Shadowfever

by Karen Marie Moning

“Dead cats. ”

  “Nine lives,” I countered.

  He smiled and his head swiveled in a distinctly Unseelie manner. I was also seeing, superimposed on a space of air that couldn’t exist—at least not in this realm—an enormous darkness regarding me. Its head didn’t swivel: It grated like stone on stone. It was as if the king was so vast that no single realm could contain him, around him dimensions splintered, overlapped, shifted. His eyes locked with mine, opening wider and wider until they swallowed the entire abbey, and I went spinning, head over heels, into them, with the abbey tumbling beside me.

  I was wrapped in enormous black velvet wings, taken into the heart of darkness that was the Unseelie King.

  He was so far beyond my comprehension that I couldn’t begin to absorb it. “Ancient” didn’t come close, because he was newborn in each moment, as well. Time didn’t define him. He defined time. He wasn’t death or life, or creation or destruction. He was all possibles and none, everything and nothing, a bottomless abyss that would look back at you if you gazed into it. He was a truth of existence: Once you’d been exposed to him, you’d never be the same. Like a contagion that infected the blood and brain, he forced new neural pathways to develop merely to handle the brief contact. That or you went nuts.

  For a split second, drifting in his vast, ancient embrace, I understood everything. It all made sense. The universes, the galaxies—existence was unfolding precisely as it should, and there was a symmetry, a pattern, a stunning beauty to the structure of it.

  I was tiny and naked, lost in black velvet wings so lush, rich, and sensual that I never wanted to leave. His darkness wasn’t frightening. It was verdant, teeming with life on the verge of becoming. There were shiny pearls of worlds tucked into his feathers. I rolled between them, laughing with delight. I think he rolled with me, watching my reaction to him, learning me, tasting. I tumbled among planets, constellations, stars. They hung from his quills, suspended, trembling with growing pains. Waiting for the day he would unfasten them, bat them off into the ballpark, and see what they might do. A home run—hey, batter, batter! Fly ball, watch out! That ball sucks, didn’t stitch it tight enough … coming apart at the seams …

  I saw us through his eyes: dust motes floating in a shaft of sunlight that stabbed through the rusted-out roof of a barn. He was as likely to swipe his hand through us and watch us scatter as he was to turn and walk away from this particular hole-in-the-roof byproduct. Or maybe sneeze us all into the great outdoors, where we would go whirling off in a dozen different directions, lost in lonely oblivion, never to come together again.

  By our standards, he was mad. Utterly and completely mad. But every now and then, he surfaced and walked a fine line of sanity. It never lasted long.

  By his standards, we were paper dolls, flat and one-dimensional. Barking mad as far as he was concerned. But every now and then, one of us walked a fine line of sanity. It never lasted long.

  Still, all was well. Life was, and change happened.

  Me. He thought I was relatively sane. I laughed until I cried, rolling around in his feathers. Because of his imprint inside me? If I was a shining example of my race, we should all be shot.

  He showed me things. Took my hand and escorted me into an enormous theater, where I watched an endless play of light and shadows from a prime seat in the front row. He watched me, chin on a fist, from a red crushed-velvet chair in a box near the stage.

  “Never did get it all out. ” His voice came from every speaker: huge, melodic.

  “The Book?”

  “Can’t eviscerate essential self. ”

  “Playing doctor again?”

  “Trying. You listening this time?”

  “He’s stealing your Book. You listening?”

  The dreamy-eyed guy’s head swiveled away from the stage, and suddenly the theater was gone and we were back in the cavern.

  Wings no longer cradled me.

  I was cold and alone. I missed his wings. I yearned for him. It hurt.

  “It will pass,” he said absently. “You will forget the pain of separation. They always do. ” His eyes narrowed on V’lane. “Yes. He is. ”

  “Aren’t you going to stop him?”

  “Que sera, sera. ”

  I was being stalked by a song, haunted by the calliope from hell. “It’s your responsibility. You should take care of it. ”

  “Should is a false god. No fun there. ”

  Page 207

 

  “Some changes are better than others. ”

  “Expound. ”

  “If you stop him, the changes will be much more interesting. ”

  “Opinion. Subjective. ”

  “So is yours,” I said indignantly.

  His starry eyes glinted with amusement. “If he replaces me, I will become something else. ”

  I could almost hear the Sinsar Dubh saying, Is not any act of destruction, should time enough pass, an act of creation? The apple didn’t fall far from the tree.

  “I don’t want you replaced. I like you as you are. ”

  “Flirting with me, beautiful girl?”

  I tried to breathe and couldn’t. The Unseelie King was touching me, kissing me. I could feel his lips on my skin, and I—I—I—

  “Breathe, BG. ”

  I could breathe again.

  “Please, stop him. ” I wasn’t above begging. I’d get on my knees. If V’lane succeeded in gaining ultimate power, I didn’t want to live in this world. Not with him in charge. With a spell of unmaking he could kill Barrons, and he’d made it clear, every chance he got, that he wanted to. He had to be stopped. I wasn’t losing any of my people. My parents were going to live to a ripe old age. Barrons was going to live forever. Me? Well. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was going to do. But I planned on having a long, full lifetime. “It would mean a lot to me. ”

  “You would owe me. Like you owe my Gray Woman. ”

  Was there anything he didn’t know? Deals with devils … Barrons would have said, if he hadn’t been frozen. “Deal. ”

  He winked. “I’d planned to, anyway. ”

  “Ooh! Then why did you—”

  “Pretty girl and all. Asking. Gotta love that. Stuff of heroes. Don’t get the role often. ”

  He was gone. He reappeared near the slab, staring at V’lane through crystal walls.

  I was horrified to realize V’lane was more than halfway through the Sinsar Dubh.

  But it was going to be okay. The king was going to stop him, crush him like a bug. V’lane would take one look at who’d come after him and sift out with his tail tucked, whimpering with fear. The king would reseal the cavern, and all would be well. No one would have any spells of unmaking. Barrons would continue to be unkillable. That was a constant, eternal rock beneath my feet that I needed.

  “—fore. Where on earth do you think he came from?” My mother finished her sentence. She frowned. “And where did he go?”

  Time resumed and everyone in the cavern began moving again.

  V’lane’s head dropped down and his eyes slid open.

  His reaction wasn’t at all what I expected.

  His mouth ticked up in a cool smile. “About fucking time you showed your face, old man. ”

  “Ah,” said the Unseelie King. “Cruce. ”

  52

  Cruce? V’lane was Cruce?

  I glanced around the cavern. Everyone looked as stupefied as I felt, staring between V’lane and the dreamy-eyed guy.

  When I’d stood at Darroc’s side, watching the Seelie and Unseelie armies face off in a snowy Dublin street, I’d been awed by the mythic proportions of the event.

  Now, according to the dreamy-eyed guy who was really the Unseelie King, the Seelie who’d been masquerading as V’lane for hundreds of thousands of years was really the legendary Cruce, aka War—the final and most perfect Unseelie ever sung into existence.

  And he was facing of
f with his maker.

  Cruce was staring down the Unseelie King.

  It was the stuff of million-year-old legends. I looked from one to the other. You could have heard a pin drop in the cavern.

  I glanced at Barrons, who had both brows raised in an expression of complete shock. For a change, there was something he hadn’t known, either. Then his eyes narrowed on the dreamy-eyed guy.

  “He’s the king? That frail old geezer?”

  “Geezer? You mean the pretty French woman,” Jo said. “She’s a waitress at Chester’s. ”

  “French woman? It’s the Morgan Freeman lookalike from the bar on the seventh level at Chester’s,” Christian said.

  “No,” Dageus said, “ ’tis the ex-groundskeeper from Edinburgh castle who took on a bussing job at Ryodan’s pub when the walls fell. ”

  And I saw a young, dreamy-eyed college guy. He winked at me again. We all saw something different when we looked at him.

  I stared back at V’lane … er, Cruce.

  How had I not known? How had I been so completely duped? It had never been a Seelie Prince facing an Unseelie Prince that night in the snowy Dublin street but two Unseelie Princes. If War’s brother had recognized him, he’d never given it away.

  Page 208

 

  V’lane was Cruce.

  V’lane was War.

  I’d walked hand in hand with him on a beach. I’d kissed him. More times than I could count. I’d had his name in my tongue. I’d trembled with orgasm after orgasm in his arms. He’d given me Ashford back. Had he taken it to begin with?

  War. Of course. He’d turned my world on itself. He’d set armies against each other and sat back watching the chaos he’d created. He’d even gotten out in it and fought with us. No doubt laughing inside, enjoying the added chaos, being in the thick of the fight, watching his handiwork up close and personal.

  Was he behind it all? Had he been nudging Darroc for millennia, priming him to defy the queen? And when Darroc was made mortal, had Cruce whispered in a few Unseelie ears, maybe planted key information, and helped him bring down the walls from far behind the scenes? Had he been watching, waiting for the day he might get close enough to the Sinsar Dubh to steal the king’s knowledge and kill the current queen and take her magic?

  Did Fae really possess such patience?

  He’d killed all the princesses and secreted the queen away to kill at the right time.

  He’d turned the Seelie and Unseelie courts against each other, using our world as their battlefield.

  We were all pawns on his chessboard.

  I had no doubt he was after the ultimate power. The nerve of him, the arrogance—he was the one who’d told me it could be done and how! He was the one who’d recounted the legend to begin with. Unable to resist bragging? When I’d asked him about Cruce, he’d gotten irritated, saying: One day you will wish to talk of me. He’d been jealous of himself, angry that he couldn’t reveal his true majesty. He’d said, Cruce was the most beautiful of all, although the world will never know it—a waste of perfection to never have laid eyes upon one such as he. How it must have chafed him to have to hide his true face for so long.

  I’d tanned in a silk chaise, lying next to him. I’d dipped my toes in the surf, holding hands with War. I’d admired an Unseelie Prince’s naked body. Wondered what it would be like to have sex with him. I’d conspired with the enemy and never even guessed it. All the while he’d been touching and adjusting things, nudging us this way and that.

  And it had worked.

  He’d gotten exactly what he’d wanted. Here he was: standing over the king’s Book, absorbing the deadly knowledge, with the unconscious queen lying at his feet so he could kill her and take the True Magic of their race, too. He’d put her on ice in the Unseelie prison to keep her under control and alive until he was certain he was the most powerful male among them all. The king had given up his dark knowledge. Once Cruce had it, would he really be stronger than the king?

  I watched the spells scribed in the Sinsar Dubh slide off the page, move up his fingers into his hands, arms, shoulders, and vanish beneath his skin. He was almost done. Why wasn’t the king stopping him?

  “Begun. Can’t be stopped. Think I’d leave part of the Book in two places when they couldn’t even guard one?” the king said.

  Barrons and the rest of the men were back to slamming the walls, trying to tear them down to get to Cruce.

  But it was too late. He had only a few pages left to go.

  I stood, shivering, looking between the king and Cruce, hoping the king knew what he was doing.

  Cruce turned the last page.

  As the final spell vanished, the Book collapsed into a thin pile of gold dust and a handful of winking red gemstones on the slab.

  The Sinsar Dubh had finally been destroyed.

  Too bad it now lived and breathed inside the most powerful Unseelie Prince ever created.

  The transition was seamless.

  One moment I was in the cavern with everyone else. The next I was standing on a giant grassy swell of a hill with Cruce and the king.

  An enormous moon obliterated the horizon. Welling up from behind the planet, it blocked out the night sky entirely but for a smattering of stars against a cobalt palette above it.

  The rounded pasture climbed gently for miles, vanishing into the moon and making it seem like, if I walked to the top of the ridge, I might hop the pine-board fence and bridge planet to moon with a single leap. The air hummed with a low-level charge, and in the distance, thunder rolled. Black megaliths jutted like the fingers of a fallen giant poking into the cool, unblinking eye of the moon.

  We stood between towering stones—Cruce facing the king, me at midpoint between them.

  The queen was slumped at Cruce’s feet.

  I backed out and away for a wider view. I wondered who’d brought us here and left all the others behind. Cruce or the king? Why?

  Page 209

 

  Wind whipped my hair into a tangle. The breeze was rich with spice and the fragrance of night-blooming jasmine. Hunters glided past the moon, gonging deep in their chests, and the moon answered.

  I had no idea what world I was on, what galaxy I was in, but some part of me—my inner king—knew this place. We’d chosen the hill of Tara for the resemblance, but Tara was a pale imitation. On Earth, the moon was never so near as it was here, and there was only one, not three, in the night sky. Power pulsed in this planet’s rocky core and mineral veins, earth’s magic had been bored to death by humans long ago.

  “Why the three of us?” I said.

  “Children,” the king replied.

  I didn’t like what his answer seemed to imply. War was so not my brother.

  “MacKayla,” Cruce said softly.

  I gave him a cool look. “Did you think it was funny? You lied to me over and over. You used me. ”

  “I wanted you to accept me as I was, but—how is it you say?—my reputation preceded me. Others filled your head with lies about Cruce. I endeavored to correct them, open your eyes. ”

  “By telling me more lies? V’lane didn’t kill Cruce the day the king and queen fought. You switched places with V’lane. ”

  “With the three amulets the king never believed good enough, I deceived them all. Together they are strong. ” He touched his neck, a smug glint in his eyes, and although I couldn’t see them, I knew he wore them still. He’d used them to maintain his flawless glamour of Seelie Prince. I’d seen it flicker only a few times, when he’d been near the abbey’s wards.

  “That day I called you to help me defeat the guardian in the abbey, the day you hissed and vanished—”

  “It was a truth ward made of blood and bone. It sensed me as Unseelie. Had I stayed, I would have been unable to maintain the glamour. But you could not pass it, either. Why is that?”

  I didn’t answer. “The queen killed V’lane w
ith her sword, and never even knew it. You’ve been impersonating him ever since. ”

  “He was a fool. After I had my audience with the queen, it was V’lane she dispatched to confine me in her bower. I took his face and gave him mine. He was not half the Fae I am. He knew nothing of true illusion, could not have created an amulet capable of such if he’d lived a million years. Then I took him to her to kill. He was pathetic. Pleaded his innocence. Whimpered at the end and made a mockery of my name. The other Unseelie Princes tried their hand at a curse and blamed that on me, as well. ”

  “You hid among the Seelie all this time. ”

  “Never drinking from the cauldron. Watching. Waiting for the perfect convergence of events. The Book was missing for an eternity. The old fool hid it. Twenty-three years ago I felt it and knew the time was right. But enough about me. What are you, MacKayla?”

  “You set Darroc up. ”

  “I encouraged where encouragement was useful. ”

  “You want to be king,” I said.

  Cruce’s iridescent eyes flashed. “Why would I not? Someone needs to take over. He turned his back on his children. We were an accident of creation he sought to contain and hide. He fears power? I do not. He refuses to lead our people? I will champion them as he never did. ”

  “And when they weary of your rule?” the king said. “When you realize you can never please them?”

  “I will make them happy. They will love me. ”

  “So all gods think. At first. ”

  “Shut up, old man. ”

  “Still you wear V’lane’s face. What do you fear?” the king said.

  “I fear nothing. ” But his gaze lingered on me a long moment. “I fight for my race, MacKayla. I have since I was born. He would conceal us in shame and condemn us to a half life. Remember that. There are reasons for all I have done. ”

  Abruptly his golden mane was raven, his gold-velvet skin bronzed.

  Iridescent eyes emptied. A torque threaded with silver slithered around his neck. Beneath his skin, kaleidoscopic tattoos crashed like waves in a turbulent sea. He was beautiful. He was horrifying. He was soul-destroying. A nimbus of gold surrounded his body.

  And his face, oh, God, his face, I knew that face. I’d seen that face. Bending over me. Holding my head in his arms. Cradling me.

  While he moved inside me.

  “You were the fourth at the church!” I cried. He’d raped me. With his other dark brethren, he’d turned me into a mindless shell of a person, left me shattered and naked in the street. And I would have remained broken forever, except that Barrons had come charging in after me with men and guns, taken me away, and put me back together again.