Feverborn (25 page)

She bolted from the chair and headed for the door.

“Choose wisely, Jada,” he said softly behind her.

She froze, hand on the panel, turned and looked at him. She had no intention of replying. But her mouth said, “Choose what wisely?”

He smiled but it didn’t touch his eyes. That cool, clear silver gaze had always seemed to stare straight into her soul. She studied him, realizing his eyes weren’t quite as void as she’d always thought. There was something in them, something…ancient. Immortal? And patient, endlessly patient, as he moved his chess pieces around. Aware, brutally, intensely alive and on point, and she had a sudden certainty that Ryodan saw right through her.

He knew. He’d known all along what she wanted.

“Why else would you let me tattoo you,” he murmured.

He’d tattooed her with full awareness of what he was
doing; giving her a collar, a leash to yank anytime and anyplace she wanted, with absolutely no foreknowledge of how she might choose to use it. Why would he do that?

And in those complex, every-shade-of-gray eyes, she thought she saw something else. Thought she heard him speak.

When the time comes, trust will be your weakness
.

“I always choose wisely,” she said, and left.

Trinity College. Jada remembered discovering it at nine years old while taking her first ever tour of the city. The sheer number of people coming and going, laughing and talking, flirting and living, had astonished the child. She’d felt like she was on fire with life. Born of a fool’s fever, her mom used to say about her, words slurring with drink and exhaustion after another long day working two jobs, still finding time at night to take lovers. Jada knew nothing of that—the circumstances of her conception, how foolish it had been or not, and hadn’t cared. She’d only known that she was born
with
a fever that made everything brighter, hotter, and more intense for her.

She’d been alone most of her life. People on TV weren’t the same as the real thing.

Even out in the world, she’d been more isolated at nine than most grown-ups, with no clue who her father was, her mother dead. No home. Just a yellow, mom-scented pillowcase with little ducks embroidered along the edge in a house that held an iron cage she never wanted to see again.

Trinity was
college
. A magical word to the child, a place she’d seen on TV, where people gathered in large numbers,
smack bang in the middle of the
craic
-filled city, and learned fascinating things, fell in love, broke up, fought and played and worked. Had
lives
.

Jada moved across the campus, deciding if Dancer tried to feed her, she would go back to the abbey. She’d had her fill of people behaving abnormally today.

She found him in one of the lecture halls that either had already housed an inordinate amount of musical equipment, including a baby grand piano, and an entire computing lab, or he’d moved everything in there to consolidate efforts and save time walking from building to building on campus.

He wasn’t alone. When Jada dropped down from the slipstream and walked in, he was sitting on the piano bench, close to a pretty woman, one hand on her shoulder, as they laughed together about something.

She stopped. Nearly backed out. They looked good together. How had she failed to see what a grown man he was when she’d been fourteen? She was struck again by the idea that he’d downplayed himself for her, to hang out with the child she’d been. And now that she was grown up, he wasn’t doing it anymore.

Were he and the woman lovers? The woman looked like she wanted to be, leaning into Dancer’s tall, athletic body, smiling up at him. His dark, thick hair had gotten long again, falling forward into his face, and she curled her hands into fists. Years ago she used to wash it for him, drape a towel around his shoulders and cut it. He’d take his glasses off and close his eyes and she’d used the privacy to stare unabashedly at his face. They’d nurtured each other in small ways. In the back of her mind, she’d harbored the vague idea that maybe
one day she’d be a woman and he’d be a man and there might be something magic between them. Dancer had been the only truly good, uncomplicated person in her life.

She must have made some small noise because he suddenly glanced over his shoulder and his face lit up.

“Jada, come in. I want you to meet everyone.”

She moved forward, wondering what was going on. They’d always been a team. Just the two of them. She’d never seen him with anyone else. Ever. She hadn’t even known he had friends.

He was striding toward her, long-legged, good-looking, full of youthful enthusiasm and energy. The pretty woman wasn’t far behind him, hurrying to catch up. Glancing between Dancer and Jada with a guarded expression.

“Good to see you,” he said, smiling.

“You have no intention of feeding me, do you?” She thought she’d better get that out of the way first.

He raised a brow. “Are you hungry?”

“No.”

“Okay then, no. Jada, this,” he swept an arm around the woman’s shoulders and pulled her forward, “is Caoimhe Gallagher. She was working on her doctorate in music theory before the walls fell. She and”—he gestured toward the bay of computers where a young man with brilliantly colored hair was hunched before a screen—“Duncan, were living in one of the dorms.”

Jada studied the woman he’d called “Keeva,” wondering if she was one of the O’Gallagher clan endowed with
sidhe-
seer blood. If so, she belonged at the abbey.

“Aye, and there’s Squig and Doolin,” Caoimhe said, offering her a hesitant smile and pointing down the line of screens. “Brilliant with math, not much for the talking. We’d no clue they’d taken up in the old library. More than a few of us managed to survive, hiding here on campus.”

Dancer said, “I found them shortly after I started working in the labs. Apparently I was making a lot of noise.” He grinned. “Caoimhe’s been helping me refine some of my theories about the black holes, what made them, what might fix them. Wait till you hear some of her ideas about music and what it really does. She’s got perfect pitch and her ear is bloody unreal!”

Jada looked at the woman’s ears but saw nothing of note.

“I hum it, she can play it,” Dancer clarified. “I give her frequencies to work with, and she makes songs out of them.”

“I hadn’t realized others were working with us,” she said coolly.

“Unless someone drops the bloody Song of Making in our lap, Jada, we can’t do it alone,” he said. “C’mon. Let me show you around.”

She left Trinity half an hour later, seeking solitude.

In the past, Dancer had a way of subtly recharging her, making her feel pretty much perfect. But today she’d realized he made a lot of people feel that way.

His “crew” saw him the same way she did: superbrainy, unpredictable, funny, high-energy, attractive.

She’d liked having him all to herself. It was confusing to
watch him interact with people he’d known for a while, realizing he had a life that hadn’t included her.

While she’d a life that hadn’t included him, she’d believed she was his entire world.

Today she’d wondered if it had been Caoimhe he’d watched
Scream
with, that night she wasn’t around. Wondered if, when he’d disappeared for days in the past, he was off with these friends she hadn’t known he’d had, laughing and working and implementing plans.

Back then she’d appreciated that he hadn’t held on to her too tightly. But she’d also assumed his life had kind of stopped happening when she wasn’t around. That he’d gone—alone—to one of his labs, where he thought about her the entire time and invented things to help her. Her self-preoccupation had been so intense, she’d believed when she wasn’t present in certain parts of the world, those parts of the world were put in a jar on a shelf until she returned.

Not so. His life had gone on while she’d kept him at bay, determinedly dodging anything that hinted at a restraint.

She remembered Mac telling her once that the reason grown-ups mystified her was because she wasn’t factoring their emotions into her equations. She’d never understood how careful Dancer had been around her so she wouldn’t startle and run. Apparently so cautious he’d kept their friendship completely separate from the rest of his life and friends.

There’d been nine in all that she’d met, working on various matters related to their problem. Some were studying the hard science of the holes, others searching for the softer Fae lore, and those, like Caoimhe, working with Dancer one on one, teaching him everything they knew about music, speculating
with him as she once had. It was jarring to an extreme, but then the whole day had been.

She knew what she needed.

Hand on the hilt of her sword, she went fluid and kicked up into the slipstream.

P
utting pen to paper clarifies my thoughts.

Before I came to Dublin, I didn’t have many thoughts to ponder other than new drink recipes and what guy I wanted to date.

Since my arrival here, I’ve filled journal after journal. The way I saw it, there were only three real possibilities and they were, unfortunately, equally plausible.

“You’re still trying to label things, Ms. Lane,” Barrons said, reading over my shoulder.

“I knew you were there,” I said irritably. I always do. He’d walked in the back door of BB&B about twenty seconds
ago. Every cell in my body comes to hard, frantic, sexual life when he’s near. I hadn’t expected to see him. It was barely noon and he’s a night owl, not an afternoon one.

Between withdrawal that made me feel all my nerves were raw, flayed, and twitching on the surface of my skin and the many frustrating, slinking hours it took me to get back from the water tower to Chester’s—all so I could
dependently
ask Barrons to get a Hunter to take me back into the bookstore—I was in a sour mood. But I’d also been in no mood to risk running into the Unseelie princess, her army, and her human guns. I couldn’t outshoot or Voice all of them at once.

For being so bloody powerful, I couldn’t even walk home by myself. It pissed me off. Asking Barrons for things drives me crazy.

“Makes two of us, Ms. Lane.”

“Well, do something about it,” I said pissily.

“There you go, asking me for things again.”

I stretched on the love seat I’d dragged from his study into the rear of the wrecked bookstore and peered up at him over my shoulder. I couldn’t find him for a second. He was motionless, fading beautifully into shadow, existing in that seamless, not-quite-there way he existed only around me and only when we were alone.

“Okay. I give up. What am I doing wrong?”

“At the moment? Not fucking me.”

He yanked my head back with a fistful of my hair, arched my neck at a hard angle, and sealed his mouth over mine, tongue going deep, kissing me so hard and raw and electric that my mind blanked and I dropped my journal, forgotten.

Can’t breathe with this man. Can’t breathe without him.

“Where do you feel most free,” he murmured against my mouth.

I bit his lip. “With you.”

“Wrong. You know why you fuck so good?”

I preened. Jericho Barrons thought I fucked “so good.” “Because I’ve had a lot of practice?”

“Because you fuck like you’re losing your sanity and can only find it again on the far side of depravity. Not by taking a shortcut. By taking the very long, lingering way around. You look like a pretty, soft, breakable Barbie. You fuck like a monster.”

That pretty much summed it up. “Do you have a point?”

“Don’t be afraid of the monster. She knows what she’s doing.”

“Why are you still talking?”

“Because my dick isn’t in your mouth.”

“That can be remedied.” I was over the love seat and on him, taking him down hard to the floor beneath me, and he was falling back, laughing and oh, God, I love that sound!

I ripped his zipper open as we went, then my hands were against his hot skin and my mouth was on his dick and nothing could rattle me, nothing could touch me, because I was rattling Jericho Barrons’s cage and, as always, while it lasted, I would be whole and perfect and free.

Later he said, “You think of the
Sinsar Dubh
as being an actual book inside you.”

“And?” I said drowsily. Apparently sex with Barrons was the cure for everything, including the tightly wired tension of
withdrawal. I’d been shooting furtive looks at my fridge, with its lovely baby food jars of canned Unseelie all day. Clenching hands and jaw, refusing to let my feet walk me over to it. But Barrons in my mouth pretty much makes me stop thinking about anything else in it.

“I doubt it’s either open or closed. Stop thinking of it so concretely.”

“You mean it’s embedded in me, inseparably, and my ethical structure is the proverbial cover? And I need to stop worrying about the Book and think about me. What I can live with. What I won’t live without.”

He propped himself up on a shoulder, muscles rippling and bunching, and looked down at me, smiling faintly.

I touched his lips with my fingertips. I adore this man’s mouth, what it does to me, but I most especially adore the rare occasions he smiles or laughs out loud. In the low light, the dark, harsh angles of his face seemed chiseled from stone. Barrons isn’t a classically handsome man. He’s disturbing. Carnal. Base. Forbidding. Big and powerful, radiating primal hunger. His eyes are blades, slicing into you: dark, ancient, glittering with predatory intensity. He moves like a beast even in his human skin. A woman takes one look at him, her stomach drops like a stone and she runs like hell.

Which direction she goes is the defining point: she’ll run away—or toward him—depending on her ability to be honest with herself, her hunger for life and willingness to pay any price at all to feel so damned alive. “What? Why are you smiling?” I said.

He bit my finger. “Stop fishing for compliments. I give you enough.”

“Never enough. Not when it comes to you. Do
you
think I used it? Do you think I brought Alina back from the dead?”

“I think neither of those questions signify. You’re alive. You’re neither insane nor psychotic. Life goes on, and in the going, reveals itself. Quit being so impatient.”

I pushed my hands into his thick dark hair. “I love how you simplify me.”

“You need it. You, Ms. Lane, are a piece of work.”

“I’ll show you work. I want this.” I leaned forward and murmured into his ear. “Right now. Exactly that way. And this
and
this. And I want you to keep doing it until I’m begging you to stop. But don’t stop then. Make me take it a little longer.” I wanted to feel no responsibility. No control.

“And bloody hell, woman, there you go, asking me for things again.” He stood and tossed me over his shoulder, one big hand clamped possessively on my bare ass, to take me to that place we sometimes went when I had a serious kink in my already seriously kinked chain.

“Hard life, Barrons.”

“I’ll show you hard.”

Of that I had no doubt. Every possible way.

Damn, it was good to be alive.

Much later with a voice that was raw from—well, let’s just leave it at raw—I said to him when I was fairly certain he was meditating deeply enough that he wouldn’t hear me, “I should have gone after her.”

“Dani,” he murmured.

Well, shit. He was aware after all.

“Always.”

“Yes, Dani,” I said.

“Analyze the odds. You know she’d have kept running.”

“But Barrons, she made it out, losing virtually zero Earth-time. Maybe I could have caught up with her, somehow. Maybe she would have gone to a safer world if I’d chased her through, with a quicker way home. Maybe she wouldn’t have had to be alone in there the whole time and she and I would have battled our way back to Dublin together.”

“Maybes are anchors you chain to your own feet. Right before you leap off the boat into the ocean.”

“I’m just saying. I think I know what I did wrong.”

“What’s that?”

“I didn’t believe in magic. I’m living in a city of it, jam-packed with dark magic, evil spells, twisted Fae, and I have absolutely no problem believing in all of
them
. But somehow I stopped believing in the good magic.” I prodded him in the ribs, where black and red tattoos stretched across his hard stomach and trailed down to his groin. “Like
Bewitched
. Or
The Wizard of Oz
—”

“An untrained witch and a charlatan,” he said irritably. “Did you just bloody poke me in the bloody ribs?”

“Okay, or Dumbledore, he’s the real thing. My point is you can’t believe only in Voldemort. You have to believe in Dumbledore, too.”

“Or you could just believe in me.” He caught my hand and put it exactly where he wanted it.

I smiled. I excelled at that.

Hours later I was holding my cellphone in that hand, staring at my recently created contact.

The good magic, including those possibilities that weighed in on the side of the positive, not the negative, was heavy on my mind.

Barrons was gone, back to Chester’s, where we would meet soon. I bit my still-swollen lower lip and worried it as I punched the Call button. It rang only once and she was on the line.

“Mac?” Alina said quickly. “Is that you?”

Fuck. Instant pain. How many times had I sat in my room in Dublin, dialing her damned number to listen to her recording, wishing just one more time to hear her answer? More times than I cared to count. Yet here it was. I could get addicted to this alone. Merely being able to call and hear something that sounded like my sister answering. I wondered where she was. Where Barrons had no doubt set her up, probably warding the place to keep her alive, too.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey, Jr.” She sounded happy to hear from me, but wary.

“Where are you?”

“My apartment.”

I closed my eyes, wincing. I could walk over there, bound up stairs I’d once sat on sobbing as if my soul was being hacked in two, slowly and with a chain saw. She’d open the door.

And instantly double over, puking, because even if she really was my sister, I couldn’t hug her, because I was anathema to her now.

“Want to come over?” she said hesitantly.

“So I can make you puke some more?”

“Your boyfriend—”

“He’s not my boyfriend.”

“Okay, the man you love,” she said flatly, “brought me some pages photocopied from the
Sinsar Dubh
. He said you used them to learn to manage the discomfort. I’m practicing. I don’t like puking any more than you like making me puke.”

Working with those pages had helped me only to a point. But unlike the corporeal Book—which had enjoyed tormenting me—I had no desire to hurt Alina. If she really was. And if she practiced enough with them, maybe one day I’d get that hug. If she really was. “When did Darroc give you the engagement ring?” It was bothering me, a nagging detail.

She made a soft sound that was equal parts irritation and acceptance. A
so we’re going to play this stupid game?
coupled with
I love you, Mac, and I know you can be totally neurotic, so I’m going to humor you
. “A couple of weeks before I lost time. Or whatever happened.”

“The body I buried wasn’t wearing it.”

“That makes sense,” she said pointedly, “because it wasn’t mine.”

If the Book was trying to trick me, it might have made that mistake, putting a ring on her finger that hadn’t been on her when I’d buried her, skimming my acknowledgment that they’d been in love and embellishing it with a perfectly human touch. I doggedly pursued my line of questioning. “Were you wearing the ring in the alley?”

“No. I’d taken it off that afternoon. I’d discovered some things about him. We’d had a fight. I was angry.”

“What kind of things?”

“He was into some stuff I didn’t know about. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“When did you put it back on?”

“When I went home to change. After the alley, the next thing I knew, I was standing outside the Stag’s Head, wearing the most bizarre outfit. I didn’t even bring it with me to Dublin. I have no clue how I ended up with it on. Remember the dress I wore my last Christmas at home? The one I hated but you thought looked so good on me? The one that made my ass look flat.”

I pressed a suddenly trembling hand to my mouth.

“That’s what I had on with the
ugliest
shoes. I’d never even seen them before, and I was freezing. And pearls. You know I haven’t worn those things in years. I wanted to find Darroc, so I went home to change and go hunt for him but when I got there my place had been totally trashed. Did you do that? Did you freak out when you thought I was dead?”

I cleared my throat. Still, it took me two tries to get words out and when I did I croaked like a frog. “Why did you put the ring back on? According to you it was what—like only ten hours earlier that you’d taken it off?” I knew why. I’d have done the same thing with Barrons.

She said softly, “I love him. He’s not perfect. I’m not either.”

So, my sister had the same epiphany I did when it came to relationships. Not surprising. But my inner Book knew I’d had that epiphany. She’d spoken in present tense about Darroc, refusing to believe he was really dead. Again, like me. If
someone told me my fiancé was dead and I’d never seen his body, I’d have a hard time believing it, too. I was intimately acquainted with the stages of grief: denial being the first.