Shadowfever

by Moning, Karen Marie

  I smiled. I loved this kid. We were okay with each other again. One more pain in my heart was gone. “Oh, she’s definitely going to catch us. I intend to have a few words with that old woman.” If things went south, I’d keep my power in check and let Dani whiz us out, or I’d summon V’lane. “Want to come along?”

  “You’re kidding, right? Wouldn’t miss this gig for the world!”

  22

  Even with Dani whizzing us in at superspeed, they found us in the south wing in less than three minutes.

  Ro must have laid new wards, to sense us and tip her off if we entered the abbey. I wondered how she did it, if it was like witchcraft and required a pinch of hair, blood, or nail. I could too easily see the old woman standing over a bubbling cauldron, dropping items in, stirring away, cackling with delight.

  However she’d accomplished it, a group of sidhe-seers led by Kat confronted us at the intersection of two corridors before we were even halfway to the Forbidden Library I’d broken into the last time I was here. I’d left a group searching it while I tried to get past a holographic guardian down yet another seemingly “dead-end” hall in the abbey.

  Like us, they wore snug clothes no Book could hide under. I imagined that, between the Shades and the Sinsar Dubh’s visit, things were pretty tense at the abbey.

  “What’s in the bag?” Kat demanded.

  I opened the translucent plastic grocery bag I’d brought and showed her there was no Book inside it. Once they were assured I wasn’t carrying concealed, they got right to the point.

  “The Grand Mistress said you were dead, she did,” Jo said.

  “Then she said you weren’t, but we were to be thinking of you as dead because you’d taken the Lord Master’s side, just like Alina,” accused Clare.

  “But you aren’t Alina’s sister at all, are you, now?” Mary demanded.

  “After we visited Nana O’Reilly,” Kat said, “I spoke with Rowena, and she confirmed what Nana told us about the Haven Mistress being an O’Connor. But she said Isla died a few nights after the Book escaped, and it was believed Alina died as well, although the girl’s body was never found. Regardless, Alina was her only child. So, Mac, who are you?”

  Dozens of sidhe-seers stared at me, waiting for my answer.

  “She don’t hafta answer to you,” Dani said belligerently. “Buncha sheep can’t even see what’s in fronta your own eyes.”

  “Sure we can. We see a sidhe-seer that supposedly doesn’t exist. Worries us some, as it should,” Kat said. “Then there’s you, so determined to defend her. Why would you be doing that?”

  Dani compressed her lips into a thin line and folded her skinny arms over her chest. She tapped a foot and stared up at the ceiling. “Just saying, things ain’t always bad just ’cause you don’t understand ’em or ain’t like ’em. That’s like thinking anybody who’s smarter or faster is dangerous just ’cause they got more brains or quicker feet. Ain’t fair. Peeps can’t help how they’re born.”

  “We’re standing here, waiting to understand.” Kat turned her level gray gaze on me. “Help us, Mac.”

  “Is it true?” I said, point-blank. “Is emotional telepathy your sidhe-seer gift?”

  Suddenly self-conscious, Kat tucked her shirt in and smoothed her hair. “Where did you hear that?”

  I withdrew Darroc’s notes from the grocery bag, stepped forward, and offered them to her, but she was going to have to meet me halfway to take them.

  I hadn’t brought all of what I’d crammed into my pack, just enough for a gesture of good faith. I didn’t give a rat’s ass what Rowena thought of me, but I wanted in with the sidhe-seers. Part of me hated this abbey, where Rowena tightly controlled the sidhe-seers’ power yet had failed to control the greatest responsibility she’d had. Part of me still wanted to belong. My bipolar was showing again.

  “I found these when I was undercover,” I stressed the word, “with Darroc. I searched his penthouse. He had notes on everything, including Unseelie I’ve never heard of or seen. I thought you might want to add them to your libraries. They’ll be useful when you encounter new castes. I don’t know how he got the scoop on what happens inside these walls, but he must have had someone on the inside. Perhaps he still has.” Dani had told me someone had sabotaged the wards outside my cell when I was Pri-ya. “You might find it interesting that he says Rowena’s gift is mental coercion,” I said pointedly.

  “How do we know these papers aren’t some load of malarkey you’ve been making up yourself?” Mary demanded.

  “You decide. I’m through defending myself.”

  “You haven’t answered my question,” Kat said. “Who are you, Mac?”

  I met her serene gray gaze. Kat was the only one that I trusted to think things through and make a wise decision. The slender brunette was tougher than she looked, levelheaded, calm in times of stress, and I hoped one day she would replace Rowena as Grand Mistress of the abbey. The position didn’t require the most powerful sidhe-seer, like the Haven did, but the wisest, a woman with long-term goals and vision. Kat exuded quiet capability, an almost complete lack of ego, a quick mind, and a solid heart. She had my vote all the way.

  If she was indeed emotionally telepathic, she would sense my sincerity when I told her as much of the truth as I knew myself.

  “I don’t know who I am, Kat. I really did believe I was Alina’s sister. I’m still not convinced I’m not. Nana said I looked like Isla. Apparently enough that I looked the way she expected Alina to appear grown up. However, like you, I’ve heard that Isla didn’t have a second child. If you think that upsets you, imagine what it does to me.” I gave her a bitter smile. “First I find out I’m adopted, then I find out I don’t exist. But here’s a shocker for you, Kat: According to Darroc’s notes, he knew the origin of the sidhe-seers. Supposedly—”

  Three shrill blasts of a whistle split the air, and sidhe-seers snapped to attention.

  “Enough!” Rowena commanded, as she sailed up behind them, dressed in a smart, fitted suit of royal blue, her long white hair braided in a regal crown around her head. There were pearls at her ears and throat and tiny seed pearls on the chain that draped from her glasses. “That will be all! Restrain the traitor and bring her with me. And Danielle Megan O’Malley, if you think for one bloody moment to whisk her away, think twice. Be very, very careful, Danielle.” Turning to Kat, she said, “I gave an order. Obey it now!”

  Kat looked at Rowena. “Does she speak the truth? Is your gift mental coercion?”

  Rowena’s brows drew together over her fine, pointed nose. Blue eyes blazed. “You would believe her lies about the claims of an ex-Fae over what I have told you? Och, and I thought you wise, Kat. Perhaps the wisest of all my daughters. You have never failed me. Do not disappoint me now.”

  “My gift is emotional telepathy,” Kat said. “He was right about that.”

  “The best liar knows to salt his deception with an occasional truth, to lend the flavor of credibility. I have not coerced my daughters. I never will.”

  “I say it’s time for truth all around, Grand Mistress,” Jo said. “There are only three hundred fifty-eight of us left. We weary of losing our sisters.”

  “We’ve lost more than our sisters,” Mary said. “We’re losing hope.”

  “I agree,” said Clare. “Yes,” murmured Josie and the rest.

  Kat nodded. “Tell us what Darroc believed about the origin of our order, Mac.”

  Rowena glared down her nose at me. “Don’t you dare!”

  I felt it then—a subtle pressure on my mind—and I wondered if she’d been using it on me whenever I’d been around her since the night we’d met. Regardless, it was no threat to me now. I’d learned to resist Voice, and the pressure coming from her was nothing compared to that. I’d been on my knees, cutting myself, with Barrons. I’d had a hell of a teacher.

  I ignored Rowena and addressed the sidhe-seers. “Darroc believed it was not the Seelie Queen who brought the Sinsar Dubh to the abbey to be
interred so long ago—”

  Rowena shook her head. “Don’t do this. They need faith. They’ve precious little else. It is not your place to take it from them. You’ve no confirmation of his claims.”

  I felt the subtle pressure grow stronger as she tried to cow me. “You knew. You’ve always known. And, like so many other things, you never told them.”

  “If you believe a seed of evil exists within you, it may consume you.” She searched my face. “Och, surely you understand that.”

  “One might also argue that if you believe a seed of evil exists within you, you have the opportunity to learn to control it,” I countered.

  “One might also argue ignorance is safety.”

  “Safety is a fence, and fences are for sheep. I would rather die at twenty-two, knowing the truth, than live in a cage of lies for a hundred years.”

  “You sound so certain of that. Were it put to the test, I wonder where you would truly stand.”

  “Illusion is no substitute for life,” I said.

  “Allow them their sacred history,” Rowena said.

  “What if it’s not so sacred?” I said.

  “Tell us,” Clare demanded. “We have the right to know.”

  Rowena turned her head away and looked at me from the side, down her nose, as if I were too distasteful to regard directly. “I knew from the moment I saw you that you would try to destroy us, MacKayla—or whoever you are. I should have put you down then.”

  Kat inhaled sharply. “She’s a person, not an animal, Rowena. We don’t put people down.”

  “Right, Ro,” Dani said tightly, “we don’t put peeps down.”

  I glanced at Dani. She was staring at Rowena, eyes narrowed and filled with hatred. Oh, yes, it was long past time for truth in these walls, whether we liked those truths or not. Maybe Darroc was wrong. Maybe what he’d written was mere conjecture. But we couldn’t question something we refused to face. And unquestioned suspicions had a nasty tendency to grow. Didn’t I know; One was expanding exponentially in my head, in my heart, even now.

  “Rowena has a point,” I conceded. “I don’t know whether or not Darroc was right. But you should know that Barrons suspects it, too.”

  “Tell us,” Kat demanded.

  I drew a deep breath. I knew how this had affected me, and I hadn’t spent my entire life indoctrinated into the sidhe-seer credo. I’d skimmed Darroc’s notes again before I’d brought them. Farther into the pages, he’d written it not as a bulleted supposition but as a fact: The Unseelie King created the sidhe-seers. “Darroc believed it was the Unseelie King himself who trapped the Sinsar Dubh and created a prison for it, here, on our world. He believed the king also created prison guards.” I hesitated, then added grimly, “Sidhe-seers. According to Darroc, it was the last caste of Unseelie the dark king created.”

  You could have heard a pin drop. Nobody said anything. Nobody moved.

  Now that that was out, I turned my attention to Rowena. I had no doubt she knew what I needed to know. “Tell me what the prophecy says, Rowena.”

  She sniffed and turned away.

  “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”

  “Ballocks, child. We won’t be doing this at all.”

  “Tell me what the prophecy says, Rowena,” I said again, and this time I used Voice to command her. It resonated, echoing back at me off the abbey’s stone walls. Sidhe-seers rustled and murmured.

  Eyes bulging, hands fisted, Rowena began to spit out words in a language I didn’t understand.

  I was about to order her to speak in English, when Kat cleared her throat and moved forward. Her face was pale, but her voice was calm and determined when she said, “Don’t do this, Mac. You needn’t coerce her. We found the book containing the prophecies in the Forbidden Library you opened. We can tell you all you need to know.” She held out her hand for the papers I’d brought. “May I?”

  I gave them to her.

  She searched my gaze. “Do you believe Darroc was right?”

  “I don’t know. I could Voice Rowena and see what she knows. I could interrogate her thoroughly.”

  Kat looked back at Rowena, who was still speaking. “It’s Old Irish Gaelic,” she told me. “Took a bit of time, but we’ve translated it. Come with us. But hush her, will you?” She shivered. “It’s not right, Mac. It’s like what you did to Nana. Our wills must be our own.”

  “You can say that, knowing she’s probably been using coercion on all of you for years?”

  “Her power doesn’t begin to compare to yours. There is seduction and there is rape. Some of us suspected she had … compelling leadership abilities. Still, she made wise and fair decisions.”

  “She lies to you,” I said. Kat was far more forgiving than I was.

  “Withholds. A small but important difference, Mac. She was right about faith. Had we been told as children we might be Unseelie, we may have walked a very different path. Release her. I’m asking you.”

  I looked at Kat a long moment. I wondered if she had something besides emotional telepathy, a kind of emotional balm she could apply if she chose. As I looked into her eyes, my anger at Rowena seemed to diminish. And I could see a grain of truth in what Kat had said. Alina and Christian had called them “necessary lies.” I wondered if someone had told me when I was, say, nine or ten that I was Unseelie, if I would have thought I was destined to be bad and never even tried to be good. Would I have thought: What’s the point?

  I sighed. Life was so complicated. “Forget the prophecy, Rowena,” I commanded.

  Instantly, she stopped speaking.

  Kat raised a brow and looked amused. “Is that truly what you wished her to do?”

  I winced. “Don’t forget it! Just stop talking about it!”

  But it was too late. I’d Voiced her to forget it, and I could tell by the look of disdain on the old woman’s face that every word of it had been wiped from her mind.

  “You are a danger to us all,” she said haughtily.

  I raked my hands through my hair. Voice was tricky.

  “My daughters will tell you of the prophecy I no longer recall thanks to your ineptitude at Druid arts. They will tell you freely, without coercion. But you will consent to my terms: You work with our order and no one else. If I recall the shape of it, we know what we need. You will track it. We will do the rest, with …” She trailed off, rubbing her forehead.

  “The five Druids and the stones,” Kat supplied.

  “You found the prophecy and it actually tells us what to do?” I said.

  Kat nodded.

  “I want to see it.”

  We gathered in the Forbidden Library, a small, windowless room that had failed to impress me when I’d first found it, spoiled as I was by Barrons Books and Baubles. Dozens of lamps were positioned around the low-ceilinged stone room, bathing it in a soft amber glow, bright enough to keep Shades at bay but diffuse enough to minimize damage to ancient fading pages.

  Now, as I glanced around, it affected me differently than it had the first time. In my absence, sidhe-seers had organized the dusty chaos, dug old tomes out of trunks, carried in bookcases, and arranged things for easy access and cataloging.

  I love books, they’re in my blood. I wandered the dry stone room, stopping here and there to pass my hands over fragile covers I longed to touch but wasn’t willing to risk harming.

  “We’re copying and updating everything,” Kat said. “For millennia, only the Haven was permitted access to these histories and records. In a few more centuries many of them would have been dust.” She gave Rowena a look of gentle rebuke. “Some of them already are.”

  “Och, and if you one day carry the scepter of my position, Katrina,” Rowena said sternly, “you’ll come to appreciate the limits of a single lifetime and the difficult choices that must be made.”

  “The prophecy,” I said impatiently.

  Kat motioned us all to a large oval table. We pulled out chairs and tucked in around it.

  “We translat
ed as best we can.”

  “Some of the words aren’t Old Irish Gaelic,” Jo said, “but appear to have been invented by a person self-schooled.”

  “Jo’s our translator,” Dani said, with equal measures of pride and disdain. “She thinks research is fun. As fecking if.”

  “Language!” Rowena snapped.

  I blinked at her. She was still on that kick? I’d gotten so inured to “fecking” that it hardly even seemed like a cussword to me anymore.

  “Ain’t your problem no more. You ain’t the boss of me.” Dani gave Rowena a hard stare.

  “Och, and you’re so happy on your own, are you, Danielle O’Malley? Your mam would rise from her grave were she to ken her daughter left the abbey, consorts with a Fae prince and others of dubious blood, and takes orders from none at the tender age of ten and three.”

  “Don’t give me no tender-age bunk,” Dani growled. “ ’Sides, I’m gonna be ten and four soon.” She beamed around the table. “February twentieth, don’t forget. I like chocolate cake. Not yellow. Hate fruit in my cakes. Chocolate on chocolate, the more the better.”

  “If you two can’t be quiet, leave,” I said.

  The book Kat opened was surprisingly small, thin, clad in dull brown leather, and tied with a worn leather cord. “Moreena Bean lived in these walls a bit over a thousand years ago.”

  “A sidhe-seer whose gift was vision?” I guessed.

  Kat shook her head. “No, a washerwoman for the abbess. They called her Mad Morry for her ramblings, ridiculed her insistence that dreams were as real as those events we lived. Mad Morry believed life was not a thing shaped of past or present but possibles. She believed that every moment was a new stone tossed into a loch, causing ripples that those ‘revered among women’ for whom she toiled were too dull of mind to see. She claimed to behold the entire loch, each and every stone. She said she was not mad, merely overwhelmed.” Kat smiled faintly. “Much of what she’s written makes no sense whatsoever. If it has come to pass, we can’t tie it to current times or understand her signs. If all she penned in these pages is supposed to pass in order, we are only at the beginning of her predictions. A mere twenty pages in, she tells of the escape of the Sinsar Dubh.”