Shadowfever

by Karen Marie Moning

  My heart is going to explode.

  I can’t do this. I just went through this with my sister. Regret upon regret. Missed opportunities. Bad decisions. Grief.

  How many more people will have to die before I learn how to live? He was right. I’m a walking catastrophe.

  I fumble in my pocket for my phone. First thing I do is dial Barrons’ cell. The call doesn’t go through. I press IYCGM. Call doesn’t go through. I hit IYD and hold my breath, watching Barrons intently. The call doesn’t go through.

  Like the man himself, all lines are down.

  I begin to shake. I don’t know why, but the fact that the cell phones don’t work convinces me more than anything else that he’s beyond my reach.

  Page 5

 

  I flip my head down, scrape my hair forward, and, although it takes me a few tries to get the angle right, I take a shot of my nape. Sure enough, two tattoos. Barrons’ brand is a dragon with a Z in the center that shimmers with faint iridescence.

  To the left of his tattoo is a black circle crammed with strange symbols I don’t recognize. It seems Ryodan was telling the truth. If the tattoo was put there by the LM, it explains a lot: Why Barrons so heavily warded the basement where he dragged me back from being Pri-ya, how the LM found me at the abbey once the wards had been painted over, how he found me again at the house Dani and I squatted in, and how he’d tracked me to my parents’ in Ashford.

  I pull out the small dirk I lifted from BB&B.

  My hand trembles.

  I could end my pain. I could curl up and bleed out next to him. It’d be over so quickly. Maybe I’d get another chance some other time, some other place. Maybe he and I would be reincarnated like in that movie, What Dreams May Come, that Alina and I hated so much because the kids and husband died, then the wife committed suicide.

  I love that movie now. I get it, the whole idea of willingly going to hell for someone. Living there, insane if you have to, because you’d rather be insane with them than endure life without them.

  I stare at the blade.

  He died so I would live.

  “Damn you! I don’t want to live without you!”

  It’s how you go on that defines you.

  “Oh, shut up, would you? You’re dead, shut up, shut up!”

  But a terrible truth is shredding my heart.

  I’m the girl that cried “wolf. ”

  I’m the one that pressed IYD. I’m the one that didn’t think I could survive the boar on my own. And guess what?

  I did.

  I’d driven it away and already been safe by the time Barrons appeared and blasted into it.

  I hadn’t really been dying after all.

  He died for me and it hadn’t been necessary.

  I overreacted.

  And now he’s dead.

  I stare at the dirk. Killing myself would be a reward. I deserve only punishment.

  I stare at the snapshot of the back of my head. If the Lord Master found me right now, I’m not sure I would fight for my life.

  I consider attempting surgery on my own skull, then realize I am not in the best frame of mind for that. I might not stop cutting. It’s close to my spinal column. Easy way out.

  I slam the blade into the dirt before I can turn it on myself.

  What would that make of me? That I got him killed, then killed myself? A coward. But it’s not what it would make of me that bothers me. It’s what it would make of him—a wasted death.

  The death of a man like him deserves more than that.

  I bite back another scream. It’s trapped inside me now, stuffed down into my belly, burning the back of my throat, making it painful to swallow. I hear it in my ears even though my mouth makes no sound. It’s a silent scream. The worst kind. I lived with this once before, to keep Mom and Dad from knowing that Alina’s death was killing me, too. I know what comes next, and I know it’s going to be worse than last time. That I’m going to be worse.

  Much, much worse.

  I remember the scenes of slaughter Barrons showed me in his mind. I understand them now. Understand what might drive a person to it.

  I kneel beside his naked, bloody body. The transformation from man to beast must have shredded his clothing, exploded the silver cuff from his wrist. Nearly two thirds of his body is inked with black and crimson protection runes.

  “Jericho,” I say. “Jericho, Jericho, Jericho. ” Why did I ever begrudge him his name? “Barrons” was a stone wall I erected between us, and if a hairline fracture appeared, I hastily mortared it with fear.

  I close my eyes and steel myself. When I open them, I wrap both hands around the spear and try to pull it from his back. It doesn’t come out. It’s lodged in bone. I have to fight for it.

  I stop. I start again. I weep.

  He doesn’t move.

  I can do this. I can.

  I work the spear free.

  After a long moment, I roll him over.

  If there was any doubt in my mind that he was dead, it vanishes. His eyes are open. They are empty.

  Jericho Barrons is no longer there.

  I open my senses to the world around me. I can’t feel him at all.

  I am on this cliff, alone.

  I’ve never been so alone.

  I try everything I can think of to bring him back to life.

  I remember the Unseelie flesh we crammed into my backpack what seems a lifetime ago, back in the bookstore when I was getting ready to face the Lord Master. Most of it is still there.

  Page 6

 

  If only I’d known then what I know now! That the next time I saw Jericho Barrons, he’d be dead. That the last words I would ever hear him say were “And the Lamborghini,” with that wolf smile and promise that he would always be at my back, breathing down it, keeping it covered.

  The wriggling, chopped-up Rhino-boy flesh is still neatly trapped in baby-food jars. I force it between his swollen, bloodied lips and hold his mouth shut. When it crawls out the jagged gash in his neck, my trapped scream nearly deafens me.

  I’m not thinking clearly. Panic and grief ride me. Barrons would say: Useless emotions, Ms. Lane. Rise above them. Stop reacting and act. There he is, talking to me again.

  What wouldn’t I do for him? Nothing is too disgusting, too barbaric. This is Barrons. I want him whole again.

  Ryodan had flayed him from gut to chest, before he slit his throat. I carefully peel back the meat of his tattooed abdomen and stuff Unseelie into his exposed, sliced stomach. It crawls out. I consider trying to sew the stomach up, so his body would be forced to digest the flesh of the dark Fae, and wonder if it would work, but I lack needle, thread, or any other means of repairing his torn flesh.

  I attempt to put his entrails back into his body, arrange them in some semblance of order, dimly aware that this is perhaps not a normal, sane thing to do.

  Once he said: Get inside me, see how deep you can go. With my hands on his spleen, I think, Here I am. Too little, too late.

  I use my newfound proficiency in Voice and command him to rise. He told me once that student and teacher develop immunity to each other. I’m almost relieved. I was afraid Voice might raise a zombie, reanimated but not truly revived.

  I prop his mouth open with a stick, slit my wrist, and drip blood into it. I have to slice deep to get a few drops and keep slicing because I keep healing. It only makes him bloodier.

  I search my sidhe-seer place for magic to heal him. I have nothing of such consequence inside me.

  I am suddenly furious.

  How could he be mortal? How dare he be mortal? He never told me he was mortal! If I’d known, I might have treated him differently!

  “Get up, get up, get up!” I shout.

  His eyes are still open. I hate that they’re open and so empty and blank, but closing them would be an admission, an acceptance I don’t have in m
e.

  I will never close Jericho Barrons’ eyes.

  They were wide open in life. He would want them open in death. Rituals would be wasted on him. Wherever Barrons is, he would laugh if I tried something as mundane as a funeral. Too small for such a large man.

  Put him in a box? Never.

  Bury him? No way.

  Burn him?

  That, too, would be acceptance. Admission that he was dead. Never going to happen.

  Even in death he looks indomitable, his big black-and-crimson-tattooed body an epic giant, felled in battle.

  I settle on the ground, gently lift his head, maneuver my legs beneath it, and cradle his face in my arms. With my shirt and hot tears that won’t stop falling, I bathe away dirt and blood and clean him tenderly.

  Harsh, forbidding, beautiful face.

  I touch it. Trace it with my fingers, over and over, until I know the subtlest nuances of every plane and angle, until I could carve it out of stone even if I were blind.

  I kiss him.

  I lie down and stretch out next to him. I press my body to his and hold on.

  I hold him like I never permitted myself to hold him when he was alive. I tell him all the things I never said.

  For a time, I have no idea where he ends and I begin.

  The Dani Daily

  91 Days AWC

  GET YOUR SHADE-BUSTERS!!!

  READ ALL ABOUT IT!!!

  Yep, you heard me right! The feckers CAN be killed! Brought to you by The Dani Daily, your ONLY source for all the news AWC (After the Wall Crash, morons. I ain’t gonna keep spelling things out for you).

  The Dani “Mega” O’Malley SHADE-BUSTER

  • 1 chunk Unseelie flesh.

  • Fuse.

  • Flash powder. Use only pyrotechnic industry-standard mix. Do NOT use chlorate or sulfur. HIGHLY unstable. Take it from me, I know what I’m talkin’ about!

  Make cherry bomb. Pack in center of flesh. Run fuse. Mold Unseelie flesh into round shape for easier rolling. Corner Shade, roll in SHADE-BUSTER, and cover your ears! The feckers are cannibals!!! Watch Shade devour snack and disintegrate when the bomb explodes inside it. If it eats LIGHT, it dies!

  CAVEATS!

  *Kids under 14: Do NOT do this without help. Ain’t gonna do nobody no good if you blow your hands off. We need you in this fight. Be cool. Smart is the new cool.

  *You gotta be fast! If you find a ’specially bad nest, write down the address of it on The Dani Daily, stick it on the wall inside the G. P. O. , O’Connell Street, Dublin 1, and I’ll take care of it for you. (They don’t call me MEGA for nothing!)

  Page 7

 

  *Do NOT use SULFUR! It makes the mix WAY unstable. I’m still growing back my eyebrows and nose hair.

  *’Times the cherry bomb blows before the Shade eats it. Some of ’em are stupid enough to eat the next one you throw in.

  LEGAL DISCLAIMER!

  The Dani Daily (TDD, LLC) and affiliates are NOT responsible for collateral blast damage or injury!

  2

  It’s funny the things people say when someone dies.

  He’s in a better place.

  How do you know that?

  Life goes on.

  That’s supposed to comfort me? I’m excruciatingly aware that life goes on. It hurts every damned second. How lovely to know it’s going to continue like this. Thank you for reminding me.

  Time heals.

  No, it doesn’t. At best, time is the great leveler, sweeping us all into coffins. We find ways to distract ourselves from the pain. Time is neither scalpel nor bandage. It is indifferent. Scar tissue isn’t a good thing. It’s merely the wound’s other face.

  I live with the specter of Alina every day. Now I will live with Barrons’ ghost, too. Walk between them: one on my right, one on my left. They will talk to me incessantly. I’ll never escape, bridged between my greatest failures.

  The day is cooling by the time I’m able to force myself to move. I know what that means. It means night is about to come slamming down on me with the finality of steel shutters on the glass façade of an upscale shop in a rundown neighborhood. I try to disentangle myself from him. I don’t want to. It takes half a dozen attempts to make myself sit up. My head aches from crying; my throat burns from screaming. When I sit up, only the shell of my body moves. My heart is still lying on the ground next to Jericho Barrons. It beats one more time, then stops.

  Peace at last.

  I cross my legs beneath me and stiffly push myself up. I stand like I’m a hundred years old, creaking in every bone.

  If the Lord Master is hunting me, I’ve sat on this cliff’s edge for a dangerously long time.

  The Lord Master, Darroc, leader of the dark Fae, bastard that tore down the walls on Halloween and turned the Unseelie hordes loose on my world.

  The son of a bitch that started it all: seduced and either killed Alina or got her killed; had me raped by the Unseelie Princes, lobotomized, and turned into a helpless slave; abducted my parents and forced me into the Silvers; and drove me to this cliff’s edge, where I murdered Barrons.

  If not for one ex-Fae hell-bent on regaining his lost grace and exacting retribution, none of this would have happened.

  Revenge will never be enough. Revenge would be over too quickly. It wouldn’t satisfy the complexity of the needs of the creature I became while I was lying here, holding him.

  I want it all back.

  Everything that was taken from me.

  A geyser of rage explodes in me, seeping into all the nooks and crannies my grief occupies. I welcome it, encourage it, genuflect to my new god. I baptize myself in its steaming, hissing fury. I give myself over. Claim me, take me, own me, I am yours.

  Sidhe-seer is only a few letters away from Ban-sidhe: my birth country’s harbinger of death, that shrieking mythic creature driven by fury.

  I seek that dark glassy lake in my mind. I stand on the black-pebbled beach. Runes float on the shiny ebon surface, glistening with power.

  I bend, trail my fingers through the black water, scoop up two fistfuls, and offer the bottomless loch a deep bow of gratitude.

  It’s my friend. I know that now. It has always been.

  My fury is too vast for nooks and crannies.

  I don’t try to contain it. I let it build into a dark, dangerous melody. I throw my head back, making room for it as it rises. It swells, blasts up my throat, puffs out my cheeks. When it erupts from my lips, it’s an inhuman cry that soars above the trees, rips into the air, and shatters the tranquillity of the forest.

  Wolves startle awake in their dens, howling in mournful chorus; boars squeal; and creatures I cannot name scream. Our concert is deafening.

  The temperature drops and the forest around me is abruptly encased in a thick silvery coating of ice, from smallest blade of grass to highest bough.

  Birds flash-freeze and die, beaks parted, feeding their babies.

  Squirrels ice, mid-leap, and drop like stones to the ground, where they shatter.

  I glance at my hands. They are stained black, my palms cup silvery runes.

  I know now where Barrons ends and I begin.

  When Barrons ended, I began.

  Me.

  Mac O’Connor.

  Sidhe-seer that a certain Seelie Prince said the world should fear.

  I kneel and kiss Barrons a final time.

  I do not cover him or perform any ritual. It would be for me, not him. There is only one thing left that I will do for me.

  Page 8

 

  Soon, none of this will matter anyway.

  I had to be ripped in half to stop feeling so torn in two. Divided, never knowing who to trust.

  I’m now a woman with a single ambition.

  I know exactly what I’m going to do.

  And I know how I’m going to do it.

  3


  After leaving Barrons’ body, I travel in the direction my guardian demon had been herding me. I believe he must have wanted me to go this way for a reason.

  I trust him in death like I never did in life.

  What a piece of work I am.

  I follow the river for miles. As he disappears behind me, so, too, do I. With each step I take, I strip off another piece of myself. The weak parts. The parts that won’t help me accomplish my goals. And if they are the so-called human parts, oh, well. I can’t feel and still survive what I’ve got to get through.

  When I am certain I am ready, I stop and wait for my enemy.

  He does not disappoint.

  “I thought you’d never get here,” I say, my voice husky from screaming. It hurts to talk. I savor the pain. It’s what I deserve.

  The LM is still some distance away, concealed in the forest, but I see the shadows that move too sinuously to be cast by any tree.

  “Come out. ” I lean back against a tree, one hand in a pocket at my cocked hip, the other at my waist. “I am what you want, aren’t I? What you came here for. What all this is about. Why hesitate now?”

  My spear is in the holster beneath my arm, my dirk in my waistband. The black-leather rune-covered pouch holding the three stones the LM wants—three-quarters of what we all hope will form some kind of cage for the Sinsar Dubh—are tucked securely in my backpack, which hangs over my shoulder.

  Shapes glide from the darkness: the LM and the last two Unseelie Princes.

  Jack and Rainey Lane are not with them.

  That would disturb me, except the Mac who loves her parents was in those pieces I left behind with Barrons’ body. Barrons is dead. It’s my fault. I have no parents. No love. No weaknesses. There’s not a single shaft of sunshine in my soul.

  I feel immeasurably lighter, stronger.

  Darroc—I will no longer call him the LM; even the abbreviation of his smug-ass title implies superiority—has been eating a great deal of Unseelie flesh. Power is thick in the air between us. I’m not sure what comes from him and what is rolling off me. I wonder how his minions feel about him cannibalizing their own. Perhaps what is an abomination to the Light Court is a common vice at the Dark Court, an acceptable hazard of being Unseelie.

  As he approaches the circle of silvery light in which I stand, his eyes widen infinitesimally.

  I laugh, a throaty purr. I know what I look like. I washed after leaving Barrons and prepared myself with care. My bra is in my backpack. My hair is softly curled and wild around my face. It took time to get the black stain off my palms. There is nothing about me that is not a weapon, an asset, something to use to get what I want, including my body. I’ve learned a thing or two from Barrons: Power is sexy. It shapes my spine, infuses my beckoning hand.