Fever 5 - Shadowfever (15 page)

Why do you hurt me?
I LOVE YOU.
You’re incapable of love.
NOTHING EXCEEDS MY ABILITIES. I AM ALL.
You’re a
book
. Pages with binding. You weren’t born. You don’t live. You’re no more than the dumping ground for everything that was wrong with a selfish king.
I AM EVERYTHING THAT WAS RIGHT WITH A WEAK KING. HE FEARED POWER. I KNOW NO FEAR.
What do you want from me?
OPEN YOUR EYES. SEE ME. SEE YOURSELF. My eyes
are
open. I’m good. You’re evil. —CONVERSATIONS WITH THE
SINSAR DUBH

I never told anyone, but when I first arrived in Dublin, I had a secret fantasy that kept me from buckling during the worst times.
I’d pretend that we’d all been fooled, that the body sent home to Ashford wasn’t really Alina’s but some other blond coed that looked amazingly like her. I staunchly refused to acknowledge the dental records Daddy had insisted on comparing, a perfect match.
As I’d walked the streets of Temple Bar, hunting her killer, I’d pretended that any minute I was going to turn a corner and there she’d be.
She’d look at me, startled and thrilled, and say,
Junior, what’s up? Are Mom and Dad okay? What are you doing here?
And we’d hug each other and laugh, and I’d know that it had all been a nightmare but it was over. We’d have a beer, go shopping, find a beach somewhere on Ireland’s rocky coast.
I wasn’t prepared for death. Nobody is. You lose someone you love more than you love yourself, and you get a crash course in mortality. You lie awake night after night, wondering if you really believe in heaven and hell and finding all kinds of reasons to cling to faith, because you can’t bear to believe they aren’t out there somewhere, a few whispered words of a prayer away.
Deep down, I knew it was just a fantasy. But I needed it. It helped for a while.
I didn’t permit myself a fantasy with Barrons. I let rage take me because, as Ryodan astutely observed, it’s gasoline and makes great fuel. My fury was plutonium. In time, I would have mutated from radiation poisoning.
The worst part about losing someone you love—besides the agony of never getting to see them again—are the things you never said. The unsaid stalks you, mocks you for thinking you had all the time in the world. None of us do.
Here and now, face-to-face with Barrons, my tongue wouldn’t move. I couldn’t form a single word. The unsaid was ash in my mouth, too dry to swallow, choking me.
But worse than that was the realization that I was being played,
again
. No matter how real this moment seemed, I knew it was nothing but more illusion.
The
Sinsar Dubh
still had me.
I’d never really left the street where it had killed Darroc.
I was still standing, or probably lying in a heap, in front of K’Vruck, being distracted with fantasy while the Book was doing whatever it liked to do to me.
This was no different than the night Barrons and I tried to corner it with the stones and it had made me believe I was crouched on the pavement reading it, when all the while it had been crouching at my shoulder, reading
me
.
I should fight it. I should dive deep into my lake and do what I did best—blunder ahead in a generally forward direction, no matter how bad things got. But as I stared at the perfect replica of him, I couldn’t dredge up enough energy to drive the mirage away. Not yet.
There were worse ways to be tortured than with a vision of Jericho Barrons naked.
I would seek my
sidhe
-seer center and shatter it in a minute. Or ten. I leaned back against the fireplace with a faint smile, thinking:
Bring it on
.
The Barrons illusion rose from his half lunge and stood in a ripple of muscle.
God, he was beautiful. I looked up and down. The Book had done an amazingly accurate job, right down to his more generous attributes.
But it had gotten his tattoos wrong. I knew every inch of that body. The last time I saw Jericho Barrons naked, he’d been covered with red and black protection tattoos, and later his arms had been sheathed in them from biceps to wrist. Now the only tattoos he had were on his abdomen.
“You screwed up,” I told the Book. “But nice try.”
The fake Barrons tensed, knees bending slightly, weight shifting forward, and for a moment I thought he was going to launch himself at me and attack.
“
I
screwed up?” the Barrons figment snarled. He began to stalk toward me. It was difficult to look at his face when there was so much bouncing around at eye level.
“Which word didn’t you understand?” I said sweetly.
“Stop staring at my dick,” he growled.
Oh, yes, it was definitely an illusion. “Barrons
loved
me staring at his dick,” I informed it. “He would have been happy if I’d stared at his dick all day long, composing odes to its perfection.”
In one fluid motion, he had me by my collar and was yanking me to my feet. “That was
before
you killed me, you fucking imbecile!”
I was unfazed. Standing toe-to-toe with him was a drug. I needed it. I craved it. I couldn’t end this charade for anything. “See, you
admit
you’re dead,” I parried smoothly. “And I’m not an imbecile. An imbecile would be fooled by you.”
“I am
not
dead.” He slammed me back against the wall, pinning me with his body.
I was so delighted at being touched by Barrons-esque hands, so thrilled to be staring into the illusion of his dark eyes, that I hardly even felt my head smack into the wall. This was far more realistic than my brief moments with the memory of him in the black wing of the White Mansion. “Are, too.”
“Am not.”
His mouth was so close. Who cared if it wasn’t really him? It had his lips. His parts. Was one fake kiss too much to ask? I wet my lips. “Prove it.”
“You expect me to prove I’m not dead?” he said disbelievingly.
“I don’t think it’s so much to ask. After all, I
did
stab you.”
He braced his palms against the wall on either side of my head. “A wiser woman would stop reminding me of that.”
I inhaled his scent, spicy, exotic, a cherished memory that made me feel alive. The electric current that always charged the air between us sizzled on my skin. He was naked and I was up against a wall, and even though I knew I was being played by the Book, I could barely focus on his words. It felt so real. Except for those missing tattoos. The Book knew how big his dick was but couldn’t get the tattoos right. A small oversight.
“I’m impressed,” I murmured. “I really am.”
“I don’t give a bloody fucking hell if you’re impressed, Ms. Lane. I care about one thing and one thing only. Do you know where the
Sinsar Dubh
is? Did you find it for that bloody fucking half-breed bastard?”
“Oh, that’s just rich.” I snorted with laughter. The
Sinsar Dubh
had created an illusion of a person, and that extension of the
Sinsar Dubh
was asking me where the
Sinsar Dubh
was. “Infinite-regress much?”
“Answer me or I’m going to rip your head off.”
Barrons would never do that. The
Sinsar Dubh
had just made another mistake. Barrons had vowed to keep me alive, and he’d stayed true to that vow until the very end. He’d died to save me. He would never hurt me and certainly wouldn’t kill me. “You don’t know a thing about him,” I sneered.
“I know everything about him.” He cursed. “About me.”
“Do not.”
“Do, too.”
“Bull!”
“Not!”
“Too,” I spat.
“Not!” he fired back, then exhaled explosively. “Bloody hell. Ms. Lane, you drive me bloody fucking crazy.”
“Right back at you, Barrons. And you can lose all the ‘bloodys’ and ‘fuckings’ anytime now. You’re overdoing it. The real Barrons never cursed that much.”
“I bloody fucking know exactly how many bloody fuckings Barrons would use. You don’t know him as well as you think you do.”
“Stop pretending to be him!” I shoved at his chest. “You’re not and you never will be!”
“Besides, that was
before
you killed me and decided to replace me with Darroc in less than a month! Grieve much, Ms. Lane?”
Oh, how dare he? Grief was all I was. Grief and revenge, walking. “For the record, you’ve been dead for three days. And I am
so
not doing this. Get out of here. Go. Away.” I knocked his hands away from my head and stormed past him. “I’m not defending my reasons for doing what I did to you, when you aren’t even really here. That’s too psychotic, even for me.”
He grabbed me and swung me back around. “You’d better believe I’m here, Ms. Lane, and you’d better believe I’ll kill you. You could not have proved your loyalties—or lack thereof—any more completely. You jumped on me the second Ryodan said I was a threat and took me out without an instant’s hesitation—”
“I hesitated! I hated killing my guardian beast! Ryodan told me I had to! I didn’t know it was you!” Great. Now I was arguing with the
Sinsar Dubh
’s fake Barrons about killing him. Why would it want to do this to me? What could the Book possibly gain from making me live this fight?
“You
should
have known!” he exploded.
I knew I should end it, stop the illusion now, but I couldn’t.
Being around Barrons has always made me fire on all pistons, and it didn’t seem to matter a bit that I knew this Barrons was a mirage. Some people bring out the worst in you, others bring out the best, and then there are those remarkably rare, addictive ones who just bring out the
most
. Of everything.
They make you feel so alive that you’d follow them straight into hell, just to keep getting your fix.
“How should I have known? Because you’ve always been so honest with me? Because sharing information is what Jericho Barrons does best, where he
really
shines? No, because you’d bothered to warn me what might happen if I pressed IYD. Wait, I have it: I should have known because you’d confided in me—in the same trusting and open way we’ve shared so many confidences—that sometimes you turn into a nine-foot-tall, horned, insane monster!”
“I am
not
insane. I was sane enough to piss circles around you. I killed food for you. I picked up your things. Who else do you know that would have done that? V’lane doesn’t have dick enough to piss with. Your little MacKeltar doesn’t have the balls to own his actions. He certainly isn’t capable of doing what it takes to own a woman!”
“Own? You think women can be
owned
?”
He gave me a look that said,
Oh, honey, of course they can. Have you forgotten so quickly?
“I was
Pri-ya
!”
“And I liked you much better then!” His eyes narrowed as if he’d only finally processed something I’d said earlier. “I’ve been dead for you for only three bloody
days
? And you already had Darroc up against my wall out back two nights ago? You waited one fucking
day
to line up my replacement? I spent weeks worrying about whether he would scrape my brand off your skull and I wouldn’t be able to track you in the Silvers. The entire time I was trying to get back to save your ass from him, you were giving him a piece of it!”
“I didn’t give Darroc a piece of anything!” Get back from what, where? Being dead?
“A woman doesn’t rub herself up against a man like that unless she’s fucking him.”
“You don’t know the first thing about what I was and wasn’t doing. Ever heard of going undercover? Sleeping with the enemy?”
“ ‘I think you
should
be king, Darroc,’ ” he mocked in falsetto, “ ‘and if you want me, I would be
honored
to be your queen.’ ”
I gaped.
“Isn’t that what you said?”
“What were you doing—spying on me? And if you’re Barrons, you know better than to believe words.”
“Because your actions speak so well of you, do they? Where did you sleep last night, Ms. Lane? It wasn’t here. My bookstore was wide open. Your bedroom was upstairs waiting. So was your fucking honor.”
I opened my mouth, then closed it again. Honor? Barrons was flinging the word “honor” at me? Er … actually, the
Sinsar Dubh
was. I couldn’t decide which was more anachronistic. I frowned. There was something wrong here. Something was very, very off. Although “Barrons” and “honor” weren’t two words I’d think to use together in a sentence, I couldn’t come up with a single reason for the
Sinsar Dubh
to pull this kind of stunt. It had never inflicted such a prolonged and detailed illusion on me before. I could see nothing it might gain by doing it.
“Do you know why I was in the street with you and Darroc tonight?” When I didn’t reply, he snarled, “Answer me!”
I shook my head.
“I wasn’t there to spy on you and your little boyfriend. Speaking of which, what’s it like to slurp down your sister’s sloppy seconds?”
“Oh, fuck you,” I said instantly. “That’s low even for you.”
“You haven’t seen anything yet. I came to kill him tonight. I should have done it a long time ago. But I didn’t get that pleasure. The
Sinsar Dubh
beat me to it,” he said bitterly. “Enough already. You
are
the
Sinsar Dubh
!”
“Hardly. But I’m every bit as deadly. We can both destroy you. Nothing can save you from me if I turn on you.”
It was past time for this illusion to end. The only reason I’d let it go on this long was because it had begun enjoyably and I’d kept hoping it might turn around. But whatever bizarre game the Book was playing, it wasn’t going to play nice, and this icy, sneering Barrons wasn’t the man I wanted to remember.
“Time for you to go now,” I muttered.
“I’m not going anywhere. Ever. If you think for one minute I’ll let you flip sides mid-game, you’re wrong. I’m invested. You’re in too deep. You owe me. I will chain you up, tie you down, leash you with magic, whatever I have to do, but you
will
help me get that Book. And when I’ve got it, I might let you live.”
“You’re the
Sinsar Dubh
,” I said again, but my protest was weak. While he’d been talking, I’d sought my
sidhe
-seer center—that all-seeing eye that can rip away illusion and reveal the truth beneath it—and I’d focused it like a laser on the mirage.
Nothing had happened. No bubble had burst, no mirage had fractured. My hands were shaking. I couldn’t get enough air into my lungs.
It wasn’t possible.
I’d
killed
him.
And when I’d realized what I’d done, I’d channeled my grief into a weapon of mass destruction. I’d made a plan, with a set-in-cement past and a concrete future.
This … this … inexplicability didn’t fit anywhere in my understanding of reality. Not with any of my goals, not with what I’d become.
“But then again, I might not,” he said. “Unlike some people,
I
don’t do sloppy seconds.”
I inhaled sharply. I was growing dangerously light-headed. It couldn’t be. He was not actually standing there.
Was he?
It looked like Barrons, felt like Barrons, smelled and sounded like Barrons, and certainly had his attitude.