Shadowfever (Fever #5)

by Karen Marie Moning

YOU FASHION FOR YOURSELF A PRISON OF WATCHES, CLOCKS, AND CALENDARS.

Hope strengthens. Fear kills. Someone really smart told me that once.

I thought I’d lost everything. How ignorant I was. He warned me. I had so much more to lose! I want to die. It’s the only way to stop the pain.

My death had been inevitable. I saw little point in drawing it out.

I was never immune to him. There were merely degrees of denial.

I told myself I’d never want a man like you, that you were too old, too carnal, more animal than man, with one foot in the swamp and no desire to come all the way out, when the truth was that I was terrified by what you made me feel.

I take care of what is mine.

How many more people will have to die before I learn how to live?

It’s funny the things people say when someone dies. He’s in a better place.

My heart is still lying on the ground next to Jericho Barrons.

There is nothing about me that is not a weapon, an asset, something to use to get what I want, including my body. I’ve learned a thing or two from Barrons: Power is sexy.

The heads of the Unseelie Princes swivel and they regard me. It’s hard to tell with them, but I think they suddenly find me very interesting.

It takes a lot to make a man kill a beautiful woman he has not yet slept with. Especially if he enjoyed her sister.

I thought it was the longest night of my life. I was wrong.

In my dead black heart, I feel something.

On the lips of my enemy, my sister’s lover, my lover’s killer, I taste the punishment I deserve. I taste oblivion. It makes me cold and strong again.

Over the years, I’ve begun to suspect that all the houses of which I’ve been dreaming are just different wings of the same great house. Today I realize it’s true. Why have I been dreaming of the White Mansion all these years?

Now that I’m a little over the edge anyway, I can admit something: My whole life, I’ve secretly been afraid that beneath my fiercely focused grooming and accessorizing, I’m, well … psychotic.

If I know Fae as well as I think I do, I just turned him on.

Love knows no right or wrong. Love is. Only is.

a ménage twat

She warms his frost. He cools her fever.

“T-the-fuck-M-I,”

“Spare me your condescending judgments and I’ll spare you mine,”

Our anger was as intense as our lust.”

The last prince of the Court of Shadows that the king created was the first dark prince to die. Cruce was killed in the ancient battle between the king and queen. Some claim it was the queen herself who killed him.” “Cruce was the fourth Unseelie Prince?”

By agreeing to be intimate with him, I expose myself on two levels: physically I get close enough to him that he could harm me, and emotionally I run the risk that every woman runs when she’s intimate with a man—where the body goes, a tiny piece of the heart tries to follow.

I suspect my sister was a little more … refined than I am.

I have goals. I focus on them.

Family isn’t always born; sometimes it’s found.

I see a look in his eyes now that was not there a short time ago. I am both a greater liability than he knew and a greater asset—and he likes it. He likes power: both having it and having a woman who has it.

We Southern women know a thing or two about men. We know to use their name often, to make them feel strong, needed, as if they have the final say even when they don’t, and to always, always keep them believing they won the best prize in the only competition that will ever matter on the day we said, “I do.”

am behaving,” I reply sweetly. “You can’t tell me they didn’t have that coming.” I’m getting better at reading him. He finds me amusing.

I scoff at the delicacy of his army. It’s ethereal, born to wisp about, seduce, and be served. Mine is earthy, solid. Born to gorge, kill, and rule.

I realize that whoever began the fairy tale that Fae don’t feel was selling pure bullshit. They feel the entire range of human emotion. They just handle it differently: with patience born of eternity.

Pestilence, Famine, War? I hope I stand next to Death.

Prince of Consuming Night. Prince of Glorious Dawn.

I should have spent more time focused on who I was inside and less on who I was outside. Hindsight, 20/20.

Sob and breathe? Or don’t sob and suffocate?

It’s not going to kill me. At least not today. I guess I amuse.

I will not die.

One minute I can’t wait to grow up and have sex; the next I hate people, and men are people; and, dude—isn’t semen about the most disgusting thing you ever seen? Like, eew, who wants some dude to squirt snot in their mouth?

We’re locked in mortal combat. It’s a war I will do anything to win.

I’m grateful I was born pretty. I need to know what he responds to.

Imperious. Beautiful. Arrogant. I can be that.

I will look every inch his princess. When I kill him.

I choke down food that tastes of blood and ashes.

“Ah, it’s to be the full frontal attack tonight. With that dress,” he says silkily, “I had hoped for seduction.”

I see something in his eyes that elates me. He’s not kidding about making me his queen. He does want me.

“Things change. I adapt. I cut away what is unnecessary as my circumstances change.”