Bloodfever (7 page)

I stepped into the shadows beyond the church, swinging my flashlights left and right. This part of the graveyard was enclosed by a low, crumbling wall of stone, and had been fending for itself for years. No gardener toiled here. The grass grew tall and dense, and not one flower broke the stark pallor of many small cairns neglected beneath the heavy boughs of oak and slender limbs of yew. A broken wrought-iron gate swung from a single hinge that creaked a rusty protest when I pushed it open and stepped in.

So much for my talents—I was thigh-high in grass, and tripping over the darn thing before I sensed it.

In my defense, there wasn't much of it left.

“What is it?” I asked Barrons, horrified.

When I'd stumbled over the monstrosity, I'd screamed loud enough to wake the dead. Barrons had come at a run.

It was a misshapen lump at our feet, motionless but for the occasional, terrible shudder.

“I do believe it's what's left of a Rhino-boy,” Barrons said slowly.

“What happened to it?”

“I believe, Ms. Lane that something has been … gnawing at it.”

“What in the world eats Rhino-boys? And why?”

He glanced at me and I was stunned to see that he looked stunned himself, which was an exorbitant display of emotion for Barrons. “It had to be another Fae.” He sounded appalled. “Nothing human could take down one of these things, and would certainly have no cause to eat it. As for the why, I have no idea. It goes against everything that is
Sidhe
. Fae do not savage one another. Even the lowest of the Unseelie would consider this an atrocity, an abomination. Packs of them would turn on the defiler.”

“Will it die?” I asked. There was so little of it left. Yet it lived, and its agony was obvious.

“Not unless you stab it with your spear, Ms. Lane.”

“Will it eventually regenerate or something?” It was missing major parts.

“No. Only the royal castes have that power. It will exist in this form forever, unless one of its own race stumbles across it and takes pity on it, which is unlikely. Or you do.” His gaze was heavy on me. “Do you? Pity it?”

I stared into his dark eyes. Sometimes they seem bottomless, not entirely human, and this was one of those times.

“Tell me, Ms. Lane, will you walk away from it? Let it suffer for eternity? Or are you an angel of mercy?”

I bit my lip.

“Which will it be? Knowing one of these things murdered your sister. Perhaps not a Rhino-boy, but certainly one of its brethren.”

“The Lord Master killed my sister.” I was sure of it.

“So you say. He's not Fae and the marks on her body were.”

There was that. Still, if he hadn't actually dealt the killing blow, he was the one who'd orchestrated it. I narrowed my eyes. Barrons was testing me. I had no idea what his twisted idea of a passing grade was. I only knew what I had to do. There is a synergy to life and death, and this did not fit.

I slid the spear from my boot and stabbed the Rhino-boy. Barrons smiled, but I don't know if he was mocking me for being weak or lauding me for being compassionate. Screw him. It was my conscience I had to live with.

As we were leaving the cemetery, I made the mistake of looking back.

The black-shrouded specter stood, dark folds rustling, one ghostly hand on the rusted gate, watching me. Its darkness was as enormous as the night. And like the night, it was all around me, pressing at me, caressing me, knowing me.

I cried out and stumbled over a low gravestone. Barrons caught my arm and saved me from a nasty spill. “What is it, Ms. Lane—pangs of regret? So soon?”

I shook my head. “Look back at the gate,” I said numbly. It had never appeared to me before when someone else was around.

Barrons turned, scanned the old partitioned-off cemetery for several moments, then glanced back at me. “What? I see nothing.”

I turned and looked. He was right. It was gone. Of course. I should have known. I sighed. “I guess I'm just a little spooked, Barrons. That's all. Let's go home. There's nothing here.”

“Home, Ms. Lane?” His deep voice was gently amused.

“I have to call it something,” I said morosely. “They say home is where the heart is. I think mine's satin-lined and six feet under.”

He opened the car door for me—the driver's side. “Shall we dispel some of that youthful angst, Ms. Lane?” He offered me the keys. “Not far from here there's a road that goes on for miles, through positively desolate parts.” His dark eyes gleamed. “Devilish curves. No traffic. Why don't you take us for a drive?”

My eyes widened. “Really?”

He brushed a curl from my forehead and I shivered. Barrons has strong hands with long, beautiful fingers, and I think he carries some kind of electrical charge because every time he touches me it shoots an unwelcome thrill through my body. I took the keys from his hand, being careful not to make contact with skin. If he noticed, he let it pass unremarked.

“Try not to kill us, Ms. Lane.”

I slid behind the wheel. “Viper, SR10 coupe. 6-speed, V-10, 510 horses at 5,600 rpm, 0–60 in 3.9 seconds,” I babbled happily. He laughed.

I kept us alive. Barely.

 

I think it's human nature to nest. Even the homeless stake out that special park bench or spot beneath the bridge, and feather it with items prized from someone's trash. Everybody wants their own safe, warm, dry place in the world and if they don't have one, they'll do their best to create one with what they've got.

I was nesting on the first floor of BB&B. I'd rearranged the furniture, stashed a boring brown throw in a closet, and replaced it with a silky yellow one, brought two peaches-and-cream candles down from my bedroom, plugged in my new sound dock behind the cash register and tuned it to a cheery playlist, and propped photos of my family on top of my predecessor's TV.

MacKayla Lane is here! it all said.

OOP-detector/monster-killer by night—bookseller by day was a much-needed respite. I liked the spicy fragrance of candles burning, the clean, new scent of freshly printed newspapers and glossily inked magazines. I liked ringing up sales and the sound the cash register made. I enjoyed the timeless ritual of taking money in exchange for goods. I liked the way the wood of the floors and shelves gleamed in the afternoon sun. I liked lying on my back on the counter when no one was around, trying to make out the mural on the ceiling, four floors above me. I enjoyed recommending great reads and discovering new ones from the customers. It all came together in a warm, nesty sort of way.

At four o'clock on Wednesday afternoon, I was surprised to find myself bustling around the store, humming beneath my breath, and feeling almost … it took me a few moments to identify the feeling … 
good
.

Then Inspector Jayne walked in.

And if that wasn't bad enough—with him was my dad.

SIX

I
s this your daughter, Mr. Lane?” said the inspector.

My dad stopped inside the door, and peered at me, hard.

I touched a hand to my butchered hair, abruptly, excruciatingly aware of the bruises on my face, and the spear tucked into my boot.

“Mac, baby, is that you?” Jack Lane looked shocked, appalled, and so relieved that I nearly burst into tears.

I cleared my throat. “Hey, Dad.”

“ ‘Hey, Dad?' ” he echoed. “Did you just say ‘Hey, Dad'? After all I've been through to find you, you ‘Hey, Dad' me?”

Uh-oh, I was in for it. When he gets that tone, heads roll. Six feet two inches of corporate tax attorney that manages the IRS on behalf of his clients and frequently bests it, Jack Lane is smart, charming, well spoken, and tough as a tiger when provoked. And from the way he was raking back his silver-tipped dark hair and his brown eyes were flashing, he was currently
very
provoked.

He was lucky I was still calling him “Dad” at all, I thought bitterly. We both knew he wasn't.

He stalked toward me, eyes narrowed. “MacKayla Evelina Lane, what on earth did you do to your hair? And your face! Are those bruises? When was the last time you showered? Did you lose your luggage? You don't wear—Christ, Mac, you look awful! What happened—” He broke off, shaking his head, then aimed a finger at me. “I'll have you know, young lady, I left your mother with her parents four days ago! I dropped every case I was working on to fly over here and bring you home. Do you have any idea the heart attack it gave me to find out you hadn't been staying at the Clarin House for
over a week
? And nobody knew where you'd gone! Could you check your e-mail, Mac? Could you pick up a phone? I have been walking up and down these dreary, rainy, reeking-with-stumbling-drunks streets, staring into every face, searching trash-filled alleys for you, hoping and praying to God that I wasn't going to find you lying facedown in one of them like your sister and have to kill myself rather than take the news back home to your mother and kill
her
with it!”

The tears I'd been holding back came out in a waterfall. I might not have this man's DNA inside my body, but he couldn't be any more my father.

He swallowed up the room with long-legged strides and crushed me into that great, big, barrel-chested hug that always smelled like peppermint and aftershave, and it felt just like it always did—like the safest place on earth.

Unfortunately, I knew better. There was no safe place. Not for me. Not now. And certainly not for him. Not here.

He'd been walking around Dublin looking for me! I blessed the Fates that had spared him, steering him away from the Dark Zone, protecting him in those alleys from Unseelie. If anything had happened to him it would have been doubly on my head. What had I been thinking—avoiding my e-mail, refusing to call home? Of course he would come looking for me! Dad never took no for an answer.

I had to get him out of Dublin, fast, before something awful happened to him, and I lost another piece of my heart to that satin-lined box in the earth.

I had to make him fly home ASAP, and without what he'd come for—me.

 

“What happened to your face, Mac?” was the first question Dad asked me after Inspector Jayne left. Though there were still two hours to closing, I flipped the sign and stuck a Post-it next to it that said, Sorry, closed early, please come back tomorrow.

I led him to the rear conversation area where passersby couldn't see behind the shelves that someone was still inside, fingering my hair nervously. It was one thing to lie to the police, another to lie to the man who'd raised me, who knew I hated spiders and loved hot fudge sundaes topped with peanut butter and whipped cream.

“Inspector Jayne tells me you fell on the stairs.”

“What else did the inspector tell you?” I fished. How much did I have to try to explain?

“That the police officer handling Alina's case was murdered. Had his throat cut. And that he'd been to see you the day it happened. Mac, what's going on? What are you doing here? What is this place?” He craned his head around. “Do you
work
here?”

I filled him in without filling him in at all. I'd realized I liked it in Dublin, I told him. I'd been offered a job that came with lodgings, so I'd moved into the bookstore. Staying in Ireland and working gave me the perfect chance to keep the pressure on the new officer handling Alina's case. Yes, I fell on the stairs. I'd had a few beers and forgotten how much stronger their Guinness was than ours. No, I had no idea why Inspector Jayne didn't seem to think very highly of me. I gave Dad the same excuse I'd given Jayne for O'Duffy's visit. To make it more convincing, I embellished about how fatherly and kind O'Duffy had been and what a favor he'd been doing, stopping by. Crime was very high in Dublin, I told Dad, and I felt awful about O'Duffy's death but really, police officers died on the job all the time and Jayne was just being a jack-petunia about it to me.

“And your hair?”

“You don't like it?” It was hard to feign surprise when I hated it myself; I missed the weight of it, the different styles I'd been able to wear, the swish of it when I walked. I was just grateful he hadn't seen me when I'd still had all my splints on.

He gave me a look. “You are kidding, right? Mac, baby, you had beautiful hair, long and blond like your mother's …” He trailed off.

And there it was. I looked him dead in the eye. “Which mother, Dad? Mom? Or the other one—you know, the one that gave me up for adoption?”

“You want to go get some dinner, Mac?”

Men. Do they all evade as first line of defense?

We ordered delivery. I hadn't had a good pizza in forever, it was starting to rain again, and I was in no mood to go out in it. I ordered, Dad paid, just like old times when life was simple, and Daddy was always there to be my Friday night date whenever my latest boyfriend had been a jerk. I gathered paper plates and napkins from Fiona's stash behind the register. Before sitting down with our pizza, I turned on all the exterior lights, and lit a cozy gas fire. For now, we were safe. I just had to keep him safe until morning, when I would somehow get him on a plane and send him home.

I keep a happy thought inside me at all times. I cling to it in my darkest moments: When all this is over, I'm going to go back to Ashford and pretend none of this happened. I'm going to find myself a man, get married, and have babies. I need both my parents at home, waiting for me because I'm going to make little Lane girls, and we're going to be a family again.

We kept the talk light through dinner. He told me that Mom was still lost in grief and not talking to anyone. He'd hated leaving her, but he'd taken her to Gram and Gramp's and they were giving her the best of care. Thinking about Mom was too painful, so I turned the conversation to books. Dad loves to read as much as I do, and I knew that in his opinion there were far worse places he could have found me working, like another bar. We talked about new releases. I told him some of my plans for the store.

When dinner was over we pushed our plates back and regarded each other warily.

He began a somber “You know your mother and I love you” spiel, and I hushed him. I knew. I didn't have any doubts on that score. I'd been forced to come to terms with so much in the past few weeks that making peace with my discovery that my parents were not my birth parents hadn't taken as long as I'd expected. It had rocked my world, brutally shifted my paradigm, but regardless of whose sperm and egg had resulted in my conception, Jack and Rainey Lane had raised me with more love and unwavering support than most people ever know in a lifetime. If my biological parents were alive out there somewhere,
they
were my second set.

“I know, Dad. Just tell me.”

“How did you find out, Mac?”

I told him an old woman had insisted I was someone else, about brown eyes and blue not making green, about calling the hospital to check on my birth records.

“We knew this day might come.” He pushed a hand through his hair and sighed. “What do you want to know, Mac?”

“Everything,” I said in a low voice. “Every last detail.”

“It's not much.”

“Alina was my biological sister, wasn't she?”

He nodded. “She was almost three, and you were nearly a year when the two of you came to us.”

“Where did we come from, Dad?”

“They didn't tell us. In fact, they told us virtually nothing while demanding everything.”

“They” were people from a church in Atlanta. Mom and Dad couldn't conceive, and had been on an adoption waiting list for so long they'd nearly given up. But one day they got a call that two children had been left at a downtown church, and a friend of a friend of the church's pastor's sister knew their counselor, who'd suggested the Lanes. Not all couples were willing to accept, or had the financial means to take on two young children at once, and among the biological mother's lengthy list of requirements was that the children not be separated. She'd also insisted that if the adoptive couple did not already live in a rural area, they must move to a small town and agree to never live in or near a city again.

“Why?”

“We were told it was what it was, Mac, and we could take it or leave it.”

“And you didn't think it was odd?”

“Of course we did. Extremely. But your mother and I wanted so badly to have children and couldn't. We were young and in love and would have done just about anything to have a family of our own. Since both of us came from small towns to begin with, we took it as a sign to return to our roots. We visited dozens of towns, finally settling on Ashford. I was a successful attorney and pulled every string I could to push the adoption through. We signed all the documents, including the list of requirements, and in no time, we were proud parents living in a great little town where everyone believed you were our biological daughters, leading the life we'd always dreamed of.” He smiled, reminiscing. “We fell in love with you girls the moment we saw you. Alina was wearing this yellow skirt and sweater set, and you were dressed from head to toe in pink, Mac, with a little rainbow ribbon tied around a blond wisp of your hair.”

I gaped. Does the infant mind remember? To this day, pink and rainbow hues are my favorite.

“What other strange requirements did the woman have?” I couldn't call her “our mother.” She wasn't. She was the woman who'd left us.

He closed his eyes. “I no longer recall most of them. There's a legal document tucked away in a box somewhere that your mother and I signed. But there's one I never forgot.”

I sat up a little straighter.

He opened his eyes. “The first promise we had to make to the adoption agency before they'd even consider putting us on the list of prospective parents was that under no circumstances would we ever let either of you set foot in Ireland.”

I couldn't get him to go home.

I tried everything.

In his mind, he'd violated his most sacred trust the moment he'd caved in to Alina's radiant face when she'd announced that she'd won a full scholarship to study abroad—at Trinity, of all places!—by not locking her in her room and forbidding it. He should have threatened, he should have taken her car away, should have tempted her with the offer of a sporty new one if she stayed home. There were a thousand ways he could have stopped her from going, a thousand ways he'd failed.

She'd been so excited, he told me sadly. He hadn't been able to bring himself to stand in her way. Those conditions they'd agreed to so long ago had seemed as insubstantial as ghosts in the warm, sunny light of day. More than twenty perfect years had passed, and the odd demands accompanying us had lost their immediacy, become the phantom fears of a dying woman.

“She's dead, then?” I asked in a hushed voice.