Feverborn (13 page)

I rapped the counter sharply, ordering a drink. I raised my whiskey when it came as if to make a toast. “Sounds like you have a mystery. I’ve got one of my own. What do you say you help me solve mine and I’ll see what I can do about solving yours?”

He turned his head slowly and looked at me.

I dropped my gaze instantly.

He laughed softly. “That bad, Mac?”

I inhaled deeply and snatched a quick glance from beneath my lashes. I’d seen this look before, times a thousand, as I rolled in the Unseelie king’s great wings. I lowered my gaze again and steeled myself. Then looked up and straight at him, right in the eyes.

For about two seconds.

“Not bad, Christian,” I said, looking down at my drink. “Just different. Intense. Like looking up at stars. We’ll get used to it.” I paused then added, “You know I can get into
more places in this nightclub than you can. I can keep an eye out. Go poking around later tonight, see if I can learn anything about your uncle.”

I had no intention of telling him. My loyalty is one hundred percent to Barrons. Period. The end. That is one of the few things I’m absolutely certain about anymore. Our bond. Our two-person religion. But I would certainly see if I could get Barrons to get Ryodan to consider letting Christian know. At some point. I knew what it felt like to lose family. I’d blamed myself a dozen different ways for all the things I hadn’t done that might have saved Alina. I could only imagine how badly Christian was blaming himself for his uncle’s death.

After a measured pause, he clinked his glass to mine. “Perhaps we can be of use to each other. You should know, lass, I’m far from a pro at it. It was easier before my stay on those cliffs.”

“Because you didn’t turn full Unseelie?”

“Aye. I suspect. I can do it, but it’s more difficult. I tend to give myself a wide margin. Where is it you’re wanting to go?”

A
shford, Georgia: population 3,979, covering 8.9 square miles, boasting over 100 original antebellum homes, housing 964 families. It’s nestled in the prettiest part of down-Dixie I’ve ever seen.

Of course, I may be biased.

I love every nook and cranny of my town.

I’d not only toured all the historic homes decorated from pillars to eaves at Christmastime—Alina and I loved the holidays—but we’d practically lived in those atmospheric old homes on sultry afternoons and weekends, hanging out with our friends on bead-board-ceilinged porches with slow paddling fans, on white wicker swings, drinking sweet tea and believing nothing would ever change.

I’d eaten in every quaint restaurant and partied in every bar. I’d attended prom at the local high school and gone to concerts on the square. I knew every shop owner, and was evenly moderately acquainted with the politics of the region.

Given the size of my town, one would think it boring, filled with average people living moderately, but with its rich history, expensive, sprawling historic homes, and easy access to Atlanta, Ashford drew a lot of high-powered transplants from large, exciting cities—like my parents, who were seeking a simpler way of life yet enjoyed the finer things.

Mom and Dad bought a 1905 neoclassical revival mansion that had fallen into disrepair, surrounded by old, enormous wax-blossomed magnolia trees, and had lovingly restored it over the years. It boasted a typically southern, generous front porch, palatial white columns, an expansive yet warm and cozy sunroom off the back, and, of course, the pool I’d so enjoyed in the backyard. It was an idyllic, happy, safe place to grow up. Crime was virtually nonexistent in our town.

The Ashford cemetery occupied twenty-two acres, with a large Confederate memorial full of unknown soldiers, a few smallish mausoleums, manicured gardens, well-maintained walkways, and a tiered fountain.

It seconded as a park for the locals, with its gently sloping hills, flowering bushes, and crisp, cool lake on the back acreage. On the weekends you could find half the parents in town power-walking through gravestones. Divided into sections: the old cemetery, the new, and the memorial, we’d had Alina interred on the south side, in the modern portion, with a lovely marble marker.

It was late afternoon when Christian and I arrived in Ashford, or rather
near
Ashford. It had taken me hours to sneak back to Chester’s dodging every person and Fae I saw, ducking into doorways to avoid Guardians, once, reduced to hiding
in a trash Dumpster. Between my recent shock and my face plastered everywhere around the city, I’d been in no mood for confrontation. Near Chester’s, though, I’d been unable to avoid it and tested my skill at Voice that Barrons had taught me, for the first time on strangers. It worked beautifully. They obeyed me instantly, turning around and heading the other way. My hastily shouted,
And don’t breathe a word about seeing me to anyone. Forget everything about this day forever!
hadn’t necessarily been the wisest choice of words, but I was operating on the fly. I hated the thought of people walking around out there with a whole day missing from their memory. I knew what it felt like to lose time, Pri-ya, to question your own mental faculties, and resolved to be more precise in the future.

Christian had been telling the truth about his sifting abilities. I think part of the problem was he’d never been to the States before. The other Unseelie hadn’t exactly volunteered information about his new powers. He was an outsider to both races. Everything for him was trial and error. He frankly admitted he had no clue how he was “supposed” to sift. Places he’d been were the easiest. He hadn’t yet figured out tracking by person but heard he was capable of it.

We’d had to stop first at BB&B, an easy sift for him, where I rummaged for a map in the wreckage and showed him where I wanted him to take me. As there was no detailed topography of the town—it was far too small for that—we ended up smack in the middle of a cornfield and had to walk twenty minutes to get to the cemetery. By the time we arrived, I was dripping sweat. Just another hot August day in Georgia: sun scorching, humidity thick.

He’d offered to try to sift us closer but we materialized alarmingly near a colossal live oak dripping Spanish moss—as in half an inch from the massive trunk. While
he
might survive manifesting in the middle of solid wood, I wasn’t so sure about myself, so I’d opted to use my feet from there. I had a good deal of nervous energy to burn off anyway.

“Why are we here again?” he said.

“I want to check on something,” I muttered. I hadn’t bothered to tell him that I planned to dig up a grave. I wasn’t entirely certain he would have complied with my request for transport.

I glanced over my shoulder. He was trailing behind, looking at everything.

“Christ,” he said, sounding disgusted, “everything is so new here.”

I would have laughed if I hadn’t been in such a pissy mood. I’d always thought my town dripped history but ours was a few hundred years old, and in Scotland his was a few thousand. I guess when you grow up with prehistoric standing stones in your backyard, American towns seemed prepubescent.

I was pleased to see that V’lane/Cruce’s protection of Ashford when the walls had fallen had indeed kept it remarkably unchanged. Lights glowed in windows, there were no wrecked cars blocking the streets or signs of random rioting and carnage. No Dark Zones, no Unseelie lurking in the alleys, not one husk of the dead tumbling down desolate streets.

I supposed it was pretty much the way it had been before the walls fell—my town was too provincial and unexciting to draw the Fae.

It was as if the war between our races had given the place as wide a berth as Sherman’s armies when the troops made the devastating march from Atlanta, after burning it to the ground. Although Ashford hadn’t been torched by Sherman’s marauding army determined to “make Georgia howl,” half the town center burned to ash in the late 1890s, and they’d rebuilt it with a plan for revenue, planting a large number of shops and restaurants arranged around an enormous, beautifully landscaped square.

We passed the Brickyard where I used to bartend.

I barely spared it a glance.

My head was jam-packed with images of my dead sister, curled on the floor, screaming. Afraid of me. Crying out for Darroc.

It was too much to deal with. It was one thing to see an illusion of my dead sister, another to see her apparently terrified of me for some reason. That moment when her joy had turned to horror was scorched into my brain, eclipsing all my good mental photographs of her.

What sadistic game was the Book playing?

“See that hardware store?” I said to Christian, pointing. It was open for business, I supposed on the barter system, but I was in no mood to see anyone I knew. “Can you sift in and grab me a shovel?”

He shot me a look that couldn’t have more plainly said,
What the bloody hell do you think I am? Your little fetch-it boy?

“Please,” I added. “And make it two.”

One brow arched. “You think I’m going to dig?”

“I was hoping.”

“You do know I can simply make the earth move, Mac. Even as a mere druid, I had that much skill. What do you want moved?”

“Silly me,” I said dryly. I’d not even considered that Christian
was
the
Bewitched
I’d teased Barrons about being. Truth was, I’d rather been looking forward to some physical labor. That damn steam I needed to burn off.

“Come on,” I said, sighing. “The cemetery’s this way.”

“Great. A bloody cemetery,” he said, and matched my sigh. “I’m never going to get away from Death.”

There were no flowers on my sister’s grave. My town puts plastic bouquets everywhere in the cemetery, which is attractive from a distance but I always thought was kind of gruesome close up. Embalmed blossoms for embalmed people.

I paused at the foot of her grave and closed my eyes. It was over a year ago I’d stood here in the pouring rain, matching it tear for drop, trying to make sense of my life, trying to envision a future—any kind of future—for myself without her.

If I’d known back then how much worse it was going to get, I might have stretched on her grave and never gotten up.

I opened my eyes and read the inscription on her headstone, although I had no need. My parents had been too distraught to think, nodding blankly as all their friends murmured sadly and too many times to count, while clutching their children close,
No parent should outlive their child
.

I’d made all the funeral decisions.

Alina McKenna Lane. Beloved Daughter and Sister
. And
beneath it, in flowing calligraphy:
If love could have saved you, you would have lived forever
.

Beside me, Christian snorted. “You want to dig up your sister’s grave?”

“Yes,” I said flatly.

“Why, lass?”

“I want to see her body.”

“That’s twisted, even for you.”

“Says the man who’s stalking his uncle’s corpse. You said you could move the dirt. Can you raise her casket?” I glanced around the cemetery. “And somehow glamour us so those people walking over there, staring at us, don’t see what we’re doing?”

“Bloody hell, you better find me solid information on my uncle, Mac.”

“Do all Fae get testy when humans ask them to perform minor tasks?”

“I’m not Fae,” he growled, and moved to stand beside me.

“Ow!” I snapped. “What did you just do?” I’d felt a sharp tug on my hair, as if a cluster of strands had been yanked out at the roots.

“Sorry, lass. My wings. I’m not always certain where they are. Looks like some of that red stuff in your hair is still sticky.”

I rubbed my head where it stung. I didn’t feel any paint.

Then I forgot all about my hair when the ground in front of me began to tremble and churn, as if something enormous was rising from the bowels of the earth. It shook and shivered and dirt poured up and tumbled away from the burial plot as the casket emerged from the ground.

Christian was pretty darned handy.

“I don’t know why you’re bothering, Mac,” he said irritably.

“I need to see that she’s dead.”

He gave me a strange look with those strange eyes. “There’s nothing dead in there, lass.”

“I
put
something dead in there,” I snapped. “And it had damn well better still be there.”

“Whatever.” He shrugged.

When the casket settled next to the gaping hole in the earth, I stepped close and ran my hands over the lid.

Cool wood. My sister’s home now.

I dusted it lovingly, brushing away clods of dirt.

Months ago I’d stood with Christian near another casket, both determined to open it and dreading it, just like today. But that had been a coffin of ice, containing the concubine/Seelie queen.

This casket was mortal, not Fae. I remembered the day I’d chosen it, the fancy one with the elaborate inlaid burl, the elegant pin-striped cream silk. Funny how you obsessed over funeral details when you lost someone you loved, as if they might somehow see all the care you were putting into the last things you would ever be able to do for them. I’d chosen the one with the many hidden compartments, into which I tucked treasure after treasure, so she could take them out in Heaven and smile. I know, foolish to an extreme. Assuming there was a Heaven and assuming she went, I highly doubted the coffin went, too. It had been a time of madness. It had cost a fortune. I hadn’t cared. Only the best for Alina.

I remembered closing the lid myself, I’d even insisted on
turning the crank to seal it. I’d tucked the key into my pocket for some absurd reason. As if I might someday visit her, dig her up, and talk to her or something. That key was in a jewelry box in my bedroom, a mile away.

“I need you to break the seal,” I told Christian. “Make it open.”

The casket exhaled a soft plosive and the lid shifted slightly.

I stood there every bit as woodenly as I’d stood there a little over a year ago, feeling as cold and hard as her new home. Tears spilled from my eyes.

With shaking hands, I raised the embossed upper panel of the casket.

I shouldn’t have been surprised.

By this time I’d thought myself beyond all surprise.

There was nothing inside.

I’d lost my sister.

Now I’d lost her corpse, too.