Feversong (Fever #9)(114)

“Might have been a bit clearer,” I groused.

“Crystal. You muddied it.”

“Come to save our world?”

“Hand of God. No fun there.”

“What do you consider fun?” I said irritably.

“Free will. Not predictable. Bites you in the ass every time.” He laughed and I shivered, feeling it roll through every cell in my body, and abruptly I was seeing, superimposed around him, a gargantuan, ancient star-sprinkled darkness that was so far beyond my comprehension I felt as tiny as a dust mote, swirling on an air current, sparkling in the sunlight.

“Pretty much,” he murmured.

“And you’re the sun,” I murmured back.

“Bigger.”

I thought of the concubine. Of the empty chamber, void of their passion, the slamming door. “She left you,” I said sadly.

“Time.”

Changes everything, he didn’t say, but I heard it. “So?” I prodded. “How do I use the song?”

“Don’t have it.”

“Got part of it,” I insisted.

The Dreamy-Eyed Guy rippled into the bookstore in a stain of liquid darkness that licked up the bookcases, swirled on the walls, covered the ceiling then retreated back into him. His head swiveled but I saw two visions: the first of the DEG and the second of a great dark star swiveling in an abyss of dark matter. His gaze moved across our small group, coming to rest on Cruce. “And he has the other.”

I exploded. “What?” I shot Cruce a furious glare. “And you never told me?”

Cruce growled, “The fuck I do, old man.”

“You haven’t been hearing music?” the DEG said mildly.

“You iced me, you bastard!”

“Complaints. Boring. Music. Yes or no?”

“You never finished it,” Cruce growled. “Or you would have turned your precious concubine into one of us, a thing she was never meant to be. You abandoned us for hundreds of thousands of years, created and discarded us, obsessed with your quest. You betrayed us again and again.”

“Grudges. Glories. You name them. They become it.” The Dreamy-Eyed Guy’s eyes shifted, expanded exponentially, becoming voracious whirlpools of swirling darkness, sucking us down, stretching us as thin as threads, yanking us away, and abruptly I stood with Cruce and the Dreamy-Eyed Guy on a familiar grassy knoll beneath an enormous moon, with a pine-board fence unfurling high on a ridge, jutting planks into the sky like dark fingers reaching for the cool white orb.

Tiny, between towering black megaliths, I stood with Cruce on my left, the Dreamy-Eyed Guy on my right. The wind tangled hair around my face while, above me, Hunters gusted a fragrant breeze, gonging deep in their chests to the moon as the moon chimed back. Power pulsed and surged in the soil and rocks beneath my feet, and I could feel it so much more intensely now that I had the True Magic. This power was ancient, enormous, far more vast and potent than anything the Earth had ever possessed. I might sink into it, become one with it, become a world myself or perhaps a star, instead of a mere human or queen.

“This is the First World,” I breathed, understanding.

The DEG nodded but looked past me, at Cruce, “Your king never betrayed you.”

“That was all you did. At every opportunity,” Cruce snarled.

“And now we will see if you are as great a king as he.”

I narrowed my eyes, gripped by a sudden inexplicable apprehension. Danger! the marrow in my bones screamed. Wherever this conversation was going, I wasn’t going to like it. What did he mean, the king had never betrayed Cruce?

“Answer me,” the DEG said softly, but there was such immense compulsion in his words that I instantly began to puke every word I knew in an incoherent babble of random associations. “Not you,” the DEG said absently, and I shut up.

Cruce gritted, “Yes, you manipulative fuck. I have been hearing music.”

I glared at Cruce. “And you didn’t think to mention this to me when you knew we were hunting for a bloody song?”

He shrugged. “I assumed it was miscellaneous detritus from the Book. It sounded like the Unseelie castes so I believed it part of their True Names and didn’t give it a second thought.”

I narrowed my eyes, trying to decide if he was telling the truth. I was getting a mixed read from him. I turned back to the DEG and scowled. “That means you finished it. And you didn’t bother to tell us that?”

“Long before Zara was gone.”

I protested, “But you didn’t turn the concubine.” That was the fact that convinced me the king had failed, that he’d not even been an avenue worth pursuing. Now he was telling me he’d succeeded? Then why hadn’t he used it? And according to what I understood of the time line, given how long ago the king had gifted the concubine the music box, he’d had a small eternity to reconsider his decision.

“No, the king did not,” he said, and such exquisite pain lanced through me that I doubled over, holding my sides. “There’s a price to sing that song.”

“But you couldn’t have sung it. You’re not the queen,” I protested.

He turned his star-filled, apocalyptic gaze to Cruce and smiled faintly. “Rules. Malleable. He could have. He chose not to.” His expression changed to one of paternal pride. “Your turn to choose.”