Feversong
Page 40

As I’m unwillingly steered into the night, I try once again to exert control over my body. Furiously, I will my feet to stop moving. Cast away the spear. For whatever reason, having the spear makes me more dangerous. That’s reason enough to get rid of it.
Nothing happens. I can’t influence my body at all. What am I doing wrong? What’s the missing ingredient? And what didn’t Barrons tell me? Why didn’t he warn me that the Book has some deadly plan it’s trying to implement? Perhaps I could figure out some way to stop it. If I could figure out how to move.
I shake my inner head and sigh. I know why he didn’t tell me. The same reason he didn’t tell me who I killed. He didn’t want to give me more to worry about. He figured I had enough on my plate, and I do. Either that or he anticipated what I didn’t: that the Book was simply playing me again, and any information he shared with me, the Book might get, too.
And it was playing me.
How did it con me so easily? Why did I risk letting Barrons near me in the first place? I know the Sinsar Dubh is the ultimate deceiver. Why did I blithely allow Barrons to take me straight back into the middle of the people I cared about? I should have known better!
Why do I keep falling for its deceptions? And why is my belief not enough to override the Book’s beliefs? How does its force of will continue to supersede mine?
It occurs to me the answer must lie within the very definition of its nature, and mine, so I begin to tally the differences.
I’m good. It’s evil.
I’m compassionate. It’s savage.
I love. It hates.
No, I can’t even say it hates, just that it has an enormous superiority complex from which stem two mildly emotional states: rage when impeded and glee when full of itself for attaining one of its goals. It’s not capable of any true degree of—
A nonexistent lightbulb pops on in my nonexistent head. That’s it! I buy into its deceptions every time because of my emotions. Love, hope, desire, fear, doubt, confusion blind me. And it keeps winning because it has none.
How do I fight it? I’d asked Barrons.
Become it, he’d said.
I thought he’d meant I should participate to some degree in its violence and savagery, deceive it into believing I’d succumbed fully to its influence, then strike when it least expected it.
But that’s not what he’d meant at all.
He’d meant become it.
Just like it.
WE ARE DESIRE, LUST, GREED, AND THE PATH WE CHOOSE TO SUPREMACY, the Book had said as it feigned falling asleep.
The Sinsar Dubh was appetite and ambition, nothing more, capable of only vague impressions of feelings, leaving it free to coolly dissect and analyze everything around it. While I was preoccupied with my emotions, the Book had nothing in its mind at all but a hunger to figure out how to exploit me. Its path to “supremacy” was unimpeded by the slightest distraction. What an enormous advantage! And so long as I felt, it would always have that advantage, always be able to remain one step (or ten!) ahead of me, merely by keeping me in an emotional tizzy, too confused to focus fully. Emotion diluted my focus!
I snarl silently. Fucker. It used that very thing it lacked against me.
At least now I understood why the past few months had been such a wasteland of foggy confusion. It was always subtly dicking with me. Who can say what subliminal messages it fed me, whispered in my inner ear, perhaps even as I slept. I may never know to what extent it has been able to eavesdrop on me and tinker with my internal hardware, but I do know one thing: I will never be myself so long as this tick is latched into my skin.
As the Book passes the tumbled east wall of Chester’s, it spies a man and woman, walking slowly, holding hands. Invisible, they don’t even know I’m there until the Book grabs both their heads, and muttering spells, crashes their skulls together, melding their faces at the cheeks. Then it shoves them together more, joining them at the hips, ribs, thighs. They scream as they’re slowly, inexorably, fused skin-to-skin, bone-to-bone, into an awkwardly conjoined twin.
Then the Book just walks away, leaving the grotesque pair tottering about in the street, screaming. It laughs with my mouth, turns my head and glances back, purrs a spell, and instantly the gruesome twin is turned inside out; intestines and organs where their skin once was, mouths, ears, and eyes trapped within.
The macabre heap collapses to the cobbled pavement, where their now external hearts pulse wetly. The Book leaves them like that, alive.
Walks away, giggling.
The old me would have been overcome with horror, and while I was reeling, the Book would no doubt have driven another knife into me and twisted.
The new me observes with dispassionate calm: distraction/irrelevant/discern its true aim/impede it.
After a long moment in which I make no response, it probes, Mac-KAY-la, in a singsong voice. I know you’re IN there. T-T-T-Tea for two and two for tea, me for me and you for me…did you like that one? I did it just for you.
I say nothing.
Pretending not to care? You can’t fool me. You bleed for everything. You were born to be bled. Born to be RIDDEN, until there’s nothing left of you but bones. Broken horses DIEDIEDIE.
It had always mocked me for caring. While goading, pushing, prodding, trying to make me feel even more emotion.
Don’t talk to it, the Dreamy-Eyed Guy had said. Never talk to it. More recently he’d cautioned, It’s not about eating the candy, it’s about giving away words—even that broody ass poet’s. He’d told me over and over: do not engage. Not even with rhymes to drown it out. Perhaps there were many Fae things one should never, ever open a dialogue with.
After all, how had the Book finally worn me down?
By going silent.
Silence can’t be interpreted. It can’t be anticipated. It gives away nothing. And in most people, prolonged silence instills unease. We fill it up with the very best or worst of our imagination. As Ryodan said, the wise man is the silent one.
Each time I’d conversed with the Sinsar Dubh, I’d leaked information about myself, what mattered to me, what didn’t, intentionally or not. The Book had learned something about me every time I opened my mouth. Perhaps it had even learned from my dreams.
Barrons was right. I’d been its willing victim. By my consent, I’d engaged, interacted, let it gaslight and disorient me until I had no clue which end was up, then once I’d lost my bearings, I’d been easy to point whichever direction it wanted.