Iced: A Dani O'Malley Novel (Fever Series) (7 page)

That’s what gets me.

Attraction isn’t always about sex. Sometimes it’s about something far subtler, and far bigger.

I watched her fight.

And something stirred inside me that I thought was dead.

Not my dick. That’s working great. Better than ever. Always hard. Always ready.

What stirred was like gentle rain on a warm summer day. Sweet. Tender. Something I used to be. With my clan. With my nieces and nephews.

She reminds me of my Highlands—to which I can never return.

I know exactly what she’s going to be one day. Bloody hell is she ever.

Worth. Waiting. For.

Too bad I won’t be here anymore.

Take her now
.

“Fourteen,” I growl. I’ve gotten good at arguing with the voice inside my head. I get a lot of practice. An Unseelie prince wouldn’t give a second thought about her age. An Unseelie prince would see only that she has the right parts, and temper to spare. The bigger the fight, the better the feast.

“Why the feck does everybody keep saying that like it’s some kind of insult? Like, maybe I managed to forget for a minute?” she says crossly. “Geez! I’ve never seen so many people obsessed with my age!”

Dani bristling is something to see. I smile.

She takes a wary step away from me. “Dude, you planning to eat me or something?”

My smile vanishes. I look away.

I wear a mask. A face that isn’t mine.

I used to have what women called a killer smile.

Now I have a killer’s smile.

“ ’Cause, like Ryodan already bit me once today. I’m not in the mood for any more teeth in me anywhere.”

Ryodan bit her? One more reason to kill him. I look back at her, my face void of all expression. There’s no point in trying to look reassuring. This face can’t pull it off. “No biting. I promise.”

She squints at me suspiciously. “Dude, what are you? Unseelie or human? What happened to you?”

“Mac happened to me.” She flinches when I say it, and I wonder why. I blame Jericho Barrons, too. If I survive what I’m turning into, I’ll kill them both. Hate ripples through me, dense and black and suffocating. If not for them, I’d still be me. Then again, if Mac hadn’t done what she’d done, I wouldn’t be here at all. Then again, if Barrons hadn’t done what he’d done, or rather failed to do, what Mac did might not have turned me into this. Barrons didn’t check my tattoos before we performed a dangerous Druid ritual, then he abandoned me in the Silvers to die. When Mac found me in the Silvers, she fed me Unseelie to keep me alive. It’s impossible to decide which one of them I blame the most. So I blame both and I’m getting happier about that every day.

I saw Mac a few nights ago, across the club at Chester’s, looking blond and beautiful and happy. I want to take all that shiny-happy-blondness, twist it into a garrote, and strangle her with it. Hear her beg, and kill her anyway, love every minute of it.

Later that night, I’d stared at myself in the mirror for a long time. Arm bent behind my head, scratching my back with a knife—it itches all the time now—relishing the slide of warm
blood on my skin as it ran down my spine into my jeans. I used to hate blood. Now I could bathe in it. Mother’s milk.

“Yeah, she does that,” Dani agrees with a sigh. “She happened to me, too.”

“What did she do to you?”

“It’s more like what she
will
do to me if she catches me,” she says. “Don’t want to talk about it. You?”

“Don’t want to talk about it.”

“Better things to talk about anyway. So, what were you doing at Chester’s?”

Good question. I have no bloody clue. I think the sheer number of Unseelie gathered calls to something in my blood. I don’t know why I go half the places I go anymore. Sometimes I don’t even remember the hours leading up to it. I just become aware that I’m someplace new with no memory of when I decided to go or how I got there. “I wanted a beer. Not many choices left in Dublin anymore.”

“No shit,” she agrees. “Not just for beer, for everything. Which side are you on?” she says bluntly. “Human or Fae?”

It’s a good question. I don’t have a good answer.

I can’t tell her I don’t discriminate. I despise everyone. Well, almost. There’s this fourteen-year-old redhead with a mind like a diamond. “If you’re asking if I’ve got your back, lass, I do.”

She narrows her eyes and peers at me. We’re standing outside Chester’s in a pool of light. The sky is so overcast it looks like dusk at three in the afternoon. I get a sudden image of us from above: slim, delicate-faced young girl in a long black leather coat, hands on her hips, staring up at a Highlander-going-Unseelie prince. The image is painful. I should be a good-looking twenty-two-year-old college student with a killer smile and a bright future ahead of me. We’d plot and plan and fight the good fight together. That version of me would watch out for her. Make
sure nobody does to her what the voice in my head tells me the first Unseelie that catches her without her sword is going to do. What a part of me wants to do, too. Fury fills me. At them. At me. At everything. “You never take that sword off your body, right?”

She backs up a step, hands going to her ears. “Dude, my hearing works great. You don’t need to yell.”

I didn’t know I was. But a lot of things come out differently than I mean them to now. “Sorry. I’m just saying, you
do
realize what will happen to you if one of the Unseelie catches you. Right?”

“Never going to happen,” she says smugly.

“With that attitude, it will. Fear is healthy. Fear is good. It keeps you on your toes.”

“Really? ’Cause I think it’s a waste of time. Bet you don’t fear nothing,” she says admiringly.

Every time I look in the mirror. “Sure I do. That you’ll get sloppy and slip up and one of them will grab you. Snuff you out.”

She tilts her head, eyes narrowed on my face. Not many people look me full in the face anymore. Not for long anyway. “Maybe you aren’t all Unseelie prince yet. Maybe we can, like, work out some kind of arrangement.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“I want to shut down Chester’s. Torch it. Exterminate it.”

“Why?”

She cuts me a look of scorn and disbelief. “You saw it in there! They’re fecking monsters! They hate humans. They use them and eat them and kill them. And Ryodan and his men let them!”

“Say we do close down the place, say we burn it to the ground. They’ll just find another place to go.”

“No they won’t,” she insists. “They’ll pull their heads out. They’ll smell the coffee percolating and see we saved them!”

A rush of emotion, cloyingly sweet as funeral lilies, floods me, swells my tongue with a taste both familiar and sickening. She’s tough, smart, capable, a stone-cold killer when she needs to be.

And she’s so bloody naïve.

“They’re at Chester’s because they
want
to be at Chester’s. Make no mistake about that, lass.”

“No. Fecking. Way.”

“Yes fecking way.”

“They’re confused!”

“They know exactly what they’re doing.”

“I thought you were different but you’re not! You’re just like Ryodan! Just like everyone. Ready to write them all off. You don’t see that some people need saving.”

“You don’t see that most people are beyond saving.”

“Nobody’s beyond saving! Nobody! Ever!”

“Dani.” I say her name tenderly, savoring the pain she makes me feel.

I turn and walk away. There’s nothing for me here.

“So, that’s it, then?” she yells after me. “You won’t help me fight either? Gah! Sheep! You’re all big fat fecking sheep waggling big fat fecking sheep asses!”

She’s too young. Too innocent.

Too human. For what I’m becoming.

“H
ungry?” Dancer says as I bang in the door and throw my backpack and MacHalo on the couch.

“Starving.”

“Cool. Went shopping today.”

Me and Dancer love to go “shopping,” aka looting. When I was a kid, I used to dream that I got forgotten inside a department store after it closed with nobody around, which meant I could have anything I wanted.

That’s the world now. If you’re tough enough to brave the streets, and got balls enough to go into the dark stores, anything you can carry out is yours. First thing I did when the walls went down was hit a sporting goods store and cram a duffel bag full of high-top sneakers. I burn through them quick.

“Found some canned fruit,” he says.

“Dude!” It’s getting harder to find. Plenty of the ick-stuff on the shelves. “Peaches?” I say hopefully.

“Those weird little oranges.”

“Mandarin.” Not my favorite but better than nothing.

“Found some ice cream toppings, too.”

My mouth instantly waters.

One of the things I miss most is milk and all the things it made possible. A while back, a couple of counties to the west, some folks had three milk cows that the Shades didn’t get, but then other people tried to steal them and they all shot each other. And the cows. I never did get that part of it. Why shoot the cows? All that milk and butter and ice cream re
-moo
-ved from our world forever! I snicker, cracking myself up. Then I see the table and the spread of food and it cracks me up more. “You expecting an army?”

“Of one. I know how you eat.”

And he’s fascinated by it. Sometimes he just sits and watches me. Used to freak me out but not so much anymore.

I decimate the feast, then we sack out on the couch and watch movies. Dancer’s got everything wired for power, with the quietest generators I’ve ever seen. He’s smart. He survived the fall without a single superpower, no family, and no friends. He’s seventeen and all alone in the world. Well, technically he has family but they’re somewhere in Australia. With splinters of Faery reality slicing everything up, no planes flying and nobody about to take a boat out, they may as well be dead.

If they aren’t.

Nearly half the world is. I know he thinks they’re dead. We don’t talk about it. I know it from the things he doesn’t say.

Dancer was in Dublin checking out Trinity College’s Physics Department, trying to decide where he wanted to go to grad school when the walls fell, leaving him cut off and alone. Home-schooled by multiple tutors and smarter than anybody I ever met, he finished college six months ago, speaks four languages fluently and can read three or four more. His folks are humanitarians, über-rich from old money. His dad is or was some kind of ambassador, his mom a doctor who spent her time organizing
free medical care for third world countries. Dancer grew up all over the world. I have a hard time wrapping my brain around his kind of family. I can’t believe how well he adapted. He impresses me.

I watch him sometimes when he’s not watching me. He catches me now.

“Thinking how hot I am, Mega?” he teases.

I roll my eyes. That kind of stuff isn’t between us. We just hang together.

“Speaking of hot …”

I roll my eyes bigger, because if he’s finally about to say something about how much prettier I am since the Gray Woman took my looks then gave me back a little extra, I’m out of here. He’s been cool so far about not commenting. I like it that way. Dancer’s … well, Dancer. He’s my safety zone. There’s no pressure here. It’s just two kids in a fecked-up world.

“… try some hot water. Mega, you’re a mess. I got the shower working again. Go take one.”

“It’s just a little blood—”

“It’s a bucket. Maybe two.”

“—and a few bruises.”

“You look like you got hit by a truck. And you smell.”

“I do not,” I say indignantly. “I would know. I have supersmell.”

He looks at me hard. “Mega, I think you have guts in your hair.”

I reach up, dismayed. I thought I got them all out on the way over. I root around in my curls and pull out a long slimy piece.

I stare at it, revolted, thinking how maybe I should cut my hair really short or start wearing a ball cap all the time, then I look at him and he’s looking at me like he’s going to toss his cookies, then all the sudden we both start cracking up.

We laugh so hard we can’t breathe. We’re on the floor, holding our sides.

Guts in my hair. What kind of world am I living in? Even though I was always different, and saw things other people didn’t see, I never thought I’d be sitting on a sofa, in a virtual bomb shelter underground, with security cams and trapdoors and booby traps all around us, hanging with a seventeen-year-old (hot!) genius who makes sure I eat more than protein and candy bars (he says I’m not getting the right vitamins and minerals for proper bone health)
and
knows how to get a shower running in post-wall Dublin.

He plays a mean game of chess, too.

He pauses the movie when I head for the shower. I grab a change of clothes on the way in.

This is Dancer’s place, not mine. But he keeps things stocked for me in case I come by. Like me, he’s got lots of other digs, too. You have to keep moving in this city to increase your odds of survival, and set things real careful when you leave, so you know if somebody’s invaded your turf while you were gone. It’s a dog-eat-dog world. People kill each other over milk.

The hot water lasts four glorious minutes. I scrub my hair, wrap it in a towel and study my face in the steamed-up mirror. Bruises are me. I know the progression: black turns purple, purple goes green, then you get all jaundiced-looking for a while. I look past the bruises. I lock eyes with my reflection and don’t look away. The day you look away you start to lose yourself. I’m never going to lose myself. You are what you are. Deal with it or change.

I toss the towel, finger-comb my hair, tug on jeans, a tee, and consider a pair of combat boots. Dancer picked them out for me. Said I won’t burn through the soles as fast. I decide to give them a try.

I grab another bowl of puny orange slices on the way back to the sofa, pop open a jar of marshmallow cream and slather it on, then coat it all with hard-shell chocolate.

Dancer and me get down to business. He starts the movie again while I get out the game board. He kicked my butt at Go Bang for hours the last time I dropped in, but I’m feeling lucky tonight. I even magnanimously accept a restricted second move when I win the flip for opening play.