Shadowfever
Page 111

The three of us went in together.
It was one of the most awkward, uncomfortable walks Ive taken.
I had one of those outside-my-skin-watching-from-above moments. Eight months ago, when Id first ducked into BB&B, seeking sanctuary from my first encounter with a Dark Zone, Id never have imagined this moment: pushing into a brick wall behind the bookstoreI mean, really, a brick wall!with the badly skinned and heavily narcotized woman whod 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 Id thought my life would come to this, Id have marched straight for the airport that day and flown back home.
Fiona hadnt uttered a syllable since Barrons had appeared in the alley. Shed drawn her hood tightly around her face. I couldnt imagine what she had to be feeling as she marched to her suicide between the man shed loved to her own destruction and the woman she believed had taken him from her.
At first, Barrons had disagreed with my plan vehemently.
Hed 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, hed 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 didnt seem like such a bad thing to be.
Unless hed 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, hed murmured against my ear, Ill kill her where we stand, and you wont get your little test.
I glanced at him from the corner of my eye. Could he? In the same way he killed Fae, whatever it was? Yet he didnt offer it as mercy. I wondered what he was feeling as we moved down a rosy corridor. Did he mourn her, this woman whod run his store for years, this woman hed trusted with more of his secrets than hed ever entrusted to me? He hadnt offered to kill her swiftly, to end her suffering. Hed used it only as a threat to keep me from prying into his business.
His face was set in hard, cold lines. He looked down at the top of Fionas head and his face changed; then he saw me looking at him and it was again a mask of stone.
He did mourn hernot her suffering or death but that shed chosen the path that had led her here. I suspected that he would never have stopped caring for her, and taking care of her, if she hadnt turned on me. But that action had sealed her fate.
Barronswas one of the most complicated men Id ever met and at the same time one of the simplest: You were with him, or you were against him. Period. End of story. You got only one chance with him. And if you betrayed him, you ceased to exist in his world until he got around to killing you.
Fiona had ceased to exist when shed let Shades into the bookstore to devour me while I was sleepingthereby stealing his only chance at something he wanted very badly, whatever it wasand the only thing he felt now was a twinge of wishing it hadnt turned out this way, a whisper of a regret. Not so long ago hed put a knife through her heart, and if she hadnt been eating Unseelie, it would have killed her. Hed been ready to kill her in the alley, and not mercifully.
I stole another look at him, realizing the full extent of what Id just been mulling over.
He thought Id betrayed him by taking up with Darroc when Id believed he was dead. But he hadnt excised me from his life. Whatever he wanted from the Sinsar Dubh, he wanted very badly.
And according to my own assessment of him, once he had it, he would kill me.
He must have felt my gaze, because he looked at me.
Something wrong, Ms. Lane?
My gaze mocked, Is there anything right about this situation?
He smiled without humor. Besides the obvious.
I shook my head.
Youre looking at me as if you expect me to kill you.
I jerked. Was I that easy to read?
Youre wondering what kind of man I am and how I feel about all this.
I stared.
You think you betrayed me and one day I will kill you for it.
Im not sure why I even bother talking. My eyes flashed with temper. I hated being so transparent.
That you allied with Darroc to attain your goals did not betray me. Id have done the same.
Then why are you so pissy?
That you fucked him will be forgiven once you fuck me. Another woman might run headlong toward absolution.
I put an end to our discussion by staring straight ahead.
It was slow going. Fiona couldnt move very quickly. We proceeded at a snails pace through rose halls, to sunshine, to bronze.
The libraries, Barrons said as we passed. Well stop on the way back, since were in here anyway. I want another look around.
I felt a sudden tension in the cloaked figure next to me as the dark hood turned my way.
I didnt need to be able to see her face to sense the bitterness of her gaze or divine the morbid turn of her thoughts.
His comment had driven home that he and I would be walking out of here together and she would be dead. And I knew she thought we would be having a fabulous time, dancing and fighting, having sex and living, while her existence would be over, extinguished as if shed never been born, unmourned, unmissed.