Shadowfever f-5

by Karen Marie Moning

  “I said, ‘Stay close,’ ” Barrons growled behind me. “And don’t talk about the bloody Book in this bloody place. Move your ass, Ms. Lane, now.” He took my arm and pulled me from the stool.

  Cards spilled from my lap as I stood up. One had slipped inside the fur collar of my coat. I removed it and began to toss it away but at the last moment stopped and looked at it.

  The fear dorcha had been shuffling a tarot deck. The card I held was framed in crimson and black. In the center, a Hunter flew over a city at night. The coast was a dark border for the silver sheen of the ocean in the distance. On the Hunter’s back, between great, dark flapping wings, was a woman with a soft tousle of curls blowing around her face. Between strands of hair, I could see her mouth. She was laughing.

  It was the scene from my dream the other night. How could I be holding a tarot card with one of my dreams on it?

  What was on the rest of the cards?

  I glanced down at the floor. Near my feet was the Five of Pentacles. A shadowy woman stood on a sidewalk, peering through the window of a pub, watching a blond woman inside who was sitting at a booth, laughing with her friends. Me watching Alina.

  On Strength, a woman sat cross-legged in a church, naked, staring at the altar as if praying for absolution. Me after the rape.

  The Five of Cups showed a woman who looked startlingly like Fiona, standing in BB&B, crying. In the background I could see—I bent and peered closer—a pair of my high heels? And my iPod!

  On the Sun were two young women sprawled in bikinis—one lime green, the other hot pink—soaking up the rays.

  There was the Death card, a hooded grim reaper, scythe in hand, standing over a bloody body, female again. Me and Mallucé.

  There was one with an empty baby carriage abandoned near a pile of clothing and jewelry. One of those parchment-like husks the Shades left behind protruded from the carriage.

  I ran my hands through my hair, pushing it back as I stared down.

  “Prophecies, beautiful girl. Come in all shapes and sizes.”

  I glanced up at the dreamy-eyed guy, but he was no longer there. I looked to my right. Mr. Tall, Pin-striped, and Gaunt was also gone.

  On the bar, beside a freshly filled shot and a Guinness, another tarot card had been placed with care, facedown, black-and-silver side up.

  “Now or never, Ms. Lane. I don’t have all night.”

  I tossed back the shot and chased it, then picked up the card and slipped it into my pocket for later.

  Barrons steered me to a chrome staircase that was guarded at the bottom by the same two men that had escorted me to the top floor to see Ryodan the last time I was here. They were enormous, dressed in black pants and T-shirts, with heavily muscled bodies and dozens of scars on their hands and arms. Both carried snub-nosed automatics. Both had faces that drew the eye but, the moment you saw them, made you want to look away.

  As we approached, they swung their weapons toward me.

  “What the fuck is she doing here?”

  “Get over it, Lor,” Barrons said. “When I say jump, you say how high.”

  The one that wasn’t Lor laughed, and Lor slammed him in the gut with the butt of his gun. It was like hitting steel. The guy didn’t even flinch.

  “The fuck I jump. In your dreams. Laugh again, Fade, and you’ll be eating your balls for breakfast. Bitch,” Lor spat in my general direction. But he didn’t look at me, he looked at Barrons, and I think that’s what pushed me over the edge.

  I glanced between the two guards. Fade stared straight ahead. Lor glared at Barrons. I stepped away from Barrons and walked directly in front of them. Their gazes never wavered. It was as if I didn’t exist. I had no doubt I could stand there and do a dance, naked, and they’d still stare at anything but me.

  I grew up in the Deep South, in the heart of the Bible Belt, where there are still a few men who refuse to look at a woman that isn’t a relative. If a woman is with a man they need to speak with—whether it’s her daddy, boyfriend, or husband—they’ll look at the man the entire time. If the woman asks a question and they bother answering at all, they direct their reply to the man. They even turn to the side a little, as if catching a glimpse of her in their periphery might condemn them to eternal damnation. The first time it happened to me, I was fifteen, and dumbfounded. I kept asking question after question, trying to get old man Hatfield to look my way. I’d begun to feel invisible. Finally I’d moved to stand right in front of him. He’d stomped off in the middle of a sentence.

  Daddy had tried to explain to me that the old man considered it a kind of respect he was paying. That it was a courtesy given to the man the woman belonged to. I hadn’t been able to get past the words “the man the woman belonged to.” It was a property thing, pure and simple, and apparently Lor—who, according to Barrons, didn’t even know what century it was—was still living in a time when women had been owned. I hadn’t forgotten his comment about Kasteo, who hadn’t spoken in more than a thousand years. How old were these men? When, how, where had they lived?

  Barrons took my arm and turned me toward the staircase, but I shook him off and turned back to Lor. I was getting way too much bad press. I wasn’t a stone. I hadn’t been created by the Unseelie King. And I wasn’t a traitor.

  One of those things I could have a satisfying fight about.

  “Why am I a bitch?” I demanded. “Because you think I slept with Darroc?”

  “Shut her up before I kill her,” Lor told Barrons.

  “Don’t talk to him about me. Talk to me about me. Or do you think I’m not worthy of your regard because, when I believed Barrons was dead, I hooked up with the enemy to accomplish my goals? How terrible of me,” I mocked. “I guess I should have just laid down and died with a whimper. Would that have impressed you, Lor?”

  “Get the bitch out of my face.”

  “I guess taking up with Darroc makes me pretty … well”—I knew what word Barrons hated, and I was in the mood to try it out on Lor—“mercenary, doesn’t it? You can blame me for that if you want to. Or you can pull your head out of your ass and respect me for it.”

  Lor turned his head and looked at me then, as if I’d begun to speak his language. Unlike Barrons, the word didn’t seem to bother him. In fact, it seemed he understood, even appreciated it. Something flickered in his cold eyes. I’d interested him.

  “Some people wouldn’t see a traitor when they looked at me. Some people would see a survivor. Call me anything you like—I sleep fine at night. But you will look at me when you say it. Or I’ll get so far in your face you’ll be seeing me with your eyes closed. You’ll be seeing me in your nightmares. I’ll scorch myself on the backs of your eyelids. Get off my back and stay off it. I’m not the woman I used to be. If you want a war with me, you’ll get one. Just try me. Give me an excuse to go play in that dark place inside my head.”

  “Dark place?” Barrons murmured.

  “As if you don’t have one,” I snapped. “Your cave makes mine look like a white beach on a sunny day.” Shouldering past them, I pushed up the stairs. I thought I heard a rumble of laughter behind me and glanced over my shoulder. Three men stared at me with the dead, emotionless gazes of executioners.

  But, hey—they were all looking.

  Behind a chrome balustrade, the upper floor stretched: acres of smooth dark-glass walls without doors or handles.

  I had no idea how many rooms were up here. From the size of the downstairs, there could be fifty or more.

  We walked along the glass walls until some tiny detail I couldn’t discern signified an entrance. Barrons pressed his palm to a dark-glass panel, which slid to the side, then he pushed me into the room. He didn’t step in with me but continued moving down the hall to some other destination.

  The panel slid closed behind me, leaving me alone with Ryodan in the room that was the guts of Chester’s. It was made entirely of glass—walls, floor, and ceiling. I could see out, but no one could see in.

  The perimeter of the
ceiling was lined with dozens of small LED screens fed by cameras that panned every room in the club, as if you couldn’t see enough of what was going on merely by looking down past your feet. I stayed where I was. Every step you take on a glass floor feels like a leap of faith when the only solid floor you can see is forty feet below.

  “Mac,” said Ryodan.

  He stood behind a desk, couched in shadow, a big man, dark in a white shirt. The only light in the room came from the monitors above our heads. I wanted to launch myself across the room and attack him, claw his eyes out, bite him, punch him, stab him with my spear. I was astonished by the depth of hostility I felt.

  He’d made me kill Barrons.

  High on that cliff, the two of us had beaten, cut, and stabbed the man who’d been keeping me alive almost since the day I arrived in Dublin. And I’d wondered for days that had felt like years if Ryodan had wanted Barrons dead.

  “I thought you tricked me into killing him. I thought you’d betrayed him.”

  “I kept telling you to leave. You didn’t. You were never supposed to see what he was.”

  “You mean what you all are,” I corrected. “All nine of you.”

  “Careful, Mac. Some things don’t get talked about. Ever.”

  I reached for my spear. He could have told me the truth on the cliff, but, like Barrons, he’d let me suffer. The more I thought about how both of them had withheld a truth from me that would have spared me so much agony, the angrier I got. “I was just making sure that when I stab and kill you, you’ll come back so I can do it again.”

  The spear was in my hand, but suddenly my hand was in a huge fist, and the tip was pointed at my own throat.

  Ryodan could move like Dani, Barrons, and the others. So fast I couldn’t defend myself. He stood behind me, arm snaked around my waist.

  “Never make that threat. Put it away, Mac. Or I’ll take it for good.” He jabbed me with the tip of the spear in warning. “Barrons wouldn’t let you do that.”

  “You might be surprised what Barrons would let me do.”

  “Because he thinks I’m a traitor.”

  “I saw you with Darroc myself. I heard you in the alley last night. When deeds and words align, the truth is plain.”

  “I believed both of you were dead. What did you expect? The same survival instinct you admire in each other offends you in me. I think it worries you. Makes me more unpredictable than you’d like.”

  He guided my hand to the holster and tucked the spear back in. “ ‘Unpredictable’ is the key word there. Did you flip, Mac?”

  “Do I look like I flipped?”

  He brushed hair from my face, tucked it gently behind an ear. I shivered. He bristled with the same kind of energy Barrons did—heat, muscle, and danger. When Barrons touches me, it turns me on. But when Ryodan stands behind me, locking me in place with an arm of steel, touching me tenderly—it scares the hell out of me.

  “Let me tell you something about flipping, Mac,” he said softly against my ear. “Most people are good and occasionally do something they know is bad. Some people are bad and struggle every day to keep it under control. Others are corrupt to the core and don’t give a damn, as long as they don’t get caught. But evil is a completely different creature, Mac. Evil is bad that believes it’s good.”

  “What are you saying, Ryodan? That I flipped and I’m too stupid to know it?”

  “If the shoe fits.”

  “It doesn’t. Point of curiosity: Which camp are you and Barrons in? Corrupt to the core and don’t give a damn?”

  “Why do you think the Book killed Darroc?”

  I knew where this was going. Ryodan’s theory was that I wasn’t tracking the Sinsar Dubh; it kept finding me. He was about to tell me that it had killed Darroc to further its goal of getting closer to me. He was wrong. “It killed Darroc to stop him. It told me no one was going to control it. It must have learned from me that Darroc knew a shortcut to containing and using it, and it killed him to prevent me or anyone else from discovering it.”

  “How did it learn that from you? A cozy chat over tea?”

  “It found me the night I stayed at Darroc’s penthouse. It … skims my mind. Tasting me, knowing me, it says.”

  His arm tightened painfully around my waist.

  “You’re hurting me!”

  His arm relaxed minutely. “Did you tell Barrons this?”

  “Barrons hasn’t exactly been in a talkative mood.”

  Ryodan was no longer standing behind me. He was at his desk again. I rubbed my stomach, relieved he was no longer touching me. He was so much like Barrons that his body against mine was disturbing on multiple levels. I couldn’t make out much of his face in the shadows, but I didn’t need to. He was so furious that he didn’t trust himself not to harm me if he remained close.

  “The Sinsar Dubh can pick thoughts out of your mind? Have you considered the potential ramifications of that?”

  I shrugged. It wasn’t as if I had much time to consider anything. I’d been so busy jumping from the frying pan into the fire and back into the frying pan again that reflection upon the various possibles wasn’t top on my list of priorities. Who could worry about potential ramifications when the real ones kept kicking you in the teeth?

  “It means that it knows about us,” he said tightly.

  “First of all, why would it care? Second, I hardly know anything about you at all, so it couldn’t have gotten much.”

  “I’ve killed for less.”

  Of that I had no doubt. Ryodan was stone cold and suffered no conflicts about it. “If it even bothered skimming for information about you, the only thing it knows is that I thought the two of you were dead and you’re not.”

  “Not true. You know a great deal more than that, and that the Book might know about us at all should have been the first thing you told Barrons the moment he changed back and you knew he was alive.”

  “Well, forgive the fuck out of me for being shocked senseless when I realized he wasn’t dead. Why didn’t you tell me he was the beast, Ryodan? Why did we have to kill him? I know it’s not because he can’t control himself when he’s the beast. He controlled himself last night when he rescued me from the Book. He can change at will, can’t he? What happened in the Silvers? Does the place have some kind of effect on you, make you uncontrollable?”

  I almost slapped myself in the forehead. Barrons had told me that the reason he tattooed himself with black and red protection runes was because using dark magic called a price due, unless you took measures to protect yourself against the backlash. Did using IYD require the blackest kind of magic to make it work? Would it grant his demand to magically transport him to me no matter where I was but devolve him into the darkest, most savage version of himself as the price?

  “It was because of how he got there, wasn’t it?” I said. “The spell you two worked sent him to me like it was supposed to, but the cost was that it turned him into the lowest common denominator of himself. An insane killing machine. Which he figured was all right, because if I was dying, I’d probably need a killing machine around. A champion to show up and decimate all my enemies. That was it, wasn’t it?”

  Ryodan had gone completely still. Not a muscle twitched. I wasn’t sure he was breathing.

  “He knew what would happen if I pressed IYD, and he made plans with you to handle it.” That was Barrons, always thinking, always managing risks where I was concerned. “He tattooed me so he would sense his mark on me and not kill me. And you were supposed to track him—that’s why you both wear those cuffs, so you can find each other—and kill him so he’d come back as the man form of himself, and I’d never be any wiser. I’d get rescued and have no clue it was Barrons who’d done it or that he sometimes turns into a beast. But you screwed up. And that’s what he was mad at you about this morning on the phone. It was your failure to kill him that let the cat out of the bag.”

  A tiny muscle twitched in his jaw. He was pissed. I was definitely right.

 
“He can always circumvent the price of black magic,” I marveled. “When you kill him, he comes back exactly the same as he was before, doesn’t he? He could tattoo his whole body with protection runes and, when he ran out of skin, kill himself so he could come back with a clean slate, to start all over.” That was why his tattoos weren’t always the same. “Talk about your ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card! And if you hadn’t botched the plan, I would never have known. It’s your fault I know, Ryodan. I think that means it’s not me you should kill, it’s yourself. Oh, gee, wait,” I said sarcastically, “that wouldn’t work, would it?”

  “Did you know that when you were in the Silvers, the Book paid a visit to the abbey?”

  I winced. “Dani told me. How many of the sidhe-seers were killed?”

  “Irrelevant. Why do you think it went to the abbey?”

  Irrelevant, my ass. Being unable to die—I was still having a hard time wrapping my brain around that and was certain I could come up with some creative ways to test it—had given him a Fae share of arrogance and disdain for mortals. “Let me guess,” I said tartly. “This is somehow my fault, too?”

  Ryodan pressed a button on his desk and spoke into an intercom. “Tell Barrons to leave them where they are. They’re safer there. I’ll bring her to them. We’ve got a problem. A big one.” He released the button. “Yes,” he said to me, “it is. I think that when it couldn’t find you, it went to the abbey, hunting for you, trying to get a lead on you.”

  “Do the others believe this, too, or is it your personal delusion? Perspective, Ryodan. Get some.”

  “I’m not the one that needs it.”

  “Why do you hate me?”

  “I have no emotion about you at all, Mac. I take care of my own. You are not my own.” He moved past me, pressed his palm to the door, and stood waiting for me to exit. “Barrons wants you to see your parents so as you go about your business you will remember they are here. With me.”

  “Lovely,” I muttered.

  “I suffer them to live, against my better judgment, as a favor to Barrons. He’s running out of favors. Remember that, too.”