“Northwest of the city. Three miles at the most.”
I was relieved. That was exactly where I felt it, too.
“What part of this place is most securely warded?” Isla asked Barrons.
He gave her a look. “All of it.”
“What’s the plan?” I said.
“You must give your mother the amulet,” Pieter said.
I touched the chain around my neck and looked at Barrons. He took a slow breath and opened his mouth. It stretched wide on a soundless roar.
I blinked and looked again. He was composed and urbane as ever.
“It’s your call,” he said. “You have to decide this one.”
I felt so strange. Mac 1.0, bartender, daydreamer, and professional sun worshipper, would have wanted nothing more than to pass off any and all responsibility to someone else. To be taken care of. Not to be the one taking care. I no longer knew that woman. I liked making the hard decisions and fighting the good fight. Getting to lay down responsibility no longer felt like relinquishing a burden—it felt like being shut out of the most important parts of my life.
“MacKayla, time is of the essence,” Pieter said softly. “You don’t have to fight anymore. We’re here now.”
I looked at Isla. Her blue eyes shimmered with unshed tears. “Listen to your father,” she said. “You’ll never be alone again, darling. Give me the amulet. Release your burden and let me carry it for you. It was never meant to be yours.”
I looked back at Barrons. He was watching me. I knew him. He wouldn’t force my hand.
I did a double take. Who was I kidding? Of course Barrons would try to force my hand on this. He wanted the spell of unmaking to end his son’s life. He’d been hunting it for nearly his entire existence. He would stomp and argue and roar. He’d never get this close only to back off and give me space to make my own decisions.
“Don’t do it,” he snarled. “You promised.”
“The Sinsar Dubh has entered the city,” Isla said simply. “You must decide.”
I could feel it, too, rushing toward us, as if it knew that if it hurried, it could catch us with our pants down, me undecided, all of us exposed by my inability to commit.
I moved toward Isla, playing the chain through my fingers. How could I accept that I didn’t have to fight this battle? I’d been preparing for it. I was ready. Yet here she stood, telling me I didn’t need to worry. I wouldn’t doom the world, and I didn’t need to save it. Others had been preparing for the same moment and were more qualified.
That surreal feeling was back. And what was that buzzing at my ear? I kept thinking I was hearing Barrons roaring, but every time I looked at him, he wasn’t saying a word. “I need a spell from the Book,” I said.
“Once it’s locked up, we can get anything you need. Pieter knows the First Language. It’s how your father and I met, working on ancient scrolls.”
I stared into the face so like my own but older, wiser, more mature. I wanted to say it, needed to do this, at least once. I might never get the chance again. “Mother,” I tried the word on my tongue.
A tremulous, radiant smile curved her lips. “My dear, sweet MacKayla!” she exclaimed.
I wanted to touch her, be in her arms, breathe in the scent of my mother, and know I belonged. I focused on my only memory of her, deeply buried until this moment. I focused on it hard, thinking about how treasured it was. How I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten it all these years. How my child’s mind had taken a single snapshot: Isla O’Connor and Pieter staring at me with tears in their eyes. They’d been standing by a blue station wagon, waving good-bye to us. It was pouring rain, and someone had held a bright pink umbrella with green cartoon flowers above my baby carriage, but the wind had whisked a chill mist beneath it. I’d flailed my tiny fists, cold and crying, and Isla suddenly broke away from Pieter to tuck the blanket more securely around me.
“Oh, darling, it was the hardest thing I ever did that day in the rain, letting you go! When I tucked you in, I wanted so desperately to snatch you up and keep you with us forever!”
“I remember the umbrella,” I said. “I think it must be where I got my love of pink.”
She nodded, eyes shining. “It was bright pink with green flowers.”
Tears stung my eyes. I stared at her a long moment, memorizing her face.
Isla opened her arms. “My daughter, my beautiful little girl!”
Bittersweet emotion flooded me as I moved into my mother’s arms. When they closed warm and comforting around me, I began to cry.
She stroked my hair and whispered, “Hush, darling, it’s all right. Your father and I are here now. You don’t need to worry about a thing. It’s all right. We’re together again.”
I cried harder. Because I could see the truth. Sometimes it’s there in the flaws.
And other times it’s there in too much perfection.
My mother’s arms were around my neck. She smelled good, like Alina, of peaches-and-cream candles and Beautiful perfume.
And I didn’t have a single memory of this woman.
There’d been no blue station wagon. No pink umbrella. No day in the rain.
I slid the spear from my holster and drove it up between our bodies.
Straight into Isla O’Connor’s heart.
47
Isla inhaled, sharp with pain, and went stiff in my arms, clutching at my neck.
“Darling?” Blue eyes stared into mine, blank and confused. She was Isla.
“You stupid little bitch!” Blue eyes stared into mine, fiercely intelligent, furious, hard with rage. She was Rowena.
“How could you do this to me?” Isla cried.
“If only I’d killed you that night in the pub!” Blood-tinged spittle sprayed from Rowena’s lips.
“MacKayla, my darling, darling daughter, what have you done?”
“Och, and ’tis because of you all this happened!” Rowena spat. “You bloody damned O’Connors, bringing naught but trouble and misfortune to us all!”
I felt her legs buckle, but she caught herself on my shoulders and didn’t go down. She was one tough old woman.
I shuddered. I’d never been talking to Isla. It was Rowena all along, carrying the Sinsar Dubh, possessed by it. But now she was dying, and the Book’s ability to maintain a convincing illusion was dying with her. She was flashing back and forth between the illusion of Isla and the reality of Rowena.
“Did you kill my sister?” I shook the old woman so hard her hair spilled loose from its tight bun.
“Dani killed your sister. And the two of you were always cozying up. Och, and I imagine you feel differently about her now!” She cackled.
I used Voice. “Did you order her to do it?”
She writhed, mouth contorting. She didn’t want to answer me. She wanted me to suffer. “Yesss!” the word exploded in an unwilling hiss. I hoped it hurt.
“Did you use your mental coercion to make her do it?”
Her jaw locked and her eyes narrowed to slits. I repeated the question, rattling the windows in the study with the multilayered thunder of compulsion.
“Yesss! ’Twas my right. ’Tis why I was given such gifts! And the cleverness to use them. It requires the layering of many subtle commands, knowing precisely where to nudge. No other could have done it.” She gave me a smug stare, proud of herself.
I grimaced and looked away, stilled by the horror of it.
Here it was at last—the truth of my sister’s murder. I finally knew what had happened to Alina.
The day she’d discovered Darroc was the Lord Master, the same day she’d called me, crying, and left a message, was the day she’d been killed—but not at all for the reasons I’d thought. If it hadn’t been for Rowena, Alina would have lived through that day.
I’d have gotten a new phone, called her in a few days, and she’d have answered. Life would have gone on for the two of us. She and Darroc would probably have gotten back together, and who knew how things might have turned out? Her m
essage had been misleading from the beginning, but she’d had no idea this old woman was her enemy.
This bitch, this meddling tyrant who believed it was her right to use her “gifts” to force a child to kill, had ordered Dani to take Alina to a dark alley to be murdered.
My hands trembled. I wanted to kill her the same way.
Had Rowena specified the monsters Dani should find and leave Alina with? Had she insisted Dani stay and watch the deed be done? Had Alina begged? Had they both wept, knowing the wrongness of it? I’d been forced to want sex. Dani had been forced to murder. My sister. At thirteen. I couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to watch yourself kill someone you didn’t want to kill. Had Dani known Alina? Liked her? And been compelled to kill her anyway?
“And I tried to kill you in your cell when you were a mindless whore, but you wouldn’t die! I slit your throat. I suffocated you. I gutted you, I poisoned you! Still you came back. Finally I painted over the wards to let them take you and destroy you!”
“You painted over the—you were going to give me back to the princes?” I was flabbergasted. She had tried to kill me. I hadn’t just dreamed it. I shoved both thoughts from my mind. I wanted answers and, from the look of her, she wasn’t going to last long. Voice echoed out of me, reverberating off the walls. “Why did you kill Alina?”
“Are you daft? She consorted with the enemy! My spies followed her to his house and saw him with Unseelie! ’Twas reason enough. Then there was the prophecy! I’d’ve killed her at birth if I could’ve. If I’d known she was still alive, I’d’ve hunted her!”
“Did you know who she was when you killed her? Did you know she was Isla’s daughter?”
“Och, of course,” she sneered. “I had Dani lure her to us when my girls told me they’d spotted an untrained sidhe-seer, same as I sent her to you! Alina Lane, she called herself, but I knew the instant I saw her who she was. Isla, all over again, plain as day! And my Kayleigh dead because of her mother!”
I wanted to strangle her with my bare hands, choke the breath out of her. Over and over.
“Did you know who I was when you saw me that first night?”
A troubled look creased her brow. “ ’Tis impossible. You can’t be. You weren’t born. I’d have known were Isla pregnant! Women talk. They never spoke of it!”
“How did the Book get out?” I demanded.
A crafty light entered her eyes. “You think I let it out. I did no such thing. I do the work of angels! An angel came to me and warned me that the spells holding it had weakened. It bid me enter the forbidden chamber and strengthen the runes. Only I could do it. I had to be brave! I had to be strong! I was both. I see, serve, and protect! I have always been there for my children!”
I caught my breath. The Book seduced. I was willing to bet there had been no angel. The old woman charged with protecting the world from the Sinsar Dubh hadn’t strengthened the runes. She’d erased them.
“I did as the angel instructed. ’Twas your mother who let it out!”
“What happened the night the Book escaped? Tell me everything!”
“You are an abomination. The doom of us all.” The light in her eyes was matched by a craftier smile. “I’ll die here, well I ken it, but I’ll not be giving the likes of you any peace. Isla was a traitor and a whore, and you’re more of the same.” She grabbed my hand and thrust her small frame forward on the spear, twisting it as she went. “Ahhhh!” she cried. Blood gushed from her mouth.
She died sudden, mouth open, eyes wide.
Disgusted, I dropped her and stepped back, watched her fall to the floor. The Sinsar Dubh whumped to the floor. I stepped back hastily.
Behind me, Barrons was roaring. I glanced over my shoulder. He was hammering at an invisible barrier, his eyes wild, shouting.
“It’s okay,” I told him. “I have it under control. I saw through it.” I was trembling, cold and hot and nauseated. It had all been so real. It felt as if I’d killed my mother, even though my brain knew I hadn’t. For a short time, I’d believed the lies. And my heart hurt as if I’d lost a family I’d never had.
I looked back at Rowena. She stared up at the ceiling, eyes empty, mouth slack.
The Sinsar Dubh lay between us, closed, seemingly inert, a massive black tome with many locks.
I had no doubt it had chosen Rowena for her knowledge of wards so she could carry it past Barrons’ protective spells, straight into the heart of our heavily warded world.
I thought back, isolating the moment the illusion had begun. From the instant I’d stepped out of the Silver tonight, nothing had been real.
Rowena and the Sinsar Dubh had been waiting to ambush me in the bookstore the moment I’d appeared. It had skimmed my mind, picking out the details I would find most convincing.
I’d never left the study, never followed Barrons into the rear conversation area, or sat on the couch, or met my mother. It had “tasted me” on many occasions. It knew me. And it had played me like a virtuoso, sawing away at one heartstring after the next.
Creating a “father” for me had been a masterstroke. It had married memories to longings and given me what I wanted most: family, safety, freedom from crushing choices.
All to get me to hand over the amulet, to con me into placing the one thing capable of deceiving both of us into Rowena’s hands.
And if I had—oh, God, if I had! I would never have known from that moment forward what was real and what wasn’t.
I’d been so close to doing it, but the Book had made two mistakes. I’d fed it a thought about Barrons and it had immediately altered him to bring him in line with my expectations. Then I’d fed it a false memory, amplified it with the amulet, and it had played it right back at me.
I had no doubt the real Barrons had been walled off from me the entire time. The Barrons who had stood beside me in the bookstore had been an illusion the Book had constantly tweaked, according to the feedback it had been getting from me.
Almost had you … it purred.
“Almost only counts in hand grenades and horseshoes.” I stared down at the Sinsar Dubh, with its black cover and many complicated locks. But something wasn’t right. It had never looked right to me.
I consulted my memories. I remembered the day the Unseelie King had created it. This was not what he’d made. “Show me what is true,” I murmured.
When the Sinsar Dubh’s true form was revealed, I gasped. Sung into existence from slabs of purest gold and shards of obsidian, it was exquisite. I’d summoned crimson stones from one of the galaxies the Hunters liked to fly that housed tiny dancing flames. And although I’d put locks on my Book, top and bottom, they were decorative, never meant to secure it. My encryption was protection enough.
Or so I’d thought.
I’d made it lovely. I’d hoped the beauty of its binding might temper the horror of its contents.
I smiled sadly. For a brief time I’d believed I was Isla’s daughter. No such luck. I was the Unseelie King. And it was long past time for my battle with my darker half to end. According to the prophecy as I understood it, I’d triumphed over my “monster within.” It had been my hunger for illusion, to lose myself in a life I’d never had.
I fisted my hand around the amulet. It blazed with blue-black light. I was epic. I was strong. I had created this horror and I would destroy it. I would not be defeated.
Not defeat, MacKayla. I want you to come home.
“I am home. My bookstore.”
Is nothing. I will show you wonders beyond your imagining. Your body is strong. You will hold me and we will live. Dance. Fuck. Feast. It will be grand. We will K’Vruck the world.
“I’m not holding you. Ever.”
You were made for me. I for you. Two for tea and t-t-t-tea for two.
“I’ll kill myself first.” If I thought it might come to that, I would.
And let me win? You would die and let me rule? Allow me to encourage you.
“That’s not what you want, and you know it.”
>
What do you think I want, sweet MacKayla?
“You want me to forgive you.”
I have no need of absolution.
“You want me to take you back.”
In, sweet thing, take me in. Warm and wet like sex is warm and wet.
“You want to be the king. You want to turn us evil again.”
Evil, good, create, destroy. Puny minds. Puny caves. Time, MacKayla. Time absolves.
“Time does not define the act. Time is impartial; it neither condemns nor absolves. The action contains intent, and intent is where the definition lies.”
Bore me with human law.
“Enlighten you with universal law.”
You convict me of evil intent?
“Unequivocally.”
In your eyes I am a monster?
“Absolutely.”
I should be—how do you say?—put down?
“That’s what I’m here for.”
What, then, does that make you, MacKayla?
“A repentant king. I eviscerated my evil, imprisoned you once before, and I will again.”
How you amuse.
“Laugh all you want.”
You believe you are my maker.
“I know I am.”
My sweet MacKayla, you are such a fool. You did not make me. I made you.
A chill slid down my spine. Its voice oozed satisfaction and mockery, as if it were watching me head straight toward a train wreck and enjoying every minute of it. My eyes narrowed. “Not falling for the chicken/egg discussion. Your evil didn’t make me the king. I was the king, and I turned evil. I wised up and dumped my evil into a book. You were never supposed to live. And I plan to rectify that.”
Not chickens and eggs. A human woman. And you—a tiny little embryo.
My mouth opened on a retort, but I hesitated.
Of all the lies it had woven so far, this one held a startling ring of truth. Why?
What I told you before was true. I took Isla to escape the abbey. And she was pregnant. I did not expect to find you in her. I did not know how humans replicated. As I used her to kill the other humans who had dared to restrain me—ME, locked in a cold stone vacuum for an eternity of nothingness, have you any idea the HELL?—there you were. The wonder. Unformed life in her body. Mine for the taking. I marveled at the beauty of you. Unshaped, unfettered by scruple, unhampered by human weaknesses. Your race and its obsession with sin! You chain yourselves to the whipping post because you fear the sky. It is those chains, those limits, that make the bodies I take so fragile, tear them apart so soon after I possess them.
Karen Marie Moning’s Fever Series 5-Book Bundle: Darkfever, Bloodfever, Faefever, Dreamfever, Shadowfever Page 169
