Fever 5 - Shadowfever (29 page)

Half a dozen times I considered aborting my unwanted mission. I could turn around, go back to the mansion, slip through the Silver, find Jericho, resume our plans, and pretend none of this had ever happened. He’d never tell. He had a few dark secrets of his own to keep.
I could forget I was the concubine. Forget that I’d ever had a past existence. I mean, really, who wanted to be in love with someone they’d never even met—at least not in this lifetime? The thought of the Unseelie King was a big messy knot of emotions inside me that I preferred to leave tangled and unexamined.
Hurry! You must!
Razor-edged snow began to fall. Deep in caves, things chimed horrible, grating sounds. Jericho had told me that there were creatures so twisted and monstrous in the Unseelie prison that they’d stay even if the walls came down, because they liked their home. How was I supposed to have made it through if the place had still been fully populated? For that matter, how was I supposed to have found my way here to begin with? How had things been orchestrated to bring me here, to this moment, in this way—and, more importantly, by whom? Whose puppet was I? I resented being here. I couldn’t have turned back for anything.
I have no idea how long I trudged through despair and futility so palpable that every step felt like slogging through wet cement. Temporal divisions did not exist in this place. There were no watches or clocks, no minutes or hours, no night or day, no sun or moon. Just relentless black and white and blue matched by relentless misery.
How many times had I walked this path while I slept? If I’d been having the dream since birth—more than eight
thousand
.
Repetition had made every step instinctual. I skirted dangerously thin ice that I couldn’t have known was there. I intuited the location of bottomless drifts. I knew the shape and number of the entrances in the caves in the black walls high above my head. I recognized landmarks too insignificant to be noticed by anyone who hadn’t walked this path countless times.
If my heart could have pounded, it would have. I had no idea what awaited me. If I’d ever gotten to the end of my journey in my dreams, I’d blocked it thoroughly.
It had always been a woman’s voice commanding me, ordering me to obey. Had my inner concubine been taking over every time I’d fallen asleep and fed me dreams, trying to force me to remember and make me do something?
Darroc had told me that some said the Unseelie King was entombed in black ice, slumbering in his prison eternally. Had he been tricked into a trap and he’d been reaching out to me in the Dreaming to teach me all I needed to know to free him? Was that what my whole life had been about?
Despite the love I knew he and the concubine shared, I resented that my mortal existence had been used up without regard for what it might have been, what
I
might have been. Hadn’t she lived long enough once before, waiting for him to wake up, to pull his head out and live?
It was no wonder I’d always felt so psychotic in high school! I’d been walking around since childhood with the suppressed memories of another fantastical lifetime embedded in my subconscious!
I suddenly found everything about myself suspect. Did I really love sunshine so much, or was it a leftover feeling from
her
? Was I really crazy about fashion, or was I obsessing over the concubine’s closet of a thousand stunning gowns? Was I truly enthralled by beautifying my surroundings, or was it an outlet for
her
need to change the face of her confinement while she waited for her lover?
Did I even
like
the color pink?
I tried to remember how many of her dresses had been some shade of rose.
“Ugh,” I said. It came out as a deep, booming gong.
I didn’t want to be
her
. I wanted to be me. But, as far as I knew, I hadn’t even been born.
A terrible thought occurred to me. Maybe I wasn’t the concubine reincarnated; maybe I
was
the concubine and somebody had forced me to drink from the cauldron!
“Right, then sent me to a plastic surgeon and re-created my face?” I muttered. I didn’t look anything like the concubine.
My head was spinning with fears, each more disturbing than the last.
I stopped, as if a homing beacon that had been beeping faster and faster inside me had abruptly become a single long sound.
I was there. Wherever “there” was supposed to be. Whatever fate awaited me, whatever, whoever had brought me here, was just over the next ridge of black ice, some twenty feet away.
I stood still so long that I iced again.
Despair filled me. I didn’t want to look. I didn’t want to top the ridge. What if I didn’t like what I found? Had I blocked this memory because I was going to die here?
What if I was too late?
The prison was empty. There was no point in going on. I should just give in, turn to ice permanently, and forget. I didn’t want to be the concubine. I didn’t want to find the king. I didn’t want to stay in Faery or be his forever love.
I wanted to be human. I wanted to live in Dublin and Ashford and love my mom and dad. I wanted to fight with Jericho Barrons and run a bookstore one day when our world was rebuilt. I wanted to watch Dani grow up and fall in love for the first time. I wanted to replace that old woman at the abbey with Kat and take tropical vacations on human beaches.
I stood, torn by indecision. Go greet my destiny, like a good little automaton? Freeze and forget, as the overwhelming stain of futility in this place was trying to convince me to do? Or turn and walk away? That thought appealed to me a lot. It smacked of personal will, of choosing to set sail on my own course and terms.
If I never crested that ridge and never discovered the end of this dream that had been plaguing me all my life, would I be free of it?
There was no higher power forcing me to go on, no divine being charging me with tracking the Book and getting the walls back up. Just because I
could
track it didn’t mean I had to. I didn’t have to fight the Fae. I was a free agent. I could leave right now, move far away, shirk responsibility, look out for myself, and leave this mess to somebody else. It was a strange new world. I could stop resisting, adapt, and make the best of it. If I’d proved nothing else to myself over the past few months, I was good at adapting and figuring out how to go on when things weren’t remotely what I’d thought they were.
Still … could I really walk away now and never know what all this had been about? Live with unresolved bipolarity shaping all my choices? Did I
want
to live that way—a conflicted, screwed-up, half-afraid existence of someone who’d chickened out at the critical moment?
Safety is a fence, and fences are for sheep
, I’d told Rowena.
Were it put to the test
, she’d replied tartly,
I wonder where you would truly stand
.
This was the test.
I cracked the ice, shook it from my skin, and headed for the top of the ridge.

In that moment, just before I could see over the crest, a final memory I’d been suppressing surfaced, a last desperate bid to get me to tuck tail and run.
It nearly worked.
Once I topped the ridge, there would be a coffin chiseled of the same blue-black ice from which the four stones had been carved, standing in the center of a snow-covered dais, surrounded by sheer cliffs.
A chilling, bitter wind would gust down and tangle my hair. I would stand, debating, before moving to the sepulchre.
The lid would be elaborately carved with ancient symbols. I would press my hands to the runes at ten and two, slide the lid away, and look inside.
And I would scream.
My steps faltered.
I closed my eyes, but, try as I might, I couldn’t see what was inside the coffin that made me scream. Apparently I was going to have to actually perform the deed to know how my recurring nightmare ended.
I squared my shoulders, marched to the top, and stopped, startled.
There was the icy tomb, elaborately carved and embellished, precisely as I’d just pictured it. It certainly didn’t look big enough to hold the king.
But who was
he
?
This was a new twist. In all my nightmares, there’d never been anyone else here but me and whoever was inside that tomb.
Tall, beautifully formed, ice-white, and smooth as marble, with long jet hair, he sat on a bank of crusted snow beside the coffin, face buried in his hands.
I stood at the top of the ridge, staring. Wind gusted down from high cliffs and tangled my hair. Was he a residue? A memory? There was none of that fading at the edges, no transparency.
Was he my king?
As soon as I thought the question, I knew he wasn’t.
Then who was he?
What I could see of his ivory skin—a hand on his cheek, one sleek, strong white arm—raced with dark shapes and symbols.
Was it possible there were
five
Unseelie Princes? This wasn’t one of the three who’d raped me, and he had no wings, which meant he wasn’t War/Cruce, either.
So who was he?
“It’s about bloody damned time,” he tossed over his shoulder, without turning. “Been waiting weeks.”
I jerked. He’d spoken in that awful chiming and, while my mind understood it, my ears would never get used to it. That was only part of what made me jerk, though. Needing to crack my ice was another part of it. But the majority was horror at the realization of who I was looking at.
“Christian MacKeltar,” I said, and grimaced. I was speaking the language of my enemies, a language I’d never learned, with a mouth incapable of shaping it. I couldn’t get back to my side of the mirror soon enough. “Is that you?”
“In the flesh, lass. Well … mostly.”
I wasn’t sure if he meant it was mostly him or mostly flesh. I didn’t ask.
He raised his head and shot me a savage look over his shoulder. He was beautiful. He was wrong. His eyes were full black. He blinked and had whites again.
In another life, I would have gone crazy over Christian MacKeltar. Or at least I would have gone nuts for the Christian I met back in Dublin. He was so different now that, if he hadn’t spoken to me, I’m not sure how long it might have taken me to figure out who he was. The good-looking college student with the great body, Druid heart, and killer smile was gone. As I watched shapes and symbols move under his skin, I wondered: If we weren’t inside the prison that leached color from everything, would his tattoos still be black or kaleidoscopic?
I stood still too long and was suddenly staring at him through a thin sheeting of ice. He’d been sitting still and was ice-free. Why? Then there was that short-sleeved shirt he was wearing. Wasn’t he cold? When I cracked it, he spoke.
“The majority of what happens here is in your mind. Whatever you permit yourself to feel intensifies.” The words were dark bells hammered on a bent xylophone. I shuddered. I could hear the hint of Scots brogue in the chiming, and the element of humanity in the inhuman tongue made it all the more disturbing.
“You mean if I don’t think about icing, I won’t?” I said. My stomach growled and I was suddenly frosted with thick, creamy blue icing.
“Thought about food, did you now, lass?” Amusement leavened the tubular tones, made it slightly more bearable. He stood up but made no move toward me. “You’ll find you do that a lot here.”
I thought about turning the icing to ice. It was that simple. When I stepped forward, it shattered from my skin. “Does this mean if I think of a warm, tropical beach—”
“No. The fabric of this place is what it is. You can make it worse, but you can never make it better. You can only destroy, not create. That was a bit of added nastiness on the queen’s part. I suspect it’s not icing on you but flakes of frost creamed with the innards of a thing you’d rather not look at too closely.”
I glanced at the sepulchre. I couldn’t help it. It hulked, dark and silent, the boogeyman of twenty years of bad dreams. I’d been trying to ignore it but couldn’t. It gnawed at my awareness.
I would stand beside it.
I would open it, look inside, and scream.
Right. Not in a hurry to do that.
I looked back at Christian. What was he doing here? Whatever had brought me to this place had consumed all my nightly hours for most of my life. I was entitled to a few minutes of my own before whatever was fated happened.
If they were indeed my own.
It didn’t escape me that I’d just found exactly what I needed. How lucky to find the fifth of the five Druids necessary to perform the ritual right here, next to whatever it was I’d been led to!
Too bad I didn’t believe in luck anymore.
I felt bitterly manipulated. But by whom and why?
“What happened to you?” I asked.
“Och, what happened to me?” Laughter screeched like metal spikes across chalkboard bells. “That would be you, lass.
You
happened to me. You fed me Unseelie.”
I was appalled. This was what feeding him the flesh of dark Fae had done to him? Whatever transformation Christian had begun back on that world where we’d dried our clothes by the loch had continued at breakneck speed.
He looked half human, half Fae, and in this place of shadows and ice, he was leaning toward the Unseelie, not their light brethren. With a few finishing touches, he’d look just like one of the princes. I bit my lip. What could I say?
I’m sorry? Does it hurt? Are you turning into a monster inside, too?
Maybe he’d look better once he was out in the real world, where there were other colors besides black, white, and blue.
He gave me a darker version of that killer smile, white teeth flashing against cobalt lips in a white-marble face. “Och, your heart weeps for me. I see it in your eyes,” he mocked. The smile faded, but the hostility in his gaze grew. “It should. I’m beginning to look like one of them, aren’t I? No handy mirrors around here. Don’t know what my face looks like and doubt I want to.”
“Eating Unseelie did this to you? I don’t understand. I’ve eaten Unseelie. So did Mallucé and Darroc, Fiona and O’Bannion. Then there’s Jayne and his men. Nothing like this happened to me or any of them.”
“I suspect it began happening on Halloween. I wasn’t runed well enough.” The smile morphed from killer to murderous. “I blame your Barrons for that. We’ll be seeing who’s the finer Druid now. We’ll be having words when we meet again.”
From the expression on that white chiseled face, I doubted they would be words. “Was Jericho the one who tattooed you?”
He raised a brow. “So, it’s ‘Jericho,’ is it? No, my uncles Dageus and Cian did the work, but he should have checked me when I was finished, and he didn’t. He let me go into the ritual unprotected.”
“And just how pissy would your uncles have gotten if he’d tried?” It was instinct to defend him.
“He still should have. He knew more about protection runes than we did. His knowledge is older than ours, which is bloody inconceivable to me.”
“What happened that night in the stones, Christian?” Neither he nor Barrons had ever told me.
He rubbed his face with a hand, skin rasping over blue-black stubble. “I suppose it doesn’t matter who knows now. I thought to hide my shame, but it looks as if I’ve ended up wearing it.”
He began to walk a slow circle around the black coffin, ice crunching beneath his boots. It was a well-worn path. He’d been here awhile.
I tried to focus on him, but my gaze kept sliding unwillingly to the tomb. The ice was thick, but if I stared, I could see a shape through the frosted sides. The lid was thinner than the rest of the coffin.
Was that the blurred outline of a face through the smoky ice?
I yanked my gaze to Christian’s too-white face. “And?”
“We tried to summon the ancient god of the Draghar, a sect of dark sorcerers. They’d worshipped it long before the Fae came to town. It was our only hope to counter Darroc’s magic. We succeeded in raising it. I felt it come alive. The great stones that weighted it deep beneath the earth fell away.” He paused, letting the echo of his chiming bounce off the walls in ever-diminishing decibels until the icy mountains fell silent. “It came for me. Straight for me. Gunning for my soul. Ever play chicken, Mac?”
I shook my head.
“I lost. It’s a wonder it didn’t decimate Barrons. I felt it blast past me and into him. Then it was just … gone.”
“So how was that responsible for what’s happening to you?”
“It touched me.” He looked repulsed. “It … I don’t want to talk about it. Then you gave me the blood of dark Fae, and that, coupled with the three years I’ve been in here—”
“Three
years
?” The words exploded from me in a cacophony of such dissonance that I was surprised the chiming didn’t start an avalanche. “You’ve been in the Unseelie prison for three years?”
“No, I’ve been in this place for only a few weeks. But I’ve been in the Silvers for three years by my count.”
“But less than a month has passed on the outside since I saw you last!”
“So it’s passing faster for me in here,” he murmured.
“Which is exactly the opposite of what usually happens. Usually a few hours in here are days out there.”
He shrugged. Muscle and tattoos rippled. “Things don’t seem to be working right where I’m concerned. I’ve become a wee bit unpredictable.” His smile was tight. His eyes were full black again.
It was on the tip of my tongue to apologize, but I was more pragmatic than I used to be and I was getting tired of being blamed for things. “When I found you in that desert, you were dying. Would you rather I’d buried you in the Silvers?”
The corners of his mouth twisted. “Aye, there’s the rub, isn’t it? I’m glad I’m alive. And you’ve no idea what that does to me. I used to be part of a clan that protected against the Fae, upheld the Compact, and kept the truce between us and them. Now I’m turning into one of the bloody buggers. I used to think the Keltar were the good guys. Now I don’t believe there
are
good guys.”
“There’d better be good guys. I need five of them to perform the ritual.” My gaze slid to the coffin again. I shook myself and looked away. Assuming I got out of here with my sanity and life.
“See for yourself and decide. I’ll fit in with them now just fine. Uncle Dageus once opened himself up to thirteen of the most evil Druids that ever existed and still can’t exorcise parts of them.”
So Dageus was the “inhabited or possessed” that the prophecy had mentioned!
“And Uncle Cian was trapped in a Silver for nearly a thousand years, as if he wasn’t enough of a barbarian to begin with. He thinks all power is good and would do anything he had to in order to keep himself and his wife alive and happy. Then there’s Da, who’ll be useless to you. He took one look at the two of them when they showed up and swore off Druid arts forever.”
“That’s unacceptable,” I said flatly. “I need all five of you.”
“Good luck with that.”
We looked at each other in silence. He smiled thinly after a moment. “I knew someone would come. I just didn’t expect it to be you. I thought my uncles would find this place so I’d better stick close. I couldn’t find the bloody way out, anyway.”
“What have you been eating?”
“Same as we’re breathing. It’s part of hell. No food, no breath. But hunger, ah, the hunger never goes away. Your stomach gnaws at itself constantly. You just don’t die from it. And sex. Och, Christ, the need!” The look he raked over me chilled. It wasn’t nearly as bottomless as a prince’s, but it wasn’t human, either. “You lust in this place, but you can’t jack off. Nothing comes of it but greater lust. I lost a few days to a bad spot there, nearly lost my fucking mind. If you and I had sex—”
“Thanks but no,” I said swiftly. My life was already too complicated, and if it hadn’t been, this wasn’t the place I’d choose to complicate it more.
“I suspect it wouldn’t work anyway,” he finished drily. “Am I that revolting, lass?”
“Just a little … scary.”
He looked away.
“Still sexy as hell, though,” I added.
He looked back, flashed me a smile.
“There’s the Christian I know,” I tried to tease. “You’re still in there.”
“Once I get out of the Silvers, I’m hoping it won’t be like this.
I
won’t be like this.”
That would make two of us who hoped things would go back to normal, in a hurry, once we left this place behind.
I glanced at the sepulchre. I was going to have to open it sometime. Face it and get it over with. Was it the king? Did he terrify me? Why? What could possibly be in there that would make me scream?
He followed my gaze. “So now you know why I’m sitting here. Why are you here? How did you find this place?”
“I’ve been dreaming about it every night since I was a child, as if I was programmed to come here.”
His mouth twisted. “Aye, she does that. Fucks with us.”
“She? Who?”
He nodded at the coffin. “The queen.”
I blinked. “What queen?” This wasn’t making any sense.
“Aoibheal, Queen of the Seelie.”
“
That’s
who’s in the coffin?”
“Who were you expecting to find?”
All hesitation gone, I moved to the side of the tomb and stared through the lid.
Beneath smoky ice and runes, I could see the hint of pale skin, golden hair, a slight form.
“We’ve got to get her out of here, and fast,” he said, “if she’s even still alive. I can’t tell through the ice. I tried to open it but couldn’t budge it. A few times, I thought she moved. Once, I could have sworn she made a sound.”
I barely heard him. Why would the queen be
here
of all places? V’lane said he was keeping her safe in Faery.
V’lane had lied.
What else had he lied about?
Had he brought her here? If not, who had? Why? And why would opening the lid make me scream? I raked my hair back from my face with both hands and tugged on it, staring down. Something was eluding me.