Bloodfever (14 page)

“They were unconscious when they were slaughtered,” he said finally.

“Then why kill them?”

“It would appear for the pleasure of it, Ms. Lane.”

“What kind of monster does that?”

“All kinds, Ms. Lane. All kinds.”

We continued our search. Whatever fascination the house might once have held for me was gone. I hurried through an art gallery that would have made any major metropolitan museum curator swoon with envy, and felt no more than the bitterness of the man who'd been driven to acquire the spectacular collection only to hang it in a windowless, vaultlike room where none but him could ever see it. I passed over a solid gold floor, and saw only the blood.

Barrons found the old man—who'd paid over a billion dollars for the amulet, blissfully ignorant that he'd not only
not
postponed his death, but had just spent an obscene amount of money to hasten it—dead in his bed, his head half ripped off from the force with which the amulet had been torn from his neck, chain marks scored into the shredded skin of his throat. So much for longevity; by trying to cheat death, he'd succeeded only in expediting it.

Our search was fruitless. Whatever had once been housed there—the amulet, perhaps other OOPs—was gone. Someone had beaten us to it. The Unseelie Hallow was out there in the world, amplifying the will of a new owner, and we were back at square one. I'd really wanted that amulet. If it was capable of impacting reality, and I could figure out how to use it … well, the possibilities were endless. At the least, it could protect me; at best it could help me get my revenge.

“Are we done here, Barrons?” I asked, as we descended the rear stairs. I suddenly felt as if I couldn't get out of the marble mausoleum fast enough.

“There's a basement, Ms. Lane.”

We turned at the bottom of the final flight, and began walking toward a set of doors in the wall past the base of the stairwell.

At that very moment, they began to swing open.

Abruptly, I was no longer in the house at all, but standing on a white powder beach with a warm, salty breeze tangling my hair.

The sun was shining. Alabaster birds swooped low, gliding along lapis lazuli waves.

And I was naked.

ELEVEN

V
'lane!” I snarled.

I was naked—he was near.

“It is time for our hour, MacKayla,” said a disembodied voice.

“Put me back right now! Barrons needs me!” How had he so cleanly swapped one reality for the next? Had he moved me, or worlds? Had I just been “sifted”? But I hadn't even seen him, or felt him touch me, or anything!

“At the time of my choosing was our deal. Will you dishonor it? Should I undo my part of it as well?”

Could he do that? Rewind time and dump me back into the Shade-infested bookstore, crouching before my enemy with too few matches left? Or did he mean to let the Shades back in right now, and when I got home from Wales, I'd have to clear it again, this time, without his help? I had no desire to face either. “I'm not dishonoring it.
You
are. Give me my clothes back!”

“We discussed nothing of attire in our bargain. We are on equal footing, you and I,” he purred, behind me.

I whirled, fury in my eyes, murder in my heart.

He was naked, too.

All thought of Barrons and basement doors opening and potential dangers behind them vanished. Nor did it matter how I'd gotten here. I was here.

My knees turned to ash. I collapsed to the sand.

I looked away but my eyes didn't. My central nervous system was currently serving another master and had no interest in will. Will? What was will? Papers you signed in case you died, that was it. Nothing to do with my current situation. All I needed to do now was entrust my body to the Maestro before me who would play it like no other, stroking it to unimaginable crescendos, plucking chords no man had ever sounded before, or would ever match again.

A Fae prince naked is a vision that renders all other men eternally inadequate.

He stepped toward me.

I trembled. He was going to touch me. Oh, God, he was going to touch me.

Over the course of my many encounters with V'lane, I would attempt repeatedly to describe him in my journal. I would use words like: terrifyingly beautiful, godlike, possessing inhuman sexuality, deadly eroticism. I would call him lethal, I would call him irresistible, I would curse him. I would lust for him. I would call his eyes windows to a shining heaven, I would call them gates to Hell. I would fill entries with scribblings that would later make no sense to me, comprised of columns of antonyms: angelic, devilish; creator, destroyer; fire, ice; sex, death—I'm not sure why those two struck me as opposites, except perhaps sex is both the celebration of life and the process whereby we create it.

I would make a list of colors, of every shimmering shade of bronze, gold and copper, and amber known to man. I would write of oils and spices, scents from childhood, scents from dreams. I would indulge in lengthy thesaurus-like entries trying to capture the sensory overload that was Prince V'lane of the Fae.

I would fail at every turn.

He is so beautiful that he makes a part of my soul weep. I don't understand those tears. They aren't like the ones I cry for Alina. They aren't made of water and salt. I think they're made of blood.

“Turn. It. Off.” I gritted.

“I am doing nothing.” He stopped in the sand next to me, towered above me. The parts of him I needed, those perfect, incredible parts I burned to have inside me, slaking my terrible, inhuman lust, were within arm's reach. I fisted my hands. I would never reach. Not for a Fae. Never. “Liar.”

He laughed and I closed my eyes, lay shuddering on the soft white sand. The fine grains against my skin were the hands of a lover, the breeze at my nipples a hot tongue. I prayed the ocean wouldn't begin to lap at any part of me. Would I come apart? Would my cells lose the cohesion necessary to maintain the shape of my humanity? Would I scatter to the far reaches of the universe, flakes of dust borne off on a fickle Fae wind?

I rolled so my nipples pressed against the beach. As I turned, my thigh grazed the tender, aching flesh of my mons. I came, violently. “You bastard … I … 
hate
 … you,” I hissed.

I was standing again. Fully clothed in my clingy catsuit, spear in hand. My body was cool, remote; not one ounce of passion stirred in what had an instant ago been enflamed loins. I was master of my will.

I lunged for him without hesitation.

He vanished.

“I sought only to remind you of what you and I might share, MacKayla,” he said behind me. “It is extraordinary, is it not? As befits an extraordinary woman.”

I spun and lunged again. I knew he would only vanish once more, but I couldn't help myself.

“What part of ‘no' don't you understand? The
n
or the
o
? No is not maybe. It is not I like to play rough. And it is never, never,
never
yes.”

“Permit me to tender my apologies.” He was in front of me again, clothed in a robe that was a color I'd never seen before and couldn't describe. It made me think of butterfly wings against an iridescent sky, backlit by a thousand suns. His eyes, once molten amber, burned the same strange hue. He could not have looked more alien.

“I'll permit you nothing,” I said. “Our hour is up.
You
dishonored our deal. You promised you wouldn't sex me up. You broke that promise.”

He regarded me a long moment and then his eyes were molten amber, and he was the tawny Fae prince again. “Please,” he said, and from the way he said it, I knew there was no such word in the Fae tongue.

To the Tuatha Dé there is no difference between creating and destroying,
Barrons had said.
There is only stasis and change.
Nor to these inhuman beings was there any such thing as apologizing. Would the ocean apologize for covering the head and filling the lungs of the man who fell in it?

He'd used the word for me. Perhaps learned it for me. He'd used it in supplication. It gave me pause, as he'd meant it to do.

“Please,” he said again. “Hear me out, MacKayla. Once more I have erred. I am trying to understand your ways, your wants.” If he'd been human I would have said he looked embarrassed. “I have never before been refused. I do not suffer it well.”

“You don't give them the chance to refuse. You rape them all!”

“That is untrue. I have not used the
Sidhba-jai
on an unwilling woman in eighty-two thousand years.”

I stared. V'lane was eighty-two thousand years old?

“I see I have made you curious. That is good. I am curious about you as well. Come. Join me. Let us talk of ourselves.” He stepped back and waved a hand.

Two chaise longues appeared between us. A wicker table between them offered a plate with a pitcher of sweet tea and two ice-filled glasses. There was a bottle of my favorite suntan oil stuck in the sand next to the chair closest me, near a pile of thick pastel towels. Sheets of brilliantly striped silk wafted from nowhere, billowed once in the breeze and draped themselves over the chairs.

Salt air kissed my skin. I glanced down.

My catsuit was gone and I was again spearless. I was wearing a hot pink string bikini, with a gold belly chain from which dangled two diamonds and a ruby.

I blinked.

A pair of designer sunglasses appeared on the bridge of my nose.

“Stop it,” I hissed.

“I am merely trying to anticipate your needs.”

“Don't. It's offensive.”

“Join me for an hour in the sun, MacKayla. I will not touch you. I will not … as you say … sex you up. We will talk, and at our next encounter, I will not make the same mistakes again.”

“You said that last time.”

“I made new mistakes this time. I will not make those, either.”

I shook my head. “Where is my spear?”

“It will be returned to you when you leave.”

“Really?” Why would he return a Fae-killing Hallow fashioned by his race to me, knowing I would use it to kill more Fae?

“Consider it a gesture of our goodwill, MacKayla.”

“Our?”

“The queen and I.”

“Barrons needs me,” I said again.

“If you insist I prematurely terminate our hour because you feel I have dishonored it, I will not return you to Wales, and you will still be of no use to him. Stay or go, you won't be with him. And MacKayla, I believe your Barrons would tell you he needs no one.”

That much was true. I wondered how he knew Barrons. I asked him. They must have trained with the same master of evasion because he said only, “It rains in Dublin incessantly. Look.”

A small square in the tropical vista opened before me, as if he'd peeled back the sky and palms, and torn a window open onto my world. I saw the bookstore through it. The streets were dark, wet. I would be alone there.

“It is raining now. Shall I return you, MacKayla?”

I looked at the tiny bookstore, the shadowy alleys to either side of it, Inspector Jayne sitting across the street beneath a streetlamp watching it, and shivered. Was that the dim outline of my private Grim Reaper down the block? I was so tired of the rain and the dark and enemies at every turn. The sun felt heavenly on my skin. I'd almost forgotten the feel of it. It seemed my world had been wet and gloomy for months.

I glanced away from the depressing view, and up at the sky. Sun has always made me feel strong, whole, as if I get more than vitamins from it; its rays carry something that nourishes my soul. “Is it real?” I nodded up at the sun.

“As real as yours.” The window closed.

“
Is
it mine?”

He shook his head.

“Are we in Faery?”

He nodded.

For the first time since I'd so unceremoniously arrived, I examined my surroundings. The sand was radiantly white and soft as silk beneath my bare feet, the ocean azure, and the water so clear I could see entire cities of rainbow-colored coral beneath it with tiny gold and pink fish swimming the reefs. A mermaid danced on a crest of a wave before disappearing beneath the sea. The tide tossed sand to the beach in a surf of glittering silver foam. Palm trees rustled in the breeze, dropping lush scarlet blossoms on the shore. The air smelled of rare spices, exotic flowers, and salt sea spray. I bit my lip on the verge of saying
It's so beautiful here
. I would not compliment his world. His world was screwing up mine. His world didn't belong on our planet. Mine did.

Still … the sun has always been my drug of choice. And if he would play fair—meaning not try to rape me again—who knew what I might learn? “If you touch me, or in any way try to affect my will, our time together stops. Got it?”

“Your will, my command.” His lips curved with victory.

I took off my shades and glanced briefly at the sun, hoping to sear the devastating beauty of that smile from my retinas, scorch it from my memory.

I had no idea who or what V'lane really was, but I knew this: He was a Fae, and an immensely powerful one. In this battle where knowledge was so evidently power, where information could keep me alive, where Barrons pretty much ruled his far-reaching world because of how much he knew, I couldn't afford to pass up a chance to interrogate a Fae, and it looked like V'lane, for whatever reason, might just let me.

Perhaps he would lie. Perhaps he wouldn't about some things. I was getting better at sorting through what people told me. Learning to hear the truth in their lies and the lies in their truth.

“Have you really been alive for eighty-two thousand years?”

“Longer. That was merely the last time I used glamour to seduce a woman. Sit and we will talk.”

After a moment's hesitation, I perched stiffly on the edge of the chaise.

“Relax, MacKayla. Enjoy the sun. It may be your last chance to see it for some time.”

I wondered what he meant by that. Did he consider himself a weather prognosticator? Or could he actually control it, make it rain? Against my better judgment, I stretched out my legs and lay back. I stared at the sapphire sea, watched graceful alabaster birds pluck fish from the waves. “So, how old are you?”

“That,” he said, “is anyone's guess. In this incarnation, I have lived one hundred and forty-two thousand years. Are you aware of our incarnations?”

“You drink from the cauldron.”

He nodded.

How long, I wondered, did it take to go mad? My short twenty-two years were sorely testing me. It seemed forgetting might be a comfort. I considered the ramifications of divesting memory, and realized why a Fae might put it off. If he'd spent fifty or a hundred thousand years watching, learning, building alliances, making enemies, the moment he divested memory he would no longer even know who those enemies were.

But they would know who he was.

I wondered if any Fae had ever been forced to drink by others of their race, to rescue them from the vast, desolate steppes of insanity. Or perhaps for more nefarious reasons.

I wondered, considering V'lane had known exactly where I was and what I'd been doing, if he'd been responsible for the massacre at the Welshman's estate.