Iced

Twenty

I am not the Sinsar Dubh, Kat. He has tricked all of you. You will need me to save you.

Each night Cruce has taken me into the Dreaming, he has made the same claim. His lies hold the polish and consistency of truth. If my emotional empathy works on Fae — a test I’ve not yet had the opportunity to perform to my satisfaction — I get such conflicting signals from him that my gift is of no avail.

Now, wide-awake after another night of diabolical dreams, I pass through double doors a hundred feet tall, several feet thick, with unfathomable tonnage, but do not afford them a second glance. My eyes are only for him. It does not seem odd to me we cannot close such doors. The oddity is that we were ever able to open them: tiny mortals tampering with chariots of the gods.

I find myself in the position the Meehan twins recently occupied, hands fisted on the glowing bars of Cruce’s cage, staring in at the iced vision.

He is War. Divisiveness. Brutality. Heinous crimes against humanity. As an event on the battlefield, and the personification of it in a cage, he is all that and more. How many humans fell before the murderous hooves of this sly horseman of the apocalypse?

Nearly half the world’s population, by last count.

Cruce brought down the walls between our races. If not for him, it would never have happened. He arranged the players, nudged them where and when necessary, set the game in motion, then galloped about the board in the guise of an avenging angel, agitating here and stirring up there, until World War III began.

I should not be here with him.

Yet I am.

I told myself white lies as I made my way beneath the abbey, deep into our hidden city, picking through a misleading maze of corridors and crypts and dead-end and pigtailing tunnels. I told myself I must ascertain the cage is secure and he is still in it. That I will see him and realize he is but a pale imitation of my dreams; that I will gaze upon him and scoff at the thrall in which his dream-self holds me. That somehow coming down to check on him might set not him — but me — free.

My knees tremble. Desire parches my mouth and thickens my tongue.

There is no freedom for me here.

This close to him, I long to strip where I stand, dance wildly around his cage and keen the notes of an inhuman melody I do not even know how I know. This close to him I must bite my tongue to prevent myself from moaning with need.

This close to him I feel like an animal.

I stare at my hands on the bars, pale and white, with slender fingers clutching the glowing columns, and in my mind’s eye I can only see them wrapped around that part of Cruce that has made of me an adulteress. Curled as they were last night and the night before and the night before. I see the curve of my lips as I smile. I see the soft roundness of my mouth as I take him inside it.

I find my fingers dancing lightly over the pearl buttons of my blouse and snatch them away. I see a shameful vision of my girls discovering their new Grand Mistress cavorting naked around Cruce’s cage. It is erotic. It is horrific.

Freedom terrifies you because you never permit yourself any, Cruce said last night in my dreams. I am not the only one in a cage. The shame you feel is not about me but that you know you stand in a cage, too, and it is of your own making. You have felt the darkest emotions of others since you were a child, you know what monsters crouch inside them, and you confuse your passions with their monsters. They are not the same, my beloved Kat. Not the same at all.

He says I repress passion. That I do not permit myself to feel any of it. He says my love for Sean is a lie. That I seek comfort and safety and do not know what love is. He says I choose Sean because he, too, feels no passion. He says we are not running toward each other in love, but away from things in fear. Set yourself free, he says. Come to me. Choose me.

God help me. I walk in a valley of darkness and I need your light to guide me.

I unwrap my hands and back away. I must never come here again.

I will build a blockade of mental tricks in my mind, as I did when I was young and needed to protect myself from the wild, hurtful emotions of my family.

As I turn away I hear a noise so small I nearly overlook it. I don’t want to turn back. It is nearly impossible for me to force myself to leave this place.

Yet I turn. I am the Grand Mistress here. The cavernous chamber, lit by a skein of torches on the walls, appears empty. There is nothing in it but a stone slab, Cruce’s cage, and me. If I share this chamber with another, they are either behind the slab or on the far side of his cage. Hiding. Quiet. Waiting for me to leave.

Cognizant of my position at the abbey, I avert my gaze from the iced prince and sedately walk the circumference of his cage, head straight, shoulders squared.

I turn the corner. “Margery,” I say. She is directly opposite where, moments ago, I stood. Had she made no sound, I would have left none the wiser.

“Kat.”

Hostility buffets me in hot waves. The emotions of others have temperature and color, and when intense, texture as well.

Margery is red, fevered, and complexly crafted as a honeycomb, with hundreds of tiny deceits and angers and resentments tucked into each small nook. I know a thing about resentment: it is a poison you drink yourself, expecting others to die.

I’ve been classifying emotions into categories all my life. Navigating the hearts of those around me is a minefield. There are people I stand near a single time and skirt forevermore. Margery’s emotions are deeply conflicted, dangerous.

I wonder if I could feel my own, I would also be hot, red, a honeycomb of lies and resentments. But I do not want to lead! my soul is crying.

“I was wondering if we overlooked something about the grid,” she says. “I fear he is not securely contained.”

“As was I. As do I.”

“Great minds.” She offers a tight smile. Her hands clench the bars, white-knuckled.

I do not add the cued “think alike” because she and I do not. She hungers for power. I long for simplicity. I would have made a fine fisherman’s wife, in a cottage by the sea, with five children, cats and dogs. She would make a grand Napoleon.

We assess each other warily.

Does he visit her?

Does he make love to her?

I cannot ask if she is dreaming of him and if that is what has brought her down here on this rainy, cold morning. Whether she is or not, she will claim she is not then tell the entire abbey that I am, that I am being corrupted and must be replaced.

She will use anything against me to take control of the abbey. At the very core of my first cousin Margery Annabelle Bean-McLaughlin is a great, sucking need. It was there when we were children, playing together, and she broke the knees of my dolls and stole small treasures from me. I have never understood it. I observe her white knuckles. She clenches the bars of his cage as if she is squeezing the life from something. “Your thoughts?”

She moistens her lower lip, looks as if she’s about to speak, then stops. I wait and after a moment she says, “What if the King took the book? I mean, took it from Cruce before he iced him.”

“Do you think that’s possible?” I say, as if it’s a perfectly reasonable question. As if I don’t know in that instant we are both being fed the same lies.

She looks at Cruce then back at me. Her eyes are billboards, advertising her emotions. She regards Cruce with tender, private communion. She looks at me as if I could not possibly begin to understand the first thing about her, him, or the world we live in. “You are not gifted,” she hissed at me when we were nine and she heard her parents praising me for saving the family from a traitor in the endless plots and plans and betrayals that were our life. My parents used to take me to “business” meetings with Dublin’s seediest, and watch me carefully to see who made me most uncomfortable. “You are cursed and flawed and no one is ever going to love you!”

All these years later I see the same taunt in her eyes. Oh, yes, he is attending her nightly, too.

I am not only an adulteress, I am a cheap one. I shape that realization into a brick around my heart and slather it with mortar so it is ready for the next brick I can use. It will be in his way when he comes tonight. My Sean will be in bed beside me.

She shrugs. “Perhaps we don’t know what really happened down here that night. What if the king tricked us?”

“Why would he do that?” I say.

“How could I presume to divine his motives?”

I need to know how deep her corruption goes. “Are you thinking perhaps we should free Cruce?”

A hand floats to her chest as if in alarm. “Do you think we should?” A crafty gleam enters her eye. “Do you know how?”

She has always been weaker than me. He is merely a blacker stain in her already corrupt blood.

“I think we need to figure out how to get the grid the Unseelie King created back up and functioning. I think the chamber should be filled with concrete, the grid reactivated, the doors closed, and the entire city beneath our abbey filled with lead.”

I nearly stagger from the crippling fury of her emotional reply, although her lips shape sweetly the lie, “You are right, Katarina. As always, as everyone knows, you are right.”

I offer my hand and she takes it as she did when we were children, lacing our fingers together. When we jumped rope, she would always pull it short. She had strong conflicting emotions about me when she was young that made her hard to read. I chipped four teeth before I stopped thinking the next time she would be different.

We walk from the chamber hand in hand, as if strengthening one another with love instead of keeping the enemy close.