Darkfever (Fever, #1)

by Karen Marie Moning

I was still as green as an unripe Georgia peach,

I dropped my bags on the bed, pushed the curtain aside, and looked out at the city where my sister died. I didn’t want it to be beautiful, but it was. Full dark had fallen and Dublin was brilliantly lit.

Women who wear all black are a different story,

“That hair, those eyes. And that skin! Och, aye, you’re an O’Connor through and through.

If you can’t keep your head down and honor your bloodline, then do us all a favor—go die somewhere else.”

It was the fog that got me lost. I would have been okay if it had been a sunny day. But fog has a way of transforming even the most familiar landscape into something foreign and sinister, and the place was already so foreign to me that it quickly took on sinister attributes.

I was afraid this part of the city was so deserted because the businesses had moved out when the gangs had moved in. Who knew what lurked behind those broken windows? Who knew what crouched beyond that half-opened door?

Barrons Books and Baubles proclaimed the gaily-painted shingle that hung perpendicular to the building, suspended over the sidewalk by an elaborate brass pole bolted into the brick above the door. Alighted sign in the old-fashioned, green-tinted windows announced Open.

Movies tell you what to think. A good book lets you choose a few thoughts for yourself.

She looked beyond me, over my shoulder, and uttered a single word like a benediction. “Jericho.”

“Jericho Barrons,” a rich, cultured male voice said behind me. “And you are?” Not an Irish accent. No idea what kind of accent it was, though.

He studied me with his predator’s gaze, assessing me from head to toe. I studied him back. He didn’t just occupy space; he saturated it. The room had been full of books before, now it was full of him. About thirty, six foot two or three, he had dark hair, golden skin, and dark eyes. His features were strong, chiseled. I couldn’t pinpoint his nationality any more than I could his accent; some kind of European crossed with Old World Mediterranean or maybe an ancestor with dark Gypsy blood. He wore an elegant, dark gray Italian suit, a crisp white shirt, and a muted patterned tie. He wasn’t handsome. That was too calm a word. He was intensely masculine. He was sexual. He attracted.

The dream had been so vivid I could still taste Corona with lime, smell coconut suntan oil, and feel the silk of trucked-in sand beneath my feet.

“I am unaccustomed to asking for what I want. Nor am I accustomed to bartering with a woman,”

I didn’t trust Jericho Barrons farther than I could throw him, which was a great big Not At All,

“You procured a hired conveyance at my establishment.” “We call them taxis where I come from. And bookstores.” God, he was stuffy.

I couldn’t imagine Jericho Barrons as a child, going to school, face freshly scrubbed, hair neatly combed, lunch box in hand. He’d surely been spawned by some cataclysmic event of nature, not born.

If he was winter, I was summer. If I was sunshine, he was night. A dark and stormy one.

The cramped room was suddenly stuffed to overflowing with Jericho Barrons. If a normal person filled one hundred percent of the molecules they occupied, he somehow managed to cram his to two hundred percent capacity.

He stopped circling, so I stopped too, his back to the wall, mine to the open door. In time, when I began to see patterns, I would see that he always positioned himself in such a fashion, never with his back to an open window or door. It wasn’t about fear. It was about control.

“Go home, Ms. Lane. Be young. Be pretty. Get married. Have babies. Grow old with your pretty husband.”

I resented the Barbie implications—Go procreate and die, I’m sure that’s all someone like you can do.

“The Sinsar Dubh is a book.” “A book? That’s all? Just a book?” It seemed terribly anti-climactic.

“Reconsidering your stay, Ms. Lane?” “Absolutely not.” “You’ll be going home in a box, then.” “Is that another of your threats?” “It is not I who will put you there.”

“If you are not with me, Ms. Lane, you are against me. I have no mercy for my enemies.”

He wanted the same thing I wanted and he was willing to kill for it. That made us enemies in my book any way I looked at it.

He laughed, a rich dark sound. “I do believe I’m being dismissed. I can’t recall the last time I was dismissed.”

There are two kinds of people in this world, Ms. Lane: those who survive no matter the cost, and those who are walking victims.” He pressed his lips to the side of my neck. I felt his tongue where my pulse fluttered, tracing my vein. “You, Ms. Lane, are a victim, a lamb in a city of wolves.

your sister was one of many students who pass through these halls each term and if she stood out at all—it was through her absence, not her presence.”

Born and raised in the Bible Belt, Mom had taken a strong position about cussing when we were growing up—A pretty woman doesn’t have an ugly mouth, she would say—so Alina and I had developed our own set of silly words as substitutes. Crap was fudge-buckets. Ass was petunia. Shit was daisies and the f-word, which I can’t even recall the last time I used, was frog.

I was going to find out exactly what the Sinsar Dubh was. I knew it was a book—but a book about what?

Sinsar Dubh1: a Dark Hallow2 belonging to the mythological race of the Tuatha Dé Danaan. Written in a language known only to the most ancient of their kind, it is said to hold the deadliest of all magic within its encrypted pages. Brought to Ireland by the Tuatha Dé during the invasions written of in the pseudohistory Leabhar Gabhåla3, it was stolen along with the other Dark Hallows and rumored to have found its way into the world of Man.

1Among certain nouveau-riche collectors, there has been a recent surge of interest in mythological relics, and some claim to have actually beheld a photocopy of a page or two of this “cursed tome.” The Sinsar Dubh is no more real than the mythical being said to have authored it over a million years ago—the “Dark King” of the Tuatha Dé Danaan. Allegedly scribed in unbreakable code, in a dead language, this author is curious to know how any collector proposes to have identified any part of it.

Werewolves? Oh please, just plain stupid. Who wants to get it on with a man who’s ruled by his inner dog?

[Four is a sacred number to the Tuatha Dé: four royal houses, four Hallows, four stones.]

When I get mad I have imaginary conversations in my head—you know, the kind where you say that really smart thing you always wish you’d think of at the time but never do—and

Alina made it sound like Dublin was some kind of great city where everybody was so nice and everything was so pretty, but nothing is pretty and nobody is nice

I must not have looked at him very closely yesterday because he wasn’t just masculine and sexual, he was carnal in a set-your-teeth-on-edge kind of way; he was almost frightening.

Criminals and barbarians. Now I understood the slightly exotic slant to the dark eyes, the deep gold skin, the bad attitude.

Lips compressed, face tight with fury, he dragged me up off the couch with a hand in my hair, grabbed my throat with the other, and began walking me backward toward the wall.

Grief was going to devour me, day into night, night into day, and although I might feel like I was dying from it, might even wish I was, I never would.

“I know people, Ms. Lane. They think they want to die, sometimes even say they want to die. But they never mean it.

We couldn’t have been less each other’s type. If he was Antarctica, I was the Sahara.

I have a pride problem. Mom says it’s my special little challenge.

“I never thought there might be one like you out there. Unaware, untrained. Unbelievable. You have no idea what you are, do you?”

“Do I frighten you, Ms. Lane?” “Hardly. I just don’t like being bruised.” “Bruises heal. There are worse things in the night than I.”

“Don’t cross that threshold. If you walk out that door you’ll die. I give you three-day odds, at best.”

Jericho Barrons and I were done with each other. Or so I thought. It would turn out to be just one more of those things I was wrong about.

Normal was peach pie and green beans,

She definitely had a boyfriend, they said. They thought he was older. Rich. Sophisticated and handsome, but no, they’d never seen him. No one had. She never brought him around.