Shadowfever

The worst part about losing someone you love—besides the agony of never getting to see them again—are the things you never said. The unsaid stalks you, mocks you for thinking you had all the time in the world. None of us do.

Here and now, face-to-face with Barrons, my tongue wouldn’t move. I couldn’t form a single word. The unsaid was ash in my mouth, too dry to swallow, choking me.

But worse than that was the realization that I was being played, again. No matter how real this moment seemed, I knew it was nothing but more illusion.

The Sinsar Dubh still had me.

I’d never really left the street where it had killed Darroc.

I was still standing, or probably lying in a heap, in front of K’Vruck, being distracted with fantasy while the Book was doing whatever it liked to do to me.

This was no different than the night Barrons and I tried to corner it with the stones and it had made me believe I was crouched on the pavement reading it, when all the while it had been crouching at my shoulder, reading me.

I should fight it. I should dive deep into my lake and do what I did best—blunder ahead in a generally forward direction, no matter how bad things got. But as I stared at the perfect replica of him, I couldn’t dredge up enough energy to drive the mirage away. Not yet.

There were worse ways to be tortured than with a vision of Jericho Barrons naked.

I would seek my sidhe-seer center and shatter it in a minute. Or ten. I leaned back against the fireplace with a faint smile, thinking: Bring it on.

The Barrons illusion rose from his half lunge and stood in a ripple of muscle.

God, he was beautiful. I looked up and down. The Book had done an amazingly accurate job, right down to his more generous attributes.

But it had gotten his tattoos wrong. I knew every inch of that body. The last time I saw Jericho Barrons naked, he’d been covered with red and black protection tattoos, and later his arms had been sheathed in them from biceps to wrist. Now the only tattoos he had were on his abdomen.

“You screwed up,” I told the Book. “But nice try.”

The fake Barrons tensed, knees bending slightly, weight shifting forward, and for a moment I thought he was going to launch himself at me and attack.

“I screwed up?” the Barrons figment snarled. He began to stalk toward me. It was difficult to look at his face when there was so much bouncing around at eye level.

“Which word didn’t you understand?” I said sweetly.

“Stop staring at my dick,” he growled.

Oh, yes, it was definitely an illusion. “Barrons loved me staring at his dick,” I informed it. “He would have been happy if I’d stared at his dick all day long, composing odes to its perfection.”

In one fluid motion, he had me by my collar and was yanking me to my feet. “That was before you killed me, you fucking imbecile!”

I was unfazed. Standing toe-to-toe with him was a drug. I needed it. I craved it. I couldn’t end this charade for anything. “See, you admit you’re dead,” I parried smoothly. “And I’m not an imbecile. An imbecile would be fooled by you.”

“I am not dead.” He slammed me back against the wall, pinning me with his body.

I was so delighted at being touched by Barrons-esque hands, so thrilled to be staring into the illusion of his dark eyes, that I hardly even felt my head smack into the wall. This was far more realistic than my brief moments with the memory of him in the black wing of the White Mansion. “Are, too.”

“Am not.”

His mouth was so close. Who cared if it wasn’t really him? It had his lips. His parts. Was one fake kiss too much to ask? I wet my lips. “Prove it.”

“You expect me to prove I’m not dead?” he said disbelievingly.

“I don’t think it’s so much to ask. After all, I did stab you.”

He braced his palms against the wall on either side of my head. “A wiser woman would stop reminding me of that.”

I inhaled his scent, spicy, exotic, a cherished memory that made me feel alive. The electric current that always charged the air between us sizzled on my skin. He was naked and I was up against a wall, and even though I knew I was being played by the Book, I could barely focus on his words. It felt so real. Except for those missing tattoos. The Book knew how big his dick was but couldn’t get the tattoos right. A small oversight.

“I’m impressed,” I murmured. “I really am.”

“I don’t give a bloody fucking hell if you’re impressed, Ms. Lane. I care about one thing and one thing only. Do you know where the Sinsar Dubh is? Did you find it for that bloody fucking half-breed bastard?”

“Oh, that’s just rich.” I snorted with laughter. The Sinsar Dubh had created an illusion of a person, and that extension of the Sinsar Dubh was asking me where the Sinsar Dubh was. “Infinite-regress much?”

“Answer me or I’m going to rip your head off.”

Barrons would never do that. The Sinsar Dubh had just made another mistake. Barrons had vowed to keep me alive, and he’d stayed true to that vow until the very end. He’d died to save me. He would never hurt me and certainly wouldn’t kill me. “You don’t know a thing about him,” I sneered.

“I know everything about him.” He cursed. “About me.”

“Do not.”

“Do, too.”

“Bull!”

“Not!”

“Too,” I spat.

“Not!” he fired back, then exhaled explosively. “Bloody hell. Ms. Lane, you drive me bloody fucking crazy.”

“Right back at you, Barrons. And you can lose all the ‘bloodys’ and ‘fuckings’ anytime now. You’re overdoing it. The real Barrons never cursed that much.”

“I bloody fucking know exactly how many bloody fuckings Barrons would use. You don’t know him as well as you think you do.”

“Stop pretending to be him!” I shoved at his chest. “You’re not and you never will be!”

“Besides, that was before you killed me and decided to replace me with Darroc in less than a month! Grieve much, Ms. Lane?”

Oh, how dare he? Grief was all I was. Grief and revenge, walking. “For the record, you’ve been dead for three days. And I am so not doing this. Get out of here. Go. Away.” I knocked his hands away from my head and stormed past him. “I’m not defending my reasons for doing what I did to you, when you aren’t even really here. That’s too psychotic, even for me.”