Shadowfever

“He betrayed me,” I lie.

“How?”

“It’s none of your business. I had my reasons.” I watch him watch me. He wonders if the rape of the Unseelie Princes and my time in the Hall of All Days has unhinged me. He wonders if I’m unbalanced enough to have gone crazy and actually killed Barrons for pissing me off. When he glances down at the runes again, I know he thinks I have enough juice to have pulled it off.

“Step out of the circle. I have your parents and will kill them if you don’t obey me.”

“I don’t care.” I scoff.

He stares. He heard the truth in my words.

I don’t care. An essential part of me is dead. I don’t mourn it. This is no longer my world. What happens here doesn’t matter. In this reality, I’m already on borrowed time. I will rebuild a new one or die trying.

“I’m free, Darroc. I’m really, truly free.” I shrug my shoulders, toss my head, and laugh.

He sucks in a sharp breath when I say his name and laugh, and I know that I’ve reminded him of my sister. Did she say those words to him once? Does he hear joy in my laughter, as he once heard in hers?

He stalks a tight circle around me, eyes narrowed. “What changed? In the days since I abducted your parents and today, what happened to you?”

“What happened to me started happening a long time ago. You should have kept Alina alive. I hated you for that.”

“And now?”

I look him up and down. “Now is different. Things are different. We are different.”

His eyes search mine, left to right and back again, rapidly. “What are you saying?”

“I see no reason we cannot be … friends.”

He tries the word. “Friends?”

I nod.

He contemplates the possibility that I am sincere. A human would never entertain the notion. Fae are different. No matter how much time they spend among us, they just can’t nail the subtleties of human emotion. It’s that difference I’m counting on. When I left Barrons, all I wanted was to lay in wait for Darroc, use my runes and my newfound dark glassy friend to kill him the moment he appeared.

I exorcised it swiftly.

This ex-Fae turned human knows more about both the Seelie and Unseelie courts, and the Book that I am determined to possess, than anyone. When he has told me everything he knows, I’ll relish killing him. I’d considered allying myself with V’lane—and when I’m done taking everything I need from Darroc, I still may. After all, I’ll need the fourth stone. But V’lane doesn’t seem to have any real knowledge about the Book, aside from a few old legends.

It’s a better bet that the Unseelie know more about the Dark Book than the Seelie Queen’s right hand. Maybe even where to find the prophecy. Like Barrons, Darroc has actually seen pages of the arcane tome. I was forced to concede that hunting the Sinsar Dubh was an exercise in futility until I discovered how to control it. But Darroc has never stopped his search. Why? What does he know that I don’t?

The sooner I pry his secrets from him, the sooner I learn to contain and use the Sinsar Dubh, the sooner I can stop living in this agonizing reality that I will have no hesitation about destroying to replace with my world. The right one. Where everything ends happily ever after.

“Friends work toward common goals,” he says.

“Like hunting books,” I agree.

“Friends trust each other. They don’t barricade each other out.” He looks at my feet.

The runes came from within me. I am my circle. He doesn’t know this. I kick them aside. I wonder if he has forgotten my spear. As heavily laced with Unseelie as he is, a single prick would sentence him to the same slow, gruesome death that Mallucé suffered.

When I step out, he slowly looks me up and down.

I see the thoughts that flash through his eyes as they travel over my body: kill her/fuck her/assault and bind her/explore her uses? It takes a lot to make a man kill a beautiful woman he has not yet slept with. Especially if he enjoyed her sister.

“Friends don’t try to coerce each other,” I say with a pointed look at the amulet.

He inclines his head and slips it back inside his shirt.

I offer my hand with a smile. Barrons taught me well. Keep your friends close …

Darroc takes it, leans down to place a light kiss upon my lips. The tension between us is a palpable thing. One sudden move from either of us and we’ll be all over each other, trying to kill each other, and we know it. He keeps his body pliant. I infuse my limbs with languor. We are two scorpions with coiled tails, trying to mate. It is no more than I deserve, the punishment of letting him touch me like this. I sentenced Barrons to death.

I part my lips beneath his, but demurely, teeth standing guard. I exhale a soft whisper of a breath into his mouth. He likes it.

… and your enemies closer.

Behind us, the Unseelie Princes begin to chime softly like dark crystal. I remember that sound. I know what it precedes. I tighten my hand on his. “Never them. Never again.”

Darroc turns to them and barks a harsh command in a language that hurts my ears.

They vanish.

The moment I no longer know where they are, whether they might be closing in on me, I reach for my spear. It is gone, too.

The Unseelie Princes cannot sift within the Silvers with any predictability. Darroc tells me it’s a crapshoot every time they try. Cruce’s curse again, screwing things up.

I tell him the stones are no better, that whatever dimension I’m in tries to expel them once uncovered, in an effort to return the rune-covered blue-black stones to the cliffs of the icy Unseelie prison from whence they were chiseled.

I’m surprised he doesn’t know this and tell him so.

“You do not understand what life is like at the Seelie court, MacKayla. Those with true knowledge, true memories of our past, guard it zealously. There are as many versions of the Old Days and conflicting tales of our origins as there are dimensions to choose from within the hall. The only Unseelie we ever saw were those we battled the day the king and queen fought and the king slew our queen. Since then, we have drunk from the cauldron countless times.”

He moves along the cliff’s edge with unnatural fluidity and grace. Fae move like sleek, kingly predators, born of the sure knowledge that they can never die—or at least very rarely and only under special circumstances. He hasn’t lost that arrogance, or perhaps he’s reclaimed it, from all the Unseelie he’s been eating. He’s not wearing the crimson robes that once terrified me. Tall, gracefully muscled, he’s dressed like an outdoorsman in a Versace ad, with a long fall of moon-silvered hair secured at his nape. He’s undeniably sexy. In his power and confidence, he reminds me of Barrons.