Текст книги "Shadowfever"

Автор книги: Karen Marie Moning

Соавторы: Karen Marie Moning,Karen Marie Moning
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Текущая страница: 27 (всего у книги 37 страниц)

“And I’d do it again in a heartbeat. We’ll figure it out when it becomes a problem. You’re alive. That’s all that matters.”

Dani keeps it cool, all the time. On the rare occasions she lets you see a feeling, it’s one she’s chosen to paste on her face and let you see. She has a vast arsenal of scowls and disgruntled sneers, she’s nailed every nuance of saucy grins and cocky swaggers known to man, and I suspect she perfected the Look of Death by five.

Her face is naked now, wide open. Unadulterated adoration blazes in her eyes. “This is the best birthday ever! Ain’t never had nobody do something like that for me,” she said wonderingly. “Not even Mom—” She broke off, clamping her lips in a thin line.

“Peas in the Mega pod,” I said, tousling her curls, as we headed down the alley behind the bookstore. “Love you, kid.”

She jerked but quickly slapped an insouciant grin over her shock. “Dude, I’m even gonna let you get away with calling me kid. Really think I’m prettier? Not that I care or nothing, just wanna know what kinda pain in the ass it’s gonna be when I’m even hotter than I was before, and Dancer gets a good—”

“Brought ussh tasshty to drink, fassht one? Lassht one wassh sshweeeeet.”

I whirled, spear up. They’d either sifted in or been hiding in the shadows, motionless, and we’d been so caught up in relief at our near escape that we’d been oblivious.

A pair of Unseelie I’d never seen before stood by the trash dumpster by the rear door of BB&B. They were identical, each with four arms and four slender, tubular legs, three heads apiece, and dozens of mouths on their flat, horrific faces, with tiny, needle-sharp teeth. At the corners of the many mouths were pairs of much longer thin teeth, and I knew, without knowing how I knew, that they used them as straws.

My sister had been missing the marrow in her bones, her endocrine glands had been drained, her eyeballs were collapsed, and she’d had no spinal fluid. The coroner had been at a complete loss.

I wasn’t. Not anymore.

I knew what caste had killed Alina. What had gnawed and ripped and torn at her flesh to slowly and carefully remove all her inner fluids as if they were gourmet delights.

What they’d said penetrated, belatedly.

Brought us tasty to drink, fast one? Last one was sweet.

I froze, horrified. Surely that didn’t mean what it sounded like it meant. Dani was the fast one. What—Why—My brain turned to sludge.

They were staring behind me with hopeful expressions. “She issh ourssh, assh well?” Six mouths spoke as one. “You mussht take her sshpear for ussh. You mussht make her helplessh, like you did other blondie. Leave in alley with ussh again.”

Dani. I open my mouth. I can’t seem to make a sound.

I hear a choking noise behind me, a strangled sob.

“Do not go, fassht one!” Six mouths cry, gazes fixed behind me. “Come back, feed ussh again! We are ssho hungry!”

I turn and stare at Dani.

Her eyes are enormous, her face pale. She’s backing away from me.

If she draws her sword, it’ll make everything easy.

She doesn’t.

“Draw your sword.”

She shakes her head and takes another step backward.

“Draw your fucking sword!”

She bites her lower lip and shakes her head again. “Ain’t doing it. I’m faster. Ain’t killing you.”

“You killed my sister. Why not me?” The dark lake in my head begins to boil.

“Ain’t like that.”

“You brought her to them.”

Her face screws up with anger. “You don’t know a fecking thing ’bout me, you stupid fecking fecker! You don’t know nothing!”

I hear rustles behind me, leathery wet sounds, and I whirl. The freaks that killed my sister are taking advantage of the distraction and trying to leave.

Not a chance in hell. This is what I’ve been living for. This moment. My revenge. First them, then her.

I lunge for them, screaming my sister’s name.

I slice and rip and tear.

I begin with my spear and end with my bare hands.

I fall on the pair like the beast form of Barrons. My sister died in an alley with these monsters working on her, and now I know it wasn’t fast. I can see her, white-lipped with pain, knowing she’s going to die, scratching a clue into the pavement. Hoping I’ll come, afraid I’ll come. Believing I could succeed where she failed. God, I miss her! Hatred consumes me. I devolve into vengeance, I embrace it, I become it.

When I finish, there are no pieces larger than my fist.

I’m shaking, gasping, covered with bits of flesh and gray matter from smashing their skulls.

Feed ussh again! they’d demanded.

I double over and hit the pavement, puking. I puke until I dry-heave, then I dry-heave until my ears ring and my eyes are stinging.

I don’t have to look behind me to know she’s long gone.

I finally got what I came to Dublin for.

I know who killed my sister.

The girl I’d begun to think of as my sister.

I curl in a tight ball on the cold pavement and cry.

37

As I stepped out of the shower, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. It wasn’t pretty.

In all the time I’d been in Dublin, with all the horrors I’ve encountered, I’ve never seen quite this expression on my face.

I look haunted. Haunted is all about the eyes.

I feel haunted.

I came here for revenge. I brace my palms on either side of the bathroom sink and lean close into the mirror, studying myself.

Who’s in there, behind my face? A king that wouldn’t think twice about killing a fourteen-year-old girl I love? Loved. Hate her now. She took my sister to an alley, gave her to monsters that slaughtered her.

I can’t even think things like why? It doesn’t seem to matter. She did it. Res ipsa loquitur as Daddy would say. The thing speaks for itself.

I don’t have the emotional energy to dry my hair or put on makeup. I dress and drift downstairs where I slump on the sofa in the rear seating area, as thunder rolls in the leaden sky. The day is so thick with rain that it looks like dusk at noon. Lightning crashes.

I’ve lost so much. And gained precious little.

I’d had Dani in the gains column.

Finding out who killed Alina made the pain of her death fresh again. It made it all too visual for me. I’d told myself she died instantly and whatever had been done to her had happened postmortem. I knew better now. While they’d slowly drained her, she lay there scratching a clue into the pavement for me. I sat, torturing myself with thoughts of her torture, as if that might accomplish something useful, besides torturing myself.

Leftover cake mocked me on the coffee table. Unopened presents teetered nearby. I’d baked a cake for my sister’s murderer. I’d wrapped presents. I’d painted her nails. I’d sat and watched movies with her. What kind of monster was I? How could I have been so blind? Were there clues I’d never noticed? Had she ever slipped? Revealed knowledge of Alina she shouldn’t have had but I hadn’t been paying enough attention?

I dropped my head in my hands and squeezed, rubbing my temples, tugging my hair.

The journal pages!

“She has Alina’s journal,” I said, incredulous. The journal pages that had shown up for a brief time had made no sense to me. They’d never really told me anything and they’d appeared at the strangest times. Like the day Dani had brought my mail in and there’d been one in the stack. In a thick, fine envelope, just the kind a corporation like Rowena’s might use.

But why would she have given me those entries? They’d pretty much just been about …

“How much Alina loved me.” Tears stung my eyes.

The bell over the door tinkled.

I rose in a half crouch and waited. Who was here in the middle of the day?

My muscles stayed tense, and my gut tightened with anticipation. I eased back down to the sofa.

I responded that way to only one man. Jericho Barrons.

I was lost in grief and fury and hated being alive. And still I wanted to stand up, stripping as I went, and have sex with him right here on the bookstore floor. Was that the sum total of my existence? I didn’t get the erudition of I think therefore I am. Instead, I got I am, therefore I want to fuck Jericho Barrons.

“Got a little messy in my back alley, Ms. Lane.” His voice floated around bookcases, preceding him.

Not nearly as messy as I’d’ve liked. I wished I had those Unseelie bastards alive right now to kill all over again. How was I going to do what I was supposed to do?

Maybe I could just take her to an alley and give her to some monsters to die. She would be hard to catch, but my dark, glassy lake was stirring, whispering, offering all kinds of assistance, and I knew that I had more than enough juice to catch the kid. To do anything I wanted. There was something very cold inside me. Always had been. I wanted to welcome it now. Let it chill my blood and frost all my emotions until there was nothing left in me that was haunted because there was nothing left in me.

“The rain’ll clean it up.”

“I don’t like messes on my—”

“Jericho.” It was plea, lament, and benediction.

He stopped speaking instantly. He appeared around the last bookcase and stared at me. “You can say it that way anytime, Mac. Especially if you’re naked and I’m on top of you.” I could feel his gaze on me, searching, trying to understand.

I didn’t understand myself. The plea had been to not pick on me right now. Sarcasm would undo me. The lament had been a sharing of my pain, because I knew he understood pain himself. The benediction was the part I couldn’t explain. As if he was sacred to me. I looked up at him. He’d been with my alleged mother the night she’d left the abbey, the night the Book had escaped, and never told me. How could I revere him? I didn’t have the energy to confront him. Learning that Dani had killed Alina had left me feeling like a popped balloon.

“Why are you sitting in the dark?” he said finally.

“I know who killed Alina.”

“Ah.” The single word said more than most people can say in entire paragraphs. “Beyond a shadow?”

“Black and white.”

He waited. He didn’t ask. And I suddenly understood that he wouldn’t. This was part of who he was. Barrons did feel, and when he felt most strongly, he spoke the least, asked the fewest questions. Even from here I could feel the tension in his body as he waited to see if I would tell him more. If I didn’t, he would continue walking through the store and vanish as silently as he’d glided into view.

But if I spoke? What if I asked him to make love to me? Not fuck me hard, but make love.

“It was Dani.”

He said nothing for so long that I began to think he hadn’t heard me. Then he released a long, weary-sounding breath. “Mac, I’m sorry.”

I looked up at him. “What do I do?” I was appalled to hear my voice crack.

“You’ve done nothing yet?”

I shook my head.

“What do you want to do?”

I laughed bitterly and nearly began sobbing. “Pretend I never found out and go on like it never happened.”

“Then that’s what you do.”

I tipped my head back and looked up at him in disbelief. “What? Barrons, the great hand of vengeance, is telling me to forgive and forget? You never forgive. You never walk away from a fight.”

“I like to fight. You do, too, sometimes. But in this case, it doesn’t sound like it.”

“It’s not that I—I mean … it’s … God, it’s so complicated!”

“Life is. Imperfect. Royally fucked up. How do you feel about her?”

“I—” felt like a traitor answering him.

“Let me rephrase that: How did you feel about her before you found out she’d killed Alina?”

“—loved her,” I whispered.

“Do you think love just goes away? Pops out of existence when it becomes too painful or inconvenient, as if you never felt it?”

I looked at him. What did Jericho Barrons know of love?

“If only it did. If only it could be turned off. It’s not a faucet. Love’s a bloody river with level-five rapids. Only a catastrophic act of nature or a dam has any chance of stopping it—and then usually only succeeds in diverting it. Both measures are extreme and change the terrain so much you end up wondering why you bothered. No landmarks to gauge your position when it’s done. Only way to survive is to devise new ways to map out life. You loved her yesterday, you love her today. And she did something that devastates you. You’ll love her tomorrow.”

“She killed my sister!”

“With malice? Spite? Out of cruelty? Hunger for power?”

“How would I know?”

“You love her,” he said roughly. “That means you know her. When you love somebody you see inside them. Use your heart. Is Dani that kind of person?”

Jericho Barrons was telling me to use my heart. Could life get any stranger?

“Think maybe somebody told her to do it?”

“She should have known better!”

“Humans, in their infancy, tend to be infants.”

“Are you making excuses for her?” I snarled.

“There is no excuse. I’m merely pointing out what you want me to point out. How has Dani treated you since the day you met?”

It hurt to even say the words. “Like a big sister she looked up to.”

“Has she been loyal to you? Taken your side against others?”

I nodded. Even when she’d thought I’d hooked up with Darroc, she’d have remained at my side. Followed me into hell.

“She must have known you were Alina’s sister.”

“Yes.”

“Coming to see you would have felt like facing the firing squad, every time.”

I’d told her we were like sisters. And sisters, I’d told her, forgive each other everything. I’d caught a glimpse of her face in the mirror after I’d said it, when she hadn’t known I was looking. Her expression had been bleak, and now I understood why. Because she’d been thinking, Yeah, right. Mac’s gonna kill me if she ever finds out. Yet she’d still kept coming. When I thought about it, I was astonished she hadn’t hunted down and killed those Unseelie, removing the damning evidence from the face of the earth.

He was silent a long moment, then, “Did she actually kill Alina? With her hands? A weapon?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Everything has degrees.”

“You think some ways of killing are better?”

“I know they are.”

“Death is death!”

“Agreed. But killing is not always murder.”

“I think she took her somewhere she knew she’d be killed.”

“Now you don’t sound certain she killed her.”

I told him what had happened last night, what the Unseelie had said, how Alina’s body had looked, how Dani had vanished.

He nodded in silent agreement when I was finished.

“So, what do I do?”

“Are you asking me for advice?”

I braced myself for a sarcastic comment. “Don’t snap my head off, okay? I had a bad night.”

“Wasn’t going to.” He sat down on his heels in front of me and looked into my eyes. “This one got you. Worse than all the other things that happened to you. Worse than being turned Pri-ya.”

I shrugged. “I got to have sex nonstop, no blame, no shame. You kidding me? Compared to the rest of my life, that was a joy.”

He didn’t say anything for a long time. Then, “But not something you’d care to repeat in full possession of your senses.”

“It was …” I searched for words to explain.

He was motionless, waiting.

“Like Halloween. When people rioted. They loot. Do crazy things.”

“You’re saying Pri-ya was a blackout.”

I nodded. “So what do I do?”

“You pull your fucking—” He bared his teeth on a silent snarl and looked away. When he looked back again, his face was a cool mask of urbanity. “You choose what you can live with. And what you can’t live without. That’s what.”

“You mean can I live with killing her? Can I stand myself if I don’t kill her?”

“I mean can you live without her. You kill her, you snuff her life forever. Dani will never be again. At fourteen, she’ll be done. She had her chances, she fucked up, she lost. Are you ready to be her judge, jury, and executioner?”

I swallowed and dropped my head, shielding myself with hair as if I could hide behind it and not have to come out. “You’re saying I won’t like myself.”

“I think you’d deal with it fine. You find places to put things. I know how you work. I’ve seen you kill. I think O’Bannion and his men were the hardest for you because they were your first humans, but after that, you took to it with a bit of stone cold. But this would be a chosen killing. Premeditated. It makes you breathe different. To swim in that sea, you have to grow gills.”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying. Are you telling me to kill her?”

“Some actions change you for the better. Some for the worse. Be sure which one it is and accept it before you do anything. Death, for Dani, is irrevocable.”

“Would you kill her?”

I could tell he was uncomfortable with the question, but I didn’t know why.

After a strained silence, he said, “If that’s what you want, yes. I’ll kill her for you.”

“That’s not what I—no, I wasn’t asking you to kill her for me. I was asking if you would in my shoes.”

“The shoes you wear are beyond my ability to fathom. It’s been too long.”

“You’re not going to tell me what to do, are you?” I wanted him to. I didn’t want any of the responsibility for this. I wanted someone to blame if I didn’t like how it turned out.

“I respect you more than that.”

I almost fell off the couch. I parted my hair and looked up at him, but he was no longer squatting in front of me. He’d stood and moved away.

“Are we, like, having a conversation?”

“Did you just, like, ask me for advice and listen with an open mind? If so, then yes, I would call this a conversation. I can see how you might not recognize it, considering all I usually get from you is attitude and hostility—”

“Oh! All I ever get from you is hostility and—”

“And here we go. She’s bristling and my hackles go up. Bloody hell, I feel fangs coming on. Tell you what, Ms. Lane,” he said softly, “anytime you want to have a conversation with me, leave the myriad issues you have with wanting to fuck me every time you look at me outside my cave, come on in, and see what you find. You might like it.”

He turned and began moving toward the entrance to the rear part of the store.

“Wait! I still don’t know what to do about Dani.”

“Then that’s your answer for now.” He stopped at the door and glanced back at me. “How much longer will you dissemble?”

“Who uses words like dissemble?”

He leaned back against the door and folded his arms. “I won’t wait much longer. You’re on your last chance with me.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” What was he saying? Would Barrons walk away from me? Me? He never walked away from me. He was the one who would always keep me alive. And always want me. I’d come to count on those things like I counted on air and food.

“During a blackout, people do what they’ve wanted to do all along but have repressed, afraid of the consequences. Worried what others might think of them. Afraid of what they’ll see in themselves. Or simply unwilling to get punished by the society that governs them. You don’t care what other people think anymore. Nobody’s going to punish you. Which raises the question: Why are you still afraid of me? What haven’t you wrapped your head around yet?”

I stared at him.

“I want the woman I think you are. But the longer you dissemble, the more I think I made a mistake. Saw things in you that weren’t there.”

I fisted my hands and bit down a protest. He made me feel so conflicted. I wanted to shout, You didn’t make a mistake. I am her! I wanted to cut my losses and run before the devil owned more of my soul.

“There was purity in that basement. That’s the way I live. There was a time I thought you did, too.”

I did, I wanted to say. I do.

“Some things are sacred. Until you act like they’re not. Then you lose them.”

The door swung silently shut.

38

“You okay, Mac?” Kat sounded worried. “You don’t look so good.”

I forced myself to smile. “I’m fine. Little nervous, I guess. I just want everything to go right and get this over with. You?”

She smiled but it didn’t reach her eyes, and too late I remembered her touch of emotional telepathy. She could feel how badly off balance I was.

I felt doubly betrayed, first by Dani, then by Barrons for telling me he wouldn’t wait forever. And ashamed for things I didn’t understand. But it went all the way back to believing he was dead, then finding out he was alive, and it had something to do with my sister. No, it went back farther than that, to the end of my being Pri-ya. I sighed. I couldn’t pin it down.

“Last night I found the Unseelie that killed Alina,” I told Kat, figuring that would get her off my back.

The sharp focus of her gaze softened. “Did you have your revenge, then?”

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

“But it failed to ease your pain as you expected it would.” She was silent a moment. “When the walls came down, Rowena didn’t tell us about eating Unseelie. I lost both my brothers to Shades. I’ve killed dozens of them since. It never makes me feel better. If only revenge would bring them back, but it doesn’t. It adds to the body count.”

“Wise as ever, Kat.” I smiled. But inwardly I seethed.

I didn’t want wise. I wanted blood. Crushed bones. Destruction. My dark lake had rippled into crashing waves last night, with a dark wind blowing hard across it.

I am here, it was saying. Use me. What are you waiting for?

I had no answer for it.

I continued to march toward O’Connell and Beacon, checking my watch. It was ten to nine. Kat had fallen into step with me a few blocks back.

“Where’s Jo?”

“Food poisoning. Bad can of beans. Thought about bringing Dani but couldn’t find her. Brought Sophie instead.”

Hearing Dani’s name impacted me hard. Kat looked at me sharply. I squared my shoulders and marched on. At the intersection, V’lane and his Seelie waited, on the opposite side of the street from Rowena and her sidhe-seers.

My dark lake boiled at the sight of her, hissed and steamed: Think she doesn’t know Dani did it? She knows everything. Did she order it? I locked my jaw down and fisted my hands.

I would take care of my personal vendettas later. First things first. If I was the Unseelie King, I needed the Book locked away, the sooner the better. If I wasn’t the Unseelie King, I still needed it locked away, because, for whatever reason, it kept coming for me and those I loved. My parents and I would never be safe, as long as it was loose.

All I had to do was play my small part. I would fly the Hunter over the city—supplied courtesy of Barrons, dampened and controlled—and help them corner it. Once it was contained, I would join them on the ground.

Just to be on the safe side, I planned to keep my distance. I didn’t want any more surprises in my life.

My body tensed with sexual awareness.

“Mac,” Ryodan said coolly as he pushed past me.

The sexual tension heightened to a painful state, and I knew Barrons was behind me. I waited for him to pass.

Kat walked by, Lor passed, and then they were all at the intersection. Still I stood, waiting for Barrons to get out from behind me.

Then his hand was on the nape of my neck and I felt the hardness of him against my ass. I inhaled sharply and leaned back against him, pushing for him with my hips.

He was gone.

I swallowed. I hadn’t seen him all afternoon, since he’d told me I could lose him.

“Ms. Lane,” he said coolly.

“Barrons.”

“The Hunter is landing in …” He looked up. “Three … two … now.”

It flapped down into the center of the intersection, wings churning black ice crystals in the air. It settled with a soft whuff of breath, swung its head low, and glared at me with fiery eyes. It was subdued—and pissed as hell about it. I felt for it with my mind. It was seething, rattling the bars of whatever cage Barrons was capable of creating with his mysterious runes and spells.

“Good hunting,” he said.

“Barrons, I—”

“You’ve got rotten timing.”

“You two gonna stand there fucking each other with your eyes all night, or can we get on with it?” Christian demanded.

The Keltar had arrived. Christopher, Drustan, Dageus, and Cian stalked from a nearby alley.

“Get on your demon horse, girl, and fly. But remember,” Rowena shook a warning finger at me, “we’re watching you.”

And although I knew now why she was so convinced I was a threat—since Dani had told me about the real prophecy—I still consoled myself with the thought of deposing and killing her.

This Hunter was larger than the last one Barrons had “charmed.” It took Barrons, Lor, and Ryodan to help me get up on its back. I was glad I’d remembered to bring gloves and to dress warmly. It was like sitting on an iceberg with sulfur breath.

Once I was settled between its icy wings, I looked around.

This was it.

The night we were going to take down the Sinsar Dubh.

At the meeting yesterday, no one had even raised the question: What then?

Rowena hadn’t said: The Seelie won’t be permitted anywhere near it! It will be ours to guard, and we will keep it under lock and key forever!

As if anybody’d believe that. It had gotten out once.

And V’lane hadn’t said: Then I will take my queen to Faery, with the Book, where she will recover and search it for fragments of the Song of Making, so she can reimprison the Unseelie and re-create the walls between our worlds.

I wouldn’t have believed that, either. What made them so certain fragments of the Song were in the Book? Or that the queen could even read it? The concubine might have once known the First Language, but she’d obviously drunk from the cauldron too many times to remember it now.

And Barrons hadn’t said: Then I will sit down and read it, because somehow I know the First Language, and once I get the spell I’m after, you all can do whatever the fuck you want. Fix the world or destroy it, I don’t care.

And Ryodan hadn’t said: Then we’re killing you, Mac, because we don’t trust you and you’ll no longer be necessary.

Unfortunately, I believed the last two.

The tension I felt was unbearable. I hadn’t realized how much I took Barrons for granted until he’d made it plain earlier today that his time with me had an expiration date.

I could lose him.

Maybe I didn’t know what I wanted from him, but at least I knew I wanted him around. That had always seemed to be enough for him.

Unfair as hell and you know it, a small voice inside me said.

At my hip, my radio squawked. “Check, Mac.”

I pressed a button. “Check, Ryodan.”

We tested the radios all around.

“What are you waiting for, girl?” Rowena barked. “Get up there and find it!”

I nudged the Hunter with muscles and mind and watched her dwindle beneath me, as great black wings powerfully churned the night air. I wanted to squash her with my thumb like the infuriating speck she was.

Then I forgot her in the pleasure of the moment.

This was a rush.

This felt … good.

Familiar.

Free.

We rose higher and higher into the sky. Rooftops receded beneath us.

In front of me was the silvery coastline. Behind me, open country.

The air was crisp with a tang of salt. Lights beneath us were few and far between. I laughed out loud. This was amazing. I was flying.

I’d done it before, with Barrons, but this was different. It was just me and my Hunter and the night. I felt wide open with possibilities. The world was my oyster. No, the worlds were my oysters.

Damn, it was good to be me!

I suddenly knew something about Hunters—maybe it fed it to me with its mind. Not only were the massive icy dragons sifters, they made the Silvers obsolete. They weren’t Fae. They never had been. They were amused by us. Aloofly entertained. They hung out with the Unseelie because they found it … interesting to pass time in such a fashion. They’d never been imprisoned.

No one owned them.

No one ever could.

In fact, we didn’t even begin to understand what they really were. (Not alive the way we thought. Was I flying on a huge breathing meteor through the sky? Carved from that of which the universe had begun?)

I reached out for the Hunter’s mind. You can sift worlds!

It turned its head and fixed me with a fiery orange eye, as if to say, How stupid are you? You knew that.

No, I didn’t.

It snorted a tendril of smoky fire back at me, scorching my jeans.

“Ow!” I clapped a hand over my knee.

Don’t need blinders. Wipe off his marks. Interfere with my vision. That one should be terminated. He plays with the instruments of gods.

“Barrons? What marks?”

On my wings, the back of my head. Wipe them off.

“No.”

It was disappointed but fell silent, accepting my decision.

I opened my sidhe-seer senses. Or was it that part of me that was the Unseelie King? I gasped.

I knew where the Sinsar Dubh was. It was outside Barrons Books and Baubles. Looking for me.

“East,” I said into my radio. “It’s at the bookstore.”

They crept around it, draping a net of stones chiseled from the cliffs of its home, closing in slowly but surely, with my guidance.

It could sense me near. It wasn’t sure where. But it didn’t seem to be able to sense them.

I listened to chatter on my radio.

Rowena had begun with her demands that the Seelie not be allowed to see the Book once it was sealed away, although Kat tried desperately and diplomatically to curb her imperious attitude.

The Seelie were growing more incensed by the moment. And getting more imperious by the moment.

Drustan was trying to run interference, but the other Keltar began bickering among themselves about the role of the Seelie and the role of the sidhe-seers, insisting their part to play was more important.

Barrons was getting angrier with each passing minute, and Lor had just threatened to drop the stone and leave if everyone didn’t shut the fuck up.

“Two blocks west of you, V’lane,” I said. He was walking, not sifting. Said the Book would sense his presence if he did.

“It’s moving again, fast,” I cried. It had just shot three blocks in a matter of seconds. “It has to be in a car. Whoever it’s got is driving it. I’m going to try to get closer for a better look.”

“Don’t you dare!” Rowena said. “You stay up there, far away from it, girl!”

I scowled. A Hunter-sized bowel movement on her head would go a long way toward making me feel better. For now. I was afraid killing her might be all that would satisfy me long term.

“Get off my back, old woman,” I muttered, and turned the voice function of my radio off so I could hear them but they couldn’t hear me.

I didn’t want anyone to pick up on the whoosh-whoosh of the wings that had abruptly appeared beside me—which were much too massive to belong to the Hunter I was on.

I stared down the leathery wing of my Hunter at the one that was flying tandem with us.

K’Vruck.

Nightwindflyhighfreeeeeee.