“You don’t see the forest for the trees. ”
“Ain’t no forest. Shades ate it. Let me go. You don’t get to just dangle folks in the air when you feel like it. ”
He drops me so abruptly I stumble on the ice and almost fall, but he catches me and puts me back on my feet. I shake his hand off my arm.
“There doesn’t need to be love,” Jo says. “Sometimes it’s not about that. ”
“Then you shouldn’t be boinking him!”
“It’s my own business who I boink,” Jo says.
“I don’t ‘boink’ anyone. I fuck,” Ryodan says.
“Thank you for that much-needed clarification,” I say with saccharine pissiness. “Hear that, Jo? You get fucked by him. Not even the decency of a boinking. Screwed. Plain and simple. ” I’m beyond irate. I’m seeing through a red haze. The fecking fire-can folks are singing so loud they’re hampering my ability to think straight. I want Dancer. Ryodan drives me insane. Jo’s a hopeless case. Dublin’s dying.
I can’t stand things anymore so I punch Ryodan in the nose.
We all kind of freeze for a second and even I can’t believe I just hauled off and decked Ryodan with no warning and no real provocation. At least no more than he’s always giving me.
Then Ryodan manacles my arm and starts dragging me back toward Chester’s, looking madder than I ever seen him, but Jo gets my other arm, trying to make him stop, yelling at him and yelling at me. I’m slipping and skidding on the ice, trying to get them both off me.
We stumble across snowdrifts, fighting each other, when all the sudden the day gets foggy and I can’t hear a sound any of us are making. My mouth’s moving and nothing’s coming out. I can’t hear the fire-can folks either. I can’t even hear my breath in my ears. Panic compresses my chest.
Me and Ryodan look at each other and have a moment of perfect communion like me and Dancer do sometimes. No words necessary. We’re made of the same stuff. In battle there’s nobody else I’d rather be hanging with. Not even Christian or Dancer.
I grab Ryodan and he grabs me and we sandwich Jo between us.
Then we freeze-frame the hell out of there like the devil is on our heels.
Or more precisely, the Hoar Frost King.
THIRTY-FIVE
“She blinded me with science”
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.
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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!”
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“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.
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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. ”