Shadowfever

by Moning, Karen Marie

  I pluck one from its hanger and spin around, dancing with it. Faint strains of music drift upon the air and I lose track of time.

  Here’s a curio cabinet housing items I cannot name but nonetheless recognize. I pocket a few of the smaller trinkets. I open a music box and listen to a song that makes me feel I am drifting in space, enormous and free, more right in my skin than I’ve ever been, poised on the brink of all possibles. I forget everything for a time, lost in joy that is larger than the mansion itself.

  In room after room, I find something familiar, something that makes me happy.

  I see the first of many beds. As in my dreams, there are so many that I lose count after a time.

  I wander sumptuous room after room, see bed after bed. Some of the rooms have nothing but beds.

  I begin to feel … uneasy. I don’t like looking at these beds.

  The beds disturb me.

  I turn my head away, because they make me feel things I don’t want to feel.

  Need. Desire. Alone.

  Empty beds.

  Don’t want to be alone anymore. So tired of being alone. Tired of waiting.

  After a time, I stop looking in the rooms.

  I was wrong when I thought it might not be possible to feel negative things inside the White Mansion.

  Grief wells up inside me.

  I’ve lived so long. Lost so many things.

  I force myself to focus. I remind myself that I’m supposed to be looking for something. A mirror.

  I love that mirror.

  I shake my head. No, I don’t. I just need it. I don’t have any emotions about it!

  It brings me such pleasure! It brings us together.

  White marble, Darroc said. I need to find white-marble floors. Not crimson, not bronze, not pink, and especially not black.

  I envision the mirror as he described it: ten feet tall, five feet wide.

  Gilt-framed, like the ones at 1247 LaRuhe.

  The mirror is a part of the vast Unseelie Hallow that is the network of Silvers. I can sense Hallows. I can sense all Fae OOPs—Objects of Power. It is perhaps my greatest advantage.

  I reach out with my sidhe-seer senses, expand and search.

  I sense nothing. It didn’t work in the Hall of All Days, either. Impossible, I suppose, to sense a Silver while inside the Silvers.

  My feet turn me, and I begin walking in a new direction with complete confidence. I’m suddenly certain I have seen the mirror I need many times and I know exactly where it is.

  I’ll find the way out long before Darroc does. And although I will not leave without him—I have much use for him—it will please me to best him.

  I hurry down a mint corridor, turn without hesitation onto an iridescent path, and rush down a pale-blue hall. A corridor of silver turns to blush wine.

  The mirror is ahead. It draws me. I can’t wait to get to it.

  I’m focused, so focused that the crimson hallway barely makes a dent in my awareness.

  I’m focused—so focused on my goal that, by the time I realize what I’ve done, it’s too late.

  I don’t know what makes me look down, but something does.

  I freeze.

  I’m at a crossroads, the intersection of two halls.

  I can go east, west, north, or south—if such directions exist in the House—but whichever way I choose, the floor is the same color.

  Black.

  I stand uncertainly, berating myself for screwing up again, when suddenly a hand slips into mine.

  It is warm, familiar. And much too real.

  I close my eyes. I’ve been played with in Faery before. Who am I to be tortured with now? What is my punishment to be? Which ghost will nip at me now with needles for teeth?

  Alina?

  Barrons?

  Both?

  I fist my other hand so nothing can hold it.

  I know better than to think if I keep my eyes closed my ghost will go away. It doesn’t work that way. When your private demons decide to mess with you, they demand their pound of flesh. It’s best to pay it and get it over with.

  Then I can focus on finding my way off the black floor. I brace myself for how bad it’s going to be. I speculate that if golden floors in the Hall of ALL Days were bad, black floors in the White Mansion will be … forgive the pun … beyond the pale.

  Fingers twine with mine. I know the hand as well as my own.

  Sighing, I open my eyes.

  I jerk away and scramble back frantically, boots slipping on the shiny black surface. I sprawl flat on my back with such a jolt that I bite my tongue.

  I begin to hyperventilate. Does she see me? Does she know me? Is she there? Am I?

  She laughs, a silvery sound, and it makes my heart hurt. I remember laughing like that once. Happy, so happy.

  I don’t even try to get up. I just lay there and watch her. I’m bewildered. I’m hypnotized. I’m carved in two by a sense of duality I cannot reconcile.

  Not Alina. Not Barrons.

  At the juncture of east, west, north, and south, she stands.

  Her.

  The sad, beautiful woman who haunts my dreams.

  She is so dazzling it makes me want to weep.

  But she’s not sad.

  She’s so happy that I could hate her.

  She glows radiantly, she smiles, and it curves lips of such soft, divine perfection that mine part instinctively to receive her kiss.

  Is this her—the Unseelie King’s concubine? No wonder he was obsessed!

  When she begins to glide away down one of the corridors—the blackest of the four, the one that absorbs the light cast by candles in sconces—I push myself up.

  Moth to a flame, I follow.

  According to V’lane, the concubine was mortal. In fact, her mortality was the first domino in a long, convoluted line that toppled out of control and led to this moment.

  Nearly a million years ago, the Seelie King asked the original Seelie Queen—since her death, many queens have risen, only to be ousted by another who achieved greater power and support—to turn his concubine Fae, to make her immortal so he could keep her forever. When the queen refused, the king built his concubine the White Mansion inside the Silvers. He secreted his beloved away from the vindictive queen, where she could live without aging until he was able to perfect the Song of Making and turn her Fae himself.

  If only the queen had granted his one simple request! But the leader of the True Race was controlling, jealous, and small.

  Unfortunately, the king’s efforts to duplicate the Song of Making—the mystical stuff of creation, a power and right that the queen of their matriarchal race selfishly hoarded—created the Unseelie, imperfect half-lives that he couldn’t bear to kill. They lived. They were his sons and daughters.

  He created a new realm, the Court of Shadows, where his children could play while he continued his work, his labor of love.

  But the day came when he was betrayed by one of his own children and found out by the Seelie Queen.

  They clashed in a battle to end all battles. Seelie struck down their darker brethren, who sought only the right to exist.

  The dominoes fell, one after another: the death of the Seelie Queen at the hands of the king; the suicide of the concubine; the act of “atonement” in which the Seelie King created the deadly Sinsar Dubh.

  He rechristened himself the Unseelie King—never again would he be associated with the petty viciousness of the Seelie; henceforth he would be Unseelie, literally meaning not of the Seelie. He no longer called his home the Court of Shadows, in which he hid to perform his labor of love. It became simply Unseelie court.

  By then, however, the court was a prison for his children, a macabre place of shadows and ice. The cruel Seelie Queen’s last act had been to use the Song of Making—not for creation, not to make his beloved immortal!—but to destroy, trap, and torture for all eternity any who had dared disobey her.

  And the dominoes fell …

  The book containin
g the Unseelie King’s knowledge, all his darkness and evil, somehow ended up in my world, being protected by humans. It was set loose in a manner that I have yet to determine, but of this I am certain: Alina’s murder, my screwed-up life, and Barrons’ death—all are the result of a chain of Fae events that began a million years ago over a single mortal.

  My world, we humans, we’re just pawns on an immortal chessboard.

  We got in the way.

  Jack Lane, attorney extraordinaire, would put the Unseelie King, not Darroc, on trial and make a persuasive case against the concubine for guilt by association.

  Because the unthinkable occurred and the original queen died before she had the chance to pass on the Song of Making to one of the princesses as her successor, the Fae race began to decline. Many princesses rose to the Seelie throne, but few lasted long before another wrested away her power. Queens were killed, others merely deposed and banished. Infighting grew and coups became more frequent. The Fae race became limited. All that was already was all that could ever be.

  No new things could be made. Old powers were lost, and, over the eons, ancient magic was forgotten, until one day the current queen was no longer capable of reinforcing the weakening walls between realms and retaining control of the deadly Unseelie.

  Darroc exploited this weakness and brought the walls between our worlds crashing down. Now Fae and human vie for control of a planet that is too small, too fragile, for both races.

  All because of a single mortal—the domino that started all the others falling.

  I follow the woman who I suspect is that mortal—in a not-quite-really-there kind of way—down the inky corridor.

  If she is the concubine, I can summon no anger toward her, try though I might.

  On their immortal chessboard, she was a pawn, too.

  She is lit from within. Her skin shimmers with a translucent glow that illuminates the walls of the tunnel. The hall grows darker, blacker, stranger with each step we take. In contrast, she is holy, divine: an angel gliding into hell.

  She is warmth, shelter, and forgiveness. She is mother, lover, daughter, truth. She is all.

  Her pace quickens and she races down the tunnel, passing soundlessly over obsidian floors, laughing with joy.

  I know that sound. I love that sound. It means her lover is near.

  He is coming. She feels his approach.

  He is so powerful!

  It is what first drew her to him. She’d never encountered anyone like him.

  She was awed that he chose her.

  She is awed every day that he continues choosing her.

  The stuff of him explodes through from the Court of Shadows, telling her he comes, filling her home (prison) where she lives a fabulous life (a sentence not of her choosing) surrounded by everything she wants (illusions, she misses her world, so far away and all of them long dead) and waits for him with hope (ever-growing despair).

  He will carry her to his bed and do things to her until his black wings open wide, so wide, eclipsing the world, and when he is inside her, nothing else will matter but the moment, their dark, intense lust, the endless passion they share.

  No matter what else he is—he is hers.

  What is between them is without blame.

  Love knows no right or wrong.

  Love is. Only is.

  She (I) rushes down the dark, warm, inviting hall, hurrying to his (my) bed. We need our lover. It has been too long.

  In her chamber, I behold the duality of which I am carved.

  Half the concubine’s boudoir is dazzlingly white, brilliantly illuminated. The other half is a dense, seductive, welcoming blackness. It is split evenly down the middle.

  Light and the absence of light.

  I savor both. Neither disturbs me. I suffer no conflict over things upon which a simpler mind would be forced to bestow labels such as Good and Evil or embrace madness.

  Against one frosted crystalline wall of the white half of the room is a huge round bed on a pedestal, draped in silks and snowy ermine throws. Alabaster petals are scattered everywhere, perfuming the air. The floor is carpeted with plush white furs. White logs, from which silvery-white flames pop and crackle, blaze in an enormous alabaster hearth. Tiny diamonds float lazily on the air, sparkling.

  The woman hurries for the bed. Her clothing melts away and she (I) is naked.

  But no! This is not his pleasure, not this time! His needs are different, deeper, more demanding tonight.

  She spins and we gaze, lips parted, at the black half of the room.

  Draped in black velvet and furs, covered with soft ebony petals that smell of him, that crush so softly beneath our skin, it is all bed.

  From wall to wall.

  He needs it all. (Wings unfolding, no mortal can see past them!)

  He is coming. He is near.

  I am naked, wild, ready. I need. I need. This is why I live.

  She and I stand, staring at the bed.

  Then he is there and he gathers her up—but I can’t see him. I feel enormous wings closing around us.

  I know he’s there, she’s enveloped in energy, in darkness, wet and warm like sex is wet and warm, and I’m breathing lust. I am lust and I strain to see him, strain to feel him, when suddenly—

  I am a simple beast, on crimson sheets with Barrons inside me. I cry out, because even here in this boudoir of duality and illusion, I know it is not real. I know I have lost him. He is gone, forever gone.

  I’m not back there in that basement with him, still Pri-ya but beginning to surface enough to know that he just asked me what I wore to my prom, and shutting it all down, racing from reality back into my madness, so I don’t have to face what happened to me or deal with what I’m beginning to suspect I might have to do.

  I’m not standing there a few days later, looking back at his bed with those fur-lined handcuffs, contemplating climbing back in and pretending I hadn’t recovered so I could keep doing it—every raw, animal thing we’d done in my sexually insatiable state—fully aware of what I was doing and who I was doing it with.

  Dead. Dead. I’ve lost so much.

  If only I’d known then what I know now …

  The king lifts the concubine. I see her sliding down a body I cannot discern in the darkness, and (I straddle Barrons and slam him home inside me; God, it feels so good!) the concubine strains, arches her neck, and makes a sound that doesn’t come from our world (I laugh as I come, I’m alive, so alive), and when his vast wings spread wide, when they fill the blackness of his boudoir and pass beyond, he knows more joy in this moment than he has ever known in his entire existence, and the bitch queen would deny him this? (And I know more joy in this moment than I’ve ever known, because there is no right, no wrong, only now.)

  But, wait—Barrons is vanishing!

  Moving away from me, melting into the darkness. I will not lose him again!

  I lunge to my feet, get tangled in sheets for a moment, then I am hurrying to catch him.

  It grows colder, my breath ices the air.

  Ahead I see only black, blue, and a white that is bled of all light.

  I run toward the black as fast as my feet will carry me.

  But hands are on my shoulders, turning me, forcing me away, fighting me!

  They are too strong! They drag me down a black corridor, and I beat at the body that dares interrupt us!

  No others are allowed here!

  This is our place! The intruder will die! If only for gazing upon us!

  Cruel hands push me, slam me into a wall. My ears ring from the impact. I am dragged, shoved again, and again. I bounce off wall after wall, until finally it stops.

  I shudder and begin to weep.

  Arms band me, hold me tightly. I press my face to the warmth of a hard, muscled chest.

  I am too small a vessel to survive on a sea of such emotion! I grip his collar and cling. I try to breathe. I am raw, aching with need, and I am empty, so empty.

  I lost it all, and for what?


  I can’t stop trembling.

  “What part of ‘if you see a black floor, turn back immediately’ didn’t you understand?” Darroc growls. “For fuck’s sake, you went straight to the blackest of them all! What’s with you?”

  I lift my head from his chest, but barely. For a moment, all I can do is stare down. The floor is pale pink. He has dragged me all the way back to one of the dawn-themed wings. I fumble for my spear. It is gone again.

  Awareness returns in slow degrees.

  I shove him away.

  “I warned you,” he says coolly, offended by my anger.

  Well, bully for him; I’m offended by him, too. “You didn’t tell me enough, just to stay away! You should have told me more!”

  “I do not explain Fae matters to humans. But since you clearly will not obey otherwise—black floors are his wings. Never enter them. You are not strong enough to survive there. The residue of all that once transpired there still walks those wings. It can trap you. You forced me to come in after you, putting us both at risk!”

  We glare at each other, breathing hard. Although he is pumped on Unseelie flesh and far stronger because of it than I am, I gave him a hell of a fight. It hadn’t been easy getting me out of there.

  “What were you doing, MacKayla?” he says finally, softly.

  “How did you find me there?” I counter.

  “My brand. You were in extreme distress.” The tiny gold flecks in his eyes glitter. “You were also extremely aroused.”

  “You can sense my feelings from your brand?” I am incensed. He subjects me to violation after violation.

  “Only intense ones. The princes pinpointed your precise location. Be glad they did. I found you just in time. You were rushing for the black half of the boudoir.”

  “So?”

  “The line that divides the two halves of that chamber is no line. It is a Silver. The largest ever made by the king. It is also the first and most ancient of them, unlike any of the others. When needed, it was used for punishment, to execute. You were running for the Silver that leads straight into the Unseelie King’s bedchamber, in the fortress of black ice, deep in the Unseelie prison. In a few more of your human seconds, you would have been dead.”