Fever 4 - DreamFever (12 page)

  It was a tight vote.

  I won by a narrow margin.

  I committed to memory the face of every woman who voted against me.

"What the feck is V'lane doing here?" I demanded, the moment Dani and I were alone.

   It was hours before we were. Rowena had decided to push me a little in front of the
other sidhe-seers after I'd won the vote, to see if I'd bend. She instructed me to clear no
less than a dozen Shades from the abbey before I ate or slept, in order to earn my keep.

  I'd bent for her this time.

   Not only did I enjoy tracking the Shades and driving them out into the late-afternoon
light--I'd been watching them long enough as my neighbors at the bookstore that I
knew all the places they liked to hide--but I've learned to choose my battles. I
understood the importance of throwing a few of the smaller fights, to keep my
competition off balance, underestimating me. Rowena would believe I was fully
cooperative, right up to the moment her ranks rebelled and overthrew her. I had no
intention of staying in the abbey long. I was here for my spear, answers, and to incite
riot among the Grand Mistress's followers. Wake them up to their calling. Get them to
ditch the old woman and become all they could be.

  "He showed up the day Barrons took you," Dani said. "You shoulda seen it! When he
heard you were gone, he went ballistic."

  "The Fae don't go ballistic, Dani." Impassive, they rarely showed emotion. Not even
V'lane's recently acquired reactions could be construed as "ballistic."

  Her eyes got big. "Dude, he iced Rowena."

  "You mean turned her into a block of it?" Dani was so full of slang it was hard to
know what she meant sometimes. Since Rowena was alive, I figured she had to be
speaking literally.

   Dani nodded. "From the neck down. Left her head un-iced so she could talk. Then
threatened to flick her with his fingernail so she could watch herself shatter. It was
wicked cool."

  "Why?"

   She shrugged. "He was �berpissed that Ro let you go. I told him nothing coulda
stopped Barrons, but that just seemed to piss him off more. Said he'd been stuck
guarding the queen and couldn't get to you. I think he planned to do what Barrons did,
and when he learned Barrons beat him to it by a few hours, he totally melted down. I
thought he'd ice us all."

   "Why is he still here? And after that little trick, how did he get to be such buddies
with Rowena?" I tried not to think about what might have happened if V'lane had
gotten to me first. It didn't seem to me that sex with another death-by-sex Fae would
have done anything but kept me Pri-ya. I could hardly imagine V'lane telling me stories
of my childhood or showing me pictures of my family to help bring me back.

  Dani grinned. "Easier to show you." She moved toward me so quickly that she
blurred out of sight and was gone.

  Then I was gone, too, or, rather, the hallway we'd been standing in was gone, and I
couldn't make out anything but blurs of motion and noise. I could feel Dani's hands on
my shoulders. She was whizzing me somewhere at an extreme rate of speed.

  I banged my elbow on something that grunted. "Ow!" I said.

  Dani snickered. "It helps if you keep your elbows tucked in."

  "Watch where you're going, kid!" someone yelled.

  "Oops, sorry," Dani muttered.

  Something slammed into my hip. "Ow," I said again. I heard someone curse; it faded
quickly.

  "We're almost there, Mac."

  When we stopped, I scowled at her and rubbed my elbow. It was no wonder she was
bruised all the time. "Let's just walk the next time, okay?"

  "Are you kidding me? S'the coolest thing in the world to move like I do! I'm not
usually so clumsy, but there are more people out of their rooms `cause you're here and

they're all talking `bout you. I know these halls by heart. I can do `em in my sleep, but
the fecking people get in the way."

  "Maybe you could persuade them to start signaling their turns," I said dryly. "You
know, like you do when you're bicycling around as couriers."

  Her face lit up. "Think they would?"

  I snorted. "Doubt it. We're not exactly their favorite people." I glanced around. We
were in a huge room filled with a U-shaped conference-table arrangement and dozens of
chairs. "Why did you bring me here, and what--"

  I broke off, staring past her at the enormous maps covering the walls.

  After a moment, I turned slowly.

  "We call it the War Room, Mac. S'where we keep track of things."

   The entire room was wallpapered with maps, hung from ceiling to floor. There were
notations everywhere, with Post-it notes stuck on some areas and enlarged inserts taped
to others. Some of the cities bore the Sidhe-Seers, Inc. (SSI) emblem of the misshapen
shamrock, our oath to See, Serve, and Protect.

  "Where's the key?" What did all these symbols and notes stand for?

  Dani saw where I was looking. "The shamrocks show the headquarters of the foreign
branches of Post Haste, Inc. Ain't no key. Ro won't let us write it down. Room's
majorly warded."

   "We have that many sidhe-seer offices?" I was incredulous. There were more of us
worldwide than I'd ever have guessed. SSI had obviously been global for a long time.
Our "war" had also gone global while I'd been out of it. The Unseelie hadn't stayed in
one place once they were freed. They'd ranged out over the entire planet and, according
to what I was seeing on the maps, certain castes seemed to prefer certain climes. There
were drawings and notes scribbled everywhere. It would take days for me to absorb it
all. I walked around the room slowly. "What are these?" I pointed to two areas close
together, which were marked off with brown slash marks.

  "Wetlands. There's a caste of Unseelie that's nuts about swamps, and they take you
down as fast as Shades. We don't go near them."

  "And these?" Squares, heavily outlined in bold black marker.

  Dani flinched. "Some of `em `ve been rounding up kids, really young ones. They
keep `em for a while before they ... do things with `em. We try to find where and break
`em out."

  I inhaled sharply and kept walking. I stopped when I reached a column of dates, with
numbers written next to them that had been crossed out dozens of times.

  The most recent date was January 1.

  The number next to it was a few billion shy of the nearly seven billion it should have
been.

  I pointed a finger and didn't even try to pretend it wasn't shaking. "Is this date and
number telling me what I think it's telling me? Is that how many of us are left on this
planet?"

   "By our estimates," Dani said, "total world population has been reduced by more than
a third." It was one of the few complete, well-spoken sentences I'd ever heard pass her
lips. I looked at her sharply and caught a split second of a completely different Dani--a
geeky, smart thirteen-year-old abandoned by everyone she'd ever trusted or loved, in a
world gone mad. It was so quickly masked by an insouciant grin that I wondered if I'd
really seen it at all. "Dude. Pretty intense, huh?" Her green eyes sparkled.

  "Dude me one more time and you're Danielle forever." I looked back at the maps. I
was never going to be able to sleep tonight. A third of our world's population was dead.
"How long was I ... out of it? What's the date?"

  "January seventh. And, sorry, it just slips."

  "What does this have to do with V'lane?" Keep talking, I told myself, so you don't
melt down. We'd lost a third of our planet's population! More than two billion people
were dead! They'd been dying the whole time I'd been a mindless animal. The guilt was
crushing.

   I followed the maps around the room, looking for Georgia, feeling sick inside. The
state had two inky spots smudged on it, one over Savannah and one over Atlanta, both
of which were only a few hours from Ashford, Georgia, my hometown. Most of the
spots on the maps were over major cities. "What are the dark smudges?" I asked tightly,
afraid I knew.

  "Dark Zones." My face must have betrayed my thoughts, because she added hastily,
"V'lane checked on your folks. He says they're okay."

  "Recently?"

  She nodded. "He keeps watch. Says he does what he can."

  I drew a deep breath, the first since I'd laid eyes on the maps. "How did the Shades
spread so quickly?" I demanded. "How did they even get overseas? Is the power out
everywhere in the world?"

  "V'lane says initially other Unseelie were helping `em, `til they decided the Shades
were chewing up their new playground too fast. Now he says Unseelie are fighting each
other for territory. Some of `em are even trying to get the power back up, to keep the
Shades out."

  I remembered the sky battle I'd seen, wondered what it had been about.

  "One time when I went into Dublin looking for you, I saw humans walking with
Rhino-boys, going down into a boarded-up bar. Didn't follow, `cause it freaked me out
so bad. They were girls, Mac. Dunno if they were Pri-ya, but they didn't look like it.
Looked like they went `cause they wanted to." Her lambent gaze clouded. "Mac, I think
Unseelie are the new vamps to some fecked-up groupies out there."

   "Does V'lane know all this? Are the Seelie doing anything about it?" I was horrified.
I knew my generation. We had a world of opportunities for instant gratification at our
fingertips, with few or no censors, and most of my friends hadn't had a daddy like mine,
who said things like, Don't confuse intensity of emotion with quality of emotion, baby,
when I'd gotten tangled up with class heartbreaker Tommy Ralston. The more he'd hit
on my girlfriends, the harder I'd worked to keep him. It was like I was addicted to
whatever made me feel most intensely, even though it was hurting me. Pain is not love,
Mac. Love makes you feel good. I missed my dad. I needed to see my parents. See with
my own eyes that they were all right.

  "V'lane says they're trying to stop the worst of the Unseelie," Dani said, "but they
can't kill each other, `cause they don't die and we got the sword and the spear. V'lane
says the Seelie want `em back, but so far none of `em have tried to take `em from us. He
says it's just a matter of time, though."

  Chaos. It was complete chaos. Unseelie free, fighting Seelie, fighting one another,
acquiring human groupies like Malluc�'s band of Goth worshippers. I wouldn't be at all
surprised if Malluc�'s cult had simply converted allegiance to the latest, greatest exotic
danger in town.

  A third of the world population gone!

   All because we'd failed to keep the walls up on Halloween. Because I'd failed. I
closed my eyes and rubbed them, as if it might somehow rub the horrifying reality of a
world with a third less people right out of existence, or at least out of my mind.

  "At first, we had no clue what was going on anywhere. No phones or text messages.
No email. No Internet. No TVs or radios. S'like living in the Stone Age. Well, maybe
not that bad," she allowed with a grin, "but you get the picture. Then V'lane offered to
help. Said he could sift around, gather intel, find out what was going on, carry
messages, take Ro places. After he iced her like that, she didn't trust him one bit. Not
that she ever trusted him. But it was an offer she couldn't refuse."

  "What about the Sinsar Dubh? I take it no one's gotten their hands on it yet?"

  She shook her head.

  "Has anyone seen it recently?"

  She shook her head again. "I think that's the real reason Ro let you stay, and would
have even if they'd voted against you. Just woulda pushed you `round harder. Her and
V'lane been swapping information, bartering with each other. She told him what I told
her I saw in the street the day I rescued you--"

  "I wondered how V'lane knew about that." I might have found his knowledge of the
Unseelie Princes incriminating, except both V'lane and Barrons always seemed to have
the inside scoop on everything. It no longer surprised me.

   "--in exchange for him telling her what you'd learned about how the Book was
moving around. That you were targeting it by tracking the worst crimes. But now
there's so much violence everywhere, and no newspapers or TV, so there's no way to
find the fecking thing."

  I thought about that and smiled. "Except for me." I was even more important now.

  Dani grinned back. "Yup. I figure we're the two most kick-ass weapons she's got."

  "But she's still keeping the sword from you, isn't she, Dani? Doling it out when she
feels like it?"

  Dani's expression soured and she nodded.

   It was time for some meddling, and Dani was definitely primed. "Doesn't it seem
wrong to you that the two most powerful sidhe-seers in this abbey aren't armed at all
times? Don't you think, since you're superstrong and superfast, you deserve to carry the
sword? I bet even your hearing is superheightened, isn't it? That's why you heard me
come in today, when no one else did, isn't it?"

  She nodded.

  "You're amazing, Dani. You're hands down the most valuable asset Rowena has.
And look at me--not only can I track the Book, I can Null the bastards. Freeze them,
shut them down cold while we kill them. Remember the night we fought together?" It
had been exhilarating. I wanted to do it again. I wanted to do it every night, until the
night was ours again. I wanted to be out there prowling, hunting them like they hunted
us. I wasn't willing to be afraid any longer. It was time for them to be afraid of me.

  Her eyes narrowed, her lips parted on a sharp breath, and she nodded again. Her
sword hand was clenching and unclenching, like mine did when I didn't have my spear
and I thought about Fae. I wondered if I got that almost-not-quite-human look on my
face sometimes, too.

  I didn't need to see a window to know that night was falling. I could feel the
approach of twilight in my bones, as surely as I imagined a vampire must. No matter
how heavily warded the perimeter of the abbey was, without my spear I felt like I was
missing an appendage: the most important one. I might be immune to death-by-sex Fae
glamour--though I wouldn't trust that completely until I'd tested it on some other Fae
besides V'lane--but they could still capture me if they came in force. And if turning me
Pri-ya wouldn't work this time, they could just torture me to make me do what they
wanted. I wasn't immune to torture. Pain bothered me. A lot. I needed my spear. Now.