Feverborn (28 page)

“C
hrist, Mac, what the bloody hell do you and Barrons
do
in this place?” Lor said as he walked in the front entrance of BB&B.

He stood looking around the room, at the broken furniture I hadn’t been strong enough to move, the crimson paint sloshed everywhere, and the small area of organization in the rear I’d set up for myself with a love seat and a table that looked like a very small eye in a very large storm. He whistled low and shook his head.

I knew what it looked like. A battlefield.

“Never mind,” he said. “I don’t wanna know. Guess there’s a reason Barrons keeps you around. So, where’s my little honey?”

“Upstairs. In my room,” I told him. We’d brought Jada and Ryodan back to BB&B, with Barrons working more of his
Bewitched
magic to get us through the funnel cloud. “How’d you get in through the storm?” I wondered if they
all knew the same spells. I’d somehow gotten the impression Barrons was by far the most proficient, that Ryodan had some degree of skill but preferred to leave the heavy lifting to Barrons, and I’d assumed Lor was mostly oblivious to…well, everything but blondes with big boobs. And recently, Jo.

“There’s a way,” he evaded.

“Then why haven’t I been using it?” I said pissily. Sometimes I almost wanted to be one of them. Almost. The Hunter wasn’t willing to fly me anymore. I was going to be even more dependent on Barrons in the future. Or have to give up coming home for a while. A sudden chill kissed my spine, and I wondered if for some reason, soon, I wouldn’t be here much at all. I shook it off as exhausted brooding.

The owner of Chester’s had insisted on returning to his club, but Barrons had flatly vetoed it, saying BB&B was more heavily warded, and besides, Jada couldn’t go far if she decided to try, with the Fae-tornado surrounding the area. Both men seemed to think she’d run the second she was coherent again.

She’d been unconscious since the abbey. I’d tucked her into my bed upstairs, pulled the covers up to her chin, and sat beside her for a long time, trying to understand what was going on with her, touched and troubled by how fragile she looked, young and vulnerable.

It was sometimes hard to remember Jada was only somewhere between nineteen and twenty years old. If she were a normal girl, in a normal world, she might be a sophomore in college. She presented a facade that packed the presence of a woman of thirty. But she wasn’t. She’d been a fourteen-year-old who’d had to grow up too fast. Now she was a nineteen-year-old
that had grown up even more, faster and harder. I smiled bitterly, remembering one of Dani’s favorite mottos: Bigger, Better, Faster, Harder, More. She’d always been voracious for life, hungry to experience it all.

Why on earth had she raced back into the abbey, into a killing Fae fire, just to save a stuffed bear, sliced down the middle with its innards falling out?

“She sleeping?” Lor said.

“I can’t tell. I don’t know if she’s sleeping or…something else.” Exhausted to the point of collapse, as if she’d been holding herself together with sheer force of will for a long time.

I’d held her hand. It was limp, as if all the life had been drained from her body. I was frantic to know what had happened, but Ryodan, too, had passed out shortly after arguing with Barrons about where to go.

Half the Nine had remained behind at the abbey, standing guard for when the Fae came back. We’d left Christian soaring over the burning fortress. I fervently hoped he could save some of it. I even more fervently hoped the blaze didn’t burn it all the way down into the ground, freeing Cruce from the cavern. Criminy, we had a mess on our hands.

Will Ryodan die?
I’d asked Barrons on the way back to BB&B. And come back whole? I hadn’t added.

Not a chance
, he’d replied grimly.
He’s fighting it. He won’t leave her like this. The bloody idiot will stay here and heal the long way
.

But he
will
heal?
I’d pressed. I couldn’t even bear to look at him. It was seeing the man in that movie,
The English Patient
, but with no bandages to hide the horror.

He’ll heal. You would consider it rapidly. He won’t. And it’ll be hell
.

I’d pondered having the ability to simply kill yourself if you were badly wounded, so you could swiftly end your suffering and come back perfect again. It had been beyond my comprehension. What a leap of faith to bleed yourself out. I decided they must have died so many times that they either had implicit trust they would always come back or didn’t care.

He’d shot me a look.
You used the spear tonight. You didn’t lose control
.

I know
, I’d replied.
I don’t know what was different
. It may have helped that I’d stabbed my first one instinctively before I realized what I’d done. And once I realized it, I’d known I could do it and it had been easy from there. I’d figured it was one of three things: the Book was neutralized inside me somehow; it was open and I was using it without being corrupted; or it was cooperating, for whatever reason.

You’re coming into your own
.

I’d kept my silence. I still couldn’t shake the feeling that the universe had two really nasty evil shoes and only one of them had dropped.

We’d put Ryodan in Barrons’s study on a mattress he’d dragged down from upstairs.

You could put him in the bedroom next to Jada
, I’d suggested.

He won’t want her to see him like this
.

I don’t think she’s seeing much of anything
, I’d pointed out.

I don’t think she has been for a while
. He’d glanced pointedly
at the heavily smoked stuffed animal I was holding on my lap as we headed back for Dublin in one of the Nine’s Hummers.

I’d tucked it into her arms as I’d tucked her into my bed.

And I’d seen the only faint signs of life in her as she sighed and curled herself tightly around it. She muttered something then that sounded like, “I see you, yee-yee.”

My heart had felt raw and inflamed inside my chest, on the verge of rupturing, as I’d watched her.
Mea culpa
. I hated myself even more than I had before for chasing her into the Silvers that day. I was only now beginning to fully understand what those years had cost her.

And I’d thought then, staring down at her, what if Alina isn’t really dead? That would mean I’d chased Dani into the hall—and she hadn’t even killed my sister.

For a few really hellish moments there I’d wanted to go curl up somewhere and quietly die.

But I’d shaken it off. My dying wouldn’t do a thing for Dani. And she was all that mattered.

Lor strode past me and I followed him into Barrons’s study.

I dropped into a chair behind the desk and looked warily at Ryodan. Barrons was draping filmy pieces of fabric drenched in some silvery liquid on his charred body, murmuring softly while he worked.

“He’s awake,” Barrons said.

I hadn’t needed to be told. I was watching him shiver with pain as Barrons laid the barely-there pieces of glowing cloth against his raw flesh. One of the Nine shivering with pain was a terrible thing to see.

“Do you think maybe you should knock him out for his own good?” I said uneasily.

Lor laughed. “I’ve thought that on more than one occasion.”

“He wants to be awake,” Barrons murmured.

“Can he talk?”

“Yes,” Ryodan rasped.

“Can you tell us what happened?”

He made a wet sighing sound. “She flew into that…bloody abbey like…a mother bear obsessed…with her cub. I thought…five and a half years is a long time…maybe she’d had a child…brought it back.”

Oh, God, I thought, appalled, I hadn’t even thought of that! Had the bear belonged to a child?
Her
child? Just what had Dani gone through in the Silvers?

“I kept circling her, trying to keep…her from…burning, but she acted like…she didn’t even feel the heat. Christ…I could barely breathe. Beams were falling, stone was crumbling.”

“Why the fuck didn’t you change?” Lor growled with a quick look at me.

“I know,” I said to him levelly. “Surely you know I know.”

“Dunno why you’re still alive, though,” he said coolly.

“Not in…front of her.” Ryodan gurgled harshly.

“Precisely,” Lor said, shooting me a look.

I ignored him. “Are you sure he’s okay talking?” I asked Barrons worriedly.

Barrons gave me a look. “If he’s doing it, he wants to be.”

“Go on,” I urged Ryodan.

“Need to tell. You…need to know.”

“He won’t be conscious when I’ve finished,” Barrons told me. “For some time.”

“She kept saying she…had to save…Shazam. That she wouldn’t have…survived without him and she wasn’t…losing him. She wasn’t leaving him. Ever. She fucked up once and…wasn’t fucking up again. She was…ah, fuck. It was…it was like looking at her at fourteen again. All eyes and heart…blazing in her face. And she started to cry.”

Lor said softly, “You never could stand that.”

Ryodan lay shuddering while Barrons worked, then gathered his strength and went on. “She tore the damned room…apart looking for…something. I couldn’t figure out what. The place was a bloody mess…must’ve exploded when the fire started. All kinds of…weapons, ammo…kept trying to push it away from the fire and…keep her from burning. Food everywhere…a filthy pillowcase with ducks on it and…rotting fish all over the place. Fucking fish. I kept thinking what the fuck…was with the fish?”

Rotting fish? I frowned, unable to process it.

“Finally, she…screamed and dove toward the bed and I thought…so, her kid is under there…it’s okay…I’ll get them out.”

He fell silent again and closed his eyes.

“And she pulled out the stuffed animal,” I said miserably.

“Yes,” he whispered.

“How did she end up unconscious?”

“Me.”

“You
hit
her?” Lor growled, half rising.

“I was a bloody…fucking idiot. Should’ve known better.”

“What did you do?” I exclaimed.

“When I saw…what she was holding…cooing to it like it was…fucking
alive
, I…” He trailed off. Then after a long moment he hissed, “I took it from her, ripped it open, and showed her it was just a…a stuffed animal.”

“And she snapped,” Barrons said quietly.

“Blank. Her eyes filled with…anguish and…grief then…just empty. Like she wasn’t even…alive anymore.”

“You think it’s like that Tom Hanks movie,” Lor said, “where he got stranded on an island and talked to a goddamn ball for years?”

“Only Jada forgot it wasn’t real,” I said, horrified.

“Don’t know,” Ryodan said. “Maybe it’s…how she survived and…why she came back Jada. She kept saying he was so…emotional. Moody. He needed her to take care of him. Possible she survived by…divvying herself up…creating an imaginary friend with…Dani’s attributes…while becoming Jada.”

I closed my eyes. Tears slipped down my cheeks.

“I made her see…he wasn’t real. Then she…was just…gone. Bloody hell…
I
did it to her.”

We sat in silence for a time.

Finally, I got up.

Ryodan would survive. He had his brothers.

Dani needed a sister.

Lor followed me out. “What the fuck was up at Chester’s, Mac? Why was an Unseelie prince in our club? And where the bloody hell was he hiding?” he demanded.

I stopped walking and turned to face him. When I’d asked him to capture me a sifter to take me to Chester’s, he’d insisted on coming along. I’d demanded he remain in one of the subclubs with the sifter while I went to get Christian. I’d called it due as part of my favor, thereby keeping my oath to Ryodan that his secrets were mine.

I gave him a frosty look. “You asked me a favor and I gave it to the best of my ability in exchange for one from you. We’re even. If you try to push me on this, I’ll fight you with everything I’ve got. And I’ve got more than you think. Like you, Lor, my loyalties are to Ryodan. Give me space on this.”

He measured me a long moment then inclined his head. “I’ll leave it. For now.”

Together, we went upstairs to stand vigil over Jada.

Over the next several hours, visitors came to see Jada. I don’t have any idea how they got into the store with the funnel cloud around it. I assumed Lor was bringing them in somehow. Living with the Nine around means accepting endless mysteries. Jo came and sat with me for hours and we talked and tried to figure out what to do to help Jada/Dani heal. Jo told me she’d been to the abbey twice to see her, but Jada had kept herself surrounded by her closest advisors both times, and acknowledged her only to enlist her aid in continuing the modernization of their libraries.

Jada’s
sidhe
-seers took shifts coming, sat grimly with us
and kept us updated on conditions at the abbey, which I barely heard, staring at the bed, lost in sadness deep enough to drown.

Barrons intermittently came upstairs, checking with grim dark eyes to see if anything had changed.

Jada lay unmoving in the bed, as if carved from stone, holding on to the charred stuffed animal as though her life depended on it. I was surprised Ryodan hadn’t dropped it. He’d been burned beyond belief but somehow managed to hang on to both Jada and the stuffed bear with which she was obsessed—and keep them both from burning. Any other man would have dropped the thing in the fire.

Finally, I was alone with her, and I moved to sit on the bed. As I pulled the covers up, the glint of Cruce’s cuff caught my eye and I suddenly couldn’t get it off my arm fast enough.

She’d given it to me when she kept my spear. Hadn’t wanted me walking around unprotected, even then. And it had kept me safe from all harm in battle tonight.

It should have been on
her
arm.

There were so many should-have-beens.

I tried to pick up her arm to put the cuff on her wrist but I couldn’t break her death grip on Shazam. I laid it on the table next to the bed so when she woke up she could have it back.

I touched her hair softly, smoothing scorched auburn tendrils from her face. It was still pulled back in a ponytail but had slipped down to her nape, and I could see the natural curl in it. I smiled faintly, sadly. One day I’d like to see her wearing it curly and wild and free again.