Feverborn (Fever #8) - Karen Marie Moning Page 0,51
inhaled again, deeply. Sure enough. I smelled a doughnut. And coffee. The scent of yeast and something sugary was enormously enticing. I marveled that somewhere in Dublin someone was making doughnuts again. My stomach rumbled loudly. I made a mental note to find that vendor. Food had been in short supply for so long I could only give kudos to the black market if they were managing to obtain baking ingredients.
I moved quietly into the foyer, across black and white marble floors, beneath an elaborate crystal chandelier, my gaze focused tightly ahead, skirting a large round table with a dusty vase of silk flowers and pausing at the foot of an elegant, spiraling staircase.
Soft footfalls directly above.
The sound of a drawer sliding open. A muffled curse.
I couldn’t make out much. The walls and floors were of solid, hundred-year-old construction and served as sound insulation.
I cocked my head, listening, trying to fathom who might come here and search the premises. Besides me. For a moment I wondered if that was what I might find, should I ascend those curving stairs, if I’d somehow gotten trapped in a time loop, if the Sinsar Dubh was playing games with me.
If I doggedly mounted these carpeted risers, was it me I’d find up there?
Like I said, I take nothing for granted anymore. Not a damned thing.
Darroc? Had he truly died?
Some other sidhe-seer, dispatched by Jada, to reconnoiter the house?
Nah. Sidhe-seers worked in twos or more, not alone. Jada and I were the oddity, not the norm.
I eased my foot onto the first riser, placing it squarely in the middle because stairs always squeak when you’re trying to climb them silently. Sure enough, it let out a sullen squeal.
Biting my lip, I eased up, foot sideways, attempting to distribute my weight evenly, moving cautiously.
Above me a door banged shut and I heard another muffled curse, followed by an angry, “Where are you?”
I froze. Sniffed the air. Faint, but there. So faint I’d not caught it, but then I hadn’t expected to.
Squaring my shoulders, I marched up the stairs, determined to lay this particular bullshit to rest once and for all.
Another door banged, footfalls approached. I stiffened and stopped halfway up the stairs as the intruder burst from one of the bedrooms and stormed toward the very stairs I was on.
No. No. No.
This was wrong. This was so bloody wrong.
Alina stood at the top of the stairs, emotion flooding her beautiful features.
Shock. Astonishment. Joy.
Tears trembling in eyes I knew as well as my own. Better. I’d looked at her much more than I’d looked at myself in a mirror.
“Mac?” she breathed. “Holy crap, is it you, Jr.? Oh my God, oh my God!” she squealed. “When did you get here? What are doing in this house? How did you even know to look—Oh! Ahhhhh!”
She froze, mid-sentence, her joy morphing to pure horror.
I froze, too, midway up two more stairs, boot in the air.
She began to back away, doubling over, hands going to her head, clutching it. “No,” she moaned. “No,” she said again.
“You are not my sister,” I growled, and continued bounding up the stairs. I was confronting it this time. Staring it down cold. Proving the truth to myself, even without my sidhe-seer senses. My bastard Book, or Cruce, or whoever the hell was behind this was not playing this game with me.
Never this game.
The Alina-thing whirled and ran, hunched in on herself, clutching her stomach as if she, too, felt as kicked in the gut as I did.
“Get back here, whatever you are!” I roared.
“Leave me alone! Oh, God, I’m not ready. I don’t know enough,” she cried.
“I said get the hell back here! Face me!”
She was sobbing now, dashing through the house, stumbling into walls and crashing through doors. Slamming them behind her and locking them.
“Alina!” I shouted. Even though I knew it wasn’t her. I didn’t know what else to call the monster. Was my Book projecting an image? Or was the worst I’d feared for so many months now true?
Had I really never stepped out of the illusion that night we’d “allegedly” defeated the Sinsar Dubh?
Had it suckered me so completely that I only “believed” I’d been the victor but was in truth living in a matrixlike cocoon, my body in stasis, under complete dominion of the Book, merely dreaming my life? And I could either dream good things or have nightmares?
For months now I’d been crippled by that debilitating fear.
I didn’t trust one damned thing about my so-called reality.