Dreamfever_The Fever Series

by Karen Marie Moning

  Place large skillet on medium-high heat. Add oil and Unseelie cubes and season to taste with salt, pepper, and garlic powder. Add carrot and onion and cook for 5 minutes, stirring frequently.

  In a saucepan over medium heat, melt butter and add flour. Whisk in broth and Worcestershire sauce. Thicken gravy and add to meat and vegetables. Add peas.

  Fill casserole dish with meat and vegetable mixture, and spoon potatoes over meat. Season potatoes to taste and broil 6 to 8 inches from top of oven, until evenly browned. (You may need to cook covered so the Unseelie doesn’t slither up the sides and end up on the bottom of the oven.) Garnish with chopped parsley.

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks to my fabulous editor, Shauna Summers, whose keen insights, unflagging enthusiasm, and support have been such a big part of bringing this series to life. You’re a dream editor, Shauna! Thanks to Jessica Sebor for staying on top of the details and for keeping track of me as I move all over the country. I know it hasn’t been easy. Thanks to Bantam Dell’s fabulous marketing, art, and sales departments for all your hard work and energy. Thanks also to the brilliant Genevieve Gagne-Hawes for reading and critiquing the first drafts of all the Fever books. You’re an amazing woman, and my thanks are long overdue! Also, to my agent, Amy Berkower, and the good people at Writer’s House who do the behind-the-scenes work that isn’t immediately recognized. I see and appreciate all of it!

  Thanks to the Moning Maniacs, who make the message boards at karenmoning.com such a fun place, sharing your passion for life, love, and books. Our drop-of-a-hat get-togethers mean so much to me. Thanks to the talented fans who designed the artwork at the Fever Fan Merchandise Store, and to the “precinct captains” who managed their leg of the MacHalo World Tour. You’re the best!

  Thanks to Leiha Mann, whose talents are so many and diverse that I can never list them all: manager, innovator, coordinator, photographer, mover and shaker, and maker of grand events. I’m continually astounded at how much person is packed inside that tiny frame!

  Finally, a special thanks to my husband, Neil, who is the first person to hear Mac’s escapades every morning and the last person I talk to about them every night. From brainstorming to editing, to writing the songs and recording the sound track, you’ve enriched the Fever world, and my life, in so many ways! It’s pure joy creating with you.

  To all the people who’ve devoted their time, energy, creativity, and insight to the Fever world—thanks!

  Want more Mac?

  Read on for never-before-published

  bonus material from your favorite author …

  A deleted scene from Dreamfever

  An interview between Karen Marie Moning and Jericho Barrons

  Deleted Scene from Dreamfever

  This was written before Faefever was finished, as a sort of aiming-at-emotion in the future. By the time I began writing Dreamfever, I no longer liked it. I have few actual “deleted” scenes but I have a lot of notes and small sketches like this.

  —KAREN MARIE MONING

  “You’re not the only fucking one that got branded!” Barrons slammed his fist into the wall behind my head. Bits of plaster dusted my shoulders.

  Oh, really? I wasn’t the only one walking around with a mark on me I didn’t want? Our gazes locked and I jerked. Was he letting me see this, or had intimacy given me a window into his soul. As if he had one. He deserved no less. He hadn’t done it to save me. He’d had sex with me because it was the only way he could continue using me. He’d had sex with me to steal my services back from his enemies at Camp Pri-ya.

  And for the first time since the morning he’d gotten up and walked out, leaving me painfully, horrifically aware of both who I was and where I was—in Jericho Barron’s lust-drenched bed on the verge of begging him not to leave me while in full possession of my senses—I could see that it hadn’t left him nearly as untouched as I’d thought. As he’d led me to think.

  I searched his face. Beneath his left eye, a tiny muscle contracted, smoothed, contracted again. That minute betrayal was Barron’s equivalent of a normal person having a full-blown hissy fit. Oh, no, far from untouched. Had he stood outside my door as I’d stood outside his, fists at his sides, lips drawn back? Did it have him as bad as it had me? Was it eating at him, gnawing at him with the same sharp vicious little teeth that wouldn’t let me sleep?

  Yes, it was. I could see the rage of insatiable, uninvited lust in every line of that dark, stoic face that had once been too subtly etched for me to read. I wasn’t the only one lying awake at night, fevered with memories, tossing, turning, soaking my sheets, burning up—not for Fae sex, but him, damn it all to hell, him.

  Remembering being too naked in body and soul, trembling with need. Backing to him, a wild animal. Later, straddling him, holding him down and demanding more and more because Jericho Barrons couldn’t be depleted. Of anything. Whatever he was. He was without limit.

  He hadn’t erased the Fae Princes’ marks—he’d burned his own into them until I could no longer discern the shape of the marks they’d left. He’d scarred their scars out of me with a bigger scar. The bastard. And if I’d managed to carve up some part of him in return—

  “Good,” I said, hard and low. “Welcome to my world, Barrons. I hope it hurts like hell.” His hand was on my throat and my back was to the wall. I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t need to. He was touching me. Two enormous magnets, repelling and attracting; a manifest of nature, not a matter of will at all. The air between us crackled with energy. Did I smell flesh burning?

  “Good?” he said softly, and staring into those black eyes was like staring down the shadowy, demon-littered corridor of the Unseelie mirror in his study. “You think it’s good to have something like me obsessed with you? My dear, dear, bloody idiotic, suicidal Ms. Lane, you have no fucking idea what’s gotten the scent of you in its nostrils, what has the taste of you in its blood, or you’d run. You’d run for what little remains of what you think of as your life.”

  He whirled, long black coat fluttering, out the door, and was gone.

  I stared into the deepening twilight into which he’d disappeared. Nightfall was painting the stone walkway one of those new Fae shades that hadn’t existed before the walls had come crashing down around our ears; a dreamy silvery violet, spider-webbed with moonbeams that was eerily beautiful. I shivered. I hated the new colors. They were … somehow just … wrong.

  I shook it off.

  Obsessed, Barrons had said.

  I smiled. Good.

  Interview with

  Jericho Barrons

  It’s me, KMM, and I’m at Barrons Books & Baubles where I’ll be interviewing Jericho Barrons today.

  I choose my seat with care, sitting on the chesterfield sofa Mac usually occupies. It tickles me to sit where she usually sits. There’s a bottle of pink polish on the table next to me, and two fashion magazines. The gas fireplaces are on. I feel as if Mac might have just left, when the truth is she hasn’t been here for quite a while. Barrons moves a chair close to me and sits so near our knees almost touch. If I move, they will. I battle the urge to move. Before I begin the interview, I glance around my bookstore with pleasure. I see the parts of it that aren’t fully realized, the opaqueness in certain areas that I’ve not committed to the page in comprehensive detail. It occurs to me that perhaps I should finish painting the mural five floors up, maybe add a few chairs. Barrons makes a sound of impatience. I know that sound well. I open my laptop and begin.

  Karen Marie Moning: Let’s start things off with the question we all want the answer to: What are you, Jericho Barrons?

  Jericho Z. Barrons: At the moment, hungry.

  He gives me a look that makes me want to feed him whatever he wants.

  KMM: That’s not what I mean and you know it.

  JZB: I’ve been informed I’m a “lefty.” Does that help?

  I refuse to look at his crotch to see where his package is. He’s doing to me what he does to Mac all the time: trying to
distract and evade with sex. But I know every mistake Mac has made, and I’m not falling for it. I will get answers.

  KMM: Are you the Unseelie King? I say coyly.

  JZB: Don’t you think I‘d be able to touch my own bloody book if I was?

  He sounds cross.

  KMM: You answered my question with a question, not an answer, Barrons. Are you the Unseelie King: yes or no? I push.

  His eyes narrow. I refuse to squirm in my chair. I’m the author. I created him. I don’t need to squirm. As if he read my mind, he says:

  JZB: You think you created me don’t you?

  KMM: I did create you, I say dryly.

  Perhaps there’s a touch of conceit in my voice. If I created him then I can control him and if I can control a man like Barrons, then I must be one hell of a woman.

  JZB: Has it occurred to you that perhaps I created you?

  I go blank for a moment. I’ve always been more than a little perturbed by Zhuangzi’s conundrum of whether Chuang Chou was a man dreaming he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was a man. I suspect reality is a bit less tangible, more frighteningly malleable to fiction writers.

  JZB: Or perhaps, he exploits my hesitation instantly, I stroll by your bedroom window at night, whisper my tale to you and let you believe it is fiction. Allow you to suffer the delusion that you’re in charge.

  Mockery shimmers in his dark gaze and for a moment I’m transfixed. I don’t think I put small gold flecks in his eyes. Where did they come from?

  KMM: I shake off the thrall and say, Get over yourself, Barrons. No doubts. I created you.

  JZB: Really. Then why the bloody hell are you asking me what I am? The Sahara could be no dryer than his voice.

  I stare. Why am I? The answer comes swiftly. Because—try though I might to convince myself otherwise—I’ve long suspected I don’t have any control over Barrons, and never had. He has parted with his secrets only if and when he felt like it—and that hasn’t been often. Still, I’m the author. I do too know what he is. I set my laptop aside and stand, bristling with irritation and indignation.

  KMM: That’s it, Barrons. You pushed me too far. I’m going to tell them everything, right now. I’m going to spill it all. Tell them every sordid detail about what you are, what you did, and what you want.

  He stands, too. He towers over me. I did not write him that tall and I know it. And I certainly didn’t write him that attractive. I gave him flaws. Where are they? And where did his tattoos go? The ones on his left arm are gone now, and there’s something new on his neck. Is it moving? He smiles and I know I didn’t write that smile. Death smiles like that.

  JZB: Really, he says softly and I shiver because I know—after all, I created him—that soft from Barrons is dangerous. And risk that I created you, and if you become too much of a nuisance I’ll kill you off? Are you ready to die, Ms. Moning? You know what happens to unwanted, irksome characters. He touches my cheek. Electricity sizzles under my skin. He traces a finger down my jaw, stopping at my jugular. You are swift becoming unwanted.

  I stare up at him, appalled to realize I want to be wanted by Jericho Barrons. I want to touch him. I want him to touch me. I want him to look at me with lust. I’m baffled by this. Like Fae creations, can a fictional character take on a life of its own? Change without the author’s consent? Do I really know who and what he is? Is it possible he’s been masquerading all along, deceiving even his own creator? The lines of reality blur around me.

  KMM: I do, too, know what you are, I insist.

  JZB: Bored now. Where’s Mac?

  KMM: I’m the one asking the questions.

  JZB: I said, “Where’s Mac?”

  Unbelievable! He Voiced me! The bastard actually Voiced me!

  KMM: At Chester’s with Ryodan, I grit, where I left her when I came here to interview you.

  His hand is suddenly around my throat and I can’t breathe. My toes barely touch the floor.

  JZB: If she fucks him you die.

  He releases me, and I collapse onto the sofa. With a blur of movement, and the slam of the front door, Jericho Barrons is gone.

  Eventually, I collect myself. I’m not sure why I bother, but I stop to turn off both gas fires on the way out, as if it’s all so real that a backdraft might burn my fictional bookstore down. As I’m leaving, I glance up, and do a double take. The mural is complete!

  I stop and turn slowly. Sure enough, right where I wanted them, sit two plush, red velvet chairs.

  I didn’t put them there.

  If you’re dying to know what happens to

  Mac, don’t miss the upcoming installment in

  Karen Marie Moning’s “addictively dark,

  erotic and even shocking”* series.

  SHADOWFEVER

  by

  Karen Marie Moning

  Coming soon from Delacorte Press

  *Publishers Weekly

  About the Author

  KAREN MARIE MONING is the internationally bestselling author of the Highlander and Fever novels. Her books have appeared on the New York Times, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly bestseller lists, and have won numerous awards, including the prestigious RITA. The Fever series has been optioned by Twentieth Century Fox/New Regency Productions. You may write to her at Karen@KarenMoning.com.