Feversong (Fever #9)(17)
“It’s Fae. Has to be a prince. Looks like something hacked off its wings. Brutally,” Fade said.
“Pure rage,” Barrons murmured.
“You think it was Mac?” Jada clenched her fists, forced them to unclench, worrying that the prince lying facedown on the ground was Christian MacKeltar. He didn’t deserve this. He’d had enough misery already; first being turned Unseelie then getting captured by the Crimson Hag and killed over and over again, and finally losing his uncle to the Hag’s cruel javelin. Once he’d spared her from having to make a hellish decision by sacrificing himself. It was a debt she didn’t feel she’d fully repaid.
“I’ve seen her use these runes before. They’re from the Sinsar Dubh. She’s eliminating the princes. If you hadn’t taken the spear, this one would be dead.”
Jada glanced quickly at Fade. “Where’s Christian? Have you seen him lately?”
He shook his head. “Not for the past hour or so.”
Barrons spoke to Fade again, in the same unintelligible language.
Jada said tightly, “If you don’t trust me enough to speak English around me, I don’t trust you enough to work with you. Are we a country or are we islands? I make one hell of an island. Your call.”
“I told him to turn the thing over.”
“And you couldn’t say that in English?”
“I just did.”
Fade issued another series of guttural commands. The beasts rolled the Unseelie over on his back and resumed tearing off the runes.
When the face was cleared, Jada released a soft sigh of relief. She’d last seen this prince in a prison of ice, below the abbey. It was Cruce, not Christian. Then she stiffened. “We’ve got to lock him up again!”
“I’m not so sure of that,” Barrons disagreed.
“But he’s the Sinsar Dubh, too,” she said.
“I’m not so sure of that either. I think he absorbed the knowledge of the Book, whereas Mac may have been absorbed by it. Cruce read it in the First Language, the spells passed up his arms. From what you described, that’s not at all what happened to Mac.”
Jada saw nothing to be gained by assuring him Mac had definitely been absorbed. She hadn’t been in the cavern the night the corporeal Sinsar Dubh was interred and didn’t know the details. But Cruce wasn’t throwing off anything like what had been palpably emanating from Mac, the dark whirlwind energy of a pure psychopath. “We have to find Christian. If he wasn’t first, he’ll be next.”
Barrons sliced his head in curt negation. “Without the spear or sword, the Book can’t kill Christian and these beasts can release him. We must determine the significance of Cruce appearing in the Hummer.”
On the ground, the Unseelie prince stirred, groaning.
Barrons prodded him with the toe of his boot. “Wake the fuck up, Tink, and tell us what happened.”
Cruce opened his eyes, blinked up at Barrons.
And vanished.
Jada shot him an incredulous look. “You just set him free. I thought you left a few runes on him.”
“Why would I do that?”
“They prevent the Fae from sifting.”
“And you’re just now telling me this?” he said with equal incredulity.
“I thought you knew everything. You always know everything. You recognized them.”
“That doesn’t mean I know every blasted detail of what they bloody do,” he snapped.
“Well, I suggest you grab a few before the beasts finish them off. If we don’t get the chance to use them on him, they might be of use holding Mac.”
While Barrons dispatched Fade to fetch a container, Jada closed her eyes and pinned Cruce’s sudden appearance in the Humvee on her mental bulletin board. Around that inexplicable event, she tacked up every fact she knew about him, stepped back and studied the big picture, seeking logic. The world around her vanished, leaving what she loved best: a mystery, an unexplained event, and her fierce, consuming desire to riddle it out. Everything in the universe made sense, if one gathered enough information and examined it properly.
Up went the impaired state of Cruce’s prison, the closed doors of the cavern, the cuff she’d worn for months without it ever closing, the apparent release of Cruce by the Sinsar Dubh (or had it caught him wandering the grounds, already free?), the cuff abruptly closing—as if responding to a signal it had previously been unable to receive—the legend that in addition to affording a protective shield, the cuff of Cruce had served as the concubine’s way of summoning the Unseelie King. For that reason alone, Jada had deemed it worth stealing from Cruce’s arm, but it never worked.
Suspicion took the cohesive form of a valid premise. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she murmured.
“What?” Barrons demanded.
She opened her eyes. “We were talking about him right before he appeared. When I took the cuff from his arm, he was still imprisoned, his power contained. A short time ago, before he was turned into a blob, he must have been free for at least a brief time.”
Long enough that the cuff might have responded to its creator and established a bond between them?
Trusting that Barrons was correct and she wasn’t summoning another version of what Mac had become, Jada tested it. “Cruce.”
The prince was back again, standing in the middle of them, swaying slightly, his hand at his throat, looking shocked and startled before his expression turned thunderous.