Dreamfever (Fever #4)

by Karen Marie Moning

Most of what I believed about myself, and life, I derived from modern media, without questioning any of it. If I wasn’t sure how to behave in a certain situation, I’d search my mind for a movie or TV show I’d seen, with a similar setup, and do whatever the actors had done. A sponge, I absorbed my environment, became a byproduct of it. I don’t think I ever once looked up at the sky and wondered if there was sentient life in the universe besides the human race. I know I never looked down at the earth beneath my feet and contemplated my own mortality. I tunneled blithely through magnolia-drenched days, blind as a mole to everything but guys, fashion, power, sex, whatever would make me feel good right then.

“You answer to me, sidhe-seer,” she spat, “not the other way around.” “In whose warped fantasy?”

Jericho Barrons was my poison now.

“Decide, Ms. Lane,” Barrons said, behind me. “Choose,” V’lane agreed. “Go to hell, both of you! New world. New rules. New me. Don’t call me. I’ll call you.”

Life didn’t explode in the sunshine and pretty places. Life took the strongest root with a little bit of rain and a whole lot of shit for fertilizer.

Daddy told me once—when I’d said something about how perfect his relationship with Mom was—that I should have seen the first five years of their marriage, that they’d fought like hellions, crashed into each other like two giant stones. That eventually they’d eroded each other into the perfect fit, become a single wall, nestled into each other’s curves and hollows, her strengths chinking his weaknesses, her weaknesses reinforced by his strengths.

“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.

“There’s only one question that matters, Ms. Lane, and it’s the one you never get around to asking. People are capable of varying degrees of truth. The majority spend their entire lives fabricating an elaborate skein of lies, immersing themselves in the faith of bad faith, doing whatever it takes to feel safe. The person who truly lives has precious few moments of safety, learns to thrive in any kind of storm. It’s the truth you can stare down stone-cold that makes you what you are. Weak or strong. Live or die. Prove yourself. How much truth can you take, Ms. Lane?”

Regardless of how many people I surrounded myself with, no matter how many friends and family I loved and was loved by in return, I was alone at the moment of being born and at the moment of dying. Nobody came with you and nobody went with you. It was a journey of one.

Maybe in the moment of being born and the moment of dying, we’re nearer to pure. Maybe it’s the only time we’re ever still enough to feel that there’s something bigger than us; something that defeats entropy; that has always been and will always be. A thing that can’t be flipped. Call it what you will. I only know it’s divine. And it cares. It was no longer my “comfort zone.” It was my truth.

“You think it’s good to have something like me obsessed with you? My dear, dear, bloody idiotic, suicidal Ms. Lane, you have no fucking idea what’s gotten the scent of you in its nostrils, what has the taste of you in its blood, or you’d run. You’d run for what little remains of what you think of as your life.”