Feverborn

34

He stood looking around the room, at the broken furniture I hadn’t been strong enough to move, the crimson paint sloshed everywhere, and the small area of organization in the rear I’d set up for myself with a love seat and a table that looked like a very small eye in a very large storm. He whistled low and shook his head.

I knew what it looked like. A battlefield.

“Never mind,” he said. “I don’t wanna know. Guess there’s a reason Barrons keeps you around. So, where’s my little honey?”

“Upstairs. In my room,” I told him. We’d brought Jada and Ryodan back to BB&B, with Barrons working more of his Bewitched magic to get us through the funnel cloud. “How’d you get in through the storm?” I wondered if they all knew the same spells. I’d somehow gotten the impression Barrons was by far the most proficient, that Ryodan had some degree of skill but preferred to leave the heavy lifting to Barrons, and I’d assumed Lor was mostly oblivious to…well, everything but blondes with big boobs. And recently, Jo.

“There’s a way,” he evaded.

“Then why haven’t I been using it?” I said pissily. Sometimes I almost wanted to be one of them. Almost. The Hunter wasn’t willing to fly me anymore. I was going to be even more dependent on Barrons in the future. Or have to give up coming home for a while. A sudden chill kissed my spine, and I wondered if for some reason, soon, I wouldn’t be here much at all. I shook it off as exhausted brooding.

The owner of Chester’s had insisted on returning to his club, but Barrons had flatly vetoed it, saying BB&B was more heavily warded, and besides, Jada couldn’t go far if she decided to try, with the Fae-tornado surrounding the area. Both men seemed to think she’d run the second she was coherent again.

She’d been unconscious since the abbey. I’d tucked her into my bed upstairs, pulled the covers up to her chin, and sat beside her for a long time, trying to understand what was going on with her, touched and troubled by how fragile she looked, young and vulnerable.

It was sometimes hard to remember Jada was only somewhere between nineteen and twenty years old. If she were a normal girl, in a normal world, she might be a sophomore in college. She presented a facade that packed the presence of a woman of thirty. But she wasn’t. She’d been a fourteen-year-old who’d had to grow up too fast. Now she was a nineteen-year-old that had grown up even more, faster and harder. I smiled bitterly, remembering one of Dani’s favorite mottos: Bigger, Better, Faster, Harder, More. She’d always been voracious for life, hungry to experience it all.

Why on earth had she raced back into the abbey, into a killing Fae fire, just to save a stuffed bear, sliced down the middle with its innards falling out?

“She sleeping?” Lor said.

“I can’t tell. I don’t know if she’s sleeping or…something else.” Exhausted to the point of collapse, as if she’d been holding herself together with sheer force of will for a long time.

I’d held her hand. It was limp, as if all the life had been drained from her body. I was frantic to know what had happened, but Ryodan, too, had passed out shortly after arguing with Barrons about where to go.

Half the Nine had remained behind at the abbey, standing guard for when the Fae came back. We’d left Christian soaring over the burning fortress. I fervently hoped he could save some of it. I even more fervently hoped the blaze didn’t burn it all the way down into the ground, freeing Cruce from the cavern. Criminy, we had a mess on our hands.

Will Ryodan die? I’d asked Barrons on the way back to BB&B. And come back whole? I hadn’t added.

Not a chance, he’d replied grimly. He’s fighting it. He won’t leave her like this. The bloody idiot will stay here and heal the long way.

But he will heal? I’d pressed. I couldn’t even bear to look at him. It was seeing the man in that movie, The English Patient, but with no bandages to hide the horror.

He’ll heal. You would consider it rapidly. He won’t. And it’ll be hell.

I’d pondered having the ability to simply kill yourself if you were badly wounded, so you could swiftly end your suffering and come back perfect again. It had been beyond my comprehension. What a leap of faith to bleed yourself out. I decided they must have died so many times that they either had implicit trust they would always come back or didn’t care.

He’d shot me a look. You used the spear tonight. You didn’t lose control.

I know, I’d replied. I don’t know what was different. It may have helped that I’d stabbed my first one instinctively before I realized what I’d done. And once I realized it, I’d known I could do it and it had been easy from there. I’d figured it was one of three things: the Book was neutralized inside me somehow; it was open and I was using it without being corrupted; or it was cooperating, for whatever reason.

You’re coming into your own.

I’d kept my silence. I still couldn’t shake the feeling that the universe had two really nasty evil shoes and only one of them had dropped.

We’d put Ryodan in Barrons’s study on a mattress he’d dragged down from upstairs.

You could put him in the bedroom next to Jada, I’d suggested.

He won’t want her to see him like this.

I don’t think she’s seeing much of anything, I’d pointed out.

I don’t think she has been for a while. He’d glanced pointedly at the heavily smoked stuffed animal I was holding on my lap as we headed back for Dublin in one of the Nine’s Hummers.

I’d tucked it into her arms as I’d tucked her into my bed.

And I’d seen the only faint signs of life in her as she sighed and curled herself tightly around it. She muttered something then that sounded like, “I see you, yee-yee.”

My heart had felt raw and inflamed inside my chest, on the verge of rupturing, as I’d watched her. Mea culpa. I hated myself even more than I had before for chasing her into the Silvers that day. I was only now beginning to fully understand what those years had cost her.

And I’d thought then, staring down at her, what if Alina isn’t really dead? That would mean I’d chased Dani into the hall—and she hadn’t even killed my sister.

For a few really hellish moments there I’d wanted to go curl up somewhere and quietly die.

But I’d shaken it off. My dying wouldn’t do a thing for Dani. And she was all that mattered.

Lor strode past me and I followed him into Barrons’s study.

I dropped into a chair behind the desk and looked warily at Ryodan. Barrons was draping filmy pieces of fabric drenched in some silvery liquid on his charred body, murmuring softly while he worked.

“He’s awake,” Barrons said.

I hadn’t needed to be told. I was watching him shiver with pain as Barrons laid the barely-there pieces of glowing cloth against his raw flesh. One of the Nine shivering with pain was a terrible thing to see.

“Do you think maybe you should knock him out for his own good?” I said uneasily.

Lor laughed. “I’ve thought that on more than one occasion.”

“He wants to be awake,” Barrons murmured.

“Can he talk?”

“Yes,” Ryodan rasped.

“Can you tell us what happened?”

He made a wet sighing sound. “She flew into that…bloody abbey like…a mother bear obsessed…with her cub. I thought…five and a half years is a long time…maybe she’d had a child…brought it back.”

Oh, God, I thought, appalled, I hadn’t even thought of that! Had the bear belonged to a child? Her child? Just what had Dani gone through in the Silvers?

“I kept circling her, trying to keep…her from…burning, but she acted like…she didn’t even feel the heat. Christ…I could barely breathe. Beams were falling, stone was crumbling.”

“Why the fuck didn’t you change?” Lor growled with a quick look at me.

“I know,” I said to him levelly. “Surely you know I know.”

“Dunno why you’re still alive, though,” he said coolly.

“Not in…front of her.” Ryodan gurgled harshly.

“Precisely,” Lor said, shooting me a look.

I ignored him. “Are you sure he’s okay talking?” I asked Barrons worriedly.

Barrons gave me a look. “If he’s doing it, he wants to be.”

“Go on,” I urged Ryodan.

“Need to tell. You…need to know.”

“He won’t be conscious when I’ve finished,” Barrons told me. “For some time.”

“She kept saying she…had to save…Shazam. That she wouldn’t have…survived without him and she wasn’t…losing him. She wasn’t leaving him. Ever. She fucked up once and…wasn’t fucking up again. She was…ah, fuck. It was…it was like looking at her at fourteen again. All eyes and heart…blazing in her face. And she started to cry.”

Lor said softly, “You never could stand that.”

Ryodan lay shuddering while Barrons worked, then gathered his strength and went on. “She tore the damned room…apart looking for…something. I couldn’t figure out what. The place was a bloody mess…must’ve exploded when the fire started. All kinds of…weapons, ammo…kept trying to push it away from the fire and…keep her from burning. Food everywhere…a filthy pillowcase with ducks on it and…rotting fish all over the place. Fucking fish. I kept thinking what the fuck…was with the fish?”

Rotting fish? I frowned, unable to process it.

“Finally, she…screamed and dove toward the bed and I thought…so, her kid is under there…it’s okay…I’ll get them out.”

He fell silent again and closed his eyes.

“And she pulled out the stuffed animal,” I said miserably.

“Yes,” he whispered.

“How did she end up unconscious?”

“Me.”

“You hit her?” Lor growled, half rising.

“I was a bloody…fucking idiot. Should’ve known better.”

“What did you do?” I exclaimed.

“When I saw…what she was holding…cooing to it like it was…fucking alive, I…” He trailed off. Then after a long moment he hissed, “I took it from her, ripped it open, and showed her it was just a…a stuffed animal.”

“And she snapped,” Barrons said quietly.

“Blank. Her eyes filled with…anguish and…grief then…just empty. Like she wasn’t even…alive anymore.”

“You think it’s like that Tom Hanks movie,” Lor said, “where he got stranded on an island and talked to a goddamn ball for years?”

“Only Jada forgot it wasn’t real,” I said, horrified.

“Don’t know,” Ryodan said. “Maybe it’s…how she survived and…why she came back Jada. She kept saying he was so…emotional. Moody. He needed her to take care of him. Possible she survived by…divvying herself up…creating an imaginary friend with…Dani’s attributes…while becoming Jada.”

I closed my eyes. Tears slipped down my cheeks.

“I made her see…he wasn’t real. Then she…was just…gone. Bloody hell…I did it to her.”

We sat in silence for a time.

Finally, I got up.

Ryodan would survive. He had his brothers.

Dani needed a sister.

—

Lor followed me out. “What the fuck was up at Chester’s, Mac? Why was an Unseelie prince in our club? And where the bloody hell was he hiding?” he demanded.

I stopped walking and turned to face him. When I’d asked him to capture me a sifter to take me to Chester’s, he’d insisted on coming along. I’d demanded he remain in one of the subclubs with the sifter while I went to get Christian. I’d called it due as part of my favor, thereby keeping my oath to Ryodan that his secrets were mine.

I gave him a frosty look. “You asked me a favor and I gave it to the best of my ability in exchange for one from you. We’re even. If you try to push me on this, I’ll fight you with everything I’ve got. And I’ve got more than you think. Like you, Lor, my loyalties are to Ryodan. Give me space on this.”

He measured me a long moment then inclined his head. “I’ll leave it. For now.”

Together, we went upstairs to stand vigil over Jada.

—

Over the next several hours, visitors came to see Jada. I don’t have any idea how they got into the store with the funnel cloud around it. I assumed Lor was bringing them in somehow. Living with the Nine around means accepting endless mysteries. Jo came and sat with me for hours and we talked and tried to figure out what to do to help Jada/Dani heal. Jo told me she’d been to the abbey twice to see her, but Jada had kept herself surrounded by her closest advisors both times, and acknowledged her only to enlist her aid in continuing the modernization of their libraries.

Jada’s sidhe-seers took shifts coming, sat grimly with us and kept us updated on conditions at the abbey, which I barely heard, staring at the bed, lost in sadness deep enough to drown.

Barrons intermittently came upstairs, checking with grim dark eyes to see if anything had changed.

Jada lay unmoving in the bed, as if carved from stone, holding on to the charred stuffed animal as though her life depended on it. I was surprised Ryodan hadn’t dropped it. He’d been burned beyond belief but somehow managed to hang on to both Jada and the stuffed bear with which she was obsessed—and keep them both from burning. Any other man would have dropped the thing in the fire.

Finally, I was alone with her, and I moved to sit on the bed. As I pulled the covers up, the glint of Cruce’s cuff caught my eye and I suddenly couldn’t get it off my arm fast enough.

She’d given it to me when she kept my spear. Hadn’t wanted me walking around unprotected, even then. And it had kept me safe from all harm in battle tonight.

It should have been on her arm.

There were so many should-have-beens.

I tried to pick up her arm to put the cuff on her wrist but I couldn’t break her death grip on Shazam. I laid it on the table next to the bed so when she woke up she could have it back.

I touched her hair softly, smoothing scorched auburn tendrils from her face. It was still pulled back in a ponytail but had slipped down to her nape, and I could see the natural curl in it. I smiled faintly, sadly. One day I’d like to see her wearing it curly and wild and free again.

I stroked her cheek, wiping away a smudge of tear-streaked soot, then got a washcloth from the bathroom and gently cleaned her face. I dampened her hair and smoothed it back. The water made it even springier, with little curls forming. She didn’t move at all.

“Dani,” I whispered. “I love you.”

Then I stretched out on the bed behind her, wrapped my arms around her, and held her like she was holding Shazam.

I didn’t know what to do, what else to say. Apologies were pointless. What was, was. Dani had always lived by the motto, “The past is past. The present is now, and that’s why it’s a present. ’Cause you got it, and you can do stuff with it!”

I pressed my cheek to her hair and whispered the same words against her ear that I’d heard her say earlier. Although I had no idea what they meant, they obviously meant something to her.

“I see you, yee-yee,” I said. “Come back. Don’t go away. Please don’t leave me.” I started to cry. “It’s safe here. We love you, Dani. Jada. Whoever you need to be. It’s okay. We don’t care. Just please don’t leave. I’ve got you, honey, I’ve got you.” I cried harder.

—

You never see it coming.

That final, fatal blow.

You think the shit has already hit the fan and exploded all over your face. You think things are so bad they can’t get any worse. You’re walking around tallying all the things that are wrong with your world when you discover you have no clue what’s really going on around you and you’ve only been seeing the tip of the iceberg that sank the Titanic—at the precise moment you hit the iceberg that sank the Titanic.

Hours later I went downstairs, moving woodenly, aching in every limb, head hurting, eyes swollen, nose stuffed solid.

Jada still wasn’t stirring, although twice in the past hour she’d opened her eyes. Both times she’d become aware of me and closed them instantly, either slipping back into unconsciousness or just plain shutting me out.

The bookstore was surprisingly quiet, and I ducked my head into the study to see how Ryodan was doing. He was alone, draped in shimmering cloth etched with glowing symbols, slumbering deeply.

I checked the front of the store, but it was empty so I poked my head out the back to see where everyone was. In the distance, down the alley to the right, I heard voices. I cocked my head, listening.

Barrons talking softly with someone.

I stepped out into the faint bruise of dawn, thinking that in just a few hours I was supposed to meet Alina and I wasn’t sure I was up to it. My heart was pulped. Dani was all I could think about. I was loath to leave her side for an hour or more, for any reason. I certainly couldn’t invite Alina here. Last thing I wanted was Jada being affected in any way by her presence.

I hurried down the alley and turned the corner but no one was there.

I kept walking, absently following the sound of Barrons’s voice, wondering why everyone had left the store. As I turned the next corner, I heard a dry chittering and glanced up.

The sky above me was thick with black-robed wraiths, gliding, soaring, rustling. Thanks to the Hunter, I now knew they were the Sweeper’s minions. And whatever the mysterious entity was, it was right, I was certainly broken. My heart was in pieces.

There were hundreds of them. I tipped back my head. Even more perched on the rooftops on both sides of the street. I glanced back at BB&B, barely able to make out the roof of the building, and was stunned to see that it, too, was completely covered in ghoulish carrion. I’d been so lost in thought that I hadn’t even looked up as I’d stepped out. They must have been perching up there in silence.

They weren’t silent now. Their chittering grew, became a sort of metallic screeching I’d never heard before as they looked from me to one another and back to me again.

“Well, shit,” I muttered as a lightbulb went off in my head. They could see me. And I knew why. “That damned cuff.”

I’d left it on the table near Jada. When he’d tried to sell me on it, V’lane told me the cuff of Cruce afforded protection against Fae and “assorted nasties.” Apparently my wraiths fell into the latter category. It made sense, when I thought about it. Ryodan said my ghouls had once stalked the king. I could see Cruce not wanting any skulking, spying creatures near him, and working to perfect a spell to prevent them from being able to find him. That explained why once I’d become visible again, they hadn’t instantly become my second skin. Jada had given me the cuff while I was cloaked by the Sinsar Dubh.

Now they were back. Great.

And something was still trying to decide if it wanted to “fix me.” Bloody great. Good luck with that.

I started to move forward, hesitated a moment, feeling that odd finger of a chill at my spine again, and glanced back at BB&B.

I decided to wait for Barrons to get back. It made me uneasy how quickly they found me once I’d taken off the cuff. I remembered them flying over the city, searching. Although they’d never appeared to present any real threat to me, had even slept on the same bed with me in Chester’s without ever doing anything to me, who knew when the rules might change in this crazy-ass world?

Maybe the Sweeper had made up its mind, I thought darkly. I didn’t like that thought.

I spun briskly to head back for the safety of the bookstore.

That’s when they dropped from the sky like great, smelly, black, suffocating straitjackets and took me down.

35

I regained consciousness to find myself staring straight up at the ceiling of a dimly lit industrial warehouse.

I could tell what it was by the vast metal beams and girders and pulleys used to move supplies. I guessed I was somewhere in the Dark Zone, flown up and out by the gaunt wraiths that were far more formidable than I’d ever imagined.

When they’d descended from above, their assault was instantaneous, almost as if they’d sifted, expanding their leathery cloaks, smothering me. I hadn’t even managed to lift a finger before my hands were immobilized.

My spear and guns, useless. I hadn’t been able to get to anything, not even my cellphone. Then again, from what I’d seen, Barrons’s tattoos hadn’t been finished and IYD wouldn’t have done me any good.

One moment they’d been in the sky, the next my arms were tightly straitjacketed to my sides, my legs bound. Their smelly, leathery cloaks had covered even my head and I wasn’t able to breathe. I thought I was dying. The horrible thing about being suffocated is you don’t know if you’re going to wake up or not.

I’d decided in my last, fleeting moment of consciousness that the way the Sweeper had decided to “fix” me was apparently to kill me; a sentiment I might not have entirely disagreed with at various points in my life.

But not now. Jada needed me. Oh, she didn’t know that and probably wouldn’t agree with it, but she did. The Sweeper could try to kill me later. Now was not a good time. I wasn’t staying here to get “fixed.”

I leapt up.

Er, rather, my brain gave the command for my body to leap up.

Nothing happened.

Manacles rattled. Slightly. My wrists and ankles burned. I groaned. I’d practically broken my neck trying to stand. I was strong. My restraints were stronger.

I tried to move my head. It didn’t work. There was a wide band across my forehead, strapping it tightly to the surface upon which I was stretched, flat on my back.

I was horrified to realize I was secured to some kind of cold metal gurney. For a moment I was afraid I’d been given a paralytic drug, but then found that I could move my head a few inches if I put effort into it. The rest of me was so tightly buckled down, I couldn’t move my arms or legs at all.

There was a sudden rustling in the distance, the sound of my stalkers, their dry chittering. I stank to high heaven, drenched in their disgusting yellow dust.

I went motionless and closed my eyes again.

In horror flicks, when the hero gets strapped to this kind of thing, in this kind of place, the villain always waits for them to regain consciousness before the truly gruesome acts of barbarism begin.

I could play dead a long time.

As the rustling wraiths drew nearer, I heard a whirring and grinding, the sound of badly greased cogs turning. I kept my eyes closed and concentrated on breathing deep and natural.

I recognized the sound.

The thing ambulated ponderously closer, panic and dread accompanying it, filling me with the same immobilizing fear I’d felt the night the walking trash heap passed through the alley behind BB&B. I couldn’t have moved then even if I’d been unrestrained.

If I had been able to move, I would have smacked myself in the forehead. As I ran like hell.

The trash heap I’d seen the other day was the mysterious Sweeper!

It had been right there with me, inside our protective storm, looking for me two days ago, and I’d had no clue it was the thing that had its minions watching me.

In my defense, they didn’t look anything alike. And who would think something ancient and all-powerful that fixed other things would itself be compiled of refuse?

Although, I brooded, it sort of made sense. Maybe it was always fixing itself, too, and just grabbed whatever was handy. I remembered the metallic things embellishing the Unseelie princess’s spine, the metal I’d seen flashing on my carrion stalker’s faces, and it made even more sense. Sort of. As much as anything in our Fae-infested world made sense anymore.

The thing crashed to a rattling halt somewhere to the right of me. I lay rigid with fear, listening, trying not to let panic completely unravel me.

There were noises then, smaller ones than the Sweeper’s heavy tread. Metal against metal: clinks and clacks of things being turned on and off and moved around.

Beyond my closed lids the environment grew brighter. Two more clicks and it was abruptly brilliant. Focused, intense lights had been turned on and were shining directly down on me.

I didn’t like this one bit. I was strapped to a table, with bright lights above, about to be fixed by something that couldn’t even walk straight and was made of trash and guts. Despite the panic immobilizing my limbs and clouding my mind, I couldn’t help but wonder what the hell it thought was wrong with me. How was I broken? I wanted to know, to argue with it. I wisely kept both mouth and eyes shut. Not that I could have opened either anyway. Its mere presence was a paralytic.

After what felt like an endless amount of time, it rattled and clanked away.

The chittering of the ghouls faded as they went with it, and I collapsed in my skin with relief as voluntary motion returned.

A reprieve. No clue why. Didn’t care.

I slitted my eyes open and closed them quickly again, blinded by the bright, cold lights shining down. I turned my head as far to the right as I could. That was where I’d heard the ominous sounds, and I wanted to know what I was facing. I opened my eyes again.

After ascertaining no wraiths lurking in the shadows, waiting to sound the alarm the second they saw me stir, I strained my muscles to peer as far right as possible.

A long metal table.

A dazzling array of sharp, glittering instruments.

It was straight out of a horror movie. I had the sudden unsolicited, disturbing memory of sitting in BB&B five nights ago, trying to dig bullets out of myself, thinking about what sick things could be done to me if I was tied up, given my regenerating abilities.

Breathe, I told myself. Above the table was a large rectangular screen featuring a picture of something gray and black and white and shadowy.

I narrowed my eyes, focusing on the screen. It took me a few seconds to process what I was seeing, and I only did because my nose itched and I couldn’t get to it so I scrunched it up and sort of tossed my head the small amount I could, and the image on the screen moved.

It was me. On the inside. Specifically my skull.

Every detail: sinus cavities, teeth, bones, muscles. There were symbols marked in various spots on the skull. I angled my head hard and noticed that to the right of the large screen were four smaller ones.

Those took me longer to figure out but I finally realized each was showing different parts of my brain. There were symbols marked on those images, too, concentrated in—if I remembered my biology courses correctly, and unfortunately at the moment I seemed to be recalling them with horrifying clarity—the limbic region of my brain.

I knew what the limbic region was. We’d studied it in my abnormal psych course. It was a set of brain structures located on both sides of the thalamus, and it supported emotion, behavior, and long-term memory, among other things. The limbic system included the hypothalamus, the amygdala, and the hippocampus. It was highly tied to the brain’s pleasure center and tightly linked to the prefrontal cortex.

The reason I recalled all this so clearly was because our university had been participating in a study while I was taking my AP course, and the professor had solicited volunteers for it.

The purpose of the study had been to explore whether a “turned off” limbic system or brain damage in that area was a valid marker of psychopathy. He’d told us there was significant evidence acquired from incarcerated criminals that there was indeed a correlation.

I remembered looking at my classmates, who’d eagerly thrust their hands in the air, thinking: Who would be stupid enough to volunteer for this? What if they got their brain scanned and learned they were psychopaths? Was that really something you wanted to know? More importantly—was it really something you wanted everyone around you to know?

I’d shoved my hands deep in my pockets that day and kept them there.

Now, as I studied the screen of my brain, I pondered the implications. I lacked the training to decide if my limbic region was “turned off” or damaged, but from the look of the instruments on the table and the symbols on the various parts of my brain—it was about to be.

The Sweeper thought my brain needed to be fixed. I scowled. There was nothing wrong with my brain. Had I been able, I would have clamped both my hands protectively to my head. Would my skull keep remodeling as it tried to cut me open? Sealing around its instruments? I had no doubt that whatever barbaric surgery it had planned wouldn’t go easy. I wondered if it was the presence of the Book inside me that made the Sweeper consider me both powerful enough and fractured enough to require fixing. The damned Sinsar Dubh just never stopped messing up my life.

A voice broke the silence from my left—first, scaring the shit out of me, then filling me with far more horror than I’d realized I could even hold.

“It’s my heart,” Jada whispered. “What’s it planning to fix of yours?”