Shadowfever - Moning Karen Marie (читать бесплатно книги без сокращений TXT) 📗

Cards spilled from my lap as I stood up. One had slipped inside the fur collar of my coat. I removed it and began to toss it away but at the last moment stopped and looked at it.

The fear dorcha had been shuffling a tarot deck. The card I held was framed in crimson and black. In the center, a Hunter flew over a city at night. The coast was a dark border for the silver sheen of the ocean in the distance. On the Hunter’s back, between great, dark flapping wings, was a woman with a soft tousle of curls blowing around her face. Between strands of hair, I could see her mouth. She was laughing.

It was the scene from my dream the other night. How could I be holding a tarot card with one of my dreams on it?

What was on the rest of the cards?

I glanced down at the floor. Near my feet was the Five of Pentacles. A shadowy woman stood on a sidewalk, peering through the window of a pub, watching a blond woman inside who was sitting at a booth, laughing with her friends. Me watching Alina.

On Strength, a woman sat cross-legged in a church, naked, staring at the altar as if praying for absolution. Me after the rape.

The Five of Cups showed a woman who looked startlingly like Fiona, standing in BB&B, crying. In the background I could see—I bent and peered closer—a pair of my high heels? And my iPod!

On the Sun were two young women sprawled in bikinis—one lime green, the other hot pink—soaking up the rays.

There was the Death card, a hooded grim reaper, scythe in hand, standing over a bloody body, female again. Me and Malluce.

There was one with an empty baby carriage abandoned near a pile of clothing and jewelry. One of those parchment-like husks the Shades left behind protruded from the carriage.

I ran my hands through my hair, pushing it back as I stared down.

“Prophecies, beautiful girl. Come in all shapes and sizes.”

I glanced up at the dreamy-eyed guy, but he was no longer there. I looked to my right. Mr. Tall, Pin-striped, and Gaunt was also gone.

On the bar, beside a freshly filled shot and a Guinness, another tarot card had been placed with care, facedown, black-and-silver side up.

“Now or never, Ms. Lane. I don’t have all night.”

I tossed back the shot and chased it, then picked up the card and slipped it into my pocket for later.

Barrons steered me to a chrome staircase that was guarded at the bottom by the same two men that had escorted me to the top floor to see Ryodan the last time I was here. They were enormous, dressed in black pants and T-shirts, with heavily muscled bodies and dozens of scars on their hands and arms. Both carried snub-nosed automatics. Both had faces that drew the eye but, the moment you saw them, made you want to look away.

As we approached, they swung their weapons toward me.

“What the fuck is she doing here?”

“Get over it, Lor,” Barrons said. “When I say jump, you say how high.”

The one that wasn’t Lor laughed, and Lor slammed him in the gut with the butt of his gun. It was like hitting steel. The guy didn’t even flinch.

“The fuck I jump. In your dreams. Laugh again, Fade, and you’ll be eating your balls for breakfast. Bitch,” Lor spat in my general direction. But he didn’t look at me, he looked at Barrons, and I think that’s what pushed me over the edge.

I glanced between the two guards. Fade stared straight ahead. Lor glared at Barrons. I stepped away from Barrons and walked directly in front of them. Their gazes never wavered. It was as if I didn’t exist. I had no doubt I could stand there and do a dance, naked, and they’d still stare at anything but me.

I grew up in the Deep South, in the heart of the Bible Belt, where there are still a few men who refuse to look at a woman that isn’t a relative. If a woman is with a man they need to speak with—whether it’s her daddy, boyfriend, or husband—they’ll look at the man the entire time. If the woman asks a question and they bother answering at all, they direct their reply to the man. They even turn to the side a little, as if catching a glimpse of her in their periphery might condemn them to eternal damnation. The first time it happened to me, I was fifteen, and dumbfounded. I kept asking question after question, trying to get old man Hatfield to look my way. I’d begun to feel invisible. Finally I’d moved to stand right in front of him. He’d stomped off in the middle of a sentence.

Daddy had tried to explain to me that the old man considered it a kind of respect he was paying. That it was a courtesy given to the man the woman belonged to. I hadn’t been able to get past the words “the man the woman belonged to.” It was a property thing, pure and simple, and apparently Lor—who, according to Barrons, didn’t even know what century it was—was still living in a time when women had been owned. I hadn’t forgotten his comment about Kasteo, who hadn’t spoken in more than a thousand years. How old were these men? When, how, where had they lived?

Barrons took my arm and turned me toward the staircase, but I shook him off and turned back to Lor. I was getting way too much bad press. I wasn’t a stone. I hadn’t been created by the Unseelie King. And I wasn’t a traitor.

One of those things I could have a satisfying fight about.

“Why am I a bitch?” I demanded. “Because you think I slept with Darroc?”

“Shut her up before I kill her,” Lor told Barrons.

“Don’t talk to him about me. Talk to me about me. Or do you think I’m not worthy of your regard because, when I believed Barrons was dead, I hooked up with the enemy to accomplish my goals? How terrible of me,” I mocked. “I guess I should have just laid down and died with a whimper. Would that have impressed you, Lor?”

“Get the bitch out of my face.”

“I guess taking up with Darroc makes me pretty … well”—I knew what word Barrons hated, and I was in the mood to try it out on Lor—“mercenary, doesn’t it? You can blame me for that if you want to. Or you can pull your head out of your ass and respect me for it.”

Lor turned his head and looked at me then, as if I’d begun to speak his language. Unlike Barrons, the word didn’t seem to bother him. In fact, it seemed he understood, even appreciated it. Something flickered in his cold eyes. I’d interested him.

“Some people wouldn’t see a traitor when they looked at me. Some people would see a survivor. Call me anything you like—I sleep fine at night. But you will look at me when you say it. Or I’ll get so far in your face you’ll be seeing me with your eyes closed. You’ll be seeing me in your nightmares. I’ll scorch myself on the backs of your eyelids. Get off my back and stay off it. I’m not the woman I used to be. If you want a war with me, you’ll get one. Just try me. Give me an excuse to go play in that dark place inside my head.”

“Dark place?” Barrons murmured.

“As if you don’t have one,” I snapped. “Your cave makes mine look like a white beach on a sunny day.” Shouldering past them, I pushed up the stairs. I thought I heard a rumble of laughter behind me and glanced over my shoulder. Three men stared at me with the dead, emotionless gazes of executioners.

But, hey—they were all looking.

Behind a chrome balustrade, the upper floor stretched: acres of smooth dark-glass walls without doors or handles.

I had no idea how many rooms were up here. From the size of the downstairs, there could be fifty or more.

We walked along the glass walls until some tiny detail I couldn’t discern signified an entrance. Barrons pressed his palm to a dark-glass panel, which slid to the side, then he pushed me into the room. He didn’t step in with me but continued moving down the hall to some other destination.

The panel slid closed behind me, leaving me alone with Ryodan in the room that was the guts of Chester’s. It was made entirely of glass—walls, floor, and ceiling. I could see out, but no one could see in.