Fever 4 - DreamFever (3 page)

   She won't keep her clothes on. Tears `em off like they burn her skin. Dude, I want to
look like her when I grow up. When I brought her here, Ro took her and locked her
downstairs in one of the old cells they used back when. Stone walls. Stone floor. Pallet.
Bucket for waste. She's not making any, `cause she's not eating or drinking, but still--
it's the principle! She's not an animal, even if she's acting like one. She can't help it!
Prison bars for a door.

   Ro said it was for Mac's own good. Said the Unseelie Hunters would track her, and
the princes would sift in and take her back to the Lord Master, if we didn't put her
below earth and surround her with wards. We spent most of the day I brought her back
painting symbols all over the abbey, with the Haven looking over our shoulders, telling
us what to do. They had pictures. Ro got `em out of a book in one of the Forbidden
Libraries. It was wicked cool! We had to mix blood into the paint. I know, `cause Ro
wanted mine. She didn't want me to tell the other girls. I know a lot of stuff the other
girls don't. The walls of Mac's cell are covered with wards, inside and out.

   I pass Liz in the corridor on the way to the stairs. She's wearing a MacHalo, blazing
like a small sun.

  "How is she?" I say.

  Liz shrugs. "No idea. Not my turn to be checking on her, and you won't find me
down there `less it is."

  When I pass Barb and Jo, I don't ask. Most of the sidhe-seers feel the same way as
Liz. They don't want Mac here, and nobody's taking any chances. There's no electricity
downstairs. Like medieval times. Torches burning in wall sconces. You get the picture.

  It'd make me nervous for Mac, `cept I tossed fifty or so click-on LED lights in her
cell and been keeping an eye on the batteries.

  "I don't know why you bother," Jo throws over her shoulder. "She spiked the Orb.
She flirted with a Seelie Prince. She was asking for it. Fae and human don't mix. That's
the whole point of our order--we keep the races apart. She got what she was asking
for."

   My blood boils. I thought I was at the door, about to go down, but I've got Jo
flattened against the wall, our noses separated only by the distance forced by the front
lights of our MacHalos.

  There's that look. Scared of me.

  "You should be," I say coolly. "Scared of me. Because if anything happens to Mac,
you're gonna be the first person I come looking for."

  She shoves me away, hard. "Rowena will take away your pretty sword. Without your
sword, you're not so tough, Danielle."

  Was she kidding me? "It's Dani." I hate that sissy name. I shove her back against the
wall.

  I can't fecking believe it, but she shoves me again. Still got that scared look but
defiant, too.

  "You might be faster and stronger, kid, but enough of us together could kick your ass,
and we're beginning to want to. You take care of a traitor, you start looking like one."

  I look at Barb, who shrugs as if to say, "Sorry, but I agree."

  Buncha idiots. I whiz off without a backward glance. Not wasting time or breath on
them. Mac needs me.

My first clue something's wrong is I open the door to the downstairs and it's dark. I
stand there, stupid for a second. No way all the torches burned out at once. I'm not
sensing Fae, and even the weakest sidhe-seer among us has range enough to cover the
whole abbey.

  No Fae around means one of us put out the torches. Means we got somebody in our
ranks wants Mac dead bad enough to try to outright kill her. And expects to get away
with it. I punch on my Click-Its, go into superspeed mode, and bingo--I'm at her cell.

  It's worse than I thought.

   When we brought buckets of paint downstairs, we never got around to carrying the
unused gallons back up, and now somebody's gone and dumped black paint all over the
floor and splashed it on the walls outside her cell, obliterating the wards.

  I toe it with a sandal. It's wet, fresh.

  I frown. Something's not making sense. With the torches out--sure, the Shades could
get down here. With the wards obliterated, they could even enter the cell--if there
weren't fifty lights blazing in there with her, but there are. So what's the point? Why
make a half-assed murder attempt that has no chance of working?

   "Aw, crap," I say, as it dawns on me. Because it's not Shades someone's expecting.
It's something bigger and badder, something not afraid of the light.

  No way. No way we got that serious a traitor in our walls!

  I mull the evidence. Brain says, way, Dani. Wise up.

  Don't want to leave her alone, but I can't guard her without a weapon! Still not
sensing Fae. I need forty-five seconds, tops. Gotta risk it.

  Freeze-frame!

Moving like I do is cool; `s `bout as close to being invisible as you can get. People say
they feel a rush of wind blasting by that practically blows off their hair. I'm still testing
the limits. I like running outside best, `cause there's less to crash into. Bruises are me.

   Point I'm making is, people can't even see me. So a person touching me when I'm
freeze-framing? Totally out of the question.

 I can sort of see what's going on around me, hear a little, too, but it's mostly a blur of
movement and noise.

  The noise that tips me off, moments before I get freaked out of my skin, is male
voices. Angry. Violent. No men are allowed in the abbey.

  Ever. No exceptions. The night Mac brought V'lane here, we all `bout died.

  But here they are. Men headed toward me. Lots of them. Gunshots! Fecking A! What
kinda idiot brings guns to this kinda war? What would guns kill? Oh, jeez, duh--us.
Why? Right ahead, coming faster than expected--

  AVOID! AVOID! AVOID!

   I call on every ounce of speed and agility I got, because something major weird is
happening and something's sort of in my space with me, and I'm having a shit of a time
avoiding it, and all the sudden I'm plucked from the air by my elbows and jammed into
a stationary position on the floor, so hard my teeth rattle.

  Plucked.

  Me.

  Snatched straight out of superwhiz speed. Forced to stop.

  I can't deal.

  I squeak.

  "Dani," a man says.

  I gape. Mac never told me what he looked like. I can't believe Mac never told me
what he looked like. I can't stop staring. "Barrons?" I breathe. It has to be him. It can't
be anybody else. This is what she lived with every day? How did she stand it? How did
she ever say "no" to him about anything? How does he know who I am? Did Mac tell

him about me? I hope she told him how awesome I am! I'm so embarrassed I could die.
I squeaked in front of him. Mice squeak. He takes up too much space. He yanked me
from midair.

  I scramble back, half-freeze-frame speed. I get the feeling he lets me. It chafes, bad.

  I look past him and nearly squeak again.

   Eight men fan in V formation behind him, packing weapons from head to toe, draped
in ammo, toting what look like Uzis. Big men. Couple of `em seem more animal than
human. One of `em looks like Death himself, with white hair, pale skin, and hot dark
eyes that assess restlessly, incessantly. They fix on me. I cringe. They all move sleek
and strange. Ooze arrogance like Fae, but they're not Fae. Sidhe-seers are plastered up
against the walls, trying not to draw attention to themselves. Nobody dead that I can
see. I think the gunshots I heard were warnings, sprayed into the air. Hope so. The
energy rolling off these dudes is fierce. Whatever Barrons has got--I can't put my
finger on it, but on a raw-power graph it's off the fecking charts--they've got, too.
Watching this crew stalk down the hall of the abbey makes even me feel like peeling out
of the way.

  One of the men has Ro banded by a forearm, knife at her throat.

  I should whiz in and save her. She's our Grand Mistress. She's our highest priority.
Thing is, I'm not sure I can make it past Barrons.

  "Get out of my abbey!" she's shouting.

   "Where's Mac?" Barrons says, soft, making my gaze dart back to him. Soft from him
is a surgical knife poised above your jugular. "Has the bitch hurt her?"

   If looks could kill! Someday somebody's gonna look at somebody about me like that.
I'm not about to tell him I'm pretty sure Ro was gonna let her die. "No. She's okay." I
clarify a little. "Well, I mean, as okay as she was when she got here."

  He gives me a look and says, "Where?" again.

  A cold, hard fact just got driven home for me with the doused torches and painted-
over wards. I can't keep Mac safe by myself. Even I have to sleep sometimes. With the
exception of All Hallows' Eve, Barrons has kept her safe.

  Still ... there's no way anything human plucked me out of the air like that. What is
he? I don't know how much Mac trusts him. "Promise me you won't harm Ro," I say.
"We need her."

  Something savage moves deep in his eyes. "I'll decide that when I see Mac."

  I feel savage all the sudden, too. "Well, where the feck were you when she needed
you?" I snarl. "I was there."

  Without another word, I freeze-frame out.

  Only two things I trust in these walls: me, and my sword. If my instincts are spot
on--as they always are--Barrons isn't the only thing headed Mac's way right now.

  I'm gonna beat `em all there.

  I let that old, cold sidhe-seer place in my head swallow me. I become power, strength,
speed, free!

  The door to Ro's office splinters.

  The sword is mine.

   Then I'm in Mac's cell, standing over her. She rolls over like she senses the heat of
my body. Clings to my leg. Rubs against me. Makes noises. I pretend nothing's weird.
She can't help herself right now. I don't look straight at her. I haven't since I got her
out. I don't know a lot about sex, but I do know what's happening to her is no way to
learn it. I been doing a little research. It's got me worried. There's not a single case of a
person turned Pri-ya coming back from it. Not one. They're mindless animals that do
whatever they're told until they die. And those were the cases of people turned by
Seelie. Never been anyone turned by Unseelie, and Mac got the whammy from three of
the most powerful! But Mac's got wicked balls. She'll claw her way back somehow.
She has to. We need her.

  A Fae sifts in!

   Wantneedsexdie blasts me. Hesitation ain't me! I jab my sword into its gut. It looks
down. Thing is stunned, disbelieving. We stare at each other. Unbearable perfection.
My cheeks get wet like last time I looked at a prince, and I don't have to wipe them to
know it's blood. If just looking at it makes my eyes bleed, how did Mac survive three of
them touching her? Doing things to her? Even mortally wounded, it's forcing me to my
knees. I want to let it do anything it wants to me. I want to obey it. I want to call it
Master. Ro says they're the equivalent of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, so
who's my sword stuck in? Death, Pestilence, Famine, or War? Dude, what a kill! I'd pat
myself on the back if it wasn't taking everything I got to keep from pulling my sword
out of it and turning it on myself. It's fecking with me. Trying to take me with it. Its
iridescent eyes blaze in what I'm pretty sure is its dying attempt to incinerate me. Then
we're both falling to our knees: it `cause it's dead, and me--I'm so fecking
embarrassed--'cause I think I just had my first ever orgasm killing an Unseelie Prince.
That's wrong. I hate it. I hate that it made me feel that now. It wasn't supposed to be
that way.

  Then Barrons is in the cell.

  Then there's another Unseelie Prince sifting in behind me. The thing is so powerful,
my sidhe-seer senses pick up on it before it becomes corporeal. I spin, lunge, but I don't
get the rush of killing it, because the bastard takes one look behind me and vanishes.

  I get that. I'm not stupid. It was more afraid of Barrons than of me and my sword.

  I whirl to face him, to demand answers, because I'm not letting him take Mac
anywhere until he explains a few things, but the look in his eyes shuts me down.

   Way to go, Dani, the look says. You're not a kid, say his eyes. You're a warrior, and
a bloody fine one at that. His look takes me in, measures me up and down, and reflects
me back at myself, and in the glittering black mirror of his gaze, I am one hell of a
woman. Barrons sees me. He really sees me!

    When he picks up Mac and turns away, I swallow a dreamy sigh.

    I'm gonna give Barrons my virginity one day.
 

                                Mac: in the cell at the abbey

I   am heat.

    I am need.

    I am pain.

  I am more than pain. I am agony. I am the other side of death denied the mercy of it. I
am life that should never have been.

   Skin is all I am. Skin that is alive that hungers that aches that needs to be touched to
endure. I roll and roll, but it is not enough. It makes the pain worse. My skin is on fire,
flayed by a thousand red-hot blades.

  I have been on the cold stone floor of this cell for as long as I can recall existing. I
have never known anything but this cold stone floor. I am hollow. I am barren. I am
empty. I do not know why I continue to be.

    But wait! In my stasis is there something? Is this change?

    I lift my head.

    There is other-than-empty near!

    I crawl to it, beg it to make my agony stop.

  The other-than-empty tries to put things in my mouth and make me chew. I roll my
head away. Resist. Not what I want. Touch me here. Touch me now!

    It does not. It goes away. Sometimes it returns and tries again.

    Time has no meaning.

  I drift.

  I am alone. Lost. I have always been alone. There has never been anything but cold
and pain. I touch myself. I need. I need.

  The other-than-empty comes and goes. Puts things in my mouth that smell and taste
bad. I spit them out. Those are not what I need.