Darkfever f-1

by Karen Marie Moning

  "Get out of my way," I cried, plunging blindly into the crowd, shoving them aside, vultures, one and all.

  I couldn't help it. I burst into tears as I raced from the room.

  For such an old woman, she sure could move fast.

  She cut me off less than a block away from the museum, darting in front of me, blocking my path.

  I veered sharply left, and detoured around her without missing a beat.

  "Stop," she cried.

  "Go to hell," I snapped over my shoulder, tears scalding my cheeks. My victory over V'lane with the spear had been completely overshadowed by my public humiliation. How long had I been sitting there with parts of me sticking out that no man had ever gotten a good look at in broad daylight unless armed with a speculum and a medical license? How long had they been watching me? Why hadn't someone tried to cover me up? Down South, a man would have draped a shirt around me. He would have taken a quick glance while he did it, I mean, really, breasts are breasts and men are men, but chivalry is not entirely dead where I come from.

  "Voyeurs," I said bitterly. "Sick scandal-starved people." Thank you, reality TV. People were so used to being taken straight into other people's most intimate moments and viewing the sordid details of their lives that they were now far more inclined to sit back and enjoy the show than make any effort to help someone in need.

  The old woman got in front of me again and I veered right this time, but she veered with me and I crashed into her. She was so elderly and tiny and fragile-looking that I was afraid she might topple over, and at her age, a fall could mean serious broken bones and a long recovery period. Good manners—unlike those creeps in the museum, some of us still had them—temporarily eclipsed my misery, and I steadied her by the elbows. "What?" I demanded. "What do you want? You want to bean me in the head again? Well, go ahead! Do it and get it over with! But I think you should know that I couldn't help seeing this one and the situation is—well, it's complicated."

  My assailant was the old woman from the bar that first night I'd arrived in Dublin; the one who'd rapped me with her knuckles and told me to stop staring at the Fae and go die somewhere else and—although now I knew she'd saved my life that night, she might have done it more nicely—I was currently in no mood to thank her.

  Tilting her silvery-white head back, she stared up at me, a flabbergasted expression on her wrinkled face. "Who are you?" she exclaimed.

  "What do you mean, who am I?" I said sourly. "Why are you chasing me if you don't know who I am? Do you make a habit of chasing strangers?"

  "I was in the museum," she said. "I saw what you did! Sweet Jesus, Mary Mother of God and all the saints, who are you, lass?"

  I was so disgusted with people in general that I shrieked, "You saw what that thing was trying to do to me and didn't try to help me? If it had raped me, would you have just stood there and watched? Thanks a lot! Appreciate it. Gee, it's getting to the point where I'm not sure who the bigger monsters are—us or them." I spun sharply and tried to walk away but she latched onto my arm with a surprisingly strong grip.

  "I couldn't help you and you know it," she snapped. "You know the rules."

  I shook her hand off my arm. "Actually, I don't. Everyone else seems to. Just not me."

  "One betrayed is one dead," said the old woman sharply. "Two betrayed is two dead. We count precious each of our kind, never more so than now. We cannot take risks that might betray more of us, especially not me. Besides, you held your own in a way I've never seen—and against a prince, no less! Sweet Jesus, how did you do it? What are you?" Her sharp blue gaze darted rapidly from my left eye to my right and back again. "At first your hair fooled me, then I knew it was you, from the bar. That skin, those eyes, and the way you walk—och, just like Patrona! But you can't be Patrona's, or I'd have known. From what O'Connor line do you come? Who is your mother?" she demanded.

  I tossed my head impatiently. "Look, old lady, I told you that night in the bar that I'm not an O'Connor. My name is Lane. MacKayla Lane, from Georgia. My mom is Rainey Lane and before she married my dad, she was Rainey Frye. So there you have it. Sorry to disappoint you, but there's not a single O'Connor anywhere in my family tree."

  "Then you were adopted," the old woman said flatly.

  I gasped. "I was not adopted!"

  "Ballocks!" the old woman snapped. "Though I've no notion the hows and whys of it, you're an O'Connor through and through."

  "The nerve!" I exclaimed. "How dare you come up to me and tell me I don't know who I am? I'm MacKayla Lane and I was born in Christ Hospital just like my sister and my dad was right there in the room with my mom when I was born and I am not adopted and you don't know the first thing about me or my family!"

  "Obviously," the old woman retorted, "you don't, either."

  I opened my mouth, thought better of it, shut it, and turned and walked away. I would only be giving credence to the old woman's delusions by rebutting them. I wasn't adopted and I knew that for a fact, as certainly as I knew she was one crazy old woman.

  "Where are you going?" she demanded. "There are things I must know. Who you are, if we can trust you and how, by all that's holy, did you get your hands on one of their Hallows? That night in the bar I thought you Pri-ya" — she spat the word like the foulest of epithets—"from the moonstruck way you were staring at it. Now I've no idea what you are. You must come with me now. Stop right there, O'Connor." She used a tone of voice that, not so long ago, would have stopped me dead in my tracks and turned me around, out of respect for my elders if nothing else, but I wasn't that girl anymore. In fact, I was no longer even certain who that girl had really been, as if Mac BTC—Before The Call that day by the pool—hadn't quite been real, just an empty, pretty amalgam of fashionable clothes, happy music, and coltish dreams.

  "Stop calling me that," I hissed over my shoulder, "and stay away from me, old woman." I broke into a sprint but wasn't fast enough to outrun her next words, and I knew as soon as she said them that they were going to chafe like sharp pebbles in my shoes.

  "Then ask her," rang out the old woman's challenge. "If you're so certain you're not adopted, MacKayla Lane, talk to your mother and ask her."

  CHAPTER 19

  "What's on the agenda tonight?" I asked Barrons the moment he stepped into the bookstore. I'd been pacing near the front windows with all the lights blazing, both interior and exterior, watching as night fell beyond the illuminated fortress.

  I guess my tone was a little tight, because he raised a brow and looked at me hard. "Is something wrong, Ms. Lane?"

  "No. Not at all. I'm fine. I just wanted to know what I have to look forward to tonight," I said. "Robbing somebody we get to let live, or somebody we have to kill." I sounded brittle even to myself, but I wanted to know just how much worse a person I was going to be by tomorrow morning. Every day I looked in the mirror it was getting harder to recognize the woman looking back at me.

  Barrons paced a slow circle around me. "Are you sure you're all right, Ms. Lane? You seem a little tense."

  I rotated at the center, turning with him. "I'm just ducky," I said.

  His eyes narrowed. "Did you find anything at the museum?"

  "No."

  "Did you search every exhibit?"

  "No."

  "Why not?"

  "I didn't feel like it," I said.

  "You didn't feel like it?" For a moment Barrens looked perfectly blank, as if the idea that someone might disobey one of his orders just because they didn't feel like it was even more inconceivable to him than the possibility of human life on Mars.

  "I am not your workhorse," I told him. "I have a life, too. At least, I used to. I used to do perfectly normal things like date and go out to eat and see movies and hang out with friends and never once think about vampires or monsters or mobsters. So don't go getting all over my case because you think I haven't performed up to your exacting standards. I don't plan your days for you, do I? Even an OOP-detector needs a break every now and then." I gave him a disgust
ed look. "You're lucky I'm helping you at all, Barrens."

  He closed in on me and didn't stop until I could feel the heat coming off his big, hard body. Until I had to tilt my head back to look up at him, and when I did, I was taken aback by his glittering midnight eyes, the velvety gold of his skin, the sexy curve of his mouth, with that full lower lip that hinted at voluptuous carnal appetites, and the upper one that smacked of self-control and perhaps a bit of cruelty, making me wonder what it would be like—

  Whuh. I shook my head sharply, trying to clear it. From my two brief encounters with V'lane, I knew that merely being in the same general vicinity with a death-by-sex Fae caused an extreme hormonal spike in a woman that did not go away until it was released somehow. What V'lane had done to me today had left me so awfully, icily aroused that it had taken more orgasms than I'd thought possible and a long frigid shower to calm me. And now it seemed I hadn't done a good enough job, because I was still suffering residual effects. There was no other way to explain why I was standing there wondering what it would be like to kiss Jericho Barrons.

  Fortunately, he chose that moment to open the mouth I'd been finding so disturbingly sexual and begin speaking. His words abruptly restored my perspective.

  "You still think you can walk away from this, don't you, Ms. Lane?" he said coolly. "You think this is about finding a book, you think it's about figuring out who killed your sister—but the truth is, your world is going to Hell in a hand-basket and you're one of the few people that can do something about it. If the wrong person or thing gets its hands on the Sinsar Dubh, you won't be ruing the loss of your rainbow-hued, prettily manicured world, you'll be regretting the end of human life as you know it. How long do you think you'll last in a world where someone like Mallucé, or the Unseelie who's got his Rhino-boy watchdogs stationed all over the city, gets the Dark Book? How long do you think you'll want to? This isn't about fun and games, Ms. Lane. This isn't even about life and death. This is about things that are worse than death."

  "Do you really think I don't know that?" I snapped. Maybe I hadn't been talking about everything he'd just said, but I'd sure been thinking about it. I knew there was a bigger picture going on out there than just what had been happening to me, in my little corner of the world. I'd eaten ketchup-soaked fries and watched the Gray Man destroy a helpless woman and I'd wondered every night since who was falling victim to him now. I'd gotten an up close look at the Many-Mouthed-Thing's many mouths and knew it was out there somewhere, feeding on someone. I'd wondered—if I could jump forward in time a year or two—what Dublin would look like then. I had no doubt the dark territory of the abandoned neighborhood was expanding even as Barrons and I spoke, that somewhere out there another streetlamp had fizzled, emitting a final, weak flicker of light before burning out, and the Shades had instantly slithered in around it and tomorrow, according to Barrons, the city wouldn't even remember that block had ever existed.

  Such worries weren't just on my waking mind; they were invading my dreams. Last night I'd had a nightmare in which I'd been floating over a Dublin that was pitch-black except for a single, blazing four-story stronghold in the middle of it. In the surreal manner of dreams, I'd been both above the city and down inside the store, looking out the front door. So much of Dublin had fallen to darkness that I'd known, even if I'd begun walking the instant the morning sun crested the horizon, I wouldn't be able to make it to another lighted sanctuary before nightfall, and that I was stuck at Barrons Books and Baubles for the rest of my life.

  I'd woken up thinking about things like prophetic dreams and apocalypses instead of entertaining my usual blissful early-morning thoughts of what I was going to eat that day and what pretty outfits I might wear.

  Oh yes, I knew this was about worse things than death. Like being expected to go on living after your sister was killed. Like watching everything you believed about yourself and the world in general get unveiled as one great, big, fat lie. But the big picture going on out there wasn't my problem. I'd come to Dublin to find Alina's killer, get whatever justice I could, then go home, and that's what I still planned to do. O'Bannion was no longer a threat, and maybe out of sight was out of mind for Mallucé. Maybe Barrons could save the city from the Fae. Maybe the Queen—if anything V'lane had said was true—would find the Dark Book without my help just fine, send the Unseelie back to prison, and our world would go back to normal. Maybe after I left, all the evil things hunting the Sinsar Dubh would fight themselves to death over it. There were a great many possibilities and none of them had to involve me. I was sick of this place. I wanted out before one more strand of reality unraveled around my ears.

  "Then what's with the attitude," Barrons demanded, "and why didn't you finish at the museum?"

  "I had a bad day today, okay?" I said coolly, though inside I felt like a volcano about to blow at any moment. "Isn't everybody entitled to one, now and then?"

  He searched my face for a long moment, then shrugged. "Fine. Finish up tomorrow."

  I rolled my eyes. "So what are we doing tonight?"

  He gave me a faint smile. "Tonight, Ms. Lane, you learn how to kill."

  I know what you're wondering; I'd be wondering it, too: Did I call my mom?

  I'm neither that stupid nor that insensitive. She was still reeling from the shock of Alina's death and I wasn't about to upset her more.

  Still, I had to prove the old biddy wrong, so after I left the museum and stopped at a hardware store for a cache of flashlights, I'd made a beeline back to Barrons Books and Baubles so I could call the hospital where I'd been born and lay the old woman's ridiculous claim to rest.

  One great thing about small towns is that the people are so much more helpful than they are in big cities. I think it's because they know the person on the other end of the line is somebody they might run into at their kid's Softball practice on Tuesday, or at Wednesday night bowling league, or one of the town's many church picnics and festivals.

  After being transferred a half a dozen times and put on hold a few more, I finally got through to the woman in charge of the Records Department, Eugenia Patsy Bell, and she was just as nice as could be. We chatted for a few moments during which I learned I'd gone to high school with her niece, Chandra Bell.

  I told her what I was looking for, and she told me yes, they kept both paper and electronic files on every birth in the hospital. I asked if she could find mine and read it to me over the phone. She said she was terribly sorry, she wasn't allowed to do that, but if I could confirm some personal information, she could pull it up right now on her computer, print it off, and get it out to me in the afternoon mail.

  I gave her Barrons' address and was just about to hang up, when she asked me to hold on a moment. I sat on the other end of the line, listening to her tap away at her keyboard. She asked me to reconfirm my information twice, and I did so, each time with a growing sense of dread. Then she asked if she could put me on hold one more time while she went and checked the physical files. It was a long hold, and I was glad I'd made the call on the bookstore's phone.

  Then Eugenia came back and said—wasn't it just the darnedest thing? — she couldn't explain it, because she knew for certain their records were complete. Their database went all the way back to the early nineteen hundreds and was painstakingly maintained by none other than herself.

  And she was so sorry that she couldn't help me, but there was absolutely no record, electronic or otherwise, of a MacKayla Lane born at Christ Hospital twenty-two years ago. And no, she said when I pressed, nothing twenty-four years ago for Alina Lane, either. In fact, there was no record at all of any Lane born at Christ Hospital during the past fifty years.

  We couldn't find a single Unseelie.

  We walked down street after street, went into pub after pub, but found nothing.

  There I was, armed with a Fae-killing spear and a seriously bad attitude, only to be denied the chance to blow off some steam by taking out one of the monsters responsible for turning my life into the mess i
t was.

  Not that I was entirely certain I could have taken one of them out. Oh, I was pretty sure my head was in the right place. I just didn't know if my body would perform the way it was supposed to. I was pretty sure I was feeling the same thing a guy must feel before he proves himself in his first fist-fight: wondering if he has what it takes to knock out his opponent, or if he'll humiliate himself by swinging like a girl, or worse, miss completely.

  "That's why I brought you out tonight," Barrons said, when I told him my concerns. "I'd rather you screw up while I'm with you, so I can manage the situation, than have you attempt your first kill on your own and get yourself killed instead."

  I had no idea how prophetic his words would prove. "Just a hard night's work, out protecting your investment, huh?" I said dryly as we exited yet another pub filled with only people, no monsters. Sarcasm aside, I was glad he was along to save me if I needed saving. I might not trust Barrens, but I'd developed a healthy respect for his ability to 'manage' situations. "So, how am I supposed to do it?" I asked. "Is there some trick to this?"

  "Just freeze it and stab it, Ms. Lane. But do it fast. If it sifts you somewhere else, I won't be able to save you."

  "Is there any particular place I'm supposed to stab it? Assuming, of course, whatever we stumble across has the equivalent of human body parts." Were they like vampires? Was a direct hit to the heart necessary? For that matter, did they even have hearts?

  "The gut's always good."

  I glanced down at my lavender shirt and short, purple, floral-patterned skirt. The outfit went fabulously with my new darker 'do. "Do they bleed?"

  "Some of them. In a manner of speaking, Ms. Lane." He gave me a quick, dark flash of a smile that wasn't nice at all, and I knew right then and there that whatever came out of some of the Unseelie was going to seriously gross me out. "You might try wearing black next time. Then again, we could always just hose you off back at the garage."