Feverborn (11 page)

When she reached the bed, she rummaged beneath it and removed a small wooden box containing various items she’d collected upon her return to the city. She withdrew a folded piece of paper smudged with chocolate, sat on the bed, undid her hair, and ran her fingers through it.

Time. Both enemy and ally.

They thought she’d lost five and a half years of her life. She hadn’t. She’d lived them.
They
were the ones who’d lost five and a half years of her life. And held it against her.

Absurd.

She turned to gaze at handwritten words she knew by heart.

Kill the clocks, those time-thieving bastards

Haunting every mantel, wrist, and wall

Incessantly screaming our time is gone

Marching to war with us all

Kill the clocks they remind me of people

I once met in passing that pushed me aside

To rush to their train or plane or bus

Never seeing where the true enemy lie

Kill the clocks before they’ve seduced you

Into existing as they do, in shadows of the past

Counting the days as they slip by us

Boxed into a world where nothing ever lasts

Kill the clocks and live in the moment

No cogs or gears can steal our now

When you laugh with me, Mega, time stands still

In that moment, I’m perfect somehow

She touched the chocolate stain. It was a lifetime ago that Dancer had given her this poem, the same night he’d given her a bracelet she’d lost in the Silvers. Securely tied, it had been sacrifice that or her hand. At one point or another she’d sacrificed most everything.

“What a mess,” Shazam muttered crossly. He was sprawled in the middle of the bed, on a mound of pillows, peering over her arm. He yawned, baring enormous teeth and a curled-up black-tipped pink tongue. “Not a bit of it works. It should be ‘lay’ not ‘lie.’ What does manage to flow has been bastardized for the sake of the rhyme.
Awkward
.”

“Those who can’t, critique.”

“As if clocks can be killed, and even if they could I hardly think enlightenment would suddenly descend on such a primitive race, granting the ability to grasp complex temporal truths. Why do you insist on remaining with these three-dimensional people? There’s no question one of you will manage to destroy this world. Sooner rather than later. We should move on
now
. Did you bring me something to eat?” he said plaintively. “Something with blood and a heartbeat?” His whiskers trembled in anticipation.

“There are power bars—”

He sniffed. “A misnomer if I ever heard one. Not only don’t they confer any appreciable power, I’m quite certain they sap mine. They taste bad and make me depressed.” His violet eyes grew dewy.

“Everything makes you depressed. If you ever got out of bed—”

“What point is there in getting out of bed when you make me stay in these stuffy, dirty chambers?”

“I don’t make you do anything. I merely asked—”

“Your ‘asks,’ boulders around my neck,” he said woefully. “I’m as unseen as I was on Olean.”

“That makes two of us.” Refolding the poem along the creases, she tucked it back into the box, stretched out on the bed, sword at her side, and closed her eyes. She didn’t undress. She never undressed. Sleeping was dangerous enough. She’d had enough of waking up to battle nude. Although it had certain advantages—blood was much easier to wash off and it often disconcerted the hell out of a human male enemy—she preferred not to.

Shazam got up immediately, turned around three times,
lay back down then bounded right back up, bristling so hard the mattress vibrated. “You smell bad. Like a predator. I’m not going to be able to sleep with you smelling up my air. Who touched you? Why did they?”

“I’m not taking a shower,” she said without opening her eyes. “I’m too tired. Besides, we’ve both smelled worse.”

“Fine. I’m not cuddling, then.”

“I didn’t ask you to cuddle. I never ask you to cuddle. I don’t even use that word.”

“You don’t have to. Your expects, bars on my cage.”

“I merely suggested in exchange for grooming, since you have all that fur and blaze like a small sun, you might keep me warm. Some of those worlds were cold.” And still, she often felt she had ice in her bones.

“It’s not cold here. And you haven’t groomed me all day. It was a
long
day. I was alone the
whole
time. Because you make me stay in here.”

“You would attract too much attention out there.”

“I would stay in a higher dimension.”

“Until you thought you might get some attention.”

“I
like
attention.”

“I don’t.”

“Did you
ever
like attention?”

“I don’t remember.”

“You’re ashamed of me. Because I’m fat. That’s why you don’t want them to see me.”

She slit her eyes open just barely, lids heavy. “I’m
not
ashamed of you. And you’re not fat.”

“Look at my belly,” he said tearfully, clutching it with both paws and jiggling.

She smiled. “I like your belly. I think it’s a perfectly wonderful belly, all soft and round.” Yesterday, he’d been convinced his ears were too big. The day before that it had been something wrong with his tail.

“Maybe you’re ashamed of yourself. You should be. The fur behind my ears is getting matted.”

“You’re beautiful, Shazam. I’ll groom you tomorrow,” Jada said sleepily.

“It’s
already
tomorrow.”

She sighed and stretched out her hand. Shazam head-butted it ecstatically.

Jada worked her fingers into the long fur behind his ears and began gently detangling. It was beyond her how he got so matted all the time when he slept most of the day and rarely left the bed.

He turned his face up, eyes slanting half closed with bliss and rumbled in his broad chest. “I see you, Yi-yi.”

Yi-yi was what he’d named her that day long ago on Olean when she’d named him. He’d been saying the same words to her every time she awakened or fell asleep for four years, and wouldn’t rest until she said it back.

“I see you, too, Shazam.”

Sometime later they curled together and slept as they had on so many worlds, Shazam’s head nestled on a pillow of her hair in the hollow between her neck and shoulder, one paw wrapped around her arm, one leg sticking straight up in the air, twitching as he dreamed.

B
arrons and I landed a safe distance away from the cordoned-off black hole suspended in the air near the underground entrance to Chester’s nightclub.

Jayne and the Guardians had been busy, commandeered by Ryodan to secure each and every black hole in Dublin. I glanced over my shoulder at it and shivered. They disturbed me on a cellular level, even with my
sidhe-
seer senses muted. Murder was now alarmingly easy: just shove someone into a floating black sphere, no evidence remained. Not that anyone was prosecuting murders at the moment, or even caring, too busy trying to stay alive themselves. The endless line of patrons waiting to get into the club angled sharply away from the roped-off area, apparently liking it no more than I did.

Barrons slid from the Hunter’s back and dropped gracefully to the pavement. It never ceased to amaze me how such a large, massively muscled man could move so lightly, half vanishing into shadow without even seeming to try.

He reached up to help me down, as if my accompanying him was a foregone conclusion.

I had no doubt he planned to head off with Ryodan to do whatever they were going to do about the Dageus situation I’d still not been told about, and I’d be stuck alone at some subclub, sandwiched between black holes above and below, killing time all day, watching various soap operas unfold, waiting for “my man” to come get me and lead me like a dutiful puppet to our next activity.

Not.

Being a woman raised in a rural area of the Deep South—although my mother urged both Alina and me to be independent—I had a tendency to get swept along by a strong man.

Being Barrons, sprung from whatever cataclysm sprung him, he had a tendency to sweep things along without asking—humans falling neatly into the category of “things.”

But I’ve come to understand the difference between nurture and nature, and my nature is vastly different than I once believed. More rigid. Less malleable. More solitary. Less social. It would be easier to embrace what I suspect my true nature is if not for the dark squatter within making me second- and tenth-guess myself.

I’d been invisible and inactive too long. In the streets, I was a target for anyone who’d seen the blasted Dublin dailies. I was considerably less of a target high above them, where those hunting me wanted only to smother me in noxious yellow dust, not control or kill me.

“Go on without me. I want to be in the sky, Barrons.”
The morning was aglow with the faint pastel promise of a dazzling Fae-kissed sunrise.

“I want you inside Chester’s.”

“Because you want to keep me safe. The Unseelie king wanted the concubine safe, too. Built a hell of a cage for her.” I would feel useless and aggravated in Chester’s. I would feel stupendously alive high above Dublin. No contest.

He went still, and for a moment I nearly lost track of him, standing right there in front of me. Big, dark man turned transparent shadow. “I’m not the Unseelie king,” he said tightly.

“And I’m not the concubine. Glad we figured that out.” There’d been a time I’d vacillated between thinking we were both one or the other.

“You’re being hunted, Ms. Lane.”

“What’s new?”

“Feeling invincible because you ate a little Unseelie?” Barrons said sardonically.

Feeling alive because sex with him had reminded me who I was, deep down at the core, glued me back together in some intangible way, but I was not about to tell the arrogant beast that. Boundaries were necessary for a successful relationship. Most relationships aborted in the boundary-defining stage. Not because people demanded what they needed. But because they didn’t, then got resentful about it.

I wanted to walk beside this man for a long time, and to do that I’d have to be able to be completely myself. I was still discovering what that was. I couldn’t say that I’d ever call us a “couple.” But we were together. Committed to that togetherness
as best as we were both able. I wondered what my rules were. Wondered who the woman was that had once been this man’s sun, moon, and stars. If he’d tried to curtail her activities.

“Stay the fuck out of my head, Ms. Lane.”

I blinked. I hadn’t even been aware I was pressing.

“She was her own woman,” he said. “You are, too.”

“That’s what I wanted to know.”

“Ask next time,” he said coolly.

I snorted. “You’ll answer?”

He turned and walked away. Over his shoulder, he tossed, “Try to stay alive, Ms. Lane.”

“You, too, Barrons,” I said softly, as the great beast between my legs flapped its wings and rose, carrying us into the rainbow-streaked morning.

If someone had told me, a year and a day ago when I’d stepped off the plane from Ashford after countless, exhausting layovers, that I would one day be flying above Dublin, breathing in the crisp, briny air, on the back of an icy dragon-like creature that wasn’t from our world, taking stock of my city, I’d have laughed and pointed them in the direction of the nearest psychiatric facility.

I’d have been really wrong.

I’d been really wrong about a lot of things back then.

The lure of watching the sunrise on a Hunter had been impossible to resist. As we sluiced through wet clouds, I nestled close to the frigid base of its wings, with the hot brimstone
of its breath drifting past my face. Clamping the bony ridge between my thighs, I threw my arms wide and trailed my gloved fingertips through crimson, orange, and pink mist. Head thrown back, gazing up at the dawn, I experienced a moment of uncomplicated bliss.

I was just Mac. Not someone’s daughter or lover or sister or walking time bomb. Flying alone in the vast morning, I felt connected to everything, simple and good. Sky above, earth below, fire within.

Although I despised the Fae on my world, I had to admit, their presence made it more beautiful. And therein was the deadliness of their race: seduction via beauty, magic, and the power to grant wishes.

Rays of sun slanted intermittently down as we pierced banks of fantastically colored fog, until the Hunter, perhaps intuiting my innate desire to enjoy the sun at any opportunity, soared straight up and broke the dense cover to float lazily above rainbow-hued cumulus and nimbus stretching as far as the eye could see, granting me a clear view of the star I so worship, whose undiluted presence is so rare in rainy Dublin.

For a time, I stretched out, ignoring the ice beneath my back, soaking up the golden rays on my front, basking like a cat at a warm hearth. Who needed a Fae trip to the beach when I could sunbathe in the sky? But it wasn’t long before the clouds swirled once again in my mind and I reluctantly refocused, urging my ride to take us low again so I could get a Hunter’s-eye view of the city.

We plummeted through mist, dropping down and down
until at last I glimpsed rooftops and streets and gas lamps dotting the overcast, cloudy morning that was a typical day in Dublin.

People were out, heading off to help rebuild in exchange for supplies. Street vendors were once again hawking wares at portable stands, including food and drinks. Guardians stood by the fours near each vendor, reminding me it was far from a safe city yet.

Still, I felt a fierce flash of pride and optimism. The walls had fallen. We’d gotten back up. The ice monster had come. We’d survived and the city had recovered. Now we had black holes. We would figure it out.

“Lower,” I urged. I wanted a closer look at certain parts of town. I wanted to know if any of the Shades had returned, if there were new castes of Unseelie in town, if we had more black holes of considerable size to worry about. I would have gone on a focused hunt for
all
the black holes, but apparently Ryodan had been keeping track of them for some time now. No point in duplicating our efforts.

As we flew through a whiteout of fog above the docks, circling wide to turn back over the city, I suddenly gasped, “No! Stop! Turn the other way!” A flock of my dreaded stalkers had just materialized directly ahead of us, streaking out from behind a bank of low-slung clouds.

But my outcry came too late. We dove straight into the center of the clutch and I squeezed my eyes shut—remnant of some absurd ostrich instinct that if I couldn’t see them maybe they couldn’t see me—bracing myself for their sudden cloying presence on all sides.

Nothing.

I sniffed cautiously. No awful stench, no rustle of leathery cloaks, no creepy chittering.

I opened my eyes a slit.

I was still alone on the Hunter’s back.

I opened them wide and glanced over my shoulder. My ghoulish stalkers were vanishing rapidly behind us.

“Didn’t they see me?” I exclaimed. Was I so small and unexpected astride a Hunter that they’d not noticed me? I nudged the icy beast to get its attention. “Do you know what those things you just flew through are?”

Minions
. It spoke in my mind.
To one nearly as ancient as I
.

“One what? A Hunter?”

Collector
.

“Collector of what?”

Powerful, broken things. It presumes to fix them. It once tried to fix the one you call Unseelie king
. It rumbled with soft laughter.

I couldn’t imagine anything trying to “fix” the Unseelie king. What would it change? Where would it even begin? And how powerful was this “collector” if it could actually tinker with something as omnipotent as the King of the Dark Fae? “I take it that didn’t go well.”

Subjective
.

“Was one of the things we flew through the collector?”

That one does not appear until it has decided. Dispatches minions to assess. Not all things are deemed fixable
.

I bristled. For months now I was being assessed by something’s minions? There was an ancient thing out there that had decided I was “broken” and wasn’t sure whether it
wanted to fix me? That was offensive on too many levels for me to count. I had yet another enemy out there and didn’t even know what it looked like.

But it had been watching me.

All this time, through countless hooded eyes. Pressing close to me, sleeping beside me in Chester’s, monitoring my every move. And when I’d killed its minions, it had simply dispatched more. Always watching. Until the Book made me invisible and the collector had apparently lost the ability to keep track of me.

I snatched a hasty glance at my hand, fearing the worst. But no, I was still visible. Then why hadn’t they noticed me?

“Does it have a name?” I wanted something concrete to call my unknown enemy. Something to research, ask around about. Ryodan had once said my ghouls had attended the Unseelie king in his private quarters. Now I knew why. They’d scouted him, too, in a time long past.

Sweeper
.

A simple word but I had sudden chills at the base of my spine. I’d heard it before. The Dreamy-Eyed Guy, one of the Unseelie king’s many skins, had recently said, “ ’Ware the Sweeper, BG. Don’t talk to its minions either.” The damn king had known all along I was being hunted by it. And that was all the warning he gave me?

“I really hate the Unseelie king,” I muttered.

You are
.

“Am not,” I groused. I’d laid that to rest. I might have been contaminated by the peculiar half-mad being but I wasn’t him.

Were you not, you would not fly
.

“Tell me about the Sweeper,” I said. “Tell me everything.”

It said nothing.

“Have you seen it?”

The Hunter moved its great head from side to side, mouth open, straining wind through its teeth.

“Do you know anyone who knows more about it?”

Perhaps the one that inhaled the child
.

“K’Vruck!”

It rumbled again, laughing at me.
Name this. Name that
.

“Do you know where K’Vruck is?”

Nightwindflyhighfree
.

“Could you find him?”

I do not hunt for you. Not-king
.

I sighed. “If you see him, will you tell him I’m looking for him?”

Again there was no reply. I made a mental note to be more circumspect in the future about telling the Hunters I wasn’t the king. If they sensed something in me, they accorded respect, I wanted that respect. And cooperation.

I leaned forward over the Hunter’s back. Something had just caught my eye, a thing I couldn’t believe we’d forgotten.

“Fly low and land there.” I pointed to the center of the city’s largest Dark Zone.

Months ago, V’lane/Cruce had rebuilt the dolmen at 1247 LaRuhe in order to help the Keltar free Christian from the Unseelie prison. And there it stood, towering and ominous, behind the uncharacteristically formal house, smack in the middle of the crater left when Cruce had destroyed the
warehouse it once occupied. The Highlanders had either neglected to dismantle the stone gate to the prison when they were done with it, or it had been rebuilt again.

I shivered. I’d walked the Unseelie prison. It hadn’t been empty. There’d been things lurking in blue-black crevices, terrible things that hadn’t ventured forth despite having been granted their freedom.

All portals between my world and Faery: bad.

And if I were successful, I’d have the Hunter fly me to the abbey, where I’d knock down those stones, too. Perhaps I’d be able to convince my ride to assist, lend a massive wing or perhaps char them with its smoky breath.

Nor do I perform tricks for you
, it said in my mind.

The Hunter touched down in a wide intersection, flapping debris into funnel clouds with its giant leathery wings, showering the cobbled streets with black ice.

“Stay here until I get back.” I stripped off the gloves I was wearing, checked to make sure my spear was tucked into the makeshift holster I’d created with my scarf, and hurried down the street toward what had once been the Lord Master’s house.

The estate at 1247 LaRuhe was exactly the same as it had been last time I saw it, extravagant, forgotten, and as out of place in the casually dilapidated, industrial neighborhood as slender Kat had looked in powerful, forbidding Kasteo’s subterranean gym.

The first time I’d come here, I was following my sister’s
last clue, chiseled as she lay dying. I believed it would lead me to the Book she’d wanted me to find, and instead discovered her boyfriend, learned he was the Big Bad ushering Unseelie into our world, and was nearly killed by one of his bloodthirsty companions. Six months later, I’d visited the house again, because Darroc had taken my parents captive and I was hell-bent on freeing them.