Shadowfever

If anyone is going to kill her, he’d said moments ago, it’s me.

God, how I’d grieved him!

He speaks of killing me so casually. Still not trusting me. Never trusting me. Those dark currents gurgle, begin to gush. I am furious. With him. He deserves a dose of grief himself. I wet my lips. “As a matter of fact there is.”

He inclines his head imperiously, waiting.

“And only you can give it to me,” I purr, arching my back.

His gaze drops to my breasts. “I’m listening.”

“It’s long overdue. I haven’t been able to think about anything else. It nearly drove me crazy today, waiting for you to get here so I could ask for it.”

He stands up and rakes me with a scathing look.

Sloppy seconds, his eyes say.

You had it first, I counter silently. I think that means he got the leftovers.

I push away from the door, circle the desk, trailing my fingertips lightly over his Silver as I pass it. He watches my hand and I know he’s remembering how I once touched him.

I stop a few inches from him. I’m humming with energy. He is, too. I can feel it.

“I’ve become obsessed with getting it, and if you say no, I’ll just have to take it.”

He inhales sharply. “You think you can?” Challenge stirs in his dark gaze.

I have a sudden vision of the two of us having an all-out fight from end to end of the bookstore, culminating in fierce, no-holds-barred sex, and my mouth goes so dry I can’t swallow for a moment.

“It might take me a while to … get my hands on exactly what I want, but I have no doubt I could.”

His eyes say: Bring it on. But you’ve got a lot to pay for.

He hates me for teaming up with Darroc. He believes we were lovers.

And he’d have sex with me in a heartbeat. Against his better judgment, with no tenderness at all, but he’d do it. I don’t get men. If I thought he’d betrayed me with … say, Fiona, a day after he’d helped kill me, I’d make him suffer for a good long time before I slept with him again.

He believes that I had sex with my sister’s lover the day after I stabbed him, that I forgot all about him and moved on. Men are wired different. I think for them, it’s about stamping out all trace, all memory, of their competitor as quickly and completely as possible. And they feel that the only way they can do it is with their body, their sweat, their semen. As if they can re-mark us. I think sex is so intense for them, they can be so easily ruled by it, that they think we can, too.

I look up at him, into those dark, bottomless eyes. “Can you die—ever?”

For a long moment he doesn’t speak. Then he moves his head once, in silent negation.

“As in: never? No matter what happens to you?”

I get that silent slice to the left and back to the middle again.

The bastard. Now I understand the anger I’ve been feeling beneath the elation. Some part of my brain had already put this together:

He’d let me grieve.

He never told me he was a beast that couldn’t be killed. He could have spared me all the pain I’d endured with one tiny little truth, one small confession, and I’d never have felt so violent and dark and broken. If he’d only just said: Ms. Lane, I can’t be killed. So if you ever see me die, don’t sweat it. I’ll be back.

I’d lost myself. Because of him. Because of his idiotic need to keep everything about himself secret. There was no excuse for it.

But even worse was this: I’d thought he’d given his life to save me, when all he’d really done was the equivalent of take a little nap. What did “dying” for someone mean when you knew you couldn’t die? Not a damn thing. An inconvenience. IYD hadn’t been a big deal after all.

I’d wept, I’d mourned. I’d built a massive and utterly undeserved Monument to Barrons, The Man Who’d Died So I Could Live, in my head. I’d thought he’d made the ultimate sacrifice for me, and it had milked my emotions brutally. I’d let it consume me, take me over, turn me into someone I couldn’t believe I’d been capable of becoming.

And he’d never been willing to die so I could live. It had been business as usual—Barrons keeping his OOP detector alive and functioning, coolly impersonal, focused on his goals. So what if he was the one who would never let me die? It didn’t cost him anything. He wanted the Book. I was the way to get it. He had nothing to lose. I finally understood why he was always so fearless.

I’d thought he’d cared about me so much he’d been willing to give up his life. I’d romanticized it and gotten swept away in a misguided fantasy. And if he’d stayed here last night, I’d have made a complete fool of myself. I’d have confessed feelings to him that I’d felt only because I’d thought he’d given his life for mine.