Faefever

Chapter 19

It was the second longest night of my life. The longest is yet to come.

I passed the time culling my memory for good ones, reliving them in vivid detail: those two years when Alina and I were in high school together; the trip we’d made as a family to Tybee Island, the guy I’d met there, who gave me my first real kiss, out in the waves where my parents couldn’t see us; my graduation party; Alina’s farewell bash before she’d left for Ireland.

Silence came long before dawn.

It was absolute; the hours from five to seven were so unearthly quiet I was afraid some cosmic calamity had befallen my closet; that a Fae realm had been victorious in the battle for the right to exist at my precise latitude and longitude, and me and the mops had been relegated Elsewhere. Precisely where Elsewhere might be I had no idea, but at 7:25 A.M., the moment of sunrise, it was still so utterly silent that when I placed my hand on the doorknob, it occurred to me to wonder if I might open it onto the vacuum of Space.

It would certainly simplify things.

I would be dead, and no longer have to worry about what the day might bring.

If I opened the door, I had to go out there. I didn’t want to. My closet was cozy, safe, perhaps forgotten. What would I find out there? How would I get out of the city? What existed beyond Dublin’s boundaries? Had we lost parts of the world last night, in a metaphysical battle between realms? Was Ashford, Georgia, still where it was supposed to be? Was I? Where would I go? Who would I trust? In the grand scheme of things, finding the Sinsar Dubh suddenly seemed a minor issue.

I cracked open the door, glimpsed the lower platform beyond, and exhaled with relief. Distastefully, with meticulous care, I strapped my spear harness back on. Unseelie marched through my blood, posturing aggressively. It would continue to do so for days, and I would fear my spear the entire time. I eased from the closet. After a thorough look around to make sure no Shades had assumed squatting rights during the night, I clicked myself off and ascended to the belfry.

When I stepped into the stone archway, I exhaled another sigh of relief.

The city looked mostly the same. The buildings stood. They hadn’t been burned or demolished, and they hadn’t vanished. Dublin might be worse for the wear, her party dress torn, hose run, stiletto heels broken, but she was in dishabille, not dead, and could one day be craic-filled and vibrant again.

There was no foot or motor traffic. The city looked abandoned. Though signs of rioting littered the streets, from cars to debris to bodies, there were neither people nor Fae moving around down there. I felt like the last person left alive.

There were no lights on, either. I checked my cell phone. No service. By nightfall, I was going to have to be holed up safely again.

I watched the city until day had fully dawned, and sunlight splintered off streets cobbled with broken glass. In the past forty-five minutes, no one and nothing had moved. It seemed the Unseelie foot soldiers had scrubbed Dublin clean of human life, and moved on. I doubted the Shades had gone. I could see greenery on the outskirts of the city. They’d probably gorged until the first rays of morning had forced them to retreat to their hidden cracks and crevices.

I blessed whatever fates had inspired me to make my MacHalo. It looked like it was going to be an integral part of keeping myself alive for a while. Impossible to stay to the lights when there were no lights to stay to.

First on my agenda was to find batteries, and cram my backpack full of them. Second was food. Third was wondering if Barrons could still track me by the tattoo at the base of my skull in a world that had merged with Faery realms, and if that was a good thing or a bad thing? Would V’lane come searching for me? Had the sidhe-seers survived? How was Dani? I didn’t dare let my thoughts turn toward home. Until I found a phone that worked and could call, I couldn’t handicap myself with those fears.

At the top of the rickety ladder, I slipped off my spear harness and dropped it the hundred-plus feet to the floor below, tossing it into the corner near the door. If the rungs gave way again, I would not fall on my own spear.

I descended slowly, carefully, and didn’t breathe normally again until I’d reached the bottom. I’d eaten all the Unseelie I’d diced and jarred. I felt safer with a stash on me. I wanted more. Needed more. Who knew what battles I might encounter today?

I grabbed a loop of the spear harness, slid it over my shoulder, and stepped through the door, head cocked, listening for voices, movement, any sign of danger. The church was eerily quiet, flatly so. I inhaled, taking full advantage of my Unseelie-enhanced senses. There was a peculiar odor in the air, one I couldn’t place. It appealed yet. disturbed me. It smelled kindred. but not quite. I hated not having my sidhe-seer senses. I hated not knowing if there might be Fae right around the corner, waiting to ambush me.

I moved furtively forward and added a fourth note to my mental agenda: new footwear. Tennis shoes. Rare are the boots crafted for stealth, and mine weren’t.

Midway across the anteroom, I stopped. To my left was a wide flight of marble stairs, swathed by a carpeted runner that descended to tall double doors exiting the church.

To my right was the entrance to the chapel. Even beyond its closed doors, I could smell the inner sanctum, the faint, cloying scent of incense and that other, elusive, spicy scent that disturbed and intrigued me. In the dim light of the hushed morning, the white doors of the oratory seemed to glow with a soft, unspoken invitation.

I could turn left, and head out into Dublin’s streets, or go right, and take a few moments to confer with a God I’d not spoken to much in my life. Was he listening today? Or had he shaken his head, packed up his Creation Kit, and headed off for a less screwed-up world late last night? What would I talk about? How cheated I felt by Alina’s death? How angry I was at being alone?

I turned left. There were easier monsters to deal with in the streets.

At the top of the stair, lust blasted me, incinerated my will, awakening exotic, excruciating sexual need. For a change, I welcomed it.

“V’lane!” I exclaimed, yanking my hand from the top button of my jeans. I could feel him outside the church. He was moving toward me, down the sidewalk, up the outer stairs, about to enter. He’d found me! I caught myself thanking the God I’d just refused to talk to.

The doors opened and I was blinded by sunlight. My pupils constricted to pinpoints. Framed in the entrance, V’lane’s hair shimmered a dozen shades of gold, bronze, and copper. He looked every inch the avenging angel in a way Barrons never could. There was that unusual scent; the one that beckoned and bedeviled me. Rolling off his skin. Did he always smell this way, and I could only pick it up now because I had Unseelie-heightened senses?

Spiked by his dark brethren, I wasn’t sensing V’lane as a Fae. I felt no nausea. His appearance had been preceded only by his lethal sexuality. He was impacting me as he would any woman. It was no wonder heads turned when we went places. His allure was even stronger with my sidhe-seer senses dead, as if some special quality in my blood normally shielded me from his full effect, but couldn’t when my veins ran with Fae.

Whatever the reason, his impact was formidable today. It was even more intense than the first time I’d encountered him, when I’d had no idea what he was. My legs felt weak. My breasts were heavy, aching, and my nipples burned. I wanted sex, needed sex. Violently. Had to have it. Didn’t care about repercussions. I wanted to fuck and fuck until I couldn’t move. Hadn’t he said he could give it to me without hurting me? Mute himself, protect me from being harmed or changed?

“Turn it off,” I forced myself to say, but I was smiling when I said it, and my command lacked heat.

I was so relieved to see him!

My sweater was on the floor. I bent to pick it up.

He moved from the shaft of brilliant sunlight and glided up the stairs. “Sidhe-seer,” he said.

As the door closed behind him, and the anteroom returned to its dimly lit state, my pupils dilated, adjusted, and I realized my error. Gasping, I took a step back. “You’re not V’lane!”

The exotic prince’s gaze fixed on my breasts, sculpted by a lacy bra. I pressed my sweater to my chest. He made a sound deep in his throat and my knees buckled with sexual anticipation. Only with immense effort did I remain standing. I wanted to be on my knees. I should be on my knees. He wanted me on my knees. And hands. My head was vacuumed of thought. My lips and legs moved apart.

He stepped closer.

I fought a frantic battle with myself, managed to step back.

“No,” he said. “I am not.” Lids lowered over alien, ancient eyes, lifted. “Whatever that is.”

“Wh-who are you?” I stammered.

He took another step forward.

I took another step back. There went my sweater again. Shit.

“The end,” he said simply.

The doors leading to the inner sanctum opened behind me. I felt the draft of passage, and more of the strange, disturbing scent filled my nostrils.

Lust sledgehammered me, front and rear.

“We are all the end,” a cold voice floated over my shoulder. “And beginning. Soon. Later. After.”

“Time. Irrelevant,” the other replied. “Round is round.”

“We are always. You are not.”

They might as well have been speaking a foreign language. I turned, hardly able to breathe. There was a lacy bra lying on the floor at my feet. It was mine. Shit again. The air was cool on my flushed skin. I would not ask “after what?” There were two of them. Two death-by-sex Fae. Two princes. Could I outrun them? Could I survive them? They could sift. I was between them. Could I Null them? Oh, God, not with my sidhe-seer abilities dead! “Do you know V’lane? He’s a Seelie Prince,” I managed to get out through lips that ached for touch, for fullness that had only been hinted at by the sensation of V’lane’s name piercing my tongue. I wanted to drown in men. I wanted to be stuffed plumper than a sausage. Lips would do. So would other things. I looked from one of their crotches to the next. I shook my head, violently. My mouth was parched, my head spinning. “He protects me.” Maybe they were friends of his. Maybe they could summon him. Maybe they feared him and would back off.

I wouldn’t have been surprised by villainous laughs, sneers, ribald comments—after all, I was standing there naked from the waist up. I expected some comment, some expression, any expression, but they merely rotated their heads on their necks with eerie smoothness, and examined me in a manner so far from human that my blood ran cold and I stopped breathing.

I knew who they were. They were no friends of V’lane’s. That alien gesture had given them away.

When I breathed again it was a great, sucking inhalation.

These were the Unseelie Princes. Fae that had never had the opportunity to study us, learn our habits, perfect glamour through mimicry; Fae that could employ our language but only void of reference or metaphor; that had learned about our world from a great distance, by proxy; that probably didn’t even grasp the basic Fae concepts of stasis and change. Fae that had never been free, never drunk from the cauldron, never had sex with a human woman.

But they planned to have sex with me. It was pouring off them in immense, hungry, dark waves. Lust laced the room, explosive as dynamite, its fuse dangerously short. The air reeked of it. I was drawing it in with every breath, feeding an unquenchable, exquisite Fae fever.

A third one glided into the church.

What had Christian said? Myth equates the heads of those four houses, the dark princes, with the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Pestilence joined Death and Famine in God’s house. Now only War remained unaccounted for. I hoped he would stay that way.

They closed in on me, a circle of three, morphing from one shape to the next as they came. Shifting shapes, colors, and. something else that might have been a dimensional nature. I see 3-D, not 4 or 5. My eyes couldn’t explain to my brain what they were seeing so they just settled for pretending they weren’t seeing it. V’lane said the Fae have never revealed their true face to us. That may have been what I glimpsed.

Swallowing my fear of the only weapon I had to use against them, I jerked out the spear, dropped the harness, and pivoted in a threatening circle.

“Stay back!” I commanded. “This is a Seelie Hallow. It can kill even princes! Just try me!” I stabbed at the nearest one. He paused, regarded the spear then raised incandescent eyes to mine. He swiveled his head upon his neck, and glanced at the others, then back at the spear in a way that made me look, too.

I discovered with horror that my hand was turning it toward me, slowly, slowly, until the tip, the deadly, flesh-rotting tip was pointing straight at me. I tried to turn it away, to point it at him, but I couldn’t move. My brain was issuing orders my body refused to obey.

Rape was horrific enough. There was no way I was going to die like Mallucé afterwards.

When the tip was a mere quarter inch from my skin, I tried to fling the spear away, hoping I could, and they’d just forget about it. My release mechanism worked as my override had not—a thing that would make sense to me one day—and the spear clattered across the floor, through the door into the chapel. It crashed into the base of the pedestal of holy water with such impact that water sloshed over the side, and hissed and steamed when it hit the spear.

The princes adopted static form, became males so unutterably beautiful that looking at them was a moment of such exquisite perfection that it hurt my soul, and I gibbered wordlessly. They were naked except for glistening black torques that writhed like liquid darkness around their necks. Their supple, golden-skinned bodies were tattooed in brilliant, complicated patterns that rushed over their skin, kaleidoscopic storm clouds across a gilded sky. Lightning flashed in their glittering eyes.

Deep within me, I felt answering thunder.

I couldn’t look at them. They were too much. I turned away but they were there again, forcing me to gaze upon their frightening, fantastic faces. My eyes widened, widened still.

I wept tears of blood that scaled my cheeks. I scrubbed at them with my fingers, and they came away seared, crimson.

Then the princes’ mouths were on my fingertips, with tongues of soothing coolness, and fangs of licking ice, and a beast far more primitive than Savage Mac, and far beyond my control, yawned and stretched her arms above her head, and awakened with a delicious sense of anticipation.

This was what she’d been born for. What she’d been waiting for all this time. Here. Now. Them.

Sex that was worth dying for.

I kicked off my boots. They peeled away my jeans and underwear, and turned me between them, kissing, tasting, licking, taking, feeding from the passion they fed in me, slamming it back at me, taking it, returning it again, and with each transfer between us it grew into something bigger than me, bigger than them, into a beast of its own.

With some distant part of my mind I recognized the horror of what was happening to me. I tasted on their perfect lips the emptiness within them, and understood that beneath the flawless, velvety, golden skin, far beneath the waves of Eros I was drowning in. there was nothing but. an ocean of. me.

I glimpsed, even as I surrendered to it, the true nature of the Unseelie princes. They are voids of what they are not, and crave most: passion, desire, the fire of life, the capacity to feel.

Some essential component in them had been lost long ago, or perhaps frozen out of them by seven hundred thousand years of icy incarceration, or perhaps they’d come into being via the king’s imperfect Song, equally imperfect and empty. Whatever the cause, the most intensely they could feel was through sex. They were maestros of lust, eternally denied music in their realm, surrounded by others also void, without a human’s body to play the melody upon.

But with a human, so long as she felt, so did they, and they would gorge on her song, until the concert hall fell silent, the passion turned to ash, and she died, her body gone as cold as that place inside them where life could never be fully realized.

Empty, they would find another woman to play, and gorge again, giving her sex at its most elemental, at its purest, and most potent, channeling all that it was to be alive out of her, back into her, and out again. My orgasms were not petit mal but repeated births, a re-creation of myself every time I came. It was sex that was life that was blood that was God that filled every empty orifice I had, inside and out.

And it was killing me.

And I knew it.

And I had to have more.

We rolled and slid across the cool marble floor of the anteroom, my three dark princes and I, seeking purchase on the carpeted stairs, one beneath me, one behind, one inside my mouth.

They moved deep in me, filling me with sensations as kaleidoscopic as their tattooed bodies. I narrowed to a tiny blossom, exploded outward, and fragmented again and again into bits of shattered woman. They tasted of nectar, smelled of dark, drugging spices; their bodies were hard and sculpted and perfect, and if every now and then the ice of their black torques and pink tongues and white teeth were sharp nips of frostbite at my skin, it was a small price to pay for what they did inside me.

I felt my mind slipping; moments of my life flashed before my eyes, before dropping away to some forsaken place. I cried out, begging to be freed, but my mouth shaped only words of instruction, and demand: more, harder, faster, there.

My last month in Dublin, with all its hopes and worries and fears, flashed through my mind—and was forgotten. There went the day I’d spent in Faery with Alina, followed by all memory of Mallucé and Christian and the O’Bannions and Fiona and Barrons, and meeting Rowena in the bar, that first night in Ireland. My summer was flying backward past my eyes, falling away. Was there a fourth male kissing me now? Tasting me? Why couldn’t I see him? Who was he?

I pricked myself on the day of Alina’s death, then it was gone, too, and that day hadn’t happened, and my life continued to unfurl backward.

I lost my college years to Pestilence’s kisses. I bade farewell to high school with Famine spurting sweetly in my mouth. I lost my childhood in three Fae Princes’ arms. If there was a fourth, I never saw his face. Only felt the strangeness of another, who wasn’t quite the same.

And then I’d never been born.

I was only now.

This moment. This orgasm. This hunger. This endless emptiness. This mindless need.

I was aware that others had entered the anteroom but I could not see beyond my dark princes. Didn’t care. More was good.

When my princes drew away from me, my body grew so cold I thought I would die. I writhed on the floor, begging for more.

Someone reached for me.

I grasped with both hands for the succor of touch, tossed a tangle of hair from my eyes, and looked up, straight into the face of the Lord Master.

“I think she’ll obey me now,” he murmured.

Obey him?

I’d die for him.