I look up. Blood drips down the side of the building. As the gruesome Hag knits away, she plucks a small bone from the mess of entrails and organs and tucks it into her corset, taking a moment to rearrange her obscenely human-looking breasts. Then she stops abruptly and looks down at me as if she’s suddenly realized there’s more prey in the alley and it’s watching her. After a moment she dismisses me and returns to her stitching, but I feel … marked somehow. Like she filed me away in her Unseelie-insect brain.
“How do I kill her? Will my sword work?”
“Might. But you’d never get close enough. Her needles are longer than your sword. She’d have your guts in her dress before you even managed to swing it. ”
“You said she gets obsessed while she’s knitting. ”
“Not that obsessed. ”
The ambience in the back alley changes abruptly and it takes me a minute to figure out why. A light just came on in the back of BB&B and is spilling out the window, across the bloodstained snow.
I know what that means. Mac’s moving around inside, looking for Barrons. I imagine it won’t be long before she looks out back to see if his car’s out there.
If Mac walked out that door and tried to kill me right now, I’m not sure how well I’d fight.
I take one last look at Barrons and Ryodan. I have to make this right somehow. I have to balance the scales and there’s a lot weighing in against me.
“Come near me again and I’ll kill you,” I say, soft like Ryodan used to talk.
I freeze-frame into the night.
THIRTY-TWO
“If I stay lucky then my tongue will stay tied”
I spend the next two days slapping up terse Dani Dailies that describe the Crimson Hag and her M. O. , hunting for Dancer, collecting the rest of the ziplocks I need from the other iced scenes (except for the club beneath Chester’s, which I’m in no hurry to go near), and packing my backpack full of samples. They’re some of the most miserable days of my life. I go up and down like a fecking psychotic elevator being controlled by some fecking psychotic little kid, punching random floor buttons. One second I’m swaggering, the next I’m drooping.
One minute I’m elated because I never have to go to work again. My life is my own. Jo can quit the subclub. She’ll stop wearing sparkly stuff between her boobs and boinking Ryodan. The next minute I remember that if Ryodan’s remaining men learn that I played even one tiny little part in their boss’s death, I’m deader than every doornail in Dublin. On top of that, the Crimson Hag is loose, the Hoar Frost King is still out there, Dublin is slowly turning into Ant-fecking-arctica, Christian and me are on the outs, and now Mac has double the reasons to kill me, assuming she knows.
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I can’t decide if she knows. One minute I think she does, the next I don’t.
The bodies are gone. I went back in the middle of the night to hide them. I should have hidden them right away but I wasn’t thinking clear. Aside from blood in the alley and up the brick wall, no trace of them remained.
At first I thought Mac must have found and taken them somewhere for a proper burial, but then I decided she didn’t, because yesterday I saw her hurrying down the street toward Chester’s, all bundled up and shivering in the cold, and she didn’t look sad. I’ve seen Mac sad. I know what it looks like. She looked a little tense but otherwise normal. She had a trail of ZEWs behind her, chittering away. I wonder if, like crows, the ZEWs are harbingers of death. It worries me they’re following Mac. Her tension is probably because of what’s happening to Dublin. Everybody I’m seeing is tense. And shivering. It’s ten degrees in Dublin during the day, even colder at night. Snow’s been falling, piling up. The city isn’t set up to handle this kind of weather. Lots of folks don’t have power where they’re staying. They won’t survive these conditions long.
I wonder if the Crimson Hag ate Barrons’s and Ryodan’s bodies. Stitched up their entrails then dined on the rest. I’d think she’d have spit up a few bones but maybe she needed them all to spruce up her corset. Then I figured Christian probably went back to tidy up and hide the evidence. Trying to get on my good side again or something.
I wonder where the heck Dancer is! I need his superbrain to help me crunch the facts so I can save my city from turning into an iceberg. So then I can save folks from getting knitted up into a dress.
I got two more places to check for him, then I’m out of places to hunt.
I freeze-frame up O’Connell, yanking WeCare posters off streetlamps as I go. Stupid fecking stupid feckers are trying to take advantage of people not having power, encouraging them to come into prayer meetings, to get warm and “take the white. ” I didn’t know what that meant till I saw a couple folks coming out of one of the churches the WeCare people have designated as their own, wearing long white robes over their clothes.
They were carrying bags of canned goods and smiling. In my experience, anybody besides your mom that feeds you is going to want something in exchange for it.
I whiz up to Dancer’s penthouse, where we like to stretch out in the sun, disarm his booby traps and poke my head in the door, calling for him. The place is silent and empty. I decide to see if he’s got any food in the pantry ’cause I’m starving. When I get there, I crack up. There’s a note taped to a stack of cans sitting smack in the middle of the floor. It’s a cryptogram. It’s how we leave messages for each other.
I pop open can after can of beanie weenies and gorge while I solve the puzzle that tells me where he is.
There’s a lot hidden away in Dublin, just like out at the abbey. When I first started hanging out in the city, I got one of those sightseeing books and visited all the hot spots like any tourist. I was embarrassed to be a stranger in my own town, never having been out of my cage much. I wanted to know everything everybody else knew, see it all with my own eyeballs instead of watching it on TV or reading about it in a book.
I went to Trinity College and toured all the cool stuff there. I never got to go to school so it was neat to see the classrooms and labs and libraries and folks being all social instead of being kept by themselves all the time. I couldn’t wrap my brain around growing up that way. Mom taught me to read. I taught myself the rest.
I hit up the museums, dropped by the brewery, hung out in Temple Bar, visited the catacombs beneath Christ Church Cathedral and St. Michan’s Church, and eventually hunted down the underground rivers. I listened when college kids raved about their favorite places and went there, too. I paid attention when old folks talked on the streets about things that used to be.
That’s how I found Dublin-down. Couple of wrinkly old dudes playing checkers by River Liffey used to work for a mob family and knew some interesting stuff. Beneath a restaurant run by a dude name of Rocky O’Bannion, this big-time mobster that disappeared last year in the craziness of the walls coming down, I found it. A honeycomb of tunnels and hidden crypts beyond a pile of rubble and a series of grated entrances so complex only someone as curious as me or a criminal trying to hide bodies and booty would ever have gone through. Dancer and me mapped out parts but we still got a lot to explore.
That’s where I find him now, in one of the underground catacombs, down a collapsed tunnel (unless you knew how to find the hidden detour) beyond bolted steel doors, hinged into stone, all booby-trapped.
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The room he’s in is long and narrow and made completely of stone, with those old vaulted fornix ceilings, supported by massive columns, like I only ever seen in ancient crypts and the library at the abbey. He’s got lights set up that I figure have to be battery-powered ’cause I don’t hear a generator, and setting one up to vent down here would take a lot of work. He’s standing behind a stone slab that used to hold a corpse but is now covered with notebooks and envelopes, laptops, bottles, beakers, and burners. Yep, this place is Dancer, just missing a TV to watch movies on, a fridge and shower, and knowin
g him, he probably has a hidey-hole rigged up nearby with all the conveniences. Another slab is crammed with bottled water and food. His head is down and he’s working on something, deep in thought.
“Dude, this is fecking awesome!” I say as I step inside.
Dancer looks up and the grin he gives me is blinding. His whole body changes, like he was strung up on wires hanging him from the ceiling and they just got cut. His shoulders ride lower, his limbs slide smoother, the hard planes of his face relax into the Dancer I know. “Mega!” he says. Then he says it again, “Mega!”
“That’s my name, dude. Don’t wear it out. ” I swagger into the chamber and see he’s been collecting things from the scenes, too. Behind him is the pièce de résistance: a mystery board! He blew up maps and pieced together an enormous topographical survey of Dublin and the outlying areas and has pins and notes plastered all over it. I beam. I couldn’t have done better myself. “This place is the Shit,” I say.
“Thought you’d like it. ” He picks his glasses up off the slab, pushes them back on his nose and grins at me. His eyes are red like he’s been studying too long. He’s tall and lanky and pretty much perfect. I grin back and we just grin at each other for a few seconds, ’cause we’re so happy to see each other again. It’s a big city. Sometimes I feel alone in it. Then I see Dancer.
I toss my backpack on a nearby folding table and pull out my ziplocks and photos to add to his board. He comes over and we sort through them in happy silence, brushing shoulders and grinning at each other. He keeps looking at me like he can’t exactly believe I’m there. Dude’s acting like he really missed me. We’re always glad to see each other, but something’s different today.
I go to start pinning my photos of the scenes on the board, and I look back at him, ’cause something don’t make sense to me, besides how strange he’s acting. “There ain’t this many iced places in Dublin!” I gesture at the pins on the board.
“There weren’t a few weeks ago. It’s been escalating. ”
“Dude, there were only ten. You got, like, twenty-five pins on this board! You telling me fifteen more places got iced in the past few days?”
“Mega, the last time I saw you was nearly a month ago. The day we tried to get your sword back from Jayne. ”
I gape. “That wasn’t a month ago. That was a couple days ago!”
“Nope. I haven’t seen you for three weeks, four days, and”—he looks at his watch—“seventeen hours. ”
I let out a low whistle. I knew time moved different in Faery but it didn’t occur to me that the White Mansion was part of Faery. No wonder Ryodan was so pissed at me! I missed work for weeks. I snicker. It must have been driving him crazy. My snicker dies. I forgot for a sec that he was dead. I feel sick all the sudden so I tear open a candy bar and eat it.
“I was worried. ”
I look at him. He’s looking me right in the eyes, more serious than I ever seen him. It makes me uncomfortable. Like I’m supposed to say something and I don’t know what.
I stare back and we just look at each other for a few seconds. I root around in my repertoire and come up with: “Dude, get over yourself. I’m the Mega. You never got to worry about me. I been on my own forever. I like it that way. ” I flash him my trademark grin.
I get a faint smile in return. “Got the message, Mega. Loud and clear. ” He turns around, walks back to the slab. He’s not moving smooth anymore. Some of those wires are back. I don’t like those wires. They look … I don’t know, grown up to me.
“Just saying, don’t worry about me. Stupid to worry about me. I can take care of myself. ”
“Now I’m stupid. ”
“I didn’t say you were stupid. I say it was stupid to worry about me. ”
“And it—the act of worrying—isn’t to be confused with the person doing it. ”
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“Exactly. I’m the Mega, remember? I kick butt all over Dublin!” I don’t know what’s wrong with him. He’s not responding right to anything I’m saying!
“Ability to defend oneself has absolutely no bearing on or relevance to deportment or emotional comportment of others. ”
“Huh?”
“Don’t tell me what I can and can’t feel. If I feel like worrying about you, I buggering well will. ”
“Dude, no need to get snippy. ”
“I’m not snippy. I’m offended. You were gone nearly a month. Between dodging the psychotic jackass that stalks you day and night, analyzing evidence, and trying to save this city, I’ve been haunting every iced scene that pops up. Visiting them two and three times a day. Do you know why?”
“To collect more evidence?”
“I’ve been waiting for them to melt enough that I could see if you were in there. Dead. Never to be talking to me again. ”
I stare at him. We never talk about stuff like this. It reeks of a cage to me. Like there’s one more person I’m supposed to check in with now. Like my life isn’t already owned by too many other folks. “I got my sword back now,” I say stiffly. “I’m not going to get iced. ”
“Invalid. Those two statements have no relevance to each other. None. Zip. Zilch. Nada. The sword won’t protect you from getting iced. I left notes for you in the pantry of every hideout I’ve got and all of yours I could find. Do you know what I heard? Nothing. For almost a month. ”
“Dude, I got the picture. You didn’t like not being able to find me. Too bad you can’t put a leash on me, huh? Maybe stick me in a cage somewhere?” He’s pissing me off. I think we’re having our first ever fight. It makes me feel sick to my stomach.
“Excuse the crap out of me for caring about you. ”
“Dude, what’s wrong with you? This ain’t us. Why are you ruining us?”
“Caring about you is ruining us?”
“Caring is one thing. Trying to lock me up is another. ”
He gives me a look that I just don’t get. Like I’m being obtuse when he’s the one being obtuse. I thought our way of hanging was clear and well-defined. We’re superheroes. He’s not sticking to the script. If he keeps deviating, I’m jumping comic books.
“My mistake. I won’t make it again. ” Just like that, he goes back to being Dancer, all business. “That day at the castle was the first time I got a look at what’s been freezing things. A lot’s happened since then. It freezes a new place just about every day. Ryodan and his men have been tearing this city apart looking for you. He raided half my stoops. I moved down here to get the bloody feck away from him. He’s going to kill you when he finds you. ”
“Not if I kill him first,” I mutter around a mouthful of candy bar, pretending I didn’t already. When you have a secret that folks would kill you for, you sit mum on it. From everyone. ’Course, if I’m learning from my mistakes, I should kill Christian like I didn’t kill those stupid lisping fairies that ate Alina and ratted me out to Mac. I’m a little irked that Dancer’s back to talking about stuff like we never even had our first spat, because it’s a big deal to me. It’s going to take me hours to stop feeling nauseous and confused inside. I eat when I get confused. I stuff another candy bar in my mouth.
“Even Barrons got in on the hunt. So did those abbey girls you sometimes hang with. The city keeps getting colder with each new place that’s iced. People are falling apart. Nobody knows what to do, how to stop it, or even where it’s safe to be anymore. ” He steps back and looks at the map. “So far I haven’t been able to discern the pattern. We’ve got to figure out what it’s looking for. ”
“What do you mean ‘looking for’?” That was exactly the feeling I picked up with my sidhe-seer senses, but Dancer doesn’t have those. I start to feel a little less sick. I don’t know if it’s the candy bars in my stomach or thinking about work.
“Unless it’s behaving in a random, illogical manner driven by absolutely no biological imperative—which I postulate is antithetical for any sentient life fo
rm—it has purpose. ”
I beam, our fight forgotten. Got to love a dude that says stuff like “postulate” and “antithetical”! “I love hanging with you!” I tell him.
He gives me a look that’s vintage Dancer but a little wary, so I turn up the wattage on my grin till he grins back.
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“That purpose may be alien enough,” he goes on, “to elude ready detection, but it’s there. It’s our methods that are lacking. We have to step outside our box and process the facts with no preconceptions. This thing isn’t from our world. It doesn’t follow our rules or any laws of physics. It appears capable of opening a portal wherever it feels like it. I’ve seen it do it twice now. ”
“You saw it again?” I’m so fecking jealous I could spit.
“I’ve been keeping an eye on WeCare, trying to figure who the head honcho is. Nobody seems to know who started the organization up. A few nights ago I went to check out one of their prayer meetings. The church where they were holding it got iced when I was half a block away. One minute they were singing, the next I couldn’t hear a thing. Seemed like the whole world went still or I went deaf. I stood in the street and watched. It did exactly the same thing it did at Dublin Castle. Came out of a portal, fogged everything, iced it, opened another portal, and vanished. ”
I flinch. He was half a block away! What if he’d been, like, one single minute earlier? Then I have a worse thought. What if I hadn’t been able to find him for a month? Would I have been freeze-framing from one ice sculpture to the next, waiting for them to melt, wondering if I’d lost my best friend?
I’m suddenly ashamed. “Dude. Sorry I was gone so long. ”
His head whips up and he gives me a grin that fecking slays me. “Dude. Thanks. Glad you’re back. ”
“I hear you saved my life at the church that night. You’re the Shit. ”
“No, you are. ”
We grin at each other for what feels like an hour of heaven, and just like that everything is okay between us again.
We start yakking our heads off like nothing was ever wrong. He tells me scoop about new gangs forming in the city. I tell him about the Unseelie King’s library. I can’t keep that kind of fascinating stuff to myself. I can tell by how bright his eyes get that he’s dying to see it.