Feversong (Fever #9)(145)

“Yes. But you can’t eat people on our world and you can’t wipe out species. We’ll find another way to deal with your appetite.”

“But what if I can’t help myself?” he wailed.

“You can. I’ll teach you. You did great when we were together before. Everything’s easier when you’re not alone. Come on. We’re going home,” I told him firmly.

“Home? Where I can stay forever?” His lips pulled back, revealing sharp fangs and a black-tipped tongue as he turned a suspicious glare on Mac. “She doesn’t want me.”

“Not true,” Mac said. “But there will be rules.” She glanced at Barrons, who raised a brow and shrugged in a silent, What’s one Hel-Cat compared to the things we’ve handled?

“I am NOT a Hel-Cat,” Shazam said with a regal sniff. “I am Shazam. My Yi-yi named me and that is my only name.”

“Shazam,” Mac said, and it was the offer of a truce, of new beginnings. To me, she said, Can you control him?

I nodded and opened my arms. Shazam exploded out of the air and leapt into them at full velocity, taking me back to the ground beneath him, licking my face and biting my hair.

I wrapped my arms around him and held on to his furry, powerful body. He was going to sleep with me tonight and wake me up in the morning. I had someone of my own to love. I would survive the pain of losing Dancer. And one day life would be good again.

“And we’ll have adventures,” he said happily, pouncing my curls.

“Every day,” I told him. “Ew. Tribesman breath!”

“Your pitiful abandonment. My bad breath. You might have packed that can with fish, but no. Another big empty. Like all the other big empties in my life.”

“No big empties anymore.”

“Promise?”

“Swear it.”

He shifted his paws about, accommodating his great belly, then dropped hard on my stomach, evoking a loud whuff from me, and touched his damp nose to mine. “I see you, Yi-yi,” he said, eyes slanted half closed and gleaming.

I thought of Dancer. Of love lost. Of love regained. “I see you, too, Shazam.”

Then he was up and running across the island, and I was off chasing him and laughing.

He pounced my ankles and tripped me and I tumbled to the ground with him on top of me, nipping at my jeans, tugging at my shirt. Beneath a dazzling sun, on the island where I’d lost him along with a part of myself, I found both again.

We played for hours, running and blowing off steam, wading at the lake’s edge, catching silvery minnows, and I was happy to see he’d not eaten all the fish. He’d eaten only his enemy. I understood that. He could control himself. Together, we’d learn smarter ways of living and being.

Much later we sat together watching the waves lap at the shore, Shazam snuggled close to my side, keeping me warm as the temperature dropped.

I’d forgotten all about the others, lost in a time of much-needed joy and abandon.

As stars came out to twinkle in the sky above me, Shazam looked at me and I was suddenly struck by how old his eyes seemed. All playfulness and vulnerability had vanished and I was struck suddenly by how accurately I’d named him after a wise old wizard.

“He’s happy, Yi-yi.”

I went very still. “He, who?”

“The one who danced you into love.”

I stared at him. Then, “How do you know about him?”

“Slipstream. I’m in it. All. I am somewhat…larger than I appear.” His whiskers twitched as if he were vibrating with hidden laughter, then he busied himself polishing them with spit-moistened paws. That had long lethal talons. My Hel-Cat.

“Shazam, what are you really?”

He leapt up and was off, racing across the island. Over his shoulder, he called, “Hungry. And ready to go. Hurry, tiny red. Take me home.”

Home.

I knew some truths about that word now.

You weren’t always born into one. But if you were lucky, you found one somewhere along the way. It was a place where you fit and were accepted, where people helped you with your problems and you helped them with theirs. Where you made mistakes and so did they but the love never wavered.

A place where erosions never turned into landslides because you dug one another out. And always would.

Shazam and I stepped into the portal together this time.





The Unseelie King walked to the edge of the Horsehead Nebula, great dark wings trailing behind him, staring but not seeing.

What was it she’d once said to him?

You have so many ambitions. I have but one. To love.

And he’d thought, small.

Human.

Beautiful.

But small.

He’d liked that in his woman, a small lovely ambition. Given that she didn’t have his talents, he could see that was enough for her.

He, however, had from the very first moments of his existence teemed with power, bristled electric, exploded with it. He was a supernova. Creating was his drug, addictive and irresistible. All-consuming.

He’d believed mere emotion could never compete with the power rush of slapping together worlds and watching them evolve. That love could yield no prize that might make it worth turning his back on shaping civilizations and birthing stars, building his Court of Shadows.

He’d been wrong.