Shadowfever

What they’d really been was his way of keeping the world safe from the child.

I lie on the floor of the stone chamber, dying. I lose awareness again for a time, then am back.

I watch the child become the night version of Barrons’ beast. Black skin, black horns and fangs, red eyes. Talk about homicidally insane. He makes the beast Barrons was in the Silvers seem downright genial and calm.

He bays continuously while he changes, head whipping from side to side, spraying me with his spittle and my blood, staring at me with feral crimson eyes. He wants to sink his teeth into me, shake me, and crush every last drop of blood from my body. The mark Barrons placed on my skull doesn’t do a thing to defuse his bloodlust.

I am food and he can’t reach me.

He rattles the bars of the cage and he howls.

He morphs from four to ten feet tall.

This is what I heard beneath the garage. This is what I listened to while looking at Barrons across the roof of a car.

This child, caged down here, forever imprisoned.

And I understand, as my lifeblood seeps out, that this is why he was bringing the dead woman out of the Silver.

The child had to be fed.

He held this child, watched him die. I try to think about it, wrap my brain around it. The child has to be his son. If Barrons didn’t feed him, the child suffered. If he did feed him, he had to look at this monster. How long? How long had he been caretaker for this child? A thousand years? Ten? More?

I try to touch my neck, feel the extent of my wounds, but I can’t raise my arms. I’m weak, dreamy, and I don’t really care. I just want to close my eyes and sleep for a few minutes. Just a short nap, then I’ll wake up and get busy finding something in my lake to help me survive this. I wonder if there are runes that can heal torn-out throats. Maybe there’s some Unseelie in here somewhere.

I wonder if that’s my jugular gushing. If so, it’s too late, way too late for me now.

I can’t believe I’m going to die like this.

Barrons will come in and find me here.

Bled out on the floor of his bat cave.

I try to summon the will to search my lake, but I think I lost too much blood too fast. I can’t care, no matter how I try. The lake is curiously silent. Like it’s watching, waiting to see what happens next.

The roaring in the cage is so loud, I don’t hear Barrons roaring, too, until he’s scooping me up into his arms and carrying me from the room, slamming doors behind him.

“What the fuck, Mac? What the fuck?” He keeps saying, over and over. His eyes are wild, his face white, his lips thin. “What were you thinking coming down here without me? I’d’ve brought you if I thought you’d be so stupid. Don’t do this to me! You can’t fucking do this to me!”

I look up at him. Shades of Bluebeard, I muse dreamily. I opened the door on his slaughtered wives. My mouth won’t shape words. I want to know how the child is still alive. I feel numb. He’s your son, isn’t he?

He doesn’t answer me. He stares at me as if memorizing my face. I see something move deep in his eyes.

I should have made love to this man. I was always afraid to be tender. I’m bemused by my own idiocy.

He flinches.

“Don’t you think for a fucking minute you can put all that in your eyes, then die. That’s bullshit. I’m not doing this again.”

Got any Unseelie? I half-expect him to race aboveground to hunt one and bring it back. But I don’t have that much time and I know it.

“I’m not good, Mac. Never have been.”

What—true-confession time? my eyes tease. Don’t need it.

“I want what I want and I take it.”

Is he warning me? What could he possibly threaten me with now?

“There’s nothing I can’t live with. Only things I won’t live without.”

He stares at my neck, and I know it’s a mess from the look in his eyes. Savaged and shredded. I don’t know how I’m still breathing, why I’m not dead. I think I can’t talk because I no longer have intact vocal cords.

He touches my neck. Well, at least I think he does. I see his hand beneath my chin. I can’t feel anything. Is he trying to rearrange my internal parts like I once did to his, in the early-morning sun on the edge of a cliff, as if I could put him back together by sheer force of will?

His eyes narrow and his brows draw together. He closes his eyes, opens them again, and frowns. He shifts me in his arms and studies me from a different angle, glancing between my face and neck. Comprehension smooths his brow, and his lips twist in the ghastly smile people give you right before they tell you they have good news and bad news—and the bad news is really bad. “When you were in Faery, did you ever eat or drink anything, Mac?”