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

“Try it … myself,” she finally continued, “pray it … killed me … too.”

“Why are you here?” I turned and stared down at her. Although she’d put her cloak back on, she’d left the hood down.

“Can’t heal.” Gray eyes shimmered with constant pain in bloody sockets. Even her lids were gone. “Can’t die. Tried … everything.”

“Still eating Unseelie?”

“Dulls … pain.”

“It’s probably what’s keeping you alive.”

“Too … late.”

“You mean you think you’ve been eating it so long that even if you stopped now you might not die?”

“Yesss.”

I considered that. Depending on how much she’d eaten, it was possible. Malluce had been marbled with Fae like a steak with fat. Maybe even if she stopped entirely, she would never be fully human again. I’d eaten it only twice in my life and hoped it had passed from my body forever.

“Can’t find …” Her gaze drifted to the abandoned Dark Zone, and I understood that she’d hunted for a Shade to kill her. But they’d moved on long ago to greener pastures, literally, and she didn’t look capable of walking very far. I couldn’t imagine her driving a car, sitting on that flayed flesh. I shuddered. “Only spear … sword … will—”

“—make the Fae parts quit keeping you alive,” I finished. I looked away, stared out over the roof of Barrons’ garage at the hundreds of dark roofs beyond. “You want me to kill you.” There was a terribly irony here.

“Yesss.”

“Why not try Dani? Don’t you think you might have better luck there?”

“Said no.”

I blinked. She’d actually known about Dani, found her, and Dani had refused?

“Said … you had to …”

“And you think I have mercy?”

“Can’t … look … at me.”

I jerked my gaze back to her skinned face. “I can ignore you for the rest of my life.” But it wasn’t true. And she knew it.

“Merssseee,” she hissed again.

I punched the ledge of the window.

There were no easy choices anymore. I didn’t want to go down there and look at her. I didn’t want to stab her. I couldn’t possibly let her go on suffering if I could do something about it, and I could.

I gazed longingly at my bed. I wanted nothing more than to crawl back in.

My window was broken. The room would be freezing in no time.

I reached for my holster, strapped it on over my pajama top, slid the spear beneath my arm, grabbed a coat from the chair, and headed for the stairs.

I had a small epiphany on the way down.

My spear would kill the Fae parts of Fiona, granting her the ultimate demise she wished, but very slowly. It had taken months for Malluce to die. When I stabbed a Fae, it was entirely Fae and died swiftly. But when a human eats Unseelie, it laces the human’s body with pockets and threads of immortal flesh, and there’s no way to stab each and every thread or pocket, so the wound works instead like a slow poison. I wonder if whoever created the immortal-slaying weapons deliberately designed them that way, to carry out a horrific punishment for a horrific crime.

However, there was another potential method of execution that would either kill her instantly—or answer a question I badly wanted answered.

The entire time I’d been fighting tonight, I’d been thinking about it.

I wanted to test the Silver in the White Mansion.

Maybe lots of people and Fae could go through it.

I’d been considering taking an Unseelie captive and forcing it into the Silver.

Now I didn’t have to. I had a volunteer.

And, even better, she was mostly human.

If Fiona could pass through the king’s Silver without dying, that would mean the legend was a bluff.

It killed Barrons.

I shrugged. That might have been an anomaly. Barrons defied the laws of physics. Maybe humans could pass through it just fine. Maybe the Unseelie King hadn’t warded it as well as he thought he had. Maybe humans from our planet were different from his mortal concubine, and how could you ward against something you didn’t even know existed? All I knew was I wasn’t the king, and here was my chance to prove it. I hated losing more time, but my peace of mind was worth losing time for.

I stepped into the alley and moved slowly toward her. “Hood up.”

She made a sound that was almost laughter but made no move to lift it.

“Do you want to die? If so, hood up.”

Eyes hot with hate, moving stiffly and with painstaking care, she adjusted the fabric to shadow her face.

As she put her arms back down, a gust of wind blew the stench of her straight into my nostrils. I gagged. She smelled of blood and decaying flesh with a strong medicinal odor, as if she was eating painkillers by the handful.

“Follow me.”

“Where?”

“The spear will kill you, but it will do so slowly. I might have a way to kill you instantly.”

The hood turned toward me as if she was searching my face to divine my motives.

Daddy told me once that we believe others are capable of the worst we ourselves are capable of. Fiona was wondering if I might be as cruel to her as she’d have been to me in the same position.

“It will be hell for you to have to walk there. But I think you’d rather spend twenty minutes getting there to die than the weeks or even months it could take to die from the spear wound. Because of the Unseelie you’ve been eating, you’ll die slowly.”

“Spear … not instant?” There was shock in her voice.

“No.”

I knew the moment she accepted it. When I turned and headed for the Silver in the brick wall, she followed. I heard the soft swish of her cloak behind me.

“There’s a price, though. If you really want to die, you’re going to have to tell me everything you know about—”

“I can’t leave you alone for a minute, can I?” Barrons said. “Where the hell do you think you’re going this time, Ms. Lane? And who is that with you?”

The three of us went in together.

It was one of the most awkward, uncomfortable walks I’ve taken.

I had one of those outside-my-skin-watching-from-above moments. Eight months ago, when I’d first ducked into BB&B, seeking sanctuary from my first encounter with a Dark Zone, I’d never have imagined this moment: pushing into a brick wall behind the bookstore—I mean, really, a brick wall!—with the badly skinned and heavily narcotized woman who’d run BB&B with Barrons, who was waiting for me to put him in a good mood again with sex and who turned into a nine-foot-tall beast on occasion, all so I could find out if I was the king and creator of the monsters that had overtaken my world. If I’d thought my life would come to this, I’d have marched straight for the airport that day and flown back home.

Fiona hadn’t uttered a syllable since Barrons had appeared in the alley. She’d drawn her hood tightly around her face. I couldn’t imagine what she had to be feeling as she marched to her suicide between the man she’d loved to her own destruction and the woman she believed had taken him from her.

At first, Barrons had disagreed with my plan vehemently.

He’d wanted to use the spear and kill her without going back into the Silvers and wasting weeks, possibly months, doing it. But after I pulled him aside and explained that she was the perfect test, he’d reluctantly agreed, and I realized that he, too, hoped the legend was an erroneous myth.

Why? He thought I was the concubine. Considering what I was afraid I was, the concubine didn’t seem like such a bad thing to be.

Unless he’d concluded that, if I was the concubine, the king himself was destined to come for me at some point, and that was one foe he might not be able to take on, even in beast form. Perhaps he worried that the king would take his OOP detector, and then where would he be?

But if you ask her one thing about me, Ms. Lane, he’d murmured against my ear, I’ll kill her where we stand, and you won’t get your little test.