Fever 3 - Faefever (25 page)

“But the king gave her only a portion of the Silvers. The other he kept hidden from her, for his concubine, where he planted lush gardens and built a great, shining white house upon a hill with hundreds of windows, and thousands of rooms. When his mortal grew restless, he made her the amulet, so she could shape reality with her will. When she complained of loneliness he made her the box.”

“What does it do?”

“I do not know. It has not been seen since.”

“Are you saying he also made her the Book? But why?”

“Patience, human. I tell this tale. The king’s experiments continued. Eons passed. He created more . . . aberrations. Over time, of which we have a fortunate abundance, they began to improve until some of them were as beautiful as any Seelie. The Unseelie royalty were born, the princes and princesses. Dark counterparts to the Light. And like their counterparts, they wanted what was rightfully theirs: power, freedom to come and go, dominion over lesser beings. The king refused. Secrecy was a necessary part of his plan.”

“But someone went to the queen,” I guessed. “One of the Unseelie.”

“Yes. When she learned of his treachery, she tried to strip him of his power but he had grown too strong, and learned too much. Not the Song, but another melody. A darker one. They battled fiercely, sending their armies against each other. Thousands of Fae died. In that age, we still had many weapons, not merely the few that remain. Faery withered and blackened; the skies ran with the lifeblood of our kind, the planet itself upon which we lived wept to see our shame, and cracked from end to end. And still they fought until he took up the sword and she took up the spear and the king killed the Faery Queen.”

I inhaled sharply. “The queen is dead?”

“And the Song died with her. She was slain before she was able to name her successor and pass on her essence. When she died, the king and all the Unseelie vanished. Before dying, she had managed to complete the walls of the prison, and with her last breath uttered the spell to contain them. Those Unseelie that eluded the spell’s radius were hunted by the Seelie, and killed.”

“So, where does the Book come into all this?”

“The Book was never meant to be what it was. It was created in an act of atonement.”

“Atonement?” I echoed. “You mean for killing the queen?”

“No. The king’s atonement was to his concubine. She slipped from the Silvers and took her own life. She hated what the king had become so much that she left him the only way she could.”

I shivered, chilled by the dark tale.

“They say the king went mad and when his madness finally abated, he beheld the dark kingdom he had created with horror. In her name, he vowed to change, to become the leader of his race. But he knew too much. Knowledge is power. Immense knowledge is immense power. So long as he had it, his race would never trust him. Aware they would not let him near the Cauldron of Forgetting, and even if they did, they would destroy him the second he drank from it, he created a mystical book into which to pour all his dark knowledge. Freed of it, he would banish it to another realm where it could never be found and used for harm. He would return to his people, their Seelie King, beg their forgiveness, and lead them into a new age. The Fae would become patriarchal. The Unseelie, of course, would be left to rot in their prison.”

“So that’s what the Book is,” I exclaimed, “part of the dark king himself! The worst part.”

“Over the eons it changed, as Fae things do, and became a living thing, far different from what it was when the king created it.”

“Why didn’t the king destroy it?”

“He had made . . . how do you say it? . . . his doppelgänger. It was his equal and he could not defeat it. He feared one day it might defeat him. He cast it out, and for much time it was lost.”

I wondered how it had come to be in the
sidhe
-seers’ care. I didn’t ask, because if V’lane didn’t know it had been there, I didn’t want to be the one to tell him. He despised Rowena, and might decide to punish her, and other
sidhe
-seers could suffer in the process. “Why does the queen want it? Wait a minute, if the queen is dead, who is Aoibheal?”

“One of many who came after, and tried to lead our race. She wants it because it is believed that, somewhere in all its darkness, the Book contains the key to the true Song of Making that has been lost to my race for seven hundred thousand years. The king was close, very close. And only with living strands of that Song can the Unseelie be reimprisoned.”

“And Darroc? Why does he want it?”

“He thinks foolishly to possess its power.”

“Barrons?”

“The same.”

“Am I supposed to believe you’re different? That you would blithely hand all that power to the queen, with no thought for yourself?” Sarcasm laced my words. V’lane and self-serving were synonyms.

“You forget something, MacKayla. I am Seelie. I cannot touch the Book. But she can. The queen and king are the only two of our race that can touch all the Hallows, Seelie and Unseelie. You must obtain it; summon me, and I will escort you to her. We alone have any hope of rebuilding the walls should they come down. Not the old woman, nor Darroc, nor Barrons. You must place your trust, as I have, in the queen.”

_____

It was dark when I returned, massaged, manicured, pedicured, and waxed. There were a dozen long-stemmed red roses wrapped in tissue paper waiting for me, propped in the alcoved entrance to the bookstore. I bent to pick them up, then stood in the lighted cubby, fumbling with the card.

Well, well, all my suitors were calling. There was a disposable cell phone tucked into the leaves with a text message waiting: Yes or no?The reply number was zeroed out; I could text him back, but I couldn’t call him.

“V’lane?” came Barrons’ voice from behind me.

I shook my head, wondering what “I prized most” was, afraid to contemplate it.

I felt the electricity of his body behind me as he reached around me and took the card from my hand. He didn’t move away, and I battled the urge to lean back into him, seeking the comfort of his strength. Would he wrap his arms around me? Make me feel safe, if only for a moment, and if only a delusion?

“Ah, the old ‘what you prize most’ threat,” he murmured.

I turned around slowly, and looked up at him. He stiffened and sucked in a shallow breath. After a moment, he touched my cheek.

“Such naked pain,” he whispered.

I turned my face into his palm and closed my eyes. His fingers threaded into my hair, cupped my head, and brushed the brand. It heated at his touch. His hand tightened at the base of my skull and squeezed, and he raised me slowly to my tiptoes. I opened my eyes and it was my turn to inhale sharply. Not human. Oh, no, not this man.

“Never show it to me again.” His face was cold, hard, his voice colder.

“Why? What will you do?”

“What it is my nature to do. Get inside. It’s time for your lesson.”

After I’d received yet another failing grade, Barrons and I cruised the streets.

I’d gotten no tips from Jayne since his last call, four nights ago. I read the paper each morning. If I recognized the
Sinsar Dubh
’s calling card, and I was pretty sure I did, it was jumping to a new victim every night. I knew what the good inspector was doing: he was waiting for his “tea.”

I
was waiting for divine inspiration to strike at any moment, and show me the way, who to trust, what to do. I had no doubt Jayne would get what he wanted before I did.

I was wrong.

We’d been at it for almost six hours, driving up and down, muscling through the city in the Viper. After so many nights, I knew every street, every alley, every parking lot. I knew the location of every convenience store and petrol station that was open between dusk and dawn. There weren’t many. Crime might not be keeping the partyers at home—the drunk and lonely are hard to corral; I know that from bartending—but it was certainly sending the small-business owners and their employees packing well before nightfall.

It made me sad to see Dublin battening her hatches. Just last night, we’d discovered a two-block Dark Zone that wasn’t on my map, by driving through it. I mourned each newly darkened block as a personal loss, a few inches off my hair, a drabber outfit. We were both changing, this boisterous,
craic
filled city and I.

Normally, when we went hunting, Barrons drove in case I lost control of my primary motor functions, but it had been getting more difficult to turn him away from near brushes with the Book, so I’d insisted on driving tonight.

He made a lousy passenger, barking directions I ignored, but it was better than the alternative. Last night when we’d had a near brush with the Book, I’d pretended to have an abrupt desperate need to use the bathroom—the only gas station open was one we’d fueled at, in the opposite direction—and he’d given me an unnervingly searching look. I suspected he was getting suspicious. After all, he could read the paper, too. This morning’s crime had been less than a mile from where I’d had him turn around last night. Although he didn’t know my radar had been getting stronger, I had no doubt he was going to put two and two together eventually.

And so I was driving, my
sidhe
-seer senses on high alert, waiting for the faintest tingle, so I could subtly turn us away, when something totally unexpected happened.

The
Sinsar Dubh
popped up on my radar, and it was moving straight toward us.

At an
extremely
high rate of speed.

I whipped the Viper around, tires smoking on the pavement. There was nothing else I could do.

Barrons looked at me sharply. “What? Do you sense it?”

Oh, how ironic, he thought I’d turned us
toward
it. “No,” I lied, “I just realized I forgot my spear tonight. I left it back at the bookstore. Can you believe it? I
never
forget my spear. I can’t imagine what I was thinking. I guess I wasn’t. I was talking to my dad while I was getting dressed and I totally spaced it.” I worked the pedals, ripping through the gears.

He didn’t even try to pat me down. He just said, “Liar.”

I sped up, pasting a blushing, uncomfortable look on my face. “All right, Barrons. You got me. But I
do
need to go back to the bookstore. It’s . . . well . . . it’s personal.” The bloody, stupid
Sinsar Dubh
was gaining on me. I was being chased by the thing I was supposed to be chasing. There was something very wrong with that. “It’s . . . a woman thing . . . you know.”

“No, I don’t know, Ms. Lane. Why don’t you enlighten me?”

A stream of pubs whizzed by. I was grateful it was too cold for much pedestrian traffic. If I had to slow down, the Book would gain on me, and I already had a headache the size of Texas that was threatening to absorb New Mexico and Oklahoma. “It’s that time. You know. Of the month.” I swallowed a moan of pain.

“
That
time?” he echoed softly. “You mean time to stop at one of the multiple convenience stores we just whizzed past so you can buy tampons? Is that what you’re telling me?”

I was going to throw up. It was too close. Saliva was pooling in my mouth. How far behind me was it? Two blocks? Less? “Yes,” I cried. “That’s it! But I use a special kind and they don’t carry it.”

“I can smell you, Ms. Lane,” he said, even more softly. “The only blood on you is from your veins, not your womb.”

My head whipped to the left and I stared at him. Okay, that was one of the more disturbing things he’d ever said to me. “Ahhh!” I cried, letting go of both the wheel and the gearshift to clutch my head. The Viper ran up on the sidewalk and took out two newspaper stands and a streetlamp before crashing to a stop against a fire hydrant.

And the blasted, idiotic Book was
still
coming. I began foaming at the mouth, wondering what would happen if it passed within a few feet of me. Would I die? Would my head
really
explode?

It stopped.

I collapsed against the steering wheel, gasping, grateful for the reprieve. My pain wasn’t decreasing but at least it was no longer increasing. I hoped the Book’s next victim would hurry along and tote it off in the other direction, fast. Hardly
sidhe
-seerlike, but I had problems.

Barrons kicked open the door, stalked to my side, and yanked me out. “Which way?” he snarled.

I would have fallen to my knees but he held me up. “I can’t,” I managed to say. “Please.”

“Which way?” he repeated.

I pointed.

“Which way?”

He’d Voiced me. I pointed the other way.

Grabbing a fistful of my hair, he took off, dragging me behind him. Closer, closer still. “You’re going . . . to. . . . kill . . . me,” I cried.

“You have no idea,” he growled.

“Please . . . stop!” I was stumbling, blind to everything but the pain.

He released me abruptly and I fell to my knees, gasping, crying. It hurt so bad. Shrieking in my head. Ice in my veins. Fire under my skin. Why? Why did the Book hurt me? Surely I was no longer
that
pure and good! I’d been lying to everyone. I’d killed a
sidhe
-seer—granted, it had been by accident, but it was still innocent blood on my hands, along with all of O’Bannion’s men. I’d been thinking lustful thoughts about men no sane woman would think lustful thoughts about. I’d been carving up other living creatures to eat to steal their . . .

Strength. That was what I needed. Unseelie strength and power; the darkness that was kith and kin to the Book, living inside me.

Where was my purse?

I fumbled for it through the pain. It was in the car. I’d never make it there. I couldn’t even stand up. I whimpered with the agony of simply trying to raise my head. Where was Barrons? What was he doing? The air was ice. The pavement beneath me frosted, and I felt it move up my knees, and creep over my thighs. An arctic wind whipped at my hair, tore at my clothes. Debris battered me.

What was Barrons doing? I had to see!