Bloodfever

Up until now, Barrons had been my only source of information about what I was, and what was going on around me. But I’d just learned there was another source out there, and it was an organized one. There were other sidhe-seers battling and killing the Fae; spunky fourteen-year-olds, with superhero speed, no less.

Up until now, without even knowing her name, I’d discounted Rowena as a cantankerous old woman who probably knew a few others like us and was old enough to recall a bit of sidhe-lore. I’d never dreamed she might be plugged into a community of sidhe-seers, an active network with a council and rules, and mothers who taught their children from birth how to cope with what they were. The ancient enclave Barrons had told me about in the graveyard still existed today!

I was angry that she hadn’t invited me into that community the night we’d met, the night I’d seen my first Fae and nearly betrayed myself—would have, in fact, if she’d not intervened.

But no, far from taking me under her wing when I’d so desperately needed help, and teaching me how to survive, Rowena had chased me off and told me to go die somewhere else.

And that’s exactly what I would have done—died—if I’d not crossed paths with Jericho Barrons.

Unguided, clueless about what I was, one or another of the Unseelie monsters I would have refused to believe was real would have killed me. Perhaps a Shade would have reduced me to a papery husk the next time I’d unwittingly wandered into the abandoned neighborhood. Perhaps the Gray Man would have made shorter work of my beauty than awful hair, bad clothes, and rapidly shifting priorities were managing to do quite nicely. Perhaps the Many-Mouthed Thing would have turned his many mouths on me, or perhaps I’d have been drawn to the attention of the Lord Master and ended up his personal OOP detector, not Barrons’, and he’d have used and killed me just like Alina.

Whatever else Barrons may be—he was the one who’d saved me. He’d opened my eyes and turned me into a weapon. Not Rowena and her merry band of sidhe-seers. I’d take tough love any day over no love at all.

There are no male sidhe-seers, Dani had said. Never have been.

Well, I had news for her: Barrons could see them, he’d taught me about them, and we’d fought them side by side, and that was more than Rowena or anyone else had ever done for me.

I had no doubt she’d send for me soon. She’d had sidhe-seers out hunting for me. She knew I had one of the Seelie Hallows. That day in the museum when V’lane had forced his deadly sexuality on me, she’d seen me threaten him with the spear. When I’d finally escaped, she’d caught up with me and tried to get me to go somewhere with her. But it had been too little, too late. She’d abandoned me for the second time that day in the museum, letting me strip in public and back up like a mindless mare in heat to a death-by-sex Fae and not lifting a finger to help me. When I’d demanded to know why she hadn’t tried to do something—anything—she’d said coldly, One betrayed is one dead. Two betrayed is two dead…we cannot take risks that might betray more of us, especially not me.

She was important, this old woman. And she had information about me, about who I was. And when she sent someone for me, I would go.

But only with guarded thoughts and cautious tread.

At our third encounter, things were going to be very different: She was going to have to prove herself to me.

It was dark by the time I got back to the bookstore. I made my way down the side alley and around to the back entrance, a flashlight clutched in each hand. I noticed Barrons had boarded up the broken window in the garage.

I was not developing a full-blown obsession with the Shades. I was merely checking to make sure the status quo was still…well, quo. One of my enemies had set up a base camp right outside my back door. The least any good soldier would do was scout it on a regular basis to make sure there were no new developments.

There were no new developments. The floodlights were on, the windows were closed. I dragged the back of my hand across my brow with a sigh of relief. Ever since the Shades had gotten into the store, I’d not been able to get them off my mind, especially the big, aggressive one that had menaced me in Barrons’ parlor, and was currently moving restlessly back and forth at the edge of the darkness.

I blinked.

It was shaping a tendril of itself into something that looked suspiciously like a fist with a single upright human finger—you know which one. Surely it wasn’t learning from me, was it? I refused to entertain the thought. There was no room for it in my head; my brain was full. It had been a trick of the shadows, nothing more.

I turned for the stairs and was on the top step, my hand on the doorknob, when I felt its presence behind me.

Dark.

Empty.

Vast as the night.

I turned, as inexorably drawn as if a black hole had opened at my back and I was being sucked into its event horizon.

The specter stood motionless, watching me in silence, still as death. The inky folds of its voluminous, cowled robe rustled in the breeze.

I narrowed my eyes. There was no breeze. Not the merest hint of wind stirred the back alley. Not a hair on my head moved. I licked my finger and held it up. The air was flat, stagnant.

Yet the specter’s robe rippled, buffeted by a draft that wasn’t there.

Great. If I’d been looking for proof that the ghoulish vision haunting me was a delusion, I’d just gotten it. I’d obviously Photoshopped this thing in from stills stored in my memory compiled from movies, childhood ghost stories, and books. In my mind’s media banks its robes always rustled, I never saw its face, and it always carried a sharply curved, lethal blade mounted on a tall pole of ebony wood like the one it was toting now. It was perfect. Too perfect.

Why was I doing this to myself?

“I don’t get it,” I said. Of course, the specter said nothing. It never did and never would. Because Death wasn’t standing in this alley with me, waiting, with patience born of perpetuity, for the right moment to punch my ticket, call in my chip. The Eternal Footman wasn’t holding out my coat, a subtle yet irrefutable signal that the dance, for me, was over, the ball done, the night through.

And if I wanted further evidence that this clichéd spirit was just that—an apparition, a figment of an overwrought imagination—I had only to remind myself that Barrons, Jayne, and Derek O’Bannion hadn’t seen it, when they’d been in its vicinity. Jayne and O’Bannion weren’t necessarily conclusive evidence, but Barrons was. Good grief, the man could smell a kiss on me. He didn’t miss anything.