Shadowfever

“Thought about food, did you now, lass?” Amusement leavened the tubular tones, made it slightly more bearable. He stood up but made no move toward me. “You’ll find you do that a lot here.”

I thought about turning the icing to ice. It was that simple. When I stepped forward, it shattered from my skin. “Does this mean if I think of a warm, tropical beach—”

“No. The fabric of this place is what it is. You can make it worse, but you can never make it better. You can only destroy, not create. That was a bit of added nastiness on the queen’s part. I suspect it’s not icing on you but flakes of frost creamed with the innards of a thing you’d rather not look at too closely.”

I glanced at the sepulchre. I couldn’t help it. It hulked, dark and silent, the boogeyman of twenty years of bad dreams. I’d been trying to ignore it but couldn’t. It gnawed at my awareness.

I would stand beside it.

I would open it, look inside, and scream.

Right. Not in a hurry to do that.

I looked back at Christian. What was he doing here? Whatever had brought me to this place had consumed all my nightly hours for most of my life. I was entitled to a few minutes of my own before whatever was fated happened.

If they were indeed my own.

It didn’t escape me that I’d just found exactly what I needed. How lucky to find the fifth of the five Druids necessary to perform the ritual right here, next to whatever it was I’d been led to!

Too bad I didn’t believe in luck anymore.

I felt bitterly manipulated. But by whom and why?

“What happened to you?” I asked.

“Och, what happened to me?” Laughter screeched like metal spikes across chalkboard bells. “That would be you, lass. You happened to me. You fed me Unseelie.”

I was appalled. This was what feeding him the flesh of dark Fae had done to him? Whatever transformation Christian had begun back on that world where we’d dried our clothes by the loch had continued at breakneck speed.

He looked half human, half Fae, and in this place of shadows and ice, he was leaning toward the Unseelie, not their light brethren. With a few finishing touches, he’d look just like one of the princes. I bit my lip. What could I say? I’m sorry? Does it hurt? Are you turning into a monster inside, too? Maybe he’d look better once he was out in the real world, where there were other colors besides black, white, and blue.

He gave me a darker version of that killer smile, white teeth flashing against cobalt lips in a white-marble face. “Och, your heart weeps for me. I see it in your eyes,” he mocked. The smile faded, but the hostility in his gaze grew. “It should. I’m beginning to look like one of them, aren’t I? No handy mirrors around here. Don’t know what my face looks like and doubt I want to.”

“Eating Unseelie did this to you? I don’t understand. I’ve eaten Unseelie. So did Mallucé and Darroc, Fiona and O’Bannion. Then there’s Jayne and his men. Nothing like this happened to me or any of them.”

“I suspect it began happening on Halloween. I wasn’t runed well enough.” The smile morphed from killer to murderous. “I blame your Barrons for that. We’ll be seeing who’s the finer Druid now. We’ll be having words when we meet again.”

From the expression on that white chiseled face, I doubted they would be words. “Was Jericho the one who tattooed you?”

He raised a brow. “So, it’s ‘Jericho,’ is it? No, my uncles Dageus and Cian did the work, but he should have checked me when I was finished, and he didn’t. He let me go into the ritual unprotected.”

“And just how pissy would your uncles have gotten if he’d tried?” It was instinct to defend him.

“He still should have. He knew more about protection runes than we did. His knowledge is older than ours, which is bloody inconceivable to me.”

“What happened that night in the stones, Christian?” Neither he nor Barrons had ever told me.

He rubbed his face with a hand, skin rasping over blue-black stubble. “I suppose it doesn’t matter who knows now. I thought to hide my shame, but it looks as if I’ve ended up wearing it.”

He began to walk a slow circle around the black coffin, ice crunching beneath his boots. It was a well-worn path. He’d been here awhile.

I tried to focus on him, but my gaze kept sliding unwillingly to the tomb. The ice was thick, but if I stared, I could see a shape through the frosted sides. The lid was thinner than the rest of the coffin.

Was that the blurred outline of a face through the smoky ice?