Fever - Burned Part 15

As she turns a corner and enters a dimly lit street, her gaze lifts to the shattered streetlamp, then down to lightly misted cobblestones and back up again.

She pauses to absorb the scene: the Unseelie blood dripping from the jagged gla.s.s that housed the light; the many pieces of unmoving Fae flesh tossed in a heap; the small pile of human parts with wilted flowers placed carefully on top; the footsteps in the scattered debris, trails of blood and smears of green that map out movements.

She moves closer. Someone placed the human's picture ID on top of the flowers so he would be found and identified, bestowing the blessing of closure so those who cared might not wonder endlessly if their husband or father might one day walk in the door again.

If not for the blossoms, she would think it an act of vengeance, not compa.s.sion.

A killer followed by a merciful pa.s.serby?

She closes her eyes, a.n.a.lyzes, a.s.sesses, processes all she saw and factors in what she has come to understand about humans and monsters in her years of war. Working methodically, logically, she re-creates the events that transpired in this street.

She eliminates the possibility of two separate actors. This was the work of one.

Someone killed a Fae and butchered a human by accident in the process.

Someone killed her Fae.

If she felt, which she doesn't, her emotions would run the gamut from stunned to furious.

Neither disrupts her serene features.

Someone else adjusted her ledgers.

She wants to know who.

She steps closer to the pile of Unseelie flesh, notes the suckered fingers, the gray skin.

The individual spear wounds in each small piece by which the dismembered-yet-still-alive Unseelie was granted death.

From the shape of the wounds, she knows the killer.

Her name is also on her list.

She covets the weapon. Once she has acquired it, she will be unstoppable.

She lifts her head. A Fae is moving toward her, rapidly. Powerful. Unseelie. She has been hunting this one but not to kill.

"You wish the Unseelie Princes dead," she says to the night. She knows the night is always listening. "I will do it for you. But you must do something for me."

She finds it necessary to repeat herself three times before the princess with ice-white skin and cobalt hair appears in the damp street before her.

"What makes you think I won't kill you where you stand?" Imperial ice drips from the princess's words.

"Perhaps you could. Perhaps you couldn't. Perhaps you could use an ally in this city whose strengths c.h.i.n.k your weaknesses. Perhaps we both could. Not that either of us have many weaknesses. Still, there are those few. You and your brother princes are immune to one another, powerless to spell or destroy one another. I deem that a significant weakness."

Starry eyes narrow as the princess takes her measure.

Jada says, "There is the devil that can't get the job done and won't eat you, and the devil that can get the job done but might. We are both the latter. I agree not to eat you."

The princess's eyes narrow and she appears to be reconsidering her initial a.s.sessment. "Perhaps we can aid one another. If the price is acceptable."

"You will locate a certain Unseelie for me." She tells her the one she seeks.

"Even I do not approach that one," the princess hisses.

"Then I will not kill your brothers."

"It is impossible!"

"I said 'locate,' not kill. That is the price. It is non-negotiable."

"How do you think to kill the princes? You are human."

"I know where to obtain a weapon that kills Fae."

"There is no such thing."

"There is."

"All Fae?"

"Yes."

"And you can get this weapon?"

"Yes."

The princess is silent a time, then finally says, "Perhaps you have useful knowledge. I will not kill you tonight. You will show me this weapon and demonstrate its power."

"You will locate the one I seek first. Then you will take me there."

"Locate. That is all."

"Both. Or nothing."

"That would be two services rendered. The weapon becomes mine."

"Two princes for two services," she says flatly.

Ancient, cold eyes regard her. She is acutely aware of the precariousness of the moment. But one that fails to venture never gains.

Finally the princess says, "In times of war allies are useful."

"I will offer my services for your future needs. The weapon will be part of those services."

"I will consider it." The princess vanishes.

14.

"Tools, said I, you do not know Silence like a cancer grows"

KAT.

My gift, if you can call it that, is an empathetic heart. I began crying the moment I was born and wept until I was five years, three months, and seventeen days old-the afternoon Rowena came to my parents' house and began teaching me to s.h.i.+eld myself from the constant barrage of others' emotions.

I often think I've learned nothing, except how to stop crying, don a mask, and pretend the world isn't too much for me to bear.

I know how fragile we are, how biased the war that rages on this planet where the angels are made of gla.s.s and the demons of concrete. All you have to do is drop one of us and we shatter.

Last night I watched Sean across the dangerous expanse of a treaty table and realized our love is gla.s.s, too. I must become diamond dust to strengthen the mix.

In the days preceding the h.o.a.r Frost King's defeat, Margery enlisted Ryodan's aid to tether a dangerous, drifting fragment of Faery that was about to demolish our abbey, and the price Ryodan called due from me the night I went to pay our debt was Sean filling in as a waiter at Chester's for a time.

So the dominos began to fall.

Sean can't bear to watch people suffering any more than I, and confronted by those in need, he became their provider. It's a strength I admire with all my heart.

Yet it's also the same treacherous foundation upon which both our families were built. Our fathers possessed an enormous sense of responsibility for their own. And their own came to them with problems and requests, each more difficult to address, to satisfy, than the last.

Over time, it corrupted them. The lime of murder, the viscosity of revenge, cemented the blood in their hearts until they, too, were poured of concrete.

I move through the dance floors of Chester's with purpose, my s.h.i.+elds as high as I can raise them, yet I cannot block the immense loneliness of this densely crowded place, the hunger and despair, desperation and need. So many angels, so many cracks. They don't even require dropping, a fair jostle would do the trick.

I have the care of two hundred seventy-one women in Dublin. The eldest, Tanty Anna, my wise, gentle, ancient advisor whose eyes seemed to stare straight into heaven, is a month dead, murdered by the Crimson Hag. Christian paid the ultimate price for our freedom that night and I'm powerless to help save him. One of my younger charges, Dani, enormously gifted and enormously impulsive, has been missing for weeks now, and I fear the worst. Margery seethes and plots daily to take the reign I would gratefully relinquish, just not to her.

My soul mate has a.s.sumed charge of the black market and put himself in direct compet.i.tion with two Unseelie Princes and a ruthless male that defies quantifying.

Now there are new sidhe-seers in Dublin, led by a woman not even Ryodan has been able to track. I've never felt so inept in my life. I want to rebuild my abbey. I want to fill the walls a thousand strong again. I want the strength of concrete without the price of it.

When I came here months ago, seeking Ryodan to repay my debt, he said a thing I've been unable to stop thinking about: Drop your blinders and raise the sewer to eye level; admit you're swimming in s.h.i.+t. If you don't acknowledge the t.u.r.d hurtling down the drain toward you, you can't dodge it.

I've come to get out of the toilet bowl and become the commode that flushes the s.h.i.+t.

The fragment of a Faery fire-world I prayed was responsible for the gra.s.s that grows tall and green beyond my bedroom window, directly above Cruce's icy prison, is gone now, yet the meadow is more verdant than before, exploding with poppies, red, fat, bobbing, opium-drenched blossoms that drug my senses on warm evenings when the projection of a great, black-winged prince circles my bed.

I have warded him out of my tangle of linens with blood-magic, an art I'd sworn never to practice, a line I wouldn't cross.

But it is no longer only myself I must protect.

Elaborate golden trellises have pushed up from the earth all over the abbey's grounds, draped with black roses that reek of exotic spices and far-off lands.

Dozens of standing stones have appeared in the gardens, etched with symbols I can't read. A pair of megaliths awaits a cover stone to become a dolmen. It makes me s.h.i.+ver when I pa.s.s.

Pearl benches frame a vast, brilliant, many-tiered fountain in which water sparkles as turquoise as a Caribbean sea.

Animals I've never seen before peek at me from trees fringed with lacy vines that grow strange beyond our walls, shedding brown bark for ivory threaded with silver, sprouting low-hanging canopies of sapphire leaves.

The floors in my section of the abbey are changing from stone to polished gold.

At night I hear male laughter echoing down our halls and corridors. The lights within our walls glow soft gold day and night, without electricity to source them. Our fires blaze, without wood to feed them. Our generators run only a small number of lamps. We removed the bulbs. Still they glow. Something unholy powers the rest.

Cruce is changing our home, taking it over, and I know it's only a matter of time before the jailer is evicted by the jailed, Paradise lost.

We talk of it amongst ourselves but so far have said nothing to outsiders. This is our home, for many of us the only good one we've known. If we do not find a way to stop the transformation, we will be forced to leave.

Soon.

We are not yet ready to admit defeat.

If we are driven forth, who will watch the abbey? Will we sit idly beyond its walls, praying the prisoner never breaks free?

I cradle my belly with one hand protectively. I've not yet begun to show. I devote most of my energy to s.h.i.+elding it. I must secure our future.

When I reach the bottom of the gla.s.s stairs in the gla.s.s house that the concrete demon Ryodan calls home, he is waiting for me.

But of course.

"Why did you lie about Sean?" I ask him.

"I didn't lie. You sewed my words into a cloth of your choosing. If you'll recall, I urged you to talk to him that night. Had you heeded my advice, you would have known, soul mates and all, confiding everything."

"Don't mock me."

"Don't make it so easy."

"You said you were collecting my debt from him."

"I said I was willing to accept the replacement of a missing server as full payment, and let you off the hook."

"And put me on another."

"You chose to become the worm. A little conversation goes a long way, Katarina. You've still not told Sean that Cruce f.u.c.ks you in your dreams."

I say nothing and he laughs.

"Yet here you are. Seeking me again. Come for more answers to which you won't listen. I only waste my breath once. Leave." I remain where I am.

He sweeps me with that cool silver gaze and arches a brow. "Be very certain you know what you're doing, Katarina," he warns softly. "If you ask something of me, I will not stop until I feel the request has been satisfied. As I deem fit."

I fix on two words he uttered. "You do not feel."