Fever 5 - Shadowfever (45 page)

beautiful body.
“When you die, do your tattoos disappear?” Wet, his hair is darker, glossy, his skin a
deep bronze. Water runs over muscle, sprays off his erection. He’s always hard. “Yes.”
“That’s why they were different.” I frown. “Do you come back exactly how you were
when you died the first time?”
“Were you
Pri-ya
the entire time?”
I gasp and try to duck my head so he can’t see my eyes. My eyes betray me sometimes,
no matter how hard I try, especially when my feelings are intense.
He grabs my head and holds it with two fistfuls of my hair, forcing me to look at him. “I knew it—you weren’t!” His mouth is on mine, he has me against the wall. I can’t
breathe and I don’t care. He is exultant. “How long?” he demands.
“What happens when you die?” I counter.
“I come back.”
“Duh, obviously. How? Where? Do you eventually just stand up from your ashes again or
something?”
I hear a rattle and suddenly he’s on the floor, head back, muscles rippling, fighting to
remain a man. He’s losing the battle. He has talons. Black fangs slide from his mouth, gouging
into his skin. I can tell he doesn’t want to turn, but something I asked him has made him
frenzied.
I can’t stand watching him struggle. I wonder if anyone has ever tried to help Barrons. I
answer, talk to him to keep him grounded in the here and now. “I knew what was happening
from the moment you asked me what I wore to the prom.” I drop to my knees beside him, take
his head in my arms and cradle him at my breast. His face is half beast, half man. “I began to
surface. It was like I was there but trying not to be there. I’m here, Jericho. Stay with me.” Later we sleep. Or I do. I don’t know what he does. I’m exhausted and warm and feel
safe for the first time in a long time, drifting off in Barrons’ underground world, next to the king
of beasts.
I wake to him pushing into me from behind. We’ve had sex so many times, so many
ways, I can barely move. I’ve come so many times I think it’s impossible for me to even
want
to
come again, but then he’s inside me and my body tells a different story. I need so badly I ache. I
slip my hand down and, as soon as I touch myself, I come. He shoves into me deep, rocking into
my climax. I’m on my side. He’s tucked me into his body, spooned close. His arms are around
me, his lips on my neck. Teeth graze my skin. When I stop shuddering, he pulls out and
immediately I want him again. I push back with my rump and he’s back. He goes slow, so slow
it’s torture. He thrusts, I clench. He withdraws, I lay tense, waiting. Neither of us says a word. I
barely breathe. He stops and stays perfectly still for a while but not to tease. He likes being hard
inside me. Connected, we lie there in silence. I don’t want the moment to end. But it does, and when we’re separate, we don’t speak for a long time. I watch the
shadows flickering on a famous painting on the wall. He’s not asleep. I can feel him back there,
aware.
“Do you ever sleep?”
“No.”
“That must be
hell.
” I love sleeping. Curling up, napping, dreaming. I need to dream. “I dream,” he says coolly.
“I didn’t mean—”
“Never pity me, Ms. Lane. I like what I am.”
I roll over in his arms, touch his face. I let myself be tender. Trace his features, slide my
fingers into his hair. He seems both put off and entranced by the way I’m touching him. I
rearrange my head to accommodate the advantages of never sleeping. There are a lot. “How do
you dream if you don’t sleep?”
“I drift. Humans need to shut down to let go. Meditation accomplishes the same thing,
lets the subconscious play. That’s all you need.”
“What happened to your son?”
“Aren’t you question girl?” he mocks.
“He’s why you want the
Sinsar Dubh.
”
I feel the sudden violence in his body. It gusts like a sirocco, and just like that I’m inside his head and we’re in a desert and I wonder with a strange sense of duality in which I am him
and I am me why it always seems to come back to this place for him. Then …
I’m Barrons, and I’m on my knees in the sand
.
The wind is kicking up; the storm comes
.
I was stupid, so stupid
.
Death for hire. I laughed. I drank. I fucked. Nothing mattered. I swaggered through life,
a god. Grown men screamed when they saw me coming
.
I was born today. I opened my eyes for the first time
.
It all looks so different now that it’s too late. What a grand fucking joke on me. I should
never have come here. This is one battle-for-hire I should never have taken
.
I hold my son and I weep
.
The sky opens, letting the storm free. Sand comes, so thick it turns day into night
.
One by one, my men fall around me
.
I curse the heavens as I die. They curse me back
.
There is black. Only black. I wait for the light. The Old Ones say thereis light when you
die. They say to run for it. If it goes away, you drift the earth forever
.
No light comes to me
.
I wait all night in the dark
.
I’m dead yet I can feel the desert beneath my corpse, the abrasion of sand on my skin, up
my nostrils. Scorpions sting my hands, my feet. Open, dead eyes crusted with sand watch the
night sky as the stars pop and vanish, one by one. The darkness is absolute. I wait and wonder.
The light will come. I wait, I wait
.
The only light that comes for me is dawn
.
I stand up, and my men stand up and we stare uneasily at one another
.
Then my son stands up and I don’t care. I spare no thought for the strange night that
shouldn’t have been. The universe is a mystery. The gods are fickle. I am and he is and that is
enough. I toss him on my horse and leave my men behind
.
“My son was killed two days later.”
I open my eyes, blinking. I can still taste sand, feel the grit in my eyes. Scorpions crawl at
my feet.
“It was an accident. His body disappeared before we could bury it.”
“I don’t understand. Did you die in the desert or not? Did he?”
“We died. It was only later that I pieced it together. Things rarely make sense while
they’re unfolding. After my son died the second time, he died many more times, simply trying to
get back to me and come home. He was deep in the desert without conveyance or water.” I stare. “What are you saying? That every time he died, he came back in the same place
he’d died that first time with you?”
“At dawn the next day.”
“Over and over? He would try to make it out, die of heatstroke or something, then have to
start all over again?”
“Far from home. We didn’t know. None of us died for a long time. We knew we were
different, but we didn’t know about the dying. That came later.”
I watch him and wait for him to speak again. This is the crux of Barrons. I want to know.
I won’t push.
“That wasn’t the end of his hell. I had rivals who rode the desert, too. Death for hire.
Many were the times we’d thinned each other’s pack. One day, they found him walking the
sands. They played with him.” He looks away. “They tortured and killed him.” “How do you know this?”
“Because when I finally put things together, I tortured and killed a few of them and they
talked while they died.” His lips smile; his eyes are cold, merciless. “They set up camp not too
far from where he was reborn every dawn and found him the next day. Once they realized what
was happening, they believed he was demon spawn. They tortured and killed him over and over.
The more he came back, the more determined they were to destroy him. I don’t know how many
times they killed him. Too many. They never let him live long enough to change. They didn’t
know what he was, nor did he. Just that he kept coming back. One day another band attacked,
and they didn’t have time to kill him. He was left alone, tied up in a tent for days. He got hungry
enough that he turned. He never turned back. It was a year before we were hired to hunt the beast
that was scouring the country, ripping out the throats and hearts of men.”
I was horrified. “They killed him every day for a year? And you were hired to kill him?” “We knew it was one of us. We’d all changed. We knew what we’d become. It had to be
him. I hoped.” His mouth twisted in a bitter smile. “I actually hoped it was my son.” There was
naked hunger in his eyes. “How long was he a child tonight? How long did you see him before
he attacked you?”
“A few minutes.”
“I haven’t seen him like that in centuries.” I could see him remembering the last time.
“They broke him. He can’t control his change. I’ve seen him as my son only five times, as if for
a few moments he knew peace.”
“You can’t reach him? Teach him?” Barrons could teach anyone.
“Part of his mind is gone. He was too young. Too frightened. They destroyed him. A man
might have withstood it. A child had no chance. I used to sit by his cage and talk to him. When
technology afforded, I recorded every moment, to catch a glimpse of him as my son. The
cameras are off now. I couldn’t watch the recordings, looking for him. I have to keep him caged.
If the world ever found him, they would kill him, too. Over and over. He’s feral. He kills. That’s
all he does.”
“You feed him.”
“He suffers if I don’t. Fed, sometimes he rests. I’ve killed him. I’ve tried drugs. I learned
sorcery. Druidry. I thought Voice might make him sleep, even die. It seemed to hypnotize him
for a time. He’s highly adaptable. The ultimate killing machine. I studied. I collected relics of
power. I drove your spear through his heart two thousand years ago, when I first heard of it. I
forced a Fae princess to do her best. Nothing works. He’s not in there. Or if he is somewhere, he
is in constant, eternal agony. It never ends for him. His faith in me was misplaced. I can
never—”
Save him
, he doesn’t say, and I don’t, either, because if I’m not careful I’m going to start
crying, and I know it would only make things worse for him. He’s thousands of years past tears.
He just wants release. Wants to lay his son to rest. Tuck him in and say good night forever, one
last time.
“You want to unmake him.”
“Yes.”
“How long has this been going on?”
He says nothing.
He will never tell me. And I realize a number doesn’t really matter. The grief he felt in
the desert has never abated. I understand now why they would kill me. It’s not just his secret. It’s
theirs, too. “All of you return to the place you first died every time you die.”
He is instantly violent. I understand.
They kill to keep anyone from doing to them what was done to his son. It is their only
vulnerability: wherever they come back at dawn the next day. An enemy could sit there, waiting
for them, and kill them over and over again.
“I don’t want to know where that is. Ever,” I assure him, and mean it. “Jericho, we’ll get
the Book. We’ll find a spell of unmaking. I promise. We’ll put your son to rest.” I feel suddenly
vicious. Who had done this to them? Why? “I swear it,” I vow. “One way or another, we’ll make
it happen.”
He nods, folds his arms behind his head, stretches back on a pillow, and closes his eyes. As the moments pass, I watch the tension leave his face. I know he’s in that place where
he meditates, where he controls things. What extraordinary discipline.
How many thousands of years has he been taking care of his son, feeding him, trying to
kill him and ease his agony, if only for a few moments?
I’m back in the desert again, not because he takes me there but because I can’t get the
look on his son’s face out of my head.
His eyes say,
I know you will make the pain stop
.
Barrons has never been able to. It never ended. For either of them.
The child, whose death destroyed him, has destroyed him every single day since. By
living.
Dying
, Barrons said,
is easy. The man who dies escapes, plain and simple
. I’m suddenly glad Alina is dead. If the light comes for anyone, it came for her. She rests
somewhere.
But not his son. And not this man.
I press my cheek to his chest, to listen to his heart beating.
And for the first time since I met him, I realize it isn’t. Have I never heard his blood rush
before? His heart pound? How could I not have noticed?
I look up at him to find him staring down his chest at me, an unfathomable expression in
his eyes. “I haven’t eaten lately.”
“And your heart stops beating?”
“It becomes painful. Eventually I would change.”
“What do you eat?” I say carefully.
“None of your fucking business,” he says gently.
I nod. I can live with that.
* * *

He moves differently down here. He doesn’t try to conceal anything. Here, he is himself and moves in that way that seems one with the universe, smooth as silk, flowing noiselessly from room to room. If I forget to pay attention to where he is, I misplace him. I discover he’s leaning against a column—when I’d thought he
was
the column—arms folded, watching me.

I explore his underground lair. I don’t how long he’s lived, but it’s clear he has always lived well. He was a mercenary once, in another time, another place, who knows how long ago. He liked fine things then, and his taste hasn’t changed.

I find his kitchen. It’s a gourmet chef’s dream—stainless-steel top-of-the-line everything. Lots of marble and beautiful cabinets. Sub-Zero fridge and freezer well stocked. Wine cellar to die for. As I devour a plate of bread and cheese, I imagine him here all those nights when I trudged up to my fourth- or fifth-floor bedroom and slept alone. Did he pace these floors, cook himself dinner, or maybe eat it raw, practice dark arts, tattoo himself, go for a drive in one of his many cars? He was so close all that time. Down here, naked on silk sheets. It would have driven me crazy if I’d known then what I know now.

He peels a mango while I wonder how he managed to get his hands on fruit in post-wall Dublin. It’s so ripe it drips down his fingers, his arms. I lick the juice from his hands. I push him back and eat the pulp off his stomach, lower, then end up with my bare ass on the cool marble of the island and him inside me again, my legs locked around his hips. He stares down at me, as if he’s memorizing my face, watches me like he can’t quite believe I’m here.