Shadowfever

  I stalk off ahead, down a brilliant yellow corridor. The windows open on exactly the kind of summer day Alina and I always loved. I can’t get away from her ghost! I quicken my pace.

  We hurry down a hall of mint, then one of indigo with French doors that open onto a turbulent stormy night, before turning onto a path of pale pink, and finally there it is—a towering arched entrance into a white marble hall. Beyond the elegant entrance, windows open onto a dazzling winter day, ice-encased trees sparkling like diamonds in the sun.

  Peace settles over me. I’ve been here in my dreams. I loved this wing.

  Once, long ago on her world, a sunny day in spring was her favorite, but now a sunny day in winter delights her more. It is the perfect metaphor for their love.

  Sunshine on ice.

  She warms his frost. He cools her fever.

  “You said Alina called you,” Darroc says behind me. “You said she was crying on the phone, that she was hiding from me. Did she make that phone call the day she died?”

  He startles me from my reverie and, without thinking, I nod.

  “What exactly did she say?”

  I toss him a look over my shoulder that says, You really think I’m going to tell you that? If anyone is going to be answering questions about her, it’s going to be him answering to me. I step into the white marble corridor.

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  He follows me. “All you accomplish by persisting in your inane and erroneous belief that I killed Alina is guaranteeing that you will never find her true murderer. Humans have an animal of which you remind me. The ostrich. ”

  “My head is not buried in the sand. ”

  “No, it’s up your ass,” he snaps.

  I whirl on him.

  We glare at each other, but his words give me pause. Am I being an ostrich? Do I deny myself the opportunity to avenge my sister, because I’m stuck in a rut I refuse to get out of? Will I let my sister’s real murderer get away, because I can’t open my mind to see beyond my preconceptions? Barrons warned me from the beginning to not so blithely assume Darroc was definitely her killer.

  A muscle works in my jaw. Each time I remember something about Barrons, I hate Darroc more for taking him from me. But I remind myself why I’m here and why I haven’t already killed him.

  To accomplish my goal, there are certain answers I need.

  I eye him speculatively. There are others I just want.

  And once I get the Book in my hands and change things, I’ll never have another chance to ask. He’ll be gone. I’ll have killed him. Here and now is my one shot.

  “She said she was going to try to come home but she was afraid you wouldn’t let her leave the country,” I say stiffly. “She said I had to find the Sinsar Dubh. Then she sounded terrified and said you were coming. ”

  “Me? By name? She told you ‘Darroc’ was coming?”

  “She didn’t have to. What she said earlier made it clear. ”

  “And what was that? What so thoroughly incriminated me?”

  I still have her message memorized. I dream it sometimes, word for word. “She said, I thought he was helping me, but—God, I can’t believe I was so stupid! I thought I was in love with him and he’s one of them, Mac! He’s one of them! Who else could that have been? You keep telling me she loved you. Was there someone else she was involved with that she thought she—”

  “No! There was only me. She would never have sought another. I gave her everything. ”

  “Then you understand why I believe you killed her. ”

  “I do not, and did not. There are holes larger than Hunters in your puny human logic!”

  “Who else could it have been? Who else did she fear?”

  He turns and paces to one of the windows, where he stands gazing out at the dazzling winter day. Ice-crusted trees sparkle like they’ve been diamond-dipped. Drifts of powdery snow shimmer in the sunlight. The scene seems lit from within, like the concubine herself.

  But there is only darkness inside me. I feel it growing.

  “You are certain that the day you had this conversation with her was the day she died?”

  It wasn’t a conversation, but I don’t tell him that. “Although the Garda didn’t find her body for two days, they estimated her time of death at about four hours after she called me. The coroner in Ashford said it was possible she died as much as eight to ten hours after she made the call. She said it was difficult to estimate exact time of death due to the way her body had been savaged. ” I refuse to say “chewed on. ”

  Still staring out the window, his back to me, he says, “One morning after I left, she followed me to the house on LaRuhe. ”

  I catch my breath. These are words I’ve been waiting to hear since the day I identified my sister’s body. To learn what she did the last day she was alive. Where she went. How it came to such a bitter end.

  “Did you know?” I demand.

  “I eat Unseelie. ”

  He knew. Of course he knew. It amps up all the senses, hearing, sight, taste, touch. It’s what makes it so addictive—and the super-sized strength is icing on the cake. You feel alive, incredibly alive. Everything is more vivid.

  “We’d been in bed all night, fucking—”

  “T-the-fuck-M-I,” I snarl.

  “You think I don’t know what that means. Alina used to say it. Too much information. It disturbs you to hear of the passion your sister and I shared. ”

  “It sickens me. ”

  When he turns, his gaze is cool. “I made her happy. ”

  “You didn’t keep her safe. Even if you didn’t kill her, she died on your watch. ”

  He flinches almost imperceptibly.

  I think, Nice, real nice, got that fake emotion down real well.

  “I thought she was ready. I believed what she felt for me would win in one of your idiotic human battles of morality. I was wrong. ”

  “So she followed you. Did she confront you?”

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  He shakes his head. “She saw me through the windows at LaRuhe—”

  “They’re painted black. ”

  “They weren’t yet. I did that later. She watched me meet with my Unseelie guard and overheard our conversation about freeing more of the Dark Court. She heard them call me Lord Master. After my guard left and I was alone, I waited to see what she would do, if she would come in, if she would give us a chance. She didn’t. She fled, and I followed, at a distance. She spent hours walking around Temple Bar, crying in the rain. I waited, gave her space, time to clarify her thoughts. Humans do not think as quickly as Fae. They struggle with simple concepts. It is astounding your species ever managed to—”

  “Spare me your condescending judgments and I’ll spare you mine,” I cut him off, in no mood to listen to him condemn my race. His race already did that. Billions dead. All because of their petty power struggles.

  He inclines his head imperiously. “I went to her apartment later that day. I found her in the bedroom, climbing out the window, onto the fire escape. ”

  “See? She was afraid of you. ”

  “She was terrified. It made me angry. I had given her no reason to fear me. I dragged her back in. We fought. I told her she was human, stupid and small. She called me a monster. She said I tricked her. That it was all a lie. It was not. Or, rather, it was at first but then it wasn’t. I would have made her my queen. I told her that. And that I still would. But she wouldn’t listen. She wouldn’t even look at me. Finally I left. But I did not kill her, MacKayla. Like you, I do not know who did. ”

  “Who trashed her apartment?”

  “I told you we fought. Our anger was as intense as our lust. ”

  “Did you take her journal?”

  “I went back for it after I learned she was dead. It was not there. I took photo albums. It was then, when I found her calendar book, that I discovered her ‘friend’ Mac was real
ly her sister. She lied to me. I was not the only one who was duplicitous. I have lived among your kind long enough to know this means she knew from the beginning something about me was not what it seemed. And wanted me anyway. I believe that if she had not been murdered, in time she would have come to me, chosen me of her own free will. ”

  Yes, I think, she would have come to you. With a weapon in her hand, just like I will.

  “I needed to know if you shared her unique talents. Had you not arrived in Dublin when you did, I would have had you brought to me. ”

  I absorb that and am furious. It’s very important to me to pinpoint the exact moment my life started going wrong. Especially now.

  It goes back further than I’d realized.

  The moment Alina left for Dublin and began heading toward the day she would encounter him, there’d been no hope of my life turning out any other way. Events had been set in motion that trapped me. I would have embarked upon exactly the same path, through a different door. If I’d not disobeyed my parents and flown to Ireland to investigate Alina’s murder, would he have sent the Hunters after me? The princes? Maybe dispatched the Shades to devour my town and drive me out?

  One way or another, I would have ended up here, with him, in the middle of this mess.

  “Because of your sister, I resisted harming you. ”

  More than anything he has ever said, those words stun me. I stand half dazed as they echo through my brain, knocking loose conflicting thoughts, nudging them to where they no longer oppose. Without warning, my convictions shift and settle into a new position. I’m startled by where they end up, but they moved with such logic and simplicity that I can’t deny the veracity.

  Darroc did care about Alina.

  I believe him.

  There was something I’d never been able to explain to my own satisfaction: I’d wondered why Darroc hadn’t been more aggressive, more brutal with me from the very first. It had made no sense to me. He’d seemed almost lackadaisical in his efforts to abduct me and had kept offering me the chance to come willingly. What kind of world-destroying villain did that? It was certainly not what I’d expected from my sister’s murderer. Mallucé had been far deadlier, far more ruthless. Of the two, I’d been much more terrified of the wannabe vamp when I’d first arrived.

  Occam’s razor: The simplest explanation that accommodates all variables is most likely the truth. Darroc had resisted harming me because of Alina. He’d restrained himself because he’d cared about my sister.

  Just how much—and how much I could use it against him—remained to be seen.

  “My deference undermined my efforts, and the Hunters began to question my conviction. ”

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  “So you had me raped and turned Pri-ya,” I say bitterly. How quickly he’d gone from deference to murder, because that’s what turning me Pri-ya had been tantamount to. Until Barrons had pulled me back, no one had ever recovered from being made a mindless Fae sex slave. They died from it.

  “I needed to solidify my position. Then I lost you before I even had the chance to begin using you. ”

  “Who was the fourth, Darroc? Why don’t you just tell me?” He’d stood there watching as the Unseelie Princes destroyed me. He’d seen me naked on the ground, helpless, weeping. I calm myself by imagining the many ways I might kill him when the time comes.

  “I have told you before, MacKayla, there was no fourth. The last prince of the Court of Shadows that the king created was the first dark prince to die. Cruce was killed in the ancient battle between the king and queen. Some claim it was the queen herself who killed him. ”

  “Cruce was the fourth Unseelie Prince?” I exclaim.

  He nods. Then he frowns and adds, “If a fourth being was at the church, neither I nor my princes were capable of seeing it. ”

  He seems as disturbed by that thought as I am.

  “I repeatedly offered you an alliance. I need the Book. You can track it. Some believe you can corner it. Some believe you are the fourth stone. ”

  I bristle. There’s little I’m certain of lately, but this much I’d bet the bank on. “I am not a stone. ” I was pretty sure V’lane had the fourth and final one.

  “Fae things change. They become other things. ”

  “Not people,” I scoff. “Look at me. I wasn’t carved from the cliffs of the Unseelie hell! I was born to a human woman!”

  “You know that for a certainty? My sources say you and Alina were adopted. ”

  I say nothing, wondering who his sources are.

  He laughs. “No one knows what the king truly did after he went mad. Perhaps he made one of the stones different, the better to hide it. ”

  “Stones don’t become people!”

  “It’s what the Sinsar Dubh is trying to do. ”

  I narrow my eyes. Was Ryodan right? Was that what this was all about—the Book taking on a corporeal, sentient form? Interesting that both he and Darroc believed this, as if perhaps they had discussed it while forming other plans—plans such as killing Barrons and getting him out of the way! After all, it was Barrons that brought me back from the Pri-ya state where I could have so easily been used. Damned inconvenient for them.

  “But the people it takes over keep killing themselves,” I say.

  “Because the Book has not found the one strong enough to endure the merging. ”

  “What do you mean, ‘endure the merging’? Are you saying the right person could pick up the Sinsar Dubh without killing themselves?”

  “And control it,” he says smugly.

  I inhale sharply. This is the first I’ve heard of anything like this. And he sounds so confident, so certain. “Use it rather than being used?”

  He nods.

  I’m incredulous. “Just pick it up and open it? No harm, no foul?”

  “Absorb it. All the power. ”

  “How? Who is this ‘right person’?” I demand. Was it me? Was that why I could track it? Was that why everyone was really after me?

  He gives me a mocking smile. “Oh, trifling human, such delusions of grandeur you suffer. No, MacKayla. It has never been you. ”

  “Then who?”

  “I’m the one. ”

  I stare at him. He is? I look him up and down. Why? How? What does he know that I don’t know? That Barrons didn’t know? “What’s so special about you?”

  He laughs and gives me a look that says, You really think I’m going to tell you that? I hate it when people throw my own looks back in my face.

  “But I did tell you. I answered your questions. ”

  “Trivial questions. ”

  My eyes narrow. “If you know how to merge with it, why did you insist I bring the stones into the tunnel with me when you took my parents captive? Why are you so interested in them?”

  “It is said the stones can immobilize it. I have had little success getting near it. If I cannot get close enough on my own, I may need to use them. I have you to track it, the stones to corner it, and I can do the rest. ”

  “Is it because you eat Unseelie? Is that why you’d be able to do it?” I can slice, dice, and devour with the best of them. See Mac gorge.

  “Hardly. ”

  “Is it something you are? Something you did? Something you know how to do?” I hear the franticness in my voice and it appalls me, but if he has some way of bypassing the whole absurdity of getting the fourth stone from V’lane, gathering the five Druids—Barrons seemed pretty sure one of them was Christian, and he’s still lost in the Silvers—figuring out the prophecy, and performing some complicated ceremony, I want to know what it is! If there’s a shortcut, any chance I can reach my goal in a matter of hours or days rather than trying to live through agonizing weeks or even months, I want it! The less time I have to spend in this hellish reality, the better.

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  “Look at you, MacKayla, all flushed and glowing, salivat
ing over the idea of merging with the Book. ” The gold flecks in his eyes begin to glitter again.

  I’d know that look on any man’s face.

  “So like Alina,” he murmurs, “yet so unlike her. ”

  It’s a difference he seems to appreciate. “What is it about you? Why will you be able to merge with it?” I demand. “Tell me!”

  “Find the Book, MacKayla, and I will show you. ”

  When we finally locate the room with the Silver in it, it’s just as Darroc described: empty of furnishings, save a single mirror, five feet by ten.

  The mirror appears to have been inserted seamlessly into whatever the walls are made of in the House.

  But my mind’s not on the Silver at all. I’m still reeling from what Darroc told me.

  Another piece of the puzzle that had been giving me fits clicks into place. I’d been perplexed by his determination to get the Book, when none of us knew how to touch it, move it, corner it, do a single damned thing with it, without getting taken over, turned evil, then killed, after being forced to kill everyone around us.

  Along with wondering why Darroc hadn’t been more brutal, I’d wondered why he was hunting it when he’d never be able to use it, when even Barrons and I had been forced to admit that chasing the thing was pointless.

  Yet Darroc had never relented. He’d kept his Unseelie scouring Dublin for it incessantly. The whole time I’d been stumbling in the dark, trying to figure out the four, and the five, and the prophecy, Darroc had been following a much easier path.

  He knew a way to merge with the Sinsar Dubh—and control it!

  There’s no question in my mind that Darroc’s telling the truth. I have no idea how or where he got this information, but he definitely knows how to use the Sinsar Dubh without being corrupted.

  I need that knowledge!

  I watch him through narrowed eyes. I’m no longer in a hurry to kill him. Fact is, I’d kill to protect the bastard at this point.

  I mentally refine my mission. I don’t need the prophecy, stones, or Druids. I’ll never need to ally myself with V’lane in the future.

  I need one thing: to uncover Darroc’s secret.

  Once I have it, I can corner the Book myself. I don’t have any problems getting near it. It likes to play with me.

  My hands tremble with excitement that’s difficult to contain. Trying to fulfill the absurd conditions of the prophecy would have taken forever. My new plan could be achieved in a matter of days, bringing my grief to a swift end.