Feversong

  I sat on the couch, rubbing my temples, fighting a headache, thinking how ridiculously difficult the queen’s job was. It was no wonder they got so bitchy and ruthless. Power was a crushing weight. Then again, Fae queens didn’t get headaches. They felt no pain at all, and as far as I knew, suffered no physical demands. No need for sleep or food.

  Frowning, I sank inward and accessed the Elixir of Life. Not for myself but for Dancer. I’d already tried hunting for topics like Healing Humans, which hadn’t yielded a single tab; no surprise there. Why would a Fae care to (a) heal a human, (b) make any files about it if they did.

  That was yet another limit to all this bloody information I had. Some things were common knowledge to Fae, so they didn’t bother recording it. Why would I make a file on how to brush my teeth or dry my hair?

  It wasn’t long before I sighed and shook my head. The potion of immortality had been—as many Fae things were—stolen from some other race an eternity ago. It wasn’t capable of “healing,” it dramatically transformed any being that consumed it. And it carried a high price: barrenness and, in time, it eradicated every vestige of the immortal soul if you believed in such things, and I did. When a Fae died, there was no afterlife. At best they drifted, their essence scattered to the molecules of the world on which they’d died. At worst they were simply gone as if they’d never been. I was fascinated to discover the Fae believed humans were reincarnated again and again with many different lives, eternally. But a dead Fae could never have its essence scraped back together to become something else.

  I wondered what made the Fae decide a nearly immortal existence without children or pain—but very little pleasure either—was worth it, suddenly apprehending them not as a vastly more powerful race, but cowards. I’d rather roll the dice, play the lottery, enjoy an unpredictable and sometimes scary eternity of passion and pain than the fate they’d chosen to embrace.

  Regardless, the elixir was not the answer for Dancer.

  The bell above my door tinkled as it opened and closed. My head lifted.

  And my heart sank.

  Lor stalked into the bookstore, an enormous blond Viking dressed in black leather pants, boots, and a Woodstock tee that looked like it might actually be an original. “Hey, Mac.”

  “Barrons isn’t here,” I said hastily.

  He sliced his head to the left. “Not looking for him. I came to see you.”

  Well, shit. He was pretty much the last person I wanted to see. I couldn’t look at him without my box that contained thoughts of Jo threatening to explode.

  When he dropped onto the couch, the frame protested the impact of his weight. Lor, like the rest of the Nine, stood well over six feet and was massively muscled and badly scarred. With thick blond hair and chiseled good looks, he was the fun-loving caveman, the hardcore rock-and-roll partier that burned through bombshell blondes yet somehow managed to leave them in an adoring stupor when he moved on. He had a soft spot for women and children and had been Dani’s shadow for years, without her ever knowing it.

  I’d sent Jo to him. After she broke up with Ryodan, I’d taken one look into her red-rimmed, wounded eyes and known instantly that she was never going to be able to toe that line. One way or another, if she didn’t move forward to the next thing, she’d end up trying to go back.

  And Ryodan would never take her back.

  Only thing worse than dumping a boyfriend you deep down wanted to keep but shouldn’t for one reason or another was backsliding, and getting dumped yourself.

  I did that once. Choosing to leave had made me feel empowered. Going back and getting rejected had screwed with my head for a quite a while. Once you walked away, you had to keep walking and never look back.

  My brain had put two facts together that day at the bar: fun-loving Lor who never had relationships and allegedly was a mind-blowing, enthusiastic fuck, and Jo needing a distraction to keep her from backsliding. It had seemed like the perfect solution. Harmless. With potential for good. Lor gets his world rocked, Jo moves on. No way they’d ever repeat it. Lor didn’t do do-overs.

  I’d never once thought it would turn out to be anything more for Jo than a stepping-stone to a new life.

  But they’d sparked off each other. I’d seen it. There’d been something building.

  And I’d killed her.

  “What’s up?” I said briskly. “I was just about to head out,” I lied.

  “Hear about Jo?”

  I nodded. Cleared my throat. “I’m so sorry, Lor.” In more ways than he knew.

  “I had plans for that one,” he murmured. “Ah, did I ever. Crazy bitch. Thought she didn’t wanna fuck me, and anybody could see plain as day she loved fucking me.”

  Yep. Twist that knife.

  He stared at me a long, unreadable moment. Finally he said, “I can’t talk to those fucks about her. Can’t talk to anybody. Figured you’d listen ’cause you were friends with her. Hell, you’re the one sent the little spitfire to me.”

  And I was endlessly sorry I had.

  “I got a rule, see. Never fuck a brunette. Know why?”

  Nope, but I could see he was going to tell me. I shook my head, not trusting myself to speak. All I could see was me shattering Jo’s skull. Eating her. I thrust the images away. There was danger here. The Nine were far too capable of skimming minds.

  “I had a wife once. Long time ago.”

  Let me guess. She was a brunette. “You know,” I said quickly, “I’m not supposed to know about any of this, remember? What would Ryodan do if he heard you were talking to me?”

  “Fuck Ryodan. Bastard had her longer than I did.” His face darkened and all trace of playful, caveman Lor vanished, leaving the hard-planed visage of a virtual stranger.

  I realized I was seeing the real Lor for the first time. Brutal, cold, every bit as much a beast as the rest of them. Bonecrusher. The word floated into my mind but I had no idea why.

  “You got any fucking clue what it’s like to outlive everyone? At first you think it’s the greatest goddamn party you coulda been invited to. You fuck and feast and do every goddamn thing you want and think you got the world by the balls. Then you realize every bloody person you like hanging with is gonna die. You know how many musicians I watched go before they even hit thirty? And the women, shit. How many times can you care? How long till you start to hate? Despise. Motherfucking revile.”

  His eyes bored into mine and I inhaled shallowly. A series of disjointed images flashed through my mind, and I knew he was feeding them to me. Once, Lor had been a completely different man. The worst of them. The Bonecrusher. He’d befriended Genghis Khan and run with the Mongols, he’d warred with Attila the Hun, slaughtered with Caligula, rampaged with Nero, laughed with Ivan the Terrible, been executioner for Robespierre, drank blood from the skulls of their enemies with Vlad the Impaler. For a thousand years he’d sought war after war, killing endlessly. He’d abjured his own clan, until one night they’d shown up in force, led by Ryodan, captured him and dragged him away.

  “You fucks’d call it an intervention,” he said with cold, dead eyes.

  “You loved Jo,” I whispered.

  “Nope,” he said succinctly. “But the woman made me sorta start to feel like maybe I would put up with that shit again, watch her grow old, die, deal with it. And now she’s fucking gone.”

  Of all the people I could have killed, it had to be Jo. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “She’s already been forgotten. So much going on, nobody’s even talking about her anymore. By the time we got back, she’d been dead for over a month. I just heard. The scraps of her body got dumped in a grave. Gonna go dig ’em up, sniff out the Unseelie that did it. Torture that fuck to death a hundred different ways.”

  A chill went up my spine. “You could do that? Smell who killed her from her remains?”

  “Oh, yeah. That’s easy shit. I dropped by to let you know. Seeing as you’re Fae queen and all, letting you know there’s gonna be a fuck lot of Unseelie dyin
g tonight. Not just the one that did it. I’m gonna take down the whole caste, every goddamn last one.”

  I swallowed. “And you came for my blessing?”

  He got to his feet and stalked for the door, tossing over his shoulder, “Nope. Telling ya to stay the fuck outta my way tonight. I’ll take your ass down, too, if you get in it.”

  The door banged shut behind him.

  I sat unmoving for a moment, allowing myself to wallow in shame and grief and regret and pain, meeting it measure for measure.

  Then I stepped away from crushing emotion and played out scenarios, isolating the likely one: Lor finds Jo’s remains, smells that I killed her, kills me, the song can never be sung, the Earth gets destroyed.

  All because I killed Jo.

  Barrons had once killed a Fae princess. No doubt Lor could kill a queen. Especially a new, young one.

  He was going to have to wait to kill me until after we saved the world.

  It occurred to me, as I pulled out my cellphone, that my decision might seem every bit as cold and ruthless to the casual observer as the things Barrons and Ryodan often did. Covering my ass. Deceitful, even.

  My fingers flew over the letters:

  Lor’s on his way to dig up Jo’s grave to sniff out the identity of her killer. He’s the Bonecrusher again.

  The reply from Barrons was instantaneous:

  I’ll take care of it.

  JADA

  I dropped out of the slipstream and blasted in the door of the physics building, shoving damp hair from my face, aware that I looked the same way I felt—not in control—but there wasn’t enough time to do everything I wanted, and something had to give. Since it took forever to dry and straighten my hair, I’d often skipped showers for days, but I’d had to take one today and wasn’t in the mood to waste time, so my hair was a mass of tangled curls just like the old days, minus slippery guts tucked into a few. Mac becoming the Fae queen had put a temporary courtesy-damper on my killing sprees. All my emotions were on the surface, and I couldn’t kill anything. It was a recipe for disaster.

  When I’d left Dancer earlier, telling him I was going to the abbey, I was sidetracked by Mac’s call and ended up spending the day with Christian, getting drenched then muddy. Although he was able to move the earth out from beneath the black holes, the one at Chester’s was especially challenging, as close as it hung to the ground. He’d had to gently loosen a half inch of compacted soil at a time, without disturbing it so much the hole sucked it up. I’d alternated between seeping water beneath the sphere with a hose to keep the ground wet and sprawling on my stomach using a rake I’d modified with a super long handle, to delicately ease the loosened mud free.

  Being so close to the hole had been intensely disconcerting. I didn’t hear music coming from it like Mac, but I’d been acutely aware of instant death hovering just above my shoulders the entire time. I’d plastered my hair with mud to weigh it down and flattened myself pancake thin to the ground, but it wasn’t as easy as it used to be at fourteen. Boobs were sometimes a serious pain in the ass.

  We’d lost some of the soil to the hole. It was inevitable.

  But when we’d left it, the sphere hung a full ten feet from the vast crater beneath it.

  Christian had been four square against me raking, but it required strength to resist the gravitational pull of the ergosphere up close, and since we had so many blasted holes to work on, he’d finally accepted that everyone with the right amount of muscle was necessary, including me. It had taken us all day to dig it out to our satisfaction.

  During a brief break, he’d sifted me out to the abbey, a power I’d heard Mac now had, too. I was floored to discover she’d effortlessly rebuilt the fortress. She’s starting to make the Nine look like not-so-super heroes to me. I want to be Mac when I grow up. Then again, maybe not. I’d heard the Fae had already begun to seek her out with their problems, and I’ve got enough of my own.

  I’d hit an old hidey-hole and showered once I returned to Dublin then headed with expeditious velocity for Trinity. I’d been getting a slew of excited texts from Dancer all afternoon.

  Dancer.

  One day, kid, Ryodan had said to me a long time ago, you’ll be willing to mortgage your fucking soul for somebody.

  I devoutly hoped that bastard wasn’t going to prove right about everything he’d once said.

  I remembered battling the Hoar Frost King at the abbey at fourteen, whisking Dancer to safety, dumping him on the sidelines because he was “only human.” Then I’d been whisked and dumped on the sidelines and gotten a taste of how it felt.

  Who was I to tell Dancer not to live out loud, and in every color of the rainbow?

  There was a special place in Hell for hypocrites, and I had no intention of ending up there.

  So, I’d decided to pretend there was nothing wrong with Dancer to the precise degree he wanted me to pretend it. We would enter into an elaborate conspiracy of two. That was what friends did for each other when there was no other option.

  Everything about the situation pissed me off. I’d always thought one day we might be more than just friends. I’d been perfectly willing to take my time getting to that point.

  But thanks to a genetic flaw that was a treacherously ticking time bomb, coupled with the looming end of our world, there was no other way for me to see it than: one day was here.

  I took the chance or I missed it. No guarantees. Fewer promises of tomorrow than I’d thought.

  Scowling, I shoved my hair from my face then stopped to glance in one of the windows I was passing in the hallway, using my reflection to untangle the worst snarls.

  I realized what I was doing and made a face at myself.

  I didn’t care what I looked like. I’d never cared. I wasn’t starting now.

  As I was about to walk through the door of the lab, I drew up short, frowning. I had a fluttery sensation in my stomach that I used to get often when I was young, and every time I did, it shorted out my powers. Silverside, I’d finally figured out it happened when I was either feeling extremely emotional or thinking intensely about sex. Why those two things shorted me out was beyond me. But they did.

  At the moment I was both.

  I inhaled deep. Exhaled slow. Bold. Ruthless. Energy. Action. Tenacity. Hunger. That was what B-R-E-A-T-H was.

  Once the fluttering stopped, I did what I used to do—freeze-framed into the room and spooked Dancer right out of his chair.

  The look on his face was priceless.

  He knew by me doing it that I’d made up my mind, which was exactly what I wanted him to know. People tended to waste a lot of breath on words when a simple action communicated much more succinctly.

  I wasn’t going to cage him. And I wasn’t going to let his heart be my cage either.

  I was going to do exactly what I used to do. What Dancer was doing.

  Live now.

  As if there was no tomorrow.

  That didn’t necessarily mean it was going to be easy. But I was damned well going to try.

  He had on faded jeans and a white tee with the words, HOLY SHIFT! LOOK AT THE ASYMPTOTE ON THAT MOTHER FUNCTION! emblazoned on the front. “Does this mean you’re going to take me for a ride on that badass bike of yours, too?” He flashed me that one-of-a-kind Dancer grin that always lit up his face, holding nothing back, aqua eyes brilliant, full of life.

  I nodded. Then I leaned in and kissed him. Not anything like I’d once kissed Ryodan. I’d done that to mess with him, and it had worked even though he tried to pretend it hadn’t. It’d messed with me, too.

  I kissed Dancer with some part of myself I didn’t even understand. The me that kissed Ryodan, I got. She was hard, powerful, had an ancient soul and a fierce heart. The me that kissed Dancer was young, innocent, and although there was a massive door between the world and her soft heart, there was a path that could be walked to it, with a key hanging by the door, engraved with a D for Dani and Dancer. Sometimes I really did feel like I had two different peopl
e inside me, even though I knew I didn’t. One version of me was drawn to Dancer and another was a moth, obsessed with Ryodan’s flame. They evoked completely different qualities in me.

  I kissed Dancer soft and slow, butterfly wings against his mouth, waiting to see what he did, how it was going to go between us.

  He slipped his hands into my damp hair and said against my mouth, “God, I love it when you wear your hair down, Mega. It’s like you, full of fire and larger than life.”

  We just kind of stood there, kissing slow and talking a little, and he told me he used to think he might never get to kiss me and he sure never thought I’d kiss him like this. And I told him I always thought he had the most incredible eyes, to which he replied he has a lot of incredible parts and I was welcome to check them out anytime I wanted.

  His arms slid around me and I shivered because no one ever put their arms around me and held me close like he was doing. Like I really meant something to him and he never wanted to stop touching me. Like he couldn’t believe he was so lucky to get to hold me and I was the biggest prize he ever could have won in his whole life.

  He backed off with the kiss and we just kind of breathed into each other while he gave me time to settle into the feel of his body, arms warm and strong, close but not holding tight. It was hard for me to make myself stay put. I never let anybody touch me. Too personal. Too much risk involved.

  So it took maybe ten minutes of just hugging and being close to really let myself go fluid like I do when I meditate. It was the hardest kind of meditation I’ve ever done because there was another person in it with me. I felt like I was made of all exposed edges, and I kept craving my walls and personal space back.

  But I wanted this, too, and had started to think it was possible, if I never let anyone touch me, I might never be able to. That it would get easier and easier to keep everyone at arm’s length and harder and harder to let anyone in. I think we get a window for intimacy. And it can close. I’d be Jada forever, and if Jada had sex, it would be a one-night stand, and the color of the rainbow I’d never get to know was love.