Fever 5 - Shadowfever Read Online Free PDF Page B

After all, I’ll need the fourth stone. But V’lane doesn’t seem to have any real knowledge about the Book, aside from a few old legends.
It’s a better bet that the Unseelie know more about the Dark Book than the Seelie Queen’s right hand. Maybe even where to find the prophecy. Like Barrons, Darroc has actually seen pages of the arcane tome. I was forced to concede that hunting the Sinsar Dubh was an exercise in futility until I discovered how to control it. But Darroc has never stopped his search. Why? What does he know that I don’t?
The sooner I pry his secrets from him, the sooner I learn to contain and use the Sinsar Dubh , the sooner I can stop living in this agonizing reality that I will have no hesitation about destroying to replace with my world. The right one. Where everything ends happily ever after.
“Friends work toward common goals,” he says.
“Like hunting books,” I agree.
“Friends trust each other. They don’t barricade each other out.” He looks at my feet.
The runes came from within me. I am my circle. He doesn’t know this. I kick them aside. I wonder if he has forgotten my spear. As heavily laced with Unseelie as he is, a single prick would sentence him to the same slow, gruesome death that Mallucé suffered.
When I step out, he slowly looks me up and down.
I see the thoughts that flash through his eyes as they travel over my body: kill her/fuck her/assault and bind her/explore her uses? It takes a lot to make a man kill a beautiful woman he has not yet slept with. Especially if he enjoyed her sister.
“Friends don’t try to coerce each other,” I say with a pointed look at the amulet.
He inclines his head and slips it back inside his shirt.
I offer my hand with a smile. Barrons taught me well. Keep your friends close …
Darroc takes it, leans down to place a light kiss upon my lips. The tension between us is a palpable thing. One sudden move from either of us and we’ll be all over each other, trying to kill each other, and we know it. He keeps his body pliant. I infuse my limbs with languor. We are two scorpions with coiled tails, trying to mate. It is no more than I deserve, the punishment of letting him touch me like this. I sentenced Barrons to death.
I part my lips beneath his, but demurely, teeth standing guard. I exhale a soft whisper of a breath into his mouth. He likes it.
… and your enemies closer .
Behind us, the Unseelie Princes begin to chime softly like dark crystal. I remember that sound. I know what it precedes. I tighten my hand on his. “Never them. Never again.”
Darroc turns to them and barks a harsh command in a language that hurts my ears.
They vanish.
The moment I no longer know where they are, whether they might be closing in on me, I reach for my spear. It is gone, too.
The Unseelie Princes cannot sift within the Silvers with any predictability. Darroc tells me it’s a crapshoot every time they try. Cruce’s curse again, screwing things up.
I tell him the stones are no better, that whatever dimension I’m in tries to expel them once uncovered, in an effort to return the rune-covered blue-black stones to the cliffs of the icy Unseelie prison from whence they were chiseled.
I’m surprised he doesn’t know this and tell him so.
“You do not understand what life is like at the Seelie court, MacKayla. Those with true knowledge, true memories of our past, guard it zealously. There are as many versions of the Old Days and conflicting tales of our origins as there are dimensions to choose from within the hall. The only Unseelie we ever saw were those we battled the day the king and queen fought and the king slew our queen. Since then, we have drunk from the cauldron countless times.”
He moves along the cliff’s edge with unnatural fluidity and grace. Fae move like sleek, kingly predators, born of the sure knowledge that they can never die—or at least very rarely and only under special circumstances. He hasn’t lost that arrogance, or perhaps he’s