Fever 3 - Faefever (7 page)

“She came to the ALD, looking for someone to translate a page of text.”

“What kind of text?” I thought instantly of the
Sinsar Dubh
.

“Nothing I could translate. My uncles couldn’t, either.”

I assumed his uncles were linguists and said so.

He smiled faintly, as if amused by the question. “They’re historians, after a fashion, knowledgeable about antiquities and such. I’ve never stumbled across a text they couldn’t translate.”

“Did you ever find out what it was?”

“My turn, Mac. I’ve a few questions of my own. What happened to you the other night? Why’d you cry off?”

“I told you. My dad called, and we got to talking about Mom and how she’s getting worse and I lost track of time. Then, by the time I got off the phone, something I ate for dinner wasn’t agreeing with me and I felt so sick I just went to bed.”

“Nice try,” he said dryly. “Now tell me the truth.”

“I just did.”

“No, you didn’t. You’re lying. I hear it in your voice.”

“You can’t hear whether I’m lying in my voice,” I scoffed. “Body language might tell you a thing or two, but—”

“Yes, I can.” He cut me off with a faintly bitter flash of that killer smile. “Literally. You lie, I hear it. And I wish I didn’t. You have no idea how often people lie. All the bloody time, about everything, even stupid things that make no sense to bother lying about. Truth between us, Mac, or nothing at all. Your choice. But don’t bother trying to fool me. You can’t.”

I began to ease off my coat, remembered my arsenal, and thought better of it, settled back in my chair, and crossed my legs, one high heel swinging. I searched his face. My God, he was serious. “You really know when people are lying?”

He nodded.

“Prove it.”

“Got a boyfriend?”

“No.”

“Is there a man you’re interested in?”

“No.”

“You’re lying.”

I stiffened. “I am not.”

“Yes, you are. He may not be a boyfriend but there’s someone you’re interested in enough that you’re thinking about having sex with him.”

I glared. “I am not. And you can’t possibly know that.”

He shrugged. “Sorry, Mac, I hear the truth even when the person isn’t admitting it to themselves.” One dark brow lifted. “I don’t suppose it might be me?”

I blushed. He’d just made me think it. Us. Naked. Wow. I was a perfectly healthy woman, and he
was
a gorgeous man. “No,” I said, embarrassed.

He laughed, gold eyes glittering. “Lie. A whopper. Gotta love that. Have I told you I’m a big believer in fulfilling a woman’s fantasies?”

I rolled my eyes. “I
wasn’t
thinking it before you said it. You put the thought in my head and then, there it was, and I was thinking it.” And that worried me, because I could think of only two other people—and I was using that term loosely about both—that I might have been thinking of having sex with
before
he’d made me think about having sex with him, and both were terrible choices. “This doesn’t prove anything.”

“Guess you’ll have to take me on faith then, until you get to know me. I take you on faith. I don’t ask you to prove that you see the Fae.”

”People think about having sex all the time,” I said irritably. “Are you aware of every time you’re thinking about it, and who with?”

“Bless the saints, no. I wouldn’t get anything done. Most of the time it’s just background music, you know, sex-sex-sex-find-in-it-before-more-perfectly-good-sperm-die, playing in my head, to an easy, sensuous beat, then somebody like you walks in and it ratchets up to that Nine Inch Nails song my uncle plays all the time for his wife.” He grimaced. “We leave the castle and go somewhere else when he does that.”

“Your uncle listens to Trent Reznor?” I blinked. “You live in a castle?” I didn’t know which thought was weirder.

“Big. Drafty. Not as impressive as it sounds. And not all my uncles are as cool as Dageus. Men want to be him. Women adore him. It’s irritating, actually. I never introduce my girlfriends to him.”

If he was anything like Christian, I could see why.

“Point is, Mac, don’t lie to me. I
will
know. And I won’t put up with it.”

I pondered his claim. I knew what it was like to be capable of doing something others would consider impossible. I decided to take him at face value, and see what came of it. Time would tell. “So, is it a gift of birth, like me being a
sidhe
-seer?”

“You don’t think being a
sidhe
-seer is a gift. Nor is my . . . little problem, and yes, much to my parents’ inconvenience, I was born this way. There are necessary lies. Or, at least, kind ones. I never got to hear any of them. I don’t get to hear them now.”

Alina had said the same thing: Necessary lies. “Well, look on the bright side of it, you don’t get to hear any lies, but nobody around you gets to tell any, either. Do you think it’s easy to be around someone that you have to tell the truth to all the—oh!” I drew up short. “You don’t have many friends, do you?” Not if he spoke his mind freely, and he looked like the kind of guy that did.

He shot me a cool look. “Why’d you cry off last night?”

“I had a close call with a Dark Hallow, and they make me too sick to function if I get too close.”

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and stared at me with fascination. “Now
that
was a celestial choir of truth, lass! You saw a Dark Hallow? Which one?”

“How do you know about the Dark Hallows? Who
are
you and what’s your involvement in this?” I didn’t need any more mystifying men in my life.

“How much truth will you give me?”

I hesitated only briefly. Of all the men I’d met in Dublin, he seemed the most like me; essentially normal, but afflicted with an unwanted, life-altering talent. “As much as I can, if you do the same.”

He nodded, satisfied, then settled back in his chair. “I come from a clan that, in ancient times, served the Fae.”

The Keltar, Christian told me, had once been High Druids to the Tuatha Dé Danaan, many thousands of years ago, during that brief time in which the Fae had attempted to play nice and coexist with man. Something had happened that shattered the fragile peace—he skimmed over this part—but whatever it was had caused Fae and Man to go their separate ways, and not amicably.

A Compact was negotiated to permit both races to exist on the same planet but keep the realms separate, and the Keltar were given the duty of performing certain rituals to maintain the walls between them. Over the millennia, they performed them faithfully with few exceptions, and if they failed in some small way, they always managed to make up for it in the nick of time.

But in recent years, the rituals stopped going as expected. On those preappointed nights of the year when the Keltar were to perform their magic, some other dark magic had risen up and prevented the pledge from being reinforced, and the tithe from being fully paid. Although this other magic hadn’t been able to collapse the walls between our worlds, it had seriously weakened them. Christian’s uncles believed the walls would not hold through another incomplete ritual. The queen of the Seelie, Aoibheal, who in the past had always appeared in times of crisis, had yet to be seen, although they’d invoked her by every spell they had at their disposal.

I was riveted by the story. The thought that, for thousands of years, a clan in the Highlands of Scotland had been protecting Mankind from the Fae fascinated me. Especially if they were all like Christian: gorgeous, sexy, self-possessed. It was comforting to know there were other bloodlines out there in the world with special, unusual powers. I wasn’t alone in my awareness of what was happening to our world. I’d found someone besides Barrons who had more information than me, and he was willing to share it!

“My uncles believe something has happened to the queen,” he said, “and as her power diminishes, another’s grows. The walls continue to weaken, and if we don’t figure out something by the time the next ritual must be performed, they’ll come down.”

“What’ll happen then?” I asked in a hushed voice. “Will the Compact be broken?”

“My uncles believe the Compact already
is
broken, that the walls are holding only because of the increasing tithes they keep paying. Fae magic is strange stuff.” He paused then said tightly, “At the last rites, we had to use blood, Keltar blood, in a pagan ritual. It’s unheard of. We’ve never used blood before. Uncle Cian knew how to do it. It was dirty magic. I could feel it. What we did was wrong but it was the only thing we could do.”

I understood that feeling. What I’d done to Jayne would never sit entirely well with me, but I’d been unable to think of an alternative. It hadn’t been dirty magic, just dirty tea. Manipulative. Ruthless. But I’ve begun to understand that you can only afford to play nice when there’s not much at stake. “And if the walls come down completely?” I reiterated my earlier question. I wanted to know just how bad things might get.

“When the Fae walked among us before, only the Seelie did. The Unseelie have been imprisoned for so long that mere whispers of myths remain. If the walls come down completely,
all
the Unseelie will be freed, not just the lower castes that are currently managing to get through somehow. The most powerful of the Unseelie Royal Houses will escape.” He paused and when he spoke again, his voice was low, urgent. “Myth equates the heads of those four houses, the dark princes, with the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”

I knew who they were: Death, Pestilence, War, and Famine. The Unseelie I’d seen so far were bad enough. I had no desire to ever encounter a royal dark Fae.

“It’ll get bad, Mac. They’ll turn our world into a living nightmare. My uncles believe the Seelie may not be able to reimprison the Unseelie if they escape.”

Was this why everyone was after the
Sinsar Dubh
? Did it contain the spells necessary to imprison the Unseelie, maybe even keep the walls from coming down in the first place? It would certainly explain why V’lane and the Queen wanted it, why Alina had wanted me to find it before the Lord Master did. No doubt if he got his hands on it, he’d hurry up and destroy it to make sure no one could ever imprison his army again. I wondered where Barrons fit in. Would he really sell it to the highest bidder?

I couldn’t dwell on the possibility of Unseelie overrunning our world. Keeping my thoughts tightly focused on my goals was the key to keeping my fears in check. “Tell me more about Alina.” At my swift change of subject, he looked relieved, and I realized I wasn’t the only one who felt like I was charged with an impossible task. It was no wonder Christian seemed mature beyond his years. He was. He had his own fate-of-the-world issues to deal with.

“I’m sorry, Mac, but I don’t have much more to say. I tried to make friends with her. Although my uncles couldn’t translate the text, they knew where it had come from, and we needed to know how she’d gotten it. It was a photocopy of a page from an ancient book—”

“—called the
Sinsar Dubh
.”
The Beast,
I thought, and my soul shivered.

“I wondered if you knew about it. What do you know? Do you know where it is?”

I didn’t know
exactly
where it was at the moment, and brandished that thought like a shield when I answered, “No,” in case he really was a walking, breathing lie detector. Because he was searching my gaze far too intently for my comfort, I added quickly, “What happened when you tried to make friends with my sister?”

“She rebuffed my efforts. She was deeply involved with someone and I got the impression he was very possessive. Didn’t like her talking to anyone.”

“Did you ever meet him?”

“No. I caught a glimpse of him once. Fleeting. Don’t remember much, which makes me believe he was Fae. They mess with your head if they don’t want you to see them.”

“Did you tell my sister the stuff you just told me?”

“I didn’t get the chance.”

“If you never became friends, how did you find out she was a
sidhe
-seer? How did you find out about me?”

“I followed her a few times,” he said. “She was always watching things that weren’t there, studying empty spaces. I was raised on stories of
sidhe
-seers. My family is . . . into old myths and lore. I put two and two together.”

“And me?”

He shrugged. “You were poking around Trinity asking about her. Besides, family’s a matter of public record, if you know where to look.”

With all my enemies, those were records I’d like destroyed. I was grateful my parents were four thousand miles away.

“Which Dark Hallow did you have a close call with last night?” he asked casually.

“The amulet.”

“Lie.”

I tested him. “The scepter.”

“Lie again. And there is no such thing.”

“You’re right. It was the box,” I said heavily.

“I’m waiting for the truth, Mac.”

I shrugged. “The
Sinsar Dubh
?” I offered, like I didn’t really mean it.

He exploded out of his chair. “What the—are you
kidding
me? No, no need to answer that, I know you’re not. You said you didn’t know where it was!”

“I don’t know. I saw it in passing.”

“Here? In Dublin?”

I nodded. “It’s gone. I have no idea where it was . . . taken.”

“Who—” Christian began.

“Hi, guys. What’s up?”

Christian’s gaze slid past me, to the door. He stiffened. “Hey, man, I didn’t hear you come in.”

I hadn’t, either.

“How long’ve you been standing there?”

“I just opened the door. I thought I heard you in here.”

I turned in my chair. The second time he’d spoken, I’d recognized the voice. The dreamy-eyed guy I’d seen in the museum and then run into later on the street the day I’d been interrogated by Inspector Jayne was filling the doorway with his dark, dreamy good looks. He’d told me he worked at the ALD, but I’d put him out of my mind. Like Christian, in another life, I’d have dated him in a heartbeat. Why, then, had it been Barrons I’d ended up kissing?

“Hey, beautiful girl. Fancy seeing you here. Small world, isn’t it?”

“Hey.” I blushed a little. I do that when a good-looking guy calls me beautiful. Especially now that every time I look in a mirror, I hardly recognize myself. Ironically, when your world comes completely unglued, it’s the paste of the everyday, meaningless little things that suddenly seem like real gems.