“Thought we were friends, Mac.”
I see in her eyes that all I have to do is say, “We are,” and she’ll find some way to deal with what she’s looking at right now. How dare she put so much faith in me? I never asked for it, never deserved it.
“You thought wrong. Now answer the question.” I’m the only one who never treated her like a child. She hates being called “kid” more than anything. “Kid,” I say. “Then get the hell out of here. Take your toys and go play somewhere else.”
Her brows climb her forehead and her mouth pulls down. “What did you just say?”
“I said, kid, answer my question and go away! We’re a little busy here, can’t you see?”
She’s bouncing from foot to foot again, a smudge of darkness in the dark. “Feckin’ grown-ups,” she bites out through clenched teeth. “All the feckin’ same. Feckin’ glad I feckin’ left the feckin’ abbey. You can just go to hell!” She shouts the last words, but they catch a little as they come out, like they get tangled up on a sob she’s forcing back down.
I don’t even see the blur of black move away. There’s a burst of light from her MacHalo as she flashes into motion like the Enterprise entering warp speed, then an empty alley.
I’m startled to realize that I think she’s just the tiniest bit faster. Is she eating Unseelie? I’m going to kick her ass all over Dublin if she’s eating Unseelie.
“Why didn’t you stop her, MacKayla? You could have exploited her trust in you to get information about the Book.”
I shrug. “Kid always got on my nerves. Let’s go hunt ourselves a sidhe-seer. If we can’t find one, Jayne’s men are bound to know what’s going on.”
I turn away from Barrons Books and Baubles toward what used to be the biggest Dark Zone in Dublin. It’s a wasteland now, not a single Shade left. When Darroc brought the walls crashing down on Halloween and Dublin went dark, the amorphous vampires escaped their prison of light and slithered on to greener pastures.
Hurting Dani took all my energy. I’m in no mood to walk past BB&B. I’d have to confront the obvious—that, like the man, the store is big, silent, and dead.
If I walk past it, I’ll have to force myself not to stare hungrily at it. Have to ignore that, in this reality, I’ll never enter those doors again.
He’s gone. He’s really, truly gone.
My bookstore has been lost to me as completely and irrevocably as if the Dark Zone had finally swallowed it up.
I’ll never own it. I’ll never open those diamond-paned cherry doors for business again.
I’ll never hear my cash register’s tiny bell ring or curl up with a cup of cocoa and a book, warmed by a cozy gas fire and the promise of Jericho Barrons’ eventual return. I’ll never banter with him, practice Voice, or be tested against pages of the Sinsar Dubh. I’ll never steal hungry glances when I think he’s not looking at me, or hear him laugh, or climb the back stairs to my bedroom that’s sometimes on the fourth floor and other times on the fifth, where I might lie awake and practice things to say to him, only to end up discarding them all because Barrons doesn’t care about words.
Only actions.
I’ll never drive his cars. I’ll never know his secrets.
Darroc takes my arm. “This way.” He turns me around. “Temple Bar.”
I feel his eyes on me as he guides me back toward the bookstore.
I stop and look up at him. “I thought there might be things you needed from the house on LaRuhe,” I say casually. I really don’t want to walk past BB&B. “I thought we should rally your troops. We’ve been gone a long time.”
“There are many places I keep supplies, and my army is always near.” He makes a slicing gesture in the air and murmurs a few words in a language I don’t understand.
The night is suddenly twenty degrees cooler. I don’t have to look behind me to know the Unseelie Princes are there, in addition to countless other Unseelie. The night is suddenly thick with dark Fae. Even with my “volume” muted, there are so many, so close to me, that I feel them in the pit of my stomach. Does he keep a contingent of them a mere sift away at all times? Have the princes been hovering all this time, listening for his call, a half dimension beyond my awareness?
I’ll need to remember that.
“I am not walking around Dublin with the princes at my back.”
“I said I will not let them harm you, MacKayla, and I meant it.”
“I want my spear back. Give it to me now.”
“I cannot permit that. I saw what you did to Mallucé with it.”
“I said I won’t harm you, Darroc, and I meant it,” I mock. “See how that feels? Little hard to swallow, isn’t it? You insist that I trust you, but you won’t trust me.”
“I cannot take the risk.”
“Wrong answer.” Should I force the issue and try to take the spear? If I succeed, will he trust me less? Or respect me more?
When I seek the bottomless lake in my head, I don’t bother closing my eyes to do it. I just let them go a little out of focus. I need power, strength, and I know where to find both. With almost no effort at all, I’m standing on a black-pebbled beach. It has always been there for me. It always will be.
Distantly, I hear Darroc speaking to the princes. I shiver. I can’t bear the thought of them behind me.
Deep in its cavernous depths, the black water churns and begins to bubble.
Silvery runes like the ones I encircled myself with on the cliff’s edge break the surface, but the water keeps boiling, and I know it’s not yet done. There’s something more … if I want it. I do. After a few moments, it pushes up a handful of crimson runes that pulse on the inky water like slender deformed hearts. The bubbling stops. The surface is once again as smooth as black glass.
I bend and scoop them up. Dripping blood, they flutter in my fists.
Distantly, I hear the Unseelie Princes begin to chime, but not softly. It’s the sound of broken, jagged crystal scraping against metal.
I don’t turn to look at them. I know all I need to know: Whatever gift I’ve been given, they don’t like it.
My gaze refocuses.
Darroc looks at me, then down at my hands, and goes still. “What are you doing with those? What were you doing in the Silvers before I found you? Did you enter the White Mansion without me, MacKayla?”
Behind me, the princes chime louder. It’s a cacophony that slices into the soul like a razor, severs tendon, and chips bone. I wonder if that’s what comes of being fashioned from an imperfect Song of Making, a melody that can unmake, unsing, uncreate at a molecular level.
They hate my crimson runes, and I hate their dark music.
I won’t be the one to yield.
“Why?” I ask Darroc. Is that where the runes I’ve scooped up came from? What does he know about them? I can’t ask him without betraying that, while I have power, I have no idea what it is or how to use it. I raise my fists and open them, palms up. My hands drip thick red liquid. Slender tubular runes twist on my palms.
Behind me, the princes’ jagged chiming becomes a hellish shriek that even Darroc looks rattled by.
I have no idea what to do with the runes. I was thinking of the Unseelie Princes, that I needed a weapon against them, and they appeared in my mind. I have no idea how I translated them from that dark glassy lake into existence. I understand no more about these crimson symbols than I did about the silvery ones.
“Where did you learn to do that, MacKayla?” Darroc demands.
I can barely hear him over the princes. “How do you plan to merge with the Book?” I counter. I have to raise my voice to a near yell to make myself heard.
“Do you have any idea what those things are capable of?” he demands. I read his lips. I can’t hear him.
The shrieking behind me rises to an inhuman pitch that pierces my eardrums like ice picks. “Give me my spear and I’ll put them away,” I shout.
Darroc moves closer, trying to hear me. “Impossible!” he explodes. “My prince
s will not remain and protect us if you have the spear.” His gaze slides with distaste over the runes in my hands. “Nor with those present.”
“I think we can take care of ourselves!”
“What?” he shouts.
“We don’t need them!” The ice picks in my ears have begun drilling into my brain. I’m on the verge of a massive migraine.
“I do! I am not yet Fae again. My army follows me only because Fae princes lead at my back!”
“Who needs an army?” We’re inches apart, shouting at each other, and still the words are nearly lost in the din.
He rubs his temples. His nose has started to bleed. “We do! The Seelie are amassing, MacKayla. They, too, have begun hunting the Sinsar Dubh. Much has changed since you were last here!”
“How do you know?” I hadn’t seen any handy newsstands in the Silvers while I was in there.
He grabs my head, pulls it to his. “I stay informed!” he snarls against my ear.
The chiming has become an unbearable orchestra of sounds that the human ear was never meant to hear. My neck is wet. I realize my ears are bleeding. I’m mildly surprised. I don’t bleed easily anymore. Haven’t ever since I ate Unseelie.
“You must obey me in this, MacKayla!” he shouts. “If you wish to remain at my side, dispose of them. Or is it war you wish between us? I thought it was an alliance you sought!” He wipes blood from his lips and cuts a sharp look at the princes.
Blissfully, blessedly, the chiming stops. The ice picks through my eardrums vanish.
I inhale deeply, gulping clean, fresh air greedily, as if it might wash my cells clean of the stain from the princes’ horrific symphony.
My relief is short-lived, however. As abruptly as the hellish music stopped, my shoulders and arms are freezing, and I think sheets of ice might crack and drop away if I move.
I don’t need to turn my head to know that the princes have sifted into position, one on my left, one on my right. I feel them there. I know their inhumanly beautiful faces are inches from mine. If I turn my head, they will look into me with those piercing, mesmerizing, ancient eyes that can see beyond where the human soul is, that can see into the very matter that comprises it—and can take it apart piece by piece. Regardless of how much they despise my runes, they’re still ready to take me on.
I look at Darroc. I’d wondered what his reaction would be if I tried to take the spear. I see a look in his eyes now that was not there a short time ago. I am both a greater liability than he knew and a greater asset—and he likes it. He likes power: both having it and having a woman who has it.
I despise walking with Unseelie Princes at my back. But his comment about the Seelie amassing armies, my ignorance about the runes I hold in my hands, and the icy dark Fae sandwiching me make compelling arguments.
I tilt my head, toss my dark curls from my eyes, and look up at him. He likes it when I use his name. I think it makes him feel like he’s with Alina again. Alina was soft and Southern to the core. We Southern women know a thing or two about men. We know to use their name often, to make them feel strong, needed, as if they have the final say even when they don’t, and to always, always keep them believing they won the best prize in the only competition that will ever matter on the day we said, “I do.”
“If we get into a battle, Darroc, will you promise to return my spear so I can use it to help defend us? Will you permit that?”
He likes those words: “help defend us” and “permit.” I see it in his eyes. A smile breaks across his face. He touches my cheek and nods. “Of course, MacKayla.”
He looks at the princes and they are no longer beside me.
I’m uncertain how to return the runes. I’m not sure they can be returned.
When I toss them over my shoulders at the princes, they make sounds like exploding crystal goblets, as they sift hastily to avoid them. I hear the runes steam and hiss as they hit pavement.
I laugh.
Darroc gives me a look.
“I am behaving,” I reply sweetly. “You can’t tell me they didn’t have that coming.”
I’m getting better at reading him. He finds me amusing. I wipe my palms on my leather pants, trying to get rid of the bloody residue from the runes. I try my shirt. But it’s no use; the red discoloration has set.
When Darroc takes my hand and leads me down the alley between Barrons Books and Baubles and Barrons’ garage, which houses the car collection I used to covet, I don’t look to either side. I keep my gaze trained straight ahead.
I’ve lost Alina, failed to save Christian, killed Barrons, am becoming intimate with my sister’s lover. I hurt Dani to drive her away, and now I’ve teamed up with the Unseelie army.
Eyes on the prize, there’s no turning back.
10
Snow begins to fall, carpeting the night in a soft white hush. We march across it, a stain of Unseelie, stomping, crawling, slithering toward Temple Bar.
There are castes behind me that I’ve seen only once before—the night Darroc brought them through the dolmen. I have no desire to inspect them any more closely than I did that night. Some of the Unseelie aren’t so bad to look at. The Rhino-boys are disgusting, but they don’t make you feel … dirty. Others … well, even the way they move makes your skin crawl, makes you feel slimy where their eyes linger.
As we pass a streetlamp, I glance at a flyer, drooping limply on it: The Dani Daily, 97 days AWC.
The headline brags that she killed a Hunter. I put myself in Dani’s head, to figure out the date. It takes me a minute, but I get it—after the walls crashed. I perform a rapid calculation. The last day I was in Dublin was January 12.
Ninety-seven days from Halloween—the night the walls crashed—is February 5.
Which means I’ve been gone at least twenty-four days, probably longer. The flyer was faded, worn by the elements. Much more snow and I’d never have seen it.
However long I’ve been gone, Dublin hasn’t changed much.
Although many of the streetlamps that were ripped from the concrete and destroyed have been replaced and the broken lights repaired, the power grids are still down. Here and there, generators hum, dead giveaways of life barricaded in buildings or holed up underground.
We pass the red façade of the Temple Bar, of the bar district. I glance in. I can’t help myself. I loved the place BWC—before the walls crashed.
Now it’s a dark shell, with shattered windows, overturned tables and chairs, and papery husks of human remains. From the way they’re piled, I know the patrons were crammed inside, huddled together when the end came.
I remember the way the Temple Bar looked the first time I saw it, brightly lit, with people and music spilling from open doors into the cobbled streets of the corner beyond. Guys had whistled at me. I’d forgotten my grief over Alina for a blessed second or two. Then, of course, hated myself for forgetting.
I can almost hear the laughter, the lilt of Irish voices. They’re all dead now, like Alina and Barrons.
I remember spending the long week before Halloween walking the streets of Dublin for hours on end, from dawn ’til dusk, feeling helpless, worthless, for all my supposed sidhe-seer skills. I wasn’t sure any of us would survive Halloween, so I’d tried to cram as much living into those last days as possible.
I’d chatted up street vendors and played backgammon with toothless old men who spoke a version of English so heavily distorted by dialect and gums that I’d understood only every fifth word, but it hadn’t mattered. They’d been delighted by a pretty girl’s attention, and I’d hungered for paternal comfort.
I’d visited the famous tourist hot spots. I’d eaten in dives and slammed back shots of whiskey with anyone who’d do them with me.
I’d fallen in love with the city I couldn’t protect.
After the Unseelie had escaped their prison and savaged her—dark, burned, and broken—I’d been determined to see her rebuilt.
Now I longed only to replace her.
“Do you sense i
t, MacKayla?” Darroc asks.
I’ve been keeping my sidhe-seer senses as closed as possible. I’m tired and have no desire to find the Sinsar Dubh. Not until I know everything he knows.
I open my senses warily and turn the “volume” up to a two on a scale of one to ten. My sidhe-seer senses are picking up the essence of countless things Fae, but none of them is the Sinsar Dubh. “No.”
“Are there many Fae?”
“The city is crawling with them.”
“Light or Dark Court?”
“It doesn’t work like that. I can only pick up Fae, not their allegiance or caste.”
“How many?”
I adjust the volume to three and a half. A tenth this much Fae in close proximity used to have me holding my stomach and trying not to puke. Now I feel charged by it. More alive than I want to be. “They’re on all sides of us, in twos and threes. They’re above us, on the rooftops and in the skies. I don’t get the feeling that they’re watching us, more that they’re watching everything.” Are they, too, hunting my Book? I’ll kill them all. It’s mine.
“Hundreds?” he presses.
“Thousands,” I correct.
“Organized?”
“There is one group to the east that is considerably larger than the others, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Then east we go,” he says. He turns to the princes and barks a command. They vanish.
I voice a growing suspicion. “They’re not really gone, are they? They never are when you send them away.”
“They remain close, watching but unseen. A sift away, with more of my army.”
“And when we find this group of Fae?” I press.
“If they are Unseelie, they are mine.”
“And if they’re Seelie?”
“Then we will drive them from Dublin.”
Good. The less Fae in my way, the better.
Few have ever seen the Seelie, save the rare mortal stolen away and kept at the Fae court and, of course, Barrons, who once spent a great deal of time there, sleeping with a princess, before killing her and pissing off V’lane for all eternity.
Karen Marie Moning’s Fever Series 5-Book Bundle: Darkfever, Bloodfever, Faefever, Dreamfever, Shadowfever Page 129
