Feverborn

by Karen Marie Moning

  “I think the odds are high that’s a great big no.”

  “Dani would have risked it.”

  “There was a time when I”—she emphasized the pronoun—“didn’t understand the price you can end up paying.”

  “You mean going through the Silvers,” I said.

  “Coming back,” she whispered. “That was the highest price of all.”

  “Got any better ideas?” I said flatly.

  Long pause, then, “No.”

  I closed my eyes and reached for my inner lake. She was never paying another price. Not if I could help it, and I could. And maybe I’d be just fine.

  “Mac, I need you to promise me something,” she whispered urgently.

  “Anything,” I said, walking out to greet the still black waters in my mind. They didn’t try to rush up and drown me this time. The surface was serene, placid, inviting, no hint of an undertow.

  “If I don’t make it out of here—”

  “You will.”

  “If I don’t,” she repeated, “I need you to do something for me. Promise me you’ll do it. Promise me you’ll accomplish it no matter what. Say it.”

  “I promise,” I said. But whatever she wanted, she could do herself, because she was getting out of here. I was going to see to it.

  “The Silver I came through that brought me home…” She told me where it was and how to find it. “I need you to go back through it for me.”

  “For what?” I backed away from my lake for a moment, giving her my full attention.

  “I need you to rescue Shazam.”

  My brain stuttered and I just lay there a few moments, opening my mouth, reconsidering and closing it. I’d thought we were having a fairly sane conversation. She’d been composed, intelligent, rational. Showing more humor than I’d ever seen from Jada. Now we were back to the stuffed animal she nearly died trying to save from the fire.

  “He’ll wait for me forever,” she said in an anguished whisper. “He’ll wait and wait and he’ll believe that I’ll come. I can’t stand the thought of him being disappointed, over and over again.”

  I didn’t say anything. Because I knew that was what she had done. Waited for someone to come rescue her. And no one had.

  “Every day, he’ll just keep sitting there. Thinking it’s going to be that day. The happy one.”

  She started to weep then, and it set off another flood of my own tears. The happy one, she’d said. How many years had it taken for her to stop believing? To stop hoping for the happy day?

  “He’s so emotional,” she whispered. “And he gets so depressed and he gives up. He was alone for so long. I promised him he’d never be alone again.”

  He was? Or she had been?

  “And I know he’s going to be hungry,” she fretted. “He gets so hungry.”

  Oh, God, I thought, she must have starved in the Silvers, with her enormous requirements for food. And she’d passed that trait off, too, to an imaginary friend.

  “Do you promise me you’ll go back and save him if I don’t get out?”

  “The fish,” I said woodenly. “You were feeding the stuffed animal fish.”

  “You might not be able to find him at first. He hides in other dimensions. You’ll have to talk to the air and tell him his Yi-yi sent you and it’s okay to come out. It may take a while before he believes it’s safe. Whatever you do, don’t let him lick you or try to eat you.”

  “Dani,” I said brokenly. She wanted me to go through the Silvers and talk to the air.

  “I knew the fish were a bad idea,” she said with some embarrassment.

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say.

  “I’m not crazy, Mac. Shazam is real,” she said.

  I blinked. What did she mean? What was she saying? I’d seen “Shazam.” He was a gutted stuffed animal.

  She said tightly, “I left him.”

  “The stuffed animal?”

  “No,” she said irritably, “that was different. I couldn’t sleep. So I pretended it was him to help me sleep while I figured out what to do. But I knew I was pretending. Then when the abbey caught fire, I felt like it was happening all over again. It was that day again, the day I really lost him. It triggered me. I went a little nuts.”

  I turned my head as far to the left as I could. “Shazam is real? Really, truly real?” I said.

  “He’s a cranky, furry koala bear/cat thing. I found him my first year Silverside.”

  I opened my mouth, closed it. Considered what she’d just said, weighing it for clarity and conviction. Was she telling the truth? Or was she so fractured she was now convincing herself, since Ryodan had gutted her delusion, that she’d left it behind? “A koala bear/cat thing that talks and hides in the air?” I finally said.

  “Mac, stop thinking so much. It’s probably why it wants to work on your brain. You have all that internal monologue going on all the time.”

  I bristled. “Don’t be a bitch.” I knew why I thought so hard about everything; all my life I’d had to sift through two complete beings inside me without ever knowing the other one was there: fifty thousand years of the Unseelie king’s memories bouncing around in my subconscious, recurring nightmares of icy places, fragments of songs, desires that hadn’t made any sense. I’d harbored emotions I’d never been able to pinpoint to any event in my life. Everything was suspicious to me—because half of it wasn’t mine. And I’d done a damn fine job navigating what was mine and what wasn’t.

  She said again, “He’s real. You have to believe me. That’s part of the promise you’re making me.”

  “You weren’t alone the whole time?” I longed to believe that. I hated the thought that she’d spent five and a half years battling enemies all by herself.

  “No. Well, except for when he vanishes. And he’s amazing in a fight. Well, as long he stays focused and doesn’t have one of his pessimistic meltdowns. He hates being alone. And he’s alone again.” She added softly, “He loves me. He never said it but I know. It’s what he means when he says he sees me. And I can’t let him down. I can’t fail him. You have to tell him you see him, okay? Just keep telling the air that you see him. He’ll come out. And if I don’t make it, Mac, you have to love him. Promise me you’ll take care of him.”

  I tried to wrap my brain around what she was telling me. I wanted to believe it was true, that she wasn’t broken and she wasn’t crazy. That she’d actually lost someone and it had been killing her inside. That in fact it had devastated her so deeply, she’d pretended he was a stuffed animal. She had feelings, deep ones. A sudden happiness filled me. Whether or not Shazam was real, Dani felt loved—and loved in return.

  “There’s nothing wrong with your heart, honey,” I said softly.

  “It’s broken,” she whispered. “I can’t go forward with Shazam behind me. I don’t know how.”

  God, I knew that feeling! A sister, a parent, a lover, an animal. It didn’t matter where you put your unconditional love, once given, the stealing away of it was an assault to every sense. Smells were the worst—they could ambush you, put you smack back in the middle of the hottest part of the grief. The scent of a peaches-and-cream candle. The brand of deodorant she’d used. Her pillow back home. The smell of the bookstore in the evening, when I’d believed Barrons was dead. When you love too hard, you can lose the will to live without them. Everywhere you look is a great big sucking absence of what you once had and will never have again. And life gets weirdly flat and too sharp and painful at the same time, and nothing feels right and everything cuts.

  There was a sudden rattling in the distance, and I inhaled sharply.

  “It’s coming,” she whispered.

  “Promise me a favor now,” I whispered.

  “Anything,” she vowed.

  “If you have a chance to escape, if you suddenly find yourself free, run like hell and leave me behind.”

  “Anything but that, Mac.”

  “I promised you, damn it,” I hissed. “Now you promise me,
and mean it. If you have the chance to escape, turn your back on me and run as fast as you can.”

  “I don’t run anymore.”

  “Promise me. Say it.”

  She remained silent. The only sound was the whine and clatter of our would-be tormentor approaching.

  “Quid pro quo or I won’t keep my promise,” I threatened. “I won’t save Shazam if I get out.”

  “Coerced promises aren’t fair, Mac. You know that.”

  “Please,” I said softly. “It won’t mean anything if what I do goes wrong and we both die. One of us has to make it.”

  She said nothing for a moment, then said stiffly, “I promise to do what I think is best.”

  I laughed softly. That was Dani. Not Jada at all. And it was enough because I knew Dani: survival at any cost.

  I heard the screech of metal and knew we didn’t have much time. I closed my eyes, leapt and dove into my black lake.

  “What are you doing, Mac?” she said sharply, no longer bothering to be quiet. I knew why. There was an ominous portent to the sound of the approaching Sweeper. It was no longer ambling. It was moving with briskness and focus. Our “operations” were about to begin. Whether we were awake or not.

  “What I should have done the moment you jumped through that Silver,” I said. “Believing in the good magic, too.”

  She was quiet; as if trying to think of what to say. Finally she said, simply, “I don’t want to lose you, too.”

  “I thought you didn’t like me,” I reminded. Chittering, coming closer. Rustling. I swam hard, focusing on the shaft of golden light slicing through the murky water.

  “I don’t sometimes,” she said irritably. “But we’re…”

  “Sisters?” I said as I drifted lightly to my feet in the black cavern. She’d come after me. She’d looked out that window, decided I was in trouble, and shoved aside whatever it was she’d gotten out of bed to do—go save Shazam?—and come after me instead.

  “Peas. Pod. Whatever you’re doing, think hard about it.”

  Peas in the Mega-pod, she’d once called us. My heart expanded, so full of love for her it hurt. “I have.”

  “And know I’ve got your back.”

  “Back at you, kid,” I said lightly. But I’d had to say it loud, to make myself heard over the jarring approach of the Sweeper.

  “I’m not a kid anymore.”

  “Don’t we all know that,” I said dryly. I dashed into the cavern, the shining, resplendent black rock chamber that housed the enormous power that had kept me immobilized by fear for far too long.

  No more.

  I had no idea which of my three suppositions was right, and no longer cared. The only thing that mattered to me was that Dani lived. That she went on to love. To save “Shazam” if he actually existed, to grow up and take lovers, regain her wonder and freedom of emotion and wholeness of heart.

  And if the price was me, the price was me.

  I guess that’s what love is. You care more that they live than you care about whether you do. Dani’s light would never be extinguished. Not on my watch.

  Panic was pressing at the outer edges of my mind and I knew the Sweeper was almost on us. I could smell the noxious odor of the wraiths hemming us in.

  I hurried to the Book and turned the pages rapidly, scanning, looking for anything I could use.

  “Mac,” I heard from a distance. “Don’t do it for me. Don’t lose your soul for me. You know I have responsibility dysmorphia syndrome. You’ll make it worse.”

  I laughed in the cavern as I thumbed through page after page. Who said I would lose my soul? Good magic, I reminded myself.

  There! A bit of a double-edged sword, but it would work.

  Triumphantly, I shouted the words of the ancient spell I’d just found. The syllables echoed sharply off the stone of the cavern, amplifying, growing, shimmering in the air around me. I could feel the power flooding me, ready, able, and more than willing. It filled me with euphoria, and I knew something that felt so good couldn’t possibly be bad.

  As I finished the final syllable, the Book abruptly collapsed into a pile of shimmering gold dust.

  I stared at it wondering what had just happened. Looking for the same winking red gemstones I’d seen in the cavern.

  Had I absorbed it? Was I one with it? I’d been reading it in the First Language. Had I succeeded in doing what Cruce had done?

  I didn’t feel any different.

  I knew that, beyond me, in the warehouse, the Sweeper and its minions were gone. The spell had done what I’d intended it to do. Well, essentially.

  And most importantly, Dani was free and safe.

  Even now she was rising from her gurney, restraints falling away as she stood up. I could see her movements in my mind’s eye.

  Music began to play in my cavern and I frowned. It was a Sonny and Cher song that I’d always hated. They say we’re young and we don’t know…

  My blood turned to ice in my veins and I could feel it, oh God, I could feel it!

  Inside me, expanding, cramming every nook and cranny of my being!

  Blighting everything, blacking out the tiniest most essential parts of me, draping my soul in homicidal rage and bottomless hunger and madness and horror, shoving me back and down, cramming me into a tiny box with no holes for air, packing me in there as tightly as a sardine.

  Just before the lid slammed down, I used the last bit of control I had over my mouth to scream, “Run, Dani. RUN!”

  Got you, sweet thing, the Sinsar Dubh purred.

  PEOPLE

  SIDHE-SEERS

  SIDHE-SEER (SHEE-SEER): A person on whom Fae magic doesn’t work, capable of seeing past the illusions or “glamour” cast by the Fae to the true nature that lies beneath. Some can also see Tabh’rs, hidden portals between realms. Others can sense Seelie and Unseelie objects of power. Each sidhe-seer is different, with varying degrees of resistance to the Fae. Some are limited; some are advanced, with multiple “special powers.” For thousands of years the sidhe-seers protected humans from the Fae that slipped through on pagan feast days when the veils grew thin, to run the Wild Hunt and prey on humans.

  MACKAYLA LANE (O’CONNOR): Main character, female, twenty-three, adopted daughter of Jack and Rainey Lane, biological daughter of Isla O’Connor. Blond hair, green eyes, had an idyllic, sheltered childhood in the Deep South. When her biological sister, Alina, was murdered and the Garda swiftly closed the case with no leads, Mac quit her job bartending and headed for Dublin to search for Alina’s killer herself. Shortly after her arrival she met Jericho Barrons and began reluctantly working with him toward common goals. Among her many skills and talents, Mac can track objects of power created by the Fae, including the ancient, sentient, psychopathic Book of magic known as the Sinsar Dubh. At the end of Shadowfever we learn that twenty years before, when the Sinsar Dubh escaped its prison beneath the abbey, it briefly possessed Mac’s mother and imprinted a complete copy of itself in the unprotected fetus. Although Mac succeeds in reinterring the dangerous Book, her victory is simultaneous with the discovery that there are two copies of it; she is one of them and will never be free from the temptation to use her limitless, deadly power.

  ALINA LANE (O’CONNOR): Female, deceased, older sister to MacKayla Lane. At twenty-four went to Dublin to study at Trinity College and discovered she was a sidhe-seer. Became lovers with the Lord Master, also known as Darroc, an ex-Fae stripped of his immortality by Queen Aoibheal for attempting to overthrow her reign. Alina was killed by Rowena, who magically forced Dani O’Malley to trap her in an alley with a pair of deadly Unseelie.

  DANIELLE “THE MEGA” O’MALLEY: Main character. An enormously gifted, genetically mutated sidhe-seer with an extremely high IQ, superstrength, speed, and sass. She was abused and manipulated by Rowena from a young age, molded into the old woman’s personal assassin, and forced to kill Mac’s sister, Alina. Despite the darkness and trauma of her childhood, Dani is eternally optimistic and determined to survive and ha
ve her fair share of life plus some. In Shadowfever, Mac discovers Dani killed her sister, and the two, once as close as sisters, are now bitterly estranged. In Iced, Dani flees Mac and leaps into a Silver, unaware it goes straight to the dangerous Hall of All Days. We learn in Burned that, although mere weeks passed on Earth, it took Dani five and a half years to find her way home, and when she returns, she calls herself Jada.

  ROWENA O’REILLY: Grand Mistress of the sidhe-seer organization until her death in Shadowfever. Governed the six major Irish sidhe-seer bloodlines but rather than training them, controlled and diminished them. Fiercely power-hungry, manipulative, and narcissistic, she was seduced by the Sinsar Dubh into freeing it. She ate Fae flesh to enhance her strength and talent, and kept a lesser Fae locked beneath the abbey. Dabbling in dangerous black arts, she experimented on many of the sidhe-seers in her care, most notably Danielle O’Malley. In Shadowfever she is possessed by the Sinsar Dubh and used to seduce Mac with the illusion of parents she never had, in an effort to get her to turn over the only illusion amulet capable of deceiving even the Unseelie king. Mac sees through the seduction and kills Rowena.

  ISLA O’CONNOR: Mac’s biological mother. Twenty-some years ago Isla was the leader of the Haven, one of seven trusted advisors to the Grand Mistress in the sacred, innermost circle of sidhe-seers at Arlington Abbey. Rowena (the Grand Mistress) wanted her daughter, Kayleigh O’Reilly, to be the Haven leader, and was furious when the women selected Isla instead. Isla was the only member of the Haven who survived the night the Sinsar Dubh escaped its prison beneath the abbey. She was briefly possessed by the Dark Book but not turned into a lethal, sadistic killing machine. In the chaos at the abbey, Isla was stabbed and badly injured. Barrons tells Mac he visited Isla’s grave five days after she left the abbey, that she was cremated. Barrons says he discovered Isla had only one daughter. He later tells Mac it is conceivable Isla could have been pregnant the one night he saw her and a child might have survived, given proper premature birth care. He also says it is conceivable Isla didn’t die, but lived to bear another child (Mac) and give her up. Barrons theorizes Isla was spared because the sentient evil of the Sinsar Dubh imprinted itself on her unprotected fetus, made a complete second copy of itself inside the unborn Mac and deliberately released her. It is believed Isla died after having Mac and arranging for her friend Tellie to have both her daughters smuggled from Ireland and adopted in the States, forbidden ever to return to Ireland.