Iced

Twelve

I slo-mo Joe it across Halfpenny Bridge.

We didn’t learn a single new thing at the latest ice sculpture. Like the others, it blew shortly after we arrived. I freeze-framed out of there through flesh-colored shrapnel I pretended wasn’t parts of fingers and faces I’d failed to save.

The new places that got iced have nothing in common that I can see. There were two of those small underground pubs that’ve been springing up all over the city, and a fitness center where three people were frozen doing yoga in the middle of a bunch of crystal bowls. How weird is that? People doing yoga in times like these!

So far I’ve got an underground club at Chester’s, a warehouse on the outskirts of the city, two inner-city small pubs, and a fitness center. Humans, Unseelie, and Imperial guards all at some places but not others, so whatever’s happening doesn’t appear to be targeting a certain person like Ryodan or group of victims. It’s looking more like a random, spontaneous event with each scene I see.

I’m trudging, which I don’t usually do, because I’m thinking hard and when I’m thinking hard plus freeze-framing I run into things a lot. My bruises are fading and sometimes I try to be my normal-colored self for like a whole day. I’m too wired for sleep. I get like that sometimes and can’t do anything about it but ride it out. I need something to do or I’m going to drive myself nuts.

I find Dancer in his favorite corner penthouse on the south side of the river Liffey. The two outer walls are solid floor-to-ceiling windows that look out over the streets. When I get there, he’s stretched out on a rug in the sunshine with his shirt off, eyes closed, glasses on the floor beside him.

Dancer’s going to be a big guy one day, if he ever gains weight. Last time we measured ourselves, he was fourteen inches taller than me, lanky and lean. He forgets to eat. His hair is dark with some wave and he never cuts it until it gets in his way, then he asks me to trim it. It’s soft. I like it to his chin as it is now, falling away from his face. When he wears his glasses, which is pretty much every minute he’s awake because he’s so nearsighted (he hates them and before the walls fell he was going to get Lasik), he looks like a hunky geek. I’d never tell him that! I like his hands. His feet are ginormous! His eyes aren’t green or blue, they’re aqua, like they’re Fae-brushed. He’s got better eyelashes than me.

When I see him I don’t say, “Dude where you been, I was starting to worry,” because me and Dancer don’t do that to each other. He survived the walls going down all by himself. So did I. And I don’t say, “What happened the night Ryodan showed up and took me, where’d you disappear to?” It doesn’t matter. We’re here now. It’s like somehow we know in our guts that it’ll never be too long, the other is always going to walk through the door one day, eventually.

He props up on an elbow when the door closes. He knows it’s me because I had to disarm ten booby traps before I got to the door. Nobody else could make it through one of his gauntlets without tripping some alarm. Well, except for Ryodan, who seems to be the exception to every fecking rule.

My heart squinches a little when I look at him. I never had siblings but I think he’s like a brother to me. I can never wait to see him again, tell him all the ideas I’ve been thinking, the things I’ve seen, and get his take on it all. Sometimes when we see each other we can’t stop talking for hours and hours and we get so excited we start to stumble over our words trying to say it all so fast. I consider telling him about the iced scenes and the mystery I’m looking into but I don’t want Dancer to be any bigger on Ryodan’s radar than he already is. That Ryodan even knows he exists makes me nuts. I want Dancer safe. And I know him. If he got the tiniest hint of a big mystery like this, he’d start poking into all kinds of places that could get him killed. It doesn’t matter how über-impressed I am with how smart he is. Ryodan’s worse than walls falling or the world melting down. You don’t survive if he doesn’t want you to.

“Mega, I’ve been thinking—”

“Stop the presses! Do I need to put out a special edition of The Dani Daily?”

“Might.”

He grins and I grin back. Dancer thinking has stellar results. You wouldn’t believe the bombs he can build. We blow up things sometimes just for fun. You know, things that need to be blown up anyway like places where a lot of Shades used to hide that maybe they would return to one day like birds along a migration route, if it was still there.

“You got me wondering about Papa Roach’s babies,” he says.

“Yeah?” I stretch out in the sun next to him, prop up on an elbow, too, facing him. I love being able to see his eyes without his glasses in the way. It’s a rare treat.

“Do you know how long they can stay separate from a body, either Papa or human?”

“Dunno. Dancer, I finally found Scream 4. Want to watch it tonight?”

“Watched it last night,” he says absently, running a hand through his hair, making it stand up funny in a totally hot way, and I can tell by the way his eyes are unfocused that he’s lost in thought and not aware of stuff around him. He gets that way a lot.

“You watched it without me?” I’m hurt. Me and Dancer love horror flicks. We gorge on them because they make us laugh. They have a way of putting the world in perspective. We’d been hunting for Scream 4 for a while, planning to watch it. Dancer doesn’t usually watch movies alone, least not that I know of.

“But I’ll watch it again. It was cool.”

“Cool.” I still feel hurt, even though there’s no reason for it. He’s watching it with me tonight. So what if he saw it last night, too? And so what if he saw it with someone else? I don’t care about stuff like that. What happens when I’m not around ain’t got nothing to do with me. “What about Papa Roach?”

“Blowing them up doesn’t work. Torching them is no good either. But what if we keep them from returning to a body? Any body. Human or their own. Wouldn’t that solve the problem? Our goal is to keep them from getting inside more people. They’re immortal, and your time is too important to waste running around after thousands of them with your sword. So, I started thinking what about a tough, impossible-to-escape spray-plastic? Encase them and keep them from being able to reattach to anything. I’ve been working on a formula. Once it’s done, we can fill those small fertilizer tanks we swiped from the hardware store and test it out. I already rigged up a couple of sprayers to fit.”

So, that’s where he’d been. And when he got done working last night he watched a movie to chill. No big.

“I’ve got something that sets hard at a quarter-inch thick. I’m still trying to get it to gel to the perfect degree of solidity. I think I’ve figured out a way to add iron to the mix without making it too rigid. How do the segments attach to Papa? Tentacles? Suckers? How do they get under human skin? Can you catch me a couple to test it on?”

“You’re the Shit, you know that,” I say.

“No, you’re the Shit,” he says and grins, and we say it back and forth a couple of times. He thinks I’m the Shit because I can actually catch them. I was born with my gifts. Dancer is always thinking, trying to find ways to do things better. Surviving the fall with no special powers and no friends wows the feck out of me.

We relax on the floor because sunshine in Dublin is rare, and we talk about anything and everything except things like where I was when he was wherever he was. I don’t tell him I was in a dungeon for almost four days and he doesn’t ask. I like that about him. Friends don’t build cages for each other.

We watch the sun move across the sky, and sometimes he gets up to get me things to eat. He tells me he’s been checking stores and nearly every single one has been wiped clean. I have to stop myself three times from almost spilling the beans about the iced stuff I’ve been seeing.

When it’s getting near seven o’clock, I start getting antsy and it makes me mad because I don’t want to have to leave but somebody else is pulling my strings and I’ve got to go. I have to get to Chester’s early enough to avoid Mac but not so early Ryodan gets all cocky about it.

I sigh.

“Something worrying you, Mega?” Dancer says.

“Just got to go take care of some things.”

“I thought we were going to watch a movie. I found a whole box of Skittles at the airport. And jerky. The hot stuff.”

I smack myself in the forehead. Skittles, jerky, and a movie. What was I thinking, saying hey, let’s watch a movie tonight. My nights don’t belong to me anymore. Somebody else owns them. That’s not just a bitter pill to swallow. For someone like me it’s a suicide tooth. It’s irrelevant that I want to go work on the ice mystery and keep more innocent folks from dying. I can’t handle that Ryodan gets to dictate when, how, and where I do it. It almost makes me not want to work on it at all. I hate being controlled.

I can’t not go to Chester’s because I don’t know what Ryodan will do to Jo if I don’t show, and there’s no way I’m running the risk of finding out. I don’t know if he’d hunt me down here, smash up the TV and DVD player, and take Dancer and put him in his dungeon. I never know what that dude will do next.

But I’m crystal clear about one thing he’s doing.

Ruining my life.

I bang into Ryodan’s office. “I been in enough cages in my life,” I say. I got worked up on the way over, talking to myself in my head about the unfairness of it all.

He glances up from his paperwork.

“Paperwork! Holy replicating reams! Is that all you ever do? It’s no wonder you want me coming around so much. Got to liven up your boring life with the superexcitement of the Mega.” I’m so mad, I’m vibrating and the papers on his desk flutter in the breeze. When I get really mad, I cause a kind of air displacement that does on a tiny scale what the Fae do on a massive scale, except I can’t affect the temperature. I do it sometimes to freak people out, get them off balance. It used to bug the crap out of Ro.

He catches a paper before it flies off the desk. “Something wrong.”

How does he do that? Say questions without them sounding like questions at all? I been practicing and it’s not easy. Vocal cords want to go up at the end of an interrogatory. I been trying to reprogram myself. Not because I plan to start acting like him (at least not around him) but because I think it’s good to test yourself, override compulsion. Learn more self-control.

My hair’s flying around my head in a cloud, getting in my eyes. I shove it back with both hands, wishing me and Dancer were eating jerky and hanging cool. “Yeah! Like, I might just have a life! Like I might just have plans for things that conflict with your stupid report-to-work-every-night-at-eight rule! Nobody else has to work every single night! Maybe I could get a couple of nights off to do something I want to do. Is that too fecking much to ask?”

“You have a date.”

Another nonquestion, but the word “date” in the same thought with Dancer makes me say, “Huh?”

Ryodan stands and dwarfs me. I live in a world of people who are taller than me, but Jo says she thinks I’m going to grow more. I measure myself a lot. I don’t want to be stuck at five foot two and three-quarters forever.

“You mentioned plans. You didn’t say what they were.”

“None of your fecking business.”

“Everything is my business.”

“Not my personal life. That’s why they call it personal.”

“This is about your little boyfriend.”

“Don’t talk about him. Don’t even think about him. And he’s not little. Stop calling him little. One day he’s going to be bigger than you. You just wait and see.”

“This isn’t the time to play house and get clumsy with a kid that doesn’t know what to do with his own dick.”

He just made me think about Dancer’s dick. The thought is so uncomfortable I start bouncing from foot to foot. “Who said anything about dicks? I just want to watch a movie tonight!”

“Which one.”

“How could that possibly matter?”

He gives me a look.

“Scream 4. Happy?”

“Wasn’t very good.”

“Dancer said it was,” I say crossly. Has everybody seen it but me?

“Shows what he knows.”

“You got a problem with Dancer?”

“Yes. He’s the reason you’re in a shit mood tonight and I have to put up with it. So fix the shit mood or I’ll fix Dancer.”

My hand goes to the hilt of my sword. “Don’t you even think about trying to take anything from me that’s mine.”

“Don’t make me.”

His fangs just slid out. I shake my head and whistle. “Dude, what are you?”

He looks at me long and hard and I see something in his eyes that I almost get but don’t. It’s a look that I feel like I should know but just can’t make sense of. There’s more of a breeze in the small, closed office than I usually manage to generate, and I realize he’s vibrating, too — and he makes wind, too. I’m beyond annoyed. Is there anything I can do that he can’t do? When I look down through the glass floor, I see that everyone beneath us is moving slo-mo. We’re both freeze-framing. I didn’t realize I’d shifted all the way up.

He drops back into slo-mo first.

It takes me a sec longer to get ahold of my temper. When I manage to shift down, I flop into a chair and sling a leg over the side. I speak belligerence in every language known to man. Sign language is my native tongue.

Ryodan is like the ocean. He is what he is. And he’s not about to change. There’s no point in fighting the tide. It ebbs. It flows. You ride it. He’s got me by the short hairs and he’s not about to let go.

“So, what are we doing tonight? Boss.” I put all my aggravation into the last word.

There’s that look again. Mystery to me. Sometimes I can read him like a book, other times the only things I see on his face are two eyes, a nose, and a mouth.

I roll my eyes. “What?”

“Something’s come up. I was going to tell you.” He goes back to his paperwork, dismissing me. “You can go.”

I sit up straight. “Really? You mean it?”

“Get out of my office, kid. Go watch your movie.”

I can’t get to the door fast enough. I yank it open.

“But watch out for icy spots. I hear they’re deadly.”

I pause on the threshold, getting mad all over again. I had a happy feeling for all of one stinking second before he went and squashed it. “You just had to say that. You can’t help yourself, can you? You think the only thing to do with a parade is rain on it. Some people know to enjoy the parade because, dude, the rain always comes back.”

“The wise man ensures his survival before enjoying it. The fool dies enjoying it.”

Skittles, jerky, and Dancer are calling my name. I rip open a candy bar, bouncing from foot to foot. “But what if the wise man never gets around to the enjoying part?” I got a lot of unlived experiences waiting for me. Sometimes I want to be just what I am. Fourteen and free.

“Perhaps the wise man knows being alive is the enjoying part.”

“Have more places gotten iced since last night?” I should have kept my mouth shut. I shouldn’t have asked. Responsibility adds weight and years to my shoulders when he nods.

He rubs salt in the wound. “But maybe you’ll get lucky, watching a movie with your little boyfriend, and nothing will happen. Bright side of it is, if something does, you’ll never know.”

’Cause I’d like, be dead instantly. Bright side, my ass. Ryodan knows just how to push my buttons.

I roll my eyes, close the door and sit back down. I’ll be fourteen later. Like probably next year. When I’m fifteen.

Without looking up, he says, “I said get out of here, kid.”

“Cancel your plans, dude. Folks are dying. We’ve got work to do.”

This one takes the cake, way out on the south side of Dublin, where things get rural.

Behind a shack that’s barely managing to stay upright, with a swayback porch and a roof that looks like a really old person’s mouth without dentures in, a man, a woman, and a little boy are frozen, doing laundry the old-fashioned way that Ro used to wash her Grand Mistress robes. She said it kept her humble. There wasn’t a humble bone in that porky old witch’s body, not even a nice hair anywhere.

The man’s hands are iced to an antique washboard and he has some weird kind of metal thing iced on his shoulders like part of a frame that holds your head still if you broke your neck. The child is frozen, banging a spoon against the bottom of a battered pot. I don’t let myself look at the kid long. It slays me when they die. He never even got to have a life. The woman got iced while she was lifting a shirt from a bucket of soapy water. I stand at the edge of the lawn, shivering, absorbing as many details as I can from a distance, getting ready to freeze-frame in. If this scene behaves anything like the others, it’s going to explode soon.

“How did you even hear of this one?” The pubs I understand, even the fitness center because it was in Dublin and Ryodan knows everything that goes on in the city. But these are farmers doing laundry out in the country.

“I hear everything.”

“Yeah, but how?”

“That was supposed to terminate your line of questioning.”

“Dude, news flash. ‘Supposed to’ never works with me.”

“Observations.”

“They knew it was coming, whatever it was.” Which makes me feel a whole lot better. I can stop worrying about dying with no warning. Although the boy was looking down at the pot he was holding, the grown-ups’ mouths were open, their faces contorted. “They saw it and screamed. But why didn’t they run? Why didn’t she drop the shirt she was washing? It doesn’t make sense. Does it freeze them mildly before it totally ices them? Could they have a small reaction but not be able to fully move? Did it sneak up on the other folks at the other scenes from behind?”

“I need answers, kid, not questions.”

I puff out a breath. It gets foggy but doesn’t ice. “It’s not as cold as the other scenes.”

“It’s older. It’s thawing.”

“How do you know that?”

“There’s a drop of condensation on the end of the man’s nose that’s about to fall.”

I squint. “I don’t see no stinking drop. You can’t see that far that clearly.” I have supereyes and I can’t see it.

“Jealous, kid.” He lets the last word rise that one-hundredth of a note that he does sometimes when he’s humoring me. There’s a smile in his voice. It pisses me off more.

“There is no fecking way you can see a drop of water from here!”

“There’s another sliding down between the woman’s breasts. Just above the mole on her left one.”

“Dude, you can’t outsee me by that much!”

“I can out-everything you.” He gives me a look that I usually see in the mirror.

Just like that I’m in a total snit. “Then I guess you don’t need me, and I’m wasting my time.” I turn around and stomp back to the Humvee. But before I make it five steps, he’s in my way, looming over me, arms crossed, looking at me weird. “Not in the mood, Ryodan. Get out of my way!”

“Being needed is toxic.”

“It’s good to be needed. Means you’re important.”

“It means there’s an imbalance of power. There was no shortage of life-suckers before the walls fell. You’re not responsible for the world just because you’re more capable.”

“ ’Course I am. That’s what more capable folks do.”

“You could ask me to teach you.”

“Huh?” This night is getting weird in a hurry. “Teach me like you’re teaching a class or something? What are you going to call it: ‘You Too Can Be a Sociopath 101’?”

“It would be more like a graduate-level class.”

I start to snicker. His sense of humor sneaks up on you. Then I remember who’s talking and bite it off.

“You want to be faster, stronger, smarter. Ask me to teach you.”

“I ain’t asking you for nothing. And you might be faster and stronger. For now. No way you’re smarter.”

“Your choice. But turn around because you’re not leaving. It’s night, and you know what that means.”

“Like, it’s dark?”

“You’re with me until dawn.”

“Why dawn? You a vamp or a zombie or something that can’t stand the light?”

He freeze-frames away, moves in on the scene. “I like sex for breakfast, kid. I eat early and often.”

There I am thinking normal thoughts about iced people and how much he bugs me, then he slams me in the eyeballs with sex for breakfast stuff, and just like that my hormones do that crazy thing they do sometimes, where they start slapping up pictures all over the inside of my head and each one is more embarrassing than the last. And I can’t close my internal eyes because they don’t really exist and hormones are more stubborn and unpredictable than even me.

I wish I’d never watched porn movies or seen Ryodan “eating breakfast” because then the pictures wouldn’t be so vivid and hard to get rid of.

But there he is, in graphic detail because I know exactly what he looks like naked, I saw him. I know how his body moves. He’s got a lot of muscle. Scars, too. I know that when he has sex he laughs like the world is a perfect place. And when he did that, my hands curled into fists because I thought about touching his face like maybe I could catch joy in my hands and hold it. I had all kinds of fecking strange and stupid thoughts standing there on level four. I could so kick the shit out of myself for watching. I don’t get hormones. I don’t understand why the horny little buggers would even notice an old dude like him.

“You coming?”

I shake myself mentally, pick up and shift sideways.

Nothing happens.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I mutter.

“Kid, why are you still standing there?” He’s freeze-framing around the frozen trio. “It could blow any second.”

I don’t move, thinking how much I hope it will, so he won’t figure out I’ve lost my superpowers again.

“I have to, uh, use the, uh—” I gesture to the woods behind me. “Need a little privacy. Be right back.”

Just like I hoped, while I’m in the shrubbery, pretending to pee, the laundry people blow.

The ride back to Dublin is a long and silent one.