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

He was no longer behind the counter but sitting on a bar stool beside me, to my left, no—to my right. No, he was on the stool with me. There he was—behind me, mouth pressed to my ear.

“Too much falsely inflates. Too little underprepares. The finest surgeon has butterfly fingers. Airy. Delicate.”

Like his fingers on my hair. The touch was mesmerizing. “Am I the Unseelie King?” I whispered.

Laughter as soft as moth wings filled my ears and muddied my mind, stirring silt from the dregs of my soul. “No more than I.” He was back behind the bar. “The cantankerous one comes,” he said, with a nod toward the stairs.

I looked to see Barrons descending. When I looked back, the dreamy-eyed guy was no more visible than his reflection.

“I was coming,” I said irritably. Fingers handcuffed around my wrist, Barrons dragged me toward the stairs.

“What part of ‘directly’ didn’t you understand?”

“Same part of ‘play well with others’ you never understand, O cantankerous one,” I muttered.

He laughed, surprising me. I never know what’s going to make him laugh. At the oddest moments, he seems to find humor in his own bad temper.

“I’d be a lot less cantankerous if you admitted you wanted to fuck me and we got down to it.”

Lust ripped through me. Barrons said “fuck” and I was ready. “That’s all it would take to put you in a good humor?”

“It’d go a long way.”

“Are we having a conversation, Barrons? Where you actually express feelings?”

“If you want to call a hard dick feelings, Ms. Lane.”

A sudden commotion at the entrance to the club, two levels above us, caught his attention. He was taller than me and could see over the crowd. “You’ve got to be kidding me.” His face hardened as he stared up at the balconied foyer.

“What? Who?” I said, bouncing on my tiptoes to try to see. “Is it V’lane?”

“Why would it be—” He glared down at me. “I stripped his name from your tongue. There hasn’t been an opportunity for you to get it back again.”

“I told one of his court to go get him. Don’t look at me like that. I want to know what’s going on.”

“What’s going on, Ms. Lane, is that you found the Seelie Queen in the Unseelie prison. What’s going on—given the condition she’s in—is that V’lane’s obviously been lying about her whereabouts for months now, and that can mean only one thing.”

“That it was impossible for me to permit the court to know that the queen was missing, and has been missing for many human years,” V’lane said tightly behind us, his voice hushed. “They would have fallen apart. Without her reining them in, a dozen different factions would have assaulted your world. There has long been unrest in Faery. But this is hardly the place to discuss such matters.”

Barrons and I turned as one.

“Velvet told me you required my presence, MacKayla,” V’lane continued, “but he said your news was of the Book, not of our liege.” He searched my face with a coolness I hadn’t seen since I’d first met him. I supposed my method of summoning him had offended. Fae are so prickly. “Have you truly found her? Is she alive? In every spare moment, I have searched for her. It has prevented me from attending you as I wished.”

“Velvet is a Fae name?”

“His true name is unpronounceable in your tongue. Is she here?”

I nodded.

“I must see her. How does she fare?”

Barrons’ hand shot out and closed around V’lane’s throat. “You lying fuck.”

V’lane grabbed Barron’s arm with one hand, his throat with the other.

I stared, fascinated. I was so discombobulated by recent developments that I hadn’t even realized Barrons and V’lane were standing face-to-face on a crowded dance floor for what was probably the first time in all eternity—close enough to kill each other. Well, close enough for Barrons to kill V’lane. Barrons was staring at the Fae prince as if he’d finally caught a fire ant that had been torturing him for centuries while he’d lay spread-eagled on the desert, coated in honey. V’lane was glaring at Barrons as if he couldn’t believe he’d be so stupid.

“We have larger concerns than your personal grievances,” V’lane said with icy disdain. “If you cannot remove your head from your ass and see that, you deserve what will happen to your world.”

“Maybe I don’t care what happens to the world.”

V’lane’s head swiveled my way, cool appraisal in his gaze. “I have permitted you to retain your spear, MacKayla. You will not let him harm me. Kill him—”

Barrons squeezed. “I said shut up.”

“He has the fourth stone,” I reminded Barrons. “We need him.”

“Keltars!” V’lane said, staring up at the foyer. He hissed through his teeth.

“I know. Big fucking party tonight,” said Barrons.

“Where? Is that who just came in?” I said.

Barrons leaned closer to V’lane and sniffed him. His nostrils flared, as if he found the scent both repulsive and perfect for a fine, bloody filet.

“Where is she?” a man roared. The accent was Scottish, like Christian’s but thicker.

V’lane ordered, “Shut him up before his next question is, ‘Where is the queen,’ and every Unseelie in this place discovers she is here.”

Barrons moved too fast for me to see. One second, V’lane was his usual gorgeous self, then his nose was crushed and gushing blood. Barrons said, “Next time, fairy,” and was gone.

“I said, where the bloody hell is the—”

I heard a grunt, then the sound of fists and more grunts, and all hell broke loose at Chester’s.

“I doona give a bloody damn what you think. She’s our responsibility—”

“And a hell of a job you’ve done with her—”

“She’s my queen and she’s not going anywhere with—”

“—so far, losing her to the fucking Unseelie.”

“—and we’ll be taking her back to Scotland with us, where she can be watched o’er properly.”

“—a pair of inept humans, she belongs in Faery.”

“I’ll send you back to Faery, fairy, in a fucking—”

“Remember the missing stone, mongrel.”

I looked from the Scotsman, to Barrons, to V’lane, watching the three of them argue. They’d been covering the same ground with no new developments for the past five minutes. V’lane kept demanding she be turned over to him, the Scot kept insisting he was taking her back to Scotland, but I knew Barrons. He wasn’t going to let either of them have her. Not only did he trust no one, the queen of the Fae was a powerful trump card.

“How the fuck did you even know she was here?” Barrons demanded.

V’lane, whose nose was once again perfect, said, “MacKayla summoned me. As I walked up behind you, I heard you, as anyone else might have. You jeopardize her life with your carelessness.”

“Not you,” Barrons growled. “The Highlander.”

The Scot said, “Nearly five years past, she visited Cian in the Dreaming, telling him she would be here this eve. The queen herself ordered us to collect her, from this address on this night. We have irrefutable claim. We are the Keltar and wear the mantle of protection for the Fae. You will turn her over to us now.”

I almost laughed, but something about the two Scots made me think twice about it. They looked like they’d been traveling hard through rough terrain and hadn’t showered or shaved in days. Words like “patience” and “diplomacy” were not in their vocabulary. They thought in terms of objectives and results—and the fewer things between the two, the better. They were like Barrons: driven, focused, ruthless.

Both were shirtless and heavily tattooed—Lor and another of Barrons’ men I hadn’t seen before had made all of us strip down to clothing that couldn’t conceal a book, before permitting us access to the upper level of the club. Now the five of us stood, partially dressed, in an unfurnished glass cubicle.

The one arguing, Dageus, was all long, smooth muscle, with the fast, graceful movements of a big cat and cheetah-gold eyes. His black hair was so long it brushed his belt—not that he needed one, in hip-slimming black leather pants. He sported a cut lip and a shiner on his right cheek from the skirmish that had begun at the door and spread like a contagion through several sub-clubs. It had taken five of Barrons’ men to get things back under control. Being able to move like the wind gave them a tremendous advantage. They didn’t warn the patrons to stop fighting—they simply appeared and killed them. Once humans and Fae figured out what was happening, the outbreak of violence ended as quickly as it had begun.