Shadowfever

“No rooms in the White Mansion ever get completely dark, not even where night falls. I erred the first time I opened a Silver. I hung it in a place that did. A creature I believed securely imprisoned—one I did not ever intend to free from the Unseelie prison—escaped.”

“What creature?” I demand. This man who looks like a Versace ad, who walks and talks like a human, isn’t. He’s worse than someone possessed by a Gripper—one of those dainty, beautiful Unseelie that can slip inside a person’s skin and take over. He is one hundred percent Fae in a body that should never have been his. He’s a cold-blooded killer, responsible for butchering billions of humans, hundreds of thousands of them in Dublin on a single night, without a second thought. If there was a creature in the icy Unseelie hell that he never intended to set loose, I want to know why, exactly what it is, and how to kill it. If it worries him, it terrifies me.

“Watch the floors, MacKayla.”

I look at him. He’s not going to answer me. Pressing would only make me appear weak.

We’ve resumed the search together. He’s unwilling to leave me on my own. I’m in no hurry to be on my own again. I’m still raw from what happened to me in the black wing. I’d gotten cemented in memories, and if Darroc hadn’t busted me out, I might never have escaped.

Chasing Barrons, I might not have wanted to escape. I remember the bones in the Hall of All Days. I think of the beach in Faery with Alina. If I’d chosen to stay with her then, would I have eventually died from eating food with no substance, drinking water that was no more real than my sister?

Damn Faery with its killing illusions!

I push memories of sex with the king, with Barrons, away. I distract myself with hatred for the man who killed my sister.

Was Alina happy? It’s on the tip of my tongue again.

“Very,” he fires back at me, and I realize I’ve not only said it aloud but it seems he’s just been waiting for me to ask.

I’m appalled that I’ve been so weak. Offering my enemy the opportunity to lie to me! “Bullshit!”

“You are impossible.” Disdain etches his handsome face. “She was nothing like you. She was open. Her heart was not sealed away behind walls.”

“Look what that got her. Dead.”

I stalk off ahead, down a brilliant yellow corridor. The windows open on exactly the kind of summer day Alina and I always loved. I can’t get away from her ghost! I quicken my pace.

We hurry down a hall of mint, then one of indigo with French doors that open onto a turbulent stormy night, before turning onto a path of pale pink, and finally there it is—a towering arched entrance into a white marble hall. Beyond the elegant entrance, windows open onto a dazzling winter day, ice-encased trees sparkling like diamonds in the sun.

Peace settles over me. I’ve been here in my dreams. I loved this wing.

Once, long ago on her world, a sunny day in spring was her favorite, but now a sunny day in winter delights her more. It is the perfect metaphor for their love.

Sunshine on ice.

She warms his frost. He cools her fever.

“You said Alina called you,” Darroc says behind me. “You said she was crying on the phone, that she was hiding from me. Did she make that phone call the day she died?”

He startles me from my reverie and, without thinking, I nod.

“What exactly did she say?”

I toss him a look over my shoulder that says, You really think I’m going to tell you that? If anyone is going to be answering questions about her, it’s going to be him answering to me. I step into the white marble corridor.

He follows me. “All you accomplish by persisting in your inane and erroneous belief that I killed Alina is guaranteeing that you will never find her true murderer. Humans have an animal of which you remind me. The ostrich.”

“My head is not buried in the sand.”

“No, it’s up your ass,” he snaps.

I whirl on him.

We glare at each other, but his words give me pause. Am I being an ostrich? Do I deny myself the opportunity to avenge my sister, because I’m stuck in a rut I refuse to get out of? Will I let my sister’s real murderer get away, because I can’t open my mind to see beyond my preconceptions? Barrons warned me from the beginning to not so blithely assume Darroc was definitely her killer.

A muscle works in my jaw. Each time I remember something about Barrons, I hate Darroc more for taking him from me. But I remind myself why I’m here and why I haven’t already killed him.

To accomplish my goal, there are certain answers I need.

I eye him speculatively. There are others I just want.

And once I get the Book in my hands and change things, I’ll never have another chance to ask. He’ll be gone. I’ll have killed him. Here and now is my one shot.

“She said she was going to try to come home but she was afraid you wouldn’t let her leave the country,” I say stiffly. “She said I had to find the Sinsar Dubh. Then she sounded terrified and said you were coming.”

“Me? By name? She told you ‘Darroc’ was coming?”

“She didn’t have to. What she said earlier made it clear.”

“And what was that? What so thoroughly incriminated me?”

I still have her message memorized. I dream it sometimes, word for word. “She said, I thought he was helping me, but—God, I can’t believe I was so stupid! I thought I was in love with him and he’s one of them, Mac! He’s one of them! Who else could that have been? You keep telling me she loved you. Was there someone else she was involved with that she thought she—”

“No! There was only me. She would never have sought another. I gave her everything.”

“Then you understand why I believe you killed her.”

“I do not, and did not. There are holes larger than Hunters in your puny human logic!”

“Who else could it have been? Who else did she fear?”

He turns and paces to one of the windows, where he stands gazing out at the dazzling winter day. Ice-crusted trees sparkle like they’ve been diamond-dipped. Drifts of powdery snow shimmer in the sunlight. The scene seems lit from within, like the concubine herself.

But there is only darkness inside me. I feel it growing.

“You are certain that the day you had this conversation with her was the day she died?”

It wasn’t a conversation, but I don’t tell him that. “Although the Garda didn’t find her body for two days, they estimated her time of death at about four hours after she called me. The coroner in Ashford said it was possible she died as much as eight to ten hours after she made the call. She said it was difficult to estimate exact time of death due to the way her body had been savaged.” I refuse to say “chewed on.”