42
I die for a long time.
Much longer than I think it should take.
Figures I’d die slow and in pain. I pass out several times and am surprised that I regain consciousness. I feel fevered. The skin of my neck is numb, but the wound burns like I’ve been injected with venom.
I think I left half of my neck in the child’s impossibly expandable jaws.
He began to change the moment I took him in my arms.
I managed to tear myself from his preternaturally strong grasp and stumble from the cage before he completed the transformation.
But it was too late. I’d been a fool. My heart had wed Barrons to a sobbing child and embraced sentimentality. I’d seen the chains, padlocks, and wards as Barrons’ way of keeping a child safe.
What they’d really been was his way of keeping the world safe from the child.
I lie on the floor of the stone chamber, dying. I lose awareness again for a time, then am back.
I watch the child become the night version of Barrons’ beast. Black skin, black horns and fangs, red eyes. Talk about homicidally insane. He makes the beast Barrons was in the Silvers seem downright genial and calm.
He bays continuously while he changes, head whipping from side to side, spraying me with his spittle and my blood, staring at me with feral crimson eyes. He wants to sink his teeth into me, shake me, and crush every last drop of blood from my body. The mark Barrons placed on my skull doesn’t do a thing to defuse his bloodlust.
I am food and he can’t reach me.
He rattles the bars of the cage and he howls.
He morphs from four to ten feet tall.
This is what I heard beneath the garage. This is what I listened to while looking at Barrons across the roof of a car.
This child, caged down here, forever imprisoned.
And I understand, as my lifeblood seeps out, that this is why he was bringing the dead woman out of the Silver.
The child had to be fed.
He held this child, watched him die. I try to think about it, wrap my brain around it. The child has to be his son. If Barrons didn’t feed him, the child suffered. If he did feed him, he had to look at this monster. How long? How long had he been caretaker for this child? A thousand years? Ten? More?
I try to touch my neck, feel the extent of my wounds, but I can’t raise my arms. I’m weak, dreamy, and I don’t really care. I just want to close my eyes and sleep for a few minutes. Just a short nap, then I’ll wake up and get busy finding something in my lake to help me survive this. I wonder if there are runes that can heal torn-out throats. Maybe there’s some Unseelie in here somewhere.
I wonder if that’s my jugular gushing. If so, it’s too late, way too late for me now.
I can’t believe I’m going to die like this.
Barrons will come in and find me here.
Bled out on the floor of his bat cave.
I try to summon the will to search my lake, but I think I lost too much blood too fast. I can’t care, no matter how I try. The lake is curiously silent. Like it’s watching, waiting to see what happens next.
The roaring in the cage is so loud, I don’t hear Barrons roaring, too, until he’s scooping me up into his arms and carrying me from the room, slamming doors behind him.
“What the fuck, Mac? What the fuck?” He keeps saying, over and over. His eyes are wild, his face white, his lips thin. “What were you thinking coming down here without me? I’d’ve brought you if I thought you’d be so stupid. Don’t do this to me! You can’t fucking do this to me!”
I look up at him. Shades of Bluebeard, I muse dreamily. I opened the door on his slaughtered wives. My mouth won’t shape words. I want to know how the child is still alive. I feel numb. He’s your son, isn’t he?
He doesn’t answer me. He stares at me as if memorizing my face. I see something move deep in his eyes.
I should have made love to this man. I was always afraid to be tender. I’m bemused by my own idiocy.
He flinches.
“Don’t you think for a fucking minute you can put all that in your eyes, then die. That’s bullshit. I’m not doing this again.”
Got any Unseelie? I half-expect him to race aboveground to hunt one and bring it back. But I don’t have that much time and I know it.
“I’m not good, Mac. Never have been.”
What—true-confession time? my eyes tease. Don’t need it.
“I want what I want and I take it.”
Is he warning me? What could he possibly threaten me with now?
“There’s nothing I can’t live with. Only things I won’t live without.”
He stares at my neck, and I know it’s a mess from the look in his eyes. Savaged and shredded. I don’t know how I’m still breathing, why I’m not dead. I think I can’t talk because I no longer have intact vocal cords.
He touches my neck. Well, at least I think he does. I see his hand beneath my chin. I can’t feel anything. Is he trying to rearrange my internal parts like I once did to his, in the early-morning sun on the edge of a cliff, as if I could put him back together by sheer force of will?
His eyes narrow and his brows draw together. He closes his eyes, opens them again, and frowns. He shifts me in his arms and studies me from a different angle, glancing between my face and neck. Comprehension smooths his brow, and his lips twist in the ghastly smile people give you right before they tell you they have good news and bad news—and the bad news is really bad. “When you were in Faery, did you ever eat or drink anything, Mac?”
V’lane, I say silently. Drinks on beach.
“Did they make you sick?”
No.
“Did you drink anything at any time that made you feel like your guts were being ripped out? You’d want to die. From what I hear, it would have lasted about a day.”
I think a moment. The rape, I finally say. He gave me something. The one I couldn’t see. I felt pain for a long time. Thought it was from the princes being inside me.
His nostrils flare, and when he tries to speak, only a deep rattle comes out. He tries twice more before he gets it right. “They would have left you like that forever. I’m going to slice them into tiny pieces and feed them to one another. Slowly. Over centuries.” His voice is as calm as a sociopath’s.
What are you saying?
“I wondered. You smelled different afterward. I knew they’d done something. But you didn’t smell like the Rhymer. You were like him but different. I had to wait and see.”
Staring up at him, I take a fresh mental assessment of myself. I am beginning to feel my neck again. It burns like hell. But I can swallow.
Not dying?
“They must have been afraid they’d kill you with their—” He looks away, muscles working in his jaw. “An eternity of hell. You would have been Pri-ya forever.” His face is tight with fury.
What did they do to me? I demand.
He resumes walking, carries me through room after room, finally stopping in a chamber nearly identical to the rear seating cozy in BB&B: rugs, lamps, chesterfield, fluffy throws. Only the fireplace is different: enormous, with a stone hearth a man can stand in. Gas logs. No wood smoke seeping out somewhere to give him away.
He props pillows against the arm and places me gently on the sofa. He moves to the fireplace and turns it on.
“The Fae have an elixir that prolongs life.”
They gave it to me.
He nods.
Is that what happened to you?
“I said prolongs. Not turns you into a nine-foot-tall horned insane monster.” He watches my neck. “You’re healing. Your wounds are closing. I know a man that was given this elixir. Four thousand years ago. He smells different, too. As long as the Rhymer is never stabbed by the spear or sword, he lives, un-aging. He can only be killed in the ways a Fae can be killed.”
I stare up at him. I’m immortal? I can move my arms again. I touch my neck. I feel thick ridges as the skin fuses back together. It’s like when I ate Unseelie. I’m healing beneath my hands. I feel things crunching, moving in my neck, growing new and strong.
“Think of it as long-lived and hard to kill.”
Four thousand years long-lived? I stare at him blankly. I don’t want to live four thousand years. I think about that Unseelie, badly mutilated, left in my back alley. Immortality is terrifying. I just want my small lifetime. I can’t even conceive of four thousand years. I don’t want to live forever. Life is hard. Eighty or a hundred years would be just perfect. That’s all I ever wanted.
“You might want to seriously reconsider carrying that spear. In fact, I may decide to destroy it. And the sword.” He unbuckles the holster from my shoulder and throws it to the floor, near the fireplace.
I watch it clatter to a stop against the fa?ade of the hearth, relieved. I can die. Not that I want to right now. I just like options. As long as I have the spear, I have options. I’m never getting rid of that thing. It’s my date with a gravestone, and I’m human. I want to die one day.
“But he can’t.” It’s the first complete sentence I speak since I was attacked. “Your son can’t die, can he? No matter what. Ever.”