Feversong (Fever #9)(4)
Women shiver in the unnaturally cold, gusty air, clustered around a growing pile of their fallen sisters, watching me warily as I approach, stealing glances, looking hastily away. My faded jeans, hiking boots, and gray fisherman’s sweater only make me look a wolf stalking near, wearing half a sheepskin, covering none of the frightening parts. I see myself as they do: an enormous man with a distant, wintry gaze that calls a price if engaged, majestic black-velvet wings, frosted torque, and tattoos slithering like dark snakes beneath my skin as they always do when I’m aroused by lust—murderous or otherwise—cradling a young, fair-haired girl. Looking, no doubt, as if I’m the one that killed her. My face appears more feral in a mirror than it feels on my bones. We could not be more incongruous together, the corpse and I. Yet we fit together perfectly. The only girl I’ll ever take into my arms will either already be dead or soon end up that way.
One of the women stares too hard, meeting my gaze.
Her thoughts are clear but I’m not the one to defuse her battle-lust with aggressive sex behind abbey hedges. Bloody fool, I tell her with my eyes, staring back. Look away. Never look back.
Blood trickles from the corners of her eyes before she closes them and presses a hand to her temple.
I hope I gave her a headache. She’ll not lock eyes with me again.
My first name is Death. My last, Keltar. My middle: Celibate.
I move into the small crowd. Women inhale sharply and pull back, making a wide corridor for me. There are a few among them, however, including the one who stared, that dart furtive glances my way. Though Unseelie, I fought beside them, put out the fire, so they rewrite my myth in their minds, romanticizing, domesticating the transmogrified Highlander. I keep my gaze fixed on the corpse I carry, my movements rigid and aloof, damning them for considering for even one mad moment the idea of having sex with an Unseelie prince.
I understand it, though.
War is funny like that. Adrenaline begets a need for more adrenaline until we’re all junkies, until only when we’re in danger do we feel no pain, only when we’re locking jaws with Death do we feel alive. Battle-hardened soldiers understand how to save the imperiled day.
But we will never again understand how to live the normal ones.
I gently deposit the dead girl’s body on the pile. As I straighten from releasing my slight burden, I go motionless, sensing a newcomer. MacKayla Lane is near. I know her scent; it’s sunshine on skin, the nearly intangible whiff of chlorine from a summer pool, and something too muddy and complex to be named. She’s always smelled that way to me; the promise of a hot new girlfriend that might just be a nut job.
I push through the sidhe-seers, circle the frozen fountain, and head into the gloomy, dark morning, making for the south wing. The sky is so dense with thunderclouds, it’s little better than twilight on the grounds. Mac’s down somewhere beyond an iced, toppled pile of stones, although I can’t fathom why she remains alone when her sisters are here. Her allegiance was unquestionable tonight, to the abbey, to Dani, to the human race. She belongs with them. Unlike me.
Someone closes a hand on my shoulder from behind. I knock the hand off and whirl, wings lifting, rustling in warning. Around my neck, my torque writhes, flares with a cold blue-black light. No one touches me. I say who. I say when.
“Hey,” says the sidhe-seer who stared too long.
I give her a look. It says, Shut up and go away. And do it right now or die.
She arches a brow. “Would it kill you to say ‘hey’ back?”
Her voice is beautiful, husky with a knife-edge rasp and a sexy French accent. “Ah, a scintillating conversationalist,” I say sarcastically. “What will you dazzle me with next? A witty ‘What’s up?’?”
“You made the ice that put out the fire,” she says.
I let my eyes fill with the strangeness of what I’ve become, silently daring her to look again, but she keeps her gaze fixed on my sternum. “I’m not a man for small talk. Say something that matters or leave.”
She stands her ground, unfazed by my efforts to drive her away. “I hear you’ve got a problem.”
“What would that be?” I’ll go see Mac, check on Dageus, then go home alone where I stay alone until there’s something for me to do that proves me more man than monster.
“When you have sex with a woman, she dies. Yet you need it like you need to breathe. I hear you won’t do it anymore because you don’t want to kill anyone. How’s that working out for you?”
What makes her think she can walk up to an Unseelie prince and instigate a glib conversation about sex? Who knows I’m not having sex and talks about me to sidhe-seers? “Where did you hear that?”
“Colleen. Your sister worries about you.”
Her hands form casual fists at her waist. This one has a cocky swagger and a bit of a death wish. Bloody Colleen, dishing with her bloody friends about her bloody brother. She and I are going to have a talk. “And you think you can help me with that?”
“It’s no more complicated than anything else in life. It takes discipline and I know discipline. I cut my teeth on it.”
She looks like she did, lean and long, with a strut of a walk and the clear definition of a six-pack beneath her torn, bloodstained tank. Beneath a shredded jacket, half-empty ammo belts crisscross her chest. Unlike the others, if she feels the biting wind I called to this meadow, she doesn’t shiver.