Feverborn (Fever #8) - Karen Marie Moning Page 0,46

immediately, turned around three times, lay back down then bounded right back up, bristling so hard the mattress vibrated. “You smell bad. Like a predator. I’m not going to be able to sleep with you smelling up my air. Who touched you? Why did they?”

“I’m not taking a shower,” she said without opening her eyes. “I’m too tired. Besides, we’ve both smelled worse.”

“Fine. I’m not cuddling, then.”

“I didn’t ask you to cuddle. I never ask you to cuddle. I don’t even use that word.”

“You don’t have to. Your expects, bars on my cage.”

“I merely suggested in exchange for grooming, since you have all that fur and blaze like a small sun, you might keep me warm. Some of those worlds were cold.” And still, she often felt she had ice in her bones.

“It’s not cold here. And you haven’t groomed me all day. It was a long day. I was alone the whole time. Because you make me stay in here.”

“You would attract too much attention out there.”

“I would stay in a higher dimension.”

“Until you thought you might get some attention.”

“I like attention.”

“I don’t.”

“Did you ever like attention?”

“I don’t remember.”

“You’re ashamed of me. Because I’m fat. That’s why you don’t want them to see me.”

She slit her eyes open just barely, lids heavy. “I’m not ashamed of you. And you’re not fat.”

“Look at my belly,” he said tearfully, clutching it with both paws and jiggling.

She smiled. “I like your belly. I think it’s a perfectly wonderful belly, all soft and round.” Yesterday, he’d been convinced his ears were too big. The day before that it had been something wrong with his tail.

“Maybe you’re ashamed of yourself. You should be. The fur behind my ears is getting matted.”

“You’re beautiful, Shazam. I’ll groom you tomorrow,” Jada said sleepily.

“It’s already tomorrow.”

She sighed and stretched out her hand. Shazam head-butted it ecstatically.

Jada worked her fingers into the long fur behind his ears and began gently detangling. It was beyond her how he got so matted all the time when he slept most of the day and rarely left the bed.

He turned his face up, eyes slanting half closed with bliss and rumbled in his broad chest. “I see you, Yi-yi.”

Yi-yi was what he’d named her that day long ago on Olean when she’d named him. He’d been saying the same words to her every time she awakened or fell asleep for four years, and wouldn’t rest until she said it back.

“I see you, too, Shazam.”

Sometime later they curled together and slept as they had on so many worlds, Shazam’s head nestled on a pillow of her hair in the hollow between her neck and shoulder, one paw wrapped around her arm, one leg sticking straight up in the air, twitching as he dreamed.

Part II

the thing I came for:

the wreck and not the story of the wreck

the thing itself and not the myth

the drowned face always staring

toward the sun

the evidence of damage

worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty

the ribs of the disaster

curving their assertion

among the tentative haunters.

—Adrienne Rich

The legend of a monster is invariably

worse than the monster.

Unfortunately the monster is usually

quite bad enough.

—The Book of Rain

12

“Yet it was there I felt the crossroads of time…”

Barrons and I landed a safe distance away from the cordoned-off black hole suspended in the air near the underground entrance to Chester’s nightclub.

Jayne and the Guardians had been busy, commandeered by Ryodan to secure each and every black hole in Dublin. I glanced over my shoulder at it and shivered. They disturbed me on a cellular level, even with my sidhe-seer senses muted. Murder was now alarmingly easy: just shove someone into a floating black sphere, no evidence remained. Not that anyone was prosecuting murders at the moment, or even caring, too busy trying to stay alive themselves. The endless line of patrons waiting to get into the club angled sharply away from the roped-off area, apparently liking it no more than I did.

Barrons slid from the Hunter’s back and dropped gracefully to the pavement. It never ceased to amaze me how such a large, massively muscled man could move so lightly, half vanishing into shadow without even seeming to try.

He reached up to help me down, as if my accompanying him was a foregone conclusion.

I had no doubt he planned to head off with Ryodan to do whatever they were going to do about the Dageus situation I’d still not been told about, and I’d be stuck alone at some subclub, sandwiched between black holes above and