Iced

Fourteen

It turns out Ryodan didn’t have diddly-squat for me to do. There were no other iced scenes to visit so he made me hang around his office with him.

I wanted to go back out and examine the debris of the warehouse scene that exploded the other night, pick through it more thoroughly for clues (thinking I could move my hidey-holes at the same time), but he told me to study all the folks and Fae through the glass floor and see if I thought any of them might be responsible for what was happening.

I said, dude, you said you think it’s happening spontaneously, like some part of Faery is bleeding through. Now you want me checking out individuals like they might be doing it. Which one is it?

He said both and went back to his paperwork. I don’t think he feels the same sense of urgency I do, since it’s only been humans getting iced lately and none of them on his turf. If he doesn’t start showing me some investigative action, I’ll be forced to work on it on my own time, and I don’t know how to squeeze everything in, plus sleep every few days or so.

Mac left pretty quick. She seemed to get real nervous about what was happening with the ZEWs. That’s Zombie Eating Wraiths for short, because that’s what they look like. They had dirt and cobwebs on their cloaks, clues to where they hole up. I relaxed once she was gone. Then I got tense again having to watch Jo down there in the kiddie subclub, showing off so much leg to the Unseelie, and there’s no question they were liking it. I’d like to have legs like Jo some day, all curvy and smooth-skinned and pretty.

No bruises!

She kept looking up at Ryodan’s office with a weird look on her face, all longing-like, like she must have known I was up there. I didn’t know she missed me so much! It made me feel bad for not spending more time with her. Sometimes she’d look real hard at the stairs like she was hoping maybe I’d come down.

I watched, sword hand itching all the while, because there were so many things in the club preying on humans that needed killing. By dawn I was a seething knot of repressed, homicidal sidhe-seer thoughts, and not one bit wiser about who or what was behind the icings.

Two good things came from the hours I sat there till he finally let me leave. I learned about four new types of Unseelie and I composed my next Dani Daily. I plan to clean it up a little visually, make it even more professional-like before printing.

Now, sitting up on my favorite water tower perch, I read through my handwritten copy one more time, proofing it before I go to press.

May 24, 1 AWC

Brought to you exclusively by

DANI MEGA O’MALLEY aka

I Give a Rat’s Ass

and unlike IMITATION

newcomers

I always have been

YOUR ONLY CREDIBLE SOURCE FOR THE LATEST NEWS IN & AROUND DUBLIN!

Who’s been bringing you the facts about what’s what ever since the walls fell? Me.

Who searched you out and brought food and news to your hidey-holes when you were too afraid to leave them? Me. Who carried messages, hunted for missing family members, and brought them home to you if they were alive? Dani Mega O’Malley.

Who dug through the rubble for wallets and IDs, and gave you back their things so you could grieve? It wasn’t some fly-by-night organization that got most of their whole first paper’s “news” out of being snarky about me. That’s not news. That’s slander. I give you facts you can use.

Who’s been killing your enemies and teaching you how to fight for the past seven months? Who rounded up the children and took them to safety? Don’t forget what you know is true just because somebody else suddenly pops up, imitating MY paper, making crazy fecked-up claims. I haven’t seen any power or water running yet that isn’t generator-powered, and, folks, I can hook that up for you.

ICare

Always will, Dublin.

Dani out!

I don’t do rebuttals and I ain’t got no love letters in me, so this’ll have to do. Once I print and post it, I’m going to hole up and sleep like the dead for ten hours. Been up two or three days now. I always forget until I’m about to keel over.

I’ve been sitting on my water tower, looking down over the city, watching the sun come up. The air is clean like it never was before the walls fell. It’s foggy but not smoggy like it used to be. I love living in a harbor town. Once, when I was nine, I stowed away on a fishing boat. They couldn’t get rid of me until the end of the day because they needed the full day’s catch. They finally ended up letting me ride up front, wind in my hair, salt spray in my face. The docks have always fascinated me with big ships coming and going places, tales of adventure and excitement stuck to their hulls like barnacles! Now they just sit, dead in the water like so much else. I’ve got a cool hidey-hole on one of them. I decide I ain’t been there in a while and I’ll catch some z’s there later.

The sky is platinum, the sea slate, and the river Liffey is sliding down through the city, metallic. Fog spills silver lace over it all. Takes my fecking breath away!

I could admire it for hours but I got a job to do.

People got short memories. They get fear-blind and easily dazzled. Especially during times of war when the world starts looking so dark and gritty that shiny things start looking shinier. I got to keep reminding them of the things they know are true.

Me and Dublin, we’re peas in the Mega pod. This is my city and my paper and I don’t give up nothing that’s mine without a fight.

I’ve never lost a fight yet.

Well, only to that fecker Ryodan. And there’s no way he’s behind WeCare. He’s like, the antithesis of WeCare. He’s, like, We-Don’t-Fucking-Care all wrapped up with We’ll-Eat-You-for-Lunch, too.

There goes my mood again. That’s all it takes. One little thought about him. I have to go to “work” again tonight like some fecking slow-mo Joe, trudging along with the masses, and the unfairness of it all is now that the world has melted down, nobody has to go to work anymore. Except me.

I bristle, realizing I can’t go sleep like the dead once I get my rag up because I have to set an alarm. Me. I have to get up at a certain time!

I’ve never paid any attention to time. Dancer says I’ve enjoyed a luxury most people never have. He hates clocks and watches and everything that has to do with time. He says people already have too many lost days and that most folks live in the past or the future but never the present, always saying stuff like “I’m unhappy because ‘X’ happened to me yesterday, or I’ll be happy again when ‘Y’ happens to me tomorrow.” He says time is the ultimate villain. I don’t really get that but that’s probably because until this very frigging moment I never had to look at a clock for anything. I woke up when I felt like it. I went to sleep when I felt like it.

If I’m lucky, I’ll be able to squeeze in five whole hours of sleep before I have to go back to “work.”

I’m aghast at the horrificness of it all. Clock hands are ticking away my life at someone else’s direction.

It’s so wrong.

I wake up slow and careful, don’t even stretch. I lay still, feeling the boat rock gentle on the waves. I love sleeping on my ship. Got it booby-trapped to the nines. I got caught by one of them today, they’re so good! I don’t open my eyes because it takes me a while to get moving. Sometimes it can take me a half hour. That’s why I set my alarm for seven instead of seven-thirty.

My alarm.

Was that what just woke me?

I don’t remember turning it off.

I fumble for my cell phone. Signal might be dead but it still plays music and games. And has a stupid alarm clock.

I encounter an obstacle between me and my phone that feels like—

“Aiy-eeeeeeee!” I make a sound I didn’t know I could make, part gasp, part shriek, and shoot straight up in bed, eyes flying open. What just came out of my mouth is so girly it makes me cringe so I grab my sword and swing it.

He knocks it out of my hand and it clatters across the floor.

I can’t even say anything for a sex. I mean sec.

This is like my worst nightmare ever in the whole world! This is worse than all the ZEWs coming after me plus the devil and all the Unseelie princes, too!

Ryodan is in bed next to me!

Sitting there, cool as you please! We’re in bed together! He’s giving me that faint smile and mocking stare. Guess he was watching me sleep. Did I snore? Was I flopped flat on my back with my mouth hanging open? I have no idea how long he’s been here! How’d he get in? How the heck did he get past all my booby traps? Obviously I’m going to have to come up with some new ones!

I try to push him off the bed. It’s like trying to budge a mountain. I hit him. Like a girl. Not even using my superpowers. Assuming I have them at the moment, the fickle fecking things. What good is it to be a superhero if you only are some of the time and you never get to know when?

He catches my fist and holds it.

I can’t get my fist out of his hand. “Dude, give me some space here! I need room when I wake up! I can’t breathe! Move!”

He laughs and I want to crawl under the covers and burrow deep and hide and pretend this is just a really bad nightmare and it’ll be over soon.

“Get off my bed!”

When he lets me go and stands, the mattress rises four inches on his side. I can’t believe I didn’t feel him sit down. Yes I can. I sleep hard.

“You’re late for work, kid.”

“What time is it?” I glance wildly around for my cell phone. I’m so sleep-discombobulated I can barely function. I spot it on the end table next to the bed. It’s smashed into a gazillion pieces. “You broke my cell phone!”

“It was smashed when I got here. You must have done it when the alarm went off.”

“It’s not like it’s my fault,” I say crossly, shoving my hair out of my face with both hands. “I’ve never had to use an alarm before.”

“Am I giving you shit.”

“You’re like, here!”

“That’s because you’re late for work, kid. Get dressed.”

Clothes hit me in the chest.

I realize I have on my favorite pjs. They’re flannel and have ducks on them. Maybe he didn’t notice. I can’t stand it. This is my place. It’s supposed to be private.

“Captain’s quarters. Pretty plush. Get moving. We’ve got things to do.” He walks to the door and heads for the deck.

“Nice pjs, kid.”

He takes me to a church.

Churches crack me up. They’re like money, a conspiracy of faith. Like everyone agreed to believe that not only is there a God, but he comes down and checks on folks, so long as they hang in certain places, put up altars, burn lots of candles and incense, and perform sit-stand-kneel and other wacky rituals that’d make a coven of witches look not OCD. Then to further complicate it, some folks perform rituals, subset A, and other folks perform rituals, subset B, C, or D, and so on into an infinity of denominations, and call themselves different things then deny everyone else’s right to heaven if they’re not performing the same rituals. Dude. Weird. I figure if there is a God, he or she isn’t paying attention to what we build or if we follow some elaborate rules, but copping a ride on our shoulders, watching what we do every day. Seeing if we took this great big adventure called life and did anything interesting with it. I figure the folks that are the most interesting get to go to heaven. I mean, if I was God, that’s who I’d want there with me. I also figure being eternally happy would be eternally boring so I try not to be too interesting, even though it’s hard for me. I’d rather be a superhero in hell, kicking all kinds of demon ass, than an angel in heaven, wafting around with a beatific smile on my face, playing a pansy harp all day. Dude, give me drums and big cymbals! I like the crash and bang.

So, Ryodan takes me to a church and I stand outside looking in, stymied.

I mentally review the places I’ve seen so far that got iced: Chester’s subclub, a warehouse on the outskirts of town, two small underground pubs, a fitness center, the rural Laundromat-family, and now a small congregation in a church.

I linger at the tall, double-door entrance, absorbing details because I’m in no hurry to rush in. The cold emanating from the interior is brutal, worse than any scene yet. My breath burns all the way down into my lungs, even with a good fifty yards between me and the front of the church where the folks are gathered at the altar in a frosty nativity scene. There are eight men, three women, a priest, a dog standing there, and an old man sitting at the organ. I hear more men than women survived Halloween, and in a lot of rural places women have become a wicked hot commodity with men tripping all over themselves to score one. The pipes of the organ behind the altar are covered with icicles, and the ceiling drips enormous stalactites. There’s a frozen fog hanging around the entire interior. The priest is standing behind the altar, facing the others, his arms raised, like he was in the middle of a sermon.

“It’s colder than any of the rest, which suggests it happened more recently, ambient temperature and all factored in,” I say, and when I talk, my breath crystallizes in little clouds that hang in the air. I jerk with a sudden uncontrollable shiver. “Feck, it’s cold!”

“Too cold for you.”

I look at him. There was nearly a question mark at the end of that one. “Dude, you worried about me? I’m indestructible. When did you find out about this one?”

“Fade found it about forty minutes ago. He’d passed the church ten minutes earlier, and it wasn’t iced. On his way back it was.”

“So it is the freshest one we’ve seen so far.” I notice he’s not pressing into the church in slow-mo like he has at prior scenes. Guess it’s a little cold even for him.

I breathe in and out, fast and hard, bellowing my lungs, priming my adrenaline pump. “Let’s do it.”

I mentally pick myself up, shift gears and freeze-frame in.

There’s cold and then there’s something worse. This cold knifes into me and twists, catching gristle and bone. It slices down through muscle and tendon, razoring my nerves. But this scene is the freshest of them all, and if there’s anyplace I’m going to find clues, it’s here, before the temperature starts to rise and things change. If things do. I just don’t know enough.

I circle the small gathering, shivering. I’ve stuttered with cold at other scenes but never shivered while freeze-framing. I think shivering is cool because it’s the body’s way of freeze-framing on a molecular level. Your cells sense the temperature is too cold for you, and your brain makes you vibrate minutely all over to generate heat. So I’m, like, freeze-framing twice right now, on a cellular level and on my feet. The body is a brilliant thing.

I look at their faces first.

They’re frozen with their mouths open, faces contorted, screaming, same as the outdoor Laundromat-people. These folks saw it coming, too. All except for the priest who’s looking startled at the folks standing there, which tells me whatever it was, it came from behind the priest and it came fast because his head isn’t even turning. He must have been reacting to the looks on their faces. It must have appeared and iced simultaneously, or he’d have had time to begin to look behind him.

I feel a little better about whatever’s happening because twice now people saw it coming. That means I have a chance of getting out of its way if it comes in my direction.

“Save your. Observations and breath,” Ryodan says at my ear. “Gather. Info and. Get out.”

I look at him because of how he just spoke. Soon as I do I understand why he kept stopping and starting. His face is iced solid. It cracks when he adds, “Hurry the. Fuck. Up.”

My face isn’t iced. Why is his? I reach out without thinking, like I’m going to touch him or something, and he knocks my hand away. “Don’t. Fucking touch. Anything. Not. Even me.” Ice shatters and re-forms on his face four times before he completes the sentence.

Embarrassed, I whiz away, snap my mind up tight and focus on the details. I have no clue why I almost touched him. There’s no explanation for my behavior. I think he put some kind of spell on me with his application.

What’s happening at these iced places? Why is it happening? Is some inhumanly cold part of Faery really bleeding through? I understand why Ryodan thinks it is. At each scene, nothing appears to have been taken. I see no common denominators. Nothing was eaten. No one was harmed. Then why did it happen? I consider each of these iced scenes a crime. People are dead. Crimes require motive. I whiz back and forth, trying to discern some inkling of a motive, a hint of a sentient mind behind this. Looking close, for tiny injuries, say from something like needle-thin teeth. Are they drained of bodily fluids certain sick Fae consider tasty? The thought makes me think of a few Fae I should have killed. If I had, everything would be fine between me and Mac. She’d never have known. Still don’t know why I didn’t. Wasn’t like I wanted to get caught.

I see no signs of harm or foul play of any kind.

Then I see her and it’s an instant heart punch.

“Aw, bugger!” I say.

I don’t mind so much when adults get killed because I know they had a life. They lived. They had their chance. And hopefully they died fighting. But kids … well, kids just slay me. They didn’t even get to know what a crazy, wonderful, amazing place the world is! They didn’t even get to have hardly any adventures.

This one didn’t get any adventures at all. She never even got passed the “Gee, I’m glad I got milk” stage.

One of the women is holding a baby girl with a halo of curly red hair just like mine, nestled in the crook of her arm. She has a tiny fist wrapped around her mom’s finger and is frozen staring up at her mom like she’s the most beautiful, magical angel in the world, which is exactly how I felt about mine before everything got so … yeah, well. So.

And something nuts happens to me that I don’t understand, but I’m going to start doing what the rest of the world does and blame everything on my hormones because I used to be the coolest of the cool until I started having periods.

I get all mushy inside like some kind of wimp that buys into those greeting card commercials, and I think about Mom, and even though she did things to me that other people would think were awful, I understand why she kept me in a cage. There weren’t many choices and she didn’t have much money and she wasn’t always mean to me. She did it to keep me safe. I never blamed her for keeping me in a cage with a collar.

I just wished she’d stop forgetting me.

Like she didn’t want to remember me.

Or maybe she wished she’d never had me.

But it wasn’t always like that with us. I remember feeling crazy-loved. I remember when it was different. I just never could get it back.

And all the sudden there’s like this stupid fecking thing so cold at the corner of my eyes on the insides like I tried to cry or something and I don’t fecking cry, and it froze the second it started and my head hurts and I reach out and I touch the tiny fist wrapped around her mommy’s finger and my heart squinches and then I have this horrible pressure in my ears and then something inside me gives with a soft squishing sound, and all the sudden I can’t breathe and I’m so cold I guess it must be like getting dumped naked in space.

The cold knifes into me, flays me, slays me, glacierizes me.

Cold takes on new meanings and just about when I think I understand it, like it’s some complex state of being that I could exist inside of, it flips all around on me, and I burn everywhere and I’m hot, and I’m hot, and I’m so fecking unbelievably hot that I start tearing off my clothes and I can’t do it fast enough because I feel thick and slow and stupid and I realize somehow I’ve dropped back down into slow-mo!

Was it when I touched her? Was that why he told me not to touch anything? Does touching something so cold knock you down from fast-mo? How does he know that, if it’s true? Did it knock him down once somewhere, is that how he knew? Then why didn’t it kill him?

It’s too cold down in slow-mo, seriously like outer space.

I try to freeze-frame back up.

I stumble to my knees. I must have waited too long. Maybe the instant I dropped down was too long.

God, the floor is cold! It hurts, it hurts, it hurts! I just thought “God.” I don’t use that word. Do I believe? Have I found faith here, on my knees, now, at the end? That seems kind of hypocritical-like to me. Ain’t dying a hypocrite. I start to snicker. I’m not shivering. I’m hot. I’m so hot.

Even now I try to absorb more details. Curiosity. Cat dying. May as well. It’s a vacuum here. Something’s wrong, something’s missing that I couldn’t feel missing in fast-mo but I don’t understand what. The stuff around me, the people and everything feel … somehow flat, void of an essential ingredient that would give it multidimensionality.

“Ry—” I can’t get his name out.

I hear him yelling, but I can’t understand the words and it sounds weird. Like he’s talking muffled into a pillow.

I try to skinny off my jeans. Need them off. They’re cold, so cold. Have to get everything off. It’s so cold it’s burning my skin. He’s fighting me, trying to keep them on me. Get out of my way, I try to say but nothing comes out. I need them off. If I can get them off I might be okay.

And all I can think is—

Help me! I scream inside my head.

My heart is going. It summons up the energy for one last violent feck-you pump but only manages a soft squish.

I can’t die like this. I have things to do. My adventure has hardly begun. Everything goes black. I see Death. Ain’t so fascinating. It’s a sledgehammer.

Aw, shit. I know what rigor mortis is. I know my face is going to stick. I’m choosing how.

I belly up a laugh from way down deep where I’m always half laughing anyway because being alive — dude! — it’s the greatest adventure in the world. What a ride it’s been. Short but stupendous. Ain’t nobody can say Dani Mega O’Malley didn’t live while she was here.

No regrets!

Dani out.