Feversong (Fever #9)(15)
Closing her eyes, Jada re-created the scene in her head and painted the picture for him with attention to details that would have impressed even Ryodan.
Half an hour from the abbey, Jada stretched and the cuff on her wrist pinched her arm. Thinking she’d slid it up too far, she unzipped the sleeve of her jacket and shoved it back to reposition the wide armband. The ruby gemstones on the gold and silver cuff glowed as if lit by tiny crimson flames. She turned it this way and that, examining it. “Bugger,” she muttered.
“What?” Barrons demanded.
The cuff she’d so easily removed many times in the past had somehow become a seamless band of metal, with no way to take it off short of hacking off her own hand. When she’d stretched, it had caught on her arm, trapping a tiny piece of her skin.
“My cuff. It’s closed. It never was before.”
“Where did you get it?”
“I took it off Cruce when I first arrived at the—ah, shit!”
“What the fuck?” Barrons snarled. He hit the brakes so hard it gave her whiplash.
An enormous red object had just materialized out of thin air. It crammed the entire front seat from window to window, lap to ceiling, obliterating her view of the windshield. It was wedged in so tightly, the two of them were packed beneath it like sardines in a can. She tried to kick up into the slipstream but nothing happened. She was too tightly compressed. Shifting her focus swiftly, she sped up only her fists and began pounding the intrusion.
“Jada, it’s not attacking us. Look at it,” Barrons snarled.
She drew her fists in close to her body and shot him a look. “Are you kidding me? I can’t see anything but it.” She barely had enough room to keep her head jammed back against the seat, with a scant few inches between it and her face.
Barrons had adopted a similar posture, head back against the seat, studying it through narrowed eyes. “Mac may have sent it. I’ve seen those runes before.”
“What runes? There aren’t any runes on it. It’s a bloody red blob.”
“The whole thing is made of runes fused together. And it’s not entirely a blob. There’s a foot jammed up against my window.”
“What kind of foot?”
“What do you mean ‘what kind of foot?’ How the bloody hell many kinds of feet are there?”
“Among the Unseelie alone, thousands: hooves, tentacles, claws, pincers. Then there’s the Seelie castes. Humans. Animals. Be precise.”
“A human foot. I see toes.”
“Painted nails?”
“No.”
“Hairy?”
“No hair. Big feet. Male.”
Jada frowned. She’d never seen anything like it. Not here, not Silverside. She lightly prodded it.
It instantly stung her fingers and tried to latch on, much as the stinging sentences from the Boora Boora books in the Unseelie King’s library had once done. “Barrons, we’ve got to get this thing out of here!”
When he kicked open the door, the blob expanded instantly, exploding out, dangling from the Hummer, and Jada finally had enough room to shove it off her lap and vault from the vehicle.
Barrons maneuvered himself from beneath it, dragged the blob to the ground by a foot, and they stood staring down at it.
“What the hell is it?” she demanded.
Barrons paced a tight circle around it, examining it from every angle. “The question is ‘who?’?”
“Well, whoever it is was either enormous to begin with or the runes caused it to grow and expand once employed.” She still couldn’t see any runes.
Without another word, Barrons grabbed it by a foot, dragged it around to the back of the Hummer, hefted it and quickly thrust it in. When the rear doors wouldn’t close, he stripped off his belt, looped it through the handles and tied them together.
“What are you doing? What if it keeps growing? The Blob did.” She’d loved that movie, had gorged on jellybeans and Snickers, watching it with Dancer, a long time ago, in another lifetime. Snickers. How could you not love a candy bar that was named after a good chortle? “It could absorb us both. Then who will save Mac?”
“Shut. Up,” Barrons said flatly. “And get in.”
Arlington Abbey was the first taste of life Jada had experienced beyond a cage. It had been as magical and mysterious to the eight-year-old girl who’d known neither friends nor freedom as Hogwarts to Harry. Exhilarated to be free at last, she’d zoomed about like a drunken Energizer Bunny, unable to stop, unable to eat enough, talk enough, see enough, live enough. No collars, no chains, no bars. Just the great big wide open. Toilets—not bedpans that piled up outside a cage. Choosing what to eat—not living in dread that nothing would be brought. Having a drink of water whenever she wanted it. Simple things. Priceless things.
Initially she’d considered Rowena’s stifling control inconsequential, given how her life had been, until she began to see how much damage resulted from the headmistress’s machinations, that the sidhe-seers were becoming less, not more—weak, not strong—because of her dominance, subtle manipulation, and sinister experiments. There were the cages you could see and those that weren’t so easy to spot before you were lured into them with sweet promises and lies until you were stuck like a fly on sticky tape with only your shattered innocence for company.