Текст книги "Shadowfever"

Автор книги: Karen Marie Moning

Соавторы: Karen Marie Moning,Karen Marie Moning
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Текущая страница: 23 (всего у книги 37 страниц)

32

I stepped out of the shower and looked at myself in the mirror. Since dragging my aching body up the back stairs of BB&B to my bedroom twenty minutes ago, my bruises had faded by forty percent. I traced my fingers across a particularly bad one on my collarbone. I’d thought I heard a crack and was worried something had broken, but it was only a hot, swollen contusion and was healing remarkably fast.

What was with me? I might have suspected it was something to do with my being … well, Not the Concubine, but I’d never healed like this when I was a kid. I’d run around with skinned knees constantly.

Was McCabe one of my parts? Was that why he hadn’t frozen, too? Could the dreamy-eyed guy be a part? Who else? How many parts did Not the Concubine have?

“I am not the king,” I said out loud. “There’s some other explanation.” There had to be. I simply wouldn’t accept it.

Tonight had been a rush. We’d run into Jayne, his guardians, and Dani near Fourteenth and cut a wide swath through the city. Dageus, Cian, and V’lane had pummeled; Dani and I had sliced and diced. Barrons had done whatever it was he did, but he’d done it too fast for me to see. After a time I’d stopped trying, too lost in my own bloodlust.

When I’d finally quit counting, the death toll had been in the hundreds.

How could it feel so good to kill Unseelie if I was their creator?

“See? More proof I’m not,” I told myself in the mirror with a nod. My reflection nodded sagely back. I selected the medium heat setting on my dryer and began to blow-dry my hair.

The Unseelie had retreated. Word of us had spread through the streets and they’d withdrawn from combat, flapped, sifted, and slithered away. I guess after being locked up for their entire existence, they were in no hurry to die now that they were free. I’d left Barrons, the two Keltar, and V’lane looking remarkably unsatisfied and about to fall at one another’s throats. I’d been tired, sore, and beyond caring. If they were stupid enough to kill each other, they deserved the resultant problems it would create.

As I slipped into pajamas, a pebble rattled against my bedroom window.

I was so not in the mood for V’lane right now. Yes, I had questions, but tonight was not the night to ask them. I needed rest and a clear head. I kicked away the backpack, crawled in bed and pulled the covers over my head to block out the blazing light from five lamps. The Shades were supposedly gone. “Supposedly” isn’t a word I live with well.

Another pebble.

I squeezed my eyes shut and waited for it to stop.

Five minutes of incessant pebbles later, a stone crashed through my window, spraying glass and scaring the hell out of me.

I shot up in bed and glared at the mess on the floor. I couldn’t even march over and snap his head off. I had to dig around for shoes first.

A chilly breeze flapped the curtains.

I tugged on boots and crunched to the window. “I’m not talking to you until you fix the damned glass, V’lane,” I snapped. Then, “Oh!”

A cloaked, hooded figure stood in the alley below, and for a moment it reminded me of Mallucé. Dark robes swirled in a gossamer cloud as the figure moved jerkily forward, as if every step was agony. The exterior spotlights gleamed across the cloak, and I saw it was fashioned of frothy light chiffon.

My first thought was of the Sinsar Dubh, hiding somewhere beneath those many secretive folds.

“Drop the cloak. I want to see hands, everything.”

I heard a sharp inhalation, a wheeze of agony. Arms moved with arthritic carefulness, loosening a brooch at the throat. The hood fell and the cloak rustled to the ground.

I nearly vomited. I bit back a scream. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. It was Fiona, in the badly mutilated flesh.

“Merssseee.” Skinned lips parted on a sibilant hiss.

I turned away from the window and leaned back against the sill, hand over my mouth. My eyes were closed, but there was no escape. I could see her on the backs of my lids.

She’d tried to kill me, in what seemed another lifetime. She’d taken up with Derek O’Bannion, then Darroc.

All because she loved Jericho Barrons.

The night the Book had brought her to my balcony, skinned alive, I’d wondered if all the Unseelie she’d eaten would keep her from dying. Eating Unseelie has remarkable healing properties. But apparently growing a new human skin—or maybe healing from any magical injury the Sinsar Dubh had inflicted—was beyond its ability.

“I thought the Book killed everyone it possessed,” I said finally. My words rang out in the hushed night.

“It has … different appetites for … us … who eat Unseelie.” Her pained voice floated up.

“It killed Darroc. He ate Unseelie.”

“Silencing … him. For what … he knew.”

“Which was?”

“If only … I knew. I would …” She made a garbled sound, and I assumed from the wheezes and moans that she was stooping to retrieve her cloak. I tried to imagine what would hurt worse on flayed flesh—the cold night breeze or clothes. Both would be a walking hell. I couldn’t imagine how she stood the pain.

I didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say.

“Try it … myself,” she finally continued, “pray it … killed me … too.”

“Why are you here?” I turned and stared down at her. Although she’d put her cloak back on, she’d left the hood down.

“Can’t heal.” Gray eyes shimmered with constant pain in bloody sockets. Even her lids were gone. “Can’t die. Tried … everything.”

“Still eating Unseelie?”

“Dulls … pain.”

“It’s probably what’s keeping you alive.”

“Too … late.”

“You mean you think you’ve been eating it so long that even if you stopped now you might not die?”

“Yesss.”

I considered that. Depending on how much she’d eaten, it was possible. Mallucé had been marbled with Fae like a steak with fat. Maybe even if she stopped entirely, she would never be fully human again. I’d eaten it only twice in my life and hoped it had passed from my body forever.

“Can’t find …” Her gaze drifted to the abandoned Dark Zone, and I understood that she’d hunted for a Shade to kill her. But they’d moved on long ago to greener pastures, literally, and she didn’t look capable of walking very far. I couldn’t imagine her driving a car, sitting on that flayed flesh. I shuddered. “Only spear … sword … will—”

“—make the Fae parts quit keeping you alive,” I finished. I looked away, stared out over the roof of Barrons’ garage at the hundreds of dark roofs beyond. “You want me to kill you.” There was a terribly irony here.

“Yesss.”

“Why not try Dani? Don’t you think you might have better luck there?”

“Said no.”

I blinked. She’d actually known about Dani, found her, and Dani had refused?

“Said … you had to …”

“And you think I have mercy?”

“Can’t … look … at me.”

I jerked my gaze back to her skinned face. “I can ignore you for the rest of my life.” But it wasn’t true. And she knew it.

“Merssseee,” she hissed again.

I punched the ledge of the window.

There were no easy choices anymore. I didn’t want to go down there and look at her. I didn’t want to stab her. I couldn’t possibly let her go on suffering if I could do something about it, and I could.

I gazed longingly at my bed. I wanted nothing more than to crawl back in.

My window was broken. The room would be freezing in no time.

I reached for my holster, strapped it on over my pajama top, slid the spear beneath my arm, grabbed a coat from the chair, and headed for the stairs.

I had a small epiphany on the way down.

My spear would kill the Fae parts of Fiona, granting her the ultimate demise she wished, but very slowly. It had taken months for Mallucé to die. When I stabbed a Fae, it was entirely Fae and died swiftly. But when a human eats Unseelie, it laces the human’s body with pockets and threads of immortal flesh, and there’s no way to stab each and every thread or pocket, so the wound works instead like a slow poison. I wonder if whoever created the immortal-slaying weapons deliberately designed them that way, to carry out a horrific punishment for a horrific crime.

However, there was another potential method of execution that would either kill her instantly—or answer a question I badly wanted answered.

The entire time I’d been fighting tonight, I’d been thinking about it.

I wanted to test the Silver in the White Mansion.

Maybe lots of people and Fae could go through it.

I’d been considering taking an Unseelie captive and forcing it into the Silver.

Now I didn’t have to. I had a volunteer.

And, even better, she was mostly human.

If Fiona could pass through the king’s Silver without dying, that would mean the legend was a bluff.

It killed Barrons.

I shrugged. That might have been an anomaly. Barrons defied the laws of physics. Maybe humans could pass through it just fine. Maybe the Unseelie King hadn’t warded it as well as he thought he had. Maybe humans from our planet were different from his mortal concubine, and how could you ward against something you didn’t even know existed? All I knew was I wasn’t the king, and here was my chance to prove it. I hated losing more time, but my peace of mind was worth losing time for.

I stepped into the alley and moved slowly toward her. “Hood up.”

She made a sound that was almost laughter but made no move to lift it.

“Do you want to die? If so, hood up.”

Eyes hot with hate, moving stiffly and with painstaking care, she adjusted the fabric to shadow her face.

As she put her arms back down, a gust of wind blew the stench of her straight into my nostrils. I gagged. She smelled of blood and decaying flesh with a strong medicinal odor, as if she was eating painkillers by the handful.

“Follow me.”

“Where?”

“The spear will kill you, but it will do so slowly. I might have a way to kill you instantly.”

The hood turned toward me as if she was searching my face to divine my motives.

Daddy told me once that we believe others are capable of the worst we ourselves are capable of. Fiona was wondering if I might be as cruel to her as she’d have been to me in the same position.

“It will be hell for you to have to walk there. But I think you’d rather spend twenty minutes getting there to die than the weeks or even months it could take to die from the spear wound. Because of the Unseelie you’ve been eating, you’ll die slowly.”

“Spear … not instant?” There was shock in her voice.

“No.”

I knew the moment she accepted it. When I turned and headed for the Silver in the brick wall, she followed. I heard the soft swish of her cloak behind me.

“There’s a price, though. If you really want to die, you’re going to have to tell me everything you know about—”

“I can’t leave you alone for a minute, can I?” Barrons said. “Where the hell do you think you’re going this time, Ms. Lane? And who is that with you?”

The three of us went in together.

It was one of the most awkward, uncomfortable walks I’ve taken.

I had one of those outside-my-skin-watching-from-above moments. Eight months ago, when I’d first ducked into BB&B, seeking sanctuary from my first encounter with a Dark Zone, I’d never have imagined this moment: pushing into a brick wall behind the bookstore—I mean, really, a brick wall!—with the badly skinned and heavily narcotized woman who’d run BB&B with Barrons, who was waiting for me to put him in a good mood again with sex and who turned into a nine-foot-tall beast on occasion, all so I could find out if I was the king and creator of the monsters that had overtaken my world. If I’d thought my life would come to this, I’d have marched straight for the airport that day and flown back home.

Fiona hadn’t uttered a syllable since Barrons had appeared in the alley. She’d drawn her hood tightly around her face. I couldn’t imagine what she had to be feeling as she marched to her suicide between the man she’d loved to her own destruction and the woman she believed had taken him from her.

At first, Barrons had disagreed with my plan vehemently.

He’d wanted to use the spear and kill her without going back into the Silvers and wasting weeks, possibly months, doing it. But after I pulled him aside and explained that she was the perfect test, he’d reluctantly agreed, and I realized that he, too, hoped the legend was an erroneous myth.

Why? He thought I was the concubine. Considering what I was afraid I was, the concubine didn’t seem like such a bad thing to be.

Unless he’d concluded that, if I was the concubine, the king himself was destined to come for me at some point, and that was one foe he might not be able to take on, even in beast form. Perhaps he worried that the king would take his OOP detector, and then where would he be?

But if you ask her one thing about me, Ms. Lane, he’d murmured against my ear, I’ll kill her where we stand, and you won’t get your little test.

I glanced at him from the corner of my eye. Could he? In the same way he killed Fae, whatever it was? Yet he didn’t offer it as mercy. I wondered what he was feeling as we moved down a rosy corridor. Did he mourn her, this woman who’d run his store for years, this woman he’d trusted with more of his secrets than he’d ever entrusted to me? He hadn’t offered to kill her swiftly, to end her suffering. He’d used it only as a threat to keep me from prying into his business.

His face was set in hard, cold lines. He looked down at the top of Fiona’s head and his face changed; then he saw me looking at him and it was again a mask of stone.

He did mourn her—not her suffering or death but that she’d chosen the path that had led her here. I suspected that he would never have stopped caring for her, and taking care of her, if she hadn’t turned on me. But that action had sealed her fate.

Barrons was one of the most complicated men I’d ever met and at the same time one of the simplest: You were with him, or you were against him. Period. End of story. You got only one chance with him. And if you betrayed him, you ceased to exist in his world until he got around to killing you.

Fiona had ceased to exist when she’d let Shades into the bookstore to devour me while I was sleeping—thereby stealing his only chance at something he wanted very badly, whatever it was—and the only thing he felt now was a twinge of wishing it hadn’t turned out this way, a whisper of a regret. Not so long ago he’d put a knife through her heart, and if she hadn’t been eating Unseelie, it would have killed her. He’d been ready to kill her in the alley, and not mercifully.

I stole another look at him, realizing the full extent of what I’d just been mulling over.

He thought I’d betrayed him by taking up with Darroc when I’d believed he was dead. But he hadn’t excised me from his life. Whatever he wanted from the Sinsar Dubh, he wanted very badly.

And according to my own assessment of him, once he had it, he would kill me.

He must have felt my gaze, because he looked at me.

Something wrong, Ms. Lane?

My gaze mocked, Is there anything right about this situation?

He smiled without humor. Besides the obvious.

I shook my head.

You’re looking at me as if you expect me to kill you.

I jerked. Was I that easy to read?

You’re wondering what kind of man I am and how I feel about all this.

I stared.

You think you betrayed me and one day I will kill you for it.

I’m not sure why I even bother talking. My eyes flashed with temper. I hated being so transparent.

That you allied with Darroc to attain your goals did not betray me. I’d have done the same.

Then why are you so pissy?

That you fucked him will be forgiven once you fuck me. Another woman might run headlong toward absolution.

I put an end to our discussion by staring straight ahead.

It was slow going. Fiona couldn’t move very quickly. We proceeded at a snail’s pace through rose halls, to sunshine, to bronze.

“The libraries,” Barrons said as we passed. “We’ll stop on the way back, since we’re in here anyway. I want another look around.”

I felt a sudden tension in the cloaked figure next to me as the dark hood turned my way.

I didn’t need to be able to see her face to sense the bitterness of her gaze or divine the morbid turn of her thoughts.

His comment had driven home that he and I would be walking out of here together and she would be dead. And I knew she thought we would be having a fabulous time, dancing and fighting, having sex and living, while her existence would be over, extinguished as if she’d never been born, unmourned, unmissed.

I felt hatred emanating from beneath that cloak, malevolent and dark, and was glad to see black floors ahead.

I felt like we were prison guards, taking the long, slow, hellish walk to the electric chair. The convict between us would have done anything to escape her sentence, but fate had left her no choice but to crave oblivion.

“How?” she whispered, as we entered the black tunnel.

I looked at Barrons and he looked at me. Once we’d stepped onto the black floors, I’d begun to feel the sexual tension this part of the castle inevitably stirred. One glance at his face confirmed he was feeling it, too.

I was horrified to realize that Fiona must be feeling it, too.

Barrons replied tightly, “There is a Silver that divides the chamber of the Unseelie King and the concubine’s. Only those two can step through it. All others die instantly.”

“Even … you?”

So she knew he could die. And come back.

“Yes.”

There was that awful wet sound, laughter but not. “She … knows now.”

Barrons gave me a look that clearly said, Shut her up or I’ll end it now.

“Yes. I know all of it, Fiona,” I lied.

She moved forward, silent once again.

* * *

Christian was asleep in the Unseelie King’s big bed, long black hair a silken fan across a pillow.

If Fiona hadn’t been skinned and in so much pain, I would have pushed her across the white half of the boudoir into the mirror to get it over with, but I couldn’t bring myself to touch her.

“Who the—What the fuck?” Barrons stalked across snowy furs, through diamond-studded air, to the enormous Silver, staring at the male in the bed.

I glanced at the fireplace, expecting to see the concubine, trying to figure out how I would explain things to Barrons if the queen’s memory residue was stretched out there, but the furs were empty, the fire banked to low white embers.

His voice startled Christian awake; the young Scot rolled over and sprang to his feet.

Silk sheets dripped from his body, leaving him nude and visibly aroused. For a moment I thought he’d gotten rid of the tattoos, but they appeared, moving up his legs, his groin, and his abdomen, then around the side of his chest, before vanishing again.

I joined Barrons at the edge of the mirror, trying not to stare, but gorgeous naked men are gorgeous naked men.

I wondered if memories of the king and queen’s lovemaking had been affecting him the way they’d got to me. His eyes glittered with lazy sensuality, and I could too well imagine the bent of his dreams. He might be difficult to pry out of the chamber when the time came.

He stood on the dark side of the boudoir and looked at me. “I must be dreaming. Bring that sweet ass over here and I’ll show you what God made women and well-hung Scotsmen for.”

“Who the bloody hell is that?” Barrons demanded.

“Christian MacKeltar.”

“That’s not Christian MacKeltar!” Barrons exploded. “That’s Unseelie royalty!”

“Ah, fuck me.” Christian ran his hands through his long, dark hair, muscles rippling in his shoulders. “Is that really what I look like, Mac?”

I almost said, I don’t know, I can’t stop looking at your—

Fiona pushed me.

The bitch actually shoved me from behind.

I was so flabbergasted, I didn’t even gasp. I was speechless. I’d come here on a mission of mercy and she’d tried to kill me again!

She’d concluded from what Barrons had told her that I would die if I touched the Silver, too, and her final act had been to try to take me with her.

She pushed me hard enough that I shot straight through the unresisting Silver and crashed squarely into Christian, knocking him backward onto the bed. We got tangled up in each other, trying to get out.

Behind me, Barrons roared.

On top of me, Christian made a raw, horny sound and ground himself against me.

I sucked air between my teeth. Every instinct in my body wanted to have sex, here, now, with anyone. This place was dangerous. “Christian, it’s the chamber. It makes sex—”

“I know, lass. Been here awhile.” He raised one of his arms that was pinning me to the bed. “Get out from under me. Move your ass!” he gritted.

When I didn’t react instantly, he snarled, “Now! I won’t be able to say it again!”

I looked at him. His eyes were out of focus, fixed on some point inside me, like a Fae prince. I shot out from beneath him and scrambled from the bed.

He crouched there a moment on his hands and knees, balls heavy, erection huge and flat to his stomach, then he lunged to his feet, trying to cover himself, his hand a hopelessly inadequate shield. He tried to yank a sheet from the bed, but the black silk was king-sized, for acres of bed. Cursing, he began digging among pillows and furs, looking for his clothes, while I tried not to watch and failed miserably.

“Mac!” Barrons thundered.

My heart was pounding. I wanted Barrons, not Christian, but the man I wanted was on the other side of the mirror, and this damned half-white, half-black boudoir was Ecstasy on steroids with a shot of adrenaline, and it made things so dreamy and confused …

It was the awful sound of Fiona’s laughter that broke the spell.

I turned to see her standing right next to the mirror, looking up at Barrons, her hood down.

She spoke the longest sentence she’d said tonight.

“How does it feel to want someone more than they want you, Jericho?” Her voice dripped venom. “If she went through that mirror, she belongs to the king. I hope wanting her eats you alive. I hope he takes her from you. I hope you suffer for all eternity!”

Barrons said nothing.

“You should have left me to die where you found me, you bastard,” she said bitterly. “All you did was give me a life that made me want things I couldn’t have.”

I would have told her it wasn’t like that at all. Barrons didn’t feel that way about me, or about anyone, but before I could say a word, Fiona threw herself at the mirror.

I braced myself for her to slam into me.

I was that sure I wasn’t the Unseelie King.

I was ready for the stench of her to assault my nostrils, her mutilated body to slam into mine. I would deflect her toward the bed, where I would stab her and put us all out of her misery, once and for all.

Fiona fell over dead the instant she touched the mirror.

“Hello, Ms. Concubine,” Barrons mocked.

Oh, if he only knew.

But Christian didn’t tell him before we left, and neither did I.