Текст книги "Shadowfever"
Автор книги: Karen Marie Moning
Соавторы: Karen Marie Moning,Karen Marie Moning
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Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 37 страниц)
29
To my credit, I didn’t scream for long.
But the short burst in their hellish language was enough to disturb precariously packed snow and ice. My chiming scream echoed off sheer cliffs. Unlike an echo, however, it grew louder with each rebound and I heard a rumble that could presage only one thing: an avalanche.
My head whipped around. “Grab her!”
Christian shook his head, cursing. “Christ, you open your bag of stones. You feed me Unseelie. You scream. You’re a walking—”
“Just grab her and run! Now!”
He raced to the coffin, then stood, hesitating.
“What’s wrong with you? Pick her up!”
“She’s the queen of the Fae.” Awe tinged his voice. “It’s forbidden to touch the queen.”
“Fine, then stay here with her and get buried alive,” I snapped.
He scooped her up.
She was so frail, so wasted by … whatever wastes fairies, that I could have carried her myself, but I had no desire to touch her. Ever. Which was really kind of funny in a dark and disturbing way, if I thought about it. So I didn’t.
Ice cracked and rumbled high above, showering crystals across the dais.
We needed no further encouragement. We slipped and slid down the frozen ridge and fled the way I’d come, heading for the narrow fissure between cliffs. It was going to be a close race and a tight squeeze with Christian’s shoulders and with an avalanche chasing us.
“Why’d you scream, anyway?” he shouted at me over the rumbling.
“She startled me, is all,” I shouted back.
“Bloody great. Next time put a sock in it, would you?”
Neither of us said anything then, focused on trying to outrun being buried alive. I bounced between the walls of the cliffs like a Ping-Pong ball. Twice I lost my footing and went down. Christian went flying over the top of me but somehow managed to hang on to the frail queen. The avalanche chased us, growling like dark thunder, crashing from ravine to canyon, spraying the deep fissure with snow.
We finally cleared the claustrophobic path through the cliffs, slid on our asses down a steep hill, then raced across the canyon for the towering fortress of black ice.
“The Unseelie King’s castle!” Christian marveled as we dashed through the towering doors. He looked up, down, and around. “I grew up on tales of this place, but I never imagined I’d see it. I thought the closest I’d get to one of the legendary Tuatha Dé was standing next to a portrait. And here I am, holding the Seelie Queen, in the Unseelie King’s fortress.” He gave a bitter laugh. “And turning into one of them.”
I murmured the same soft command that had opened the tall doors and heaved a sigh of relief when they slid silently closed on the thundering rush of snow beyond. Would the avalanche I’d started reach the castle? Pile up outside the doors, sealing us in here more securely than any bolt? I waited for Christian to demand to know how I’d shut them, but he was so engrossed in his surroundings, he’d not even noticed.
“What now?” His fascinated gaze kept sliding between the frail woman in his arms and the interior of the dark fortress.
“Now we head for the Silver in the king’s boudoir,” I said.
“Why? I can’t go through and neither can she.”
“I can. And I can get help and bring them back to the mirror to talk to you. We’ll make plans to get you out, figure out how and where to meet.”
He cocked his head and studied me a moment. “There’s a thing you should know, lass. My truth sensor works just fine here in the Unseelie prison.”
“So?”
“What you just said wasn’t truth.”
“I’m going to go through the mirror. Truth?” I said impatiently.
He nodded.
“And I’m going to get help and bring them back for you. Truth?”
He nodded again.
“Then what the hell is the problem?” I had a lot on my mind. Delays were untenable. Standing still, my mind began to think. I needed to keep moving. I couldn’t bear to look at the woman in his arms. Couldn’t handle thinking what looking at her made me think.
His eyes narrowed. They were full black again. There was a time when it would have made me nervous, but I doubted anything would make me nervous ever again. I was beyond stress, beyond fear, beyond reach.
“Tell me you plan to save me,” he ordered.
That was easy. With each passing day, I understood Jericho better. People didn’t ask the right questions. And if you answered enough of their wrong ones, by the time they ever got around to a right one, you could just snap their head off and shut them up. How many times had he done that to me? I was developing a grudging respect for his tactics. Especially now that I had something to hide.
“I plan to save you,” I said, and I didn’t need a truth detector to hear the ring of sincerity in my voice. “And I will do it as quickly as possible. It will be my priority to get you out of here.” It would. I needed him. More than I’d ever understood.
“Truth.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“I don’t know. Something.” He shifted the queen in his arms.
She wore a sparkling white gown. I knew that dress. Who’d selected it for her? Had she chosen it? How and why? I refused to look at her. I snapped my gaze from her dress to Christian’s face.
“Tell me again why you screamed,” he fished.
He was getting too close for comfort. But I knew this game. Barrons had taught me well. “I was frightened.”
“Truth. Why?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Christian, I told you already! Are we going to stand here all day while you interrogate me, or are we going to get out of here?” Beyond the fortress, the avalanche crashed and roared. It was nothing like the roar I felt building in me. “She wasn’t what I expected, okay?” That was certainly the truth! “Even though you told me it was her in the coffin, I expected it to be the Unseelie King,” I tossed, to get him off the scent.
There was just enough sincerity in what I’d said to appease him. But barely. “If you’re somehow lying to me …” he warned.
He’d do what? By the time he figured out what I was doing, it’d be too late. Besides, I really wasn’t someone he wanted to be threatening, no matter who he was turning into or how powerful he was becoming. I’d just found out I was way more terrifying than anything he could possibly be turning into.
“The king’s bedchamber is this way,” I said coolly. “And don’t threaten me. I’m sick of being used and pushed around.”
Christian dallied. There was no other word for it. He was fascinated by the Unseelie King’s fortress, and his Keltar duties as Fae lorekeeper had been bred into him since birth, despite any misgivings he might have about what was happening to him. He took detailed mental notes on everything he saw, to pass on later to his clan. I was glad he didn’t have pen or paper, or I might never have gotten him to the mirror. “Look at this, Mac! What do you think it means?”
I glanced unwillingly where he pointed. It was a door that was much smaller than the others. There was an inscription above the arch. It was a powerful ward. The king had kept things in there he’d never wanted loosed on the world. The ward had been broken long ago. Great. I just hoped they weren’t on my world. I resumed walking, staring straight ahead, retracing my earlier steps. Unlike Christian, I didn’t want to see a damned thing.
“You’ll have time to look around when I’m gone,” I said.
“I’ll need to stay close to the Silver to know when you return.”
“Well, move a little faster, okay? We have no idea how time’s passing out in the real world. You slow it down, I speed it up.”
“Maybe we’ll split the difference.”
“Maybe.” Would enough time have passed that Barrons would be alive again? Standing at the mirror, waiting for me? Or had so much time passed that he’d have given up? Moved on to other tasks?
I’d know in a few minutes.
“She’s not breathing,” he said.
“Neither are we,” I said drily.
“But I think she’s alive. I can … feel her.”
“Good. We need her. Through here,” I said.
Moments later I stepped into the comforting darkness of the Unseelie King’s boudoir, where the dark maker of the Court of Shadows had rested—he’d never slept—and fucked, and dreamed.
Jericho wasn’t dead on the other side of the mirror, nor was he waiting for me. I assumed that meant we’d been gone a good long time as humans counted it.
Christian made it easy for me.
I couldn’t have asked for more.
He laid her on the king’s bed, close to the Silver, and tucked furs around her.
“She’s so cold. You’ve got to hurry, Mac. We need to get her warm. In my travels, I heard that during the battle between the king and original queen, some of the Seelie were taken captive before the prison walls went up. The Unseelie planned to torture them for all eternity, but legends say the Seelie prisoners died because this place is the antithesis of all they are and drains their life essence.” He gave me a grim look. “I think someone brought the Seelie Queen here, put her in that coffin, and left her to die slowly. Uncle Cian said she wasn’t really there when she came to see him but was a projection of herself. As if she was trapped somewhere, focusing all her effort and energy on sending a vision of herself to nudge events around so we would save her when the time was right. Someone wanted revenge. I think she’s been here a long time.”
And V’lane was looking like the prime suspect, considering that he’d been lying to me about where she’d been since day one. But how could any of this be? Why would V’lane have had this woman to begin with? How had she ended up in the Seelie court?
The truth was, I was standing in the middle of so many lies—some of them hundreds of thousands of years old—that I didn’t know where to begin trying to untangle them. If I pulled on one thread, ten others would unravel, and I saw little point in trying to make sense of anything now.
All I could do was what had to be done. Get them both out of here. The sooner the better. Especially her. Not because she was the queen but because Christian’s legend resonated with me and I knew it to be true. A Seelie could survive only a finite space of time in here. I doubted a human would survive half that long. And I wasn’t entirely sure which she really was.
She was dangerously weak. The slight form on the bed barely made a hump. Masses of silvery hair cloaked a body that had deteriorated to that of a slender, undeveloped child. My dreams had been trying to warn me. I’d waited too long. I’d almost been too late.
“Look over there,” I exclaimed, pointing to the far side of the bed. “What’s that on the wall? I think I’ve seen those symbols before.”
He was halfway across the bedchamber before that sixth sense of his made him look back over his shoulder. I know, because I was looking over mine.
It was too late.
I’d already scooped her up and pushed into the Silver. She was oddly insubstantial, as if she’d donned physical form to contain the energy of which she was made and, as her life essence evaporated, so did the physicality holding her. Was she beyond saving?
I know what he thought.
I was the traitor.
I was trying to finish the job of killing the queen by forcing her through a mirror only the king and his concubine could pass through. A mirror that killed all other life, including Fae.
But that wasn’t it at all.
I wasn’t trying to kill the queen. I knew she wouldn’t die. I knew she could go through the mirror.
Because the woman in my arms wasn’t Aoibheal, queen of the Fae.
She was the concubine.
30
That was why I’d screamed. I’d been having a hard enough time dealing with the thought that I was the concubine.
As I’d stared into the coffin and recognized her from the White Mansion, it had taken me only a moment to process that, if the concubine was lying in the coffin and I could pass through the king’s Silver, I had a serious problem.
The scream had been instinctive, denial from the very marrow in my bones clawing its way up my throat and past my lips.
If she was the concubine, and I could go though the Silver, too, there was only one other … person—and I was using that term very loosely—I could be.
“And it’s not the concubine, that’s for sure,” I muttered as I pushed through the Silver and slammed into the wall. I’d expected resistance like in every other Silver, but this one—the first ever created—was untainted by Cruce’s curse. I turned at the last moment, cradling her in my arms, taking the brunt of the impact on my shoulder. Not a damned thing about this made sense.
“Mac, what are you doing?” Christian roared, storming toward the mirror.
“Don’t touch it!” I cried. “It will kill you!” I didn’t want him to think for a minute that it wouldn’t and try to come through. It had killed Barrons. I had no doubt it would destroy Christian, and he didn’t have a get-out-of-death-free card. At least not that I knew of. But as had just become painfully apparent to me, I didn’t know much of anything, so maybe he had a whole deck of them. Maybe everyone did but me. Still, I wasn’t going to count on it. I needed him. More than ever before, I needed the Sinsar Dubh contained, and he was one of the five necessary to do it. I understood why it played with me now.
He stopped inches from the mirror and peered at me through it. “Why didn’t it kill her? I’ll know the truth,” he warned.
I adjusted her in my arms, scooped up a mass of her hair, and draped it over my shoulder so it didn’t trail the floor and trip me. I stared back through the mirror at him. “Because she’s the concubine. That’s why I really screamed. I recognized her.”
“But I thought you were the conc—” He gave me a fast once-over. “But you went through the—But that would mean—Mac?”
I shrugged. I couldn’t think of anything to say.
“How do you know she’s the concubine?” he demanded.
“The memory residue of the king and the concubine walks these halls. It’s hard not to get lost in them. But I imagine you won’t have quite as hard a time as I had, seeing how you aren’t quite so … personally involved,” I said bitterly. “I have no doubt you’ll see her while I’m gone.” I still wouldn’t look at her. It was too disconcerting. She was frighteningly light, delicate, and very, very cold. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
We stared at each other.
“I won’t believe it,” he said finally.
“It makes too much sense not to be true. There’s no record of me being born, Christian. The Book … it hunts me. I hear it always has.”
“Not buying it.”
“Give me another explanation.”
“Maybe the legends are wrong. Maybe a lot of people can step through the Silver. Maybe it’s all bluff, to keep people from trying.”
My heart lurched when he took a step forward. “No, don’t! Christian, listen to me. I can’t tell you who, but I know you can hear the truth in what I’m saying. I watched the Silver kill someone already.”
He cocked his head, then nodded. “Aye, lass. I hear truth in that, but why can’t you tell me who?”
“It’s not my secret to tell.”
“You’ll tell me one day.”
I didn’t reply.
“I’m still not buying it.”
“Find me an alternative. Any alternative. I’ll happily believe it.”
“Maybe you’re … I don’t know … Maybe you’re their child somehow,” he offered.
“Seven-hundred-thousand-plus years later?” I’d already considered and discarded that thought. Not only didn’t it resonate with my gut feelings, but “It doesn’t begin to explain all the things I know and feel and remember, or why the Book plays with me,” I said. I couldn’t explain how I knew it, but I wasn’t the progeny of the Unseelie King and his concubine. My feelings were far too personal. Far too sexual and possessive. Not a child’s feelings at all. But a lover’s.
He shrugged. “I’ll remain here. But hurry back.”
“Promise me you won’t try to come through, Christian.”
“I promise, Mac. But hurry. The longer I’m in here, the more I feel myself … changing.”
I nodded. As I turned away with the queen/concubine/woman I’d apparently destroyed worlds for, I couldn’t help but wonder where my other parts were.
31
I stared through the front door of Barrons Books and Baubles, uncertain what surprised me more: that the front seating cozy was intact or that Barrons was sitting there, boots propped on a table, surrounded by piles of books, hand-drawn maps tacked to the walls.
I couldn’t count how many nights I’d sat in exactly the same place and position, digging through books for answers, occasionally staring out the windows at the Dublin night, and waiting for him to appear. I liked to think he was waiting for me to show.
I leaned closer, staring in through the glass.
He’d refurnished the bookstore. How long had I been gone?
There was my magazine rack, my cashier’s counter, a new old-fashioned cash register, a small flat-screen TV/DVD player that was actually from this decade, and a sound dock for my iPod. There was a new sleek black iPod Nano in the dock. He’d done more than refurnish the place. He might as well have put a mat out that said WELCOME HOME, MAC.
A bell tinkled as I stepped inside.
His head whipped around and he half-stood, books sliding to the floor.
The last time I’d seen him, he was dead. I stood in the doorway, forgetting to breathe, watching him unfold from the couch in a ripple of animal grace. He crammed the four-story room full, dwarfed it with his presence. For a moment neither of us spoke.
Leave it to Barrons—the world melts down and he’s still dressed like a wealthy business tycoon. His suit was exquisite, his shirt crisp, tie intricately patterned and tastefully muted. Silver glinted at his wrist, that familiar wide cuff decorated with ancient Celtic designs he and Ryodan both wore.
Even with all my problems, my knees still went weak. I was suddenly back in that basement. My hands were tied to the bed. He was between my legs but wouldn’t give me what I wanted. He used his mouth, then rubbed himself against my clitoris and barely pushed inside me before pulling out, then his mouth, then him, over and over, watching my eyes the whole time, staring down at me.
What am I, Mac? he’d say.
My world, I’d purr, and mean it. And I was afraid that, even now that I wasn’t Pri-ya, I’d be just as out of control in bed with him as I was then. I’d melt, I’d purr, I’d hand him my heart. And I would have no excuse, nothing to blame it on. And if he got up and walked away from me and never came back to my bed, I would never recover. I’d keep waiting for a man like him, and there were no other men like him. I’d have to die old and alone, with the greatest sex of my life a painful memory.
So, you’re alive, his dark eyes said. Pisses me off, the wondering. Do something about that.
Like what? Can’t all be like you, Barrons.
His eyes suddenly rushed with shadows and I couldn’t make out a single word. Impatience, anger, something ancient and ruthless. Cold eyes regarded me with calculation, as if weighing things against each other, meditating—a word Daddy used to point out was the larger part of premeditation. He’d say, Baby, once you start thinking about it, you’re working your way toward doing it. Was there something Barrons was working his way toward doing?
I shivered.
“Where the fuck’ve you been? It’s been over a month. Pull a stunt like that again without telling me what you’re doing first, and I’m chaining you to my bed when you get back.”
Was that supposed to be a deterrent or an incentive? I pictured myself sprawled on my back, his dark head moving between my legs. I imagined Mac 1.0, knowing what I knew now: that in a few months Barrons would be doing everything a man could do to a woman in bed. Would she have run screaming or torn off her clothes right then and there?
As he stepped around the high-back chesterfield, he spotted the slight woman in my arms, her silvery hair trailing the floor. He looked incredulous, which, for Jericho, meant his head took on a slight cant and his eyes narrowed. “Where the hell did you find her?”
I shoved the fragile body into his arms. I’d touched her all I ever wanted to. My feelings were too complex to sort out. “In the Unseelie prison. In a tomb of ice.”
“V’lane, that fuck—I knew he was a traitor!”
I sighed. That meant Jericho thought she was the queen, too. And he should know. He’d spent time at her court. But I knew she was the concubine. So, who had actually died in the Unseelie King’s boudoir eons ago? Had anyone? The concubine hadn’t killed herself. How had she gotten from the Silvers into Faery and ended up one day becoming the current queen? Had V’lane lied to me? Or had they all drunk from the cauldron so many times that the Fae didn’t have one bit of their own history right? Maybe someone had sabotaged their written records.
“How did you get her out of there? The Silver should have killed her.”
“Apparently the queen has the same kind of immunity to the Silver that she has to the Sinsar Dubh.” I was pleasantly surprised by how smoothly I lied. Barrons has a sharp nose for deceit. “She can touch both. It looks like the king and queen can’t cast spells that the other can’t break.” The best lies are solidly cemented in known exceptions to the rule, and by her very nature as matriarch and ruler of both courts, the queen was the universal exception to every rule that bound the lessers of the Fae court. I wasn’t above exploiting it to secure my cover until I knew beyond all shadow of a doubt what to make of myself. In his dark gaze, I saw the moment he accepted the logic of my lie.
How could I be the Unseelie King? I didn’t feel like the king. I felt like Mac, with a bunch of memories I couldn’t explain. Well, that wasn’t the entire truth. There was also that place in my head where I had nifty little things like parasitic runes of ancient origin and—I terminated that line of thought. I didn’t feel like taking a tally of all the things I couldn’t explain about myself. The list was miserably long.
He took her to the sofa, tucked blankets around her, and shoved the sofa closer to the fire and turned it on. “She’s freezing. I’ve half a mind to take her back and let the place finish her off,” he said darkly.
“We need her.”
“Maybe.” He sounded unconvinced. “Fucking fairies.”
I blinked and he was no longer by the couch—he was nose-to-nose with me. My breathing quickened. It was the first time he’d ever put his preternatural speed to full use in front of me.
He tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, trailed his fingers down my cheek. He traced the shape of my lips, then let his hand fall away.
I wet my lips and looked up at him. The lust I felt when standing so close to him was almost unbearable. I wanted to lean into him. I wanted to pull his head down and kiss him. I wanted to strip, and shove him back, and be his reverse cowgirl, ride him hard until he made raw, sexy, rough sounds as he came.
“How long have you known you were the Unseelie King’s concubine?” Though his voice was soft, his words were too precise. Tension shaped his mouth. I knew every nuance of that mouth. Fury was gnawing at him and needed an outlet. “You shoved through that Silver with no doubt you’d make it through.”
My laughter held a note of hysteria. Oh, if only that was the extent of my problems!
Was I a woman, obsessed with the woman on the couch?
Or was I the male king of the Fae, obsessed with Jericho?
I consider myself open-minded about gender preference—love is love, and who’s to say how the body follows the heart?—but both of those scenarios were hard for me to accept for myself. Neither fit me like a glove, and sexuality should. When it’s right, it feels good on you, like your own skin, and the only thing that felt like skin to me was woman to man. Then there was the whole Oh, gee, I’m the screwup responsible for this whole mess. No more blaming the Unseelie King for making so many bad decisions and messing up my world. Was I the one who’d messed up theirs? If so, I bore an unbearable amount of guilt.
I raked my hair back from my face with both hands. If I kept thinking about it, I was going to lose it.
I’m not the concubine, Jericho. I’m afraid I must be some part of the Unseelie King in human form. “Not very long,” I lied. “I recognized things in the White Mansion, and I kept having dreams that made sense only if I was her. I knew there was a way to test it.”
“You bloody fool, if you’d been wrong it would have killed you!”
“But I wasn’t wrong.”
“Obtuse and illogical!”
I shrugged. Apparently I’d been a lot worse than that.
“You will never do such an idiotic thing again,” he said, muscles bunching in his jaw.
Given my track record, I was pretty sure I would. I mean, really, if I was the Unseelie King—the most powerful Fae ever—I’d somehow ended up human and clueless. That meant I was not only evil, obsessed, and destructive, I was inexcusably stupid.
He began to circle me, looking me up and down like an exotic in a zoo. “And you thought I was the king. That’s why you tried to drag me through it with you. You just can’t get enough of killing me, can you? What’s the last thing you said to me?” He mocked in falsetto: “What’s the worst that can happen? I lead you into some trap and you die for however long it is you go away?”
I said nothing. I saw little point in trying to justify myself anymore.
“I imagine it got all your little romantic notions atwitter again, didn’t it?”
“Is ‘atwitter’ even a word?”
“Did you think we were star-crossed lovers, Ms, Lane? Did you need that excuse?”
He gave me that wolf smile and I thought, Right, star-crossed lovers with a double-edged sword. Because that’s what this man was. Sharp, edgy, dangerous. With no safe side. And, yes, actually, I had thought we were star-crossed lovers. But I wasn’t about to tell him that.
I turned to circle with him, meeting that dark, hostile gaze. “I thought we resolved this in the mansion, Jericho. It’s Mac.”
“It’s Mac when I’m fucking you. The rest of the time, it’s Ms. Lane. Get used to it.”
“Boundaries, Barrons?”
“Precisely. Where’s the king, Ms. Lane?”
“You think he calls me to check in? Says, Honey, I’ll be home for dinner tonight at seven? How the hell should I know?” Which was technically the truth. Even Christian would have had a hard time with that one. I didn’t know where all his parts were.
The concubine made a faint sound and we turned to look at her.
His eyes narrowed. “I’ve got to get her out of here. I won’t have the entire Fae race trying to get past my wards. I suppose we’ll have to protect her.” His distaste couldn’t have been more evident. If given a choice between having a razor-blade enema and protecting a Fae—had it been any other Fae than the all-powerful queen—Barrons would have willingly died a few times from internal bleeding.
But she was the one Fae he wasn’t willing to sacrifice—yet.
I was definitely up for moving her somewhere else; the farther from me, the better. I’d been worried that he might try to keep her at the bookstore and had been prepared to argue that, no matter how formidable his wards were, with the two of us coming and going constantly, she’d be left alone too much to guarantee her safety. “What do you have in mind?” I said.
Half a Dani Daily flapped on a streetlamp in the chilly night breeze. I plucked it off, scanned it for the date AWC, and did some hasty calculations. If it had been posted today—which it probably hadn’t, considering its condition—the date was March 23. Maybe a week later.
I read it and smiled faintly. She’d taken the bull by the horns while I was gone. The kid feared nothing.
The Dani Daily
147 Days AWC
Dudes—Listen Up if You Wanna Survive!
A few simple rules and regs will keep you alive!
1. Skintight clothes or nothing at all! Don’t be bashful, don’t be shy. Don’t leave no place for a book to hide. The fecker’s on the rampage, has been for weeks! Need to be seeing with your own eyeballs ain’t nothing hiding on your peeps.
2. No splitting up! Do NOT go anywhere alone. That’s when it gets you! If you see a book, DON’T PICK IT UP!!!!!
3. Don’t leave your hidey-holes at night! Don’t know why, but it likes the dark. Yes, I’m talking about the SINSAR DUBH. I said it, you heard me. You dudes who ain’t been seeing my rags, it’s a book of dark magic created by the Unseelie King almost a million years ago. Past time you know the truth. If you pick it up, it will make you KILL EVERYBODY AROUND YOU, starting with the peeps you love. Start following the rules! No deviations, no stupid fecking
The bottom half had been torn off, but I didn’t need to see any more. I’d really just wanted to know the date. I’d missed her birthday. Chocolate on chocolate, she’d said. I’d planned to make her a cake myself. I’d throw a belated party for her, even if it was just the two of us.
Hardly something the Unseelie King would think about: birthday parties for humans.
“You might have all night, but some of us don’t,” Barrons growled over his shoulder.
I stuffed the paper in my pocket and hurried to catch up. We’d parked the Viper a block away. The queen wore a hooded cloak and was wrapped in blankets.
“You have all night tonight and tomorrow night and all eternity for that matter. So how long were you dead this time?” I asked, needling him.
The rattle moved in his throat.
I took a perverse pleasure in irritating him. “A day? Three? Five? What does it depend on? How badly you’re injured?”
“If I were you, Ms. Lane, I’d never bring that up again. You think you’re suddenly a major player because you went through that Silver—”
“I left Christian at the mirror. I found him in the prison,” I cut him off.
His mouth snapped shut, then, “Why the fuck does it always take you so long to tell me the important things?”
“Because there are always so many important things,” I said defensively. “Her hair’s dragging again.”
“Pick it up. My hands are full.”
“I’m not touching her.”
He shot me a look. “Issues much, Ms. Concubine?”
“She’s not even the real queen,” I said irritably. “Not the one that ruined the concubine’s life. I just don’t like Fae. I’m a sidhe-seer, remember?”
“Are you?”
“Why are you so pissed at me? It’s not my fault who I am. The only thing that’s my fault is what I choose to do with it.”
He gave me a sidelong glance that said, That might be the only intelligent thing you’ve said tonight.
I looked past him to the wrecked façade of Chester’s ahead, and for a moment it looked eerily like a ruin of standing stones, black against a blue-black sky, from a faraway time and another place. A full moon hung above it, wearing a halo of crimson, round fat face splattered with craters of blood. More Fae changes in our world.
