Iced

Twenty-Eight

A good leader knows her world.

I know nothing of my world.

Well, that’s not entirely true.

I know that 152 paces beyond where I stand looking out of Rowena’s dressing room window there is a serene arbor of shaped topiary with a tiled pavilion, stone benches, and a reflecting pool that centuries-dead Grand Mistress Deborah Siobhan O’Connor built for meditation in times of turmoil. Far enough from the abbey to grant privacy, near enough to be used often, the silvery pool was long ago usurped by fat frogs on lily pads, and on a gentle summer night, in my old room three floors above Rowena’s and two to the south, they charmed me to sleep with their lazy baritone ah-uuups for many years.

I know also that there are 437 rooms in the abbey, in common-knowledge use. I know of an additional twenty-three on the main floor alone, with more on the other three, and undoubtedly countless more of which I know nothing at all. The rambling fortress is a hive of concealed passageways and hidden panels, stones and floorboards and fireplaces that move, if you’ve the secret to their operation. Then there is the Underneath. That is how I have always seen the abbey: the Upstairs proper where sunshine glitters on windowpanes and we bake and clean and are normal women, and the Underneath where a dark city twists and turns, with passageways and catacombs and vaults, and the sweet Lord only knows what all. There, those of us in the Haven become something else sometimes, something ancient in our blood.

I know that a quarter of a mile behind the abbey is a barn with 282 stalls where cows and horses and pigs were once penned. I know a brisk walk beyond it is a dairy that housed forty-odd milk cows, with a chilled larder where we made butter and cream. I know that there are seventeen rows of five beds making eighty-five tiered vegetable garden beds behind the dairy that once grew enough to sustain the abbey’s thousands of occupants plus more to sell in the village for a tidy sum.

All these things I know belonged to a different world.

The world I live in is no longer a world I know.

It is four-thirty in the morning. I pull my wrapper more closely around me and stare out the window at gnarled oaks casting long shadows, and moonbeams crisscrossing the lawn through latticed branches. My comforting view of the familiar shaped topiary is blocked by one of those dangerous aberrations of physics Mac calls Interdimensional Fairy Potholes; IFPs for short, an expedient abbreviation. This one has the funnel shape of a crystalline tornado and shines milky-lilac, its dull, faceted exterior reflecting the moonlight. In the light of day those pellucid facets are difficult to distinguish from the surrounding countryside, compounded by their extreme variations in shape, texture, and size. I have seen IFPs larger than our back field and smaller than my hand. This one is taller than a four-story building and as wide.

When first she told me her name for them, I laughed. That was back when my family had recently been killed and I was drunk on freedom. For the first time in my life, when everyone around me felt anxious about the many new monsters on the loose, I felt gloriously, deliriously safe. My monsters were gone. They’d been trying to pry me from the abbey again, my mother evidencing a triumphant gleam in her eye at Sunday-supper-last, and I was certain she and Father had finally struck upon something Rowena wanted badly enough to give me up. For years, the diminutive Grand Mistress had commanded my blind devotion merely for standing bulwark between them and me.

IFPs are no longer a laughing matter. They never were. This one was discovered a week ago, heading straight for our abbey. We wasted days tracking its progress, trying to devise ways to divert it. Nothing worked. It is not as if an IFP can be blown off course with a giant fan. I am the leader of this enclave, yet I’m unable to do something so simple as protect it from being swallowed up by a fractured piece of Faery! The IFP is not even a sentient enemy. It is merely an accident of circumstance.

Then there are the sentient enemies I have to worry about. The thinking, coveting ones whose Upstairs never matches their Underneath, who are no doubt even now talking about the repository of endless knowledge and power the world now knows we have locked beneath our fortress, guarded by a snortingly inept 289 women ranging in age from seven all the way up to Tanty Anna, at one hundred and two.

These are my charges. Trusted to my care.

I see no end for them that does not involve their hapless slaughter!

I need more sidhe-seers. I need to strengthen our numbers.

Last night I gathered my girls around the IFP when it was a mere mile from the abbey. We’d plotted its course with ninety-nine percent certainty: it would enter our home. The only questions were how much of the south chapel next to Rowena’s chambers would it instantly engulf, and would it raze every square inch of our abbey or leave the occasional pile of rubble, perhaps a glowing, red-hot wall standing here and there?

Given its rate of locomotion, it would take nearly an hour for it to complete its passage from end to end. We were able to plot the time and trajectory of its destruction so accurately because it had already left hundreds of miles of fine, sooty ash in its wake. Dirt fields were emblazoned with deep ruts of scorched earth. Large buildings were reduced to small mountains of postapocalyptic embers.

A drifting crematorium, the IFP on a crash course with our abbey contained a fire-world fragment, a roaring inferno capable of instantly reducing concrete to cinders. Were it to enter our walls, it would leave us homeless. To say nothing of what such heat might do to a certain ice cube beneath our fortress.

We tried to spell it, divert it, destroy it, bind it into place. I’d spent the entire day scouring old books Rowena kept in her bedchamber library, although I was fairly certain it was useless. I have yet to find her real “library.” This is another thing I know, because I saw her carrying books at times of crisis that are nowhere to be found. Yet.

My girls wept at the end. We were hot and tired and soon to be homeless. We’d tried everything we knew.

Then a black Humvee drove up and three of Ryodan’s men got out.

With Margery.

The men bade us retreat to a safe perimeter. Using dark magic that mystified us, they tethered the IFP to the earth a mere twenty yards from our walls, where it has remained stationary since. Where, they assured me, it shall continue to remain stationary for all time.

“But I don’t want it there,” I told them. “What am I to do with it? Can we not move it?”

They looked at me as if I had five heads. “Woman, we saved you from certain destruction and you want to critique how we did it? Use the bloody thing as a trash compactor. Incinerate your dead and enemies. Boss’d love to have something like this near Chester’s. It’s a fire that will never go out.”

“Take it there, then!”

“Only way to get it there is cut the tether. Do that and it goes straight through your abbey. Be glad he hasn’t decided he wants it or this place would be forfeit. Dublin is on the other side of your walls. Keep your door open. Ryodan will be by in a few days to tell you what you owe him.”

After they left, Margery pumped her fist in the air and called for celebration that the danger was averted and we lived to fight another day. My girls rallied around her, jubilant, cheering. I stood jostled and forgotten in the melee.

Ryodan will be by in a few days.

To tell me what I owe him.

For years I have hidden behind these walls, trying to be as unimportant as possible. Unassuming. Overlooked. I was happy to walk the fields, daydreaming of Sean and the future we would have, studying sidhe-seer magic and occasionally guiding the girls with gentle wisdom, praising God for my blessings.

I love this abbey. I love these girls.

I turn and walk past the transparent vision of Cruce, who has been sitting on the divan in my dressing room watching me ever since the bells chimed the witching hour, four and a half hours ago, winged and naked as only he could be. I dab my brow with a handkerchief, blotting the sheen of perspiration that is constant of late. As Sean was unable to come last night, I have not slept in two days. Not to be deterred, Cruce found a waking way to torment me. Fortunately all he is capable of at the moment is a weak transmission of his appearance. He cannot speak or touch me. Or he surely would have. I slide my gaze over him with only the smallest hitch.

I begin to dress.

Last night my first cousin was a better leader than I.

Because I don’t know my world.

The time has come to change that.

The drive to Dublin is long and silent. There are no longer any radio stations to listen to and I don’t carry a phone or iPod.

The day was arduous, with Margery presiding over the abbey as if she were in charge, riding the wave of adulation for her lastminute save, peppering her salted commentary on my many failings with inflammatory phrases calculated to incite the girls and make them feel as if I am restricting them as Rowena did. I watch her and think: Am I to take less than three hundred children, young girls, and aging women to war? Later, I tell her. We must fight smart and hard, not fearlessly.

Smart and hard would have left us homeless, she retorted. Fearless is why the abbey stands today.

On that score she is correct, but here, between us and for the fate of my girls, is a deeper problem. She does not care. In order to gain control, Margery would lead the sidhe-seers to their deaths, because for her, leadership is not about their well-being, only hers. Ironically, her very self-engrossment makes her charismatic where I am not. On my way into the city I ponder the need for charm in my management of the girls. It is clear that a decision looms: I must either abdicate leadership or change in more ways than I am certain I can survive.

I arrive at Chester’s just after ten, stunned to find a line spanning three demolished city blocks. I had no idea so many young people were alive in Dublin or that I might find them lined up as if it were a common Tuesday night, as if this were the new Temple Bar. Do they not know the world is infected and dying? Do they not feel the pounding hooves of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse riding? One has been unhorsed for now, although he smiled seductively at me from my divan before I left. Another is being remade. Soon there will be four again.

I leave my car in an alley and walk to the end of the line, resigned to turning what will inevitably be an all-night wait into a lesson about my new world.

I have barely begun to say hellos to my new companions when a hand closes on my upper arm from behind.

“Ryodan will see you now.”

It is one of his men, tall, muscled, scarred as the rest. He escorts me to the front of the line, over protests and promises, from the flirtatious to the grotesque. As we descend into the club, I raise barriers to shield my empath heart.

Music hammers me, pounding, visceral. Emotions bite deep despite my efforts to deflect them. Such naked hunger, such anguished desire for connection and relevance! But they are going about it the wrong way. I see here the very definition of insanity: attending Chester’s, looking for love. Why not go to the desert, expecting to find water?

They would fare better to loot a hardware store and hope to meet another looter in the process; at least they’d know he was a responsible, capable man intent on rebuilding something. Or pilfer a library! Any man who reads is a fine one. Find a prayer group; they’ve sprung up all over the city.

On the surface, each person we pass seems happier than the next, but I feel it all: pain, insecurity, isolation, and fear. Most of them have no idea how they will survive past this night. Some have lost so many loved ones they no longer care. They live in isolated pockets of abandoned houses and buildings with no televisions and no way to keep up on the threats in the world, which are constantly evolving. Their prime directive is simple: to not sleep alone tonight. These are people who only recently could find out anything they wanted to know at the mere touch of a screen. Now, stripped of their outer hulls, defenses breached, they are adrift and listing badly.

And I cannot help but wonder …

Could I reach them? Could I somehow gather them into a single place and shape them for a purpose? I feel light-headed at the thought. They are not sidhe-seers … but they are young and strong, and impressionable.

A woman dances, her head back in mock ecstasy, smiling, surrounded by men and Unseelie. I get a flash of her heart as we pass and know that she believes a man will never love her unless she always makes him feel good. She has relinquished her right to be a person with needs and desires, and become a receptacle for filling the needs of a lover. If she is bright as a butterfly and sexual as a lioness in mating season, she will be cherished.

“That is not love,” I say as we pass. “That is a bargain. You should charge for it. You should get something in return.”

When I was young, I began ranking people by a number system: one to ten — how broken are they? She is a seven. Her heart could be healed but it would take an intensely committed man and much time. Few are so lucky. Fewer still are soul mates like me and my Sean.

As we ascend to the second floor, I look out over the subclubs and see Jo, dressed as a Catholic, school-age child. I dislike the mockery of my faith and am still uneasy with her decision to work here, but she argued passionately for it, strongly committed to her mission to gather intelligence at the richest source. She has yet to tell me anything that makes me feel subjecting her to this cesspool is worthwhile. I know a thing about people: who and what we surround ourselves with is who and what we become. In the midst of good people, it is easy to be good. In the midst of bad people, it is easy to be bad.

As we top the stairs, I find my eyes drawn back to the subclub where the waiters wear only tight black leather pants and a bow tie, revealing vast expanses of tanned, muscled skin, or in other cases generous bare bosoms. Only the stunning are employed there. I catch my breath. One of the male waiters has a beautiful back, a lovely long-limbed way of moving. I could watch him walk away for hours. I am a woman and I appreciate a fine-backed man. I am relieved because it is not Cruce. He has not so thoroughly perverted me that I no longer find human men attractive.

My escort guides me down a hallway of smooth glass walls to my left and my right, unbroken but by nearly nonexistent seams. The rooms up here are all made of two-way glass. Depending on how the lighting is adjusted in each room, you can either see into it from the outside but not out or out from the inside but not in. I had heard from Dani a description of the upper levels of Chester’s so I knew to expect a see-through glass floor, but expecting it and walking on it are two very different things. People do not like to see what lies beneath. Yet here at Chester’s the owner forces you to view it with every step you take in his demesne. He is a calculating man, and a dangerous one. And so I have come here tonight to determine my debt, pay it, and get it over with.

My escort stops before a seemingly seamless glass wall and places his palm against it. A glass panel whisks aside with a hydraulic hiss. The weight of his palm on my neck guides me into the darkened room.

“Boss’ll be with you in a minute.”

I can see out on all sides, up and down. From Ryodan’s glass aerie, he studies his world by naked eye and camera. The perimeter of the room, at the ceiling, is lined with hundreds of small monitors, three rows deep. I scan them. There are cameras focused on every room, from nearly every angle. There are rooms that are sordid beyond my awareness of such activities. This is the world I must learn if I am to lead my girls.

The door hisses open behind me and I say nothing, wait for him to speak. When he does not, I expand my empath gift to get a feel for him. There is no one in the room with me. I realize someone must have opened the door, seen me, not him, and walked on. I continue with my observations of the screens, turning slowly as I absorb the faces, the actions, the offerings. I must learn people as I have never learned them before.

The hand on my shoulder draws from me a small, involuntary scream.

I whirl, frightened, and I’m against Ryodan’s chest, with his arms gently around me. I would speak but I know I would only stammer. There was no one in this room with me. I did not hear the door open again. How, then, is he in the room?

“Easy, Katarina. I did not save you from harm last night to harm you tonight.”

I look into a face that is unreadable. It is said of this man that he wears three expressions and three alone: amused mockery, urbane aloofness, or anger. It is said if you see anger, you are dead.

I open my empath gift.

I am in this room alone.

I can find no words to say. I decide to use the ones I have. “I am in this room alone.”

“Not quite.”

“You don’t exist.”

“Touch me, Katarina. Tell me I don’t exist.” He brushes my cheek with a kiss and I shiver. “Turn your head for me and I’ll kiss you as a woman should be kissed.” He waits, his mouth brushing my cheek, for me to turn ever-so-slightly, part my lips and take his tongue. I shiver again. This man would not kiss me as I like to be kissed but as he does. His way is too hard, demanding, dangerous. His way is not love. It is passion and it burns. Incinerates. It leaves only embers as surely as the IFP his men tethered at my abbey last eve.

When I pull back, he laughs and drops his loose embrace. I give him a level look. “Thank you for sending your men to tether the fragment of Faery. They spoke of payment. We do not have much. What can our abbey offer in return for such generous aid?”

He smiles faintly. “Ah, so that is how we are to be. You speak eloquently for one who spoke no words at all until she was nearly five.”

I will not be rattled. So, he knows I was without voice for years after I was born. Many know the story. The pain of the world’s emotions overwhelmed me upon birth. I was a terrible baby, an awful infant. I cried incessantly. I never spoke. I curled in a ball and tried to escape the pain of the world. They called me autistic. “Thank you.”

“Until Rowena came and offered your family a deal.”

“I did not come to speak of myself, but of how I may repay you.”

“She would draw you from your autistic shell, but at eighteen years of age you were hers. You would come live at the abbey. Your parents leapt at the opportunity. They despaired of ever silencing your weeping.”

Sometimes, even then, Sean had been there. Sometimes in the delirium of my pain he had curled beside me and said, “Girl, why do you cry?” I remember moments of silence then. He would put his chubby arms around me, and for a short time the pain would go away.

“How would they make a grand alliance with larger and nastier criminals if their only marriageable daughter was defective?” I say dryly.

He laughs. “There you are, behind that eternal serenity. The woman that feels. Funny thing is, I, too, thought I was in this room alone. Until you said that. The dearth of emotion here is not mine alone.” His smile fades and he looks straight into my eyes with a stare so penetrating, direct, and uncomfortable that I feel I am an insect pinned to a board, prepared for dissection. “You owe me nothing further.”

I blink. “But I haven’t paid you yet.”

“You have.”

“No, I haven’t. I’ve given nothing.”

“The price was not required of you.”

I get a chill and almost can’t get my breath. This man is dangerous. Clever. Terrifying to me. “Of whom was it required? I am the one responsible. I am the one who failed. I am the one who should have led them to safety, therefore it should be me and me alone who pays a price!”

“Funny thing about payment is that it isn’t the buyer of the goods or services that gets to set it. It’s the seller. That’s me.” His face is hard and cold now.

“What price did you set?” I school my breath slow and even, waiting for his reply,

He moves to my side, guides me to the glass and directs my attention below. “I have had difficulty staffing lately. My servers keep dying on me.”

The skin of my spine begins to crawl.

“One club in particular is hard to keep staffed. The Tuxedo Club is constantly requiring replacements.”

It is the subclub where the servers dress in tight black leather pants and bow ties, and serve topless.

“Your Sean was good enough to fill in for a time.”

Bile rises in the back of my throat. “My Sean does not belong here.”

“Perhaps. But even you have to admit he looks good in the uniform.”

I look where he’s pointing. The back I admired on my way up the stairs has known my hands on its shoulder blades as he moved inside me. I have tickled it many nights as he drifted to sleep. I have massaged it when he worked the nets overlong. I have kissed each and every muscle and curve. It is, indeed, a beautiful back.

“How long?”

“I haven’t decided.”

“Don’t do this to me.”

“Why.”

“He is …” I stop and sigh. This man would understand nothing of what I would say.

“Go on.”

“Sean is my soul mate.”

“Soul mate.”

He mocks me. He mocks God. “Such things are sacred.”

“To who? Your god may love soul mates but man does not. Such a couple is vulnerable, particularly if they are fool enough to let the world see how shiny and happy they are. Their risk rises tenfold during times of war. There are two courses a couple in such circumstances can chart: go deep into the country and hide as far from humanity as possible, hoping like hell nobody finds them. Because the world will tear them apart.”

He is wrong. He knows nothing of soul mates. Still I cannot help but ask, “The other?”

“Sink up to their necks in the stench and filth and corruption of their war-torn existence—”

“You mean behave like common criminals. Would you prefer us ruthless animals? Why are you doing this?”

“I mean look at it, Katarina. See things for what they are. Drop your blinders and raise the sewer to eye level; admit you’re swimming in shit. If you don’t acknowledge the turd hurtling down the drain toward you, you can’t dodge it. You have to face every challenge together. Because the world will tear you apart.”

“You are manipulative, cynical, and base.”

“Guilty as charged.”

“Life is not as you see it. You don’t know anything about love.”

“I am intimately acquainted with the vagaries of fate in times of war. They’ve been my worst and best centuries.”

“That is not love.”

“I didn’t say it was.” He flashes a smile, white teeth gleaming in shadow. “I prefer war. The colors run more brilliant; food and drink are more rare, and the sweeter for it. People are so much more interesting. More alive.”

“And more dead,” I say sharply. “We lost nearly half the world and you find it ‘interesting’? You are a pig. Barbaric and cruel.” I turn away. I have had enough. If this is his price then I am free to go. There is nothing more I owe him. He has already taken it all.

I move for the door.

“You must tell him, Katarina. If you are to have any hope at all.”

I stop. He cannot know. There is no way that he could know. “Tell who, what?”

“Sean. About Cruce. You must tell him.”

I whirl, hand fluttering to my throat. “What in God’s name are you talking about?”

I search his eyes and I see there that somehow he knows my deepest shame. They hold a secret smile and a certain amused resignation. As if he has watched humanity’s idiocies play out in front of him so many times that they have begun to … not pain but perhaps perturb him. As if he wearies of watching the rats in the maze run into the same walls over and over. I expand my empath gift, I push with all I’ve got, and still I can’t even sense that he is in the room with me. There is nothing where he stands.

“If you don’t tell Sean that Cruce is fucking you while you sleep, it will destroy what you have with him more certainly than any job in my club could. That, down there”—he points to Sean serving a drink to a pretty, nearly naked Seelie—“is a bump in the road, a test of temptation and fidelity. If your Sean loves you, he will pass it with flying colors. Cruce is a test of your fucking soul.”

I don’t bother arguing with him. He knows. Somehow he knows. Perhaps he can read thoughts like I read emotions. It is a terrifying idea. “Why can’t I feel you?”

“Perhaps the lack is not mine. Perhaps it is within you.”

“No.” Of this I am certain. “There’s something wrong with you.”

Again he flashes that smile. “Or something right.”

Perhaps I take the coward’s way. Perhaps I take the honorable path. I cannot decide. My head is a muddle. But I give the Tuxedo Club wide berth and pull up the hood of my cloak. I do not confront my Sean as I leave. If he tells me, we will discuss it. If he does not, we will not. I tell myself I am respecting his boundaries, preserving his dignity. This is where he will be instead of in my bed in coming nights.

The price of saving my abbey is a piece of my heart and the lion’s share of my spine. That is what Ryodan called due.

My Sean will face temptation alone every night at Chester’s, and I will face it alone at the abbey, in my bed.

This is not a world I ever wanted to know.