Bloodfever

His voice preceded him. “Whoever did it is gone, Ms. Lane.” He stepped into view and I smothered a sigh of relief. The only thing I hate worse than the dark is being alone in it. I didn’t used to be that way, but I am now and it seems to be getting worse. “The guards have been dead for hours,” he told me. “The security system is disarmed and the house is wide open. Come.”

We moved directly for the front entrance, not bothering with stealth. We passed four more bodies on the way. The front doors were open, and beyond them I could see an opulent round grand foyer with a dual staircase that unfurled gracefully up each side and met in a landing suspended beneath a domed skylight hung with a glittering chandelier. I stared straight ahead. The marble floor had once been polished pearl. It was now splashed with crimson, strewn with bodies, some of them women. The housekeeping staff had not been spared.

“Do you sense the amulet, Ms. Lane? Are you picking up anything?”

I closed my eyes to shut out the carnage, and stretched my sidhe-seer senses, but carefully, very carefully. I no longer thought of my ability to sense OOPs as a benign talent. Last night, after finishing yet another book on the paranormal—ESP: Fact or Fiction?—I’d been unable to sleep so I’d lain there thinking about what I was, what it meant, wondering where the ability came from, why some people had it and others didn’t. Wondering what was different about me, what had been different about Alina. The authors contended that those with extrasensory abilities utilized parts of their brains that were dormant in other people.

Wondering if that was true, and bored out of my gourd—late-night TV is lousy in any country—I’d fingered my spear and gone poking around in my own skull.

It hadn’t been hard to find the part of me that was different, and now that I knew it was there, I couldn’t believe I’d been unaware of it for twenty-two years. There was a place in my head that felt as old as the earth, as ancient as time, always wakeful, ever watching. When I focused on it, it pulsed hotly, like embers in my brain. Curious, I’d played with it a little. I could fan it into a fire, make it expand outward, consume my skull, and pass beyond it. Like the element it resembled, it knew no morality, didn’t understand the word. Earth, fire, wind, and water are what they are. Power. At best, impartial. At worst, destructive. I shaped it. I controlled it. Or didn’t.

Fire isn’t good or bad. It just burns.

Now I skimmed it, a stone skipping the surface of a placid sea; a deep, dark sea I intended to keep placid. There would be no stirring of still waters on my watch.

I opened my eyes. “If it’s here, I can’t feel it.”

“Could it be somewhere in the house and you just aren’t close enough?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know, Barrons,” I said unhappily. “It’s a big estate. How many rooms are there? How thick are the walls?”

“One hundred and nine, and very.” A muscle worked in his jaw. “I need to know if it’s still here, Ms. Lane.”

“What are the odds of that?”

“Stranger things have happened. Perhaps the massacre was the result of a foiled robbery attempt.”

It certainly looked like an expression of rage. Incensed, inhuman fury.

I told him the truth, although I knew it would seal my fate and the last thing in the world I wanted to do was pass through those doors. “I couldn’t sense Mallucé’s stone until I was in the same room with it. I didn’t pick up on the spear until I was above it, and I only sensed the amulet once I was inside the bomb shelter door.” I closed my eyes.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Lane, but—”

“—I know, you need me to walk the house,” I finished for him. I opened my eyes and notched my chin higher. If there was the slightest chance the amulet could still be in there, we had to look.

And I’d thought the graveyard was bad. At least those bodies had been bloodless, embalmed, and tidily interred.

Barrons made the rooms more bearable for me as we went, by going ahead, entering them first, draping the bodies with sheets or blankets, and when none were available, stowing them behind furniture. Only after he’d “secured” a room, did he exit it and send me in alone, the better to focus on my search, he said.

While I appreciated his efforts, I’d already seen too much and frankly, it was hard not to glance behind a sofa or a chair, at the bodies he hadn’t covered. They exerted the same gruesome hold over me as the husks left by the Shades, as if some wholly irrational part of me thought by staring long and hard enough, immersing myself in the horror of it, I might learn something that would help me avoid the same fate.