I struggled to hold his gaze, if only to keep from absorbing how grotesque the rest of him had become. It was no wonder he kept his hood up. No wonder he hid his face. I looked away. I couldn’t take it.
“Look at me, bitch. See your handiwork. You did this to me,” he snarled.
“No, I didn’t,” I said instantly. I may not know much, but I did know that I’d never do anything like that to anyone, not even my worst enemy.
“Yes, you did. And I’m going to do worse to you before I’m done. You’ll die when I die. It might be weeks, it might be months.”
I looked back at him and tried to speak but couldn’t. His face, once handsome in a pale, Goth Byronic way, was now monstrous. “I didn’t do that,” I insisted. “There’s no way. All I did was stab you in your gut. I don’t know how the rest of you got so … so …” I let the sentence end there, the kinder for both of us. “Are you sure Barrons didn’t do it?” Not very big of me trying to blame Barrons, but at the moment, under the circumstances, I wasn’t feeling big. I was feeling small and terrified. Mallucé was holding me responsible for what he’d become, and what he’d become was worse than anything I’d seen in any movie I’d watched, or any nightmare I’d ever had.
“You stabbed me with a Fae-killing spear, you bitch!”
“But you’re not Fae,” I protested. “You’re a vampire.”
“Parts of me were Fae!” he hissed.
His mouth didn’t completely close, and flecks of spittle flew through the bars, landed on my skin. They burned like acid. I scrubbed my arms on my T-shirt.
“What?” How could parts of someone be Fae? Yet that was exactly what it looked like. As if the spear had killed parts of him. Portions of Mallucé’s face were still marble white and handsome in a vampiric way; other parts had been ravaged by a foul leprosy: A blackened vein ran down his right cheek, over his jaw, and halfway down his neck, like rotted marbling in beef; a chunk above his left eye was gray, moist; most of his chin and lower lip had collapsed into a wet, septic decay. It was horrific. I couldn’t stop staring. His long blond hair had fallen out, baring a bloated skull traced by a skein of thin, black veins.
I realized that must be why my hand had sunk into his abdomen—portions of his body were decomposing as well, which explained his altered gait and the change in his voice, not to mention a mouth that wouldn’t close, which had to make diction difficult. Was he rotting from the inside, too? Revolted, I wiped my hand on my jeans.
“Look at me,” he said, his yellow eyes burning lanterns in a misshapen skull. “Study me. Soon you’ll know this face as well as your own. We’re going to be intimate, so very intimate. We’re going to die together.” His eyes narrowed to slits. “Do you know what the worst part is?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “At first you think it’s watching parts of yourself rot. Staring in the mirror, poking your finger into melting pockets of your own flesh. Wondering if you should scrape out the rot or leave it alone. Bandage it up. Realizing that your cheek or your ear or part of your stomach is beyond repair. You lose yourself in degrees. You think, I can live with this, but then the next part goes and the next, and you find the worst part isn’t the mornings when you wake up to discover another part of you is no longer alive, but the nights when you lie awake in terror of what you’ll discover at dawn. Will it be my hand next? An eye? Will I go blind before I die? Will it be my tongue? My dick? My balls? It’s not the reality that undoes you; it’s the possibilities. It’s the waiting, the hours you lie awake wondering what will be next. It’s not the pain of the moment, but the anticipation of the next pain. It’s not the dying itself—that will be a relief—but the desperation to live, the stupid fucking need to go on long after you hate what you’ve become, long after you can even stand to look at yourself. You’ll feel that before I’m through with you.” His lips—one sculpted, pink, and firm, one rotted—peeled back from fangs. “Look at me. I lived as Death for years. I played it for them. I delivered Death to my followers, dressed in grand Goth seduction. I gave it to them in velvet and lace and smelling of sex. I took them higher than they’d ever been on any drug. I danced them into death. I ripped out their throats and drank their blood and they came beneath my body as they died. Will no one do the same for me? Will no one dance me into the darkness?”
I couldn’t find any words.
His smile was terrible, his laughter even worse: moist-sounding, wrong. He held out his arms, as if to waltz. “Welcome, dance partner. Welcome to my ball here in Hell’s grotto. Death is not seductive. It does not come silk-clad and sweet-smelling as I did for my chosen. It is lonely and cold and merciless. It takes everything from you, before it finally takes you.” He dropped his arms. “I had it all. I had the world by the balls. I fucked anything I wanted, anytime I wanted. I was worshipped, I was rich, and I was going to be one of the world’s great new powers. I was the Lord Master’s right hand and now I am nothing. Because of you.”
He pulled up his cowl, adjusted it, then turned and walked away. “So think, lovely bitch,” he tossed over his shoulder, “about how lovely you won’t be soon. Think about the morning and what horrors await you there. Try to sleep. Wonder what might wake you. Dream. For they are all you have left now. I own your reality. Welcome to mine.”
I lay on my pallet staring up at the stone ceiling. I’d gone to that sidhe-seer place in my head and discovered something: I was capable of illusion. Not the Fae kind of illusion that affected others, but a kind only I could see. It was enough. With my mind, I’d painted clouds and a blue sky on the stone ceiling of my grotto, and I could breathe again.
Was it really only three months ago that I’d been lying by the pool at my parents’ house, in my favorite pink polka-dotted bikini, sipping iced sweet tea and listening to Louis Armstrong croon about what a wonderful world it was?
The song currently playing on my mental iPod was “Highway to Hell.” I’d been on it and not even known. It was a fast road; made the Autobahn look like snail’s play—three months total from Stateside to Tombside, and a month of that had been squandered in a single afternoon, playing volleyball with a facsimile of my sister in Faery.
“V’lane?” I said with soft urgency. I conjured a light wind to buffet my fluffy clouds on the ceiling. “Are you there? Anywhere? I could really use some help right about now.” For the next little while—I had no concept of time down here—I invoked the death-by-sex Fae fervently. I promised him things I knew I’d regret. I’d regret dying more.
It was no use.
Wherever he was, he wasn’t listening.
What in the world had happened to Mallucé? What had he meant when he’d said parts of him were Fae? How could parts of a person—or vampire in this case—be Fae? My understanding was either you were Fae or you weren’t. Could Fae and human reproduce and would the resulting offspring be half-Fae?
But that wasn’t the read I was getting off Mallucé. Each time I’d encountered him, I’d focused directly on him, trying to get a sense of what he was. It had always been confused, and now it was even more so. However he’d become part Fae, he’d not been born to it. It was something he’d become. But how? Was it like vampirism? Did they bite you? Have sex with you? What?
My clouds were gone. Maintaining illusion was hard work, and between the pain of my wrist and the aftereffects of whatever drugs he’d given me to keep me unconscious while transporting me from Dublin to the Burren, I had little energy left. I was starving. I was cold and I was terrified.
I rolled over on my side and stared out of my cell.
I was imprisoned at one end of a long oval stone cavern lit by torches on the walls. At the other end a single metal door was hinged into the wall.
In the center of the cavern was a low stone slab that resembled a sacrificial altar more than anything else. There were knives, bottles, and chains on it. Three opulent, brocaded, Victorian-style chairs were drawn up around it. Mallucé had brought the tatters of his Goth past with him into the earth.
The wal
ls of the damp cavern were lined with other cells or grottos; some so narrow and small that they were barely more than barred boxes in stone that a person might be stuffed into, others large enough to hold a dozen men. My cell was sandwiched between cells on both sides, with bars separating us, but they were empty. In a few of the cells across the way, occasionally something moved. I called out to other occupants but nothing replied. Had Mallucé created this place, or was I in some ancient dungeon, remnant of a more barbaric time, buried so deep in the earth it had been forgotten?
Clouds. I rolled over and painted them on the ceiling again. I was shaking. Phrases like “deep in the earth” just weren’t working for me. I had a few friends who were spelunkers. I’d always thought they were nuts. Why go to the ground any sooner than we have to?
I added a sun and a dazzlingly white seashore to my illusion, I dressed myself in pink. I painted my sister into the picture.
Eventually I slept.
I knew he was in the cavern with me the moment I awakened.
Fae but not Fae: I could feel him there: a dark cancer, a wrongness.
My head ached from sleeping on a pillow of stone. My wrist pain had eased from the torture of screaming nerves, to flesh and blood pain, which was more bearable. I was so hungry I was almost too weak to move. Did he plan to starve me? I’d heard it took something like three days to dehydrate. How long did I have to go? I had no sense of time in this place. Would hours feel like days? Would days feel like months? How long had I been unconscious? How long had I slept? From how hungry I was, I knew at least a day had passed, perhaps two. I have a high metabolism and need to eat frequently. Assuming he fed and watered me, what would I be like after a week down here? A month?
I rolled over gingerly. There was bread and a small pail of water inside my cell. I fell on them like an animal.
As I tore off chunks of dry, crusty bread and stuffed them in my mouth, I watched Mallucé through the bars. His back was to me. His hood was down. The back of his hairless, swollen head looked gangrenous. Froths of lace rimmed his neck and black-gloved wrists where his robe fell away. Even decaying, he was still dressing in the height of Goth. He was seated at the low stone slab and if I wasn’t mistaken, he was eating something, too, making disgusting noises while he did it. I saw the flash of silver slicing, the sound of blade against stone, crunching sounds. I wondered what decaying vampires dined upon. According to the authors of Vampires for Dummies, they didn’t eat. They drank blood. His body and the chairs blocked my view of the slab.
I finished the bread too quickly, resulting in a hard, sour lump of dough in my stomach. Despite raging thirst, I sipped the water carefully. There was no bathroom in my cell from Hell. Ironic, the humiliations that occur to us in the midst of significantly larger problems, as if being killed by one’s enemy isn’t quite as terrible as being forced to urinate in front of him.
Where was Barrons? What had he done when I’d not shown up at the bookstore that night? Gone hunting for me? Was he still out there looking? Had Mallucé and the Hunters captured him, too? I refused to believe that. I needed hope. Surely if Mallucé had gotten Barrons, he’d be bragging about it, would have imprisoned him somewhere I could see him. Was he back at the bookstore, furious with me, thinking I’d gone off with V’lane again and would turn up next month, bikini-clad and suntanned?
Where was the cuff?
Why, oh, why hadn’t I let him tattoo me? What was my problem? He could have branded me between the cheeks of my petunia for all I cared, if it’d get me out of here! What had I been thinking? I was such an idiot!
A cuff can be removed, Ms. Lane; a tattoo can’t.
I’d learned that lesson the hard way. Question was would I survive it?
“Where’s my spear?” I asked Mallucé. If it was here, perhaps the cuff was, too.
“Not your spear, bitch,” the vampire said, raising an arm, bringing another bite to his mouth. I caught a glimpse of his hand; he was wearing shiny, stiff black gloves. I wondered if his hands had begun to rot and he wore gloves to contain their shape. He chewed a moment. “You were never worthy of it. I’ve put word out that I have it. Whoever restores me gets it.”
“Do you really think you can be restored?” He looked like something that had been resurrected from a grave. I couldn’t see such damage being undone.
He didn’t answer me, but I felt his anger; it chilled the room.
“If you were the Lord Master’s right hand, why doesn’t he heal you? He leads the Unseelie. He must be very powerful,” I fished.
He spat something from his mouth. I caught a glimpse of a red gristly thing before it hit the floor beyond the slab. Was he eating raw meat?
“He is nothing compared to the Fae! It’s a true Fae I need now, a full-blood. Perhaps the queen herself will come for the spear, and give me the elixir of life in exchange for it, make me truly immortal.”
“Why would she do that when she could just kill you and take the spear?”
He whirled and glared at me, citron eyes maddened with fury. Clouds were my illusion. The queen granting him eternal life was his, and I’d just shattered it.
My body retched before my brain processed what I was seeing. Some things don’t have to be filtered through the consciousness; they get you in the gut. A chunk of raw flesh dangled, half in, half out his rotting mouth, and he held another piece of it in his hand. The flesh was pinkish gray, seeping, and glistened with white pustules. I could see beyond his half-turned body to the slab. I knew now what he was eating.
A Rhino-boy was chained to the slab. Alive. What was left of it writhed in agony. Mallucé was eating Unseelie!
My bread metamorphosed instantly to a spoiled lump of yeast that expanded and threatened to disgorge. I refused to give it up. I needed my energy. I swallowed, hard. Who knew when he would bother to feed me again? “You! You’re the one who’s been eating them! But why?” Of course. It was no coincidence the half-eaten bodies had been found where my specter was seen. It had been Mallucé eating the Rhino-boy in the graveyard that night I’d searched it for Barrons. It had been him right outside my bookstore, who’d left the half-eaten nightmare in the Dumpster! So close and I’d never even known!
He shoved the bite into his mouth with his fingers. It quivered, resisting the entire time. I could see his “food” moving behind his cheeks. The flesh he was eating wasn’t just raw; like the Unseelie on the slab, it was still alive. “Do you wonder about me, bitch? I wondered about you. After you stabbed me, I sickened immediately. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I lay in my lair, poisoned, realizing in slow degrees what your spear had done to me. It was then that I projected myself to you, spied on you. I was too weak at first to do more than watch you and plan, but vengeance made me strong. That and eating most of my followers.” He laughed. “While I lay in that room, stinking to high hell, watching myself rot, I had so many conversations, so many intimate little encounters with you while I waited for this moment. In all of them you worshipped me before you died. You want to know me? You’ll know everything soon. You’ll call me Lord Master.” Around another mouthful, he said, “He’s the one who taught me to eat them.”
“Why? For what?” Here, at last, was some information about my enemy!
“So I could see them.”
“Who them? Do you mean the Fae?” I said, incredulous.
He nodded.
“Are you saying that if person eats Unseelie they develop the ability to see the Fae? A perfectly normal person, or do you have to be a vampire?”
He shrugged. “I made two of my bodyguards eat it. It worked on them.”
I wondered what he’d done to the bodyguards. I didn’t ask. I couldn’t see him letting competition in any form live to potentially challenge him. If Mallucé really was a vampire, I highly doubted he’d ever “sired” anyone. “Why did the Lord Master want you to see them?”
“To recruit me to his cause. He wanted my money, my connections. I wanted his power. And I was about to take it
—all of it—until you came along. I’d won many of his minions to my side. They serve me still.” He stuffed another bite in his mouth and closed his eyes. For a moment, there was an obscene expression of sensual pleasure on his ruined face. “You can’t imagine what it feels like,” he said, chewing slowly, half smiling. Then his eyes snapped open, febrile with loathing. “Or what it used to feel like, before you damaged me. It was the ultimate high. It gave me power in the black arts, the strength of ten men, heightened my senses, and healed mortal wounds as quickly as they were inflicted. It made me invincible. Now none of the ecstasy is there. It makes me strong. It keeps me alive, if I eat it constantly, but nothing more. Because of you!”
One more reason to hate me: I’d taken away his drug of choice. On top of that, I’d inflicted an immortal wound on him, one that eating Unseelie obviously couldn’t heal. A wound that was killing him slowly, one Fae part at a time. I didn’t quite understand that aspect of it.
“Does eating Unseelie turn you Fae eventually? Is that what you and the Lord Master were doing? Eating Fae to become Fae?”
“Fuck the Lord Master,” he snarled. “I’m your world now!”
“He abandoned you, didn’t he?” I guessed. “When he saw you like this, he sent you away to die. You didn’t serve his purposes any more.”
Fury hummed in the air. The vampire turned and carved off another slice of flesh. As he moved, his dark robes parted and I caught the flash of something gold and silver, encrusted with onyx and sapphires, hanging around his neck.
Mallucé had the amulet! He was the one who’d beaten us to the Welshman’s estate that night!
Karen Marie Moning’s Fever Series 5-Book Bundle: Darkfever, Bloodfever, Faefever, Dreamfever, Shadowfever Page 47