Faefever

He knocked my hand away. “Then why was his tongue in your mouth? Was he conducting a clinical test of your gag reflex?” He smiled, but not nicely. “How is your gag reflex, Ms.

Lane? Are you a hair trigger?”

Barrons likes to use sexual i

“Didn’t look that way to me. I think you’re a swallower. His tongue was halfway to China and you were still taking it.”

“Jealous?”

“Implies emotional investment. The only investment I have in you is my time, and I’m expecting a big payoff. Tell me about the Sinsar Dubh.”

I glanced at my hand. It had come away from his lapel wet. I angled it in the light. Red looks black at night. I sniffed it. It smelled like old pe

“I had a nosebleed.”

“Nosebleed, my petunia.”

“Petunia?”

“Ass, Barrons. As in you are one.”

“The Book, Ms. Lane.”

I looked into his eyes. Was there a Gripper in there? Something very old looked back. “There’s nothing to tell.”

“Why did you call after him?”

“I haven’t seen him since the last time we saw the Book. I keep V’lane informed. You’re not the only shark in the sea.”

He raked me with a contemptuous glance. “It’s a Fae prince’s fundamental nature to enslave a woman with sex, Ms. Lane. It’s a woman’s fundamental nature to be enslaved. Try to rise above it.”

“Oh, it is not a woman’s fundamental nature to be enslaved!” Everywoman reared up in me, battle-ready.

He turned and walked away. “You wear my brand, Ms. Lane,” floated over his shoulder, “and if I’m not mistaken, you now wear his. Who owns you? I don’t think it’s you.”

“It is, too,” I yelled at his retreating back, but he was already halfway down the street, vanishing into the darkness. “I don’t wear his brand!” Did I? Exactly what had V’lane embedded in my tongue? I fisted my hands, staring after him.

Behind me, militant footfalls approached. I reached instinctively for my spear. It was back where it was supposed to be, holstered beneath my arm again. I needed to figure out how V’lane was taking it. Had he returned it when he’d kissed me? Wouldn’t I have felt it? Could I persuade Barrons to ward, so it couldn’t be taken from me? He seemed to have a vested interest in my having it.

A troop of ugly gray-ski

I resumed my trek to the bookstore. It hadn’t eluded my orgasm-drenched brain that V’lane had disappeared the moment Barrons had appeared. Maybe he wasn’t a Gripper but an even worse Unseelie that I’d not yet encountered. In a world that kept growing darker every day, Barrons sure did seem to have a knack for keeping all the monsters at bay.

Because he was the biggest, baddest monster of all?

Monday morning I woke up slow and hard.

Most mornings, I spring out of bed. Despite the fact that my life hasn’t turned out how I wanted it to, it’s the only one I have, and I try to milk it for all it’s worth. But some days, despite my best intentions to plunge into the day and grab what happiness I can—even if it’s only a perfect latte topped with ci

I was slick with it this morning.

I’d had the dream about the beautiful dying woman again.

And now that I’d had it, I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten it for so long. For years, as a child, I’d dreamt it over and over, so often that I’d begun confusing the details with reality, and started expecting to see her somewhere when I was awake.

I had no idea what was wrong with the sad woman, just that it was something awful, and I would have given my right arm, my eyeteeth, maybe even twenty years off my life to save her. There wasn’t a law I wouldn’t have broken, a moral code I wouldn’t have violated. Now that I knew Alina and I were adopted, I wondered if it wasn’t a dream, but a memory, borne in my infancy and suppressed, creeping out at night when I couldn’t control it.

Was this beautiful, sad woman our biological mother?

Had she given us up because she’d known she was dying, and her sorrow was the pain she felt at being forced to give us to new parents?

But if she’d had to give us up because she was dying, why had she sent us so far away? If I was truly an O’Co

Were there other memories my child’s mind had blocked? If so, I needed to find them, knock them loose, and remember.

I went into the bathroom and turned on the shower. I spun the handle to full hot, and let the scalding spray steam the air. I was shivering, icy. Even as a child, the dream had always left me that way. It was bitterly cold wherever the dying woman was, and now I was cold, too.

Sometimes my dreams feel so real it’s hard to believe they’re just the subconscious’s stroll across a whimsical map that has no true north. Sometimes it seems like Dreaming must be a land that really exists somewhere, at a concrete latitude and longitude, with its own rules and laws, treacherous terrains, and dangerous inhabitants.

They say if you die in a dream, your heart stops in real life. I don’t know if that’s true. I’ve never known anyone who died in a dream to ask. Maybe because they’re all dead.

The hot spray cleansed my skin but left my psyche coated. I couldn’t soap away the feeling that it was going to be a truly sucky day.

I had no idea just how sucky.

_____

I learned in one of my college psych courses about comfort zones.

People like to find them and stay in them. A comfort zone can be a mental state: belief in God is a lot of people’s comfort zone. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking faith; I just don’t think you should have it because it makes you feel safe. I think you should have it because you do. Because somewhere deep inside you, you know beyond equivocating that something greater, wiser, and infinitely more loving than we’re capable of understanding has a vested interest in the Universe, in the way things turn out. Because you can feel that, as much as the forces of darkness might try to gain the upper hand, there is an Upper Hand.

That’s my comfort zone.

But comfort zones can be physical places, too: like your dad’s favorite recliner that your mom keeps threatening to send to Goodwill, with those sagging springs, the torn upholstery, and some kind of no-worry guarantee because the moment he settles into it every night, he relaxes; or your mom’s breakfast nook, where the sun shines in at the perfect angle every morning as she sips her coffee, and she kind of glows sitting there; or the rose garden your elderly neighbor prunes to perfection, despite the sweltering summer heat, smiling the day away.