Karen Marie Moning’s Fever Series 5-Book Bundle: Darkfever, Bloodfever, Faefever, Dreamfever, Shadowfever Page 39

  “Another problem with Fae relics is they often transmute over time, especially if they are used near or corrupted by other magic. They can take on a life of their own, and turn into something other than what they were meant to be. For example, when the Sifting Silvers were first made they rippled like the silver of a sun-kissed sea. In those hallowed halls was beauty beyond compare. They were pure, magnificent. Yet now they’re—”

  “Black around the edges,” I exclaimed, thrilled to have some nugget of knowledge to contribute to the conversation, “like they’re going bad from the outside in.”

  He looked at me sharply. “How do you know that?”

  “I’ve seen them. I just didn’t know what they were.”

  “Where?” he demanded.

  “In the Lord Master’s house.”

  He stared.

  “You didn’t go inside the house?”

  “I was in a bit of a hurry that day, Ms. Lane. I went straight to the warehouse. So that’s how he’s been getting in and out of Faery. I wondered.”

  “Not following,” I said.

  “With the Silvers a human can enter the Fae realms, undetected. How many did he have?”

  “I don’t know. I saw at least half a dozen.” I paused before adding, “There were things in those mirrors, Barrons.” Things I saw in my nightmares sometimes.

  To my surprise, Barrons didn’t ask what. “Were they open?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did you have to uncover the glasses to look into them, Ms. Lane?”

  I shook my head.

  “Did you see any runes or symbols in the mirrors, on the surface?”

  “No, but I didn’t really look.” After I’d glanced into the first few, I’d refused to regard the others with anything more than peripheral vision. “So you’re saying these mirrors are doorways into Faery? I could have walked into one?”

  “It’s not quite that simple, but under certain circumstances, yes. The Silvers are one of the Unseelie Hallows. Most believe the first Dark Hallow the King created was a single mirror. A few of us know it was actually a vast network of mirrors, linking dimensions and connecting realms. The Silvers were the Tuatha Dé’s first method of locomotion between dimensions, before they evolved to the point where they could travel by thought alone, although some say they were created for a more personal purpose of the dark king’s that history failed to record. At some point in the Fae timeline, this Cruce we keep hearing about cursed the Silvers.”

  When I regarded him expectantly, he shook his head. “I don’t know what curse, nor do I know who Cruce was or why he cursed them. I only know that not even the Fae dared to enter the Silvers, under the direst of circumstances, after he’d done it. Once they started to turn dark, the Seelie Queen banished the glasses from Faery, not trusting them in their realms, for fear of what they were becoming.”

  I felt that way about myself lately; turning dark and afraid of what I was becoming. At that moment, I had no idea how light I still was. But then we so rarely understand the value of what we possess until it’s gone.

  I shook off the spell of Barrons’ story. I needed some sunshine in my life, and soon. In the interim, a lighter topic would do. “Let’s get back to the amulet.”

  “In a nutshell, Ms. Lane, it’s rumored to amplify human will.”

  “If you visualize it, it will come to pass,” I said.

  “Something like that.”

  “Well, it certainly seems to work. You saw the list.”

  “I also saw the long gaps between ownership. I suspect only a handful of people possess a will strong enough to make it work.”

  “You mean you have to be epic already, for it to make you more epic?” I was supposed to be epic, wasn’t I?

  “Perhaps. We’ll know soon enough.”

  “He’s dying, you know.” I meant the old man. He wanted the amulet to live. When we took it from him, it would be one more inadvertent death on my conscience.

  “Good for him.”

  I don’t always get Barrons’ sense of humor, and sometimes I don’t bother trying. Since he was being so voluntarily informative, I broached another line of inquiry. “Who were you fighting when I called you?”

  “Ryodan.”

  “Why?”

  “For talking about me to people he shouldn’t be talking to.”

  “Who’s Ryodan?”

  “The man I was fighting.”

  I took a detour around the dead end. “Did you kill the inspector?”

  “If I were the type of person to kill O’Duffy, I would also be the type of person to lie about it.”

  “So, did you, or didn’t you?”

  “The answer would be ‘no’ in either case. You ask absurd questions. Listen to your gut, Ms. Lane. It may save your life one day.”

  “I heard there are no male sidhe-seers.”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “Around.”

  “And which one of those are you in doubt about, Ms. Lane?”

  “Which one of what?”

  “Whether I see the Fae, or whether I’m a man. I believe I’ve laid your mind to rest on the former; shall I relieve it on the latter?” He reached for his belt.

  “Oh, please.” I rolled my eyes. “You’re a leftie, Barrons.”

  “Touché, Ms. Lane,” he murmured.

  Tonight I didn’t know the name of our unwitting victim, and I didn’t want to. If I didn’t know his name, I couldn’t scribe it on my list of sins, and perhaps one day the old Welshman I’d robbed of his last hope for life would disappear from my memory and cease to trouble my conscience.

  We rented a car at the airport, drove through gently rolling hills, and parked down a forested lane. I parted reluctantly with my raincoat and we hiked from there. When we crested a ridge and I got my first glimpse of the place we were planning to rob, I gaped. I’d known he was rich, but knowing was one thing, seeing another.

  The old man’s house was palatial, surrounded by elegant outbuildings and illuminated gardens. It soared, a gilded ivory city, above the dark Welsh countryside, lit from all directions. Its focal point was a tall, domed entry; the rest of the house unfolded from there, wing to turret, terrace to terrace. It was topped by a brilliantly mosaicked rooftop pool surrounded by sculptures displayed on pedestals of marble. Four-story windows framed glittering chandeliers in elaborate panes. Amid the lush foliage of manicured gardens, fountains splashed from one exquisitely inlaid basin to the next and pools shimmered the color of tropical surf, steaming the cool night air. For a moment I indulged in the fantasy of being the pampered princess that got to sunbathe in this fairy-tale world. I quickly exchanged that fantasy for another: being the princess that got to shop with the old man’s credit card.

  “Sale price of one hundred and thirty-two million dollars, Ms. Lane,” Barrons said. “The estate was originally built for an Arab oil prince who died before it was completed. At forty-eight thousand square feet, it’s larger than the private residence at Buckingham Palace. It has thirteen en-suite bedrooms, an athletic center, four guesthouses, five pools, a floor of inlaid gold, an underground garage, and a helipad.”

  “How many people live here?”

  “One.”

  How sad. All this and no one to share it with. What was the point?

  “It has state-of-the-art security, two dozen guards, and a panic room in case of terrorist attacks.” He sounded perversely pleased by those facts, as if he relished the challenge.

  “And just how do you plan on getting us in there?” I asked dryly.

  “I called in a favor. The guards won’t be a problem. But make no mistake, Ms. Lane. It still won’t be easy. The security system must be disarmed, and there are half a dozen wards to be broken between us and him. I suspect the old man will be wearing the amulet. We may be here for some time.”

  We made our way down the hill, and were nearly to the house when I spotted the first body, partially concealed by a bank of thick shrubbery. For a mome
nt, I couldn’t make out what it was. Then I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Gagging, I turned away.

  It was one of the guards, not simply dead, but badly mutilated.

  “Fuck,” Barrons cursed. Then his arm was behind my knees, and I was over his shoulder, and he was running with me, away from the house. He didn’t stop until we’d reached one of the outlying guesthouses.

  He dropped me to my feet and pushed me back into the shadows beneath the eaves. “Don’t move until I return for you, Ms. Lane.”

  “Tell me that was not the favor you called in, Barrons,” I said in a low, careful voice. If it was, he and I were through. I knew Barrons wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up, but I had to believe such butchery was beyond him.

  “They were supposed to be unconscious, that’s all.” His face was grim in the moonlight. When I would have spoken again, he pressed a finger to my lips then moved off into the night.

  I huddled in the shadows of the guesthouse for a small eternity until he returned, though by my watch a mere ten minutes had passed.

  His voice preceded him. “Whoever did it is gone, Ms. Lane.” He stepped into view and I smothered a sigh of relief. The only thing I hate worse than the dark is being alone in it. I didn’t used to be that way, but I am now and it seems to be getting worse. “The guards have been dead for hours,” he told me. “The security system is disarmed and the house is wide open. Come.”

  We moved directly for the front entrance, not bothering with stealth. We passed four more bodies on the way. The front doors were open, and beyond them I could see an opulent round grand foyer with a dual staircase that unfurled gracefully up each side and met in a landing suspended beneath a domed skylight hung with a glittering chandelier. I stared straight ahead. The marble floor had once been polished pearl. It was now splashed with crimson, strewn with bodies, some of them women. The housekeeping staff had not been spared.

  “Do you sense the amulet, Ms. Lane? Are you picking up anything?”

  I closed my eyes to shut out the carnage, and stretched my sidhe-seer senses, but carefully, very carefully. I no longer thought of my ability to sense OOPs as a benign talent. Last night, after finishing yet another book on the paranormal—ESP: Fact or Fiction?—I’d been unable to sleep so I’d lain there thinking about what I was, what it meant, wondering where the ability came from, why some people had it and others didn’t. Wondering what was different about me, what had been different about Alina. The authors contended that those with extrasensory abilities utilized parts of their brains that were dormant in other people.

  Wondering if that was true, and bored out of my gourd—late-night TV is lousy in any country—I’d fingered my spear and gone poking around in my own skull.

  It hadn’t been hard to find the part of me that was different, and now that I knew it was there, I couldn’t believe I’d been unaware of it for twenty-two years. There was a place in my head that felt as old as the earth, as ancient as time, always wakeful, ever watching. When I focused on it, it pulsed hotly, like embers in my brain. Curious, I’d played with it a little. I could fan it into a fire, make it expand outward, consume my skull, and pass beyond it. Like the element it resembled, it knew no morality, didn’t understand the word. Earth, fire, wind, and water are what they are. Power. At best, impartial. At worst, destructive. I shaped it. I controlled it. Or didn’t.

  Fire isn’t good or bad. It just burns.

  Now I skimmed it, a stone skipping the surface of a placid sea; a deep, dark sea I intended to keep placid. There would be no stirring of still waters on my watch.

  I opened my eyes. “If it’s here, I can’t feel it.”

  “Could it be somewhere in the house and you just aren’t close enough?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know, Barrons,” I said unhappily. “It’s a big estate. How many rooms are there? How thick are the walls?”

  “One hundred and nine, and very.” A muscle worked in his jaw. “I need to know if it’s still here, Ms. Lane.”

  “What are the odds of that?”

  “Stranger things have happened. Perhaps the massacre was the result of a foiled robbery attempt.”

  It certainly looked like an expression of rage. Incensed, inhuman fury.

  I told him the truth, although I knew it would seal my fate and the last thing in the world I wanted to do was pass through those doors. “I couldn’t sense Mallucé’s stone until I was in the same room with it. I didn’t pick up on the spear until I was above it, and I only sensed the amulet once I was inside the bomb shelter door.” I closed my eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Lane, but—”

  “—I know, you need me to walk the house,” I finished for him. I opened my eyes and notched my chin higher. If there was the slightest chance the amulet could still be in there, we had to look.

  And I’d thought the graveyard was bad. At least those bodies had been bloodless, embalmed, and tidily interred.

  Barrons made the rooms more bearable for me as we went, by going ahead, entering them first, draping the bodies with sheets or blankets, and when none were available, stowing them behind furniture. Only after he’d “secured” a room, did he exit it and send me in alone, the better to focus on my search, he said.

  While I appreciated his efforts, I’d already seen too much and frankly, it was hard not to glance behind a sofa or a chair, at the bodies he hadn’t covered. They exerted the same gruesome hold over me as the husks left by the Shades, as if some wholly irrational part of me thought by staring long and hard enough, immersing myself in the horror of it, I might learn something that would help me avoid the same fate.

  “They have no defensive wounds, Barrons,” I said, exiting another room.

  He was leaning up against the wall a few doors down, arms crossed over his chest. He was getting bloody from moving the bodies. I focused on his face, not the stains on his hands, or the dark, wet splotches on his clothes. His eyes were intensely bright. He seemed harder, larger, more electric than ever. I could smell the blood on him, the metallic tinge of old pennies. When our gazes locked, I jerked. If there was a man behind those eyes, I was a Fae. Jet, bottomless pools regarded me; on those glossy obsidian surfaces tiny Macs stared back at me. His gaze dropped, raked over my clingy catsuit, then worked back up very slowly.

  “They were unconscious when they were slaughtered,” he said finally.

  “Then why kill them?”

  “It would appear for the pleasure of it, Ms. Lane.”

  “What kind of monster does that?”

  “All kinds, Ms. Lane. All kinds.”

  We continued our search. Whatever fascination the house might once have held for me was gone. I hurried through an art gallery that would have made any major metropolitan museum curator swoon with envy, and felt no more than the bitterness of the man who’d been driven to acquire the spectacular collection only to hang it in a windowless, vaultlike room where none but him could ever see it. I passed over a solid gold floor, and saw only the blood.

  Barrons found the old man—who’d paid over a billion dollars for the amulet, blissfully ignorant that he’d not only not postponed his death, but had just spent an obscene amount of money to hasten it—dead in his bed, his head half ripped off from the force with which the amulet had been torn from his neck, chain marks scored into the shredded skin of his throat. So much for longevity; by trying to cheat death, he’d succeeded only in expediting it.

  Our search was fruitless. Whatever had once been housed there—the amulet, perhaps other OOPs—was gone. Someone had beaten us to it. The Unseelie Hallow was out there in the world, amplifying the will of a new owner, and we were back at square one. I’d really wanted that amulet. If it was capable of impacting reality, and I could figure out how to use it … well, the possibilities were endless. At the least, it could protect me; at best it could help me get my revenge.

  “Are we done here, Barrons?” I asked, as we descended the rear stairs. I suddenly felt as if I couldn’t get out of the marble
mausoleum fast enough.

  “There’s a basement, Ms. Lane.”

  We turned at the bottom of the final flight, and began walking toward a set of doors in the wall past the base of the stairwell.

  At that very moment, they began to swing open.

  Abruptly, I was no longer in the house at all, but standing on a white powder beach with a warm, salty breeze tangling my hair.

  The sun was shining. Alabaster birds swooped low, gliding along lapis lazuli waves.

  And I was naked.

  ELEVEN

  “V’lane!” I snarled.

  I was naked—he was near.

  “It is time for our hour, MacKayla,” said a disembodied voice.

  “Put me back right now! Barrons needs me!” How had he so cleanly swapped one reality for the next? Had he moved me, or worlds? Had I just been “sifted”? But I hadn’t even seen him, or felt him touch me, or anything!

  “At the time of my choosing was our deal. Will you dishonor it? Should I undo my part of it as well?”

  Could he do that? Rewind time and dump me back into the Shade-infested bookstore, crouching before my enemy with too few matches left? Or did he mean to let the Shades back in right now, and when I got home from Wales, I’d have to clear it again, this time, without his help? I had no desire to face either. “I’m not dishonoring it. You are. Give me my clothes back!”

  “We discussed nothing of attire in our bargain. We are on equal footing, you and I,” he purred, behind me.

  I whirled, fury in my eyes, murder in my heart.

  He was naked, too.

  All thought of Barrons and basement doors opening and potential dangers behind them vanished. Nor did it matter how I’d gotten here. I was here.

  My knees turned to ash. I collapsed to the sand.

  I looked away but my eyes didn’t. My central nervous system was currently serving another master and had no interest in will. Will? What was will? Papers you signed in case you died, that was it. Nothing to do with my current situation. All I needed to do now was entrust my body to the Maestro before me who would play it like no other, stroking it to unimaginable crescendos, plucking chords no man had ever sounded before, or would ever match again.