High Voltage (Fever #10)(21)

I didn’t have time to analyze it. Didn’t think. Just opened my eyes and flung my left hand at Inspector Jayne.

The prince sifted out a mere fraction of a second before the bolt of pale blue lightning exploded in the precise spot he’d been standing. The crackling energy struck the south wall of the room, blowing it apart from floor to ceiling. Plaster exploded, wood splintered, and bricks tumbled away, leaving a gaping hole where the wall had been.

My dresser listed dangerously on the edge then plunged four floors to the street below.

Snarling, I whipped my gaze to AOZ.

He dematerialized instantly into a cloud of murky green fog that compacted, narrowed down to a tight stream, and shot out through the opening blasted in the room.

I stood there a moment, leveling my breath, waiting, while the energy surging through my arm ebbed, until at last it was gone. My legs felt like noodles and my hands were trembling.

    So much for my warding abilities. They’d failed to keep out both old god and Fae. Push come to shove, I might end up having to sleep on the heavily warded private residence levels of Chester’s, and I so didn’t want to do that. Then again, I had no idea if they were warded against gods.

I pushed the sleeve of my tee up and inspected myself. My arm was black all the way up to my shoulder, with thin tentacles of dark veins spreading across my left collarbone.

I let the sleeve drop and looked out over my bed into the pale morning beyond where a sea of rooftops stretched, and farther out, the whitecaps of a slate gray ocean. A heavy drizzle had begun to fall, and a sudden breeze gusted rain in, soaking my fluffy white comforter.

I rolled my eyes. My bedroom had been through hell in the past few hours.

But every rain cloud really did have a silver lining.

At least it didn’t smell so bad anymore.





When I was nine years old, Rowena told me a dangerous caste of Fae had infiltrated our city. Slender, diaphanous, beautiful, with a cloud of gossamer hair and dainty features, they were capable of slipping inside a human, and taking over their limbs and lives completely.

Once they assumed a human “skin,” they were no longer detectable to sidhe-seers and, thus camouflaged, vanished forever beyond our reach to prey endlessly upon our race.

This made them a most deadly threat to our order, she told me in a hushed voice, who could possess her charges at the abbey at any time; in fact, she confided, they had.

But—and there was always a but with the old bitch—she had a special charm that she, and she alone as Grand Mistress of sidhe-seers, could employ to see inside a person to the despicable, life-stealing Fae within.

At nine, nothing seemed far-fetched to me. I’d fully expected to find the world beyond my cage as densely populated by superheroes and villains as my world on the telly.

    For nearly a year Rowena steered me down the corridors of our abbey as she inspected her girls, guided me out into the streets and alleys and businesses, where we hunted the dastardly villains, a secret team of two tasked with a great, secret mission that made me feel important and good.

And when she’d identify a Gripper with the charm that never worked for me, we’d return to her office at the abbey where, with great gravity and ceremony, she’d place the luminous Sword of Light across my upturned palms and command me to save our order, perhaps even our world.

She taught me to be quick and stealthy about it. She told me how and where to stab and slice and kill. No one suspects a child, not even when they carry a sword. Most thought it a toy. I rarely needed to employ extreme velocity to complete my mission. It was easy to get close. Adults fret over lost, crying children.

Do whatever you must to save our world: no deceit or ploy unjust, she’d taught me. The end justifies the means.

I’ve come to understand the means define you.

Although they are exceedingly rare, Grippers exist.

That wasn’t a lie.

There is, however, no charm that allows anyone to see them.

I took twenty-three lives that year and I don’t know why. Mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, I carved holes in their families, shattering their hearts and their worlds. Perhaps they crossed her in business dealings. Perhaps they looked at her wrong at the post office. Regardless, none of them had been possessed. In one of her journals that I didn’t find until I was older, chronicling her own greatness with chilling narcissism, Rowena had penned: “The child was sent to Me to address my grievances and right those wrongs done Me, controlled by a penurious toy I purchased from a street vendor.”

    I don’t know why she stopped either. Perhaps there were only twenty-three names on her most-hated list. Perhaps so many murders by sword garnered too much attention from the Garda and she’d not wanted me caught and placed behind bars. Though she’d instructed me to hide the corpses, many were eventually found. The universe has a way of betraying those secrets we endeavor to hold near.

The day I learned what I’d done, I decided there were only three courses of action open to me.

Kill myself because I was a monster, too.

Live the rest of my life hating myself, unable to ever atone, consumed by a heart of darkness that would cast no light into a world that badly needed some.

Or lock the past up in a box with those other murders and carry a heart—as pure as it had once been—into the present, determined to do better, inscribing the Latin motto on the tatters of my soul: Actus me invito factus non est meus actus. Acts done by my body against my will are not my acts.