Fever 5 - Shadowfever (28 page)

I was surprised by the ease with which I slid through the black membrane. I was stunned senseless by the cold that knifed into me.
My brain issued an order to gasp. My body failed to obey it. I was crusted from head to toe with a thin sheet of glittering ice. It cracked as I took a step, tinkled to my feet, and I was instantly re-coated again.
How was I supposed to breathe here? How had the concubine breathed?
Ice coated the insides of my nose, my mouth and tongue and teeth, all the way down to my lungs, as all the parts of my body I needed to process air were sheathed in an impenetrable layer. I stumbled backward, seeking the other side of the mirror, where there was white and light and oxygen.
I was so cold that I could barely move. For a moment, I wasn’t sure I would make it back through the Silver. I was afraid I would die in the Unseelie King’s bedchamber, repeating history, only this time I’d have left no note.
When I finally slid through the dark membrane, warmth hit me like a blast oven, and I stumbled, went flying across the room, and slammed into the wall. The concubine stretched on the rug paid me no heed. I sucked in air with a greedy screech.
Where was Jericho? Could he breathe on the other side? Did he
need
to breathe, or was it his natural environment? I glanced back at the mirror, expecting to see him moving darkly on the other side, scowling at me for having forced him to reveal his true identity.
I staggered and nearly went down.
I’d been so certain I was right.
Barrons was collapsed on the floor, at the boundary of light and dark—on the
white
side of the room.
Only two in all existence could ever travel through that Silver: the Unseelie King and his concubine
, Darroc had told me.
Any other that touches it is instantly killed. Even Fae
.
“Jericho!” I ran for him, dragged him away from the mirror, and sank to the floor beside him. I rolled him over. He wasn’t breathing. He was dead. Again.
I stared down at him.
I stared into the darkness of the mirror.
The Silver hadn’t killed me. But it
had
killed him. I didn’t like what that meant one bit. It meant I was indeed the concubine.
It also meant that Jericho
wasn’t
my king.
NOW
.
The command was enormous, irresistible, Voice to the nth degree. I wanted to stay with Jericho. I couldn’t have stayed if my life had depended on it. And I was pretty sure it did.
“I can’t breathe over there.”
You do not live on this side of the Silver. Alter your expectations. Forgo breath. Fear, not fact, impedes you
.
Was that possible? I wasn’t buying it. But apparently it didn’t matter whether I bought it, because my hands were pushing me up and my feet were moving me straight into the dark Silver.
“Jericho!” I cried as I felt myself being forced away.
I hated this. I hated everything about it. I was the concubine but Jericho wasn’t the king, and I couldn’t deal with that—not that I was sure how well I would have dealt with it if he
had
been the king. Now I was being summoned to a place where I couldn’t breathe, where I didn’t really live according to my disembodied tormentor, and I had no choice but to leave him, dead again, by himself.
I suddenly had no desire to learn anything else about myself. This was enough. I was sorry I’d been so hell-bent on knowing to begin with. He’d been right. Wasn’t he always? Some things just didn’t need to be known.
“I’m not doing this. I’m not playing your stupid games, whatever they are, whoever you are. I’m going back to my life now. That would be
Mac’s
life,” I clarified. There was no reply. Only an inexorable pull into the darkness.
I was once again puppet to an invisible puppet master. I had no choice. I was being dragged through and there was nothing I could do about it.
Struggling, gritting my teeth, resisting every step of the way, I stepped over Jericho’s body and pushed back into the Silver.

It was pure instinct to fight for breath.
I was encased in ice again the moment I slid through the Silver.
Passing through the dark mirror peeled back a curtain, exposing more forgotten

childhood memories. Abruptly, I recalled being four, five, six, finding myself stuck in this alien dreamscape nightly. No sooner did I say my prayers, close my eyes, and drift off to sleep than a disembodied command would infiltrate my slumber.

I wondered what young Jack Lane had made of it—his adopted daughter who’d been forbidden to ever return to the country of her birth, who was tormented by terrifyingly cold, airless nightmares. What horrors had he decided I must have suffered to be scarred in such ways?

I loved him with all my heart for the childhood he’d given me. He’d anchored me with the day-to-day routines of a simple life, crammed it full of sunshine and bike rides, music lessons and baking with Mom in our bright, warm kitchen. Perhaps he’d let me be too frivolous, in an effort to counter the pain of those nightmares. But I couldn’t say I’d have done any differently as a parent.

The inability to breathe had been only the first of many things my child’s mind had found so terrifying. As I’d gotten older, strengthened by the cocoon of parental love, I’d learned to suppress those nocturnal images and the bleak emotions the Cold Place engendered. By my teens, the recurring nightmare had been buried deep in my subconscious, leaving me burdened with an intense dislike of the cold and a vague sense of bipolarity I was finally beginning to understand. If occasionally images that made no sense to me slipped through a crack, I attributed them to some horror movie I’d flipped through on TV.

I remembered that now, too. The voice that had demanded I come had tried to comfort me and promised I was capable of the task—whatever it was.
I’d never believed it. If I was capable, I wouldn’t have dreaded it so much.
I shook myself hard, cracking the ice. It dropped away, but I immediately re-iced.
I repeated the shaking, the re-icing. I did it four or five more times, terrified all the while that if I didn’t keep cracking it, it would build up so thick that I would end up staying right here where I stood forever, a statue of a woman, frozen and forgotten, in the Unseelie King’s bedchamber.
When Barrons came back to life, he would stand and stare through the mirror at me and try to roar me back to my senses and into motion, but there I’d be—right in front of his eyes, eternally out of his reach, because nobody but me and the Unseelie race’s mysterious creator could enter the king’s boudoir. And who knew where the king was?
For that matter, who knew
who
the king was?
And I really wanted to, which meant I had to find a way to move around in his natural habitat. I’d done it before, long ago, in another life, as his lover, so surely I could figure out how to do it again. It seemed I’d left clues for myself.
Fear, not fact, impedes you
.
I was supposed to alter my expectations and do without breath.
When I re-iced again, I remained still and let the ice cover me, instead of resisting and struggling to breathe. I tried to imagine it as a comfort, a soothing coolness to a high fever. I made it all of thirty seconds before I panicked. Silvery sheets rained from me and shattered on the obsidian floor as I moved jerkily.
I made it an entire minute the second time.
By my third try, it dawned on me that I hadn’t actually drawn a breath since I’d passed through the mirror. I’d been so busy fighting the ice that I hadn’t realized I was no longer breathing. I would have snorted but I couldn’t. There literally
was
no breath on this side of the Silver. My physicality was a different thing here.
Here I stood, fighting for something I didn’t even need, driven by a life of conditioning.
Could I talk on this side? Wasn’t voice comprised of breath to drive it?
“Hello.” I flinched.
I’d chimed like one of the dark princes, only on a different scale, high and feminine. Although my greeting had been comprised of English syllables, without breath to drive it the notes sounded as if slide-hammered on a hellish xylophone.
“Is anyone here?” I iced again, frozen in place by sheer astonishment at the bizarre sound. I spoke in shades of tubular bells.
Assured that I wasn’t going to suffocate, that I could talk, sort of, and that, as long as I kept moving, the ice would keep cracking, I began to jog in place and took a look around.
The king’s bedchamber was the size of a football stadium. Walls of black ice towered overhead to a ceiling too high to see. Spicy black petals from some exquisite, otherworldly rose garden swirled at my feet as I bounced lightly from foot to foot. Clusters of frost that were trying to form on my skin rained down to join them. I was mesmerized a moment by the sparkling crystals against the black floor and flowers.
Falling back, laughing, ice in her hair, a handful of velvety petals fluttering down to land on her bare breasts …
Never cold here
.
Always together
.
Sadness overwhelmed me. I nearly choked on it.
He had so many ambitions
.
She had one. To love
.
Could have learned from her
.
The tiny diamonds from the concubine’s—I couldn’t bring myself to say
my
, especially not standing so close to the king’s bed—side of the bedchamber hadn’t been extinguished at all. They’d become something else when they passed through and now shimmered on the dark air, midnight fireflies winking with blue flame.
The bed was draped with black curtains that fluttered around piles of silky black furs and filled up a third of the chamber, the portion visible from the other side. I moved to it, slid my hand over the furs. They were sleek, sensual. I wanted to stretch out naked and never leave.
It wasn’t the white warm place I found so comforting and familiar, but there was beauty here, too, on the far side of the mirror. Her world was the bright, glorious summer day that held no secrets, but his was the dark, glittering night where anything was possible. I tipped my head back. Was that a black ceiling painted with stars so high above me or a night sky sliced from another world and brought here for my pleasure?
I was in his bedchamber. I remembered this place. I’d come. Would he? Would I finally see the face of my long-lost lover? If he was my beloved king, why was I so afraid?
Hurry! Almost here … Come quickly!
The command came from beyond a giant arched opening far across the bedchamber. The summons was beyond my ability to deny. I broke into a run, following the voice of my childhood pied piper.
Once the king had held the Seelie Queen above all others, but somewhere down the eons, things had changed. He had puzzled over it for thousands of years, studying her, challenging her with subtle tests, in an effort to divine if the problem lay within her or within him.
He was comforted on the day he realized it was through no fault of theirs but that the two who were the eternal glue of their race were coming apart because she was Stasis and he was Change. It was their nature. The oddity was how long they had remained together.
He could not have prevented his evolution any more than she could have prevented her stagnation. All that the queen was at that very moment was all she would ever be.
Ironically, the mother of their race—she who wielded the Song of Making, she who could enact the mightiest acts of all creation—was no Creator. She was power without wonder, satisfaction without joy. What was existence without wonder, without joy? Meaningless. Empty.
And she thought
he
was dangerous.
He began to slip off more frequently, exploring worlds without her, hungering for things he could not name. The bright, silly court he once found harmlessly entertaining became to him a place of empty pursuits and jaded palates.
He built a fortress on a world of black ice because it was the antithesis of all the queen had chosen. Here, in his dark, quiet castle, he could think. Here, where there were no garish chaises or brilliantly clad courtiers, he could feel himself expanding. He was not drowned by incessant tinkling laughter, in constant petty disputes. He was free.
Once, the queen sought him in his ice castle, and it amused him to see her horror at being leeched of all her bright plumage by the strange light on the world he had chosen, which cast everything black, white, or blue. It suited his need for Spartan surroundings while he sorted through the complexity of his existence and decided the next thing he would be. It was after he had found his concubine, long after he had realized he was no longer capable of tolerating his own people for more than a few short hours at a time, but before he’d begun his efforts to make his beloved Fae like himself.
The queen had been seductive, she had been full of guile, she had been scornful. She had finally tried to use a small part of the Song against him, but he had been prepared for that because, like her, he looked into the future as far as it would permit and foreseen this day.
They held each other at bay with weapons for the first time in the history of their race.
As the imperious, unforgiving matriarch of their race stormed from his fortress, he padlocked his doors against her, vowing that until she gave him what he wanted—the secret to immortality for his beloved—no Seelie would ever again walk his icy halls. Only the queen could dispense the elixir of life. She kept it hidden in her private bower. He wanted that, and more: enough to make the concubine his equal in every way.
I shook myself hard and stopped running. I iced instantly, but it didn’t terrify me. I waited a few moments before taking a step and cracking it.
The memories on the king’s side of the Silver didn’t play out before my eyes like the residue of times past on the concubine’s side. Here they seemed to slide directly into my brain.
It was as if I’d just been two people: One had been running down enormous halls of black ice, and the other had stood in a kingly reception hall, watching the first Fae queen fight with a mighty darkness, probing for weaknesses, manipulating, always manipulating. I knew every detail of her being, what she looked like in her true form and her preferred guises. I even knew the look on her face as she’d died.
Come to me …
I began to run again, down floors of obsidian. The king hadn’t been much for decorating. No windows opened onto the world outside his walls, although I knew they once did, in those early days before the queen turned his planet into a prison. I also knew that once there were simple yet regal furnishings, but now the only embellishments were elaborately carved designs in the ice itself, lending the place a certain austere majesty. If the queen’s court was a gaily painted whore, the king’s was a strange but natural beauty.
I knew every hall, every twist and turn, every chamber. She must have lived here, before he’d made the Silvers for her. Me.
I shivered.
So where was he now?
If I genuinely was his concubine reincarnated, why wasn’t he waiting for me? It seemed I’d been programmed to end up here, one way or another. Who was summoning me?
I am dying.…
My heart constricted. If I’d thought I couldn’t breathe before, it was nothing compared to what those three simple words had just made me feel—that I would give my right arm, my eyeteeth, maybe even twenty years of my life to prevent that from happening.
I skidded to a halt before the gigantic doors to the king’s fortress and stared up. Chiseled of ebon ice, they had to be a hundred feet tall. There was no way I could open them. But the voice was coming from beyond them—out there in the dreaded, icy Unseelie hell.
Elaborate symbols decorated the high arch into which the doors were set, and I suddenly understood there was a pass code. Unfortunately, I couldn’t reach any of the symbols to press them, and there was no convenient hundred-foot ladder propped nearby.
I felt him then.
Almost as if he rose up behind me.
I heard a command come out of my own mouth, words I was incapable of uttering with a human tongue, and the enormous doors swung silently open.
The icy prison was exactly as I’d dreamed it, with a single significant difference.
It was empty.
In my nightmares, the prison had always been inhabited by countless monstrous Unseelie who had squatted high on cliffs above me, hurling chunks of ice down the ravine as if they were bowlers from hell and I was the pin. Others darted low, taking stabs at me with giant beaks.
The moment I’d stepped through the king’s mighty doors, I braced myself for an attack.
It didn’t come.
The stark arctic terrain was a great empty hull of a prison with rusted-out bars.
Even devoid of those once incarcerated, despair clung to every ridge, blew down from mountainous cliffs, and seeped up from bottomless chasms.
I tilted my head back. There was no sky. Cliffs of black ice stretched up farther than the eye could follow. A blue glow emanated from the cliffs—the only light in the place. Blue-black fog gusted from crevices in the cliffs.
The moon would never rise here, the sun would never set. Seasons would not pass. Color would never splash this landscape.
Death in this place would be a blessing. There was no hope, no expectation that life would ever change. For hundreds of thousands of years, the Unseelie had abided in these chilling, killing, sunless cliffs. Their need, their emptiness, had stained the very stuff from which their prison was fashioned. Once, long ago, it had been a fine if strange world. Now it was radioactive to the core.
I knew that if I remained long on this barren terrain, I would lose all will to leave. I would come to believe that this arctic wasteland, this frozen oubliette of misery, was all that existed, all that had ever existed and, worse—was exactly what I deserved.
Was I too late? Was I supposed to have answered this summons long before the prison walls fell? Was that why I kept seeing all those hourglasses with black sand running out?
But I kept hearing the voice in my dreams—and now, when I was awake. That had to mean there was still time.
For what?
I scanned the many caves cut into the sheer façade of jagged black cliffs, frigid homes the Unseelie had clawed into the unforgiving landscape. Nothing stirred. I knew without even looking I would find no creature comforts within. Those without hope didn’t feather nests. They endured. I was startled by a sudden deep sorrow that they’d been reduced to such straits. What a vindictive act on the queen’s part! They might have been brethren to the Light Court, not forced to shiver for eternity in the cold and dark. On sunny beaches, in tropical climes, perhaps they would have become something less monstrous, evolved as the king had. But, no, the vicious queen hadn’t been satisfied with imprisoning them. She’d
wanted
them to suffer. And for what crimes? What had they done to deserve it, other than be born without her consent?
I was disturbed by the turn of my thoughts. I was feeling pity for the Unseelie and thinking the king had evolved.
It had to be this place’s memory residue.
I crunched over iced drifts, scaled jagged outcroppings, and turned down a narrow pathway between cliffs that were hundreds of feet high. The thin fissure through which I passed was another of my childhood terrors. Barely two and a half feet wide, the narrow passage made me feel crushed, claustrophobic, yet I knew my route went this way.
With each step I took, my feelings of bipolarity grew.
I was Mac, who hated Unseelie and wanted nothing more than to see the prison walls restored, the monstrous killers contained.
I was the concubine, who loved the king and all of his children. I even loved this place. There had been happy moments here before the bitch queen broke everything in those final seconds before she died.
Speaking of dying, I should have. I wasn’t breathing. I had no blood flow. No oxygen. I should have been mortally frostbitten the moment I’d passed through the Silver. There was no plausible way I could be walking through these conditions, yet I was.
I was so cold that dying would have been a welcome relief. It was easy to see why my child’s mind had thrilled to the poem “The Cremation of Sam McGee.” The notion of being warm again was nearly beyond my comprehension.