Текст книги "Burned"
Автор книги: Karen Marie Moning
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Текущая страница: 24 (всего у книги 27 страниц)
38
“How I wish, how I wish you were here”
MAC
After seeing Christian and Drustan safely inside Chester’s, I’m surprised when Jada doesn’t immediately stalk off. With my spear, which I’m stunned to realize I’d forgotten about. But the three-day ride was depressing, Christian largely unconscious, Drustan deeply grieving, and neither Jada nor I in any mood to talk. I suspect my invisibility makes me feel safer, plus I’m still pumped by the final stages of Unseelie-flesh-high. Regardless, once she’d tucked the spear away somewhere, I’d not thought about it again.
Now I’m doubly surprised she didn’t rush off. Why linger and give me time to demand she return it? Jada does nothing without purpose.
We stand in taut silence outside Chester’s, eyeing the long line of people waiting to get in with distaste, and I’m reminded of the old Dani, how we would have sauntered off into the night to slay Unseelie and reduce the number of predators in our city, dozen by dozen, hoping to one day save these mindless lemmings from the apparently irresistible lure of flinging themselves off the proverbial cliff inside the club.
Neither of us has showered in nearly a week. I suspect if I could see myself, I’d look a fright. A week out, Jada still looks spit-and-polish perfect. I sigh, wondering if I’m going to have to fight to get my spear back. Truth is, I’m not entirely sure I can take it from her. Nor do I want to have to.
I opt for the direct approach. “Give me my spear, Jada.”
She glances in my general direction. “You can’t use it.”
“It’s mine. That’s enough of a reason.”
“Inefficient. Someone should be able to use it. I’m the obvious choice.”
I’d like to deny the validity of her words but I can’t. Given the risks, I’m unwilling to wield it. I can’t walk these streets and slay, and the sheer number of newly arrived Fae inside Chester’s tonight was staggering.
Without the sword – I wonder again where it is, that she can’t get to it – Jada can’t kill them. Seems a hell of a waste of lethal womanpower in this city.
Still, if the Sinsar Dubh decides to suddenly make me visible, I’m going to want it, need it.
“What happened after I chased you into the hall?”
“Like the one you called Dani, the past is irrelevant. I’m here now. That’s all that signifies.”
“What are your plans for the abbey?”
“None of your concern.”
“Once, we worked together.”
“Once, I was someone else.”
“What about the Book I carry?” I want to know if I have to watch my back every second of the day. I want to know how Jada thinks, if there are weaknesses in her mental defenses where I’m concerned.
“I’ll contend with Cruce. Barrons and Ryodan are enough to contend with you.”
“You’re granting me free passage.” I choose my words carefully, using the same words I spoke the night I made a pact with the Gray Woman to save her life, the night I discovered what she’d done with Alina, probing to see if I can elicit an emotional response.
“For now,” she says tonelessly.
Still, she stands in the street looking at me as if she’s waiting for something. I can’t fathom what.
“Have you seen Dancer since you’ve been back?” I take another shot at provoking emotion.
“I don’t know Dancer.”
“Yes you do. Dani was crazy about him.”
“You could have ended your second sentence after the initial three words.”
Okay, now she’s starting to piss me off, insulting the tenacious, brilliant teen that battled tirelessly for our city. “What do you want, Jada?” I say flatly. “Why are you still standing here?”
She wrinkles her nose as if her next words leave a foul taste on her tongue. “Do you believe Dani could have anticipated the Hag’s movements better than I could?”
I catch my breath. There it is. Why she remained. She despises asking me, yet can’t resist. Apparently Ryodan’s criticism has been burning like sullen fire in her gut ever since he leveled it at her. Who better to ask to confirm or deny it than me? I knew Dani better than most. That she even asks it shocks me. Jada has opened herself to an opinion. My opinion.
I don’t like this question. I don’t want Dani harboring more guilt or self-recrimination. I’ve not forgotten, and will never be able to forget, her cry that she deserved to die. I wonder what happened to her when she was young, what Ryodan knows about her, what “kryptonite” she carries in her head that he believes could destroy her. I wonder if he’s wrong, and Dani actually knows it and was relieved to turn the reins over to a remote, unfeeling part of herself. I wonder what happened to her in the Silvers, what she endured that made her transform fully into this icy other.
I study Jada in silence, realizing her question might be a small crack in the dominant personality’s facade. Then again, it might merely be a desire to reconfigure herself into the most efficient weapon possible. I don’t know much about dissociative disorder, but between trying to figure out how to stop the black holes that threaten our world, hunt the Unseelie King to get rid of this Book, and find Barrons because I need him like a bandage to my wounds, I intend to learn.
I wonder how Jada subdued Dani so completely. Similar to the way I subdue the Book? Does Dani whisper daily, struggling to break free, or is she imprisoned somewhere deep inside, in a small dark cell, her exuberant, passionate voice echoing in a tight vacuum, not heard even by Jada? Worse, has she given up?
“Are you still there?” Jada says.
“I don’t blame you for killing my sister, Dani,” I say softly. “I forgive you.” My heart feels abruptly, enormously lighter. Saying those words released an awful compressed knot behind my breastbone. I clear a throat suddenly thick with unshed grief, for the loss of Dani, for Dageus, for the way things turned out. I wish I’d been able to say these things before I chased her through the portal. “I love you,” I tell Jada, hoping somehow my Dani hears me. “I always will.”
“Irrelevant and maudlin. I asked you a question. Answer it.”
“Yes. She could have anticipated the Hag’s movements better,” I say flatly. “Dani has a fire you lack. Her gut instincts are flawless, she is brilliant.”
Jada’s eyes narrow and her nostrils flare. “I’m flawless. I’m brilliant.”
“Give me my spear.”
She cocks her head as if holding an internal debate, then slips the cuff of Cruce from her arm and holds it in the general direction of my voice. “Logic dictates a different course.”
Oh no, it doesn’t. Logic dictates she keeps both. Not give away something she isn’t required to relinquish. Interesting.
“Take the cuff,” Jada insists. “It makes sense.”
“How does letting you keep my spear make sense?”
Emerald eyes bore into the space where I stand, as if she’s trying to hammer me into her desired shape with the sheer intensity and implacability of her gaze. “I kill. It’s what I do. It’s who I am. It’s who I’ve always been. I will never change. Stay out of my way. Or your free passage will be rescinded.”
The cuff tinkles to the cobbled pavement at my feet.
Jada is gone.
39
“What are you waiting for?” the Seelie Queen demands, trying but failing to conceal her fear behind an imperious facade. “Seal our pact and attend Dublin.”
She dreads kissing him.
Once, she couldn’t kiss him enough.
The Unseelie King completes the complex process of reducing himself, compressing fragments into various, new human forms those who live in Dublin have not seen him wearing.
He never attends a world twice in the same human bodies once they’ve been identified. Humans recall him, bring petitions, crucify him with incessant, foolish demands. Give us laws, chisel them in stone, tell us how to live!
Absurd, floundering humanity, spreading from planet to planet like a plague, colonizing the stars, he finds it astounding how long they have managed to persist.
Once, he told them the truth.
Chiseled a single commandment upon a slab of stone: That is how to live: in the choosing. There are no rules but those you make for yourself.
The man to whom he’d entrusted the tablet promptly shattered it, chiseled ten precise commands upon two stone slabs and carried them down a mountain with the pomp and circumstance of a prophet.
Religious wars ravaged that world ever since.
It is possible that day, those tablets, are why he feels an unwelcome twinge of responsibility for that planet. He should never have chiseled.
He shakes off his brood and looks down at the concubine. He made himself taller and wider than she, and is now appropriate for her size, sporting the same visage he wore the day they met, nearly a million years ago.
She recalls no detail of their time together. He remembers enough for both of them. He wears the same attire.
He pushes open her cloak, closes his hands on her waist, and transports them through space and time to another location where he swiftly erects barricades and walls and seals off the prison in which he will leave her while he pretends to try to save a world beyond saving.
He inhales deeply of memory-residue on the air, the scent of sex on skin, of wings glossed with sweat, of sheets damp with passion. He has not been here in a long time.
Once their boudoir of light and shadows, of fire and ice, was the only place he wanted to be.
Till the day he found her dead inside their sacred place and madness claimed him.
Against a frosted crystalline wall, the white half of the chamber features a round bed on a diamond-crusted dais, draped in silks and snowy ermine throws. Fragrant ivory petals are scattered across the furs, perfuming the air. The floor is covered with plush white carpets before an enormous alabaster hearth filled with white and gold logs from which dazzlingly bright flames pop and crackle. Thousands of tiny diamond-bright lights float lazily on the air, twinkling. Her half is bright, joyous, a sunny day at high altitudes, the ceiling of her chamber a brilliant blue sky.
He turns his head and looks beyond the enormous gilt-framed mirror, the first Silver he ever created.
His chamber is the size of a human sports arena, draped in black velvet and furs, filled with darkly spiced ebony petals. Between sheer slabs of dark ice, a bed stretches. On one wall, a blue-black fire sends exotic flames licking up to the ceiling where they terminate in dark stars amid fantastic nebulae shimmering with blue vapors.
For a moment he sees her there, on his bed, falling back on the dark, glossy furs, laughing, dusky ice frosting her hair, a handful of velvety petals fluttering down to land on her bare breasts.
Sorrow fills him.
He had so many ambitions.
She had but one.
To love.
“What is this place? Why have you brought me here?” she demands.
He doesn’t tell her it is here he spent the finest hours of his existence.
He will leave her soon, trapped in the memory-residue of the place, a spider in a web sticky with his love.
Here, she will watch them. Laugh and dream and fuck and create. Here, she will taste their passion, know their joy.
If, after seeing it, she still insists upon her freedom, he may consider granting it. May consider her lost to him forever.
But most likely not.
He does not tell her any of that.
She inhales sharply. “You would let me go?”
“Finest hours,” he says. “You must have heard that part, too.”
“I heard also that you believe this world you claim you can save is doomed.”
He does not answer, merely stands, enjoying the warmth of her body near his, the sweetness of her breath on his face.
She disparages, “You would deceive me for a single kiss.”
“I would raze worlds for a single kiss.”
“Try saving one, for far more than that.”
“The fabric of their Universe is damaged. Without the song, it is not possible.”
She says, “You are the Unseelie King. You will find a way.”
“That sounds suspiciously like faith in me,” he mocks.
“You see faith where only a challenge has been issued. Will you fail?”
He lowers his head again, until their lips are nearly touching. “Kiss me as if you remember me. Inspire this wild god as once you did. Incite poetry and fire with your passion and perhaps I’ll find a way.”
She looks up at him and shivers, then places her small, lovely hands on his face and it’s his turn to shudder. She’s touching him. Of her own volition. Music dances on his skin, translating from her palms into his very being. A stolen touch can never compete with a voluntary touch of hunger, passion, desire. The aria of choice is joyous, the cacophony of force brutal, ugly, and cold.
She kisses him reluctantly, barely brushing her warm lips to his icy ones.
This time, unlike so many others, he doesn’t take charge, or seek to deepen the kiss. Merely stands after the agony of half a million years of grieving this woman, basking in his first moment free of pain. Breathes it, inhales it, allows the particles of his being the chance to become for a single glorious moment something other than drawn in tightly upon himself in a frozen, eternal shudder of denial and crushing loss. Regret is poison that kills the soul.
She cries out against his lips, draws back and looks up at him. “Such grief! It is too much. I cannot endure it!”
“If you believe nothing else I tell you, my queen, believe my pain. Consider the cause.”
Then he is gone.
40
“There’s a beast and I let it run”
MAC
Five days later, a full eight days since Barrons was killed on the top of the mountain, he’s still not back and I’m edgy as hell and only a minor part of it is due to being in the full throes of Unseelie-flesh withdrawal. The fact that I know he always comes back doesn’t mean I can’t still think of a gazillion reasons to worry.
I don’t know where the Nine are “reborn.” I don’t how far away it is. I don’t even know if it’s on this planet. What if he gets stuck in an IFP? What if he tries to hurry, risks taking a plane and encounters a black hole? Would it kill him again and he’d be reborn, or like K’Vruck, does this strange new Fae-fabricated development on our world possess the ability to really, truly kill him?
In the past, it’s taken him as few as four days to return. However, it took him nearly a month to make it back to Dublin after Ryodan and I killed him on that cliff in Faery. It’s the second time he’s died on a cliff. I make a mental note to avoid cliffs with Barrons in the future.
I won’t survive another three weeks. I’m driving myself crazy.
I’m still invisible and beginning to feel like the real emotional and mental me is getting sketchy around the edges, with no one to see me, and no reflection in the mirror. I’ve begun to worry I might fade entirely away.
I don’t have the heart to visit my parents and try to explain why I’m invisible.
The Book still hasn’t stirred once, not since the day it made me vanish, which continues to freak me out. I’ve begun to wonder if something happened to it. Surely it doesn’t plan to leave me invisible forever. While I love the power and safety from my enemies it confers, I’m getting a little tired of looking in the mirror and seeing nothing. I like seeing me. I like Barrons seeing me, watching his dark eyes get heavy-lidded and hot with desire.
I can’t put on makeup. I tried to blow my hair dry a few days ago and succeeded only in scorching my eyebrows and drying out my eyes. It’s been weeks since I did my nails. I can’t even see them to take the polish off. Yesterday I was struck by a sudden fear I was going to get fat and wouldn’t even know it. I had to dash out and find a scale in a nearby house and weigh myself. Unfortunately, every time I stepped on it, I turned the scale invisible, too. You don’t realize how reassuring it is to see yourself every day until you can’t anymore. Last night, while pacing the bookstore, I found a book called The Invisible Man and decided to read it to see how he handled things, but I couldn’t bear the suspense of his struggles so I skipped to the end.
Then I tossed the freaking book across the room.
Oh, yeah, don’t want to stay this way forever.
I’ve taken to haunting Chester’s at least once, sometimes twice, a day looking for Ryodan, eavesdropping for word of Barrons, but I haven’t caught a glimpse of the owner of Chester’s since two nights ago when he brought the Highlander’s body back. What little of it he was able to recover. Last time I was there, it appeared Fade was running the club.
The Keltar returned to Scotland the moment they had Dageus’s remains, taking Christian with them, and I’d finally seen the elusive Colleen – that was a woman I was looking forward to meeting again, under better circumstances – to hold a High Druid burial with all the living Keltar in attendance. I’d stood watching as they left, hearing mournful bagpipes in my head, tempted to attend, unwilling to leave my city and miss Barrons’s return.
Five days and four long silent nights in the bookstore. I don’t sleep in our lair beneath the garage when he’s not here. It makes me feel small and alone. I’ve been tossing restlessly on the chesterfield, waiting for the bell to tinkle.
I fidget with the cuff I slipped on my wrist shortly after Jada dropped it. At least now neither Seelie nor Unseelie can harm me. If Cruce is to be believed.
On the topic of Cruce, I wonder what’s happening at the abbey, if Jada really has been able to stop the transformation of our mother house, and if she was the one that closed the doors to the cavern where he’s imprisoned. I wonder what things she learned, lost in the Silvers for five and a half years. I’d head out there to see for myself but am currently obsessed with remaining close to the bookstore. In a few more days I might get resigned to the waiting and go take a look around.
The moment Jada had my spear she went on a killing spree. The next day the Dublin Daily reported hundreds of Fae dead.
And the next.
And the next.
I suspect she was making up for her failure to protect the Highlander.
Jada wasn’t lying. She certainly does kill.
Eavesdropping at Chester’s yesterday, I heard Fae have begun projecting glamour again, concealing their otherworldliness, in an effort to blend with humans, elude Jada’s lethal spear.
Which makes sidhe-seers even more critical now.
I blow out a frustrated breath. I haven’t been by Chester’s since last night. Time for my rounds. “Come on, Barrons,” I mutter. “Get your ass back here.” I leave a note on the table by the couch in case he returns and bang out the door into the night.
I slip into Chester’s when a group of drunken revelers stumble out. I pause a moment at the balustrade, looking down over the many subclubs, but see no sign of Ryodan. I don’t bother looking for Barrons. I know he’d return to the bookstore, to me, before he went anywhere else.
There’s Jo, looking dainty and pretty, hair spiky and tousled around her face, waitressing in the short tartan skirt, baby doll pumps, and crisp white blouse uniform of the kiddie subclub. I’m glad to see she didn’t let Ryodan drive her away.
Sean O’Bannion sits with four big, tough-looking men, heads close together, talking quietly at the Sinatra bar. I wonder if Kat’s back from wherever she went, if she’s okay, if they’re still together.
Over by the stairs are Lor and another of the Nine I’ve not seen before, tall, dark, cut as hell, and hot in a Jason Statham way, with a full dark shadow beard and intense eyes. I smile faintly when Lor’s gaze repeatedly sweeps the many clubs, to linger on Jo. His mouth changes when he watches her. I know that look. He’s thinking about fucking.
Barrons. God. I need that man to come back.
Fade is patrolling, watching everything, ready for the slightest disturbance.
I slip down the stairs and head across the club, walk slowly and carefully between Lor and the Jason Statham bouncer so as not to create the slightest breeze, and hurry up the chrome staircase to the private floors.
I’m not leaving tonight without snooping a bit. If I set off an alarm, so be it. I’m restless, bored, and invisible. A dangerous thing for any woman to be.
I ponder what I most want to see: the mysterious sex club the Nine are rumored to have? Nope. It would just get my already twisted, neglected panties in a worse twist. Try to find their private residences? Hmmm. That might be interesting. Steal Ryodan’s dark blade so I could control Papa Roach?
Wow. I’m stilled by the marvelous thought.
If he’s in there, I’ll just pretend I was looking for him to ask if he’d seen Barrons yet.
Ditto, if one of the others is in there.
I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before! All weapons, good.
I head straight for his office, peer up and down the hallway to make sure no one’s looking, press my hand to the panel and slip inside.
It’s empty.
Just me and Ryodan’s high-tech, two-way glass headquarters lined with gadgets, and high at the perimeter those countless hi-def cameras upon which he watches the sordid and varied details of his club. The arrogance of the man, thinking his bouncers at the bottom of the stairs guarantee sufficient security.
I head straight for his desk. The knife is no longer there. Like the office, it too is empty. I stand, looking around, trying to spot it, then fiddle with the bottom of his desk to open the hidden panel where he’d stored Jada’s contract, deciding he probably put it away for safekeeping.
When the panel slides out, I’m disappointed to find it empty. I move around to the other side of his desk and drop down into his chair, trying to think like him, decide where I would put it if I were Ryodan.
I consider the hidden panel. If I were him, I’d have a panel on this side of the desk, too. I reach beneath the drawer, groping for anomalies in the smooth wood.
There are none. I press gingerly, walking my fingers gently around on the bottom of the desk, down the legs, around the many carvings.
Got it!
A tiny notch in the center of an ornate scroll.
When the second panel slides out, I’m once again disappointed. No knife. Just rows and rows of square black buttons like those on a computer keyboard. None of them are labeled. Just smooth black buttons. I have no clue what they’re for.
I poise a finger above one of them, debating. Knowing Ryodan, I could inadvertently blow the whole club if I push the wrong one.
I sigh. Surely not. Surely he’d make it red if it was the destruct button, right?
Holding my breath, I poke the first one on the left.
Nothing happens.
I glance around the office quickly to see if some other hidden panel suddenly slid silently out. As far as I see, nothing has changed. I punch the one next to it.
Again nothing.
I punch four more in quick succession.
Not a damn thing. What the hell are these buttons for?
I blow out an exasperated breath, lean back in his chair, prop my feet on the desk, fold my arms behind my head and close my eyes, imagining I’m him, trying to fathom what he might want so close at hand.
I pretend I’m Ryodan, sitting in his office, where he watches the world on his monitors, where he receives reconnaissance, where he controls and nudges the fine details of his kingdom.
Still stymied, I open my eyes and stare around the room.
The monitors. Holy cow. There must be places in his club he likes to keep tabs on that he prefers no one else see.
I kick my boots off the desk and sit up straight. This time when I begin punching buttons, I keep a close eye on the screens on the wall directly in front of me.
Aha! Just as I thought, these control his private cameras! The ones that monitor places visitors don’t get to see.
The first one on the left makes the image of the main stairs speckle out on the seventh screen from the right and reveals their kitchens.
Oops, guess he knows I was regularly raiding them while I stayed here.
A white-haired man with burning eyes stands at the counter, eating … oh, no. I didn’t want to see that. I punch it off hastily.
The second button wipes out a shot of the kiddie subclub (apparently he liked to keep an eye on Jo) to reveal a dark, shadowy room, ornately paneled with a lovely transom ceiling. It’s empty.
I keep my eyes trained on the cameras at the ceiling in front of his desk. The third button causes the live feed of the Sinatra subclub to vanish, replacing it with an overhead shot of a state-of-the-art gym, paneled with mirrors.
Kasteo is stretched out on a weight bench, pumping iron, massive muscles rippling as he does deep, wide flies. He’s bare-chested and as heavily scarred as the others.
To his left, nearly lost in shadow, a woman lies, similarly supine, mimicking his movements with smaller dumbbells.
I gasp, and push slowly to my feet. I don’t believe my eyes. I hurry around the desk and stand directly beneath the monitor a few feet above my head. “Kat?” I exclaim softly. “Kat is working out with Kasteo? What the hell?” Is she here of her own choice? Did Kasteo abduct her? Did Ryodan lock her away with him? He’d pretended not to have any idea where the missing headmistress had gone!
I watch for a few moments then hurry back around the desk. I want to know everything. This is unbelievable.
I punch the next button. A shot of the balustrade at the entry vanishes and I see a long shadowy corridor. Lor is stalking down it, and I wonder where he’s going in such a hurry. I lose him and punch the next button. As I’d hoped, I’m able to follow him down the hallway. I punch three more buttons tracking him through what I realize must be the servers’ wing. When I punch the fifth, I gasp again as Lor reaches out, grabs Jo from behind and spins her around. I see their mouths moving, she’s angry, he’s pissed, too, but I can’t hear a word. I study the panel irritably, feeling cheated by my reality TV, trying to locate a volume button but no such luck. When I glance back up, Lor has Jo turned around, facing the wall, shoved against it. He’s holding both her hands in one of his, trapped against the cool glass surface.
I can see her profile. She’s not angry anymore. She’s turned on as hell.
With his other hand he undoes his belt, shoves her short skirt up, and before I can give them the privacy the moment demands, he’s up against her, pushing inside her.
Her back arches, head drops back, and the look on her face is—
“Just as I suspected, everybody is having sex but me,” I mutter irritably.
I punch the screen off and hurry to the next one.
And stare blankly at the screen for a long, pained moment.
“No,” I finally manage to say. “He would not come back here first. He would come to me.”
But he wouldn’t. And he didn’t.
Barrons is back.
Standing in a room I can’t place, a deep gash of a stone chamber. I think, Please tell me it’s not the sex club I’ve heard so many rumors about. Please tell me I’m enough.
Ryodan moves into view.
Where are they? What are they doing? Why didn’t Barrons come to me, tell me he was back?
I watch the screen, never taking my eyes from it. Minutes creep by and nothing changes. They don’t even appear to be talking. Just watching something.
I shake myself from my trance and punch the next button.
The Rhino-boy club disappears, revealing another dimly lit stone room.
A shadow moves in the darkness.
What the hell is down there?
What are they watching?
The thing separates from the shadows, stumbles toward the light, cringes and stumbles back again.
I suddenly can’t find enough oxygen in Ryodan’s office to breathe.
My hand flies to my mouth as I stare, staggered.
Dageus MacKeltar is not dead.
