Feverborn

by Karen Marie Moning

  “I’m not so bloody sure. She’s been missing for weeks.”

  “Dani was missing for weeks, too,” I said. “And she’s back just fine now.” Well, that wasn’t entirely accurate but she was back. “I’m sure she’ll show up. Maybe she’s off on confidential sidhe-seer business or something.” One thing I knew for sure, Kat was safe where she was. Physically. Mostly.

  He shook his head. “No one at the abbey has seen or heard from her. And Kat’s never gone somewhere without telling me first. We tell each other everything.”

  Ryodan said dryly, “No one tells each other everything.”

  “We do,” Sean said coolly. “I’m sore fashed and I’ll tell you that. It’s not like my Kat. I’ve been dropping by Dublin Castle twice a day, checking the bodies the Garda are collecting off the streets.”

  I cringed inwardly. “I’m so sorry, Sean. Is there anything I can do to help?” It was all I could do not to shoot Ryodan a nasty look. Sean was worried sick about Kat and he had every reason to be. If someone went missing in Dublin these days, the odds were high they were dead.

  Sean said soberly, “Aye, keep your eye out. Let me know if you hear a whisper of a word about her. You’ll find me in the piano pub with the lads most evenings. If I’m not there, any one of them will get word to me.”

  “I’ll let you know if I hear anything,” I promised.

  He nodded and stepped out.

  The moment the door closed, I spun on Ryodan and hissed, “I’ll keep your secrets, but you need to let him know somehow that she’s all right.”

  “Because it’s not fair,” he mocked.

  “Because there’s no need to inflict suffering if you can prevent it,” I retorted.

  Those cool silver eyes dismissed me. “He’ll brood, he’ll pine. She’ll return. He’ll get over it. No damage done.”

  I scowled at him. The man was as immutable as Barrons. They didn’t view a month of worry as remotely significant because a month was the blink of an eye to them, and besides, everyone died.

  Immortals. Pains in the asses, every one of them.

  “Let’s get this over with,” I said brusquely. “I have things to do.”

  —

  Our path to the small cell in the dungeon was interrupted again, this time by Christian MacKeltar.

  The moment we stepped off the elevator and turned left, I felt an icy wind at my back and he was there.

  I turned and gasped, startled. Christian looked nearly full Unseelie prince, taller than he usually was, much broader through the shoulders, with great black wings angled up and back and still sweeping the floor. Anger colored him in shades of the Unseelie prison. Ice dusted his wings, his face.

  “What the fuck were you thinking?” he snarled at Ryodan. “I can’t do this. I won’t.”

  “Then your uncle will suffer.”

  “You do it!”

  “I did the hard part. He’s alive.”

  “He’s never going to forgive you.”

  “Yes he will. Because one day he’ll feel something besides the pain and horror and he’ll be glad that he’s alive. No matter the price. That’s the way it works for men of a certain ilk. But you know that, don’t you, Highlander?”

  Ryodan turned away and we resumed walking toward the cell in silence, buffeted by an icy breeze.

  —

  In the narrow stone cell, I dropped into a chair, edgy and irritable.

  My Unseelie flesh high had evaporated without warning, late this afternoon at BB&B, while I was struggling to disengage one of my least damaged bookcases from a pile of splintered furniture and stand it upright again.

  The unwieldy tower of shelves had fractured several toes when it crashed to the floor, inadequately supported by abruptly too-weak muscles. Fortunately, even without Unseelie flesh, I heal quickly and no longer sported even a slight limp.

  Unfortunately, withdrawal was setting in, making me short-tempered and more impatient than ever.

  I wanted this over with. I’d already decided to tell them I still couldn’t find the Book, even with my sidhe-seer senses open again. How would they feel if I tried to make them go rooting around inside themselves for whatever was in there? Attempted to get them to let me use their inner demon in its wildest, most uncontrolled form?

  They wouldn’t tolerate it for a second. Why should I? There had to be another way to save our world. Speaking of, before I went disturbing anything I shouldn’t, I glanced at Barrons. I have to show you something back at the bookstore. Tonight.

  Can it wait?

  It shouldn’t. It could help us with the black holes. But I want you to take it. I’m not the one to use it.

  He inclined his head in assent.

  If something goes wrong…I told him where to find it, figuring him finding my journals, too, would no longer matter to me if the worst happened tonight.

  Nothing will go wrong.

  Easy for him to say. My Book had been far too quiet lately.

  I closed my eyes and pretended to be sinking inside, questing for my inner lake, beneath which gleamed a monster. Recalling the first time I’d discovered the place, the dark chamber, the freedom and power I’d sensed in it. Before I’d known how corrupted it was.

  I’d once loved having that inner lake. Now I despised it.

  A flood of water exploded inside me, gushing up, icy and black. I choked and sputtered and my eyes shot open.

  “What is it,” Ryodan demanded.

  I swallowed surprisingly dryly, for all the water inside me. “Indigestion,” I said. “I don’t think this is going to work.”

  Ryodan said, “We’ve got all night.”

  And I had no doubt he would sit here all night with me, and make sure I sat here, too.

  I closed my eyes again and sat very still, not reaching, merely feeling tentatively. What was going on? My lake had never exploded up to meet me like that, nearly drowning me.

  Waters rippled and stirred. Deep down, carving chasms in my soul, there was a rapid, rushing current. I didn’t like it. I’d never felt it before. My lake had always been still, serene, glassy, disturbed only when things of enormous power floated to its surface.

  Yet now I felt as if there was something in there that contained a vicious undertow. And I might get swept away by it if I wasn’t careful.

  I opened my eyes. “Just exactly how do you think the Book could possibly be of any use to us?”

  “We’ve been through this.”

  “I can’t read it. I won’t open it.”

  “Fear of a thing,” Barrons said, “is often bigger than the thing.”

  “And if the damn ‘thing’ is even a tenth the size of my fear of it, that’s bad enough,” I retorted. “You stood in the street with me and watched what it did to Derek O’Bannion. It came after you, too. You sensed its power. And you’re the one that told me if I took even one spell from it, I wouldn’t ever be the same.”

  “I said if you ‘took’ a spell. It’s possible there’s a way to access information without taking one. It’s conceivable you could read it without utilizing an ounce of magic. Like Cruce. You know the First Language.”

  Was it possible? His contention didn’t sound entirely implausible. I did know the First Language, there inside me in the tatters of the king’s memory. But those memories were part of the Book itself. If I reached for my knowledge of the First Language without it being offered, did that mean I was opening the Book? “I’ve always felt that simply opening it of my own will would doom me.”

  “It’s already been open. You closed it.”

  I hadn’t thought about any of this in months. I’d shoved every memory of the Sinsar Dubh into a far, dark corner of my mind. He was right. The Book had been open inside me that afternoon when he found me staring sightlessly outside BB&B, lost in my own head, debating whether I dare risk taking a spell from the Sinsar Dubh to free his son.

  But I hadn’t opened it. It had been open, the Book offering. Big difference.

  Might I
have read the spell to save his son, scanning only the words without disturbing the magic, without getting turned into a soulless, evil psychopath? Books could be read. Spells had to be worked. Was information one thing and magic entirely another? I wasn’t sure I could split hairs that finely. I wasn’t sure the Book would either.

  Still, Barrons had a point. Fear of a thing was often worse than the thing itself. I’d been afraid of him once. Now, I couldn’t even conceive of such a reaction to this man.

  I wanted desperately to believe the Book wasn’t the great, all-knowing, all-spying evil I’d been assuming it was.

  Unfortunately, I’d have to face it to find out.

  Maybe it was silent because it was gone. Maybe my lake had swallowed and neutralized it. I was inundated with maybes lately. Limp noodley things you could do nothing with.

  I sighed and closed my eyes, no longer pretending. I wanted to know. What was at the bottom now? What was going on in the vacuum of dread I carried in my gut every blasted day?

  I dove deep, kicked in hard, rejecting fear. I had Barrons and Ryodan in the room with me. What more could I ask as I faced my inner demon?

  I swam, holding my breath at first, diving into one towering wave after the next, getting drenched by violently churning water capped by thick foamy brine. I ran out of breath and started struggling against the sensation of suffocation. I forced myself to relax like I had the day I stepped through the Unseelie king’s great mirror in their boudoir and my lungs froze, knowing I had to breathe differently there. Now, I drew the water into my lungs, became one with it.

  The waves fought me, buffeted me, as if trying to expel me, but it only strengthened my resolve. Was this why I’d nearly drowned when I first sought it? Because the Book no longer had all that much power—perhaps never had—and didn’t want me to figure that out? And it was throwing up some huge, watery smoke screen to keep me from discovering the truth? Maybe my adamant rejection of it the night it turned me invisible had weakened it somehow. That was, after all, the night it had ceased speaking. And maybe I’d turned visible again because the single spell it offered had been a temporary one, with a finite, albeit damned convenient end date.

  I dove deeper, inhaling my icy lake, felt it rushing through my body, filling me with sidhe-seer power. I kicked and thrust and swam, following a gold beacon, forced my way through the chilling undertow and finally drifted lightly down into a dark, shadowy cavern.

  Last time I’d been here, the Sinsar Dubh had been crooning to me like a lover, welcoming me, inviting me in.

  A towering wall exploded in front of me.

  I shattered it with a fist.

  Another!

  I kicked through it, swinging and cursing.

  Wall after wall sprung up and I blasted through them as if my life depended on it.

  Whatever the Book didn’t want me to see, I was going to see.

  This was ending.

  Here, tonight.

  I wasn’t leaving this cavern until I knew what I was dealing with.

  Wall after wall tumbled, no match for my fury, until there it was: an elaborately carved ebony pedestal upon which lay a shining golden Book.

  Open. Just like in the nightmare I’d recently had.

  I stood motionless in the cavern.

  So—it could open itself. I knew that. No big.

  I’d closed it before.

  I would close it again.

  But first I’d see if it really was possible for me to look at it, understand the words, without using the spell.

  Still…if it wasn’t—and I turned into a homicidal maniac?

  I almost wavered then. Stood, dripping water for a time, having a hard time persuading myself to move forward.

  I could walk away right now. Say I couldn’t find it. Storm back out of my head and let sleeping dogs lie.

  I sighed.

  And live forever with this eternal instability? Be undermined day after day by fear of the unknown? It was past time for me to face my demons.

  Clenching my jaw, I stalked to the pedestal and forced myself to look down. Half expecting I wouldn’t understand a single word. That perhaps there wouldn’t even be any words there. That perhaps my churning sidhe-seer waters had stripped it clean of all forbidden magic.

  The blood in my veins turned to ice.

  “No,” I breathed.

  I would be evil if I’d used it.

  I would be crazy.

  I would be a psychopath.

  I wasn’t any of those things.

  At least I didn’t think I was.

  “No, damn it, no!” I said again, backing away.

  Not a murmur from the Sinsar Dubh, not a chuckle, not a jibe.

  Just me alone with the hollow echo of my footfalls.

  And my failure.

  I’d had no problem reading and understanding the words carved into the Book’s ornate golden pages. The First Language had flowed as easily as English across my mental tongue.

  And those words had seemed as familiar as a beloved and often repeated nursery rhyme.

  The Sinsar Dubh was open to a spell to resurrect the dead.

  29

  “I’m just holding on for dear life, won’t look down won’t open my eyes…”

  Jada moved through the crisp cool dawn in perfect sync with her environment, eyes closed, feeling her way through the slipstream.

  Shazam had taught her that all things emitted frequency, that living beings were essentially receivers that could pick up the vibrations if they could only achieve clarity of mind. Meaning no ego, no past or future, no thoughts at all. Unadulterated sensation. He contended humans lacked the ability to empty themselves, that they were too superficial, and that shallowness was marbled with identity, time/ego obsessed, and given the complexity of her brain, he’d doubted that she would ever get there.

  Given the complexity of her brain, she’d been quite certain she would.

  And had.

  Becoming nothing and no one was something she knew how to do.

  Now, she heard with some indefinable sense the dense, simplistic grumble of bricks ahead, the complex whir of moving life, the sleek song of the River Liffey, the soft susurrus of the breeze, and turned minutely to avoid obstacles, melding with the razor edge of buildings.

  She was being hunted.

  She’d passed small clusters of angry, armed humans, clutching papers with her picture. Mostly men, determined to gain power and ensure a degree of stability in this brutally unstable city by capturing the legendary Sinsar Dubh.

  Fools. They felt nothing more than a brisk wind as she passed, on her way to her sacred place. Her bird’s-eye view. The water tower where she’d once crouched in a long black leather coat, sword in her hand, and belly-laughed, drunk on the many wonders of life.

  As she pulled herself up the final rung and vaulted onto the platform, the smell of coffee and doughnuts slammed into her, and although her face betrayed nothing, inside she scowled.

  She dropped down from the slipstream to tell Ryodan to get the hell off her water tower. They weren’t supposed to meet for another few hours and this was her turf.

  But it was Mac she saw, sprawled out on the ledge as if she was perfectly at home, slung low in the old bucket car seat Jada had dragged up there herself, ball cap angled over her badly highlighted hair to shadow her face. She was dressed nearly identical to Jada, in jeans, combat boots, and a leather jacket.

  “What are you doing on my water tower?” Jada demanded.

  Mac looked up at her. “I don’t see your name on it anywhere.”

  “You know it’s my water tower. I used to talk about it.”

  “Sorry, dude,” Mac said mildly.

  “Don’t fecking ‘dude’ me,” Jada said sharply, then inhaled long and slow. “There are plenty of other places for you to be. Find your own. Have an original thought.”

  “I watched the Unseelie princess kill one of the Nine about an hour ago,” Mac said, as if she hadn’t even heard her. �
��She’s carrying human weapons now. Marching with a small army. They shot the shit out of Fade. Started to rip his body apart.”

  “And?” Jada said, forgetting her irritation that Mac was here. She’d tried to strike an alliance with the Unseelie princess but the powerful Fae had chosen Ryodan instead, striking a deal for three of the princes’ heads. Apparently that alliance was over, if she was now killing the Nine.

  “He disappeared. The princess saw it happen.”

  Jada went still. She knew the Nine returned. Somehow. She didn’t know the nuts and bolts of it but she certainly wanted to. “Why are you telling me this? Your loyalties are with them, not me.”

  “They’re not mutually exclusive. My loyalties are to you as well. Coffee?” Mac nudged a thermos toward her.

  Jada ignored it.

  “Got doughnuts, too. They’re soggy, but hey, it’s sugar. It’s all good.”

  Jada turned to leave.

  “I saw Alina the other night.”

  Her feet rooted. “Impossible,” she said.

  “I know. But I did.”

  Jada relaxed each muscle by section of her body, starting with her head and working down. Opponents tended to focus at eye level, so she always eradicated signs of obvious tension there first. She didn’t want to talk about this. She didn’t think about this anymore. “I watched her die,” she said finally.

  “Did you? Or did you leave before it was over?” Mac held out a doughnut.

  Jada ate it in two bites, wondering if this was some kind of twisted joke Mac was playing on her. Then, in a single swallow, she tossed back the little plastic cup of coffee Mac had offered.

  “Fuck,” she exploded. “That was hot.”

  “Duh. It’s coffee,” Mac said, arching a brow.

  “Give me another doughnut. Where did you find them?”

  “Little vendor a few blocks from BB&B. And I didn’t.” She frowned. “I had to ask Barrons to go get breakfast, and believe me, every time I ask for anything, I get this freaking lecture on how he’s not my fetch-it boy. I have to slink through the damn streets to go anywhere, hiding from everyone. They’re hunting me.”