“Barrons.” I forced my eyes open. They felt heavy, weighted by coins.
His face was in my neck and he was breathing hard. Was he grieving me? Already? Would he miss me? Had I, in some tiny way, come to matter to this enigmatic, hard, brilliant, obsessed man? I realized he’d come to matter to me. Good or evil, right or wrong, he mattered to me.
“Barrons,” I said again, this time more strongly, infusing it with everything I had left which wasn’t much, but enough to get his attention.
He raised his head. His face was all harsh planes and angles in the torchlight, his expression bleak. His dark eyes were windows on a bottomless abyss. “I’m sorry, Mac.”
“Not your…fault,” I managed to get out.
“My fault in more ways than you could possibly know, woman.”
Woman, he’d called me. I’d grown up in his eyes. I wondered what he’d think of me soon.
“I’m sorry I didn’t come for you. I shouldn’t have let you walk home alone.”
“L–Listen,” I said. I would have clutched urgently at his sleeve, but I couldn’t move either arm.
He bent nearer.
“Unseelie…slab?” I asked.
His brows drew together. He glanced over his shoulder, looked back at me. “It’s there, if that’s what you mean.”
My voice was terrible when I said, “Bring…it…me.”
He raised a brow and blinked. He glanced at the twitching Unseelie and I could see his mind working. “You—what—was Mallucé—” He broke off. “Exactly what are you saying, Mac? Are you telling me you want to eat that?”
I was beyond speaking. I parted my lips.
“Bloody hell, have you thought this through? Do you have any idea what it might do to you?”
I strove for one of our wordless conversations. I said, Pretty good one. Like make me live.
“I meant the downside. There’s always a downside.”
I told him a bigger one would be being dead.
“There are worse things than death.”
This isn’t one. I know what I’m doing.
“Even I don’t know what you’re doing, and I know everything,” he snapped.
I would have laughed if I’d been capable of it. His arrogance knew no bounds.
“It’s dark Fae, Mac. You’re planning to eat Unseelie. Do you get that?”
I’m dying, Barrons.
“I don’t like this idea.”
Got a better one?
He inhaled sharply. I didn’t understand the things that flashed across his face then—thoughts too complex, beyond my grasp—thoughts he discarded. But he hesitated a few seconds too long, before jerking his head in a single, violent negation, and I knew that he’d had some other idea, and had deemed it worse than this one. “No better ideas.”
There was a knife in his hand. He gave me a tight, mocking smile as he moved to the slab. “Wing or a thigh? Ah, I’m afraid we don’t have any thighs left.” He sliced into the Fae.
They didn’t have wings either, but I appreciated the humor, black as it was. He was trying to lessen the terrible reality of my impending meal.
I didn’t want to know what parts of it I was eating so I closed my eyes when he raised the first slice of Unseelie flesh to my lips. I couldn’t look at it. It was bad enough that it crunched in places and continued to move the entire time I chewed it. And the entire time I swallowed it. The tiny pieces fluttered in my stomach.
Unseelie flesh tasted worse than all four of my nightmare tastes combined. I guess our instruction booklets only cover this world, not Faery, which is fine with me. I’d hate to have to dream all the bad tastes of their world, too.
I chewed and gagged, gagged and swallowed.
MacKayla Lane, bartender and glam-girl, was screaming at me to stop, before it was too late. Before we could never again go back to being the uncomplicated, happy young southern girl we’d been. She didn’t get that it was already way too late for that.
Savage Mac was squatting in the dirt, stabbing her spear into the ground, nodding and saying, Yesss, finally, some real power! Bring it on!
Me—the one who tries to mediate between the two—wondered what price I was going to pay for this. Were Barrons’ concerns founded? Would eating dark Fae do something terrible to me, make me dark, too? Or do you only turn dark if you have the seeds of darkness in you to begin with? Perhaps eating it a single time wouldn’t change me at all. Mallucé had eaten it constantly. Perhaps frequency was the killer. There were many drugs a person could do a few times without paying too high a price. Perhaps the living flesh of a dark Fae would heal me, make me strong, and do little else of consequence.
Perhaps it didn’t matter, because the bottom line was that I’d made the mistake today—or tonight, or whatever it was—of giving up hope too soon, and I wasn’t about to make it again. I would fight to live with whatever means I had at my disposal, and pay whatever price I had to pay without complaining. I would never again accept death. I would battle it until the last second, no matter the horrors confronting me. I was ashamed of myself for giving up hope.
You can’t go forward if you’re looking backward, Mac, Daddy always said. You run into walls that way.
I dropped my regrets, a burdensome piece of baggage. Looking forward, I opened my mouth.
He sliced off another piece of flesh and fed it to me, and another. I chewed more strongly, swallowed more vigorously. A chilling heat suffused me and I trembled, as if in the grip of a brutal fever. After several more pieces, I felt my body begin the painful process of knitting itself back together. It was not pleasant. I cried out. Barrons covered my mouth with his hand, wrapped his arms around me, and crushed me against him while I thrashed and moaned. I guessed his efforts to keep me quiet meant Mallucé was somewhere nearby, or some of his minions were.
When the worst of it had passed, I ate more, and endured the brutal cycle again and again. Against his hot skin, I healed. Bracketed by his arms, I shuddered and writhed, and grew back together. The lacerations on the inside of my mouth faded into smooth, unbroken skin. Bones straightened and fused, tendons and torn flesh knitted itself, contusions melted. It was an agony. It was a miracle. I could feel the living Unseelie flesh doing things to me. I could feel it changing my innate structure, affecting it on a cellular level, infusing me with something ancient and powerful. Healing every ill, taking it farther, past perfect mortal health, into the realm of the extraordinary.
A slow, sweet rush of euphoria began to build inside me. My body was young, stronger than it had ever been, stronger than anything could be!
I stretched, gingerly at first, then with growing elation. There was no pain left in my body. As I moved, my muscles bunched with coiled power. My heart thundered, flooding my brain with potent, Fae-spiked blood.
I sat up. I sat up! I’d been on the brink of death and now I was whole again! Better than whole. Wonderingly, I ran my hands over my face and body.
Barrons sat up with me. He was staring at me as if waiting for me to suddenly sprout a second, monstrous head. His nostrils flared; he ducked his face to my skin and inhaled. “You smell different,” he said roughly.
“I feel different. But I’m fine,” I assured him. “In fact, I feel amazing!” I laughed. “I feel fantastic. I feel better than I’ve ever felt in my life. This is incredible!”
I stood, stretched out my arm, and flexed my hand. I fisted it and punched the stone wall. I hardly even felt it. I punched it again, hard. The skin on my knuckles tore—and healed instantly. Blood scarcely had the time to well before it was gone. “Did you see that?” I exclaimed. “I’m strong. I’m like you and Mallucé, I can kick ass now!”
His expression was grim as he rose and moved away. He worried too much. I told him so.
“You don’t worry enough,” he retorted.
It was hard to worry when I’d just been knocking on Death’s door and now felt like I was going to live forever. I’d been jerked between the two, a badly weighted pendulum, jarringly fast. I’d ricocheted from the depths of despair to euphoria, from pulverized to stronger than ever before, from terrorized to the one capable of terrorizing. Who could hurt me now? No one!