Fever - Burned Part 43

I search his face and am surprised to see something patient and understanding in those cool silver eyes.

"I know the sorrow of losing a brother," Ryodan presses. "I'll bring him back. Go."

I wonder about Ryodan and Barrons. Did they once have other brothers? Did they lose them before they became what they are, or afterward? How? I want to know about these two, understand them, hear their tales.

I doubt anyone ever does.

Drustan glances between Christian and the shadowy entrance to the gorge, visibly torn, unwilling to do anything that might risk that for which his brother gave his life, equally unwilling to leave his brother's body behind.

"Come, Drustan," I say gently. "The living need you now. If Ryodan says he'll bring his body back, he will."

Ryodan says to me, "It may take time to find ... all of him. Take Christian to Chester's. Sequester him where we protected the Seelie Queen. He'll be safe there while he heals."

As Ryodan turns to go, Jada says, "I'll come with you."

"You will return with the others and protect them."

"I'm not she who once-"

He cuts her off fast and hard. "I know who the f.u.c.k you are," he clips the words out coldly. "You're the only one that doesn't. Dani could have antic.i.p.ated the Hag's movements. You could not. Jada."

Ryodan vanishes into the night without another word.

I wince. That was harsh. Whether or not it was true.

The three of us join Christian in the Hummer and begin the long silent ride home.

38.

"How I wish, how I wish you were here"

MAC.

After seeing Christian and Drustan safely inside Chester's, I'm surprised when Jada doesn't immediately stalk off. With my spear, which I'm stunned to realize I'd forgotten about. But the three-day ride was depressing, Christian largely unconscious, Drustan deeply grieving, and neither Jada nor I in any mood to talk. I suspect my invisibility makes me feel safer, plus I'm still pumped by the final stages of Unseelie-flesh-high. Regardless, once she'd tucked the spear away somewhere, I'd not thought about it again.

Now I'm doubly surprised she didn't rush off. Why linger and give me time to demand she return it? Jada does nothing without purpose.

We stand in taut silence outside Chester's, eyeing the long line of people waiting to get in with distaste, and I'm reminded of the old Dani, how we would have sauntered off into the night to slay Unseelie and reduce the number of predators in our city, dozen by dozen, hoping to one day save these mindless lemmings from the apparently irresistible lure of flinging themselves off the proverbial cliff inside the club.

Neither of us has showered in nearly a week. I suspect if I could see myself, I'd look a fright. A week out, Jada still looks spit-and-polish perfect. I sigh, wondering if I'm going to have to fight to get my spear back. Truth is, I'm not entirely sure I can take it from her. Nor do I want to have to.

I opt for the direct approach. "Give me my spear, Jada."

She glances in my general direction. "You can't use it."

"It's mine. That's enough of a reason."

"Inefficient. Someone should be able to use it. I'm the obvious choice."

I'd like to deny the validity of her words but I can't. Given the risks, I'm unwilling to wield it. I can't walk these streets and slay, and the sheer number of newly arrived Fae inside Chester's tonight was staggering.

Without the sword-I wonder again where it is, that she can't get to it-Jada can't kill them. Seems a h.e.l.l of a waste of lethal womanpower in this city.

Still, if the Sinsar Dubh decides to suddenly make me visible, I'm going to want it, need it.

"What happened after I chased you into the hall?"

"Like the one you called Dani, the past is irrelevant. I'm here now. That's all that signifies."

"What are your plans for the abbey?"

"None of your concern."

"Once, we worked together."

"Once, I was someone else."

"What about the Book I carry?" I want to know if I have to watch my back every second of the day. I want to know how Jada thinks, if there are weaknesses in her mental defenses where I'm concerned.

"I'll contend with Cruce. Barrons and Ryodan are enough to contend with you."

"You're granting me free pa.s.sage." I choose my words carefully, using the same words I spoke the night I made a pact with the Gray Woman to save her life, the night I discovered what she'd done with Alina, probing to see if I can elicit an emotional response.

"For now," she says tonelessly.

Still, she stands in the street looking at me as if she's waiting for something. I can't fathom what.

"Have you seen Dancer since you've been back?" I take another shot at provoking emotion.

"I don't know Dancer."

"Yes you do. Dani was crazy about him."

"You could have ended your second sentence after the initial three words."

Okay, now she's starting to p.i.s.s me off, insulting the tenacious, brilliant teen that battled tirelessly for our city. "What do you want, Jada?" I say flatly. "Why are you still standing here?"

She wrinkles her nose as if her next words leave a foul taste on her tongue. "Do you believe Dani could have antic.i.p.ated the Hag's movements better than I could?"

I catch my breath. There it is. Why she remained. She despises asking me, yet can't resist. Apparently Ryodan's criticism has been burning like sullen fire in her gut ever since he leveled it at her. Who better to ask to confirm or deny it than me? I knew Dani better than most. That she even asks it shocks me. Jada has opened herself to an opinion. My opinion.

I don't like this question. I don't want Dani harboring more guilt or self-recrimination. I've not forgotten, and will never be able to forget, her cry that she deserved to die. I wonder what happened to her when she was young, what Ryodan knows about her, what "kryptonite" she carries in her head that he believes could destroy her. I wonder if he's wrong, and Dani actually knows it and was relieved to turn the reins over to a remote, unfeeling part of herself. I wonder what happened to her in the Silvers, what she endured that made her transform fully into this icy other.

I study Jada in silence, realizing her question might be a small crack in the dominant personality's facade. Then again, it might merely be a desire to reconfigure herself into the most efficient weapon possible. I don't know much about dissociative disorder, but between trying to figure out how to stop the black holes that threaten our world, hunt the Unseelie King to get rid of this Book, and find Barrons because I need him like a bandage to my wounds, I intend to learn.

I wonder how Jada subdued Dani so completely. Similar to the way I subdue the Book? Does Dani whisper daily, struggling to break free, or is she imprisoned somewhere deep inside, in a small dark cell, her exuberant, pa.s.sionate voice echoing in a tight vacuum, not heard even by Jada? Worse, has she given up?

"Are you still there?" Jada says.

"I don't blame you for killing my sister, Dani," I say softly. "I forgive you." My heart feels abruptly, enormously lighter. Saying those words released an awful compressed knot behind my breastbone. I clear a throat suddenly thick with unshed grief, for the loss of Dani, for Dageus, for the way things turned out. I wish I'd been able to say these things before I chased her through the portal. "I love you," I tell Jada, hoping somehow my Dani hears me. "I always will."

"Irrelevant and maudlin. I asked you a question. Answer it."

"Yes. She could have antic.i.p.ated the Hag's movements better," I say flatly. "Dani has a fire you lack. Her gut instincts are flawless, she is brilliant."

Jada's eyes narrow and her nostrils flare. "I'm flawless. I'm brilliant."

"Give me my spear."

She c.o.c.ks her head as if holding an internal debate, then slips the cuff of Cruce from her arm and holds it in the general direction of my voice. "Logic dictates a different course."

Oh no, it doesn't. Logic dictates she keeps both. Not give away something she isn't required to relinquish. Interesting.

"Take the cuff," Jada insists. "It makes sense."

"How does letting you keep my spear make sense?"

Emerald eyes bore into the s.p.a.ce where I stand, as if she's trying to hammer me into her desired shape with the sheer intensity and implacability of her gaze. "I kill. It's what I do. It's who I am. It's who I've always been. I will never change. Stay out of my way. Or your free pa.s.sage will be rescinded."

The cuff tinkles to the cobbled pavement at my feet.

Jada is gone.

39.

"What are you waiting for?" the Seelie Queen demands, trying but failing to conceal her fear behind an imperious facade. "Seal our pact and attend Dublin."

She dreads kissing him.

Once, she couldn't kiss him enough.

The Unseelie King completes the complex process of reducing himself, compressing fragments into various, new human forms those who live in Dublin have not seen him wearing.

He never attends a world twice in the same human bodies once they've been identified. Humans recall him, bring pet.i.tions, crucify him with incessant, foolish demands. Give us laws, chisel them in stone, tell us how to live!

Absurd, floundering humanity, spreading from planet to planet like a plague, colonizing the stars, he finds it astounding how long they have managed to persist.

Once, he told them the truth.

Chiseled a single commandment upon a slab of stone: That is how to live: in the choosing. There are no rules but those you make for yourself.

The man to whom he'd entrusted the tablet promptly shattered it, chiseled ten precise commands upon two stone slabs and carried them down a mountain with the pomp and circ.u.mstance of a prophet.

Religious wars ravaged that world ever since.

It is possible that day, those tablets, are why he feels an unwelcome twinge of responsibility for that planet. He should never have chiseled.

He shakes off his brood and looks down at the concubine. He made himself taller and wider than she, and is now appropriate for her size, sporting the same visage he wore the day they met, nearly a million years ago.

She recalls no detail of their time together. He remembers enough for both of them. He wears the same attire.

He pushes open her cloak, closes his hands on her waist, and transports them through s.p.a.ce and time to another location where he swiftly erects barricades and walls and seals off the prison in which he will leave her while he pretends to try to save a world beyond saving.

He inhales deeply of memory-residue on the air, the scent of s.e.x on skin, of wings glossed with sweat, of sheets damp with pa.s.sion. He has not been here in a long time.

Once their boudoir of light and shadows, of fire and ice, was the only place he wanted to be.

Till the day he found her dead inside their sacred place and madness claimed him.

Against a frosted crystalline wall, the white half of the chamber features a round bed on a diamond-crusted dais, draped in silks and snowy ermine throws. Fragrant ivory petals are scattered across the furs, perfuming the air. The floor is covered with plush white carpets before an enormous alabaster hearth filled with white and gold logs from which dazzlingly bright flames pop and crackle. Thousands of tiny diamond-bright lights float lazily on the air, twinkling. Her half is bright, joyous, a sunny day at high alt.i.tudes, the ceiling of her chamber a brilliant blue sky.

He turns his head and looks beyond the enormous gilt-framed mirror, the first Silver he ever created.

His chamber is the size of a human sports arena, draped in black velvet and furs, filled with darkly spiced ebony petals. Between sheer slabs of dark ice, a bed stretches. On one wall, a blue-black fire sends exotic flames licking up to the ceiling where they terminate in dark stars amid fantastic nebulae shimmering with blue vapors.

For a moment he sees her there, on his bed, falling back on the dark, glossy furs, laughing, dusky ice frosting her hair, a handful of velvety petals fluttering down to land on her bare b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

Sorrow fills him.

He had so many ambitions.

She had but one.

To love.

"What is this place? Why have you brought me here?" she demands.

He doesn't tell her it is here he spent the finest hours of his existence.

He will leave her soon, trapped in the memory-residue of the place, a spider in a web sticky with his love.

Here, she will watch them. Laugh and dream and f.u.c.k and create. Here, she will taste their pa.s.sion, know their joy.