Iced: A Dani O'Malley Novel (Fever Series) (19 page)

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.