Iced

Thirty-Five

Like we’re chained together or something, Ryodan and me stop about three-quarters of the way down the block. We go just far enough to escape danger, while staying close enough to get a look back at Chester’s.

By the time we glance back, it’s too late. The temperature where we’re standing just plummeted a good thirty degrees. The Hoar Frost King is vanishing into a slit in the air just above the street about a hundred yards away. The fog sucks in, the dark blob glides into a portal, the slit vanishes and noise returns to the world.

Sort of. Jo’s crying but it sounds like she’s doing it in a paper bag beneath a pile of blankets.

One day, in the field near the abbey, a cow head-butted me in the stomach because I freeze-framed into her and woke her up, startling her. I feel exactly the same way now: I can’t get a breath into my lungs. I keep trying to inflate them but they stay flat as pancakes glued together. When I finally do manage to breathe, it’s with a great sucking wheeze that sounds hollow and wrong and it’s so cold it burns going down.

I stare bleakly down the street.

They’re all dead.

Every last one of them is dead.

Chester’s topside is a sculpture of frozen statues shrouded in ice and silence.

“Feck, no!” I explode and wail all at the same time.

Where, moments ago, people were talking and singing, worrying and planning, living, for feck’s sake, living, not a spark of life remains. Every man, woman, and child we were standing in the middle of is dead.

The human race is down by another few hundred.

Hoar Frost King: 25. Human Race: 0.

Dublin’s going to be a fecking ghost town if this keeps up.

I stare. White bumps and knobs and pillars, folks are coated with hoar frost then glazed with a thick shiny layer of ice. Icicles hang from their hands and elbows. Breaths are frozen plumes of frosted crystals on the air. The cold the scene radiates is painful, even from here, like part of Dublin just got dunked into outer space. Kids are frozen, huddled around the fire cans, warming their hands above them. Adults are frozen, arms around each other, some swaying, some clapping. It’s eerily silent, too silent. Like the whole scene is heavily baffled and all noise is being absorbed.

Beside me, Jo is crying soft and pretty. It’s the only noise in the night, heck, it sounds like it’s the only noise in the whole world! Figures she even cries like a dainty cat. Me, I blubber like a snot-nosed hound with big wet, gulping sounds, not tiny sighs and mews. I stand in silence, shaking, gritting my teeth and fisting my hands, to keep from blubbering.

I retreat like I do when things are too much for me to deal with. I pretend they aren’t people under all that milky frost and ice. I refuse to let what happened touch me because grief isn’t going to save Dublin. I pretend they’re puzzle pieces. Nothing but evidence. They’re the way to keep it from happening again, if I can interpret the clues they left. Later, they’ll be folks to me again, and I’ll make some kind of memorial here.

They just wanted to get warm.

“You should have let them inside,” I say.

“Speculate why it came to this spot at this moment.” Ryodan says.

“Speculate, my ass. Dude, you’re colder than they are! And ain’t that the million-dollar question?” I can’t look at him. If he’d let them inside, they wouldn’t be dead. If I hadn’t stood there arguing about stupid stuff and spent more time talking him into letting them inside, they wouldn’t be dead. I shiver and button the top button of my coat, right up under my neck, and scrub frost from the tip off my nose. “Do our voices sound wrong to you?”

“Everything sounds wrong. This whole street feels wrong.”

“That’s because it is wrong,” Dancer says behind me. “Massively wrong.”

I turn. “Dancer!”

He gives me a faint smile but it doesn’t light up his face like usual. He looks tired, pale, and there are dark circles under his eyes. “Mega. Good to see you. I thought you were coming back.” He looks at Ryodan then me with a quizzical expression.

I slice my head once to the side and shrug. Last thing I want him to do is bring up that I told him Ryodan was dead. He reads me well, like always. Later we’ll chew over how the heck Ryodan survived a gutting. “I was coming back—”

“No, you weren’t,” Ryodan says. “You live at Chester’s now.”

“Do not.”

“I had to go to somewhere,” Dancer says, “and thought maybe you came looking for me but missed the note I left.”

I try to flash him a grin that says how happy I am to see him but it comes out wobbly.

“Me, too, Mega.”

I do grin then, because we’re always on the same wavelength.

“She lives with me,” Christian says from somewhere above us. “I’m the only one that can take care of her.”

I look up but don’t spot him. “I take care of myself. I ain’t living with nobody. Got my own digs. What are you doing up there?”

“Tracking the Hag. Trying to devise a way to trap her. She’s fast but she’s not a sifter.”

I jerk, and look around warily. That’s all we need right now. “Is she here?”

“If you brought that crazy bitch near me again.” Ryodan doesn’t finish his sentence. He doesn’t need to.

“I left her south of the city. Knitting. She’ll be busy awhile.”

There’s a sudden, flat whoosh of air and it instinctively makes me duck, hare to a hawk. I think the noise made by the winged fliers of the Wild Hunt is branded into a sidhe-seer’s subconscious. I’m dusted with black snow. “Christian, you got your wings!” They’re huge. They’re incredible. He can fly. I’m so jealous I almost can’t stand it.

He cocks his head and looks at me. I don’t see anything human left in his face at all. “Don’t say it like it’s a wonderful fucking life. You didn’t hear any bells tinkling. What you heard was the sound of a demon, not an angel, recently born. And like any other newborn, it needs colostrum.” He gives me a look that I think is supposed to be a smile. “Och, and you, sweet lass, are mother’s milk.”

All the sudden he looks like the most gorgeous, hunky dude I’ve ever seen, and I blink. He’s standing there, nearly six and a half feet of black-haired, bronze-skinned Unseelie prince with gigantic wings, terrifying iridescent eyes, and brilliant tattoos moving like a storm beneath his skin, but I’m seeing a good-looking Highlander. Sort of. This is new. This isn’t a blast of his death-by-sex Fae nature. This is a controlled …

“You’re throwing a glamour!” He hits me with a blast of eroticism that almost buckles my knees. He’s learning control, fast. Way too fast for my comfort. I reach for my sword. “Off it!”

“For you. Today. Not always. And remember who gave you that back, lass.”

“Touch her, I’ll cut off your wings and use them to sweep the floor at Chester’s,” Ryodan says.

“Oh, I’ll touch her. And when I do, you won’t be able to do a bloody thing to stop me,” Christian says.

“Nobody’s going to be touching me,” I say. “Unless I say so. I’m not public property.”

“What is wrong with all of you?” Jo says. “People just got murdered in front of us and you’re all too busy arguing to—”

“Humans,” Christian cuts in. “Waste of space anyway.” He looks at Ryodan. “You’re alive. Pity. I was hoping the Hag did you in for good.”

“Not a chance.”

“You should have let them in,” Jo says to Ryodan. “Then they wouldn’t all be dead.”

“Don’t tell me what to do,” Ryodan says, soft.

“She’s right,” I say. “You should have let them in.” The flash of hurt in Jo’s eyes makes me mad. “And don’t you snap at her.”

“Right, dickhead,” Christian says. “You should have let them in.” When I give him a look, he shrugs. “Being supportive, lass. Part of a healthy relationship.”

I roll my eyes. “We’re not having a relationship and I don’t need your support.”

“If I’d let them in, the thing might have come inside after whatever it was that drew it to them in the first place, and iced the whole fucking club,” Ryodan says.

He has a point but I’m not about to admit it. “Don’t you snap at her,” I say again. “You be nice to Jo.”

“I can take care of myself, Dani,” Jo says.

“Difficult though you all might find it to believe,” Dancer says, “we’ve got bigger problems than your egos. Listen up. We need to talk. Let’s go inside. It’s bloody cold out here.”

Ryodan looks at him hard a sec and I can tell by the look on his face he doesn’t like what he’s seeing with his weird X-ray vision. “Whatever you have to say can be said here. Now.”

“You’re such an asshole,” Dancer says. “Periodically I suffer the brief delusion you might wise up. Brief.”

Jo and Christian look at Dancer like they think he must have a death wish. I snicker but keep it under my breath. Ryodan looks majorly pissed and I’m in no mood to be noodled over a shoulder. I want to hear what Dancer has to say because for him to hunt me down, it’s important. I look back at the iced scene and sober in a hurry. All those folks dead make me feel sick to my stomach. They died in a second, for no reason. Death is bad enough. Dying for nothing adds insult to injury.

I look at the ice sculpture. This evidence is as fresh as it’s ever going to be. The morning all those Unseelie got iced at Dublin Castle, I didn’t get to examine the scene. I want to get as close as I can today, without freeze-framing because that night in the church when I got bumped down into slow-mo and almost died, it seemed I could feel things better.

I move down the street, knowing they’ll follow: Dancer because he wants to tell me stuff; Jo because she’s … well, Jo; Ryodan and Christian because they got some kind of ownership issues with me like I’m a supercar they got the title to. They’re so deluded it’s laughable.

I open my sidhe-seer senses. I’m nearly suffocated by a feeling of … wrongness. Like the stuff that got iced is missing some essential ingredient, like they’re no longer three-dimensional, just cardboard cutouts stood up in the street.

“Talk, kid,” Ryodan says to Dancer.

I know Ryodan irritates him because he makes it clear he’s talking to me. “After you left, Mega, I sat there for hours, staring. I knew I was missing something. I wasn’t looking at things right. I started thinking about how I came to Dublin last fall to check out Trinity and see what I thought of their Physics Department. I wanted to know if I liked their professors and labs, if they had good enough equipment for the kind of research I planned to specialize in. Not that any of that’s relevant anymore. It’s just a hobby now. I never got around to checking the place out because two days after I arrived, the walls fell and going to college became a moot point.”

“For fuck’s sake, do you think I care who you are,” Ryodan says.

“Dude’s as bad as you say, Mega,” Dancer says.

I stop about fifty feet from the frozen folks and look around. Jo and Dancer stopped about ten feet back and are shivering miserably. Ryodan and Christian flank me. I’m pretty sure Ryodan could go farther than any of us but he doesn’t. When I exhale, my breath frosts in a suspended plume. My bones hurt with cold and my lungs burn. I can’t make it another step without freeze-framing. I shiver, taking it all in. What element is present at this scene that was also present at every other scene that got iced? The answer is right here, staring me in the face, if I can peel my preconception-blinders back and see it.

There’s wood, plastic, metal, and dirt everywhere. But I know it’s not that simple.

There are no mirrors. No tapestries. No walls. No carpet. No real furnishings of any kind. No Unseelie. Pretty simple scene, really. Folks huddled around fire cans to keep warm. Was there fire at the other scenes? Like the ugly Gray Woman that’s drawn by the one thing she was created without — beauty — is the Ice Monster drawn to the warmth it can never have? “So you finally went and checked the college out?” I say.

“Yep. I went to their optical analysis lab. Place is a dream. I wanted to know what was happening to the stuff that got iced on a molecular level. Why it was still cold. Why it felt wrong.”

I consider and discard the fire theory swiftly. Off the top of my head I can think of five scenes with no fire present. I dredge my memories, find the file where I put the reconstructed images of the scenes and slap them up on an imaginary screen inside my head. I flash through them as I listen, back and forth, breaking them down, analyzing. “What did you find?”

“Trinity was pretty much untouched. Seems people don’t pilfer things that don’t address immediate needs. I padlocked everything I wanted for myself before I left. They have ultrafast Femtosecond laser systems! The setup is sweet. Pretty much everything I ever wanted to play with is there. Dude, they’ve got an FT-IR connected to a Nicolet Continuum Infrared Microscope!”

“Dude,” I say appreciatively, though I have no idea what he just said. I look beyond my mental screen at the scene in front of me again, wondering if these folks saw it coming, too, like a lot of the others did. They must have. Beneath the ice their mouths are open, faces contorted. They were screaming at the end. Soundlessly but screaming all the same.

“With enough generators running, there’s no kind of spectroscopy I couldn’t perform,” Dancer says happily.

“What the hell is spectroscopy?” Christian says.

“The study of the interaction of matter and radiated energy,” Dancer says. “I wanted to excite molecules so I could study them.”

“How … exciting,” Ryodan says.

“I prefer to excite women,” Christian says.

“It excites the feck out of me,” I say. “Don’t make fun of Dancer. He can think circles around you. He could probably figure how to excite your molecules and short them out.”

“Excitation,” Dancer says, “can be accomplished by a number of means. I was specifically interested in temperature and velocity, curious about the kinetic energy of our ziplock detritus. I thought the base state of the atoms might tell me something.”

Got to love a dude that says things like “kinetic” and “detritus.”

“What’s kinetic energy?” Jo says.

“Everything vibrates, all the time. Nothing is motionless. Atoms and ions are constantly deviating from their equilibrium position,” Dancer explains. “Kinetic energy is the energy an object possesses due to its motion.”

“Sound is a type of kinetic energy,” I say. I’ve often wondered about the properties of my ability to freeze-frame, why I can use energy the way I can, where I get it from, how my body manufactures it but another person’s doesn’t. I’m fascinated by the different types of energy, what they can do, how everything around us is constantly in motion on some minuscule level. “When a guitar is strummed, molecules are disturbed and vibrate at whatever frequency they’ll vibrate at under those circumstances. Their kinetic energy creates sound.”

“Exactly,” Dancer says. “Another example of kinetic energy is when you crack a whip in one of several specific modes of motion, the sound it makes is because a portion of the whip is moving faster than the speed of sound, and it creates a small sonic boom.”

“I didn’t know that.” Now I’m jealous of a whip. The speed of sound is over seven hundred miles per hour! I don’t make sonic booms. I want a whip. I like the idea of walking around making sonic booms everywhere. I can’t believe he never told me this before.

“This better be going somewhere,” Ryodan says.

“It is,” I say. “Dancer doesn’t waste time.”

“He’s wasting mine.”

Something’s gnawing at the edge of my brain. I’m relieved to realize these folks died quickly and without suffering, because I just calculated the most likely trajectory of the Hoar Frost King’s path, from where I saw it disappear, and I was wrong about my first assumption. There’s no way these folks saw it coming. None of them were facing the direction it came from. They died instantly, with no awareness of what killed them. I’m relieved. Unlike me, most folks don’t seem to want to live their death in slow-mo. Mom always used to say she hoped she’d die in her sleep, easy and without pain. She didn’t.

“You’re never going to believe what I discovered,” Dancer says. “I was staring straight at the results and still refused to accept it. I kept checking, running different tests, testing different objects. I went back and grabbed more ziplocks and tested that stuff, too. The results were the same over and over. You know what absolute zero is, right, Mega?”

“Like, where the feck I’m standing?” I say, but I don’t mean it, because if it was, I wouldn’t standing here. I’d be dead. I frown, studying the scene, trying to make sense of something. If they didn’t see it coming, why were they screaming? Did they feel the same suffocating panic I felt at Dublin Castle before it arrived?

“Isn’t absolute zero theoretical?” Christian says.

“Technically, yes, because all energy can never be removed. Ground state energy still exists, although laser cooling has managed to produce temperatures less than a billionth of a Kelvin.”

“Again, what the hell is your point?” Ryodan says. “Are you saying these scenes are being cooled to absolute zero?”

“No. The only reason I brought that up was to illustrate the connection between extreme cold and molecular activity, and the fact that even at the most extreme cold possible, all objects still have energy of some type.”

“And?” Jo says.

“On a molecular level, the debris left by the Hoar Frost King has absolutely no energy. None.”

“That’s impossible!” I say.

“I know. I ran the tests over and over. I tested multiple samples from every scene. I went to Dublin Castle, dug pieces of Unseelie from the snow and tested them, too,” he says. “They’re inert, Mega. No energy. No vibrations. Nothing. They’re motionless. Deader than dead. The things I was testing can’t exist, yet there I was holding them in my hands! Physics as I know it is being reinvented. We’re standing in the doorway of a new world.”

“So, you think it’s drawn by energy, and eats it? Like fuel, maybe it uses it so it can move through dimensions?” Jo says.

Dancer shakes his head. “I don’t think it’s that simple. Most of the scenes it iced didn’t have an impressive stockpile of energy. If it was after energy, there are an infinite number of richer places to fuel up. I speculate the absence of energy when it vanishes is a secondary and perhaps a completely unintended effect of whatever it’s doing, tangential to its primary purpose.”

I got the same impression with my sidhe-seer senses at Dublin Castle, that it wasn’t malevolent or intentionally destructive. I sensed it was enormously intelligent and hunting for something.

“What is its primary purpose?” Ryodan says.

Dancer shrugs. “Wish I knew. I haven’t been able to figure that out. Yet. I’m working on it.”

“Well, what are we supposed to do?” Jo says, looking around. “There has to be something!”

“Stand around, hoping the bloody thing decides to appear while we’re looking, then hit it with whatever we’ve got handy in the two seconds it’s actually here in our world?” Christian says disgustedly. “At least I know what the Crimson Hag wants. Guts, preferably immortal ones.” He gives Ryodan a look. “And I know what to use for bait.”

“So do I,” Ryodan says.

“What are you talking about?” Jo says, looking between Christian and Ryodan. “What’s the Crimson Hag?”

I realize she hasn’t seen my Dani Daily. Nor does she know Ryodan was ever dead. She has no clue her “boyfriend” is immortal. I decide to save that bombshell for the perfect moment. I also decide I’m going to be spending a lot of time with Christian and Ryodan, hoping the Hag comes after them. I let her loose. I’m the one that has to send her back to hell.

Ryodan says to Dancer, “Work faster. Get back in your lab and find me an answer. Dublin’s turning into Siberia and the thing just deposited a pile of frozen shit on top of my club.”

“At least it didn’t ice the door,” I say. “ ’Cause then we couldn’t get back in.”

Ryodan gives me a look that says he knows I know the back way in.

“Try a flamethrower,” Christian says. “Does the trick. Till everything blows.”

“Speaking of which, any ideas what makes the scenes blow up?” I ask Dancer.

“I think it creates a kind of energy vacuum where things get unstable. Like I said, physics aren’t working right. It’s possible objects reduced to no energy are brittle, and when disturbed by vibrations of objects around them, they explode. The lack of energy may also be the lack of ‘glue’ necessary to hold matter together. Except in these cases, they’re shellacked in ice. Once that shell is compromised, everything comes apart. The larger the disturbance of molecules surrounding the scene, the more violent the explosion. You freeze-framing in to study the scene would generate a significant vibrational disturbance.”

Sometimes I miss the most obvious things. How many scenes exploded when Ryodan and me were fast-mo-ing through them and I never put two and two together? I ponder what Dancer just told me, crunch it with a few other facts, mix it all up good to see what I get.

The Hoar Frost King leaves no energy behind when he vanishes. It’s stripped from everything he ices.

R’jan said that when the HFK iced places in Seelie, the Fae weren’t just killed, they were erased like they’d never been.

Both times I saw the HFK appear, all sound vanished. None of us could hear a thing. Dancer confirmed a third case of similar silence and hollow-sounding aftereffects at the WeCare event he witnessed.

Why would sound vanish? Because everything stopped vibrating the instant the HFK appeared? Why would things stop vibrating? Because it was sucking energy? What exactly is the HFK doing? What attracts it to where it’s being attracted? What is the fecking commonality? Until we figure it out, we have no hope of stopping it. We’re sitting ducks.

I examine the icy tableau before me. I need answers and I need them now. Before I went into the White Mansion I might have had a little time to play with, but since I’ve been gone, things in my city have gotten critical. There’s too much snow and the cold’s getting too extreme, and if the HFK doesn’t kill folks, cold alone will.

How many hundreds, even thousands more people will die before we figure out how to stop it? What if it goes to the abbey next? What if it takes Jo from me? What if everybody’s generators run out of gas and they all die holed up, alone?

I sigh and close my eyes.

I shiver. What I need to see is right here in front of me. I can feel it. I’m just not looking with the right eyes, the clear eyes that suffer no conflicts. I need a brain like mine and eyes like Ryodan’s.

I focus on the backs of my lids, take the grayness of them and cocoon it around me. I make a bland womb where I can begin the process of erasing myself, detaching from the world; the one where I exist and I’m part of reality and everything I see is colored by my thoughts and feelings.

I strip away all that I know about myself, all that I am, and sink into a quiet cavern in my head where there is no corporeality, no pain.

In that shadowy cave, I don’t wear a long black leather coat, or skull-and-crossbones panties, or crack jokes. I don’t love being a superhero. I don’t think Dancer is hot and I’m not a virgin, because I don’t really even exist.

In that cave, I was never born. I won’t die.

All things are distilled to their essence.

I go inside my head and become that other me, the one I don’t tell anybody about.

The observer.

She can’t feel hunger in her belly or cramped muscles from being in a cage for days on end. She isn’t Dani. She can survive anything. Feel nothing. See what’s in front of her for exactly and only what it is. Her heart doesn’t break a little every time her mom leaves, and she holds no price too high for survival.

I don’t let go of myself and seek her often because once I got stuck there and she took over and the things she did …

I live in terror that one day I won’t get to be Dani again.

But, fecking-A, she’s one smart cookie! Tough, too. She sees everything. It’s hard to see like she does. Makes me feel like a freak. She thinks I’m a wuss. But she never refuses me when I come.

I open her eyes and study the scene. She’s a receiver. Things go in and come out. She processes. No ego or id. Nothing but a puzzle here, and all puzzles can be solved, all codes decoded, all prisons escaped. No price too high for success. There is an end and there are means, and all means are justified.

The facts, void of emotion, look completely different.

Folks bang cans. Fist-pump the air. Some clap. Others warm themselves. I pick and discard. I strip to bare essence.

Their bodies are bent and moving in ways that suggest intended, even relaxed motion, not the instinctual, tense muscular and skeletal flexion of panic. Everyone whose mouth is frozen open appears to be making an elongated E. Their eyes are nearly closed and the cords are tight in their necks.

I couldn’t see it, but she can.

It’s right there, in front of us. It was there the whole time. She thinks it’s obvious and I’m stupid. I think she’s a sociopathic nut job.

I have my answer but can’t rejoice in it because she doesn’t feel. I close my eyes to detach but she won’t let me. She wants to stay. She thinks she’s better equipped than me. I try to leave the cave but she hides all the doors. I visualize brilliant lights in it, like those on top of BB&B. She turns them off.

I open her eyes because I can’t stand the darkness.

Ryodan is staring at me, hard. “Dani,” he says. “Are you okay?”

He uses a whole, unadulterated question mark, a bona-fecking-fide interrogatory that rises just like a normal person, and that simple thing penetrates. It surprises me the things that rattle her. It loosens her hold on me and I slip free. I guess my sense of humor is more Dani, not her, than anything else about us because when he cracks me up, just like that, she’s gone. For a few fleeting seconds I know I’m going to forget her again. I think she makes me forget her and I won’t remember until I need her or I get pushed too far.

Then I don’t even know that anymore.

I replay all my filed scenes, looking for — and finding — that single commonality it took me so long to see. It was right in front of me all this time but I couldn’t drop my preconceptions. I saw what I expected to see and that wasn’t what it was at all. “Holy frozen frequencies, Dancer,” I say softly. “It’s drinking sound Slurpees!”

“What?” Dancer says.

None of them were screaming. All the folks I thought were yelling in fear and horror at the end were singing.

The music changes beneath my feet. A heavy metal song just came on in Chester’s and the vibrations increase in tempo and intensity. I feel the blood drain from my face.

If I’m right …

And I am right.

There are thousands of people below us, in Chester’s, and although I’m not real impressed with their choice of a lifestyle, the race we’re in now needs all the humans we’ve got left.

“We’ve got to turn it off!” I say. “We’ve got to turn everything off right now! Dude, we’ve got to shut Chester’s down!”