"Dreamfever" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moning Karen Marie)

CHAPTER 16

A heavily industrialized version of Trent Reznor’s “Closer” was playing by the time I grabbed a bar stool and barked at the bartender’s back that I needed a shot of top-shelf whiskey and make it fast.

I want to feel you from the inside …

Due to recent experience, I had a far greater understanding of the darker half of the Fae race than I’d ever wanted. I knew the emptiness that drove them. I’d been food for their bottomless hunger.

Chester’s was full of the Unseelie King’s abominations, and humans were welcoming them, competing to get noticed by them, willing to let them “feel them from the inside” if that was what it took to get their fix, seduced by the promise of heightened strength and senses and the temptation of immortality. I’d never understood why anyone would want to live forever. It had always seemed to me that death lent life a certain poignancy, a necessary tension.

“Maybe two billion of us needed to die,” I muttered. I was in a foul mood.

“I’ll take one, too.” Dani hoisted herself onto a stool beside me.

“Nice try.”

“You ever gonna let me grow up? Or you gonna be like everybody else?”

I looked at her, then amended my original order to two shots of Macallan, one-hundred-proof. Daddy had done the same thing to me at her age. Tough love.

Shot glasses clinked on the polished chrome bar top, accompanied by a deep “Hey, beautiful girl.”

My gaze jerked to the bartender and I did a double take. It was the dreamy-eyed boy that I’d first met while scouring a museum for OOPs and had later been surprised to find working with Christian at Trinity College’s ALD, the Ancient Languages Department. My first impulse was pleasure that he’d survived. It was squelched by suspicion. Coincidences make me nervous.

“Small world,” I said coolly.

“Big enough.” He flashed an easy smile. “Most of the time.”

“New job?”

“City changes. Jobs, too. You?”

“Unemployed. Nobody buying books.” They were all out hunting one.

“Different look. Going dark, beautiful girl?”

I touched my hair.

“More than the ‘do.”

“Enough to survive.”

“Hard to say when enough’s enough.”

“Look who’s working where.”

“Look who’s drinking where.”

“I can handle myself. You?”

“Always.” He gave me another of those smiles and moved down the bar, tossing glasses, pouring high, fast, and flashy.

Beside me, Dani choked, spit, wheezed, and began to cough uncontrollably. When I patted her back, she jerked away and skewered me with a glare. “What are you trying to do? Kill me?” she squeaked, when she could speak. “That’s petrol! Who would wanna drink that?”

I laughed. “You develop a taste for it.”

“I think I mighta been born with all the tastes I need!” She pilfered a handful of cherries from across the bar, crammed them in her mouth, and hopped down from her stool. “Grown-ups are weird,” she said darkly.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“Take a look around.”

I didn’t like the idea and told her so.

“C’mon, Mac, I’m superfast and superstrong. Nobody can touch me. I’m the one should be worried about leaving you alone, slowpoke.”

Put that way, she had a point.

“Gimme room to breathe, Mac.”

She was fidgeting from foot to foot, and the look in her eyes said she was about to whiz off whether I said okay or not. I had a sudden unwanted understanding of Rowena: How do you mother a kid who’s faster than you, stronger than you, and quite possibly smarter? “Don’t go far, and not for long, deal?”

“Deal.”

“And be careful!” Wind ruffled my hair. She was already gone.

“Who’s the kid?” The dreamy-eyed boy was back. A shot clinked to the chrome counter. I tossed it back, grimaced, gasped. Fire exploded in my gut.

“Friend.”

“Good to have in times like these.”

“How’d you find this place?”

“Same way as you, I imagine.”

“Doubt it.”

“Ever find Christian?”

He was referring to the day I’d called the ALD dozens of times, hunting for the young Scot. I’d been worried sick because Barrons had “Voiced” me into revealing that the Keltars were spying on him, and I was afraid Barrons was going to hunt Christian down and hurt him. “Yes.” I didn’t see any point in telling him I’d lost him again, perhaps permanently.

“Seen him lately?”

“No. You?”

“No. I’d like to.”

“Why?” Suspicion was me.

“Friends—good to have in times like these.”

“What do you think of this place?” Why was he here? Another pretty boy in search of immortality?

“Life and death, beautiful girl. Been about it since the beginning. Will be ‘til the end.”

“What’s your poison? You want to live forever, too?”

“I’d take some peace and quiet. A beautiful girl.” He laughed. “A good book.”

“Man after my own heart. I love a good book, too.” In the mirror above the bar, something caught my eye. I tensed. In a booth behind me, the Gray Woman was holding hands with the well-muscled, gorgeous waiter who’d earlier been flirting with the udder-thing. I could see both what she was and what she was making him see. To him, she was a Fae Princess, inhumanly beautiful, mind-numbingly sexual, gazing at him with rapt adoration.

Only I could see the open, oozing lesions with which she caressed him, with which she was sucking his life away, leaving rotting teeth, rheumy eyes, parchment-thin gray skin. She was making short work of him. He wouldn’t last the hour.

My hand went to the shoulder holster beneath my coat.

“Watch yourself, beautiful girl,” the dreamy-eyed boy said softly.

I tore my gaze away from the mirror and stared at him. He was eyeing my coat, watching my hand move beneath it. He couldn’t possibly know what I was reaching for.

“What are you talking about?”

He looked behind me. “They’re here, and … well, you’ll figure it out.”

Big hands bit down on my shoulders. There were two men behind me. I could feel them. Big, electric, powerful men.

“Pull that thing out,” a man growled, “we’ll take it from you and never give it back. First rule of house: This is neutral ground. Second rule of house: Break a rule, you die.”

“Get your hands off me,” I gritted.

“We have the kid. You want to see her again, get up.”

My eyes narrowed. How had they gotten Dani? “There’s no way you—”

“We’re faster.”

“Like Barrons?”

There was no answer.

Well, I’d found my eight, or at least two of them. And they had Dani. Sighing, I stood and glared up at the Gray Woman in the mirror, but she didn’t notice, too busy serving herself off her waiter’s well-muscled platter. My blood boiled. He was no longer remotely good-looking. Barrons had told me the Gray Man rarely took so much that his victims died. Apparently the Gray Woman had larger appetites. I revised my estimate: He had another ten minutes, at most.

The dreamy-eyed boy was reflected in the mirror below them. I stared. He didn’t look the same in the mirror. He was … blurred around the edges and … wrong, very wrong. I shivered, struck by a soul-deep chill. I tried to bring his reflection into focus. The harder I tried, the blurrier he became. The blurred shape cleared, gave me a sharp look. “Don’t talk to it, beautiful girl. Never talk to it.”

I gaped. “Her, you mean? The Gray Woman?”

“It.” He spat the word with such revulsion that I flinched.

I looked down from the mirror at the real thing, not the reflection, and suddenly I could breathe again. He was a boy. A handsome, dreamy-eyed boy. Not something I wanted to run screaming from. “What ‘it’?”

He stared at me blankly. “I didn’t say anything.”

“Now,” the man behind me growled impatiently. “Move.”

They escorted me up a wide chrome staircase, to the top floor of Chester’s. Behind a chrome balustrade, dark-glass walls lined the entire circumference of the upper floor, smooth, without doors or handles.

I glanced from one of my escorts to the other. They hadn’t spoken a word since they’d closed their hands around my upper arms and begun steering me through the crowd. Nor had I. I could feel what they were made of: leashed violence. Both looked to be in their early thirties, heavily muscled. The man on my left had hands that were badly scarred. They were massive men. There was something about their eyes that made me decide keeping my mouth shut until I had a better understanding of my situation was the wisest course of action.

I glanced down as we topped the open-tread stairs. The waiter was on the floor, dead. The Gray Woman was already looking around for a new toy. My hands fisted. We walked along the wall of darkened glass until an indefinable characteristic in the featureless surface must have indicated a door, because the man on my right placed his palm to the glass. A panel slid aside, revealing a large room constructed entirely of two-way glass, cornered by metal girders. You could see everything going on outside it. The perimeter of the ceiling was lined with small screens fed by countless security cameras. Here were the guts of the club. Nothing happened anywhere in Chester’s that wasn’t seen here.

“Brought her like you said, Ry.”

They pushed me inside. The panel slid closed behind me with a soft hiss. The room was dark but for the glow of LCD panels. I took a step to catch my balance. For a moment I thought I was falling, but it was an illusion created by the floor, which was also made of two-way glass. It was so dim in the room that all I could see were outlines: a desk, a few chairs, a table, and a man standing across the room, his back to me. Everything beneath the room, however, was clearly visible. It made each step feel like a leap of faith.

“Glass houses, huh, Ryodan?” The first time I’d ever called IYCGM on my cell phone, Ryodan had berated me, told me people who lived in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, implying my goals were no loftier than Barrons’. Now here he stood, surveying his world from inside one. Did he consider his own goals so pristine? I narrowed my eyes. There was another room beyond the one in which we stood, even darker. Whatever lurked in its shadows, he was watching it intently.

After a moment he said, without turning, “Why did you come, Mac?”

“Why are you feeding humans to the Unseelie?”

“There is no force at my club. Only desire. Mutual.”

“They don’t understand what they’re doing.”

“Not my problem.”

“They’re dying. Somebody needs to wake them up to reality.”

“They’re in love with dying.”

“They’re misguided, confused.”

“Not my problem.”

“You could do something about it!”

“So I should?” he said. “Does that seem a friendly crowd down there to you? It trembles on the verge of another riot, yet you would have me play moral adviser. Men have been crucified for less. I’ve seen enough train wrecks to know when the rails are locked and the brakes have failed. It’s all train wrecks down there, Mac. Only one thing holds my interest now. Potential. Barrons thinks you have it.”

His tone made it plain. “But you don’t,” I said flatly.

“You worry me.”

“You worry me, too.” I took a few more steps into the room. I wanted a better look at him. I wanted to know what he was watching. Like Barrons and my escorts, Ryodan was tall, well built. I wondered if it was a requirement to be whatever they were: no wimps allowed. He wore dark pants and a crisp white shirt, sleeves rolled up on thickly muscled forearms. A silver cuff, identical to Barrons’, glinted at his wrist.

“Everyone seems to think you’re the solution, don’t they?” he said.

I shrugged. “Not everybody.” Rowena didn’t.

“Has it occurred to you that you might be the problem?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why do you think you keep having so many brushes with the Book, when everyone else who’s searching for it never gets a glimpse of it? Even Darroc, your illustrious master, can’t get close to it. Word is it’s been taking its own—Unseelie—chewing them up and spitting them out. But nobody who really wants it can find it. Except you.”

“I’m an OOP detector,” I reminded him. “I’m the only one who can sense it. There’s potential for you.”

“Indeed. Potential for what? Has it occurred to you that perhaps you don’t keep finding the Book—it keeps finding you?”

“What are you saying?”

“What do you think the Book wants, Mac?”

“How should I know? Death. Destruction. Chaos. Same as the rest of the Unseelie.”

“What would you want if you were a book?”

“I’m different, and that’s easy. I’d want to not be a book.”

“Maybe you’re not so different. Maybe it wants also to not be a book.”

“It has other forms. It’s the Beast, too.”

“Has the Beast ever harmed anyone? Don’t you think it would if it could? Isn’t that its nature?”

I studied his back, pondered his words. “You’re saying the Beast is only glamour. That like any Fae, it creates illusion.”

“What if its only true form is a book? One that can’t walk, or talk, or move, or do anything on its own?”

“Are you saying you think it takes people over just to have a body?”

He glanced up at the LCD screens above his head. “I don’t know what I think. I consider everything. You watch them long enough, you see what they want. Unseelie hunger, like starved prisoners, for whatever it is the Unseelie King brought them into existence lacking. What if the Book is after corporeality? A movable form it can use with autonomy? A body it can keep and control? A life of its own?”

“Then why would it kill the people it takes?”

“Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe, like dolls, they break. Or maybe some part of them manages to regain control for a few moments and stop what the Book is doing to them the only way they can. Or maybe it’s biding time, waiting for just the right moment. Maybe it has the Fae ability of prognosticating possibles, delicately shaping events to achieve certain ends. Has the Book ever spoken to you?”

“Yes.”

“Barrons said it called you by name.”

I’d never told him that. He must have heard it speak to me that night. I’d thought it spoke only in my head. “So? I don’t know how it knew my name.” He liked the “maybe” game. I could play it, too. “Maybe it knows everybody’s. I don’t know what you’re getting at, but the Book repels me. I can barely get close to it. I’m too good and it’s too evil.”

“Really.” He could not have said it more dryly.

“What do you mean, ‘really’?” I said defensively.

“Good and evil are merely opposite sides of a coin, Mac. Get tossed in the air enough, it’s easy to come down on the wrong side. Maybe the Book knows something about you that makes you different. Makes it want you. Makes it think if you flipped sides, you’d be worth more to it than any of the rest of us.”

What he was saying didn’t make sense. And it was creeping me out. “Like what? And if that was the case, then why wouldn’t it have taken me already? It’s had plenty of chances.”

“Darroc bided his time, waiting for the perfect moment. Maybe you’re not primed to flip yet. Eternal life breeds eternal patience. If you lived long enough, you might feel that if today amuses, today is good. All sense of right or wrong, all morality, all value, might cease to exist.”

With the exception of two compartments to hold everything: stasis and change—the classic Fae attitude. Of course, immortality would do that. “So you think the Book is amusing itself, waiting for the right moment to pounce? Wake up. There’s never going to be a right moment for it to pounce on me.”

“Arrogance, like anger, is often a fatal flaw.”

“Darroc lost me. He didn’t get what he wanted. I’m still standing. And I’m still fighting. And I will never flip sides,” I said coldly.

“You’re still standing because of that one, Mac.” He nodded at the room he was staring into. “Don’t forget it. Never seen anything like her, and I’ve seen a lot.”

I moved to stand beside him, peered into the room. Up close, I could discern shapes. Dani was in the middle of four men, spinning ceaselessly, sword up, snarling.

“You hurt her, I’ll kill you,” I told him. No matter that he was a foot taller than me and twice my mass.

“She said the same about you.”

Suddenly Dani went into hyperspeed, then they all disappeared, and then there was Dani again, surrounded by four men.

“She hasn’t stopped trying to get out since I put her in there. I wonder how long she could survive.”

Not very long without food, but I wasn’t about to tell him that. I looked up at him.

He turned his face to mine, looked down. Handsome, chilling man. His eyes were the clearest I’d ever seen. This was a man that suffered no conflicts with himself. He had no problems being what he was.

We stared at each other. “Black looks good on you,” he murmured. “Has Barrons seen you like this?”

“Eternal patience,” I murmured back. His tie was loosened, and in the open collar of his white shirt his neck was a skein of scars, with a long, wicked-looking one stretching up the left side from shoulder to ear. I didn’t need a nurse to tell me he’d healed from a wound, long ago, that would have killed most men. How long ago? “Does today amuse, Ryodan?”

His lips curved. He looked back at Dani and, after a moment, nodded. “It does. More than it has in recent … years.”

“She’s thirteen.”

“Time will remedy that.”

“You worry me, Ryodan.”

“Back at you. Bit of advice, Mac. Life’s an ocean, full of waves. All are dangerous. All can drown you. Under the right circumstances, even the gentlest swell can turn tidal. Hopping waves is for the weekend warrior. Choose one, ride it out. It increases your odds of survival.” He watched Dani for a moment, then said, “There are rules in my house.”

“Your buddies already told me the first two. Neutral ground. Break a rule you die.”

“No killing Fae inside my club. In my walls means under my protection.”

“I just watched one of your protected Fae kill a human.”

“If they’re stupid enough to be here, they’re stupid enough to die.”

“Does that mean I can kill humans, too?” I said sweetly. There were two in particular who had just caught my eye. Derek O’Bannion, the younger brother of the Irish mobster I’d killed after I stole the Spear of Destiny from him, and current right-hand man to the Lord Master, was crossing the dance floor beneath my feet. Accompanying him was Fiona, the woman who used to run Barrons Books and Baubles, until she’d tried to kill me; then Barrons had fired her.

Now I just needed the LM himself and a few Unseelie Princes to have all my enemies in the same place.

“Special rules for you, Mac. You don’t get to kill anything in my club, Fae or human. Your fight is outside these walls. And if Barrons’ belief in you is unfounded, there won’t be anyplace you can hide. Every last one of us will come after you.”

I didn’t dignify his threat with a response.

He knocked on the glass and made a gesture with his left hand. Three of the men disappeared. Dani blinked out. Then suddenly there she was again, and one of his men had her sword pointed at her throat.

“If you ever come into my club carrying again, we’ll take your weapons and never give them back. Clear?”

“As the floor beneath my feet.”