Bloodfever (26 page)

Obviously he didn't know it was missing yet. “Bring it on,” I purred.

He unfastened his robe and let it drop to the floor. His frothy lace shirt was badly stained. He was wearing stiff, tight leather pants, I suspected for the same reason he wore the stiff gloves. I needed him inside the cavern. Then Barrons would spell the exit and there would be no way out.

I did my boxer dance. “Come on, Johnny, let's play.”

He lunged through the entrance with inhuman speed, and closed one of his stiff-gloved hands around my throat. I saw Barrons loom up behind him and shot him a wordless command:
Don't interfere.

I grabbed Mallucé's wrist and kneed him in the groin with the strength of ten men. The flesh between his legs was too soft. My knee slid a few inches into his body.

“No feeling there, bitch,” he spat.

“What about here?” I punched him in the ear with all my strength. Blood spurted from his skull, and he reeled sideways and staggered. I watched the wound heal as quickly as it had opened. Would I do that?

I found out soon enough. He broke my nose. It reassembled itself. I nearly tore his arm from his shoulder. It dangled uselessly for a few moments then he punched me with it again, strong as ever.

“When I finish with you, bitch, I'm going to Ashford. Remember your little confession?” he taunted. “Telling me you had a mother there? Maybe I'll keep you alive long enough to see what I do to her.”

I pummeled his hated face into a mass of bloody flesh. It would end here, now. Mallucé was never walking out of these caves again if I had to stay down here for all eternity killing him. He tried to rip my ear off. I almost bit him but thought twice, not exactly clear on vampire rules. I didn't want his blood anywhere near my mouth. I kicked him in the knee. When it shattered and he went down I fell on him, kicking, punching, snarling.

I felt something inside me de-evolving, and I liked it.

Time lost all meaning to me. We were virtually indestructible machines. We beat each other senseless, long past the point of reason. I existed for one thing: to make him go down, stay down, and never move again. I no longer knew who he was. I no longer cared who I was. Things had deconstructed to the basest terms. Mallucé no longer even had a name or a face. He was Enemy. I was Destroyer. I understood only the imperative of battle, the appetite to kill.

I slammed him into the cavern wall. He smashed me into a man-sized stalagmite. It crumbled from the impact. I picked myself up and we crashed together again, punching, kicking, grunting.

Suddenly Barrons was between us, forcing us apart.

I turned on him, snarling, “What the hell are you doing?”

“You!” Mallucé looked stunned. “How did
you
get here? I left the cuff in the alley! There's no way you tracked me!”

I stared at Barrons. How
had
he found me? “Stay out of this, Barrons! It's my fight.”

Barrons caught me completely off guard with half a dozen rapid-fire punishing blows to my head and stomach.

I doubled over, dazed.

Mallucé laughed.

I was bent low, ribs cracking and rehealing for several seconds. My chest burned like a lung had been pierced.

Mallucé stopped laughing, with a strangled sound.

When I shot up, Barrons had Mallucé by an arm around his neck. He hit me again and I went right back down. Barrons had held back when he'd punched me before. Given me a love tap compared to what he was dishing out now.

The bastard did it to me three more times; each time I straightened, his fist pistoned into my face before I could even get all the way up. It felt like my brain was rattling in my skull.

The fifth time I rose, Mallucé was on the ground, unmoving. I could see why. His head was no longer attached to his shoulders. He'd killed him! Barrons had stolen my revenge, cheated me of the pleasure of destroying the one who'd nearly destroyed me!

I whirled on him. He was spattered with blood, breathing hard, head down, eyes narrowed, and fury was rolling off him in thick, dangerous waves. How dare he be furious with me? I was the wronged party! My battle was interrupted, bloodlust was bottled up inside me, a turbo engine revved to redline.

“The vamp was
mine,
Barrons!”

“Inspect his teeth, Ms. Lane,” he said tightly. “They were cosmetic enhancements. He was no vampire.”

I punched him lightly in the shoulder. “I don't care what he was! It was my fight, you bastard!”

He punched me back with the same light, warning force. “You were taking too long to finish it up.”

“Who are
you
to decide how long is too long?” I gave him another tap in the shoulder.

He returned the blow with equal force. “You were enjoying it!”

“I was not!”

“You were smiling, bouncing on the balls of your feet, egging him on.”

“I was trying to end the fight!” I punched his shoulder, hard this time.

“You were way past trying to end it,” he snapped, punching me back. I nearly fell over. “You were prolonging it. You were glorying in it.”

“You don't know what the feck you're talking about!” I shouted.

“I couldn't tell the difference between the two of you anymore!” he roared.

I smashed my fist into his face. Lies roll off us. It's the truths we work hardest to silence. “Then you weren't looking hard enough! I'm the one with boobs!”

“I know you're the one with boobs! They're in my fucking face every fucking time I turn around!”

“Maybe you need to get a grip on your libido, Barrons!”

“Fuck you, Ms. Lane!”

“You just try. I'll kick the shit out of you!”

“You think you could?”

“Bring it on.”

He grabbed a fistful of my T-shirt, and dragged me up against him until our noses touched. “I'll bring it on, Ms. Lane. But remember you asked for it. So don't even think about trying to tap out on the mat and quit the fight.”

“You hear anybody crying ‘Uncle' here, Barrons? I don't.”

“Fine.”

“Fine.”

He swapped the fistful of my shirt for one in my hair, and ground his mouth against mine.

I exploded.

I shoved at him, and clawed him closer. He shoved me back, and yanked me tighter to his body. I pulled his hair. He pulled mine. He didn't fight fair. Actually, he fought exactly fair. He didn't extend courtesies, not a single one.

I bit his lip. He tripped me and pushed me down to the stone floor of the cavern. I punched him. He straddled me.

I ripped his shirt down the front, left it hanging in tatters from his shoulders.

“I liked that shirt,” he snarled. He rose over me, a dark demon, glistening in the torchlight, dripping sweat and blood, his torso covered with tattoos that disappeared beneath his waistband.

He grabbed the hem of my shirt, tore it straight up to my neck, and inhaled sharply.

I punched him. If he punched me back, I was past feeling it. His mouth was on mine again, the hot silk of his tongue, the sharp, deliberate abrasion of his teeth, the exchange of breath and the small, desperate sounds of need. A tsunami of lust—no doubt amplified by the Fae in my blood—crashed into me, knocking me from my feet, and dragging me out to a dangerous sea. There was no lifeboat here in these deep, killing waters, not even a lighthouse, marking the way back to shore with its soft amber promise. There was only the storm of Barrons and the one I seemed to be, and if there were dark shapes moving in the waters beneath my feet that I should probably take a good hard look at and possibly reconsider trying to swim here, I didn't care.

He fitted himself to me and began a driving, erotic, rhythmic bump and grind.
A lonely boy. A lone man. Alone in a desert beneath a blood-red moon. War everywhere. Always war. A breath-stealing sirocco sweeping down over treacherously sifting sands. A cave in a cliff wall. Sanctuary? No sanctuary left anywhere.
Barrons' tongue was inside my mouth, and somehow I was inside Jericho Barrons. The images were his.

We both heard the noise at the same time and exploded away from each other as quickly as we'd come together, scrambling to opposite sides of the small cavern.

Panting, I stared at him. He was breathing hard, his dark eyes narrowed to slits.

Is it still spelled?
I mouthed, meaning the entrance to the cave.

To contain only. Not to expel.

Well, spell it again!

Isn't that easy.

He melted into the shadows behind a stalagmite.

I focused my attention on the door, tried to sense what was coming, and stiffened.

Fae … but not Fae. Followed by at least ten Unseelie.

I stared past Mallucé's body at the entrance, tensed to spring. A glint of gold and silver caught my eye in the flickering torchlight.

The amulet! How could I have forgotten? It was pooled in a pile of chain, between his body and the door. It must have fallen off when Barrons had beheaded him.

The footsteps drew nearer.

I sprang for the Hallow.

A booted foot came down on it just as I reached it.

I stared up the leg and looked straight into the eyes of my sister's murderer.

EIGHTEEN

T
he Lord Master's gaze flicked away from me, passed with cursory interest over Mallucé. “I'd come to finish him myself,” he said. “He'd become a liability. You saved me the trouble. How did you do it?” He studied me, the blood splattered on my face, clothing, and hands, the glaring lack of injuries. A slow smile spread over his exotic, beautiful face. “You ate Unseelie, didn't you?”

I said nothing. I guess something in my eyes did, though. Framed behind him in the doorway were a dozen or so Unseelie of a caste I'd not seen before, wearing black uniforms with red insignia, clearly his personal guard.

He laughed. “What a surprise you are. Lovely like your sister, but Alina would never have done it.”

My sister's name on her murderer's lips incensed me. “Don't even say her name. Nothing about her is yours. Nothing about her ever was.” If Barrons took this fight from me, I'd kill him.

But I wasn't going to get this fight. Not here. Not tonight.

The Lord Master's voice deepened, hardened, rolled with the thunder of a legion of voices. It did something inside my head; echoed, whispered, rearranged things. “Hand me the amulet. Now.”

I picked it up and handed it to him, wondering even as I did it what I was doing, why I was obeying. It glowed a faint blue-black invitation the moment I touched it. His eyes widened fractionally. He took it from me swiftly.

“Another surprise,” he murmured.

That's right, you bastard, I
am
epic, so watch out, I wanted to say, but my vocal cords weren't under my control any more than anything else was at the moment.

“Stand,” he commanded. The amulet blazed in his hand, eclipsing the feeble light I'd managed to make and been so proud of.

I stood as jerkily as a puppet on strings, mind resisting, flesh obeying. I swayed before the red-robed Lord Master, stared into his too-beautiful-to-be-human face, and waited for him to rule me. Had he done this to my sister? Had she been not duped by him, but stripped of choice like I was now?

“Come.” He turned and, automaton-like, I began to follow.

Barrons exploded from the shadows and hit me like a missile, taking me to the ground beneath him.

The Lord Master turned in a whirl of robes.

“She stays with me,” said Barrons. His voice, too, rolled with the thunder of a multitude, reverberating inside my skull. Of course I was staying with him. What had I been thinking?

What the Lord Master did next was so incomprehensible to me that I was still blinking blankly at the opening, several minutes after he was gone.

He took a long look at my enigmatic mentor, jerked his head at his guard—and left.

NINETEEN

W
e raced back to Dublin in the sleek, stolen stealth of Rocky O'Bannion's black Maybach.

I made no attempt at conversation, nor did Barrons.

I'd been through too much in the past, however many hours it had been. Twenty-seven, I would learn later. I'd faced a Hunter, discovered my specter was not only real but a greater threat than the Unseelie chasing me; been locked in a cave, tortured, beaten to the brink of death, rescued; eaten the living flesh of an Unseelie, gained superhuman strength and power and lost God only knew what, battled a vampire, gotten into a fight with Barrons that had skewed dangerously toward the end, lost a powerful Dark Hallow to my sister's murderer, and worse, been unable to function with any will at all in his presence, and if Barrons hadn't been there to save me yet again, I would have trundled off behind my archenemy, ensorcelled by the crimson-cowled Pied Piper.

Then when I'd thought nothing else could possibly startle or surprise me, the Lord Master had taken one look at Barrons—and walked away.

That worried me. A lot. If the Lord Master walked away from Barrons, how much danger was I in on a daily basis? I'd been feeling invincible up until those last few moments in the cave. Until one man in the room with me had stripped away my will with mere words, and the other man in the room with me had apparently intimidated that one into leaving. Bad and badder.

I glanced across the front seat at Badder. I opened my mouth. He looked at me. I closed it.

I don't know how he continued driving, because we stared at each other for a long time. The night whizzed by, the air inside the speeding car pregnant with all the things we weren't saying. We didn't even have one of our wordless conversations this time; neither of us was willing to betray a single thought or feeling.

We looked at each other like two too-intimate strangers who've woken after the lovemaking and don't know quite what to say to each other, so they say nothing at all and go their separate ways, promising, of course, that they'll call, but each time they look at the phone over the next few days, the discomfort and mild embarrassment of having taken off their clothing in front of someone they didn't really even know rises up, and the phone call never gets made.

Barrons and I had taken our
skins
off around each other tonight. Shared too many secrets, and none of them the important ones.

I was about to look away when he reached across the seat, touched my jaw with his long, strong, beautiful fingers, and caressed my face.

Being touched by Jericho Barrons with kindness makes you feel like you must be the most special person in the world. It's like walking up to the biggest, most savage lion in the jungle, lying down, placing your head it its mouth and, rather than taking your life, it licks you and purrs.

I turned away.

He returned his attention to the road.

We completed the drive in the same strained silence it had begun.

 

“Hold this,” said Barrons, as he turned to lock the door on the garage. He had an alarm system on it now, and punched some numbers in on the keypad.

It was nearly dawn. I could see the Shades out of the corner of my eye, down at the edge of the Dark Zone, moving as restlessly and desperately as flies stuck on flypaper.

I accepted the delicate glass ball. Eggshell thin and fragile, it was an impossible color, the ever-changing hues of V'lane's robes on the beach that day in Faery. I handled it carefully, aware of my heightened strength. I'd bent the door of the Maybach when I'd shut it too hard. Barrons was still pissed about it. Nobody likes a door-slammer, he'd growled.

“What is it?” I asked.

“The D'Jai Orb. A relic from one of the Seelie Royal Houses.”

“Can't be. It's not an OOP,” I told him.

He looked at me. “Yes, it is.”

“No, it's not,” I said. “I know these things, remember?”

“Yes,” he repeated carefully, “it is.”

“No, it's not.”

For a moment I thought we were going to get into a “is to/is not” squabble. We glared at each other, resolute in our opinions.

Then his eyes widened as if with a startling thought. “Remove the spear from the box, Ms. Lane,” he snapped.

“I hardly see the point, and I'd really rather not.” I never wanted to touch it again. I was excruciatingly aware of the Unseelie flesh inside me, and that I had no idea how profoundly eating it had changed me, and until I understood what my new limits were, I meant to studiously avoid anything capable of damaging a Fae.

“Then just open it,” he gritted.

I could do that, although I still didn't see the point. I slipped it from beneath my arm and lifted the lid. I looked at the spear. It took a moment to sink in.

I couldn't sense it.

At all.

In fact, I realized, I hadn't sensed it back in Mallucé's boudoir. I'd merely
seen
it, lying there in the box.

I focused on it, hard. I wasn't getting the faintest tingle. My
sidhe
-seer sense was dead. Not numb. Not tired. Gone. Stricken, I cried, “What's wrong with me?”

“You ate Fae. Do the math.”

I closed my eyes. “A Fae can't sense Fae OOPs.”

“Precisely. And do you know what that means? That means, Ms. Lane, that you can no longer find the
Sinsar Dubh
. Bloody hell.” He turned sharply on his heel and stalked into the bookstore.

“Bloody hell,” I echoed. It also meant that Barrons no longer had any use for me. Nor did V'lane. For all my superhuman abilities, I suddenly wasn't so special at all.

There's always a downside,
he'd warned.

This was one hell of a downside.

I'd lost everything I was to become part Fae with a fatal weakness.

 

I stayed in bed all day Sunday, slept for most of it. The horrors I'd endured had drained me. It seemed my rapid, preternatural healing had taken a toll as well. The human body wasn't meant to nearly die and regenerate. I couldn't begin to comprehend what had happened to me on a cellular level. Despite my exhaustion, the Fae inside me kept me feeling on edge, aggressive, like I was bristling with tiny soldiers inside my skin.

Fitfully, I dozed, I dreamed. They were nightmares. I was in a cold place from which there was no escape. Towering walls of ice surrounded me, hemmed me in. Creatures had carved out caverns in the stark, sheer cliffs above me, and were watching me. Somewhere there was a castle, a monstrous fortress of black ice. I could feel it drawing me, knew if I found it and entered those forbidding doors I would never be the same again.

I woke up shivering, stood under a scalding shower until the hot water ran out. Bundled in blankets, I set up my laptop and tried to answer e-mails from my friends, but I couldn't relate to anything they'd written about. Parties and Jell-O shots, and who was sleeping with who, and he-said/she-said just didn't compute in my brain right now.

I slept. I dreamed again of the cold place. I repeated the scalding shower to thaw myself. I glanced at the clock. It was Monday, nine
A.M.
I could stay in bed all day and hide or I could lose myself in the solace of routine.

I opted for routine. Sometimes it's dangerous to stop and think. Sometimes you just have to keep going.

I forced myself to groom. Exfoliated, masked, and shaved. I nicked my knee in the shower and smeared it with toothpaste when I got out, a trick Alina had taught me when I'd first begun shaving and butchered my ankles more than a few times. As the blood welled in the pale blue gel, tears threatened. At that moment, if I'd had the ability to slip into Faery and spend time with her again, I might have been too weak.

Blood welled in the pale blue gel.

I stared at it.

I was bleeding. I wasn't healing. Why? I scraped the toothpaste off my wound. It bled freely, pooling in the trickles of water on my still-wet leg.

Frowning, I made a fist and punched the doorjamb. “Ow!”

Stunned, disbelieving, I punched it again. It hurt again, and my abraded knuckles began to bleed, too.

My superhuman strength was gone! And I was not regenerating!

My thoughts whirled. Mallucé had talked as if he'd eaten Unseelie constantly, even before I'd stabbed him. I'd assumed it was because it was somehow addictive.

Now I knew how: If you didn't keep eating it, you reverted to your natural human state. Of course, Mallucé hadn't been willing to let that happen.

I stared in the mirror, watching myself bleed. It made me think of another time I'd stood in front of this mirror, examining myself. Of crimson I'd glimpsed on myself once before.

It's hard to say what causes things to come together in a startling flash of clarity but images suddenly bombarded me—

Splint dropping from my arm, smudges of crimson and black ink on my skin; tattoos on Barrons' torso, Mallucé screaming that he'd left the cuff in the alley, demanding to know how Barrons had tracked us; me chained to a beam in the garage, tattooing implements nearby—

—and I had a small epiphany.

“You bastard,” I breathed. “It was all a ruse, wasn't it? Because you were afraid I'd find out that you'd
already done it.
” Games within games, true Barrons form.

I began examining every inch of my skin in the mirror.
I'd planned to hide it
, he'd said.

I poked, I prodded. I looked beneath my breasts. I checked between the cheeks of my behind with a hand mirror and heaved a huge sigh of relief. I looked in my ears. I checked behind my ears.

I found it on the nape of my neck, high up in the slight indentation of my skull, nearly invisible beneath my hair.

It was an intricate pattern of black and red ink with a faintly luminescent
Z
in the middle, a mystical bar code, a sorcerous brand.

He must have done it the night he brought me out of the Dark Zone, the night he'd splinted and healed me. The night he'd told me to sleep and kissed me. I'd been unconscious for a long time.

Then something must have made him begin to worry that I'd find it. Worry that if I did, it might push me too far. He was right, it would have. So when I'd returned from Faery, he'd seized the perfect opportunity to insist on tattooing me
for my own good
. No doubt he would have just touched up the old one, perhaps added something nefarious to it.

When I'd made it plain that if he trespassed against my boundaries so egregiously I'd leave, he must have been in a double bind. Unwilling to push, because I'd leave—knowing if I found out what he'd already done, I'd leave.

He'd branded me without my knowledge and consent, like a piece of property.
His
property. There was a fecking
Z
on the back of my skull.

I traced the pads of my fingers over the tattoo. It was warmer than the skin around it. I remembered lying in the hellish grotto, regretting with every ounce of my being that I hadn't let him tattoo me.

If he hadn't tattooed me, I'd be dead now.

Ironically, the very thing I'd been determined to leave him over if he'd done it to me was the only thing that had kept me alive.

I stared at myself in the mirror, wishing that anything in my life were one-tenth as clear as my reflection.

Rowena was wrong. She was so wrong. There are only shades of gray. Black and white are nothing more than lofty ideals in our minds, the standards by which we try to judge things, and map out our place in the world in relevance to them. Good and evil, in their purest form, are as intangible and forever beyond our ability to hold in our hand as any Fae illusion. We can only aim at them, aspire to them, and hope not to get so lost in the shadows that we can no longer aim for the light.

Power is. If you don't use it, someone else will. You can either create with it or destroy. Creation is good. Destruction is evil. That's my bottom line.

I could sense the spear behind me, quietly chafing my
sidhe
-seer senses.

I could sense OOPs again. I had only normal human strength and healing abilities again. I was me. One hundred percent MacKayla Lane, for better or for worse.

I was back—and I was
glad
. I hoped the dark flesh had passed through me and left no mark.

Life is not black and white. The closest we ever get to either of those colors is wearing them.

I got dressed, went downstairs, and opened my store for business.

 

It was a busy day. A little rainy but not too bad.

I found the cell phone Mallucé had dumped in the alley when he'd abducted me lying on the counter next to the cash register, beside my boots, jacket, and purse; Barrons must have gone searching for me and found them. It had two bars so I plugged it in to recharge it; I don't take my cell phone responsibilities lightly anymore. I will forever be haunted by the reminder of one floating in a sky blue swimming pool, and the spoiled young woman I used to be.