High Voltage (Fever #10)(86)

Dani, my bodacious, magnificent red thread, you rocked my fucking world, you rattled my existence, you woke me up to shades of life I’d never seen before.

I think sometimes we don’t get to see our red threads for a dozen or more lifetimes. I hope other times we get a hundred lives together, back to back. I can’t wait for the chance to love you again.

But it’s not my turn now.

That privilege belongs to someone else.

I love you like pi.

Dancer



I dropped my head in my hands and wept.





    All these things made me who I am





WHEN I DECIDE TO box something, I don’t fail.

I did now.

I sat at the table, staring out at the night beyond the windows, remembering Dancer. The first time I’d met him, each and every time after. The times he’d vanish for days then I’d find him again and we’d be so bloody happy to see each other, and crack ourselves up and play with the pure, wild abandon of teens in a world that had no rules except those we made for ourselves. No one to tell us when to sleep or wake, what to eat, what not to eat, no one to tell us how to live. We’d learned from each other.

    We’d set off bombs and investigated mysteries. He’d invented things for me, given me a bracelet I’d lost Silverside, and I’d shown him my zany, expeditious velocity world. We’d watched cartoons, played at being Pinky and the Brain, other times I’d been Tasmanian devil with him or the Roadrunner, whizzing us around our town, twisting and carving and embedding our initials into everything.

We’d grown up and tackled even more important mysteries, saving the world together, falling in love.

I’d gotten his not-so-subtle message: we have more than one red thread.

And those threads aren’t gender or even species specific, at least not in my case. Some of them are romantic, some of them aren’t.

Mac’s one of my threads, our lives inextricably intertwined. I think Mac and Christian also have a red thread, their interactions not always easy but definitely transformative.

Shazam is one of my threads, too. I think Kat may be as well. We have things to learn from each other; she with her enormous empathy and me with my formidable walls.

Rowena was a great big nasty thread but not a red one. I think people can invade your life and tangle themselves around you, a black rope, and if you create too much bad Karma together, maybe they become one of your red threads in a next life, and ever after, until you get whatever you’re supposed to learn from your involvement with them—these people who force their way in and wreck your world. Perhaps it’s a lesson in some kind of cosmic forgiveness.

I haven’t learned it yet. I don’t forgive her. She was one crazy bitch and I still don’t know everything she did to me.

    Ryodan is one of my red threads, too. He might be a massive red rope, ten times as thick as a normal thread. I’m afraid Dancer saw that.

Love is funny. Even though you don’t have that person anymore, you still have the feeling. You didn’t lose your love. You lost the tangible, tactile, sensesational ability to experience the person or animal you lost.

Grief is all about not being able to touch anymore. Not being able to use your senses to experience them on a physical level. They’ve moved beyond an impenetrable veil, beyond your hands and mouth and eyes.

And…of course…that led me to another thought I tried to box and failed.

I was losing my ability to touch everything.

I recognize rabbit holes when I see them. That was a long, bottomless one.

I pushed myself up briskly, refusing to tumble over that edge. It was what it was. Period. Patterns, meaning, not my forte. Action, swift and sure, I get that.

I glanced at my phone for the time, grabbed my sword, shoved it over my shoulder into the sheath, and turned to the bedroom to freshen up and head for Chester’s. If I didn’t hustle he’d be hammering on my door.

The one who’d been willing to make Dancer one of the Nine for me. I had a brief flash of the two of them sitting together, talking about me, Ryodan offering to save Dancer, Dancer knowing I wanted them both. Holy hell. Complicated relationships. My life is full of them.

As I entered my dark bedroom and moved for the bathroom to brush my teeth and wash my face, I felt it.

    There was a living presence in my room. Lurking, seething, oozing darkly in the corner behind me.

Not Fae.

Enormous malevolence, terrifying.

I pivoted sharply. It hulked in the corner to the right of my bed, filling it up, cramming it with darkness heaped upon darkness.

No, it crouched, making itself much smaller than it actually was, voracious, and suffocatingly evil.

My sword was in my right hand instantly, my left bare, upraised.

“Show yourself,” I snarled.

It glided forward from the dense inky shadow it had woven around itself and, as its human-seeming form appeared bit by bit, head last, I realized it was removing a mask from its face.

I have a theory about people I suspect is universal: when someone conceals something from you, it makes you want to see it. The moment the mask cleared that side of its face, I stared, and was instantly ensnared by its terrible gaze.

There are rules in this world that you only learn by violating them. Some things you can never talk to, like the Fear Dorcha, who can steal a piece of your body if you’re that kind of fool. The bastard took my mouth once, left me unable to tell the world the many brilliant things I had to say. Mac saved me from him.