Iced: A Dani O'Malley Novel (Fever Series) (18 page)

He laughs again and I can’t even stand to look at him so I charge off to the door in the ground that is the new entrance to Chester’s.

He holds the door up for me. I sigh gustily as I descend the ladder. I hate Ryodan.

So I’m walking across the dance floor, cutting a beeline straight for the stairs to head up to Ryodan’s office to do whatever it is he wants me to do, when I see
her
.

She’s moving across the main dance floor with Jericho Barrons behind her, and it looks like they’re heading for one of the subclubs, though I can’t figure out why. Mac doesn’t like it here any more than I do.

I freeze.

I hate seeing her. I hate not knowing what’s going on in her life. I hate what I’ve done. Can’t change it, though, so no point in feeling it.

Ryodan slams into my back, knocking me forward into the crowd. “Walk much?” I say testily as I careen off of a hulking Rhino-boy that gnashes yellowed tusks at me.

As usual, he doesn’t miss a trick. His gaze does that ocular-shiver thing all over my face. “I thought you and Mac were friends.”

“We are friends,” I lie.

“Then go say hi.”

Shit, I hate how much he notices. “We might have had a tiny tiff.”

“Tiny, my ass.”

“Quit nosing into my business.”

“Learn not to wear it on your face, kid. Except in private, with me and no one else. You need some serious training. Telegraph like that, it’s only a matter of time before somebody hoists you on your own entrails.”

“Dude, who
uses
words like entrails? Or hoists?”

“Tell me what happened.”

I fist my hands at my waist. “It’s none of your business and that’s the beginning and end of it. Some things you can horn into. Some things you can’t. Stay the fuck out of it.”

He looks at me weird. “You said fuck. Not feck.”

“That’s all you got from what I just said?”

“You want privacy on this. I’ll give it to you. See how easy that was. If you want something, ask me for it. You’ll find I can be a generous man. When you treat me right. If you ever figure out what that is.”

He moves past me and heads for his office.

I can’t help myself, I look back at Mac. I grin and kick myself inside for doing it but there was a time when I loved waking up every day in Dublin, different than I do now, because I knew
she
was there at Barrons Books & Baubles and we were going to go do something cool that day and then she baked me a birthday cake and picked me out presents and we watched movies and we fought back-to-back and I ain’t never had anything like that before and sometimes I feel like a homeless dog out in the rain and thunder and I’m muddy and cold and I’m staring in the window at the pretty collie sleeping on a doggie bed close to the fire, and there’s a name on the bowl that’s next to her, and I wonder what it would be like to—

“Gah! Get over yourself, wussy-girl.” I got big-dog teeth and a big-dog bite and I know the rules: you stay inside, you get collared and spayed. I pick myself up and start to freeze-frame after Ryodan when a commotion in Mac’s general direction makes me stop, stay in slow-mo and glance back.

There’s a new type of Unseelie in Chester’s tonight and they’re something out of a horror flick. They look like anorexic wraiths that might drift around graveyards, breaking open coffins and feeding on rotting corpses. They’re draped in black cloaks with hoods so you can’t see their faces, and they don’t walk, they hover and glide just above the floor. I glimpse a flash of bone at the sleeves. In their hoods I catch a quick hint of pale, bloodless skin and something black. There are twenty or so of them in the subclub Mac and Barrons are just entering. They make me think of carrion crow that sense the coming of a storm and perch in treetops everywhere, waiting for the destruction to begin so they can swoop down on the dying and tear flesh from bone with sharp beaks. I’m suddenly certain they don’t have normal mouths. And equally certain I’d rather never see what they do have.

They turn toward Mac like they’re a single unit or something, which is totally creepy, and begin making a chittering noise that sets every nerve in my body on edge. There are no snakes in Ireland. Not because St. Patrick banished them like folks like to tell, but because of the island and climate issues. When I was a kid I was fascinated by snakes because I’d never seen one. I took a holiday after Mom died and Ro freed me, before she started controlling me, too, and went to a bunch of museums and zoos. I saw a rattlesnake. When it moved its tail, it had the same effect on me as these hooded Unseelie when they chitter. The dry, dusty rattle elicited some kind of atavistic response in me and got me thinking maybe genetic memory really does exist and certain sounds just make you want to run like hell.

What are they? How come I’ve never seen them before? What’s their unique prey? How do they feed? How can they be killed? Better yet, why are they all peeling away from Mac like she has the Unseelie version of the bubonic plague?

There are too many people on the dance floors between us. I can’t get a good view. I slide sideways into fast-mo, blow past Lor and Fade guarding the stairs at the bottom, making sure I catch Lor a good one with an elbow and snicker when he grunts, then stop at the top of the stairs and look down. Much better view.

The wraiths are chittering even louder, gliding back from Mac and Barrons, but it’s Mac all those dark hoods are turned toward.

“Interesting,” Ryodan says close to my ear. “You have to wonder why they can’t get out of her way fast enough. I’ve never seen them do that before.” Ryodan doesn’t like Mac. He never has. She got between him and his best boy-bud.

I give him a look. “I’ll tell you a secret, Ryodan. You mess with her, Barrons’ll kill you.” I drag a finger across my neck. “Just like that. You aren’t all that. Barrons’ll stomp your ass, hands down.”

He smiles faintly. “I’ll be damned. You have a crush on Barrons.”

“I do not have a crush—”

“You do, too. It’s all over your face. Anybody could see it.”

“Sometimes, boss, you’re just wrong.”

“I’m never wrong. You might as well take out a billboard. ‘Dani O’Malley thinks Jericho Barrons is hot.’ My offer to teach you is still open. Save you from future embarrassment. If I can see it on your face, he can, too.”

“He never figured it out before,” I grumble, then realize I just admitted it. Ryodan has a tricky way of wording things that makes you say things you didn’t mean to say. “Maybe I’ll ask
Barrons to teach me,” I mutter, and turn away from the stairs, heading for his office. I run smack into his chest. “Dude, move. Trying to get somewhere here.”

“No one but me is ever going to teach you, Dani.”

He touches me before I see it coming, has his hand under my chin, turning my face up. My shiver is instant and uncontrollable.

“That’s non-negotiable. You signed a contract with me that grants exclusivity. You won’t like it if you try to break it.”

I glare at him, wondering what the heck I actually signed. Kind of hoping I never find out.

“What are we doing here? Pansy talk or work? You got something else for me to do or not?” I glance over my shoulder one more time as I push past him. Barrons is standing in front of Mac like a shield, and I allow myself a quick flash of a smile. Ryodan is right, I need to learn to hide what I’m feeling. She’s safe. She’ll always be safe with Barrons in the picture. I never have to worry about Mac. Just about what she might do to me one day. I’d rather worry about that than Mac, so essentially all is right with my world.

I
t turns out Ryodan didn’t have diddly-squat for me to do. There were no other iced scenes to visit so he made me hang around his office with him.

I wanted to go back out and examine the debris of the warehouse scene that exploded the other night, pick through it more thoroughly for clues (thinking I could move my hidey-holes at the same time), but he told me to study all the folks and Fae through the glass floor and see if I thought any of them might be responsible for what was happening.

I said, dude, you said you think it’s happening spontaneously, like some part of Faery is bleeding through. Now you want me checking out individuals like they might be doing it. Which one is it?

He said both and went back to his paperwork. I don’t think he feels the same sense of urgency I do, since it’s only been humans getting iced lately and none of them on his turf. If he doesn’t start showing me some investigative action, I’ll be forced to work on
it on my own time, and I don’t know how to squeeze everything in, plus sleep every few days or so.

Mac left pretty quick. She seemed to get real nervous about what was happening with the ZEWs. That’s Zombie Eating Wraiths for short, because that’s what they look like. They had dirt and cobwebs on their cloaks, clues to where they hole up. I relaxed once she was gone. Then I got tense again having to watch Jo down there in the kiddie subclub, showing off so much leg to the Unseelie, and there’s no question they were liking it. I’d like to have legs like Jo some day, all curvy and smooth-skinned and pretty.

No bruises!

She kept looking up at Ryodan’s office with a weird look on her face, all longing-like, like she must have known I was up there. I didn’t know she missed me so much! It made me feel bad for not spending more time with her. Sometimes she’d look real hard at the stairs like she was hoping maybe I’d come down.

I watched, sword hand itching all the while, because there were so many things in the club preying on humans that needed killing. By dawn I was a seething knot of repressed, homicidal
sidhe
-seer thoughts, and not one bit wiser about who or what was behind the icings.

Two good things came from the hours I sat there till he finally let me leave. I learned about four new types of Unseelie and I composed my next
Dani Daily
. I plan to clean it up a little visually, make it even more professional-like before printing.

Now, sitting up on my favorite water tower perch, I read through my handwritten copy one more time, proofing it before I go to press.

I don’t do rebuttals and I ain’t got no love letters in me, so this’ll have to do. Once I print and post it, I’m going to hole up and sleep like the dead for ten hours. Been up two or three days now. I always forget until I’m about to keel over.

I’ve been sitting on my water tower, looking down over the city, watching the sun come up. The air is clean like it never was before the walls fell. It’s foggy but not smoggy like it used to be. I love living in a harbor town. Once, when I was nine, I stowed away on a fishing boat. They couldn’t get rid of me until the end of the day because they needed the full day’s catch. They finally ended up letting me ride up front, wind in my hair, salt spray in my face. The docks have always fascinated me with big ships coming and going places, tales of adventure and excitement stuck to their hulls like barnacles! Now they just sit, dead in the water like so much else. I’ve got a cool hidey-hole on one of them. I decide I ain’t been there in a while and I’ll catch some z’s there later.