Shadowfever

by Moning, Karen Marie

  The crying was coming from behind tall doors that were chained, padlocked, and engraved with runes. I shouldn’t have been able to hear it at all. I was astonished I’d ever been able to hear Barrons roaring this far underground.

  It took me twenty minutes to break the chains, wards, and runes. He obviously wanted this child protected to the hilt. Why? What was so important? What was going on?

  When I pushed open the doors, the crying stopped abruptly.

  I stepped into the room and looked around. Whatever I’d expected, it wasn’t this. There was no opulence here, no treasure or collectibles. This was little better than Mallucé’s grotto beneath the Burren.

  The room was hewn from stone, a cave cleared out in the bedrock of the earth. A small stream ran through, appearing in the east wall, disappearing beyond the west. There were cameras mounted everywhere. He would know I’d been here, even if I walked back out right now.

  In the center of the room was a cage that was twenty by twenty, made of massive iron bars, closely spaced. Like the doors, it was heavily runed. It was also empty.

  I moved toward it.

  And stopped, stunned.

  It wasn’t empty as I’d thought. A child lay in the cage, curled on its side, naked. He looked about ten or eleven.

  I hurried to him. “Honey, are you all right? What’s wrong? Why are you in there?”

  The child looked up. I staggered and went to my knees on the stone floor, stupefied.

  I was looking at the child from the vision I’d shared with Barrons.

  Every detail of it was crystal clear in my head, as if I’d lived it yesterday—a rare glimpse into Barrons’ heart. I could close my eyes and be back there again with him, that easily. We were in a desert.

  It’s dusk. We hold a child in our arms.

  I stare into the night.

  I won’t look down.

  Can’t face what’s in his eyes.

  Can’t not look.

  My gaze goes unwillingly, hungrily down.

  The child stares up at me with utter trust.

  “But you died!” I protested, staring at him.

  The boy moved toward me, came to stand at the edge of the cage and wrapped his small hands around the bars. Beautiful boy. Dark hair, gold skin, dark eyes. His father’s son. His eyes are soft, warm.

  And I’m Barrons, staring down at him …

  His eyes say, I know you won’t let me die.

  His eyes say, I know you will make the pain stop.

  His eyes said, Trust/love/adore/youareperfect/ you willalwayskeepmesafe/youaremyworld.

  But I didn’t keep him safe.

  And I can’t make his pain stop.

  We’d been in the desert holding this child, this very boy in our arms, losing him, loving him, grieving him, feeling his life slip away …

  I see him there. His yesterdays. His today. The tomorrows that will never be.

  I see his pain and it shreds me.

  I see his absolute love and it shames me.

  He smiles at me. He gives me all his love in his eyes.

  It begins to fade.

  No! I roar. You will not die! You will not leave me!

  I stare into his eyes for what seems a thousand days.

  I see him. I hold him. He is there.

  He is gone.

  But he’s not gone. He’s right here with me. The boy presses his face to the bars. He smiles at me. He gives me all his love in his eyes. I melt. If I could be someone’s mother, I would take this child and keep him safe forever.

  I push to my feet, moving as if I’m in a trance. I’ve held this child, inside Barrons’ head. As Barrons, I loved him and I lost him. In sharing that vision, it became my wound, too.

  “I don’t understand. How are you alive? Why are you here?” Why had Barrons experienced his death? There was no question that he had. I’d been there. I’d tasted it, too. It was reminiscent of the regrets I’d felt about Alina …

  Come back, come back, you want to scream … just one more minute. Just one more smile … one more chance to do things right. But he’s gone. He’s gone. Where did he go? What happens to life when it leaves? Does it go somewhere or is it just fucking gone?

  “How are you here?” I say wonderingly.

  He speaks to me, and I don’t understand a word of it. It’s a language dead and forgotten. But I hear the plaintive tones. I hear a word that sounds like Ma-ma.

  Choking back a sob, I reach for him.

  As I slip my arms through the bars and gather his small, naked body into my arms, as his dark head floats into the hollow where my shoulder meets my neck, fangs puncture my skin, and the beautiful little boy rips out my throat.

  42

  I die for a long time.

  Much longer than I think it should take.

  Figures I’d die slow and in pain. I pass out several times and am surprised that I regain consciousness. I feel fevered. The skin of my neck is numb, but the wound burns like I’ve been injected with venom.

  I think I left half of my neck in the child’s impossibly expandable jaws.

  He began to change the moment I took him in my arms.

  I managed to tear myself from his preternaturally strong grasp and stumble from the cage before he completed the transformation.

  But it was too late. I’d been a fool. My heart had wed Barrons to a sobbing child and embraced sentimentality. I’d seen the chains, padlocks, and wards as Barrons’ way of keeping a child safe.

  What they’d really been was his way of keeping the world safe from the child.

  I lie on the floor of the stone chamber, dying. I lose awareness again for a time, then am back.

  I watch the child become the night version of Barrons’ beast. Black skin, black horns and fangs, red eyes. Talk about homicidally insane. He makes the beast Barrons was in the Silvers seem downright genial and calm.

  He bays continuously while he changes, head whipping from side to side, spraying me with his spittle and my blood, staring at me with feral crimson eyes. He wants to sink his teeth into me, shake me, and crush every last drop of blood from my body. The mark Barrons placed on my skull doesn’t do a thing to defuse his bloodlust.

  I am food and he can’t reach me.

  He rattles the bars of the cage and he howls.

  He morphs from four to ten feet tall.

  This is what I heard beneath the garage. This is what I listened to while looking at Barrons across the roof of a car.

  This child, caged down here, forever imprisoned.

  And I understand, as my lifeblood seeps out, that this is why he was bringing the dead woman out of the Silver.

  The child had to be fed.

  He held this child, watched him die. I try to think about it, wrap my brain around it. The child has to be his son. If Barrons didn’t feed him, the child suffered. If he did feed him, he had to look at this monster. How long? How long had he been caretaker for this child? A thousand years? Ten? More?

  I try to touch my neck, feel the extent of my wounds, but I can’t raise my arms. I’m weak, dreamy, and I don’t really care. I just want to close my eyes and sleep for a few minutes. Just a short nap, then I’ll wake up and get busy finding something in my lake to help me survive this. I wonder if there are runes that can heal torn-out throats. Maybe there’s some Unseelie in here somewhere.

  I wonder if that’s my jugular gushing. If so, it’s too late, way too late for me now.

  I can’t believe I’m going to die like this.

  Barrons will come in and find me here.

  Bled out on the floor of his bat cave.

  I try to summon the will to search my lake, but I think I lost too much blood too fast. I can’t care, no matter how I try. The lake is curiously silent. Like it’s watching, waiting to see what happens next.

  The roaring in the cage is so loud, I don’t hear Barrons roaring, too, until he’s scooping me up into his arms and carrying me from the room, slamming doors behind him.

  “Wh
at the fuck, Mac? What the fuck?” He keeps saying, over and over. His eyes are wild, his face white, his lips thin. “What were you thinking coming down here without me? I’d’ve brought you if I thought you’d be so stupid. Don’t do this to me! You can’t fucking do this to me!”

  I look up at him. Shades of Bluebeard, I muse dreamily. I opened the door on his slaughtered wives. My mouth won’t shape words. I want to know how the child is still alive. I feel numb. He’s your son, isn’t he?

  He doesn’t answer me. He stares at me as if memorizing my face. I see something move deep in his eyes.

  I should have made love to this man. I was always afraid to be tender. I’m bemused by my own idiocy.

  He flinches.

  “Don’t you think for a fucking minute you can put all that in your eyes, then die. That’s bullshit. I’m not doing this again.”

  Got any Unseelie? I half-expect him to race aboveground to hunt one and bring it back. But I don’t have that much time and I know it.

  “I’m not good, Mac. Never have been.”

  What—true-confession time? my eyes tease. Don’t need it.

  “I want what I want and I take it.”

  Is he warning me? What could he possibly threaten me with now?

  “There’s nothing I can’t live with. Only things I won’t live without.”

  He stares at my neck, and I know it’s a mess from the look in his eyes. Savaged and shredded. I don’t know how I’m still breathing, why I’m not dead. I think I can’t talk because I no longer have intact vocal cords.

  He touches my neck. Well, at least I think he does. I see his hand beneath my chin. I can’t feel anything. Is he trying to rearrange my internal parts like I once did to his, in the early-morning sun on the edge of a cliff, as if I could put him back together by sheer force of will?

  His eyes narrow and his brows draw together. He closes his eyes, opens them again, and frowns. He shifts me in his arms and studies me from a different angle, glancing between my face and neck. Comprehension smooths his brow, and his lips twist in the ghastly smile people give you right before they tell you they have good news and bad news—and the bad news is really bad. “When you were in Faery, did you ever eat or drink anything, Mac?”

  V’lane, I say silently. Drinks on beach.

  “Did they make you sick?”

  No.

  “Did you drink anything at any time that made you feel like your guts were being ripped out? You’d want to die. From what I hear, it would have lasted about a day.”

  I think a moment. The rape, I finally say. He gave me something. The one I couldn’t see. I felt pain for a long time. Thought it was from the princes being inside me.

  His nostrils flare, and when he tries to speak, only a deep rattle comes out. He tries twice more before he gets it right. “They would have left you like that forever. I’m going to slice them into tiny pieces and feed them to one another. Slowly. Over centuries.” His voice is as calm as a sociopath’s.

  What are you saying?

  “I wondered. You smelled different afterward. I knew they’d done something. But you didn’t smell like the Rhymer. You were like him but different. I had to wait and see.”

  Staring up at him, I take a fresh mental assessment of myself. I am beginning to feel my neck again. It burns like hell. But I can swallow.

  Not dying?

  “They must have been afraid they’d kill you with their—” He looks away, muscles working in his jaw. “An eternity of hell. You would have been Pri-ya forever.” His face is tight with fury.

  What did they do to me? I demand.

  He resumes walking, carries me through room after room, finally stopping in a chamber nearly identical to the rear seating cozy in BB&B: rugs, lamps, chesterfield, fluffy throws. Only the fireplace is different: enormous, with a stone hearth a man can stand in. Gas logs. No wood smoke seeping out somewhere to give him away.

  He props pillows against the arm and places me gently on the sofa. He moves to the fireplace and turns it on.

  “The Fae have an elixir that prolongs life.”

  They gave it to me.

  He nods.

  Is that what happened to you?

  “I said prolongs. Not turns you into a nine-foot-tall horned insane monster.” He watches my neck. “You’re healing. Your wounds are closing. I know a man that was given this elixir. Four thousand years ago. He smells different, too. As long as the Rhymer is never stabbed by the spear or sword, he lives, un-aging. He can only be killed in the ways a Fae can be killed.”

  I stare up at him. I’m immortal? I can move my arms again. I touch my neck. I feel thick ridges as the skin fuses back together. It’s like when I ate Unseelie. I’m healing beneath my hands. I feel things crunching, moving in my neck, growing new and strong.

  “Think of it as long-lived and hard to kill.”

  Four thousand years long-lived? I stare at him blankly. I don’t want to live four thousand years. I think about that Unseelie, badly mutilated, left in my back alley. Immortality is terrifying. I just want my small lifetime. I can’t even conceive of four thousand years. I don’t want to live forever. Life is hard. Eighty or a hundred years would be just perfect. That’s all I ever wanted.

  “You might want to seriously reconsider carrying that spear. In fact, I may decide to destroy it. And the sword.” He unbuckles the holster from my shoulder and throws it to the floor, near the fireplace.

  I watch it clatter to a stop against the façade of the hearth, relieved. I can die. Not that I want to right now. I just like options. As long as I have the spear, I have options. I’m never getting rid of that thing. It’s my date with a gravestone, and I’m human. I want to die one day.

  “But he can’t.” It’s the first complete sentence I speak since I was attacked. “Your son can’t die, can he? No matter what. Ever.”

  43

  If I’d never eaten Unseelie, healing miraculously would have messed with my head.

  As it was, I pretended I had eaten Unseelie. I couldn’t deal with the whole elixir-that-prolongs-life scenario. It made me want to kill Darroc all over again. Violently. Sadistically. With lots of torture.

  He’d not only turned me Pri-ya, he’d planned for me to live that way eternally. I’d softened when I saw those pictures of him with Alina, imagining a different outcome for them, but now all softness vanished. If Barrons hadn’t saved me—I couldn’t even begin to imagine the horrors. I didn’t want to. I would have been pathologically insane in a very short time. What if he’d locked me away, refused to give me what I needed? Kept me somewhere small and dark and—

  I shuddered.

  “Stop thinking about it,” Barrons said.

  I shivered. I couldn’t help it. There really were worse things than dying.

  “It didn’t happen. I got you out and brought you back. It all worked out in the end. You’re tough to kill. I’m glad.”

  I’d bled out, according to Barrons, several times. Too much of my throat had been torn away for my body to repair me quickly enough. While I’d been dead—or at least no longer breathing—my body had continued repairing itself. I’d regain consciousness, only to bleed out again. Eventually enough of me had been restored that I’d remained conscious for the rest of the process. I was covered with blood, crusted with it.

  Barrons picks me up and is carrying me again. We pass through luxurious rooms, down stairs and more stairs, and I realize there are more than three levels beneath his garage. He has a whole world down here. I usually hate being underground. But this is different. There’s a sensation of expansiveness, of space not being quite what it seems. I suspect he has more Silvers in here, many ways in and out. It’s the ultimate survivalist fantasy. The world could be nuked, and life would go on down here, or we could pass through to some other world. With Barrons, I suspect, no catastrophe is ever final. He always goes on.

  Now, so will I.

  I don’t like that. I’ve been reprogrammed, changed in so many ways. This
one is going to be the hardest to deal with. It makes me feel less human, and I was already feeling detached. Am I part of the Unseelie King, now nearly immortal? I wonder if this is a loop. Are we reborn over and over again, to repeat the same cycles?

  “Would it be so bad?”

  “Are you reading my mind?”

  “You’re thinking with your eyes.” He smiles.

  I touch his face, and the smile vanishes. “Do it again.”

  “Don’t be a jackass.”

  I laugh. But there’s no amusement left in his face. It was swiftly erased.

  He looks at me with cold, hard eyes. I see what’s in them now. To the rest of the world, they might seem empty. I remember thinking a few times myself that they were void of all humanity, but that’s simply not true.

  He feels. Rage. Pain. Lust. So much emotion, electric beneath his skin. So much volatility. Man and beast, always at war. I know now it’s never easy for him. The battle he fights is nonstop. How does this man go on every day?

  He stops and lowers me to my feet. He moves through the shadows, turns on a gas fire, and begins to light candles.

  We are in his bedroom. It’s like the Unseelie King’s lair: opulent, luxurious, with an enormous bed, draped in black silk, black furs. I can’t see past it. All I can see is myself there, naked with him.

  I’m trembling.

  I’m awed that I’m here. That he wants me.

  He lights more candles near the bed. He picks up pillows and pushes them into a pile I remember from being Pri-ya.

  In that long-ago basement, he mounded them beneath my hips. I sprawled over them with my head on the bed and my ass in the air. He would rub himself back and forth between my legs until I was begging, then push slowly into me from behind.

  He places the last pillow on the pile, and looks at me. He jerks his head toward the pile of pillows.

  “I watched you die. I need to fuck you, Mac.”

  The words slam into me like bullets, taking my knees out. I lean back against a piece of furniture—an armoire, I think. I really don’t care. It holds me up. It wasn’t a request. It was acknowledgment of a requirement to make it from this moment to the next, like I need a transfusion, my blood has been poisoned.