My jaw locks and I get a muscle cramp in it the size of a walnut. My teeth clamp so hard they hurt.
The Hag isn’t even knitting with them. She didn’t even want them. She just killed and threw them away like trash!
She wants Christian. And it looks like she’s ready to kill every last one of us to get him.
“Get inside!” I shout at the women, trying to herd them back toward the abbey.
Sidhe-seers duck and scatter like a herd of gazelles running from cheetahs. Stupid sheep are supposed to be pack animals and that means, duh, run in a pack!
The Hag swoops and takes two more of my sisters! Blood sprays everywhere and folks are screaming like crazy.
I’m so mad I’m shaking. It’s total chaos. Before, it was just us we had to watch out for. Now the Hag is dive-bombing hundreds of helpless humans and I don’t know who to help first.
Ryodan’s covering Jo, Kat, and a dozen others.
Lor’s protecting a bunch of pretty blondes—figures!
Christian has like fifty women around him. I realize he’s turned on his death-by-sex Fae lure and it’s working like magnet-to-magnets. He’s got a second skin of pretty sidhe-seers. I wonder if he did it on purpose for a shield or if it’s just taking everything he’s got to stay out of her reach and he can’t suppress it. If he did it for a shield, I’ll kill him myself.
How are we going to kill the Hag? None of us can get close enough, past her lethal legs. Not even my sword is any good. I can throw it, but the bitch is faster than a witch on a quidditch broom! Dancer’s idea of trying to snake a cable around her and electrocute her is starting to look like a good one. Too bad we don’t have any cables handy down this end.
“Holy sonic booms!” I exclaim. I may not have a cable but I do have something that’s long and thin, and Indiana Jones sure made good use of it in desperate times.
I yank out my whip, freeze-frame to the outer edge of the crowd for a good shot, and crack it straight up at the Hag!
It flails limply, puddles back down on my head and I get tangled up in it. I can’t even get the stupid thing off me. I swear those black holes in her face regard me with amused contempt. Apparently there’s some skill to cracking a whip and I don’t have time to learn it. It never looked hard on TV.
“Mega!” Dancer yells. I see him in the crowd, jumping up, waving both hands in the air.
I ball it up, knot the cord around the handle for weight, and toss it to him. He catches it, unties it and snaps it at the swooping Hag.
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It explodes within a foot of her lethal left leg and sets off a small sonic boom.
She inhales, a horrific, wet, screeching sound, and rockets straight up into the sky. I don’t know if it’s because she can’t believe something got so close to her leg or if her hearing is so sensitive that the sonar explosion gave her a migraine. Whatever—she doesn’t like it one bit.
When she dives again, Dancer goes for her head this time and sets off a sonic boom right next to her ear.
She reels backward and vanishes upward into purple lights.
Me and Dancer beam at each other.
He cracks the whip triumphantly.
But this time it doesn’t crack. It makes no sound at all. Not even a tiny little hiss as it slices through the air.
Because, like, all sound just disappeared.
Figures that when the fog finally rolls in, every last one of us is on the wrong end of the playing field.
FORTY-TWO
“Try to set the night on fire”
I think the reason I didn’t feel panic preceding the Hoar Frost King’s arrival this time is because I was already feeling too much panic for more panic to penetrate. The Crimson Hag butchering sidhe-seers had me so frantic, I forgot why we were even out in the snow to begin with.
Like, to summon the Hoar Frost King.
And he’s here.
And somebody’s got to cut that fecking tether because if we don’t turn the IFP loose, the Hoar Frost King is going to ice the speakers and vanish and it’ll all have been for nothing! Worse still, if it’s as smart as I think, it won’t fall for the same trick twice. The sentience I feel rolling off it is gigantic. This is no simple-minded Unseelie. I don’t know ’cause I haven’t seen them all yet but it could be the most complex one the King ever made. I wonder if he maybe swirled a dash of himself into its beaker.
What happens next feels like it happens in slow-mo though I know it doesn’t take any time at all.
Ryodan and Lor vanish, fast-mo-ing it to the other end of the field. I look from the sidhe-seers to the slit that’s opening, stymied, trying to figure out how to protect the sidhe-seers and cut the tether at the same time. Do I save the women I care about who are standing right next to me or do I save the world? I may be a superhero but I got everyday Joe feelings.
I see Christian and he’s looking at me hard. He says without making any sound at all, You can’t do both, Dani, my love.
I know that, I mouth pissily.
It’s me she’s after.
Your point?
He vanishes.
I can’t find him anywhere for a sec.
Next thing I see is him standing, just standing there in the middle of the field between me and the other end, with his arms spread wide, head tossed back, wearing a “come and get me” expression.
What are you doing? I scream, but not a peep comes out.
The Crimson Hag swoops.
I jerk violently, like I’m the one that got stuck when she guts him.
She doesn’t flay him, though. She pierces him with one leg like he’s a shish kebob and draws him up toward her skirt. As she folds him into her dripping embrace he gives me a look. I can’t make sense of it. I don’t get it. Why did he do that? I don’t get it! Why would anybody do such a stupid thing!
As he vanishes up into the sky, clutched in her hideous legs, I shut it out. Refuse to process what he did. I can leave the sidhe-seers behind now in relative safety. I’ll think about what he did later.
Assuming there is a later.
I freeze-frame toward the Hoar Frost King. It’s major weird not being able to hear a sound. I’m not feeling any vibrations either. At least deaf people can feel vibrations. This is worse than a sound deprivation chamber, it’s a sensory deprivation world with the HFK in it.
As I get close, I see Lor and Ryodan are pushing toward the black box in what looks like slow-mo. Both of them are covered with thick white ice that keeps cracking when they move. It’s cold like the night I died at the church.
The Hoar Frost King is hovering silently over the mountain of speakers, icing them one by one. It’s lingering longer than usual, I guess all those decibels make the food source richer, and I think maybe it’s licking chocolate off its fingers.
When I freeze-frame in behind Ryodan he turns and roars silently: Get the fuck out of here!
Icy needles spear my lungs with each breath, my heart labors to pump. My head feels heavy and I realize it’s ’cause my hair has iced. I toss it, and the stuff shatters, white crystals rain from my head.
You’re not going to make it in time! I yell back, eyeing the distance between ice monster and IFP. When it opened its slit and glided into our dimension, it appeared in the worst possible place—between the IFP and speakers, not between the speakers and the abbey. Although it didn’t ice the IFP, it’s too fecking cold in the vicinity of the box for us to get there to cut the tether.
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I look at Ryodan. He can survive this cold like I can’t. I don’t know why. Guess it’s something to do with him surviving a gutting, too. He’s always been able to get closer to the iced scenes than me.
But I can freeze-frame in faster for some reason. He gets bogged down when he gets closer to the center of the cold. Like he’s trudging though concrete.
I don’t pause
to think. It’s possible, it’s the only plan I got, and there ain’t no time for second guesses.
I blast into Ryodan’s back and force him forward. As we go fast-mo-ing toward the black box, he totally gets my wavelength: I’m his locomotive and he’s my shield. I can push us, but he’s got to steer and slice.
I feel him yanking my sword from my coat and drive us forward. He ices, and cracks a half-dozen times, shaking off the crystals like a dog shaking water. I die a thousand icy deaths and come to life again. My lungs feel bloody and raw with each breath so I hold it. My bones hurt. I swear my eyeballs have iced in my head. My vision is getting all fractal-like.
Still I push us into the pain because this is my world and no fecking Fae is taking it from me. My mouth is open on a silent howl. Ryodan shakes violently as I force us to the icy epicenter.
He slices down with the sword and cuts the tether.
We’re expecting the IFP to move real slow.
Based on the rate of movement Kat documented when the sidhe-seers had been tracking its progress toward our home, it takes about a minute between cutting it loose and the fire-world fragment hitting the far wall of the abbey. Giving us plenty of time to retether it, because according to her figures, we really had at least two minutes.
Her figures were wrong. Way the feck wrong.
Like a redlined supercar with stockpiled torque, the IFP explodes free and smashes into the Hoar Frost King.
I fast-up as fast as I can go so things transpire in the slowest motion possible.
The fire-world fragment swallows the Hoar Frost King.
It engulfs it.
Sound returns.
I hear ragged breaths. Gasping. Somewhere, folks are crying.
It’s gone.
The Hoar Frost King is gone.
Just like that.
It worked so well I almost can’t believe it. I stand there stunned, feeling wary. I’m not the only one out of sorts. Ryodan’s got his eyes narrowed suspiciously. Lor is kind of hunched like he thinks the sky is going to fall on him. I’d snicker—because, dude, it’s pretty sad when you can’t just take a happy ending for what it is—but we still got major trubs. The IFP is devouring the mountain of iced speakers and heading straight for the abbey.
Kat, Dancer, and the other sidhe-seers are running toward us. “Cruce is below the abbey!” Kat screams. “You’ve got to stop it!”
Ryodan and Lor begin chanting but I can tell from the look on Ryodan’s face he’s got no expectation of finishing in time. The ten or twelve seconds we got before it hits the wall isn’t the thirty he needs to do the job.
Kat starts screaming at Ryodan because he’s not going fast enough, and Jo starts screaming at Kat for screaming at Ryodan because he’s doing everything he can. Then all the sidhe-seers get in on it, and since Ryodan and Lor are looking down at the totem cord they’re trying to ward, nobody’s looking at the IFP and I’m the first one to see what’s happening.
I knew it died too easily!
Ice is forming at the base of the fire-world fragment.
The bottom of the funnel is turning blue, crusted with white hoar frost.
The IFP sure swallowed the Ice Monster, but now the Ice Monster is icing the fecking IFP!
As I watch, frost spreads rapidly upward.
“Uh, guys,” I say.
“Are you bloody kidding me?” Dancer explodes. “It’s coming back out?”
Lor looks up. “Aw, shit. ”
“Motherfucker,” Ryodan agrees.
The Hoar Frost King freezes the IFP from the inside out.
I don’t know if the fire world is a roaring inferno that makes the sound the HFK likes to eat or if they just had a big battle of fire and ice, and ice won.
But the IFP cracks and hisses, steams and pops, as superfire gets supercooled.
Ice weighs it down and it slows to a stop. As the giant funnel gains substance, it becomes too heavy to drift and crashes thunderously to the ground like an icicle dropping from a gutter, lodging in the snow.
We all just stare at the giant ice funnel rooted in the ground, trying to process the sudden reversal of events. First, the Ice Monster was dead but the abbey was in danger. Now the abbey is safe but the Ice Monster isn’t dead.
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We didn’t succeed in killing it, and virtually everyone standing here that can’t freeze-frame is going to die the instant it comes back out.
The walls of the IFP begin to shiver and shake like the Hoar Frost King is trying to find the weakest point to hatch from its icy eggshell.
I narrow my eyes.
Eggshells are delicate. Fragile. But it’s not a shell. In fact, the entire interior of the fire world must be solid ice right now.
Which means, at the moment, the Hoar Frost King is completely encased in one of its own ice sculptures.
Trapped in a moment of perfect vulnerability.
Perhaps the only moment of vulnerability it has ever known.
I know what happens when an iced scene gets vibrated.
It explodes.
“Dancer,” I shout, “use the whip! Make sonic booms!” To Ryodan and Lor I say, “Freeze-frame around it!” To the sidhe-seers, “Dudes, get the feck out of here now!”
Then I freeze-frame in myself, moving as fast as I can on a nearly empty gas tank.
Dancer cracks his whip and we freeze-frame like maniacs.
The frozen IFP trembles and the surface suddenly blossoms a million tiny fissures.
The ground shudders, then there’s this rumble like galaxywide thunder rolling inside the IFP.
All the sudden I hear the most awful noise ever, like maybe all the sounds the Hoar Frost King ever collected erupt in one huge dissonant, fingernails-on-a-chalkboard belch and then—fecking-A, I love being a superhero!—just like I thought they would, the fused monsters explode!
FORTY-THREE
“Celebrate good times, come on!”
I’m glowing. There’s no denying it. Beaming from every pore. I never had such an amazing adventure in my whole entire life, and I’ve had some whoppers.
We’re hanging in the great room at the abbey, warming up in front of fires blazing on three sides. There’s a kettle of instant cocoa (mixed with water, not milk) being warmed in the main hearth, smelling up the room like a chocolate factory, and Kat broke out a hidden stash of—stale, but who cares?—marshmallows and a tin of hard-as-a-rock biscuits she’s been saving for a special occasion, and some scrumptious, weirdly gelatinous honey. It all tastes like heaven. Every time I eat, I’m acutely aware we might not have any more of this stuff soon.
We won! We engaged in battle against the biggest bad I ever seen and we won. Unlike the last big battle fought around these parts, I was there to see it all go down with my very own eyeballs. I didn’t have to hear about it the next day secondhand from folks that were lucky enough to be there. And no all-powerful Unseelie King swooped in and bailed us out at the last sec either. We did it ourselves!
When the IFP holding the Hoar Frost King exploded, splinters of ice went sky-high, ground-low, and every place in between. We all ducked and dodged and grabbed someone slower, freeze-framing for the shelter of the abbey. Still, we’re a pretty ragtag lot, all beat up with scrapes and cuts and bruises. There was no avoiding the fallout.
We waited inside until it was quiet for a few secs and it seemed the debris had settled, then headed back out to poke around in the chunks and convince ourselves the threats were really gone. Dancer studied the stuff for a good five minutes before flashing me a grin and pronouncing the debris inert. He plans to take samples back to Trinity’s labs but he said he was ninety-eight percent certain nothing was going to rise up from the remains.
“How did you know it would work?” Jo says to me.
“I didn’t,” I say around a mouthful of sticky honey-slathered biscuit. I lick crumbs off my fingers. “But once I saw
the Hoar Frost King was icing the fire world from the inside, I realized it was stuck in one of its own frozen scenes, like a bug in amber. And every time Ryodan and me ever freeze-framed near a frozen scene, it exploded into shrapnel-sized slivers. ” I shrug. “Who knows? Maybe it would have stayed stuck in there and exploded all by itself in time. But I sure thought it looked like it was coming back out. ”
“I thought so, too,” Lor says, and everybody agrees with him.
“Bloody brilliant about the whip, Mega,” Dancer says.
I preen.
“It was close. We got lucky,” Kat says.
“Lucky, my ass! You got superheroes on the job!” Part of superheroness is precision timing and delicate maneuvering, and if she wants to pretend it’s luck, I’m not going to waste breath I could be using to eat arguing.
“Today, Lady Luck had a name. ” Ryodan looks at me.
“No shit. ” Lor says. “Nice work, honey. ”
I just about lose my biscuits then. I glow so hard it almost hurts. I think my skin is leaking light.
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I swagger over to the hearth and gulp three marshmallows in quick succession.
“Can you believe what that Unseelie prince did?” goth-chick Josie says.
I choke on the last marshmallow I’m trying to swallow whole. I kick up into fast-mo and try to fast-cough it out but it doesn’t work. Belatedly it occurs to me fast-mo might not have been the brightest move. Friction and mucus expand the confection like a waterlogged tampon. It swells in my throat and shuts down my airway.
I thump myself on the chest with a fist. Doesn’t help. I’m about to give myself the Heimlich over the back of a chair when Lor pounds the center of my back and the marshmallow splats out onto the coat of arms above the fireplace.
“Dude, no need to shove,” Dancer says. “I give her the Heimlich all the time. She doesn’t chew when she eats. ”
I turn around and Dancer’s picking himself off the floor, looking irked. And tired. I wonder when he last slept. I forget he’s not superpowered like the rest of us just because he’s got a superbrain.
“Clean it up, Dani,” Kat says. “It’ll bake onto the medallion. ”
I grab a napkin off the biscuit tray, not feeling so cocky anymore. There were casualties. I’d managed to let myself forget that for a sec. “Christian sacrificed himself because I couldn’t make up my mind. ”