Iced: A Dani O'Malley Novel (Fever Series) (12 page)

“Dude.” I pump up the volume on my static station.

“What are you doing, Dani?”

His face feels real close to my neck. If he bites me again, I’m going to kick his ass. “I was thinking about poking the ice, seeing how thick it is.”

“Two and one-sixteenth inches.”

“Get off me.”

“Get off your sword. Or I won’t continue to let you keep it.”

Fecker can take my sword away like Jayne never could. Like only the UPs can. One more reason I can’t stand Ryodan. “Can’t get off my sword till you get your hand off mine. Pressure much?” I say testily.

We both sort of let go at the same time. I glare at him, or where I think he is, but he’s not there. I find him twenty feet away, near a small, normal-size door. He opens it. His face instantly frosts. “Ready?” he says.

“You don’t move that way in front of Jo.”

“What I do with Jo is none of your business.”

“You better not be doing nothing with Jo. I’m staying in line like a good little soldier.” And fecking-A does it ever chafe. Report to work at eight
P.M
. Gah. Report. Like I don’t have plans of my own. Like I didn’t spend hours hunting for Dancer and I’m not two
Dani Dailies
behind and haven’t spent most of my fecking day working on one, after whizzing out to the abbey to make sure Jo’s okay. She had some seriously sick scoop for me about the new, segmented Unseelie, but other than that she hadn’t wanted to talk much. I think she’s pretty upset with me. Nothing new there. If there weren’t any
sidhe
-sheep upset with me, I wouldn’t know who I was, or if the Earth was still orbiting the sun. “I’m behaving. She’s safe. You just leave her alone.”

He smiles faintly. “Or what, kid?”

“You know something, dude, if you don’t put a question mark at the end of your questions, I’m not answering them anymore. It’s rude.”

He laughs. I hate it when he laughs. It tries to put me right back on the porno level of Chester’s and that just grosses me out, so I do the static-thing in my head again.

I freeze-frame past him so fast his hair blows straight up. I make sure to go through a pile of dust, and give it a little extra twist with my heel as I whiz by so it shoots straight up his nose (a trick I perfected at the abbey!). He sneezes. Just like a real person. I’m half surprised to find he actually breathes.

The cold slams into me like a brick wall and for a second I can’t inhale.

Then I feel him at my back, an inch from my figurative rear tire like he’s drafting off my freeze-frame. It sets my teeth on edge. Makes my temper hot and breathing is easy again.

Like the first scenario he showed me, a frozen hush fills the space like those mornings in fresh, new-fallen snow when no one else is awake and the world is stiller than you ever thought it could be until you take that first step that squeaks in the drift. I always wanted to have a wicked snowball fight with somebody on mornings like those but nobody else has ever been able to keep up. Lobbing snowballs at folks is like picking tin cans off a fence with a BB gun.

I flash through the warehouse, checking it all out, fascinated in spite of being ordered here and bossed around. I love a good puzzle. What’s freezing these places and why?

A few dozen Unseelie are iced in the entry bay.

Ryodan has lower-caste grunts working for him. There are lots of Rhino-boys iced in mid-action. Like the subclub in Chester’s, the place is killingly cold. It makes my heart feel dull and tight. I don’t stop moving, won’t stop moving for anything.

Rhino-boys are frozen loading and unloading pallets and crates, gray skin coated white, shellacked by a clear layer of ice. Whatever happened to them happened fast. They had no warning. Their frosted expressions are completely normal.

Well … as normal as Unseelie ever look. I think.

I whiz around two beefy ones, studying their bumpy rhino faces, gashed mouths bared on tusks, analyzing that thought.

It occurs to me that maybe their expressions aren’t normal. I’m basing my assumptions on what I know of humans, of how our faces react. Christian is proof that I can’t do that. I can’t even figure out when Christian is smiling.

Logic demands I eliminate my assumption that the Rhino-boys had no warning. Can a Rhino-boy look terrified? I don’t know. Perhaps they show fear by something so small and weirdly Fae as a tiny rainbow-hued glint in their beady little eyes, and the white frost is concealing it. I’ve never noticed what their faces look like when I kill them. I’m usually too busy looking at the next one I plan to stab. I’m suddenly looking forward to finding one tonight and performing a test. Any excuse to kill an Unseelie is an awesome one.

What would do something like this?

And why?

It has to be a Fae because I just can’t see a human managing to build a freeze-ray gun that works on this scale only to go vigilante.

Then again.… I can’t eliminate that possibility either.

So far, both places I’ve seen iced are exactly the kind of places I would ice myself. If I had such a wicked cool weapon.

Most folks wouldn’t believe that someone who can move like me, fight and hear like me, could exist. Ergo, I can’t rule out the possibility that someone else might be so smart they figured out how to build a massive freeze-ray gun that’s capable of reducing the temperature of places to the frigidity of objects in space. Given enough time, I think Dancer could manage it. He’s that smart!

Bugger. I have facts and no connections. I can deduce nothing. Yet.

Suddenly I see past the frozen figures.

The warehouse is packed full of boxes, crates, and pallets, piled everywhere. There’s a pie of iced electronic stuff that looks like audio equipment of some kind. I guess maybe for the club. Crates are stacked to the ceiling, and more stuff was being brought in when whatever happened did.

I make one crystal clear deduction: Ryodan’s the dude emptying the stores! Preying on humans just like the Unseelie. Stealing our ability to survive so he can sell it back to us at whatever cost he decides to demand.

It’s all iced. Every bit of it.

I wonder if any of the edible stuff can be thawed and saved. People are going to die because he’s such a greedy pig.

I’m so pissed that I smash open a crate as I go whizzing by. “Oops,” I say, all innocent and accident-like. Wood splinters, two-by-fours, go flying in all directions.

Automatic weapons explode from the wreckage and skid across the iced floor, where they smash into frozen Unseelie who shatter like little glass goblins.

Okay, so that crate had guns in it. It just means I kicked open the wrong crate. I’m so sure he’s the prick stockpiling the food that I kick another, not even pretending it was by accident this time. More guns.

I go on a smashing rampage. Each time I smash a box or crate open that holds ammo or guns, I get madder. Figures he’d hide the food from me before he brought me here. I’m about to kick open my fifth crate when Ryodan suddenly has me hanging in midair by the collar of my coat, manhandles me into potato-sack-girl over his shoulder again, superspeeds me out the door, slams me into a telephone pole and says, “What the fuck is wrong with you?” at the precise moment the whole building blows up.

“Dude, are you arming these places to blow?” I say on the way back to Chester’s. “Is this another of your stupid tests? I have to solve your little mystery in the whopping three seconds I get to study it before the scene gets blown to smithereens?” The whole building had exploded outward, for a city block. We’d barely freeze-framed from the shrapnel zone in time.

“I lost a great deal of personal property in both explosions. I sacrifice nothing that is mine from which I might profit.”

“Which translates into as long as I’m useful, since you think I’m yours, I’m not going to get the—” I drag a finger across my neck.

“Kid, you might just annoy me into killing you.”

“Right back at you, boss.”

He smiles and I feel myself starting to smile back and it pisses me off so I look out the window and get real intent on what scenery I can make out in the pinkish moonlight, which isn’t much because the Shades took everything worth looking at out here. Got three hidey-holes down this way and a big stash. Didn’t know Ryodan was holing up here, too. I’ll vacate this district as soon as I get time to relocate.

“Observations,” he says.

“Four imperial Unseelie guards were the only commonality I was able to isolate endemic to both scenes.” They’d been standing, armed, at the dock doors, overseeing the delivery.

He gives me a sidewise look. “Wow. That was, like, a whole sentence. With nouns and verbs and connective tissue. Endemic. Fancy word.”

“Sloppy, dude. Should have omitted the connective tissue part.”

“Nothing else.”

I give him a look. I hate his statement-questions. I’m not answering them anymore.

He laughs. “Nothing
else
.” His voice rises on
else
about one one-hundredth of a note higher than the word “nothing,” a concession only someone like me with superhearing would ever be able to pick up. Still, it’s a concession. From Ryodan. Rarer than water in the desert.

“The ice was layered the same. Maybe hoar frost. Definitely hard rime. Clear ice on top of it all. The hard rime’s weird. White ice comes from fog freezing. What’s fog doing inside both these buildings?”

“How did the place blow?”

I think back. It happened so fast and we were outside, and he was blocking my view, and I was more focused on getting him off me than anything else. I hate to, but I admit, “I can draw no conclusions, circumstances being what they were.”

He looks sidewise at me again.

“Talking like you, dude, thinking it might get all this stupid fecking stuff over with sooner. Communication is hard enough when everybody’s trying.”

“Isn’t that the truth. Give me your hand.”

“No.”

“Now.”

There’s no way I’m giving him my hand.

He says something soft in a language I don’t understand. My arm jerks up. I watch in horror as my hand passes to his side of the Humvee, palm up.

He drops a Snickers in it, murmurs something, and my hand is my own again. I wonder when, how, and why my fecking appetite became everyone else’s business.

“Eat.”

I think about throwing the candy bar back in his face or out the window. I refuse to let my fingers close around it.

But I sure could use it.

He brakes, comes to a stop in the middle of the road, turns toward me, grabs the collar of my coat, pulls me across the expanse between our seats and leans in. Locks eyes. We’re maybe eight inches apart, and I think the only reason my nose ain’t touching his is because one of the brackets on my MacHalo is just about touching his forehead. My butt’s no longer touching the seat.

I’ve never seen such clear eyes as Ryodan’s got. Most folks are crammed full of emotions, with lines around them like battle scars. I can tell by looking at grown-ups if they’ve spent their years laughing or crying or resenting the whole world. I hear moms say to their kids when they make faces, “Careful, your face will stick like that.” And it really does. By middle age most folks wear whatever they felt the most in their lives smack on their kisser for all the world to see. Dude, so many of them should be embarrassed! It’s why I laugh so much. If my face is going to stick, I’m going to like looking at it.

Looking at Ryodan is like staring the devil in the face. It’s obvious what he’s felt the most—nothing. Ruthless. Cold dude.

“I won’t ever hurt you unless you make me, Dani.”

“You being the one who gets to decide what constitutes the definition of ‘make.’ Big fat lot of wiggle room in there.”

“I don’t need wiggle room.”

“Because you annihilate.”

“Another of those fancy words.”

“Dude. What did you just do to me?”

“Gave you what you needed but were too stubborn to take.” He closes my fingers around the candy bar with his. I can’t shake him off fast enough. “Eat, Dani.”

He drops me back into my seat, puts the Humvee in gear again and takes off.

I munch the candy bar despite the sour taste in my mouth, thinking how I used to be invisible.

“Superheroes are never invisible,” he says. “They’re just deluded.”

Turning my head toward the buildings flashing by, I screw up my face and stick out my tongue.

He laughs. “Sideview mirror, kid. And careful. Your face’ll stick like that.”

I head out into the streets with boxes of freshly printed dailies (I love the smell of new ink!) in a battered grocery cart the minute my time is my own again. I can run with a cart and slap my papers up on poles faster than I can do it on my crotch rocket. My bike’s for pleasure, for pure downtime, when I got nothing else weighing down on me, like always saving the world. I don’t get to ride it much.

Ryodan’s reminder that I’m to report to work every single night at eight
P.M.
on the dot is still ringing in my ears, making me nuts. What the feck can he possibly have to torture me with every night? Is he icing these stupid scenarios himself just for an excuse to mess with me?

I head west and begin my usual route. It’s a little after midnight. It shouldn’t take me more than a couple hours, then I’ll start hunting for Dancer again. I’m getting a little worried about him. Most times he goes somewhere else without telling me, he’s only gone a few days. I don’t know all his haunts any more than he knows all mine but I’ll keep checking those I do.