Faefever (Fever, #3)

by Karen Marie Moning

I’d die for him.

shore, I probably would have died if I hadn’t stumbled into a bookstore owned by Jericho Barrons. Who or what he is, I have no idea. But he has knowledge that I need, and I have something he wants, and that makes us reluctant allies. When I had no place to turn, Barrons took me in, taught me who and what I am, opened my eyes, and helped me survive. He didn’t do it nicely, but

no longer care how I survive, as long as I do. Because it was safer than my cheap room at

inn, I moved in to his bookstore. It’s protected against most of my enemies with wards and assorted spells, and stands bastion at the edge of what I call a Dark Zone: a neighborhood that has been...

We’ve battled monsters together. He’s saved my life twice. We’ve shared a taste of dangerous lust. He’s after

He says he wants it because he collects books. Right.

Like Barrons, V’lane is after the Sinsar Dubh. He’s hunting it for the Seelie Queen Aoibheal, who needs it to reinforce the walls between the realms of Fae and Man, and keep them from coming down. Like Barrons, he

(He’s also given me some of the most intense orgasms of

peel the pages of my memory backward, one at a time, squinting so I don’t have to see them too clearly. I turn back, past that whiteout where all memories vanish for a time, past that hellish Halloween, and the things Barrons did. Past the woman I killed. Past a part of V’lane piercing the meat of my tongue. Past what I did to Jayne.

gotten close to the Book, Barrons had been with me, and I’d had the comfort of knowing he wouldn’t let anything too awful happen to my unconscious body. He might tote me around like a divining rod, but I could live with that. Tonight, however, I was alone. The thought of being vulnerable to anyone and anything in Dublin’s streets for even a few moments terrified me. What if I passed out for an hour? What if I fell facedown into the vile puddle I was in, and drowned in mere inches of … ugh.

event didn’t reoccur. I pushed the door open all the way and stepped into the room. It smelled like Barrons. I inhaled deeply. A trace of dark, spicy aftershave lingered in the air, and for a moment I was in the caves beneath the Burren again, where I’d almost died last week, when the vampire Mallucé had abducted me and taken me deep into the labyrinthine tunnels, to torture me to death as vengeance for a gruesome injury I’d inflicted on him not long after I’d arrived in Dublin. I was lying on the ground, beneath Barrons’ wild, electric body, ripping his shirt open, and splaying my hands over the hard, muscled abdomen tattooed black and crimson in intricate, alien designs. Smelling him all around me. Feeling like he was inside me, or I was inside him. Wondering how much more inside him I’d get if I let him inside

exited the room on tiptoe, and pulled the door shut, leaving the smallest of slivers through which to peer, braced to yank it shut and run like hell. The mirror belched an icy gust of air. It was here!

Long black coat fluttering, Jericho Barrons stepped out of the glass. He was covered with blood that had iced to crimson frost on his hands, face, and clothing. His skin was pale from extreme cold, and his midnight eyes blazed with an inhuman, feral light. In his arms he carried the brutally savaged, bloody body of a young woman. I didn’t need to feel her pulse to know that she was dead.

Before I could move, a hand closed on my shoulder. “I do, Ms. Lane,” Barrons said grimly. “But first I’d like to know what the fuck you were doing kissing him.”

turned, scowling. Barrons has a habit of popping up, without warning, when I least expect it, at the most inconvenient times. I absorbed him in slow degrees, the only way to look at him. As a whole, he’s jarringly present in the space he occupies, as if ten times the man occupies a normal man-sized space. I wonder why. Because there’s an Unseelie stuffed inside him? I wonder how old he really is. I should be afraid of him. And sometimes in the middle of the night when I’m alone and I think about him—especially when I picture him carrying the dead woman’s body, and the look on his bloody face—I am. But when he’s standing in front of me, I’m not. I wonder if it’s possible for a person to do some kind of “numbing” spell, create a glamour so

“There’s something on your lapel.” I dabbed at it. He’s also meticulous, never a man to sport lint or stains on his clothes, but tonight his dark suit had a shiny spot on the left side. I was dabbing at a … man, for lack of a better word … who’d had birthdays untold, and walked in Unseelie Hallows, carrying around corpses. It felt as absurd as brushing a wolf’s teeth, or trying to mousse his fur. “And I wasn’t kissing him.” And I’d like to know what the feck you were doing with that woman in that mirror, I thought. But I didn’t say it. There’s a legal term my dad likes to use: res ipsa loquitur—the thing speaks for itself. I knew what I knew, and now I was watching him. And my back. Very carefully. He knocked my hand away. “Then why was his tongue in your mouth? Was he conducting a clinical test of your gag reflex?” He smiled, but not nicely. “How is your gag reflex, Ms. Lane? Are you a hair trigger?” Barrons likes to use sexual innuendo to try to shut me up. I think he expects the well-raised southern belle in me will think eew and back off. Sometimes, I do think eew, but I don’t back off. “I’m a spitter, if that’s what you’re asking.” I flashed him a too-sweet smile.

“Didn’t look that way to me. I think you’re a swallower. His tongue was halfway to China and you were still taking it.” “Jealous?” “Implies emotional investment. The only investment I have in you is my time, and I’m expecting a big payoff. Tell me about the Sinsar Dubh.” I glanced at my hand. It had come away from his lapel wet. I angled it in the light. Red looks black at night. I sniffed it. It smelled like old pennies. Gee, blood. No surprise there. “Have you been in a fight? No, let me guess; you saved a wounded dog, again?” I said dryly. That was the excuse he’d used last time. “I had a nosebleed.” “Nosebleed, my petunia.” “Petunia?” “Ass, Barrons. As in you are one.” “The Book, Ms. Lane.” I looked into his eyes. Was there a Gripper in there? Something very old looked back. “There’s nothing to tell.” “Why did you call after him?” “I haven’t seen him since the last time we saw the Book. I keep V’lane informed. You’re not the only shark in the sea.” He raked me with a contemptuous glance. “It’s a Fae prince’s fundamental nature to enslave

with sex, Ms. Lane. It’s a woman’s fundamental nature to be enslaved. Try to rise above it.” “Oh, it is not a woman’s fundamental nature to be enslaved!” Everywoman reared up in me, battle-ready. He turned and walked away. “You wear my brand, Ms. Lane,” floated over his shoulder, “and if I’m not mistaken, you now wear his. Who owns you? I don’t think it’s you.” “It is, too,” I yelled at his retreating back, but he was already halfway down the street, vanishing into the dar...

Because he was the biggest, baddest monster of all?

“I need to borrow a car,” I told Barrons when he walked in the front door that night, shortly after nine. He was wearing an exquisitely tailored suit, an impeccable white shirt, and a blood-red tie. His dark hair was slicked back from his handsome face. Diamond cuff links glinted at his wrists. His body hummed with energy, saturating the air around him. His eyes were startlingly brilliant, restless, darting everywhere. I’ve felt that body on top of mine, been the focus of that consuming gaze. I try not to think about it. I have a box inside me now that never used to exist. I never needed it before. It’s down in my deepest, darkest corner, and it’s airtight, soundproofed, and padlocked. It’s where I keep thoughts I don’t know what to do with, that could get me into trouble. Eating Unseelie hammers on the inside of that lid incessantly. I try to keep kissing Barrons in that box, too, but it gets out sometimes. I would not put the death of the sidhe-seer in the box. It was something I had to

“Why don’t you ask your fairy little boyfriend to take you wherever you want to go?”

Barrons’ lips twitched. I’d almost made him smile. Barrons smiles about as often as the sun comes out in Dublin, and it has the same effect on me; makes me feel warm and stupid.

don’t suppose you’d call him that the next time you see him, and let me watch his reaction?” “Don’t think that would work, Barrons,” I said sweetly. “Nobody ever sticks around when you show up. Darndest thing. Almost as if everyone’s afraid of you.” My saccharine humor exorcised the ghost of his smile. “Did you have a specific car in mind, Ms. Lane?” I wanted blue-collar muscle tonight. “The Viper.” “Why should I let you take it?” “Because you owe me.” “Why do I owe you?”

“Because I put up with you.” He smiled then, really smiled. I snorted and looked away. “The keys are in it, Ms. Lane. The keys to the garage are in the top drawer of my desk, rig...

“Of course you know that already,” he continued dryly. “You saw them there the last time you snooped through my study. I was surprised you didn’t try using them then, rather than breaking my window. You might have saved me some aggravation.”

Barrons deserves to be aggravated. He’s the most aggravating … whatever he is … I’ve ever met. The night I’d broken a window to get into his garage, it hadn’t occurred to me to try those keys because I’d been so certain he was keeping some huge dark secret locked up in there, that he’d surely never let the keys just lie around. (He is keeping some huge dark secret in there, I just haven’t figured out how to get to it yet.) He’d caught my nocturnal B&E on the video cameras hidden in the garage, and left the incriminating evidence outside my bedroom door. “Let me guess, you have video cameras hidden in the store, too?” “No, Ms. Lane, but I can smell you. I know when you’ve been in one of my rooms, and I know your nature. You snoop.”

I didn’t try to deny it. Of course I snooped. How else was I supposed to find anything out? “You can’t smell where I’ve been,” I scoffed. “I smell blood tonight, Ms. Lane, and it’s not yours. Why is your face bruised? What happened today? Who bled in my booksto...

“Why? Is that where you plan to go tonight? Do you think that’s wise? What if they attack you?” “Been there, done that. How did you find

last night? Were you looking for me?” The

was on my way to Chester’s.” He shrugged. “Coincidence. The bruise?” Chester’s. Where Inspector O’Duffy had spoken to a man named Ryodan who, according to Barrons, talked too much about things he shouldn’t be talking about—Barrons himself. I made a mental note to find Chester’s, track down the mysterious Ryodan, and see what I could learn. “I got in a fight with some other sidhe-seers. Evade if you

want, Barrons, but don’t treat me like an idiot.” “I knew you were nearby last night. I detoured to make certain you were safe. How did the fight go?

Are you … unharmed?” “Mostly. Don’t worry, I’m intact in all the ways you need me to be. Never fear, your OOP detector is here.” My hand went to the base of my skull. “Is it the brand? Can you find me so easily by it?” “I...

“I can remove it if you wish,” he said. “It woul...

His brilliant gaze met mine and we stared at each other a long moment. In those obsidian depths I saw the darkness of Mallucé’s grotto, tasted my own death again. Through the annals of history, women have paid a price for protection. One day, I won’t have to. “I’ll deal with it. Where’s the abbey, Barrons?” He wrote “Arlington Abbey” and an address on a scrap of paper f...

“Would you like me to accompany you?” I shook my head. He studied me a long moment. “Then good night, Ms. Lane.” “What about OOP detecting?” We hadn’t done any in days. “I’m busy with other things now. But soon.” “What are you busy with?” It was innocuous as questions go. Sometimes he ans...

Barrons inclined his dark head and left. I stared at the door after he’d gone. There were times that I wished I could go back to my earliest days with him, when I’d thought he was just an overbearing man, as in human. But he wasn’t, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned in the past few months, in some of the most painful ways, it’s that there’s no going back, ever. What’s done is done, the dead stay dead (well, mostly; Mallucé had a few problems with that), and all the regrets in the world can’t change a thing. If only they could, Alina would be alive and I wouldn’t even be here.

“Why did you leave when Barrons showed up?” I asked. “I despise him.” “Why?” “It is not your concern. Are you such a fool that you think to summon me to interrogate me?”

out it didn’t work, and never had? I turned around and began walking toward the Viper. I hadn’t glanced in its direction since we’d materialized. I did now, and gasped. The Wolf Countach was parked on the far side of it, deep in the shadows, and Jericho Barrons was leaning back against it, arms crossed over his chest, dressed from head to toe in black, every bit as dark and still as the night. I blinked. He was still there. Hard to peel apart from the darkness, but there. “What in the … how … where did you come from?” I sputtered. “The bookstore.” Duh. Sometimes his answers make me want to strangle him. “Did V’lane know you were standing there?” “I think the two of you were a little too busy to see me.” “What are you doing here?” “Making sure you didn’t need backup. If you’d told me you were taking your fairy little boyfriend, I wouldn’t have wasted my time. I resent it when you waste my time, Ms. Lane.” He got in his car and drove away.

followed him most of the way back to Dublin. Near the outskirts, he kicked his horses into a gallop I couldn’t match, and I lost

Barrons stood inside the front door, dripping cool old-world elegance. I hadn’t heard him come in over the music. He was leaning, shoulder against the wall, arms folded, watching me. “ ‘One eye is taken for an eye …’ ” I trailed off, deflating. I didn’t need a mirror to know how stupid I looked. I regarded him sourly for a moment, then moved for the sound dock to turn

heard a choked sound behind me I spun, and shot him a hostile glare. He wore his usual expression of arrogance and boredom. I resumed my path for the sound dock, and heard it again. This time when I turned back, the corners of his mouth were twitching. I stared at him until they stopped. I’d reached the sound dock, and just turned it off, when he exploded. I whirled. “I didn’t look that funny,” I snapped. His shoulders shook. “Oh, come on! Stop it!” He cleared his throat and stopped laughing. Then his gaze took a quick dart upward, fixed on my blazing MacHalo, and he lost it again. I don’t know, maybe it was the brackets sticking out from the sides. Or maybe I should have gotten a black bike helmet, not a hot pink one. I unfastened it and yanked it off my head. I stomped over to the door, flipped the interior lights back on, slammed him in the chest with my brilliant invention, and stomped upstairs. “You’d better have stopped laughing by the time I come back down,”

Voice make you do something that you find deeply morally objectionable? Can it override everything you believe in?” I asked Barrons, fifteen minutes later when I came back down. I’d made him wait, partly because I was still stinging from his laughter, and partly because it pissed me off in general that he was early. I like it when a man’s on time. Not early. Not late. Punctual. It’s one of those lost dating courtesies, not that Barrons and I are dating, but I think dating courtesies are common courtesies that should be practiced in most all civilized encounters. I pine for the days of good, old-fashioned manners.

I moved deeper into the room, his gaze dropped to my feet, and worked its way back to my face. I was wearing faded jeans, boots, and a snug pink Juicy T-shirt I got on sale at TJ Maxx last summer that said I’m a Juicy girl. “I bet you are,” he murmured. “Take off your shirt,” he said, but this time his voice resonated with a legion of voices. It rippled outward, past me, filling the room, stuffing every corner, cramming it full of voices that were all telling me to obey, pressuring every cell in my body to comply. I wanted my

the same way I wanted it off around V’lane, rooted in sexual compulsion, but merely because I … well, I didn’t know why. But I wanted it off right now, this very instant. I began to lift the hem of my tee, when I thought, Hang on a minute, I’m not going to show Barrons my bra, and pulled my shirt back down. I smiled, faintly at first then bigger, pleased with myself. I stuffed my hands in the back pockets of my jeans and gave him a cocky stare. “I think I’m going to be pretty good at this.” “TAKE OFF YOUR SHIRT.” The command hit me like a brick wall and destroyed my mind. I sucked in a violent, screeching breath and ripped my shirt from neckline to hem. “Stop, Ms. Lane.” Voice again, but not the brick wall: rather a command that lifted the brick wall from me, freeing me. I sank to the floor, clutching the halves of my torn T-shirt together, and dropped my head in my lap, resting my forehead against my knees. I breathed deeply for several seconds, then raised

looked at him. He could have coerced me like that anytime. Turned me into a mindless slave. Like the Lord Master, he could have forced me to do his bidding whenever he’d wanted. But he hadn’t. The next time I discovered something horrifying about him, would I say, yeah, but he never coerced me with Voice? Would that be the excuse I made for him then? “What are you?” It burst out before I could stop myself. I knew it was wasted breath. “Why don’t you just tell me and get it over with?” I said irritably. “One day you’ll stop asking me. I think I’ll like knowing you then.” “Can we leave my clothes out of the next lesson?” I groused. “I only packed for a few weeks.” “You wanted morally objectionable.” “Right.” I wasn’t sure his demonstration...

“Great. Well, in the future spare my tees. I only have three. I’ve been washing them out by hand and the other two are dirty.” BB&B didn’t have a washer or dryer, and so far I’d been refusing to tote my stuff to the Laundromat a few blocks down, although soon I was going to have to, because jeans didn’t wash well by hand. “Order what you need, Ms. Lane. Charge it to the store account.” “Really? I can order a washer and dryer?” “You may as well hold on to the keys to the Viper, too. I’m certain there are things you need a car for.” I eyed him suspiciously. Had I lost another few months in Faery, and this was Christmas? He bared his teeth in one of those predatory smiles. “Don’t think it’s because I like you. A happy employee is...

That made sense. Still, while it was Christmas, I had a few more items on my wish list. “I want a backup generator, and a security system. And I think I should have a gun, too.” “Stand up.” I had no will. My legs obeyed. “Go change.” I returned wearing a peach tee with a coffee stain over the right breast. “Stand on one leg and hop.” “You suck,” I hissed, as I hopped. “The key to resisting Voice,” Barrons instructed, “is finding that place inside you no one else can touch.” “You mean the sidhe-seer place?” I said, hopping lik...

hopped for hours. I wearied, but he didn’t. I think Barrons could have used Voice all night, and never worn down. He might have kept me hopping until dawn, but at quarter till one in the morning my cell phone rang. I thought instantly of my parents, and it must have shown on my face, because he released me from my thrall.

been hopping for so long that I actually took two hops toward my purse where I’d left it on the counter near the cash register, before I caught myself. It was about to roll into my voice mail—a thing I’ve hated ever since I missed Alina’s call—so I thumbed it on inside my purse, tugged it out, and clamped it to my ear. “Fourth and Langley,” Inspector Jayne barked.

“Why was Jayne calling you at this hour?” he said softly. “Have you been inducted as an honorary member of the Garda since they last arrested you?” I glanced over my shoulder with disbelief. He was standing at the opposite end of the room, and the volume on my phone was set to low. Maybe he’d picked up on the tones of the inspector’s voice from that distance, but there was no way he’d heard any of the details. “Funny,” I said. “What aren’t you telling me, Ms. Lane?” “He said he thinks he might have a lead on my sister’s case.” It was a weak lie, but the first that came to mind. “I have to go.” I reached behind