Bloodfever

“Maybe you need to get a grip on your libido, Barrons!”

“Fuck you, Ms. Lane!”

“You just try. I’ll kick the shit out of you!”

“You think you could?”

“Bring it on.”

He grabbed a fistful of my T-shirt, and dragged me up against him until our noses touched. “I’ll bring it on, Ms. Lane. But remember you asked for it. So don’t even think about trying to tap out on the mat and quit the fight.”

“You hear anybody crying ‘Uncle’ here, Barrons? I don’t.”

“Fine.”

“Fine.”

He swapped the fistful of my shirt for one in my hair, and ground his mouth against mine.

I exploded.

I shoved at him, and clawed him closer. He shoved me back, and yanked me tighter to his body. I pulled his hair. He pulled mine. He didn’t fight fair. Actually, he fought exactly fair. He didn’t extend courtesies, not a single one.

I bit his lip. He tripped me and pushed me down to the stone floor of the cavern. I punched him. He straddled me.

I ripped his shirt down the front, left it hanging in tatters from his shoulders.

“I liked that shirt,” he snarled. He rose over me, a dark demon, glistening in the torchlight, dripping sweat and blood, his torso covered with tattoos that disappeared beneath his waistband.

He grabbed the hem of my shirt, tore it straight up to my neck, and inhaled sharply.

I punched him. If he punched me back, I was past feeling it. His mouth was on mine again, the hot silk of his tongue, the sharp, deliberate abrasion of his teeth, the exchange of breath and the small, desperate sounds of need. A tsunami of lust—no doubt amplified by the Fae in my blood—crashed into me, knocking me from my feet, and dragging me out to a dangerous sea. There was no lifeboat here in these deep, killing waters, not even a lighthouse, marking the way back to shore with its soft amber promise. There was only the storm of Barrons and the one I seemed to be, and if there were dark shapes moving in the waters beneath my feet that I should probably take a good hard look at and possibly reconsider trying to swim here, I didn’t care.

He fitted himself to me and began a driving, erotic, rhythmic bump and grind. A lonely boy. A lone man. Alone in a desert beneath a blood-red moon. War everywhere. Always war. A breath-stealing sirocco sweeping down over treacherously sifting sands. A cave in a cliff wall. Sanctuary? No sanctuary left anywhere. Barrons’ tongue was inside my mouth, and somehow I was inside Jericho Barrons. The images were his.

We both heard the noise at the same time and exploded away from each other as quickly as we’d come together, scrambling to opposite sides of the small cavern.

Panting, I stared at him. He was breathing hard, his dark eyes narrowed to slits.

Is it still spelled? I mouthed, meaning the entrance to the cave.

To contain only. Not to expel.

Well, spell it again!

Isn’t that easy.

He melted into the shadows behind a stalagmite.

I focused my attention on the door, tried to sense what was coming, and stiffened.

Fae…but not Fae. Followed by at least ten Unseelie.

I stared past Mallucé’s body at the entrance, tensed to spring. A glint of gold and silver caught my eye in the flickering torchlight.

The amulet! How could I have forgotten? It was pooled in a pile of chain, between his body and the door. It must have fallen off when Barrons had beheaded him.

The footsteps drew nearer.

I sprang for the Hallow.

A booted foot came down on it just as I reached it.

I stared up the leg and looked straight into the eyes of my sister’s murderer.

EIGHTEEN

T he Lord Master’s gaze flicked away from me, passed with cursory interest over Mallucé. “I’d come to finish him myself,” he said. “He’d become a liability. You saved me the trouble. How did you do it?” He studied me, the blood splattered on my face, clothing, and hands, the glaring lack of injuries. A slow smile spread over his exotic, beautiful face. “You ate Unseelie, didn’t you?”

I said nothing. I guess something in my eyes did, though. Framed behind him in the doorway were a dozen or so Unseelie of a caste I’d not seen before, wearing black uniforms with red insignia, clearly his personal guard.

He laughed. “What a surprise you are. Lovely like your sister, but Alina would never have done it.”

My sister’s name on her murderer’s lips incensed me. “Don’t even say her name. Nothing about her is yours. Nothing about her ever was.” If Barrons took this fight from me, I’d kill him.

But I wasn’t going to get this fight. Not here. Not tonight.

The Lord Master’s voice deepened, hardened, rolled with the thunder of a legion of voices. It did something inside my head; echoed, whispered, rearranged things. “Hand me the amulet. Now.”

I picked it up and handed it to him, wondering even as I did it what I was doing, why I was obeying. It glowed a faint blue-black invitation the moment I touched it. His eyes widened fractionally. He took it from me swiftly.

“Another surprise,” he murmured.

That’s right, you bastard, I am epic, so watch out, I wanted to say, but my vocal cords weren’t under my control any more than anything else was at the moment.

“Stand,” he commanded. The amulet blazed in his hand, eclipsing the feeble light I’d managed to make and been so proud of.

I stood as jerkily as a puppet on strings, mind resisting, flesh obeying. I swayed before the red-robed Lord Master, stared into his too-beautiful-to-be-human face, and waited for him to rule me. Had he done this to my sister? Had she been not duped by him, but stripped of choice like I was now?

“Come.” He turned and, automaton-like, I began to follow.

Barrons exploded from the shadows and hit me like a missile, taking me to the ground beneath him.

The Lord Master turned in a whirl of robes.

“She stays with me,” said Barrons. His voice, too, rolled with the thunder of a multitude, reverberating inside my skull. Of course I was staying with him. What had I been thinking?

What the Lord Master did next was so incomprehensible to me that I was still blinking blankly at the opening, several minutes after he was gone.

He took a long look at my enigmatic mentor, jerked his head at his guard—and left.

NINETEEN

W e raced back to Dublin in the sleek, stolen stealth of Rocky O’Bannion’s black Maybach.