Fever 5 - Shadowfever (6 page)

In the House, away from my enemy, I find solace for a time. Grief, loss, pain melt away. I wonder if they cannot exist inside these walls.
The weight of my spear in the holster beneath my arm is back, heavy against my side. Like V’lane, Darroc has some way of taking it from me, but when we are apart he returns it. Perhaps so I can defend myself. I can’t imagine needing to in a place such as this.
There has never been and will never be another place in any realm, in any dimension, that holds me in such thrall as the White Mansion. Not even the bookstore competes for dominance in my soul.
The House is mesmerizing. If, deep down inside where I feel psychotic, I am angered by this, I’m too lulled by whatever drug it feeds me to focus on it for long.
I wander the rose-floored corridor, absorbing it in a dreamy daze. Windows line the right side of the hall, and, beyond the crystal-edged panes, dawn blushes over gardens filled with pink roses, wreathed heads nodding sleepily in the gentle morning breeze.
The rooms that open off this corridor are decorated in hues of morning sky. The colors of the hall, the day beyond, and the rooms complement one another perfectly, as if, from every angle, this wing was designed as an outfit, flawlessly accessorized, to be donned depending on the mood.
When the rose floor ends and a sudden turn in the corridor sets me on a lavender path, violet dusk clings to the windows. Nocturnal creatures frolic in a forest glade beneath a moon rimmed with brilliant cerulean. The rooms in this corridor are furnished in shades of twilight.
Yellow and reflective floors open onto sunny days and sunnier rooms.
Bronze corridors have no windows, only tall arched doors that lead into enormous, high-ceilinged, kingly rooms—some for dining, some filled with books and comfortable chairs, others for dancing, and still more for what I think are forms of entertainment I don’t understand. I imagine I hear echoes of laughter. Lit by candles, the rooms off bronze corridors are masculine and smell of spice. I find the scent intoxicating, disturbing.
I walk and walk, looking into this room and that, delighted by the things I find, the things I recognize. In this place, every hour of day and night is always available.
I have been here many times before.
There’s the piano I played.
Here is the sunroom where I sat and read.
There’s the kitchen where I ate truffles smothered in cream and filled with delicate fruits that don’t exist in our world.
Here, a flute lies on a table, beside an open book, next to a teapot decorated with a pattern as familiar to me as the back of my own hand.
There’s the rooftop garden, high atop a turret where I’ve gazed through a telescope at an azure sea.
Here, a library of endless rows of books, where I’ve passed time uncounted.
Each room is a study in beauty, each item in it adorned with intricate detail, as if its creator had infinity in which to work.
I wonder how long the concubine was here. I wonder how much of this house is her creation.
I taste forever in this place, but, unlike in the Hall of All Days, forever here is exquisite, gentle. The House promises a blissful eternity. It does not terrify or cow. The House is time as it was meant to be: endless, serene.
Here—a room of thousands of gowns! I dash through row after row, my arms spread wide, my hands fanning the fabulous fabrics. I love these gowns!
I pluck one from its hanger and spin around, dancing with it. Faint strains of music drift upon the air and I lose track of time.
Here’s a curio cabinet housing items I cannot name but nonetheless recognize. I pocket a few of the smaller trinkets. I open a music box and listen to a song that makes me feel I am drifting in space, enormous and free, more
right
in my skin than I’ve ever been, poised on the brink of all possibles. I forget everything for a time, lost in joy that is larger than the mansion itself.
In room after room, I find something familiar, something that makes me happy.
I see the first of many beds. As in my dreams, there are so many that I lose count after a time.
I wander sumptuous room after room, see bed after bed. Some of the rooms have nothing but beds.
I begin to feel … uneasy. I don’t like looking at these beds.
The beds disturb me.
I turn my head away, because they make me feel things I don’t want to feel.
Need. Desire. Alone
.
Empty beds
.
Don’t want to be alone anymore. So tired of being alone. Tired of waiting
.
After a time, I stop looking in the rooms.
I was wrong when I thought it might not be possible to feel negative things inside the White Mansion.
Grief wells up inside me.
I’ve lived so long. Lost so many things.
I force myself to focus. I remind myself that I’m supposed to be looking for something. A mirror.
I love that mirror
.
I shake my head. No, I don’t. I just need it. I don’t have any emotions about it!
It brings me such pleasure! It brings us together
.
White marble, Darroc said. I need to find white-marble floors. Not crimson, not bronze, not pink, and especially not black.
I envision the mirror as he described it: ten feet tall, five feet wide.
Gilt-framed, like the ones at 1247 LaRuhe.
The mirror is a part of the vast Unseelie Hallow that is the network of Silvers. I can sense Hallows. I can sense all Fae OOPs—Objects of Power. It is perhaps my greatest advantage.
I reach out with my
sidhe
-seer senses, expand and search.
I sense nothing. It didn’t work in the Hall of All Days, either. Impossible, I suppose, to sense a Silver while inside the Silvers.
My feet turn me, and I begin walking in a new direction with complete confidence. I’m suddenly certain I have seen the mirror I need many times and I know exactly where it is.
I’ll find the way out long before Darroc does. And although I will not leave without him—I have much use for him—it will please me to best him.
I hurry down a mint corridor, turn without hesitation onto an iridescent path, and rush down a pale-blue hall. A corridor of silver turns to blush wine.
The mirror is ahead. It draws me. I can’t wait to get to it.
I’m focused, so focused that the crimson hallway barely makes a dent in my awareness.
I’m focused—so focused on my goal that, by the time I realize what I’ve done, it’s too late.
I don’t know what makes me look down, but something does.
I freeze.
I’m at a crossroads, the intersection of two halls.
I can go east, west, north, or south—if such directions exist in the House—but whichever way I choose, the floor is the same color.
Black.
I stand uncertainly, berating myself for screwing up
again
, when suddenly a hand slips into mine.
It is warm, familiar. And much too real.
I close my eyes. I’ve been played with in Faery before. Who am I to be tortured with now? What is my punishment to be? Which ghost will nip at me now with needles for teeth?
Alina?
Barrons?
Both?
I fist my other hand so nothing can hold it.
I know better than to think if I keep my eyes closed my ghost will go away. It doesn’t work that way. When your private demons decide to mess with you, they demand their pound of flesh. It’s best to pay it and get it over with.
Then I can focus on finding my way off the black floor. I brace myself for how bad it’s going to be. I speculate that if golden floors in the Hall of ALL Days were bad, black floors in the White Mansion will be … forgive the pun … beyond the pale.
Fingers twine with mine. I know the hand as well as my own.
Sighing, I open my eyes.
I jerk away and scramble back frantically, boots slipping on the shiny black surface. I sprawl flat on my back with such a jolt that I bite my tongue.
I begin to hyperventilate. Does she see me? Does she know me? Is she there? Am I?
She laughs, a silvery sound, and it makes my heart hurt. I remember laughing like that once. Happy, so happy.
I don’t even try to get up. I just lay there and watch her. I’m bewildered. I’m hypnotized. I’m carved in two by a sense of duality I cannot reconcile.
Not Alina. Not Barrons.
At the juncture of east, west, north, and south, she stands.
Her.
The sad, beautiful woman who haunts my dreams.
She is so dazzling it makes me want to weep.
But she’s not sad.
She’s so happy that I could hate her.
She glows radiantly, she smiles, and it curves lips of such soft, divine perfection that mine part instinctively to receive her kiss.
Is this her—the Unseelie King’s concubine? No wonder he was obsessed!
When she begins to glide away down one of the corridors—the blackest of the four, the one that
absorbs
the light cast by candles in sconces—I push myself up.
Moth to a flame, I follow.
According to V’lane, the concubine was mortal. In fact, her mortality was the first domino in a long, convoluted line that toppled out of control and led to this moment.
Nearly a million years ago, the Seelie King asked the original Seelie Queen—since her death, many queens have risen, only to be ousted by another who achieved greater power and support—to turn his concubine Fae, to make her immortal so he could keep her forever. When the queen refused, the king built his concubine the White Mansion inside the Silvers. He secreted his beloved away from the vindictive queen, where she could live without aging until he was able to perfect the Song of Making and turn her Fae himself.
If only the queen had granted his one simple request! But the leader of the True Race was controlling, jealous, and small.
Unfortunately, the king’s efforts to duplicate the Song of Making—the mystical stuff of creation, a power and right that the queen of their matriarchal race selfishly hoarded—created the Unseelie, imperfect half-lives that he couldn’t bear to kill. They lived. They were his sons and daughters.
He created a new realm, the Court of Shadows, where his children could play while he continued his work, his labor of love.
But the day came when he was betrayed by one of his own children and found out by the Seelie Queen.
They clashed in a battle to end all battles. Seelie struck down their darker brethren, who sought only the right to exist.
The dominoes fell, one after another: the death of the Seelie Queen at the hands of the king; the suicide of the concubine; the act of “atonement” in which the Seelie King created the deadly
Sinsar Dubh
.
He rechristened himself the
Un
seelie King—never again would he be associated with the petty viciousness of the Seelie; henceforth he would be Unseelie, literally meaning
not
of the Seelie. He no longer called his home the Court of Shadows, in which he hid to perform his labor of love. It became simply Unseelie court.
By then, however, the court was a prison for his children, a macabre place of shadows and ice. The cruel Seelie Queen’s last act had been to use the Song of Making—not for creation, not to make his beloved immortal!—but to destroy, trap, and torture for all eternity any who had dared disobey her.
And the dominoes fell …
The book containing the Unseelie King’s knowledge, all his darkness and evil, somehow ended up in my world, being protected by humans. It was set loose in a manner that I have yet to determine, but of this I am certain: Alina’s murder, my screwed-up life, and Barrons’ death—all are the result of a chain of Fae events that began a million years ago over a single mortal.
My world, we humans, we’re just pawns on an immortal chessboard.
We got in the way.
Jack Lane, attorney extraordinaire, would put the Unseelie King, not Darroc, on trial and make a persuasive case against the concubine for guilt by association.
Because the unthinkable occurred and the original queen died before she had the chance to pass on the Song of Making to one of the princesses as her successor, the Fae race began to decline. Many princesses rose to the Seelie throne, but few lasted long before another wrested away her power. Queens were killed, others merely deposed and banished. Infighting grew and coups became more frequent. The Fae race became limited. All that was already was all that could
ever
be.
No new things could be made. Old powers were lost, and, over the eons, ancient magic was forgotten, until one day the current queen was no longer capable of reinforcing the weakening walls between realms and retaining control of the deadly Unseelie.
Darroc exploited this weakness and brought the walls between our worlds crashing down. Now Fae and human vie for control of a planet that is too small, too fragile, for both races.
All because of a single mortal—the domino that started all the others falling.
I follow the woman who I suspect
is
that mortal—in a not-quite-really-there kind of way—down the inky corridor.
If she is the concubine, I can summon no anger toward her, try though I might.
On their immortal chessboard, she was a pawn, too.
She is lit from within. Her skin shimmers with a translucent glow that illuminates the walls of the tunnel. The hall grows darker, blacker, stranger with each step we take. In contrast, she is holy, divine: an angel gliding into hell.
She is warmth, shelter, and forgiveness. She is mother, lover, daughter, truth. She is all.
Her pace quickens and she races down the tunnel, passing soundlessly over obsidian floors, laughing with joy.
I know that sound. I love that sound. It means her lover is near.
He is coming. She feels his approach.
He is so powerful!
It is what first drew her to him. She’d never encountered anyone like him.
She was awed that he chose her.
She is awed every day that he continues choosing her.
The stuff of him explodes through from the Court of Shadows, telling her he comes, filling her home (prison) where she lives a fabulous life (a sentence not of her choosing) surrounded by everything she wants (illusions, she misses her world, so far away and all of them long dead) and waits for him with hope (ever-growing despair).
He will carry her to his bed and do things to her until his black wings open wide, so wide, eclipsing the world, and when he is inside her, nothing else will matter but the moment, their dark, intense lust, the endless passion they share.
No matter what else he is—he is
hers
.
What is between them is without blame.
Love knows no right or wrong.
Love
is
. Only is.
She (I) rushes down the dark, warm, inviting hall, hurrying to his (my) bed. We need our lover. It has been too long.