Then I forgot her in the pleasure of the moment.
This was a rush.
This felt … good.
Familiar.
Free.
We rose higher and higher into the sky. Rooftops receded beneath us.
In front of me was the silvery coastline. Behind me, open country.
The air was crisp with a tang of salt. Lights beneath us were few and far between. I laughed out loud. This was amazing. I was flying.
I’d done it before, with Barrons, but this was different. It was just me and my Hunter and the night. I felt wide open with possibilities. The world was my oyster. No, the worlds were my oysters.
Damn, it was good to be me!
I suddenly knew something about Hunters—maybe it fed it to me with its mind. Not only were the massive icy dragons sifters, they made the Silvers obsolete. They weren’t Fae. They never had been. They were amused by us. Aloofly entertained. They hung out with the Unseelie because they found it … interesting to pass time in such a fashion. They’d never been imprisoned.
No one owned them.
No one ever could.
In fact, we didn’t even begin to understand what they really were. (Not alive the way we thought. Was I flying on a huge breathing meteor through the sky? Carved from that of which the universe had begun?)
I reached out for the Hunter’s mind. You can sift worlds!
It turned its head and fixed me with a fiery orange eye, as if to say, How stupid are you? You knew that.
No, I didn’t.
It snorted a tendril of smoky fire back at me, scorching my jeans.
“Ow!” I clapped a hand over my knee.
Don’t need blinders. Wipe off his marks. Interfere with my vision. That one should be terminated. He plays with the instruments of gods.
“Barrons? What marks?”
On my wings, the back of my head. Wipe them off.
“No.”
It was disappointed but fell silent, accepting my decision.
I opened my sidhe-seer senses. Or was it that part of me that was the Unseelie King? I gasped.
I knew where the Sinsar Dubh was. It was outside Barrons Books and Baubles. Looking for me.
“East,” I said into my radio. “It’s at the bookstore.”
They crept around it, draping a net of stones chiseled from the cliffs of its home, closing in slowly but surely, with my guidance.
It could sense me near. It wasn’t sure where. But it didn’t seem to be able to sense them.
I listened to chatter on my radio.
Rowena had begun with her demands that the Seelie not be allowed to see the Book once it was sealed away, although Kat tried desperately and diplomatically to curb her imperious attitude.
The Seelie were growing more incensed by the moment. And getting more imperious by the moment.
Drustan was trying to run interference, but the other Keltar began bickering among themselves about the role of the Seelie and the role of the sidhe-seers, insisting their part to play was more important.
Barrons was getting angrier with each passing minute, and Lor had just threatened to drop the stone and leave if everyone didn’t shut the fuck up.
“Two blocks west of you, V’lane,” I said. He was walking, not sifting. Said the Book would sense his presence if he did.
“It’s moving again, fast,” I cried. It had just shot three blocks in a matter of seconds. “It has to be in a car. Whoever it’s got is driving it. I’m going to try to get closer for a better look.”
“Don’t you dare!” Rowena said. “You stay up there, far away from it, girl!”
I scowled. A Hunter-sized bowel movement on her head would go a long way toward making me feel better. For now. I was afraid killing her might be all that would satisfy me long term.
“Get off my back, old woman,” I muttered, and turned the voice function of my radio off so I could hear them but they couldn’t hear me.
I didn’t want anyone to pick up on the whoosh-whoosh of the wings that had abruptly appeared beside me—which were much too massive to belong to the Hunter I was on.
I stared down the leathery wing of my Hunter at the one that was flying tandem with us.
K’Vruck.
Nightwindflyhighfreeeeeee.
I hastily checked my internal radar. It was hardly a typical Sinsar Dubh thought, but I couldn’t be too safe. Only when I was certain the Book was still on the ground did I breathe easily again.
What was K’Vruck doing here if the Book hadn’t brought him? Its thought had been less words and more an observation of the moment.
Was K’Vruck … happy?
It turned its head sideways and gave me a toothy, leathery-lipped grin. The tips of its wings worried my Hunter’s span, making it rear in alarm.
“What are you doing?”
What are you?
“Huh?”
I fly.
I looked at it blankly. It had emphasized the word “I.”
Used to ride me, it chuffed with reproach. Old friend.
I stared at it, nonplussed.
My eyes narrowed. It was clearly part of some conspiracy to make me think I was the Unseelie King. That was one load of crap I wasn’t buying. “Go away.” I swatted at it like a fly. “Shoo. Get out of here.” I was shooing finality more final than death.
I was dimly aware of Barrons shouting on my radio.
It turned its leathery smile forward and sailed serenely along, barely moving its enormous wings, surfing a breeze. It was five times the size of my Hunter, several houses of leathery wings and hooves and enormous oven eyes and whatever held all that icy blackness together. As it passed through the dark sky, the breeze that sloughed off its titanic body steamed like dry ice.
“Go!” I snarled.
“Mac, where the hell is the Book?” Ryodan’s voice sounded tinny on the radio. We were higher than I’d meant to be. “Where are you? I can’t see you up there. I see a couple of Hunters flying together, but I don’t see you. Fuck, is that one enormous or what?”
Great, just what I needed. Somebody to look up and catch me flying side by side with the Unseelie King’s favorite Lamborghini. I thumbed my volume back on. “I’m here. In a cloud. Hang on. You’ll see me in a few minutes,” I lied.
“There aren’t any clouds up there, Mac,” Lor said.
Christian snapped, “Lie, MacKayla. Try again. Who are you flying with?”
“Where’s the Book?” V’lane demanded.
“It’s—Oh, there it is! Damn! Now it’s four blocks to the west, down by the docks. I’m going down for a closer look.”
When I nudged my Hunter into a dive, K’Vruck dove with us.
“Ms. Lane,” Barrons demanded, “what are you doing flying with the Hunter that killed Darroc?”
39
They refused to let me land.
I couldn’t exactly blame them.
It wasn’t so much that I had my own Satanic wing man—there wasn’t anybody on the ground that night who hadn’t dipped a toe into something dark at one point or another—as that they worried the Book would grab K’Vruck somehow and then we’d all be, well … K’Vrucked.
I couldn’t shake him. The Hunter who called himself something more final than death simply would not leave my side. And a secret part of me was a little thrilled by it.
I flew over Dublin with Death.
Heady stuff for a bartender from small-town Georgia.
I had to watch from the air as the debacle unfolded. And it was a debacle.
They cornered it, hemmed it in with stones, whittled in and down until they finally had it penned on the steps of the church where I’d been raped. I had to wonder if it somehow knew that and was trying to mess with my head.
I kept waiting for it to speak in my mind, but it didn’t. Not once. Not a word. It was the first time I’d ever been in its vicinity that it hadn’t tried to mess with me somehow. I figured the stones and the Druids had a dampening effect.
&nb
sp; As I watched, they moved the four stones—east, west, north, and south—in closer and closer until they formed the corners of a box, ten feet by ten feet around it.
A soft blue light began to emanate between the stones, as if forming a cage.
Everyone backed away.
“What now?” I whispered, circling over the steeple.
“Now it’s mine,” Drustan said calmly. The Keltar Druids begin to chant, and the silver-eyed Highlander moved forward.
I had a sudden vision of him, broken and dead on the church steps. The Book morphing into the Beast, towering over them all, laughing. Taking out one after the next.
“No,” I cried.
“No, what?” Barrons said instantly.
“Stop, Drustan!”
The Highlander looked up at me and stopped.
I studied the tableau below. Something wasn’t right. The Sinsar Dubh was lying on the steps, an innocuous hardcover. No towering Beast, no chain-saw-toothed O’Bannion, no skinned Fiona.
“When did it get out of the car?” I demanded.
Nobody answered me.
“Who was driving it? Did anyone see the Book get out of the car?”
“Ryodan, Lor, speak up!” Barrons snapped.
“Don’t know, Barrons. Didn’t see it. Thought you did.”
“How did it end up on the steps?”
V’lane hissed. “It is an illusion!”
I groaned. “It’s not really there. I must have lost track of it. I wondered why it wasn’t messing with me. It was. Just not the way it usually does. I screwed up. Oh, shit—V’lane—look out!”
40
“Do you hear that?” It was driving me nuts.
“What?”
“You don’t hear someone playing a xylophone?”
Barrons gave me a look.
“I swear I hear the faint strains of ‘Qué Sera Sera.’ ”
“Doris Day?”
“Pink Martini.”
“Ah. No. Don’t hear it.”
We walked in silence. Or, rather, he did. In my world, trumpets were blaring and a harpsichord was tinkling and it was all I could do not to go spinning in wide-armed circles down the street, singing: When I was just a little girl, I asked my mother, “What will I be? Will I be pretty, will I be rich?” Here’s what she said to me …
The night had been an abysmal failure on all fronts.
The Sinsar Dubh had tricked us, but I was the one to blame. I was the one who could track it. I’d had a tiny part to play and hadn’t been able to get it right. If I hadn’t clued in at the last minute, it would have gotten V’lane and probably killed us all—or at least everyone that could be killed. As it was, I’d given V’lane just enough warning that he’d been able to sift out before it could turn the full brunt of its evil thrall on him and get him to take it from the hand of the sidhe-seer who’d been standing there offering it to him.
It had conned Sophie into picking it up right under our noses, while we’d all been focused on where it was making me think it was.
It had been walking along with us for God only knew how long, working its illusions on me, and I had misled them. Very nearly to a mass slaughter.
We’d run like rats from a sinking ship, scrambling over one another to get away.
It had been something to see. The most powerful and dangerous people I’ve ever known—Christian, with his Unseelie tattoos; Ryodan and Barrons and Lor, who were secretly nine-foot-tall monsters that couldn’t die; V’lane and his cohorts, who were virtually unkillable and had mind-boggling powers—all running from one small sidhe-seer holding a book.
A Book. A magical tome that some idiot had made because he’d wanted to dump all his evil from himself so he could start life over again as patriarchal leader of his race. I could have told him that trying to shirk personal responsibility never works out well in the end.
And somewhere out there tonight or tomorrow, though nobody would go looking for her or try to save her, Sophie would die.
Along with who knew how many others? V’lane had sifted to the abbey to warn them she was no longer one of them.
“What was going on with the Hunter up there, Ms. Lane?”
“No clue.”
“Looked like you had a friend. I thought maybe it was the concubine’s Hunter.”
“I hadn’t thought of that!” I forced myself to exclaim, as if stunned.
He gave me a dry look. “I don’t need a Keltar Druid to know when you’re lying.”
I scowled. “Why is that?”
“I’ve been around a long time. You learn to read people.”
“Exactly how long?”
“What did it say to you?”
I blew out a breath, exasperated. “It said I used to ride it. It called me ‘old friend.’ ” One nice thing about talking to Barrons was that I didn’t have to mince words.
He burst out laughing.
I’ve heard him laugh openly so few times that it kind of hurt my feelings that he was laughing now. “What’s funny about that?”
“The look on your face. Life hasn’t turned out like you thought it would, has it, Rainbow Girl?”
The name slid through my heart like a dull blade. You’re leaving me, Rainbow Girl. Then it had been laced with tenderness. Now it was merely a mocking appellation.
“Clearly I was misled,” I said stiffly. That damned harpsichord was back, the trumpets swelled.
When I grew up and fell in love, I asked my sweetheart, “What lies ahead? Will there be rainbows, day after day?” Here’s what my sweetheart said …
“You don’t really believe you’re the Unseelie King, do you?”
The trumpets warbled, the harpsichord fell silent, and the needle screeched as it was abruptly yanked from the record. Why did I even bother talking? “Where did you get that idea?”
“I saw the queen in the White Mansion. I couldn’t think of any reason for her memory residue to be there. Occam’s razor. She’s not the queen. Or she wasn’t then.”
“So who am I?”
“Not the Unseelie King.”
“Give me another explanation.”
“It hasn’t presented itself yet.”
“I need to find a woman named Augusta O’Clare.”
“She’s dead.”
I stopped walking. “You knew her?”
“She was Tellie Sullivan’s grandmother. It was to their home Isla O’Connor asked me to take her the night the Book escaped from the abbey.”
“And?”
“You’re not surprised. Interesting. You knew I was at the abbey.”
“How well did you know my moth—Isla?”
“I met her that night. I visited her grave five days later.”
“Did she have two children?”
He shook his head. “I checked later. She had only one daughter. Tellie was babysitting her that night. I saw the child at her house when I took Isla there.”
My sister. He’d seen Alina at Tellie’s. “And you think I’m not the Unseelie King?”
“I think we don’t have all the facts.”
I felt like crying. The day I’d set foot on the Emerald Isle, the slow erosion of me had begun. I’d arrived, the beloved daughter of Jack and Rainey Lane, sister of Alina. I’d accepted being adopted. I’d been elated to discover I had Irish roots. But now Barrons had just confirmed that I wasn’t an O’Connor. He’d been there when Isla died and she’d had one child. No wonder Ryodan had been so sure. There was nothing to identify me at all but a lifetime of impossible dreams, an oubliette of impossible knowledge, and an evil Book and a ghastly Hunter with a disturbing fondness for me.
“What happened that night at the abbey? Why were you there?”
“We’d gotten wind of something. Talk in the countryside. Old women gossiping. I’ve learned to listen to old women, read them over a newspaper anytime.”
“Yet you made fun of Nana O’Reilly.”
“I didn’t want you to go back and dig deeper.”
�
�Why?”
“She would have told you things I didn’t want you to know.”
“Like what you are?”
“She would have given you a name for me.” He stopped, then chewed out the next words. “Inaccurate. But a name. You needed names then.”
“You think I don’t now?” The Damned, she’d called him. I wondered why.
“You’re learning. The abbey was the focus of the talk. I’d been watching it for weeks, trying to devise a way in without setting off their wards. Clever work. They sensed even me, and nothing senses me.”
“You said ‘we’d’ gotten wind. I thought you worked alone. Who is we?”
“I do. But dozens have hunted it over time. It’s been the Grail for a certain type of collector. A sorcerer in London that ended up with copies of pages that night. Mobsters. Would-be kings. Following the same leads, we glimpsed one another now and then, gave each other a wide berth as long as we thought the other might one day provide a valuable lead, although I never saw the Keltar. I suspect the queen cleaned up after them, kept her ‘hidden mantle’ well hidden.”
“So, you were outside the abbey?”
“I had no idea anything was going on inside. It was a quiet night, like any other I’d watched it. There was no commotion. No shouting, no disturbance. The Book slipped out into the night unnoticed, or bided its time and left later. I was distracted by a woman climbing out a window in the rear of the abbey, holding her side. She’d been stabbed and was badly injured. She headed straight for me, as if she knew I was there. You must get me out of here, she said. She told me to take her to Tellie Sullivan in Devonshire. That the fate of the world depended on it.”
“I didn’t think you gave a rat’s petunia about the fate of the world.”
“I don’t. She’d seen the Sinsar Dubh. I asked if it was still at the abbey and she said it had been but was no longer. I learned that night that the damned thing had been practically beneath my nose for the past thousand years.”
“I thought it was always there, since the dawn of time, long before it was an abbey.” I wasn’t above prying into his age.
“I’ve been in Ireland only for the past millennia. Before that, I was … other places. Satisfied, Ms, Lane?”
Karen Marie Moning’s Fever Series 5-Book Bundle: Darkfever, Bloodfever, Faefever, Dreamfever, Shadowfever Page 161