Shadowfever

“The fuck I jump. In your dreams. Laugh again, Fade, and you’ll be eating your balls for breakfast. Bitch,” Lor spat in my general direction. But he didn’t look at me, he looked at Barrons, and I think that’s what pushed me over the edge.

I glanced between the two guards. Fade stared straight ahead. Lor glared at Barrons. I stepped away from Barrons and walked directly in front of them. Their gazes never wavered. It was as if I didn’t exist. I had no doubt I could stand there and do a dance, naked, and they’d still stare at anything but me.

I grew up in the Deep South, in the heart of the Bible Belt, where there are still a few men who refuse to look at a woman that isn’t a relative. If a woman is with a man they need to speak with—whether it’s her daddy, boyfriend, or husband—they’ll look at the man the entire time. If the woman asks a question and they bother answering at all, they direct their reply to the man. They even turn to the side a little, as if catching a glimpse of her in their periphery might condemn them to eternal damnation. The first time it happened to me, I was fifteen, and dumbfounded. I kept asking question after question, trying to get old man Hatfield to look my way. I’d begun to feel invisible. Finally I’d moved to stand right in front of him. He’d stomped off in the middle of a sentence.

Daddy had tried to explain to me that the old man considered it a kind of respect he was paying. That it was a courtesy given to the man the woman belonged to. I hadn’t been able to get past the words “the man the woman belonged to.” It was a property thing, pure and simple, and apparently Lor—who, according to Barrons, didn’t even know what century it was—was still living in a time when women had been owned. I hadn’t forgotten his comment about Kasteo, who hadn’t spoken in more than a thousand years. How old were these men? When, how, where had they lived?

Barrons took my arm and turned me toward the staircase, but I shook him off and turned back to Lor. I was getting way too much bad press. I wasn’t a stone. I hadn’t been created by the Unseelie King. And I wasn’t a traitor.

One of those things I could have a satisfying fight about.

“Why am I a bitch?” I demanded. “Because you think I slept with Darroc?”

“Shut her up before I kill her,” Lor told Barrons.

“Don’t talk to him about me. Talk to me about me. Or do you think I’m not worthy of your regard because, when I believed Barrons was dead, I hooked up with the enemy to accomplish my goals? How terrible of me,” I mocked. “I guess I should have just laid down and died with a whimper. Would that have impressed you, Lor?”

“Get the bitch out of my face.”

“I guess taking up with Darroc makes me pretty … well”—I knew what word Barrons hated, and I was in the mood to try it out on Lor—“mercenary, doesn’t it? You can blame me for that if you want to. Or you can pull your head out of your ass and respect me for it.”

Lor turned his head and looked at me then, as if I’d begun to speak his language. Unlike Barrons, the word didn’t seem to bother him. In fact, it seemed he understood, even appreciated it. Something flickered in his cold eyes. I’d interested him.

“Some people wouldn’t see a traitor when they looked at me. Some people would see a survivor. Call me anything you like—I sleep fine at night. But you will look at me when you say it. Or I’ll get so far in your face you’ll be seeing me with your eyes closed. You’ll be seeing me in your nightmares. I’ll scorch myself on the backs of your eyelids. Get off my back and stay off it. I’m not the woman I used to be. If you want a war with me, you’ll get one. Just try me. Give me an excuse to go play in that dark place inside my head.”

“Dark place?” Barrons murmured.

“As if you don’t have one,” I snapped. “Your cave makes mine look like a white beach on a sunny day.” Shouldering past them, I pushed up the stairs. I thought I heard a rumble of laughter behind me and glanced over my shoulder. Three men stared at me with the dead, emotionless gazes of executioners.

But, hey—they were all looking.

Behind a chrome balustrade, the upper floor stretched: acres of smooth dark-glass walls without doors or handles.

I had no idea how many rooms were up here. From the size of the downstairs, there could be fifty or more.

We walked along the glass walls until some tiny detail I couldn’t discern signified an entrance. Barrons pressed his palm to a dark-glass panel, which slid to the side, then he pushed me into the room. He didn’t step in with me but continued moving down the hall to some other destination.

The panel slid closed behind me, leaving me alone with Ryodan in the room that was the guts of Chester’s. It was made entirely of glass—walls, floor, and ceiling. I could see out, but no one could see in.

The perimeter of the ceiling was lined with dozens of small LED screens fed by cameras that panned every room in the club, as if you couldn’t see enough of what was going on merely by looking down past your feet. I stayed where I was. Every step you take on a glass floor feels like a leap of faith when the only solid floor you can see is forty feet below.

“Mac,” said Ryodan.

He stood behind a desk, couched in shadow, a big man, dark in a white shirt. The only light in the room came from the monitors above our heads. I wanted to launch myself across the room and attack him, claw his eyes out, bite him, punch him, stab him with my spear. I was astonished by the depth of hostility I felt.

He’d made me kill Barrons.

High on that cliff, the two of us had beaten, cut, and stabbed the man who’d been keeping me alive almost since the day I arrived in Dublin. And I’d wondered for days that had felt like years if Ryodan had wanted Barrons dead.

“I thought you tricked me into killing him. I thought you’d betrayed him.”

“I kept telling you to leave. You didn’t. You were never supposed to see what he was.”

“You mean what you all are,” I corrected. “All nine of you.”

“Careful, Mac. Some things don’t get talked about. Ever.”

I reached for my spear. He could have told me the truth on the cliff, but, like Barrons, he’d let me suffer. The more I thought about how both of them had withheld a truth from me that would have spared me so much agony, the angrier I got. “I was just making sure that when I stab and kill you, you’ll come back so I can do it again.”