Dreamfever
Page 61As Dani had feared, Unseelie were the new vamps.
My generation has an incurable, bottomless obsession with the undead. The heavily romanticized version, of course: the defanged fangbanger, not the real deal, which is really dead and really kills you.
As I watched, the woman bit down hard and began chewing with an expression of near-religious ecstasy.
These humans were eating Unseelie—not to fight them off and reclaim our world, but for the rush of it.
Unseelie flesh—the new drug.
“They’re trading sex for the high,” I said flatly.
“Looks like,” Dani said. “Let’s just hope those skanks can’t get knocked up.”
The thought was too awful to contemplate.
“So?” Dani said.
Goth-girl looked her up and down. “Not a bad idea. Gangly and awkward might just intrigue. They like experimenting.”
I didn’t have to look at Dani to know her hand had gone inside her long coat to her sword. “Easy, Dani,” I said softly. “You’re not.”
But the girl was already going on, vapidly intense. “You two must be new. They play it once a night, and while it’s playing you can try to persuade one of them to choose you. Otherwise, you aren’t allowed to approach them. Competition’s fierce. It can take weeks to get one to notice you.”
“Choose you for what?” I encouraged.
“Where’ve you been all this time? To make you immortal like them. If you eat enough sanctified flesh, you become immortal, too. Then you get to go to Faery with them!”
I narrowed my eyes. Did eating Unseelie really change you? Or were the dark Fae capitalizing on a lie? I was inclined to believe the latter. Mallucé had eaten it constantly, long-term, and had never become immortal. “How much is enough?” I fished.
“This is worse than an IFP,” Dani muttered. “I feel like I’m stuck in an IFCF.”
I raised a brow.
“Interdimensional Fairy Cluster Fuck,” she said sourly. “Don’t they see what’s happening? Don’t they know the Unseelie are destroying our world? Don’t they see we’re gonna die out if we don’t stop them?”
Apparently they didn’t care. I needed a drink. Badly. Pushing through the crowd, I headed for the bar.
A heavily industrialized version of Trent Reznor’s “Closer” was playing by the time I grabbed a bar stool and barked at the bartender’s back that I needed a shot of top-shelf whiskey and make it fast.
I want to feel you from the inside …
Due to recent experience, I had a far greater understanding of the darker half of the Fae race than I’d ever wanted. I knew the emptiness that drove them. I’d been food for their bottomless hunger.
“Maybe two billion of us needed to die,” I muttered. I was in a foul mood.
“I’ll take one, too.” Dani hoisted herself onto a stool beside me.
“Nice try.”
“You ever gonna let me grow up? Or you gonna be like everybody else?”
I looked at her, then amended my original order to two shots of Macallan, one-hundred-proof. Daddy had done the same thing to me at her age. Tough love.
Shot glasses clinked on the polished chrome bar top, accompanied by a deep “Hey, beautiful girl.”
My gaze jerked to the bartender and I did a double take. It was the dreamy-eyed boy that I’d first met while scouring a museum for OOPs and had later been surprised to find working with Christian at Trinity College’s ALD, the Ancient Languages Department. My first impulse was pleasure that he’d survived. It was squelched by suspicion. Coincidences make me nervous.