Feverborn (15 page)

She wasn’t oblivious to the attention. She simply didn’t care.

I glanced at Ryodan. I don’t know why. I guess I’m always
mining for gold where there is none. His face was as smooth as Jada’s.

But those eyes, those cool silver eyes, were flashing with a similar banked heat. He looked up. Down. Up again. Lingered. Then sharply away.

I thought for a moment Jada and Dancer were coming to see us but they detoured and went right instead of straight.

“Odd way to dress for an investigation,” Barrons murmured.

“She’s not Dani anymore,” Ryodan clipped.

“Would you rather she had on jeans and sneakers?” I said.

“I’d rather she had on a fucking suit of armor,” Ryodan said coolly.

And a chastity belt, if I could read the look in a man’s eyes. And I could. “She’s a woman, Ryodan,” I said softly. “Get used to it. Dancer was right. We need to accept her.”

“Don’t tell me what to get used to, Mac. I’m the one that breaks all the rules, remember.”

I stared at him.

“This morning, with Christian at the abbey, you were thinking about when you watched us down in the dungeon. You were in my office, watching my monitors.”

“Stay the hell out of my head!” I barked. Or had there been a roach or three, lurking beneath his desk, reporting back?

“Don’t give it away so easily. You saw the forbidden.”

“You
did
the forbidden,” I said flatly. “And believe me, I keep quiet about a
lot
of things I see.”

He looked at Barrons. “She knows about the Highlander.”

Barrons said, “Yet said nothing and could have.”

“Did
you
skim it from my head, too?” I asked Barrons sourly.

“I accord you greater respect. And henceforth, Ryodan will, too.” It was a warning.

Ryodan said to me, “If you turn invisible again, I’ll ward you from my club. Permanently.” To Barrons, he said, “I’ll break as many rules as you do, brother.”

I supposed he also knew somehow that I was aware they were brothers, since he was no longer hiding it from me.

None of us said anything then. I sipped my drink and glanced back at Jada, but she was gone. “Speaking of the Highlander,” I couldn’t help but meddle, “you should tell Christian. He may be able to help.” I should have left it there, because the only thing that would motivate Ryodan was if there was something in it for him, but I couldn’t help adding, “Besides, it’s his family. He deserves to know.”

“Be wise, Mac. Never mention to me that you know again.”

“Fine,” I said irritably. Then, “Shit!” The Alina-thing was on the dance floor, turning in a circle, standing tall as if to peer over the sea of heads. Looking for someone. Looking as distraught and worried as she had the first time I’d seen her. Looking as if she’d been crying her eyes out. Looking so achingly like my sister that I wanted to burst into tears myself.

Beside me, Barrons tensed. I glanced at him. He was staring where I’d been staring.

“That woman looks like she could be your sister, Ms. Lane.”

He could see the Alina-thing, too?

I was so flabbergasted for a moment that I couldn’t draw breath to speak. “Wait, how do you know what my sister looks like?”

“Your albums. The photo you put in your parents’ mailbox, Darroc later hung on my door.”

Ah, I’d forgotten about that.

“Perhaps a Fae throwing a glamour?” he said, assessing me.

I hadn’t thought of that. If he could see her, too…well, I’d positively cotton to the idea if I hadn’t opened an empty casket in Ashford earlier today.

But…maybe it was a Fae and the same Fae had stolen her body just to play some kind of sick trick on me. Both Seelie and Unseelie could cast flawless glamour. And so long as I had Unseelie flesh in me, I couldn’t use my
sidhe
-seer senses to see past it.

Well, damn. That was a darned plausible explanation.

Except, I realized glumly, the first night I’d seen the illusion had been before I’d partaken of forbidden fruit.

I had no idea what to think.

Barrons could see my illusion.

Did Ryodan see it, too? I turned to look at him. He was staring directly at her. “Lovely woman,” he murmured.

“Stay away from her,” I snapped before I could stop myself. Whatever this thing was, I simply wouldn’t be able to stand seeing Ryodan get it on with something that looked like my sister. “I mean,” I added hastily, “because we have more important things to do.”

“You made time for it.”

“A Fae?” Barrons prompted again. Prompting was an unusual demonstration of interest on his part. Uh-oh.

“Who knows? Could be.” I shrugged. “Then again, don’t they say everyone has a doppelganger somewhere?”

Barrons gave me a level look.
Something you want to talk about?

Nope. Not a thing
, I said lightly.

Another thing I love about the man: he dropped it. That was going to be a hard favor for me to return when it was time.

“I assume you’re ready to look in that lake,” Ryodan said, tossing back the last of his drink.

I was only too happy to escape the apparently visible-by-all illusion on the dance floor before we collided again, further wrecking my tenuous grasp on reality. Alina was dead. I knew it in my bones. I knew it with utter and complete certainty. And if she wasn’t dead, nothing I thought I knew could be trusted. Not one damn thing. Easier to turn away from the illusion than confront it.

I tossed back my drink and stood.

Why not? I thought acerbically. Could things get any worse?

I
should never think that.

I know better.

Still, I persist, and every damned time the universe seizes the challenge on bullish horns, stomps its hoof, and snorts, “Hey, MacKayla Lane just said she doesn’t think things can get worse. We’ll show
her
!”

Ryodan took us to the dungeon level I’d glimpsed yesterday on his office monitors. Not to Dageus’s cell but to a small stone room down a narrow passageway.

I trailed my fingers along the cool damp stone of the corridor, skimming a marbling of brightly colored moss on the walls. Apart from the nearly iridescent algae staining a strangely luminous skein on the stone, it was gloomy, gray, and cold in the subterranean chamber.

I despise being underground. I wondered if anyone was with Dageus or if they’d left him alone to deal with his transformation.
Although I listened intently, I heard no sound, no anguished baying, no tortured groans.

“Uh, Barrons, why are we in the dungeon?” I asked, looking around for ancient manacles bolted into the stone or something of the like, perhaps an iron maiden or a few bloodstained racks.

“Precaution. Nothing more. If you go, as you call it, batshit crazy, there are fewer people to kill down here.”

“I’d still leave through the club.” Meaning I could still destroy everyone within it. “Maybe we should go out into the middle of a field. Far from any town.”

He slanted me a look.
You’re not going to lose it. You’re not going to open the Book tonight. We merely want to get the lay of your inner landscape
.

I heaved an audible sigh of relief. “Then let’s get on with it.” I shot Ryodan a look as he closed us in the narrow stone cell. “Since you know I know everything, what the heck is the deal with Kat and Kasteo?”

“Another thing a wiser woman wouldn’t mention.”

“I’m only mentioning it to
you
, not anyone else,” I said. “So, what gives?”

He kicked a straight-backed chair toward me. “Sit.”

I clamped my mouth shut on
I prefer to stand
. No point in wasting energy just to vent my dissatisfaction with the current state of my life on everyone around me.

I sat. After a moment I let my lids flutter closed, although I didn’t need to. I remembered all too well, during that time I’d been a darker version of myself, letting my eyes go only slightly out of focus to drift into the place of power I called my dark glassy lake. Scooping up runes floating on the surface,
power I’d naïvely believed my birthright, some part of my
sidhe
-seer heritage, only to learn they’d been temptations strewn by the
Sinsar Dubh
, gifts to seduce and entice.

Never mine at all.

I wondered, for perhaps the first time with my intellect, precisely where my inner lake actually was. Talking about it to Ryodan made me perceive it differently. Instead of seeming normal, I’d found it peculiar.

Why did I have a lake inside me? Did every
sidhe
-seer? Was it simply my chosen visualization of an inner power source, different for all of us? With constant calamity around me, I’d never gotten time to sit down with the sisters of my bloodline to ask questions, compare notes.

I frowned. Now that I’d added my brain to the mix, trying to pinpoint the metaphysical coordinates of my dark glassy lake—as if I might establish some quantum latitude and longitude—was difficult. The place proved abruptly elusive.

I inhaled deep, exhaled slow, willing myself to relax.
Sink, sink, don’t think
, I murmured in my mind.

Nothing.

Not even a puddle in sight anywhere.

I opened my eyes, thinking I needed to refocus and try again. Barrons gave me a look. “Hang on,” I said, “give me a minute.”

“Don’t play games with me, Mac,” Ryodan warned.

“I’m not,” I said. “It’s not easy. I’ve spent months trying to stay away from the place and now you expect me to dive right in. I’ve trained myself to never even
think
about it.” Although I didn’t always succeed.

Letting my gaze shift slightly out of focus, I mentally envisioned a giant lake, glassy and deep. I paid careful attention to the details, the pebbled shore, the faint light from what seemed to be a distant sky. I lavished attention on the sleek black surface. Told myself I couldn’t wait to swim, climbed up on a large rock, and when I’d gotten the scene exactly right, closed my eyes, leapt into the air, and dove.

I crashed into the ground, hard.

Not one bloody drop of water anywhere.

“Fuck,” I snapped, rubbing my head. It hurt, as if I’d actually hit a rock with it. And my arms felt bruised. I looked at Barrons. “I can’t find it.”

“Try again,” Ryodan ordered.

I did.

And again.

And again and again.

Driving us all crazy with repeated failure.

“You’re too tense,” Ryodan growled. “For fuck’s sake, you don’t stalk an orgasm, you enjoy its arrival.”

“Bloody talk about bloody orgasms with your own bloody woman not mine,” Barrons said tightly. “You don’t know a thing about her orgasms and never will.”

Ryodan shot him a dark look. “It was a metaphor.”

“I never stalk an orgasm. I don’t have to with Barrons,” I said.

“Too the fuck much information, Mac,” Ryodan said.

“You’re the one who brought up orgasms.”

“And he never will again,” Barrons said pointedly.

“Everybody shut up. I’m trying to concentrate.” Now I
was thinking about orgasms. I considered Ryodan’s advice. Maybe I
was
trying too hard.

An hour later I was dripping sweat, my head was pounding, and my arms felt like I’d been delivering karate chops to brick walls.

“I can’t get there,” I finally said wearily. “I don’t know why.”

Ryodan regarded me through narrowed eyes. “You said you thought it was a
sidhe
-seer place.”

I inclined my head, waiting.

“Barrons said you ate—”

“Aha! Unseelie flesh!” I pounced on the excuse, enormously relieved. “So it
is
a
sidhe
-seer place and that’s why I can’t find it! I can’t possibly see my lake right now!” I’d begun to fear the
Sinsar Dubh
was so quiet of late because it had been stealthily rearranging my internal furniture, hiding things I might want to use, planting booby traps. Could it do that?

Ryodan rolled his eyes. “Outstanding. Meet Mac, the junkie.”

“I am not.”

“How many times have you eaten it in the past week,” he demanded.

“Twice. But I
had
to the first time because I was going down the cliff, and the Guardians were shooting at me the second time,” I defended.

“I’m sure you’ll ‘have to’ the next time, too.”

“I am
not
an addict.”

“How the bloody hell long does the high last anyway,” Ryodan growled.

I shrugged. “Dunno exactly. Three days or so. I should be myself again in a couple of days.” Immensely irritable and tired but myself.

He looked at Barrons. “Don’t let her eat it again.”

“She makes her own decisions,” he said. But he shot me a look:
We need information, Ms. Lane. I would prefer you refrain for a time
.

Great. One of my two ball-fortifying techniques that were keeping me strong—sex with Barrons and eating Unseelie flesh—was now lost.

I was just thinking what an anticlimactic night this was turning out to be when Ryodan opened the door.

Christian MacKeltar stood on the other side.

Three hours earlier…

J
ada didn’t have to wear the red dress.

It was a choice.

Men on every planet, in every realm, Fae or human, shared inherent characteristics.

They didn’t like to kill a beautiful woman.

At first.

They wanted other things. At first.

Beauty was one of many weapons.

It was why she’d abandoned her ragged haircut to grow it long again. But curly and wild, it had been far too easy for an opponent to grab a fistful, a liability in any battle. She’d learned to scrape it back, high, out of her face. Sometimes tuck a low braid into the collar of her shirt.

She didn’t have to dance either.

That, too, was a choice.

But when she walked into Chester’s, one of the Nine caught her eye across the dance floor and beckoned with such in-your-face enthusiasm and happiness to see her that she couldn’t resist.

Lor.

The man was a beast. A primitive caveman who loved being what he was. Blunt, blatantly sexual, with a voracious appetite for rock and roll, brawls, and hot blondes, he was prone to proposition a woman by saying, “Hey, wanna fuck?” and scored a ridiculous amount of the time with his Viking good looks and that hint of something dirty-kinky-raw just beneath the surface, locked, loaded, and ready to blast a woman’s inhibitions to dust.

They’d had something when she was younger.

Not
that
kind of something.

A bond that had been innocent yet knowing. An awareness that they were two people who were precisely what they were, no apologies, no excuses.

He’d appreciated who she’d been then, and from the look on his face, he was willing to appreciate her now.

He’d once brought her steak and potatoes. Had trailed her, making sure she stayed safe. He’d offered advice the night Ryodan dragged her off, after she’d defied him and slaughtered half the patrons in one of his subclubs. Helped her escape the room upstairs when the boss locked her in.

He’d encouraged her impulsiveness and belligerence, and for that reason alone, she should avoid him. She’d turned her back on those character flaws years ago.

But the music was seductive and the song playing was one
of her favorites, and despite the icy facade she projected, she knew the heat she had inside. She didn’t deny it. Denying would have made her weaker.

Heat was strength. It was resilience. She channeled it, shaped it into purpose, like everything else.

Sexuality, too, was power.

Lor moved toward her, pushing through the crowd, completely ignoring the many hot blondes looking his way, his grin wide and only for her.

She approached him, allowing herself a faint smile. They met in the middle of the dance floor.

“Hey, kid,” he purred. “Looking good, honey. Nice to see you back.”

“You, too, Lor.” She could count on two fingers those who’d been happy to see her.

“Fuck, I always look good. I was born looking good. Dance?”

With Hozier inviting his lover to take him to church, she moved into Lor’s body with effortless grace, following the tempo of his hips, the muscle of his powerful torso. He danced from the groin, as most powerful, centered men did, easy to match.

On one of the worlds she’d briefly visited, nature itself had danced, sinuous vines, draping from trees, moving to a rhythm she’d not been able to hear. At first she was wary, regarding them as threats, but after nearly a week on that world, she’d seen a slender trailing plant heal a wounded animal with its dance.

And one night, under three full moons, she’d taken off her clothes and gone native, pretended to be part of the vegetation,
imitating the sensual undulations until she finally found the rhythm with her body.

It had healed her, too. The wounds on her back had closed, expelling the infection, leaving only scars.

Now, she half closed her eyes and followed the lead of Lor’s hips, dropped her head back, arched her neck, and gave herself over completely to the music. The body had needs that couldn’t be ignored. It needed to run, to fight, to eat, to breathe, to move. There were other needs, too, which now that she was back on this world, surrounded by so many people with complicated feelings, had been making their presence known. She wasn’t yet ready to deal with them.

Nothing, no one, had touched her for a long time. It was difficult to process Lor’s body so close to hers, moving in tandem with her own.

So she pretended he was a vine and she was dancing in a great, dark forest, safer than most places because there were no upright creatures on that world, and the dance was only for her, to let her soul breathe, to revel in being alive one more day. In her mind, moonlight kissed her skin, a gentle, fragrant breeze rippled her hair. Abandoned to the moment, the beat, the freedom of thinking no further ahead or back than now.

“Aw, honey, keep dancing like that, you’re gonna get me killed,” Lor said close to her ear.

“I doubt that,” she said dryly.

“Figure it’s worth dying for. If only to get off on the look on that fuck’s face.”

She didn’t dissemble. Didn’t ask who. She knew who, and he knew she did. Lor was a hammer. He called it like he saw
it, pounded words like nails into conversation and didn’t care what anyone thought of him. “And what is the look on ‘that fuck’s face’?” she murmured. “He’s behind me. I can’t see him.”

Lor laughed and spun them so she could see Ryodan standing on the edge of the dance floor, tall, powerful, dressed in dark slacks and a white shirt, sleeves rolled back, cuff glinting. Watching, thunderclouds in his eyes.

Once she’d seen him laugh.

Once she’d watched him fuck. A lifetime ago.

Their eyes locked. He took two steps toward her and she flared her nostrils, cut him a cool look.

He stopped.

Lor slid an arm around her waist, turned her away.

“Then why didn’t he find me?” she said. She wanted to know how hard he’d searched. How he’d reacted. If he’d mounted a rescue and how extensive it had been. She’d had no one to ask that wouldn’t promptly report back to him.

Lor wouldn’t carry the tale. They’d shared secrets in the past.

“Aw, kid, he tried. As soon as he heard you were missing. We didn’t know you were gone for a coupla weeks. Mac didn’t tell Ryodan right away.”

Jada cultivated fluidity, resisting the urge to tense. “Mac didn’t tell you right away that I went into the hall?”

Lor shook his head.

She was momentarily breathless. She’d believed they were all out hunting for her. Worrying. Moving mountains to find her. She’d waited. Living by WWRD: What Would Ryodan Do.

“Boss said Mac was chompin’ at the bit to go after you but Barrons vetoed it. Said if she followed you through you’d just keep running.”

True, she acknowledged. She’d been running as if the hounds of Hell were on her heels that night, determined to outrun everything, especially herself. She wouldn’t have stopped if Mac had followed her. She’d have leapt into the nearest mirror in the hall. But truth, the pernicious bitch, didn’t make her feel better. “Why didn’t she tell Ryodan?”

“Dunno. You gotta ask her that. But, honey, it’s not like those two get along real well. They sure weren’t spending any time together. Maybe she was giving you time to find your way out. Maybe she had her own problems.”

Jada did the math. She’d been gone five and a half years and they hadn’t even started looking for her until two weeks
after
she’d gotten back. She’d spent those weeks coldly combing the country, amassing her wandering army of
sidhe
-seers who’d come to Dublin for one reason or another, inspiring their loyalty with her strength and laser focus, implementing the plans she’d made wandering through Hell, trying to figure out how to regain what she’d lost by coming home. Years that felt like centuries had passed for her. It had been a single week for those she’d counted friends.

She closed her eyes, finding her center. The place where she felt no pain, only purpose. When she’d fixed herself firmly there, she opened her eyes, kissed Lor lightly on the cheek and thanked him for the dance.

Then she turned to find Ryodan, deliberately late for their meeting.

He was gone.

“I thought we were having a meeting,” Jada said as she entered Ryodan’s office.

“We are,” he said, not taking his eyes from the monitor he was watching beyond her head.

“I’d hardly call the two of us a meeting.”

“What would you call us?”

Us, he’d said. With interrogative inflection. As if there was an “us.” Once, she’d thought them Batman and Robin, two superheroes, saving the world. “Was that a bona-fide question with proper punctuation?” she mocked.

“Dani needed things to fight. I was the logical choice. Even something so small as improper punctuation kept her distracted.”

“What are you saying? That you’re not really endlessly irritating—you just irritated me endlessly to keep me occupied?”

“No need to go hunting dragons when the one right next to you keeps yanking your chain. And you had so very many chains to yank back then.”

She stared at him, but he still wasn’t looking at her. That was exactly what he’d done, kept her racing from one thing to the next, provoking her so incessantly that even when she wasn’t with him, she’d been fuming about how much he annoyed her, planning how to one-up him the next time.

Or impress him.

Get him to look at her with respect, admiration.

God, she’d hero-worshipped this man! Constructed endless fantasies around him.

He looked at her then. Sharply. Hard. And she belatedly remembered his ability to skim minds, hoped she hadn’t thought that last part loud and on the top of her brain.

On the off chance she had, she tossed him something to throw him off course.

“I hated you,” she said coolly.

“You were an explosion of unchecked desires.”

“You were a complete void of them.” Not always, though. Just around her.

“Now you’re an implosion of repressed passion. Find the middle ground.”

You’re not the boss of me
, rose to the tip of her tongue, and she bit it off so hard she drew blood, hating that a mere month in this world could unravel her so much, send her sliding down the slipperiest of slopes right back into who and how she’d once been.

“Never tell me how you think I should be,” she said. “You don’t know a thing about who I am now. You don’t know what I lived through and you don’t know the choices I had to make.”

He inclined his head, waiting.

“Oh, that’s not happening. I’m never going to tell you,” she said.

“Never is a long time. I’ll be here at the end of it.” He stood up, reached in his drawer, pulled out an object, and offered it to her.

She arched a brow. “A phone?”

“I can’t track you on other worlds. If you allow me to tattoo you again, and carry the phone always, you will never get lost anywhere I can’t find you.”

Lost. That was how she’d felt. So damned lost. She’d fallen off the face of her earth. The worlds had been so strange, many of them hostile, with so little food that she’d often had to crawl her way through a Silver to her next hope of a world, too hungry, too fevered, to have a whisper of a prayer of accessing the slipstream, Shazam hovering over her anxiously, cursing, weeping, for a novel change giving up his incessant predictions of doom, to urge her on. “You mean if I’d had this phone and hadn’t cut off the tattoo…” she trailed off. “Even in the hall?”

“I’d have come for you the moment you called.”

“Anywhere?”

“Yes.”

“Without limitation at all?” She took pains to mask her incredulity. He was that powerful?

He inclined his head.

“Why the bloody hell didn’t you give it to me back then?”

“Would you have carried it?”

Honesty with herself was now part of her spine, her fundamental structure. At fourteen, she’d carried her own cell only for the music and games. She’d have seethed at the mere idea of carrying a phone for Ryodan, considered it just one more way for him to track and control her, another chain draped around her shoulders by adults who didn’t understand her—and she’d have laughed from the belly as she flung it in the trash. Then kicked the trash can for good measure and laughed some more.

“Let me tattoo you.” He was silent a long moment then said, “Jada.”

She went utterly still, not liking him this way, not trusting
this at all. He was being direct, noncaustic. Treating her as if she was exactly what she was—a woman who’d been through hell and made it back by sheer force of will and the skin of her teeth. He was calling her by her chosen name. Asking her to “allow” him to do something. No longer berating her for not being who he wanted her to be. Offering his protection. No longer jabbing at her or giving her anything to fight.

She didn’t know how to deal with this man without fighting him. “No,” she said.

“At least carry the phone.”

She regarded it as if it were a snake that would bite her the instant she reached for it. “It’s a little late to start worrying about me.”

“I always worried about you.”

The door behind her whisked open.

“Hey, guys.” Dancer stepped in to join them. He looked at her, did a double take, and said, “Wow. You look amazing, Jada.”

She felt suddenly nonplussed, a thing she’d not experienced in years. The faint heat of a blush was trying to stain her skin and she willed her capillaries to constrict and deny it. Once before Dancer had seen her in a skirt and heels, the night Ryodan made her change because her clothes smelled like Christian. She’d felt just as off-kilter with the way he’d looked at her then, with a soft stirring of butterflies in her stomach.

Sometimes she felt as split as they thought she was: a young girl hungry to spend time with a young man that was smart and good and real, a grown woman hungry for a grown man with edges sharp enough to cut herself on.

But hunger, like emotion, could drive a person to do stupid things. And the stupid didn’t survive. “It’s just a dress,” she deflected.