Shadowfever

by Moning, Karen Marie

  “Friends don’t try to coerce each other,” I say with a pointed look at the amulet.

  He inclines his head and slips it back inside his shirt.

  I offer my hand with a smile. Barrons taught me well. Keep your friends close …

  Darroc takes it, leans down to place a light kiss upon my lips. The tension between us is a palpable thing. One sudden move from either of us and we’ll be all over each other, trying to kill each other, and we know it. He keeps his body pliant. I infuse my limbs with languor. We are two scorpions with coiled tails, trying to mate. It is no more than I deserve, the punishment of letting him touch me like this. I sentenced Barrons to death.

  I part my lips beneath his, but demurely, teeth standing guard. I exhale a soft whisper of a breath into his mouth. He likes it.

  … and your enemies closer.

  Behind us, the Unseelie Princes begin to chime softly like dark crystal. I remember that sound. I know what it precedes. I tighten my hand on his. “Never them. Never again.”

  Darroc turns to them and barks a harsh command in a language that hurts my ears.

  They vanish.

  The moment I no longer know where they are, whether they might be closing in on me, I reach for my spear. It is gone, too.

  The Unseelie Princes cannot sift within the Silvers with any predictability. Darroc tells me it’s a crapshoot every time they try. Cruce’s curse again, screwing things up.

  I tell him the stones are no better, that whatever dimension I’m in tries to expel them once uncovered, in an effort to return the rune-covered blue-black stones to the cliffs of the icy Unseelie prison from whence they were chiseled.

  I’m surprised he doesn’t know this and tell him so.

  “You do not understand what life is like at the Seelie court, MacKayla. Those with true knowledge, true memories of our past, guard it zealously. There are as many versions of the Old Days and conflicting tales of our origins as there are dimensions to choose from within the hall. The only Unseelie we ever saw were those we battled the day the king and queen fought and the king slew our queen. Since then, we have drunk from the cauldron countless times.”

  He moves along the cliff’s edge with unnatural fluidity and grace. Fae move like sleek, kingly predators, born of the sure knowledge that they can never die—or at least very rarely and only under special circumstances. He hasn’t lost that arrogance, or perhaps he’s reclaimed it, from all the Unseelie he’s been eating. He’s not wearing the crimson robes that once terrified me. Tall, gracefully muscled, he’s dressed like an outdoorsman in a Versace ad, with a long fall of moon-silvered hair secured at his nape. He’s undeniably sexy. In his power and confidence, he reminds me of Barrons.

  I don’t ask why they drink. I understand. If I found the cauldron and drank from it, it would erase all pain and allow me to start life over, a blank slate. I couldn’t grieve for what I didn’t remember ever having. That they drink implies that on some level the Fae feel. If not pain, at least significant discomfort.

  “So how are we going to get out of here?” I ask.

  His reply gives me a sudden chill, a sense of something more vast and incomprehensible than déjà vu—an inevitability finally manifesting.

  “The White Mansion.”

  4

  The night the walls came crashing down, I cowered in a belfry, my only goal to survive until dawn.

  I had no idea if the world would survive with me.

  I thought it was the longest night of my life. I was wrong.

  This is the longest night of my life, walking side by side with my enemy, mourning Jericho Barrons, drowning in my own complicity.

  It stretches on and on. I live a thousand hours in a handful. I count from one to sixty beneath my breath, over and over, ticking away the minutes I make it through, thinking if I put enough of them between me and his death, the immediacy of the pain might dull and I will be able to catch a breath without a knife stabbing through my heart.

  We do not pause to eat or sleep. He keeps Unseelie flesh in a pouch and periodically chews it while we travel, which means he can keep going far longer than I. At some point, I’ll be forced to rest. The thought of relinquishing consciousness in his presence is not a pleasant one.

  I have weapons in my arsenal that I’ve not yet tried on him. I have no doubt he is concealing armaments, too. Our truce is a floor of eggshells and we’re both wearing combat boots.

  “Where is the Unseelie King?” I ask, hoping distraction might make the minutes move faster. “It’s his book on the loose out there. I heard he wants it destroyed. Why isn’t he doing something about it?” I may as well embark on an Unseelie fishing expedition, casting my nets for anything I can use. Until I know how powerful Darroc is and better understand what I have in my dark glassy lake, subtlety is the name of my game. I will make no rash moves that jeopardize my mission. Barrons’ resurrection depends on it.

  He shrugs. “He vanished long ago. Some say he’s too insane to care. Others believe he cannot leave the Unseelie prison and lies encased in a tomb of black ice, slumbering eternally. Still others claim the prison never contained him to begin with and that remorse for the death of his concubine was the only bond he ever permitted.”

  “That implies love. Fae don’t.”

  “Debatable. I recognize myself in you and find it … compelling. It makes me less alone.”

  Translation: I serve as a mirror and the Fae enjoy their own reflection. “Is that desirable to a Fae—to be less alone?”

  “Few Fae can endure solitude. Some posit that energy cast into an ethos that fails to reflect or rebound it permits that energy to dissipate until nothing remains. Perhaps it is a flaw.”

  “Like clapping for Tinker Bell,” I mock. “A mirror, validation.”

  He gives me a look.

  “Is that what the Fae are made of? Energy?”

  He gives me another look that reminds me of V’lane, and I know that he will never discuss what the Fae are comprised of with me or any human. His superiority complex has in no way been diminished by time as a mortal. Rather, I suspect it has grown. He knows both sides now. This gives him a tactical advantage over other Fae. He understands what makes us tick and is more dangerous because of it. I file the energy idea away for further contemplation. Iron affects the Fae. Why? Are they some kind of energy that could be “shorted out”?

  “You admit to flaws?” I press.

  “We are not perfect. What god is? Examine yours. According to your mythos, he was so disappointed with his initial efforts creating your race that he tried again. At least we imprisoned our mistakes. Your god permits his to roam free. At a mere few thousand years old, your creation myths are far more absurd than ours. Yet you wonder why we can’t recall our origins, from a million or more years in the past.”

  We have drawn closer to each other while speaking and both realize it at the same time. We glide back in instant retreat, regaining enough distance between us that we would see an attack from the other coming. Part of me finds this amusing.

  The princes have not yet reappeared. I am grateful. Although they no longer impact me sexually, they have a profoundly terrible presence. They leave me feeling oddly two-dimensional, minus something essential, guilty, betrayed in a way I can’t understand and don’t want to. I don’t know if I feel this because I was once beneath them, with my entire sense of self being stripped from my skin and bones, or if they are fundamentally anathema to all humans. I wonder if the “stuff” of which they were made by the Unseelie King is so alien and horrific to us that they are the equivalent of a psychic black hole. That they are unspeakably beautiful only makes it worse. Their exquisiteness is the event horizon from which there is no escape. I shiver.

  I remember.

  I will never forget. Three of them and an invisible fourth, moving over me, in me.

  Because Darroc commanded it. That, too, I will never forget.

  I thought being raped by them was terrible, that it had carved me in dee
p places, changed my innate makeup. I’d known nothing of pain, of transforming change. I do now.

  We clear the forest, and the terrain begins to slope downward. With the moon lighting our way, we hike through dark meadows.

  I give up my fishing expedition for now. My throat is raw from screaming, and putting one foot in front of the other while keeping an impassive expression on my face takes all my concentration. I slog through a lifetime of hell in the interminable darkness before dawn.

  I replay the scene on the cliff through my head a thousand times, pretending it ended some other way.

  Thick grass and slender flat rushes rustle at my waist and brush the undersides of my breasts. If there are animals in the dense thicket, they keep their distance. If I were an animal, I would keep my distance from us, too. The climate grows more temperate; the air warms with the perfume of exotic night-blooming jasmine and honeysuckle.

  As abruptly as night falls here, dawn breaks. The sky is black one moment, pink, then blue. Three seconds, night to day.

  I made it through the night. I draw a shallow, careful breath.

  When my sister was killed, I discovered that the light of day has an irrational leavening effect on grief. I have no idea why. Maybe it’s just to shore us up so we can survive the lonely, bleak night again.

  I didn’t know we were on a high plain until we were suddenly at the edge of the plateau, and I am startled by the valley dropping sharply away before me.

  Across that valley, on an oceanic swell of hill, it looms. It soars. It sprawls for miles in every direction.

  The White Mansion.

  Again I get that uncanny feeling of inevitability that, one way or another, life would have deposited me here, that in any reality I would have made the same choices that drove me to its door.

  Home to the Unseelie King’s beloved concubine for whom he killed the Seelie Queen, it is so enormous it boggles the mind. I turn my head from side to side, up and down, trying to take it all in. One could hope to behold its entirety only from miles away, as we are now. Was this where Barrons had been trying to lead me? If so, why? Had Ryodan been lying when he found me on the cliff’s edge and told me that the way back to Dublin was through an IFP, an Interdimensional Fairy Pothole, as I’d dubbed the slivers of Fae reality that splintered our world now that the walls were down?

  The walls are alabaster, reflecting the sun, and blaze with such brilliance that I narrow my eyes to slits. The sky beyond the House—I cannot think of it without a capital; it is far more than a mere residence—deepens to a dazzling blue that exists only in Faery, a shade that will never be seen in the human world. There are certain Faery colors that have dimension, are comprised of myriad seductive subtleties upon which the eye could linger for time uncounted. The sky is nearly as addictive as the golden floor in the Hall of All Days.

  I force my gaze back to the White Mansion. I explore its lines, foundation to rooftop, terrace to tower, garden to fountain to turret. A Möbius strip of tiered structures on an Escher-esque landscape, it turns back on itself here and there, continuous and unbroken, ever-changing and unfolding. It strains the eye, tests the mind. But I’ve seen Fae in their true form. I find it … soothing. In my dead black heart, I feel something. I don’t understand how anything could stir in there, but it does. Not a full-blown feeling, but an echo of an emotion. Faint yet undeniable.

  Darroc watches me. I pretend not to notice.

  “Your race has never built a thing of such beauty, complexity, and perfection,” he says.

  “Nor has my race ever created a Sinsar Dubh,” I parry.

  “Small creatures create small things.”

  “Large creatures’ egos are so big they don’t see the small things coming,” I murmur. Like traps, I don’t say.

  He intuits it. He laughs and says, “I will remember the warning, MacKayla.”

  After he found the first two Silvers at an auction house in London, Darroc tells me, he had to learn to use them. It took him dozens of tries to establish a static link into the Fae realms, then, once he was inside the Silvers, it took him months to find a way to the Unseelie prison.

  There’s pride in his voice as he speaks of his trials and triumphs. Stripped of his Fae essence, he not only survived when his race didn’t believe he would, but he accomplished the goal he’d been pursuing as a Fae, the very thing for which he’d been banished. He feels superior to others of his kind.

  I listen, analyzing everything he tells me, looking for chinks in his armor. I know Fae have “feelings” such as arrogance, superiority, mockery, and condescension. Listening to him, I add pride, vengeance, impatience, gloating, and amusement to the list.

  We’ve been making small talk for some time, watching each other intently. I’ve told him about growing up in Ashford, my first impressions of Dublin, my love of fast cars. He has told me more about his fall from grace, what he did, why he did it. We compete to disarm each other with trivial confidences that betray nothing of importance.

  As we cross the valley, I say, “Why go to the Unseelie prison? Why not the Seelie court?”

  “And give Aoibheal the opportunity to finish me off for good? The next time I see the bitch, she dies.”

  Was that why he’d taken my spear—to kill the queen? He’d lifted it without my awareness, just like V’lane had. How? He wasn’t Fae anymore. Had he eaten so much Unseelie that he was now a mutant with unpredictable abilities? I recall being in the church, sandwiched between Unseelie Princes, turning the spear on myself, throwing it, striking the pedestal of a basin, holy water splashing, steam hissing. How had he made me throw it away then? How had he taken it from me now?

  “Is the queen at the Seelie court right now?” I cast my net again.

  “How would I know? I have been banished. Assuming I found a way in, the first Seelie that saw me would kill me.”

  “Don’t you have allies at the Seelie court? Isn’t V’lane your friend?”

  He snorts disdainfully. “We sat on her High Council together. Though he gives lip service to Fae supremacy and speaks of walking the earth freely again without the odious Compact governing us—us, as if humans could govern their gods!—when it comes to action, V’lane is Aoibheal’s lapdog and always has been. I am now human, according to my fairer brethren, and they despise me.”

  “I thought you said they worshipped you as a hero for tearing the walls down and freeing them.”

  His eyes narrow. “I said they will. Soon, I will be heralded as the savior of our race.”

  “So you went to the Unseelie prison. That was risky.” I prod to keep him talking. As long as he’s talking, I can focus on his words, on my goals. Silence isn’t golden, it’s deadly. It’s a vacuum that fills up with ghosts.

  “I needed the Hunters. As a Fae, I could summon them. As a mortal, I had to physically seek them.”

  “I’m surprised they didn’t kill you on sight.” Hunters hate humans. The black-skinned, winged demons have no love for anything but themselves.

  “Death is not a Hunter’s delight. Too final.”

  A memory flickers through his eyes, and I know that when he found them, they did things to him that made him scream for a long time.

  “They agreed to help me in exchange for permanent freedom. They taught me to eat Unseelie. After tracking weaknesses in the prison walls, where Unseelie had escaped before, I patched them.”

  “To make yourself the only game in town.”

  He nods. “If my dark brethren were going to be freed, they would be thanking me for it. I discovered how to link Silvers and created a passage to Dublin through the White Mansion.”

  “Why here?”

  “Of all the dimensions I explored, this one remains the most stable, aside from a few … inconveniences. It seems Cruce’s curse had little effect on this realm, other than to splinter dimensions that are easily avoided.”

  I call them IFPs but I do not tell him this. It made Barrons smile. Little made Barrons smile.

  I think I�
�m under control, that I’ve stripped away all weaknesses. That committing to my mission has made me impervious. I’m wrong. The thought of Barrons smiling brings other thoughts.

  Barrons naked.

  Dancing.

  Dark head thrown back.

  Laughing.

  The image doesn’t “gently swim up in my mind” in a dreamy sort of way, like I’ve seen in movies. No, this one slams into my head like a nuclear missile, exploding in my brain in graphic detail. I suffocate in a mushroom cloud of pain.

  I can’t breathe. I squeeze my eyes shut.

  White teeth flashing in his dark face: I get knocked down but I get up again. You’re never gonna keep me down.

  I stagger.

  But he didn’t get up, the bastard. He stayed down.

  With my spear in his back. How am I supposed to find my way each day without him here to help me? I don’t know what to do, how to make decisions.

  I can’t survive this grief! I stumble and go down on one knee. I clutch my head.

  Darroc is at my side, helping me stand. His arms are around me.

  I open my eyes.

  He is so close that I see gold speckles in his coppery eyes. Wrinkles crease the corners. Faint lines bracket his mouth. Has he laughed so often in his time as a mortal? My hands curl into fists.

  His hands are gentle on my face when he pushes my hair back. “What happened?”

  Neither image nor pain is gone from my brain. I cannot function in this state. In moments, I will be on my knees, screaming with grief and fury, and my mission will go straight to hell. Darroc will see my weakness and kill me, or worse. Somehow I have to survive. I have no idea how long it will take me to find the Book and learn how to use it. I wet my lips. “Kiss me,” I say. “Hard.”

  His mouth tightens. “I am not a fool, MacKayla.”

  “Just do it,” I snarl.

  I watch him weigh the idea. Two scorpions. He is skeptical. He is fascinated.

  When he kisses me, Barrons vanishes from my head. The pain recedes.

  On the lips of my enemy, my sister’s lover, my lover’s killer, I taste the punishment I deserve. I taste oblivion.