Dreamfever (Fever #4)

by Karen Marie Moning

“Barrons said she was. You were here when he called.” Barrons had called my parents? When? How was his phone working? Damn, I wanted his service provider!

“Ah, Barrons comes growling.” He gave the startling equivalent of a human snicker and was gone. I reached instinctively for my spear. It was back in the holster. I frowned. I’d forgotten to check. Had it ever been gone? I turned. “Growling” was a mild word for it. Barrons stood in the doorway, and if looks could kill,

I’d have been flayed alive in the street. “One would think you’d have gotten all the Fae shoved in your mouth you could stand, Ms. Lane.” “One would think that I’d gotten all the male shoved in my mouth that I could stand. One day I’m going to choose to kiss a man. Not because I’m being raped and not because I’m being scraped up off a street named Pri-ya and not because I’m being given the mystical equivalent of a cell phone with all the usual cell phone service problems but because I bloody well want to!” I pushed past him. He didn’t move an inch. Electricity sizzled where our bodies brushed.

“Tomorrow night. Ten o’clock. Be here, Ms. Lane.” “I’m fighting with the sidhe-seers,” I tossed over my shoulder. “Call it an early n...

The LM came to see me yesterday,” I said, as I stepped through the front door of Barrons Books and Baubles. The exterior lights of the handsomely restored building were set to low, bathing the street and alcoved entrance in a soft amber glow. The interior lights were equally low. It appeared Barrons no longer considered the Shades much of a threat. I couldn’t see him, but I knew he was here. I’m attuned to even the faintest whiff of Jericho Barrons now. I wish I wasn’t. It makes me remember a time when we danced, and he laughed, and I had no cares in the world but to be … a fine beast. To eat, sleep, and have sex. Ah, the simple life. I tensed. There was an Object of Power, or several, somewhere in the bookstore. It was one kick-ass powerful one, or an assortment of lessers. I could feel it in my stomach. I could sense it, a cold

fire in the dark pit of my brain. OOPs no longer make me feel sick. They make me feel … alive. “He said you’re the jackass who taught him Voice,” I continued. “Funny how you forgot to mention that when you were trying to teach me.” “I forget nothing, Ms. Lane. I omit.” “And evade.” “Lie, cheat, and steal,” he agreed. “If the shoe fits.” “You have absurd priorities.” He stepped from the shadows between bookcases. I looked him up and down. Once before I’d seen Jericho Barrons wearing jeans and a T-shirt. It’s like sheet-metaling a W16 Bugatti Veyron engine—all 1,001 horsepower of it—with the body of a ‘65 Shelby. The height of sophisticated power sporting in-your-face, fuck-you muscle. The effect is disturbing. He had more tattoos now than he’d had a few days ago. When I’d last seen him wearing nothing but a sheen of sweat, his arms were unmarked. They were now sleeved in intricate crimson and black designs, from bicep to hand. A silver cuff gleamed on his wrist. There were silver chains on his boots. “Slumming, huh?” I said. You should talk, said those dark eyes, as they swept my black leather ensemble.

“W...

absurd about my priorities?” I evaded. None of my concern what he thought of my outfit. “You hated my rainbows, now you don’t like my leather. Is there anything you like on me?” “The LM, as you call him, sent his princes to rape you and may possibly have raped you himself, and you only now mention that he … what? Came calling? Did he bring you flowers? And the answer is skin, Ms. Lane.” I wasn’t about to acknowledge his last words. “No flowers. Just coffee. Wasn’t Starbucks, though. I’d give my eyeteeth for a grande latte from Starbucks.” “I wouldn’t so blithely offer up my eyeteeth. You never know when you might need them. For a woman who was gang-raped recently, you certainly seem blasé.” “Oh, please, Barrons, how much more can I lose?” “Never wonder that.” “Why did you teach him? Do you realize that inadvertently, perhaps even vertently—” “Not a word, Ms. Lane.” “—you might have helped him kill my sister?” “You’re stretching.” “Am I? What else did you teach him?” “A few minor Druid arts.” “In exchange for what?”

How stupid and immature is Mac

“What did Darroc say? Did he promise you your sister back again?” “Of course.” “And did you tell your rapist you’d think about it?” “He said he was coming back for me in three days. And that I’d better be willing.” “But you,” Barrons said softly, stepping closer, “ah, my dear Ms. Lane, you think you have nothing more to lose. When do these three days expire?” “That’s what really pisses me off. I don’t know. He was annoyingly vague.” Barrons looked at me, then a faint smile curved his lips, and for a moment I thought he might laugh. “The nerve. Threatening you and not being precise about it.” “My sentiments exactly.” The faint smile was gone. His face was cold. “You will not leave my side again.” I sighed. “I was pretty sure you’d say that.” “Do you want him to take you again?” “No.” “Then you won’t be stupid. You won’t go dashing off into danger at precisely the most inopportune moment for some seemingly noble cause, only to get abducted by the villain, through no fault of your own, because you had to do the

honorable thing; after all, aren’t some things worth dying for?” he said dryly. I cocked my head. “I didn’t know you read romances.” “I know humans.” “Ha. You finally admit you aren’t one.” “I admit nothing. You want truths from me? See me when you look at me.” “Why did you smash the birthday cake I got you into the ceiling?” “You were trying to celebrate the day I was born. Come, Ms. Lane. I have something to show you.” He turned and mo...

“Who’d you have to kill to get the third one?” I stared. Three of the stones necessary to “reveal the true nature” of the Sinsar Dubh glowed an eerie bluish-black on the desk in his study. He looked at me. Do you really want to know? his dark gaze mocked. “Scratch that question,” I said hurriedly. “V’lane has the fourth, right?” On that note, I wondered where V’lane had gone and why. What had happened to him in that warded corridor? Why had he hissed at me, and what had caused him pain? I’d expected him to sift in shortly after it had happened and either explain or be seriously ticked off at me. I believe so. “But we don’t know where.” Not at the moment. “Quit talking without talking. You have a mouth; use it.” I resented the implied intimacy of our wordless dialogues. “I was using my mouth a few days ago. So were you.” “Quit reminding me,” I growled. “I thought we were past unnecessary pretenses. I stand corrected.” I moved toward the desk, both drawn and repelled by the power the rune-covered stones were throwing off. I recognized the one I’d stolen from Mallucé’s lair. It was the smallest of the three. The second was twice its size, the third even larger. They had sharply hew...

“You said that if all four were brought together, they would sing a Song of Making. The Song? Or a lesser one? Are there lesser songs?” “I don’t know.” I fidgeted. Barrons admitting to ignorance disturbed me as much as the sound coming from the stones. I reached out to touch one of them. As my hand passed above it, its banked glow flared so bright it hurt my eyes. I drew my hand back. “Interesting,” Barrons murmured. “Are you up for an experiment?” I looked at him sharply. “You want to try to corner the Book with three.” To study it, see how it might react and if anything further would be revealed. “You game?” I considered it a moment, remembering what had happened the last time he and I had gone chasing the Book. The thing had abruptly changed course and headed straight for us. It had gotten Barrons in its thrall. It had gone for Barrons, not me. There was nothing wrong with me. I was fine. I was the...

mirror. It had been standing right beneath my nose in his study for months, but I’d never once sensed its Fae presence and that it was part of a vast network of Unseelie Hallows. It was closed now, masquerading as a perfectly normal mirror. “How does it work?” I asked. He continued wrapping the stones in silence. “Oh, come on,” I said impatiently. “It’s not like I’m trying to pry into your head to uncover any of your precious secrets. The Fae are screwing up my planet and I’m going to kick their asses off it. All knowledge, like weapons—good. So, spill.” He didn’t look up from what he was doing, but I could see a faint smile playing at his lips. “Sometimes I think you refuse to tell me things just to irritate me.” “But you never do anything just to irritate me,” he said dryly. “Not when it involves something that might be important. What if I get trapped somewhere with no escape but a Silver? I wouldn’t even know how to use it.” “You ...

me. If I knew a fraction of what you know, my odds of surviving would be way higher.” “Perhaps you’d no longer want to.” “Would you just cooperate?” I said, exasperated. “I do not know that word,” he mocked in falsetto. “I’m trying to arm myself so I can fight like I fuck,” I snapped. “But you refuse to help.” I hated it when he reminded me of when I’d been Pri-ya. “I was beginning to wonder if you were ever going to say that word again, Ms. Lane. Time was, you had no reservations. ‘Fuck me, Jericho Barrons,’ you’d say. Morning, noon, and night.” There are two kinds of verbal honey a Southern woman can slather on her words when she feels like it: the kind that attracts flies, melts men’s hearts, and firms up all their other parts, or the kind that makes a man want to curl up and die. I employed the latter. “I didn’t know getting you to talk was so easy, or I’d have said it five minutes ago. Fuck you, Jericho Barrons.” He raised his head and laughed, teeth flashing white in his fa...

“When the Seelie King first made them—” “Unseelie King,” I corrected. “He was Seelie first. And quit interrupting me if you want me to keep talking. When the Seelie King first made them, they formed a network of absolute precision and predictability. It was a brilliant invention. They were the Fae’s first method of travel between dimensions. Entering one of them instantly deposited you in the Hall of All Days.” “What’s the Hall of All Days?” “The Hall is … well, think of it as an airport, the main arrival and departure point of the entire network. It’s lined with mirrors that connect to mirrors on other worlds, in countless other dimensions and times. One can stand in the Hall, examine the individual glasses, and choose from hundreds of thousands of places to go. It was the Fae version of a … quantum travel agency.” “V’lane told me the king originally creat...

“V’lane told you a lot.” Barrons sounded irritated. “He tells me more than you do. Makes me wonder who to trust.” “Motto to live by: Never trust a fairy. Did he tell you how the king’s concubine died?” “He said she hated what the king had become so much that she left him the only way she could. By ending her own life.” “Did he bother pointing out that everything the king had done, he’d done for her? Did she think of that before she decided to kill herself? Did it ever occur to her that sometimes a willingness to turn dark for someone else might just be a fucking virtue?” “It doesn’t sound like he went dark for her. It sounds like he was ticked off that she was going to die and willing to do anything to keep her.” “Perspective, Ms. Lane. Get some.” The Lord Master had said the same thing. “You think the concubine should have appreciated that her lover turned into an obsessed jackass and overlooked the horrific results of his experiments? Maybe if instead of spending all his time—wasn’t it tens of thousands of years she waited?—trying to make her live forever, he’d just loved her for the mortal lifetime she had, she’d have been happy!”

Barrons looked at me sharply. “The Silvers are a mess now,” he continued abruptly. “There’s nothing predictable about them.” “Because Cruce cursed them. Who exactly is Cruce?” I kept hearing his name, but that was all. I didn’t even know whether he was Seelie or Unseelie. “And what was the curse?” “Irrelevant. He’s dead.” Barrons placed the stones in a black leather pouch covered with delicately glistening runes and tied it with a leather drawstring. The moment he sealed the bag, the chiming ceased and the stones fell silent. “But his curse will never die. It corrupted the Silvers irrevocably. What was once an easily navigated network is now a place of complete chaos. Now some Silvers take you to the Hall, but others don’t. Worlds and dimensions fractured and are splintered with IFPs. Some of the main mirrors shattered, others sprang into existence where they were never supposed to be. Many of the two-way Silvers in the Hall are now one-way tickets to wastelands. The looking glasses themselves changed, casting illusory reflections. The Hall of All Days collided with the concubine’s realm, with parts of Faery, and some of it even crashed into the Dreaming.” “The Dreaming!” I exclaimed. “There’s actually a Fae realm with that name?”

“It doesn’t belong to the Fae. The Dreaming is far older and belongs to no one. It’s where all hopes, fantasies, illusions, and nightmares of sentient beings come to be or go to rest, whichever you prefer to believe. Complicating things further, Cruce’s curse caused tears in the walls of the Unseelie prison, and now the Silvers connect to the prison, as well.” “Well, then, why haven’t the Unseelie escaped before?” “Some have. But the Unseelie prison is so enormous that few discovered the rifts in the walls, and the Silvers are so impossible to navigate that only a handful ever managed to find their way into your world. One could stay lost inside the network of the Silvers forever. They’re no longer a realm of the present, but hold the residue of the past. Some say they’re also projections of all the possibles, that they really have become the Hall of All Days that have ever been and ever will be. There are no assurances. The Fae avoid them completely.” “But not you. And not the LM.” “There are ways—Druid arts th...