Shadowfever

by Moning, Karen Marie

  She would doom the world, they’d said.

  I’d been tempted, so tempted. I wanted Alina back. I wanted the walls up. I wanted Dani to be innocent and young and not my sister’s killer. I wanted to be Jericho Barrons’ hero. I wanted to release him from endless pain. See him walk into the future with hope and maybe even smile every now and then.

  YOU SAID THE WORLD WAS IMPERFECT!

  “It is.” I pressed another dripping rune into the cover.

  But it was my world, filled with good people, like my father and mother, patient Kat, and Inspector Jayne, who were always doing their parts to make it a better place. Unseelie might be overrunning our planet, but we’d been long overdue for a threat to unify us as a race and turn our petty angers away from one another.

  There was pain, but there was also joy. It was in the tension between the two that life happened. Imperfect as it was, this world was real. Illusion was no substitute. I’d rather live a hard life of fact than a sweet life of lies.

  I flipped the Book over and pressed a rune into its back.

  Its voice was muffled, growing weaker.

  He will hate you!

  That was the crushing blow. I’d been a breath away from what Barrons had devoted his entire existence to getting, and I’d turned my back on it. I’d promised him. I’d told him we would find a way, and I’d failed him. There was no way to lift a single spell of such power from the Sinsar Dubh. It would never have floated it to the surface and given it to me willingly. Even now it was regretting that it had ever floated anything to the surface for me, but it had taken calculated risks, tempting me to look deeper. It had given me what I’d needed to stay alive, to keep me heading toward merging with it, taking it in, letting it have my body and have control. It knew what I wanted now and would never give it up unless I merged with it completely. If I’d raised that lid—even a scant inch, just for a quick peek—looking for the spell, it would have been all over. It would have taken up squatter’s rights and obliterated me. Perhaps some tiny part of me would have remained cognizant, screaming in eternal horror, but not enough to matter.

  Ryodan had been right. The Sinsar Dubh was after a body, and it had wanted mine. If I believed its story, it had prepped me to be possessed since before I was born. Waited until I’d become the perfect host. But it hadn’t waited quite long enough. Or maybe it had waited too long. Evil is a completely different creature, Mac, Ryodan had said. Evil is bad that believes it’s good.

  I hadn’t understood what he was saying at the time. I did now.

  I pressed another rune onto the binding.

  I would never lay Barrons’ child to rest now. Never free the man.

  Destroy you, bitch! Not the end. Never the end!

  Four more runes and the Sinsar Dubh was silent.

  I sat back on my heels. My hands were shaking, I was exhausted, and my cheeks were wet.

  I was about to lay my hand against the cover to confirm what I sensed, that it was contained—at least as well as it could be until we got it to the abbey—when the invisible barrier restraining Jericho evaporated.

  Then I was in his arms and he was kissing me, and all I could think was that I’d done it, I’d survived, but at what cost?

  From the day I’d met him, he’d been after one thing and one thing only. He’d been hunting it for thousands of years with singleminded focus.

  I was a woman he’d known for a few months. What could I possibly mean to him compared to that?

  49

  Shocked by the news that Rowena was dead, the surviving members of the Haven took one look at Drustan MacKeltar carrying the Book, identified themselves—and, yes, Jo was one of them—then removed the wards and opened the corridor to allow access to the chamber in which the Sinsar Dubh had originally been interred.

  I was thrilled Drustan was carrying it. I wanted nothing more to do with it. I never wanted to touch it again. If I did, I’d have to think about the spell Barrons wanted, how close it was, and how all I’d have to do was lift that cover and …

  I shook my head, forcing the thought away.

  I’d done my part. It was here, and now it was their responsibility. I’d ridden in the Hummer with the Keltar clan to the abbey as a precaution. It was hard to believe it was almost over. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the other shoe hadn’t dropped yet. In movies, the villain always twitched one last time, and my nerves were a wreck, waiting for it.

  Jo and the other Haven members led our procession into the bowels of the stone fortress, followed by Ryodan and the others. The Keltar Druids were next. Barrons and I followed, with Kat and half a dozen more sidhe-seers bringing up the rear. V’lane and his Seelie were due to sift in at any moment.

  I kept a careful eye on the Book as Drustan carried it down the corridor, past a now silent image of Isla O’Connor that I could barely look at, into an underground chamber, down more stairs, into another chamber, and down still more stairs.

  I quit counting after a dozen flights. It was deep. I was once again underground.

  I kept waiting for the Book to somehow sense it was approaching the place where it had been caged for so long and make a final, deadly gambit for my soul. Or body.

  I looked at Barrons. “Do you feel like—”

  “The fat lady hasn’t sung?”

  I love that about him. He gets me. I don’t even have to finish my sentences.

  “Ideas?” I said.

  “Not a one.”

  “Are we being paranoid?”

  “Possibly. Hard to say.” He looked at me. Although his eyes were empty of conversation, I knew he wanted to know everything that had happened while I’d been battling the Book but wouldn’t ask until we were alone. The entire time the Sinsar Dubh had been playing its head games with me, all he’d been able to see was me standing in silence with Rowena, me killing Rowena, then me standing in silence near the Book. The illusions it had woven for me had taken place only in my head. The battle had been invisible to the naked eye, but the hardest ones are.

  He’d been a silent mountain of barely contained hostility the entire way out here. Since the moment the barrier restraining him had evaporated, he hadn’t stopped touching me. I was sucking it up. Who knew how he’d feel soon.

  I couldn’t get to you, he’d exploded when he’d finally stopped kissing me long enough to speak.

  But you did, I’d told him. I heard you roaring. It was what tipped me off. You got through.

  I couldn’t save you. His expression had been stark, furious.

  I couldn’t save him, either. And I was in no hurry to tell him that.

  Did you get it? The spell of unmaking?

  Ancient eyes had stared at me, filled with ancient grief. And something more. Something so alien and unexpected that I’d almost burst into tears. I’d seen many things in his eyes in the time that I’d known him: lust, amusement, sympathy, mockery, caution, fury. But I had never seen this.

  Hope. Jericho Barrons had hope, and I was the reason for it.

  Yes, I lied. I got it.

  I would never forget his smile. It had illuminated him from the inside out.

  I blew out a breath and focused on my surroundings. There was a small underground city beneath the abbey. Even Barrons was beginning to look impressed. Wide streetlike tunnels intersected neatly; narrower alleys ran off them in dizzying slopes. We passed an enormous hive of catacombs that Jo told us held the remains of every Grand Mistress that had ever lived. Somewhere among those labyrinthine tunnels, hidden in row after row of mausoleums, was the crypt of the first leader of the first Haven. I wanted to find it, run my fingers over the inscription, know the date our order had been founded. There were secrets down here entrusted to only the initiate, and I wanted to know them all.

  Kat, too, was a member of the Haven, a secret she’d not betrayed.

  “Rowena would have shut me out if I’d told you, and I’d have had no control over the inner doings of our order. It wasn’t a risk I could take. You did well tonig
ht, Mac. She was wrong about you. With both prophecies against you, still you came through for us.” Serene gray eyes searched mine. “I can’t begin to imagine what you went through.” The look on her face told me she’d like to know and that she wouldn’t be waiting long to ask me in detail. “We can’t thank you enough.”

  “Sure you can.” I gave her a tired smile. “Never let it get out again.”

  There was a sudden commotion ahead of us.

  The Seelie had just sifted in, minus V’lane, in close proximity to Ryodan, Lor, and Fade.

  I wasn’t sure who was more disgusted. Or more homicidal.

  Velvet hissed. “You have no right to be here!”

  “Kill it,” Ryodan said flatly.

  “Don’t you dare!” I heard Jo snap.

  “Fucking fairies,” Lor muttered.

  “Touch one of them and I’ll—”

  “What, human?” Ryodan barked at Jo. “Just what will you do to stop me?”

  “Don’t push me.”

  “Stop it,” Drustan said quietly. “ ’Tis a Fae Book and they’ve come to see it contained, as is their right.”

  “They’re the reason it got out in the first place,” Fade said.

  “We are Seelie, not sidhe-seers. The sidhe-seers let it out.”

  “You made it.”

  “We did not. The Unseelie made it.”

  “Seelie, Unseelie—you’re all fairies to me,” Lor grumbled.

  “I thought there was no sifting in this part of the abbey,” I said.

  “We had to drop all the wards to let everyone in. There’s too much diversity in …”

  “Everyone’s DNA?” I said drily.

  Kat smiled. “For lack of a better word. The Keltar are one thing, Barrons and his men another, the Fae yet another.”

  And me? I wanted to ask, but didn’t. Was I human? Had the Book told me any of the truth? Did I really have the Sinsar Dubh inside me? Had it stamped its imprint, word for word, into my defenseless infant psyche? Over the years, had I always sensed it—something fundamentally wrong with me—and done my best to wall it off or submerge it in a dark glassy lake to protect myself?

  If I did have the entire Book of dark magic inside me, and Kat found out about it, would they try to lock me up down here, too?

  I shivered. Would they hunt me like we’d hunted the Sinsar Dubh?

  Barrons looked down at me. What is it?

  Just cold, I lied. If I did have the Sinsar Dubh inside me, did that mean the spell I’d walked away from was in my glassy lake? There at the bottom, like the Book had said? What was the difference, then? Had I really subdued the monster, or was it still inside me? Was the monster temptation, and I’d defeated it?

  “Where’s V’lane?” I asked, desperate for concretes.

  “He is collecting the queen,” Velvet said.

  That started another fight.

  “If you think we’re going to let her come here and open the Sinsar Dubh, you’re wrong.”

  “How do you expect her to rebuild the walls without it?” Dree’lia demanded.

  “We don’t need walls. You die as easy as any humans,” Fade said.

  “Is she even conscious?” I asked.

  “We need the walls,” Kat said quietly.

  “She surfaces but is still mostly out of it,” Ryodan said. “Point is, if anybody’s reading that damned Book, it’s not going to be a fairy. They started this fucking mess.”

  Everyone was still arguing ten minutes later when we reached the cavern that had been designed to contain the Sinsar Dubh.

  As we approached the doors, Christian glanced back at me and I nodded. I knew what he was thinking. We’d seen doors like this before, at the entrance to the Unseelie King’s fortress of black ice, however these were much smaller. Kat pressed a hand to a pattern of runes on the door and they swung open silently.

  The blackness beyond was so enormous and complete that the thin beams of our flashlights were swallowed a few feet in.

  I heard a match being struck, then Jo lit an oil torch mounted in a silver sconce on the wall. It flared into life, fed into the next and the next, until the cavern was brilliantly illuminated.

  A hush fell over us.

  Chiseled of milky stone, the cavern soared to an impossibly high ceiling with no visible means of support. Every inch of it—floors, walls, ceiling—was covered with silver runes that glittered as if they’d been branded into stone with diamond dust. The torchlight danced off the runes, making the chamber almost too bright to see. I squinted. Figured the only place in Dublin I’d ever need my sunglasses was underground.

  The cavern was easily as large as the Unseelie King’s bedchamber. Between the doors and the size of the place, I wondered how much credence there was to the theory that the king was the one who’d founded our order, who’d originally brought his cursed Book here to be entombed.

  In the center was a slab laid across two stones. It was also covered with glittering symbols, but these moved constantly, sliding up and across the slab like the tattoos that moved beneath the Unseelie Princes’ skin. They disappeared over the edge and began again at the floor.

  “Seen runes like these before, Barrons?” Ryodan said.

  “No. You?” Barrons said.

  “New to me. Could be useful.”

  I heard the sound of a phone taking pictures.

  Then I heard the sound of a phone being crushed against rock.

  “Are you out of your mind?” Ryodan said disbelievingly. “That was my phone.”

  “Possibly,” Jo said. “But no one records anything here.”

  “Crush something of mine again, I’ll crush your skull.”

  “I weary of you,” Jo said.

  “I weary of your ass, too, sidhe-seer,” Ryodan growled.

  “Leave her alone,” I said. “It’s their abbey.”

  Ryodan shot me a look. Barrons intercepted it and Ryodan looked away—but only after a long, tense moment.

  “You must place the Book on the slab,” Kat instructed. “Then the four stones must be positioned around it.”

  “Then, MacKayla, you must remove the runes from the binding,” V’lane said.

  “What?” I exclaimed, whirling to face him as he sifted in. “I’m not taking those runes off!”

  Barrons said, “I thought you were bringing the queen.”

  “I am making certain it is safe for her first.”

  V’lane scanned the chamber, studying each person, Fae and Druid. I could tell he wasn’t comfortable with the risk. His gaze rested on Velvet for a moment, who nodded. Then he looked at me. “I apologize, but it is the only way to protect her. I cannot be two of me at once without halving my abilities.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He didn’t answer.

  My parents were suddenly there. My mom and dad—here with the Sinsar Dubh—in the last place I would ever have brought them. And supposedly I was going to have to remove the runes, but we’d see about that.

  My dad had the Seelie queen in his arms, heavily wrapped in blankets. She was so well swaddled that all I could see of her were a few strands of silvery hair and the tip of her nose. My mom was pressed close to my dad’s side, and I understood why V’lane had apologized. He should have.

  He had my parents protecting the queen with their bodies.

  “You’re using my parents as her shield?”

  “It’s all right, baby. We wanted to help,” Jack said.

  Rainey agreed. “You’re so much like your sister, facing everything alone, but you don’t have to. We’re family. We face things together. Besides, if I have to stay one more moment in that glass cage, I’ll lose my mind. We’ve been stuck in there for months.”

  Barrons jerked his head, and Ryodan, Lor, and Fade closed in around my parents, shielding them.

  “Thank you,” I said softly. He was always protecting me and mine. God, I sucked.

  V’lane was still eyeing all the occupants of the room. “I had no choice,
MacKayla. Someone kidnapped her. At first I believed it must be one of my race. Now I wonder if it was not one of yours.”

  “Let’s just get this over with,” I said tightly. “Why do I have to remove the runes?”

  “They are unpredictable parasites and you have placed them directly on a sentient being. On walls, on a cage, they are useful. On a living, thinking entity, they are unbelievably dangerous. In time, it and they will transmogrify. Who knows what kind of monster we will be dealing with then?”

  I blew out a breath. It made perfect Fae sense. I’d applied something Unseelie and alive to something else Unseelie and alive. Who could say whether it would ultimately make the Book stronger, maybe even give it whatever it needed to free itself?

  “It must be re-interred precisely as it was before. Without the runes.”

  “She’s not removing them,” said Barrons. “It’s too dangerous.”

  “It is too dangerous if she does not.”

  “If it becomes something else, we’ll deal with it then,” said Barrons.

  “You may no longer be around,” V’lane replied coolly. “We cannot always count on Jericho Barrons to save the day.”

  “I’ll always be around.”

  “The runes on the walls, ceiling, and floor make them obsolete. They will contain it.”

  “It escaped before.”

  “It was carried out,” Kat said. “Isla O’Connor carried it out. She was the leader of the Haven and the only one with the power to carry it past the wards.”

  I was quiet, thinking. The truth of what V’lane had said resonated deep inside me. I feared the crimson runes myself. They were potent; they’d been given to me by the Sinsar Dubh, which in itself was enough to make them suspect. Was this another of its patient gambits? Had I sealed it with precisely what it needed to one day break free again?

  Everyone was looking at me. I was tired of making all the decisions. “I see both sides. I don’t know the answer.”

  “We’ll vote,” Jo said.

  “We’re not voting on something this important,” Barrons said. “This isn’t a fucking democracy.”