet. “Bring it on,” I purred.
He unfastened his robe and let it drop to the floor. His frothy lace shirt was badly stained. He was wearing stiff, tight leather pants, I suspected for the same reason he wore the stiff gloves. I needed him inside the cavern. Then Barrons would spell the exit and there would be no way out.
I did my boxer dance. “Come on, Johnny, let’s play.”
He lunged through the entrance with inhuman speed, and closed one of his stiff-gloved hands around my throat. I saw Barrons loom up behind him and shot him a wordless command: Don’t interfere.
I grabbed Mallucé’s wrist and kneed him in the groin with the strength of ten men. The flesh between his legs was too soft. My knee slid a few inches into his body.
“No feeling there, bitch,” he spat.
“What about here?” I punched him in the ear with all my strength. Blood spurted from his skull, and he reeled sideways and staggered. I watched the wound heal as quickly as it had opened. Would I do that?
I found out soon enough. He broke my nose. It reassembled itself. I nearly tore his arm from his shoulder. It dangled uselessly for a few moments then he punched me with it again, strong as ever.
“When I finish with you, bitch, I’m going to Ashford. Remember your little confession?” he taunted. “Telling me you had a mother there? Maybe I’ll keep you alive long enough to see what I do to her.”
I pummeled his hated face into a mass of bloody flesh. It would end here, now. Mallucé was never walking out of these caves again if I had to stay down here for all eternity killing him. He tried to rip my ear off. I almost bit him but thought twice, not exactly clear on vampire rules. I didn’t want his blood anywhere near my mouth. I kicked him in the knee. When it shattered and he went down I fell on him, kicking, punching, snarling.
I felt something inside me de-evolving, and I liked it.
Time lost all meaning to me. We were virtually indestructible machines. We beat each other senseless, long past the point of reason. I existed for one thing: to make him go down, stay down, and never move again. I no longer knew who he was. I no longer cared who I was. Things had deconstructed to the basest terms. Mallucé no longer even had a name or a face. He was Enemy. I was Destroyer. I understood only the imperative of battle, the appetite to kill.
I slammed him into the cavern wall. He smashed me into a man-sized stalagmite. It crumbled from the impact. I picked myself up and we crashed together again, punching, kicking, grunting.
Suddenly Barrons was between us, forcing us apart.
I turned on him, snarling, “What the hell are you doing?”
“You!” Mallucé looked stunned. “How did you get here? I left the cuff in the alley! There’s no way you tracked me!”
I stared at Barrons. How had he found me? “Stay out of this, Barrons! It’s my fight.”
Barrons caught me completely off guard with half a dozen rapid-fire punishing blows to my head and stomach.
I doubled over, dazed.
Mallucé laughed.
I was bent low, ribs cracking and rehealing for several seconds. My chest burned like a lung had been pierced.
Mallucé stopped laughing, with a strangled sound.
When I shot up, Barrons had Mallucé by an arm around his neck. He hit me again and I went right back down. Barrons had held back when he’d punched me before. Given me a love tap compared to what he was dishing out now.
The bastard did it to me three more times; each time I straightened, his fist pistoned into my face before I could even get all the way up. It felt like my brain was rattling in my skull.
The fifth time I rose, Mallucé was on the ground, unmoving. I could see why. His head was no longer attached to his shoulders. He’d killed him! Barro
ns had stolen my revenge, cheated me of the pleasure of destroying the one who’d nearly destroyed me!
I whirled on him. He was spattered with blood, breathing hard, head down, eyes narrowed, and fury was rolling off him in thick, dangerous waves. How dare he be furious with me? I was the wronged party! My battle was interrupted, bloodlust was bottled up inside me, a turbo engine revved to redline.
“The vamp was mine, Barrons!”
“Inspect his teeth, Ms. Lane,” he said tightly. “They were cosmetic enhancements. He was no vampire.”
I punched him lightly in the shoulder. “I don’t care what he was! It was my fight, you bastard!”
He punched me back with the same light, warning force. “You were taking too long to finish it up.”
“Who are you to decide how long is too long?” I gave him another tap in the shoulder.
He returned the blow with equal force. “You were enjoying it!”
“I was not!”
“You were smiling, bouncing on the balls of your feet, egging him on.”
“I was trying to end the fight!” I punched his shoulder, hard this time.
“You were way past trying to end it,” he snapped, punching me back. I nearly fell over. “You were prolonging it. You were glorying in it.”
“You don’t know what the feck you’re talking about!” I shouted.
“I couldn’t tell the difference between the two of you anymore!” he roared.
I smashed my fist into his face. Lies roll off us. It’s the truths we work hardest to silence. “Then you weren’t looking hard enough! I’m the one with boobs!”
“I know you’re the one with boobs! They’re in my fucking face every fucking time I turn around!”
“Maybe you need to get a grip on your libido, Barrons!”
“Fuck you, Ms. Lane!”
“You just try. I’ll kick the shit out of you!”
“You think you could?”
“Bring it on.”
He grabbed a fistful of my T-shirt, and dragged me up against him until our noses touched. “I’ll bring it on, Ms. Lane. But remember you asked for it. So don’t even think about trying to tap out on the mat and quit the fight.”
“You hear anybody crying ‘Uncle’ here, Barrons? I don’t.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
He swapped the fistful of my shirt for one in my hair, and ground his mouth against mine.
I exploded.
I shoved at him, and clawed him closer. He shoved me back, and yanked me tighter to his body. I pulled his hair. He pulled mine. He didn’t fight fair. Actually, he fought exactly fair. He didn’t extend courtesies, not a single one.
I bit his lip. He tripped me and pushed me down to the stone floor of the cavern. I punched him. He straddled me.
I ripped his shirt down the front, left it hanging in tatters from his shoulders.
“I liked that shirt,” he snarled. He rose over me, a dark demon, glistening in the torchlight, dripping sweat and blood, his torso covered with tattoos that disappeared beneath his waistband.
He grabbed the hem of my shirt, tore it straight up to my neck, and inhaled sharply.
I punched him. If he punched me back, I was past feeling it. His mouth was on mine again, the hot silk of his tongue, the sharp, deliberate abrasion of his teeth, the exchange of breath and the small, desperate sounds of need. A tsunami of lust—no doubt amplified by the Fae in my blood—crashed into me, knocking me from my feet, and dragging me out to a dangerous sea. There was no lifeboat here in these deep, killing waters, not even a lighthouse, marking the way back to shore with its soft amber promise. There was only the storm of Barrons and the one I seemed to be, and if there were dark shapes moving in the waters beneath my feet that I should probably take a good hard look at and possibly reconsider trying to swim here, I didn’t care.
He fitted himself to me and began a driving, erotic, rhythmic bump and grind. A lonely boy. A lone man. Alone in a desert beneath a blood-red moon. War everywhere. Always war. A breath-stealing sirocco sweeping down over treacherously sifting sands. A cave in a cliff wall. Sanctuary? No sanctuary left anywhere. Barrons’ tongue was inside my mouth, and somehow I was inside Jericho Barrons. The images were his.
We both heard the noise at the same time and exploded away from each other as quickly as we’d come together, scrambling to opposite sides of the small cavern.
Panting, I stared at him. He was breathing hard, his dark eyes narrowed to slits.
Is it still spelled? I mouthed, meaning the entrance to the cave.
To contain only. Not to expel.
Well, spell it again!
Isn’t that easy.
He melted into the shadows behind a stalagmite.
I focused my attention on the door, tried to sense what was coming, and stiffened.
Fae … but not Fae. Followed by at least ten Unseelie.
I stared past Mallucé’s body at the entrance, tensed to spring. A glint of gold and silver caught my eye in the flickering torchlight.
The amulet! How could I have forgotten? It was pooled in a pile of chain, between his body and the door. It must have fallen off when Barrons had beheaded him.
The footsteps drew nearer.
I sprang for the Hallow.
A booted foot came down on it just as I reached it.
I stared up the leg and looked straight into the eyes of my sister’s murderer.
EIGHTEEN
The Lord Master’s gaze flicked away from me, passed with cursory interest over Mallucé. “I’d come to finish him myself,” he said. “He’d become a liability. You saved me the trouble. How did you do it?” He studied me, the blood splattered on my face, clothing, and hands, the glaring lack of injuries. A slow smile spread over his exotic, beautiful face. “You ate Unseelie, didn’t you?”
I said nothing. I guess something in my eyes did, though. Framed behind him in the doorway were a dozen or so Unseelie of a caste I’d not seen before, wearing black uniforms with red insignia, clearly his personal guard.
He laughed. “What a surprise you are. Lovely like your sister, but Alina would never have done it.”
My sister’s name on her murderer’s lips incensed me. “Don’t even say her name. Nothing about her is yours. Nothing about her ever was.” If Barrons took this fight from me, I’d kill him.
But I wasn’t going to get this fight. Not here. Not tonight.
The Lord Master’s voice deepened, hardened, rolled with the thunder of a legion of voices. It did something inside my head; echoed, whispered, rearranged things. “Hand me the amulet. Now.”
I picked it up and handed it to him, wondering even as I did it what I was doing, why I was obeying. It glowed a faint blue-black invitation the moment I touched it. His eyes widened fractionally. He took it from me swiftly.
“Another surprise,” he murmured.
That’s right, you bastard, I am epic, so watch out, I wanted to say, but my vocal cords weren’t under my control any more than anything else was at the moment.
“Stand,” he commanded. The amulet blazed in his hand, eclipsing the feeble light I’d managed to make and been so proud of.
I stood as jerkily as a puppet on strings, mind resisting, flesh obeying. I swayed before the red-robed Lord Master, stared into his too-beautiful-to-be-human face, and waited for him to rule me. Had he done this to my sister? Had she been not duped by him, but stripped of choice like I was now?
“Come.” He turned and, automaton-like, I began to follow.
Barrons exploded from the shadows and hit me like a missile, taking me to the ground beneath him.
The Lord Master turned in a whirl of robes.
“She stays with me,” said Barrons. His voice, too, rolled with the thunder of a multitude, reverberating inside my skull. Of course I was staying with him. What had I been thinking?
What the Lord Master did next was so incomprehensible to me that I was still blinking blankly at the opening, several minu
tes after he was gone.
He took a long look at my enigmatic mentor, jerked his head at his guard—and left.
NINETEEN
We raced back to Dublin in the sleek, stolen stealth of Rocky O’Bannion’s black Maybach.
I made no attempt at conversation, nor did Barrons.
I’d been through too much in the past, however many hours it had been. Twenty-seven, I would learn later. I’d faced a Hunter, discovered my specter was not only real but a greater threat than the Unseelie chasing me; been locked in a cave, tortured, beaten to the brink of death, rescued; eaten the living flesh of an Unseelie, gained superhuman strength and power and lost God only knew what, battled a vampire, gotten into a fight with Barrons that had skewed dangerously toward the end, lost a powerful Dark Hallow to my sister’s murderer, and worse, been unable to function with any will at all in his presence, and if Barrons hadn’t been there to save me yet again, I would have trundled off behind my archenemy, ensorcelled by the crimson-cowled Pied Piper.
Then when I’d thought nothing else could possibly startle or surprise me, the Lord Master had taken one look at Barrons—and walked away.
That worried me. A lot. If the Lord Master walked away from Barrons, how much danger was I in on a daily basis? I’d been feeling invincible up until those last few moments in the cave. Until one man in the room with me had stripped away my will with mere words, and the other man in the room with me had apparently intimidated that one into leaving. Bad and badder.
I glanced across the front seat at Badder. I opened my mouth. He looked at me. I closed it.
I don’t know how he continued driving, because we stared at each other for a long time. The night whizzed by, the air inside the speeding car pregnant with all the things we weren’t saying. We didn’t even have one of our wordless conversations this time; neither of us was willing to betray a single thought or feeling.
We looked at each other like two too-intimate strangers who’ve woken after the lovemaking and don’t know quite what to say to each other, so they say nothing at all and go their separate ways, promising, of course, that they’ll call, but each time they look at the phone over the next few days, the discomfort and mild embarrassment of having taken off their clothing in front of someone they didn’t really even know rises up, and the phone call never gets made.
Karen Marie Moning’s Fever Series 5-Book Bundle: Darkfever, Bloodfever, Faefever, Dreamfever, Shadowfever Page 50
