A terrible secret that had been eating me alive.
What did you wear to your senior prom, Mac?
That had been the last thing I’d heard, Pri-ya.
Everything from that moment on had really happened.
I’d faked.
I’d lied to him and myself.
I stayed.
And it hadn’t felt any different.
I’d been just as insatiable, just as greedy, just as vulnerable. I’d known exactly who I was, what had happened at the church, and what I’d been doing for the past few months.
And every time he’d touched me, my world had dwindled down to one thing: him.
He was never vulnerable.
I’d hated him for that.
I shook my head, scattered the broody thoughts.
Where would Barrons go to be alone, relax, maybe sleep? Beyond the reach of anyone. Inside a heavily warded Silver.
With the scent of him still hanging in the air, I ransacked his study.
I was feeling ruthless and tired of playing by rules. I didn’t know why there should be any rules between us, anyway. It seemed absurd. He’d been in my space since the moment I’d met him, larger than life, electrifyingly present, shaking me up and waking me up and making me just this side of insane.
I grabbed one of his many antique weapons and pried open the locked drawers of his desk.
Yes, he’d see that I broke into it. No, I didn’t care. He could just try to take his anger out on me. I had a fair share of my own.
He had files on me, on my parents, on McCabe, on O’Bannion, people I’d never heard of, even his own men.
There were bills for dozens of different addresses in many different countries.
In the bottom drawer, I found pictures of me. Stacks and stacks of them.
At the Clarin House, stepping out into the dewy Dublin morning, tan legs gleaming beneath the short hem of my favorite white skirt, long blond hair swinging in a high ponytail.
Walking across the green at Trinity College, meeting Dani for the first time, by the fountain.
Coming down the back steps of Alina’s apartment, exiting into the alley.
Slinking down the back alley, looking at O’Bannion’s abandoned cars, the morning I’d realized that Barrons had turned out all the lights and let the Shades take the perimeter, devouring sixteen men to kill a single one who was a threat to me. There was shock, horror, and something unmistakably relieved in my eyes.
Fighting back-to-back with Dani, sword and spear blazing alabaster in the darkness. There was a whole series of those shots, taken from a rooftop angle. I was on fire, face shining, eyes narrowed, body made for what I was doing.
Through the front window of the bookstore, hugging Daddy.
Curled on the sofa in the rear conversation area of BB&B, sleeping, hands tucked against my chest. No makeup. I looked seventeen, a little lost, completely unguarded.
Marching into the Garda station with Jayne. Heading back to the bookstore, without flashlights. I’d never been in danger that night. He’d been there, making sure I survived whatever came my way.
No one had ever taken so many pictures of me before. Not even Alina. He’d caught my subtlest emotions in each shot. He’d been watching me, always watching me.
Through the window of a crofter’s cottage, I was touching Nana’s face, trying to push into her thoughts and see my mother. My eyes were half closed, my features drawn with concentration.
Another rooftop shot. I had my palm on the Gray Woman’s chest, demanding she restore Dani.
Was there anything he didn’t know?
I let the photos fall back into the drawer. I was feeling light-headed. He’d seen it all: the good, the bad, and the ugly. He never asked me any questions, unless he thought I needed to figure out the answers. He never decked me out in convenient labels and tried to stuff me in a box. Even when there were plenty of labels to stick to me. I was what I was at that moment and he liked it, and that was all that mattered to him.
I turned and stared into the mirror.
The reflection of a stranger stared back.
I touched my face in the reflection. No, she wasn’t a stranger. She was a woman who’d stepped out of her comfort zone in order to survive, who’d become a fighter. I liked the woman I saw in the looking glass.
The surface of the mirror was icy beneath my fingers.
I knew this Silver. I knew all the Silvers. They had something of … K’Vruck in them. Had the king selected an ingredient of their creation from the Hunter’s home world?
As I gazed into it, I sought that dark, glassy lake and told it I wanted in.
Missed you, it steamed. Come swim.
Soon, I promised.
Alabaster runes popped up from the black depths, shimmering on the surface.
It was that easy. I asked, it gave. Always there, always ready.
I scooped them up and pressed them, one after another, to the surface of the Silver.
When the final one was in place, the surface began to ripple like silvery water. I trailed my fingers through it and the waters peeled back, receded to the black edges of the mirror, leaving me staring down a fog-filled path through a cemetery. Behind tombstones and crypts, dark creatures slithered and crept.
The Silver belched a gust of icy air.
I stepped up, into the mirror.
As I suspected, he’d stacked Silvers to form a gauntlet no intruder would make it through alive, protecting his underground abode.
Nine months ago, if I’d been able to figure out how to get in, I’d have gotten killed within the first few feet. I was attacked the instant I stepped inside. I didn’t have time to draw my spear. When the first volley of teeth and claws came at me, my lake instantly offered and I accepted without hesitation.
A single purple rune glowed in my palm.
My attackers fell back. They hated it, whatever it was.
I swirled through fog to my waist, absorbing the barren landscape. Skeletal trees glowed like yellow bones in the sickly moonlight. Crumbling headstones listed at acute angles. Mausoleums hulked behind wrought iron gates. It was brutally cold here, almost as frigid as the Unseelie prison. My hair iced, my brows and nose hairs frosted. My fingers began to numb.
The transition from this Silver to the next was seamless. All of them were. Barrons was far more adept at stacking Silvers than Darroc had been and even more skilled, it seemed, than the Unseelie King.
I didn’t even see the change in my environment coming. I suddenly had one foot in an icy cemetery and the other in a stifling desert of black sand, sun beating down on me. I glided forward into the searing heat and was instantly parched. Nothing attacked me on this scorched terrain. I wondered if the sun alone would keep certain trespassers out. The next mirror gave me fits. Abruptly, I was underwater. I couldn’t breathe. I panicked and tried to back out.
But I hadn’t been able to breathe in the Unseelie prison, either.
I stopped fighting it and half-swam, half-walked on the ocean floor of some planet—not ours, because we didn’t have fish that looked like small underwater steamboats with whirling wheels of teeth.
My glassy lake offered a bubble of sorts, sealed it around me, and everything that came at me bounced off.
I was beginning to feel downright indestructible. Cocky. I put a little swagger in my rolling steps.
By the time I passed through half a dozen more “zones,” I was beyond cocky. Every threat that came at me, my dark lake had an answer for. I was getting drunk on my own power.
From a landscape that would have been called “Midnight on a Far Star” if it had been a painting, I burst into a dimly lit room and blinked.
It was Spartan, Old World, and smelled good. Deep, drugging spices. Barrons. My knees felt soft. I smell him, I think of sex. I’m a hopeless case.
I knew instantly where I was.
Beneath the garage behind Barrons Books and Baubles.
41
I wanted to explo
re. I would have explored, except for the child crying.
Of all the things I expected Barrons to have secreted away from the world and protected so well, a child wasn’t on my list.
Clues to his identity? Surely.
A luxurious home? Definitely.
A kid? Never.
Bemused, I followed the sound. It was faint, coming from below. The child was sobbing as if its world was ending. I couldn’t tell if it was a girl or a boy, but the pain and sorrow it felt was soul-shredding. I wanted to make it stop. I had to make it stop. It was breaking my heart.
I moved through room after room, barely noticing my surroundings, opening and closing doors, looking for a way down. I was distantly aware that the true jewels of Barrons’ collection were here, in his underground lair. I passed things that I’d seen in museums and now knew had been copies. Barrons didn’t mess with copies. He loved his antiquities. The place hummed with OOPs somewhere. I would find them eventually.
But, first, the child.
The sound of it crying was killing me.
Did Jericho Barrons have children? Maybe he’d had one with Fiona?
I hissed, then realized how Fae I’d sounded and pretended I hadn’t just done that. I stopped and cocked my head. As if he’d heard my tight-lipped exhalation, the crying got louder. Saying, I’m here, I’m near, please find me, I’m so scared and alone.
There had to be stairs.
I stalked through the place, yanking open door after door. The crying was getting on my last maternal-instinct nerve. I finally found the right door and stepped inside.
He’d taken serious precautions.
I was in a fun-house room of mirrors. I could see stairs in a dozen different places, but I had no way of distinguishing between reflection and reality.
And knowing Barrons as well as I did, if I went for the reflection, something very nasty would happen to me. He obviously cared a great deal about the protection of the child.
My dark lake offered, but I didn’t need it.
“Show me what is true,” I murmured, and the mirrors fell dark, one after the next, until a chrome staircase gleamed in the low light.
I moved silently down it, drawn by the siren lure of the child’s sobs.
Once again, my expectations were shot.
The crying was coming from behind tall doors that were chained, padlocked, and engraved with runes. I shouldn’t have been able to hear it at all. I was astonished I’d ever been able to hear Barrons roaring this far underground.
It took me twenty minutes to break the chains, wards, and runes. He obviously wanted this child protected to the hilt. Why? What was so important? What was going on?
When I pushed open the doors, the crying stopped abruptly.
I stepped into the room and looked around. Whatever I’d expected, it wasn’t this. There was no opulence here, no treasure or collectibles. This was little better than Mallucé’s grotto beneath the Burren.
The room was hewn from stone, a cave cleared out in the bedrock of the earth. A small stream ran through, appearing in the east wall, disappearing beyond the west. There were cameras mounted everywhere. He would know I’d been here, even if I walked back out right now.
In the center of the room was a cage that was twenty by twenty, made of massive iron bars, closely spaced. Like the doors, it was heavily runed. It was also empty.
I moved toward it.
And stopped, stunned.
It wasn’t empty as I’d thought. A child lay in the cage, curled on its side, naked. He looked about ten or eleven.
I hurried to him. “Honey, are you all right? What’s wrong? Why are you in there?”
The child looked up. I staggered and went to my knees on the stone floor, stupefied.
I was looking at the child from the vision I’d shared with Barrons.
Every detail of it was crystal clear in my head, as if I’d lived it yesterday—a rare glimpse into Barrons’ heart. I could close my eyes and be back there again with him, that easily. We were in a desert.
It’s dusk. We hold a child in our arms.
I stare into the night.
I won’t look down.
Can’t face what’s in his eyes.
Can’t not look.
My gaze goes unwillingly, hungrily down.
The child stares up at me with utter trust.
“But you died!” I protested, staring at him.
The boy moved toward me, came to stand at the edge of the cage and wrapped his small hands around the bars. Beautiful boy. Dark hair, gold skin, dark eyes. His father’s son. His eyes are soft, warm.
And I’m Barrons, staring down at him …
His eyes say, I know you won’t let me die.
His eyes say, I know you will make the pain stop.
His eyes said, Trust/love/adore/youareperfect/youwillalwayskeepmesafe/youaremyworld.
But I didn’t keep him safe.
And I can’t make his pain stop.
We’d been in the desert holding this child, this very boy in our arms, losing him, loving him, grieving him, feeling his life slip away …
I see him there. His yesterdays. His today. The tomorrows that will never be.
I see his pain and it shreds me.
I see his absolute love and it shames me.
He smiles at me. He gives me all his love in his eyes.
It begins to fade.
No! I roar. You will not die! You will not leave me!
I stare into his eyes for what seems a thousand days.
I see him. I hold him. He is there.
He is gone.
But he’s not gone. He’s right here with me. The boy presses his face to the bars. He smiles at me. He gives me all his love in his eyes. I melt. If I could be someone’s mother, I would take this child and keep him safe forever.
I push to my feet, moving as if I’m in a trance. I’ve held this child, inside Barrons’ head. As Barrons, I loved him and I lost him. In sharing that vision, it became my wound, too.
“I don’t understand. How are you alive? Why are you here?” Why had Barrons experienced his death? There was no question that he had. I’d been there. I’d tasted it, too. It was reminiscent of the regrets I’d felt about Alina …
Come back, come back, you want to scream … just one more minute. Just one more smile … one more chance to do things right. But he’s gone. He’s gone. Where did he go? What happens to life when it leaves? Does it go somewhere or is it just fucking gone?
“How are you here?” I say wonderingly.
He speaks to me, and I don’t understand a word of it. It’s a language dead and forgotten. But I hear the plaintive tones. I hear a word that sounds like Ma-ma.
Choking back a sob, I reach for him.
As I slip my arms through the bars and gather his small, naked body into my arms, as his dark head floats into the hollow where my shoulder meets my neck, fangs puncture my skin, and the beautiful little boy rips out my throat.
42
I die for a long time.
Much longer than I think it should take.
Figures I’d die slow and in pain. I pass out several times and am surprised that I regain consciousness. I feel fevered. The skin of my neck is numb, but the wound burns like I’ve been injected with venom.
I think I left half of my neck in the child’s impossibly expandable jaws.
He began to change the moment I took him in my arms.
I managed to tear myself from his preternaturally strong grasp and stumble from the cage before he completed the transformation.
But it was too late. I’d been a fool. My heart had wed Barrons to a sobbing child and embraced sentimentality. I’d seen the chains, padlocks, and wards as Barrons’ way of keeping a child safe.
What they’d really been was his way of keeping the world safe from the child.
I lie on the floor of the stone chamber, dying. I lose awareness again for a time, then am back.
I watch the child bec
ome the night version of Barrons’ beast. Black skin, black horns and fangs, red eyes. Talk about homicidally insane. He makes the beast Barrons was in the Silvers seem downright genial and calm.
He bays continuously while he changes, head whipping from side to side, spraying me with his spittle and my blood, staring at me with feral crimson eyes. He wants to sink his teeth into me, shake me, and crush every last drop of blood from my body. The mark Barrons placed on my skull doesn’t do a thing to defuse his bloodlust.
I am food and he can’t reach me.
He rattles the bars of the cage and he howls.
He morphs from four to ten feet tall.
This is what I heard beneath the garage. This is what I listened to while looking at Barrons across the roof of a car.
This child, caged down here, forever imprisoned.
And I understand, as my lifeblood seeps out, that this is why he was bringing the dead woman out of the Silver.
The child had to be fed.
He held this child, watched him die. I try to think about it, wrap my brain around it. The child has to be his son. If Barrons didn’t feed him, the child suffered. If he did feed him, he had to look at this monster. How long? How long had he been caretaker for this child? A thousand years? Ten? More?
I try to touch my neck, feel the extent of my wounds, but I can’t raise my arms. I’m weak, dreamy, and I don’t really care. I just want to close my eyes and sleep for a few minutes. Just a short nap, then I’ll wake up and get busy finding something in my lake to help me survive this. I wonder if there are runes that can heal torn-out throats. Maybe there’s some Unseelie in here somewhere.
I wonder if that’s my jugular gushing. If so, it’s too late, way too late for me now.
I can’t believe I’m going to die like this.
Barrons will come in and find me here.
Bled out on the floor of his bat cave.
I try to summon the will to search my lake, but I think I lost too much blood too fast. I can’t care, no matter how I try. The lake is curiously silent. Like it’s watching, waiting to see what happens next.
The roaring in the cage is so loud, I don’t hear Barrons roaring, too, until he’s scooping me up into his arms and carrying me from the room, slamming doors behind him.
Karen Marie Moning’s Fever Series 5-Book Bundle: Darkfever, Bloodfever, Faefever, Dreamfever, Shadowfever Page 163
