High Voltage (Fever #10)(23)

“No.”

“That means you’ve tried.”

“I have.”

An unwilling smile tugged at my lips as I thought both “How dare you?” and “Good for you!” She’d changed, toughened, moved beyond courtesy to necessity. We live in hard times. You can’t keep your blades sharp by polishing them with a chamois, you have to sharpen them on stone.

“The day I get in, I’ll tell you. And the moment I do, I’ll back out without looking around. I’ve no desire to know secrets you’ve no desire to tell me, Dani. But the vaults of your mind are the greatest challenge I’ve found.”

    And would forever remain that challenge. She wouldn’t get in. I restructure my brain regularly and meticulously, planting decoys everywhere. Not even Ryodan got very far past the surface. I changed the subject. “I had a visitor last night. Actually two.” Nine if you counted the Pallas cats, which I didn’t and hoped never to smell again. As I filled her in on what happened, she listened intently.

“The old gods,” she finally murmured, “at war with the Fae? Bloody hell. Does it never end?”

“Mommy said a bad word,” came a breathless, little-girl voice from behind Kat. Her daughter Rae peeked around her shoulder and I crinkled my nose at her and smiled. Usually, when I first see the dazzling-ray-of-sunshine child, I catch her up in my arms, kick us both up into the slipstream, and twirl her around in a dizzying starry explosion of light because I live to hear her unfettered belly laugh, but from the way she was peeping at me, I could tell she was in a hide-and-seek mood today. I’d chase her later, up and down halls, perhaps into the maze behind the abbey.

“Shazzy?” she asked hopefully, luminous dark eyes rounding with excitement.

“On a walkabout,” I said, and her face fell. Rae adored Shazam and the feeling was mutual. When, a few years back, Kat suddenly had a baby, seemingly out of nowhere, we’d all been shocked. We had no idea who the father was, although many believed it was her childhood love, Sean O’Bannion, who, like Christian and Inspector Jayne, had begun transforming into a Fae prince when the original princes were killed.

One of the many unpredictable things about the Fae race was, on the rare occasion the princes or princesses were killed, the nearest raw matter, mortal or Fae, that met some mysterious requirement was selected to begin a painful transformation. Mac told me the Unseelie King said the Fae were like starfish and would always regrow essential parts. Lesser Fae weren’t considered essential. The High Court was.

    Unlike Jayne, Sean O’Bannion had turned Unseelie and hadn’t been seen for years. Kat never offered the name of Rae’s father and we didn’t ask. She made it clear it didn’t matter: Rae was her daughter, end of subject. Whatever sidhe-seer gifts the girl possessed hadn’t yet begun to manifest. Rae certainly looked like she might be Sean’s, with raven curls, brown eyes flecked with amber, and the complexion of a Black Irishman’s daughter.

I wasn’t interesting enough without Shazam to keep the curious, energetic child’s attention today, and Rae ambled off to play as Kat opened a word document and made notes about our conversation, nudging me for as much detail as I could recall. “And this AOZ mentioned another who might come for the sword?”

I nodded.

“But no name?”

I shook my head.

She studied me a moment, then, “Do you believe the sword would be safer with a Fae?”

I said irritably, “I’m half tempted to give it to the strongest god I can find and let the races kill each other.”

Kat sucked in a breath.

I raised both hands in placation: one pale Irish, the other dark as ebony. “But I won’t. Mac’s queen.” And I’d die before I put a weapon into the hands of someone who might hurt her. She and I had been through so much together; she was the sister I’d never had. “I don’t think that’s the answer, Kat. I was able to protect it last night. If I hadn’t been, I’d be open to the possibility, especially if I could somehow get it to Mac.”

    I trusted neither gods nor the Fae with one of the only two hallowed weapons capable of ending an immortal life. Any Fae who got their hands on it could amass an army and go to war against their queen, and many of them despised the human who’d been chosen as their ruler’s successor. “Perhaps the sword is right where it needs to be and this power is awakening so I can keep it safe.”

Kat said dryly, “Or perhaps it’s merely coincidental and our world’s gone as mad as it seems while we bumble about foolishly trying to ascribe patterns to chaos.”

I laughed. There was that.

“The wish, Dani. Have you any idea what AOZ meant?”

I’d tried to figure it out on the ride here, reflecting on the moment I’d picked up the spelled item. I’d responded primarily with raw emotion, secondarily with actual thought. AOZ might have sorted through a dozen half-formed desires and selected whichever one he thought might bite me in the ass the hardest. I shook my head and said grimly, “No clue. Kat, what do you think about this god business? I read the Book of Invasions a long time ago and found it to be…” I try not to insult anyone else’s beliefs. I dangle first and let them finish, see how they go about it. I’ve learned diplomacy. It doesn’t come easy to me so I like to practice when I can.