Fever 4 - DreamFever (21 page)

  Dani slanted me a narrow-eyed look. "Don't you kinda think there'd be guards or
something?"

  "I think making it through the Dublin night alive and figuring out where this place is
might be all the guards it needs," I said dryly. I shoved at the door. It didn't budge.
"That and getting the door open." I slipped off my MacHalo and strapped it, still
blazing, onto my pack. I tousled my hair to get rid of hat-head.

  Dani joined me, and together we shoved open the door and got our first look at
Chester's.

  I love you so much you must kill me now ...

   The music was so loud, the bass vibrated my bones. They were playing Marilyn
Manson's "If I Was Your Vampire," but it had been rerecorded to a completely
different beat--a little dreamier, a little darker, a thing I wouldn't have thought possible.

  I stood in the doorway and stared.

  Here was the new Temple Bar. Gone underground.

   Chester's: slick, chic, the height of urban sophistication married to industrial muscle.
Chrome and glass, black and white. Coolly erotic, basely sexual. Manhattan posh wed
to Irish mob.

  Everything's black, no turning back ...

  The place was huge, the tables packed. The tiered dance floors were crammed with
hot bodies. It was standing room only. I was astonished to see that so many humans had
survived and were still in Dublin--partying, at that. Under other circumstances, it might
have been a pleasant surprise.

  These so weren't other circumstances.

  Dani grabbed my arm. It would bruise. "Un-fecking-real," she breathed.

   I nodded. I'm a sidhe-seer. To me, things are simple: There are two races--human
and Fae. I work with V'lane because I have to in order to save my people. I'll work with
the Queen of the Fae for the same reason. But it's programmed into my genes, coded
into my blood, that these two races were always intended to live separately, and it's my
job to keep things that way.

  Chester's was a sidhe-seer's nightmare.

  It was crammed with Fae and humans--mingling.

  No, it was worse than that. They were socializing.

  Oh, who was I kidding? Young, attractive humans by the dozens were flirting
outrageously with Unseelie. On one of the dance floors, half a dozen girls were licking a
Rhino-boy's sharp yellowed tusks with pretty pink tongues. His beady eyes gleamed; he
was grunting like a pig and stamping a hoof.

  On another dance floor, a blond had pulled up her shirt and was rubbing her bare
breasts against a tall, dark faceless Fae, while two other women tried to push her away
so they could have their turn.

  In a booth, a shirtless male waiter, showcasing his chiseled abs with heavily oiled
skin, was caressing the ... uh ... udders of a thing I'd never seen before and hoped I
wouldn't again.

  Beside me, Dani stiffened. "Ew. Just ew! That's disgusting." She made a gagging
noise in the back of her throat. Then she snickered. "Sure gives a whole new meaning to
the phrase `I gave her the finger,' don't it?"

  "What? Where?"

  She pointed.

  A woman was sucking erotically on the tip of a Rhino-boy's stumpy finger--which
he'd given to her by cutting it off his hand.

  I inhaled sharply as, the reality of what was going on here smacked me between the
eyes. Humans weren't just cozying up to the newest exotic big-bad because it was
something different and exciting.

  As Dani had feared, Unseelie were the new vamps.

  My generation has an incurable, bottomless obsession with the undead. The heavily
romanticized version, of course: the defanged fangbanger, not the real deal, which is
really dead and really kills you.

  As I watched, the woman bit down hard and began chewing with an expression of
near-religious ecstasy.

   These humans were eating Unseelie--not to fight them off and reclaim our world, but
for the rush of it.

  Unseelie flesh--the new drug.

  "They're trading sex for the high," I said flatly.

  "Looks like," Dani said. "Let's just hope those skanks can't get knocked up."

  The thought was too awful to contemplate.

  A young Goth-girl with feverishly bright eyes approached. "You better hurry! The
song's almost over!"

  "So?" Dani said.

   Goth-girl looked her up and down. "Not a bad idea. Gangly and awkward might just
intrigue. They like experimenting."

  I didn't have to look at Dani to know her hand had gone inside her long coat to her
sword. "Easy, Dani," I said softly. "You're not."

   But the girl was already going on, vapidly intense. "You two must be new. They play
it once a night, and while it's playing you can try to persuade one of them to choose
you. Otherwise, you aren't allowed to approach them. Competition's fierce. It can take
weeks to get one to notice you."

  "Choose you for what?" I encouraged.

  "Where've you been all this time? To make you immortal like them. If you eat
enough sanctified flesh, you become immortal, too. Then you get to go to Faery with
them!"

  I narrowed my eyes. Did eating Unseelie really change you? Or were the dark Fae
capitalizing on a lie? I was inclined to believe the latter. Malluc� had eaten it constantly,
long-term, and had never become immortal. "How much is enough?" I fished.

   She shrugged. "I don't know. Nobody knows yet. It keeps wearing off. But we will.
I've had it four times! It's incredible! And the sex--OMG! See you in Faery," she
chirped brightly, and dashed off, and I didn't have to hear anyone else say it--although
I would hear it so many times over the next few months that I'd want to kill
somebody--to realize I'd just heard one of the many strange new buzz phrases in this
strange new world.

  "This is worse than an IFP," Dani muttered. "I feel like I'm stuck in an IFCF."

  I raised a brow.

  "Interdimensional Fairy Cluster Fuck," she said sourly. "Don't they see what's
happening? Don't they know the Unseelie are destroying our world? Don't they see
we're gonna die out if we don't stop them?"

  Apparently they didn't care. I needed a drink. Badly. Pushing through the crowd, I
headed for the bar.

A     heavily industrialized version of Trent Reznor's "Closer" was playing by the time
I grabbed a bar stool and barked at the bartender's back that I needed a shot of top-shelf
whiskey and make it fast.

  I want to feel you from the inside ...

  Due to recent experience, I had a far greater understanding of the darker half of the
Fae race than I'd ever wanted. I knew the emptiness that drove them. I'd been food for
their bottomless hunger.

   Chester's was full of the Unseelie King's abominations, and humans were welcoming
them, competing to get noticed by them, willing to let them "feel them from the inside"
if that was what it took to get their fix, seduced by the promise of heightened strength
and senses and the temptation of immortality. I'd never understood why anyone would
want to live forever. It had always seemed to me that death lent life a certain poignancy,
a necessary tension.

  "Maybe two billion of us needed to die," I muttered. I was in a foul mood.

  "I'll take one, too." Dani hoisted herself onto a stool beside me.

  "Nice try."

  "You ever gonna let me grow up? Or you gonna be like everybody else?"

  I looked at her, then amended my original order to two shots of Macallan, one-
hundred-proof. Daddy had done the same thing to me at her age. Tough love.

  Shot glasses clinked on the polished chrome bar top, accompanied by a deep "Hey,
beautiful girl."

   My gaze jerked to the bartender and I did a double take. It was the dreamy-eyed boy
that I'd first met while scouring a museum for OOPs and had later been surprised to
find working with Christian at Trinity College's ALD, the Ancient Languages
Department. My first impulse was pleasure that he'd survived. It was squelched by
suspicion. Coincidences make me nervous.

  "Small world," I said coolly.

  "Big enough." He flashed an easy smile. "Most of the time."

  "New job?"

  "City changes. Jobs, too. You?"

  "Unemployed. Nobody buying books." They were all out hunting one.

  "Different look. Going dark, beautiful girl?"

  I touched my hair.

  "More than the `do."

  "Enough to survive."

  "Hard to say when enough's enough."

  "Look who's working where."

  "Look who's drinking where."

  "I can handle myself. You?"

   "Always." He gave me another of those smiles and moved down the bar, tossing
glasses, pouring high, fast, and flashy.

   Beside me, Dani choked, spit, wheezed, and began to cough uncontrollably. When I
patted her back, she jerked away and skewered me with a glare. "What are you trying to
do? Kill me?" she squeaked, when she could speak. "That's petrol! Who would wanna
drink that?"

  I laughed. "You develop a taste for it."

   "I think I mighta been born with all the tastes I need!" She pilfered a handful of
cherries from across the bar, crammed them in her mouth, and hopped down from her
stool. "Grown-ups are weird," she said darkly.

  "Where do you think you're going?"

  "Take a look around."

  I didn't like the idea and told her so.

  "C'mon, Mac, I'm superfast and superstrong. Nobody can touch me. I'm the one
should be worried about leaving you alone, slowpoke."

  Put that way, she had a point.

  "Gimme room to breathe, Mac."

  She was fidgeting from foot to foot, and the look in her eyes said she was about to
whiz off whether I said okay or not. I had a sudden unwanted understanding of Rowena:
How do you mother a kid who's faster than you, stronger than you, and quite possibly
smarter? "Don't go far, and not for long, deal?"

  "Deal."

  "And be careful!" Wind ruffled my hair. She was already gone.

  "Who's the kid?" The dreamy-eyed boy was back. A shot clinked to the chrome
counter. I tossed it back, grimaced, gasped. Fire exploded in my gut.

  "Friend."

  "Good to have in times like these."

  "How'd you find this place?"

  "Same way as you, I imagine."

  "Doubt it."

  "Ever find Christian?"

  He was referring to the day I'd called the ALD dozens of times, hunting for the
young Scot. I'd been worried sick because Barrons had "Voiced" me into revealing that
the Keltars were spying on him, and I was afraid Barrons was going to hunt Christian
down and hurt him. "Yes." I didn't see any point in telling him I'd lost him again,
perhaps permanently.

  "Seen him lately?"

  "No. You?"

  "No. I'd like to."

  "Why?" Suspicion was me.

  "Friends--good to have in times like these."

  "What do you think of this place?" Why was he here? Another pretty boy in search of
immortality?

  "Life and death, beautiful girl. Been about it since the beginning. Will be `til the
end."

  "What's your poison? You want to live forever, too?"

  "I'd take some peace and quiet. A beautiful girl." He laughed. "A good book."

  "Man after my own heart. I love a good book, too." In the mirror above the bar,
something caught my eye. I tensed. In a booth behind me, the Gray Woman was holding
hands with the well-muscled, gorgeous waiter who'd earlier been flirting with the
udder-thing. I could see both what she was and what she was making him see. To him,
she was a Fae Princess, inhumanly beautiful, mind-numbingly sexual, gazing at him
with rapt adoration.

  Only I could see the open, oozing lesions with which she caressed him, with which
she was sucking his life away, leaving rotting teeth, rheumy eyes, parchment-thin gray
skin. She was making short work of him. He wouldn't last the hour.

  My hand went to the shoulder holster beneath my coat.

  "Watch yourself, beautiful girl," the dreamy-eyed boy said softly.

  I tore my gaze away from the mirror and stared at him. He was eyeing my coat,
watching my hand move beneath it. He couldn't possibly know what I was reaching for.

  "What are you talking about?"

  He looked behind me. "They're here, and ... well, you'll figure it out."

  Big hands bit down on my shoulders. There were two men behind me. I could feel
them. Big, electric, powerful men.

  "Pull that thing out," a man growled, "we'll take it from you and never give it back.
First rule of house: This is neutral ground. Second rule of house: Break a rule, you die."

  "Get your hands off me," I gritted.

  "We have the kid. You want to see her again, get up."

  My eyes narrowed. How had they gotten Dani? "There's no way you--"

  "We're faster."

  "Like Barrons?"

  There was no answer.

  Well, I'd found my eight, or at least two of them. And they had Dani. Sighing, I stood
and glared up at the Gray Woman in the mirror, but she didn't notice, too busy serving
herself off her waiter's well-muscled platter. My blood boiled. He was no longer
remotely good-looking. Barrons had told me the Gray Man rarely took so much that his
victims died. Apparently the Gray Woman had larger appetites. I revised my estimate:
He had another ten minutes, at most.

   The dreamy-eyed boy was reflected in the mirror below them. I stared. He didn't look
the same in the mirror. He was ... blurred around the edges and ... wrong, very wrong. I
shivered, struck by a soul-deep chill. I tried to bring his reflection into focus. The harder
I tried, the blurrier he became. The blurred shape cleared, gave me a sharp look. "Don't
talk to it, beautiful girl. Never talk to it."

  I gaped. "Her, you mean? The Gray Woman?"

  "It." He spat the word with such revulsion that I flinched.

  I looked down from the mirror at the real thing, not the reflection, and suddenly I
could breathe again. He was a boy. A handsome, dreamy-eyed boy. Not something I
wanted to run screaming from. "What `it'?"