Fever 4 - DreamFever (6 page)

  He surprises me. He does not push me with words I do not like to hear. He does not
shout at me or call me Mac or insist I talk more.

  In fact, when I open my mouth to speak again, he kisses me, hard.

  He shuts me up with his tongue, deep.

  He kisses me until I cannot speak or even breathe, until I do not even care if I ever
breathe again. Until I have forgotten that for a moment he was not a beast but a man.
Until the images that so disturbed me are singed to ash by the heat of our lust and gone.

  He carries me to the bed and tosses me on it. I feel anger in his body, although I do
not know why.

  I stretch my naked body on the sleek silk, luxuriating in sensation, in the sure
knowledge of what is to come. Of what he is about to do. Of what he makes me feel.

  He stares down at me. "See how you look at me. Fuck. I understand why they do it."

  "Who does what?"

  "The Fae. Turn women Pri-ya."

  I do not like those words. They terrify me. I am lust. He is my world. I tell him so.

   He laughs, and his eyes glitter like night sky pierced by a million stars. "What am I,
Mac?" He pours his sleek, powerful body over mine, laces our fingers together, and
stretches my hands above my head.

  "You are my world."

  "And what do you want from me? Say my name."

  "I want you inside me, Jericho. Now."

  Our sex is savage, as if we are punishing each other. I feel something changing. In
me. In him. In this room. I do not like it. I try to stop it with my body, drive it back. I do
not look at this room in which we exist. I do not let my mind wander beyond the walls. I
am here and he is, too, most of the time, and that is enough.

  Later, when I am drifting like a balloon, in that happy, free place that is the twilight
sky before dreams, I hear him take a deep breath as if he is about to speak.

  He releases it.

  Curses.

  Takes another breath but says nothing again.

   He grunts and punches his pillow. He is divided, this strange man, as if he both wants
to speak and wants not to.

  Finally, he says tightly, "What did you wear to your senior prom, Mac?"

   "Pink dress," I mumble. "Tiffany bought the same one. Totally ruined my prom. But
my shoes were Betsey Johnson. Hers were Stuart Weitzman. My shoes were better." I
laugh. It is the sound of someone I do not recognize, young and without care. It is the
laugh of a woman who knows no pain, never did. I wish I knew her.

  He touches my face.

  There is something different in his touch. It feels like he's saying good-bye, and I
know a moment of panic. But my dream sky darkens and sleep's moon fills the horizon.

  "Don't leave me." I thrash in the sheets.

  "I'm not, Mac."

  I know I am dreaming then, because dreams are home to the absurd and what he says
next is beyond absurd.

  "You're leaving me, Rainbow Girl."
 

W      e're "Tubthumping" again. He makes me dance around the room, shouting: I get
knocked down but I get up again. You're never gonna keep me down.

  He dances with me. We shout the lyrics at each other. Something about seeing this
man, this big, sexual, powerful--and, some part of me knows, highly dangerous and

unpredictable--man, dancing nude, shouting that he's never going to be kept down,
completely undoes me.

  I feel as if I am seeing something forbidden. I know without knowing how I know
that the circumstances under which he would behave in such a fashion are incalculably
few.

  Suddenly I am laughing and cannot stop. I laugh so hard I cannot breathe. "Oh, God,
Barrons," I finally gasp. "I never knew you could dance. Or have fun, for that matter."

  He freezes. "Ms. Lane?" he says slowly.

  "Huh? Who's she?"

  He stares at me, hard. "Who am I?"

  I stare back. There is danger here, in this moment. I do not like it. I want more
"Tubthumping" and tell him so, but he turns off the music.

   "What happened on Halloween, Ms. Lane?" He fires the question at me, and I now
have the strangest feeling he has been asking me this question over and over for a long
time but I block it every time he asks it. Refuse to even hear it. And that perhaps there
are dozens of questions he's been asking me that I have been refusing to hear.

   Why is he calling me that new name? I am not she. He repeats the question.
Halloween. The word gives me chills. Something dark tries to bubble up in my mind, to
break the surface I keep placid and still with sex, sex, sex, and suddenly I am no longer
laughing but my body is trembling and my bones are so soft I fall to my knees.

  I clutch my head in my hands and shake it violently.

  No, no, no. I do not want to know!

  Images bombard me: A mob shouting, surging out of control. Rain-slicked, shiny
dark streets. Shadows moving hungrily in the darkness. A red Ferrari. Glass breaking.
Fires burning. People being driven, herded into hell.

   A place of books and lights that falls to the enemy. It mattered to me, that place. I'd
lost so much, but at least I had that place.

  A gruesome meal. A weapon I both need and fear. People rioting. Trampling one
another. A city burning. A belfry. A closet. Darkness and fear. Finally, dawn.

  Holy water splashing, hissing on steel.

  A church.

  I shut down. Walls slam in my heart, my mind. I will not go there. There is/was/will
never be a church in my existence.

  I look up at him.

  I know him. I do not trust him. Or is it me I do not trust?

  "You are my lover," I say.

  He sighs and rubs his jaw. "Mac, we have to leave this room. It's bad out there. It's
been months. I need you back."

  "I am right here."

  "What happened at the"--he breaks off, his nostrils flare, and a muscle works in his
jaw--"church?"

  It seems he does not want to hear about what happened at this church any more than I
want to know about it. If we are in agreement on this, why does he push?

  "I do not know that word," I say coolly.

  "Church, Mac. Unseelie Princes. Remember?"

  "I do not know those words."

  "They raped you."

  "I do not know that word!" My hands are fists; my nails hurt me.

  "They took your will. They took your power. They made you feel helpless. Lost.
Alone. Dead inside."

  "You should have been there!" I snarl, but I have no idea why. I was never at a
church. I am shaking violently. I feel like I might explode.

  He drops to the floor on his knees in front of me and grabs my shoulders. "I know I
should have!" he snarls back. "How the fuck many times do you think I've relived that
night?"

  I beat at him with my fists, hard. I punch him and punch him. "Then why weren't
you?" I shout.

  He does not resist my blows. "It is complicated."

  "`Complicated' is just another word for `I screwed up and am making excuses!'" I
yell.

  "Fine. I screwed up!" he yells back. "But I only ended up stuck in Scotland because
you asked me to go help the bloody damned MacKeltars!"

  "And there you go making excuses!" I stare at him, furious, betrayed, and I do not
know why.

  "How was I supposed to know? Do I look omniscient?"

  "Yes!"

  "Well, I'm not! You were supposed to be at the abbey. Or back in Ashford. I tried to
send you home. I tried to get you to go to Scotland. You never do what I tell you to do.
Where the fuck was your fairy little prince? Why didn't he save you?"

  "I do not know those words--fairy, prince." They burn my tongue. I hate them.

 "You do, too! V'lane. Remember V'lane? Was he there, Mac? Was he at the church?
Was he?" He shakes me. "Answer me!"

  When I say nothing, he repeats in that strange multilayered voice he sometimes uses,
"Was V'lane there when you were raped?"

  V'lane failed me, too. I needed him and he did not come. I shake my head.

   His grip on my shoulders relaxes. "You can do this, Mac. I'm here. You're safe now.
It's okay to remember. They can never hurt you again."

  Oh, yes, they could. I will not remember, and I will never leave this room.

  Here there are things that keep the monsters away.

  I need those things. Right now.

  His body. His lust. Erases it all.

   I push him back on the floor, frantic with need. He responds savagely. We explode at
each other, grabbing fistfuls of hair, kissing, grinding our bodies together. Rolling
across the floor. I want to be on top, but he flips me over and pushes me forward,
spreading me. Licks and tastes me until I come and come, then carries me to the bed and
covers me with his body. When he pushes himself inside me, in my anger I push, push,
push back at him with that magic place inside my head, because I am sick of him
stirring up things inside me. It is my turn to stir things up inside him, and

  --we are in his body, both of us, and we are killing violently, and our cock is hard
while we do it. It never felt good to kill before. It never felt bad, either, but now it
exhilarates. Now it is power, it is lust, it is being alive. The children are dead, the
woman cold, the man dying. Bones crunch, blood sprays--

  He knows I am there. He shoves me out with such violence that it flattens my magic
completely. I am awed by his strength. It excites me.

  Our sex is primitive.

  It exhausts me. I sleep. I do not know who I am anymore.

  I thought I was an animal.

  I am no longer so sure.

                                          ***

It's hard to say what makes the mind piece things together in a sudden lightning flash.

   I've come to hold the human spirit in the highest regard. Like the body, it struggles to
repair itself. As cells fight off infection and conquer illness, the spirit, too, has
remarkable resilience. It knows when it is harmed, and it knows when the harm is too
much to bear. If it deems the injury too great, the spirit cocoons the wound, in the same
fashion that the body forms a cyst around infection, until the time comes that it can deal
with it. For some people, that time never comes. Some stay fractured, forever broken.
You see them on the street, pushing carts. You see them in the faces of the regulars at a
bar.

  My cocoon was that room.

  After Barrons left--I later realized he often left while I slept--I dreamed.

   Some say dreaming is another place we go. That we don't know it as such because
it's not a physical realm we recognize. It exists in another dimension, which mankind
has not yet discovered and to which it attributes no credence.

  I dreamed my life back.

  Alina and I playing, laughing, running hand in hand, chasing butterflies with nets, but
we don't catch them, because who wants to trap a butterfly in a net? Too fragile, too
delicate. You don't want to break their wings. Like sisters and love. You have to be
vigilant with precious things. I fell asleep on my watch. I wasn't vigilant. I didn't hear
the undercurrents in her voice. I was lazy and ignorant in my happy pink world. A cell
phone dropped into a pool. Ripples spreading on the surface. Everything changed
forever.

  I am grief.

  I dream my parents, but they're not. Alina and I were born to others, but I have no
memory of them, and I wonder for the first time if someone took those memories from
me.

  I am betrayed.

   I dream Dublin and the first Fae I ever saw and that nasty old woman, Rowena, who
told me to go die somewhere else if I couldn't protect my bloodline, then left me alone
without offering me the smallest bit of help.

  I am anger. I didn't deserve that.

  I dream Barrons and V'lane, and I am lust wed to suspicion, and those two emotions
together are poison.

  I dream the Lord Master, my sister's murderer, and I am vengeance. But no longer
hot. I am cold vengeance, the lethal kind.

  I dream the Book that is a beast, and it speaks my name and calls me kindred.

  I am not.

  I dream Malluc�'s lair. I eat the flesh of immortal beings and I am changed.

  I dream Christian and Dani and the abbey of sidhe-seers. O'Duffy, Jayne, Fiona, and
O'Bannion, the Hunters, and the monsters invading my streets. Then the dreams come
darker and faster, blows from a world-class boxer bruising my brain, pulping my heart.

  Dublin goes dark! The Wild Hunt! The smell of spice and sex!

  I am in the narthex of the church, and there are Unseelie Princes all around me, and
they slice me open and rip out my insides and scatter them all over the street, leaving a
shell of a woman, a bag of skin and bones, and the horror of it, God, the horror of
watching yourself from the outside as everything you know about yourself gets stripped
away and demolished, not just the loss of power over your body but power over your
mind, rape in the deepest, most hellish sense of the word, but wait--

  There's a spark.

  Inside that hollowed-out woman, there's a place they can't touch. There's more to me
than I thought there was. Something that no one and nothing can take away from me.

  They can't break me. I won't cease. I'm strong. And I am never going to go away
until I've gotten what I came for.

  I might have been lost for a while, but I was never gone.

  Who the fuck are you?

  With an explosive inhalation, I snap upright in bed, and my eyes fly open--like
coming alive after being dead and interred in a coffin.

  I am Mac.

  And I'm back.
 

One of my college Psych professors claimed that every choice we made in life revolved
around our desire to acquire a single thing: sex.

  He argued that it was a primitive, unalterable biological imperative (thereby
excusing the human race our frequent idiocy?). He said that from the clothing a person

selected in the morning, to the food they shopped for, to the entertainment they sought,
at the very root of it all was our single-minded goal of attracting a mate and getting
laid.