Burned - Moning Karen Marie - Страница 35

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I fall to my knees, clutching my skull with both hands, crying out.

I haven’t felt pain like this since the night I went to meet Christian at Trinity College. I made it only a few blocks before the Sinsar Dubh reduced me to a gibbering, drooling mess in a gutter in Temple Bar, crushed by the agony it was inflicting.

Spikes pound through my brain. My stomach cramps and my spine becomes a red-hot poker impaling my body.

Pain fills me until I’m nothing but a single, giant exposed nerve alternately being raked over coals, then diced and iced, before getting seared again.

Barrons has me then, his arms strong, sheltering. “What the fuck, Mac?” he growls. “What’s happening?”

We are definitely not having sex so I must be dying. He called me Mac. “Music,” I grit through clenched teeth. “That … damned … music!”

“You hear music down here?” Dancer sounds incredulous.

My only response is a whimper.

Distantly, through the pain, I’m aware Barrons is carrying me back onto the elevator.

“Get a picture of it,” Ryodan says to Dancer.

“Already got a dozen, other places.”

“When I tell you to do something, don’t think. Don’t talk. Don’t breathe.”

“Reality check, thinking and breathing, necessary to take pictures. Otherwise I might end up with shots of—”

“Fucking do it.”

“—your nose hairs, or mine, or—”

“You won’t have a fucking nose left, you keep talking.”

I hear a cell phone camera snapping.

Whatever it is, I want to see it for myself. I didn’t make the miserable trek belowground and suffer this pain to leave without getting a good look at whatever our latest problem is. I drag my pounding head from Barrons’s chest and peer into the darkness beyond.

Ryodan shines the wide beam of a powerful flashlight out the door. My stalkers have begun popping into the corridor.

Halfway down the hall, I see a low-hanging round black globe. Not because Ryodan’s flashlight has illuminated it, but because the beam has lit everything but the circular area suspended in the air.

One of the Unseelie sifts in close to it, and as more arrive, it glides back to make room, and inadvertently brushes the black globe.

The instant it touches it, the ghoul contorts, is stretched long and thin into a tatter of black-skinned robe and bones, and screams with such terror that the skin all over my body prickles in goose flesh. As its hood elongates impossibly, I catch a glimpse of something shiny, metallic, where I think its face should be.

The black globe swallows it whole. Which is impossible, given the globe doesn’t have a twentieth the mass of the Unseelie.

My ghouls jostle and shove in panic. Each one that brushes the globe suffers the same fate. Stretched long and thin, then gone. The screaming is deafening, far worse than the hideous chittering. Some sift out. Others stand frozen.

The elevator doors close.

“Now do you get it?” Dancer says.

I’d shake my head but it would explode. I peer at him with pain-blurred eyes and whisper, “No.”

“When the Hoar Frost King bit chunks of frequency from our world, it created a cosmic deficit. The fabric of our universe began to unravel. That alone was problematic enough, but compounding it, at each site where it fed it also deposited something, like an overfed scavenger, regurgitating unwanted bones. Whatever it expelled possesses astronomically compact mass and density.” He pauses. When a lightbulb doesn’t instantly brighten over my head, he says with elaborate patience, “It’s. Deforming. Space-time.”

“Are you saying what I just saw is a black hole?” I manage. The farther we get from the globe, the less pain I feel.

Dancer says, “I lack the ability to perform the tests I’d like to run. Speculation aside, I can only observe these facts: they share certain similar characteristics to black holes, they were no larger than pinpricks at first, they absorb everything they come in contact with, and they’re growing. The one we just saw is the largest I’ve seen at any of the sites.”

“It’s the first place that got iced,” Ryodan says.

“You didn’t tell me any of this,” I mutter crossly to Barrons. Barrons shoots me a dry looks that says, Far be it from me to disrupt your brood. You might be motivated to do something and then I wouldn’t know who you were anymore.

I wrinkle my nose at him and don’t dignify it with a response.

“I didn’t know you had one in the club,” Dancer says. “I thought the one out front would get the honors. Dude, Chester’s is going to be swallowed from the inside!”

“Dude me one more time and you’re dead.”

We ride the rest of the way up the shaft in silence.

The Unseelie King settles into what passes as an enormous red crushed-velvet chair in what might loosely be called a theater room before a stage so vast the edges furl out into night skies filled with stars. On the left, the Milky Way shimmers. To the right, a nebula stains the sky rainbow-bright.

He rests his head of sorts on a hand of sorts and broods.

His woman retains no memory of him at all.

She knows him only as the Seelie Queen’s greatest enemy and believes that since the Unseelie Prince was unable to kill her, the king himself came to finish the job.

Though she conceals it with defiance, she is terrified of him.

To see his beloved gaze upon him with fear … there are no words. Neither split into dozens of humans, as he must be in order to walk among the tiny, strange, absurdly determined creatures who face such futile odds, nor as a god.

The joy that burned inside him upon seeing her again is ash.

He changes a channel of sorts with a remote of sorts and one of the more interesting cities on one of his more interesting worlds takes the limelight.

It is dying, as he suspected.

No matter, another will come.

But another of her will not come. In all this time, no one has touched him as she has. To have her back again and not have her at all is almost worse than believing her gone. It is as if a replication has risen from the dead, a perfect mirror image, nothing within. Should he take her into the White Mansion? Confront her with the residue of their love?

“Is that Dublin?”

Her voice is beautiful. She had names for him, endearments she called him. He would raze worlds to hear them again.

She stands behind him. Close enough that if she chose she could place a hand on his shoulder, were he not the size of a skyscraper and she the size of a pea. Once, she wore a glamour that met him size for girth, wing for wing, crown for crown. He does not bother to answer. Temple Bar is red, the River Liffey silver. She has eyes. She knows this world.

“Am I prisoner here?”

“You are.” He was never letting her go. He would not turn and gaze fifty floors of wing and blackness down at her. He was uncertain what he might do if he did.

“What are you doing to Dublin? It ails. I feel it.”

He doesn’t want to see that beneath a cloak of ermine fur she’s wearing a diaphanous gown of white that does nothing to conceal her exquisite body, her hair bound in a platinum braid. He would commit genocide on a dozen planets to see her in a gown of bloodred, pale hair spilling to her ankles, joy in her eyes, a smile of greeting.

“I do nothing. They do it themselves.”

“Attend it,” she says imperiously. “My druids are there.”

“Give me an incentive.”

“My druids are there.”

“That is not one.” He doesn’t bother to conceal his bitterness. Should he take her beneath him? Discover if that makes her recall, if memory can be forced to return?

“You will not coerce intimacy where none is granted,” she says sharply.

He goes very still. “I did not say that.”

“You did.”

She can still hear him. She may not remember him or the epic love they share but she hears his desires, as she always has.

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