Iced: A Dani O'Malley Novel (Fever Series) (24 page)

I’m out of immediate mortal danger. I won’t freeze to death. Now I just have to worry about bleeding to death.

It takes me three tries to manage to roll over on my back, and by the time I get there I’m panting worse than I do when I’ve freeze-framed for an hour, and shaking like a leaf. There’s blood in my eyes. I try to blink it away. Dude, that was a grand debacle! How embarrassing! Glad nobody saw it!

I assess my situation without moving. I’m severely cut up. My skin burns where I can feel myself. The biggest threats to my survival are the holes in my thigh and shoulder, or what
will
be holes when the ice finishes melting. I’ll need to get them bandaged fast. The problem is, I can’t feel my hands. I close my eyes, trying to focus on moving my fingers. Nothing happens.

“Ah, Dani.”

I look up to see Inspector Jayne bending over me. I’ve never been gladder to see him in my whole life.

“You’ve certainly done it now, haven’t you?”

“C-C-Candy b-b-bar,” I manage.

He smiles but it doesn’t reach his eyes.

“In m-m-m-my p-puh …” I trail off. I don’t even have the energy to say
pocket
. I give him a longing, starving look and I know he gets the picture.

He looks across me. I realize I’m surrounded by Guardians. Good, they can carry me to Chester’s and help me get patched up!

“Have you got it?” Jayne says.

“Got it, Captain.”

I go ice cold in a way that has nothing to do with cars or frozen people. I try to lunge to my feet but succeed only in flopping on the pavement like a beached fish. “D-D-Don’t you d-d-d-d-dare—”

“It’s been six days, Dani.”

Six days? How long did I sleep at Chester’s?

“You should have come. If you’d kept your word, I might have continued trying to put up with it. But I won’t allow the fate of our city to rest in whimsical hands. The sword is ours now, for the good of Dublin. We take far more of them off the streets than you do. In time you’ll understand it always should have been this way.”

“Y-Y-You—”

“Don’t try to take it back. Your first warning is your final one. I won’t treat you like a child if you do.”

“K-K-
Kill
y-you!” I explode. I still can’t feel my hands or feet but I feel my head. It’s about to explode. He has no right. It’s
my
sword!

“Don’t make it war, Dani. You won’t win.”

I try to tell him he better kill me right here and now because there’s no way they can keep my sword from me. I’ll take it back the second I’m on my feet again. There’s no place on Earth, feck, there’s no place in all of heaven or hell that they’ll ever be safe from me again! But I’m too light-headed to talk. Dizzy. My vision’s getting weird.

“She’s awful bloody, Captain. She gonna live?”

“She’s tough,” Jayne says.

“Maybe we should do something.”

“We can’t help her, not even a little, or she’ll be able to take it back.”

I flop on the pavement, unable to do a thing to stop them. I’m vulnerable, completely at his mercy.

And he’s not having any.

I won’t have any for him when the time comes.

He’s leaving me here, to live or die on my own. I’ll never forgive. I’ll never forget.

They walk away. Just like that they leave me in the middle of a dirty street like a dog that got hit by a car, bleeding and helpless and alone. Dead if another car comes along. I’ll remember that, too, when I see him again. Dude, they could have at least moved me to the sidewalk, balled up a shirt or something for a pillow beneath my head.

Something really bad happens to me then. Worse even than everything that’s already happened to me in the past few days.

I feel woozy and strange and all the sudden it’s like I’m outside
of my body, watching me. But the me lying in the street has long blond hair and is looking up at the redheaded me with tears in her eyes and telling me she can’t die yet because she’s got people to protect. She’s got a sister named Mac back home in Georgia and she just left her a message, and if she dies, Mac will come over to hunt her killer because she’s stubborn and idealistic, and she’ll die, too. But I don’t seem to be able to feel anything about what’s happening, and none of it seems real, so I walk away just like Jayne did.

My stomach heaves and I puke my guts out right there in the middle of the street. I can’t even get on my hands and knees to do it. Lying on my back, I get sick all over myself. Not the blond-haired me that’s the ghost of Alina, but the real, red-haired Dani that’s really lying in the street wondering if she’s going to bite it this time. And if there’s something wet on my face that isn’t blood or vomit … Nah. Ain’t.

Eventually I get the feeling back in my hands and feet. I guess they thaw. I fumble for a candy bar. I curl in a ball in the street and eat every candy bar I’ve got and plot revenge.

Don’t make it war, he said, and I won’t.

I don’t have to.

He already did.

I
find her stumbling through the streets, bleeding to death. If not for all that hair, I might not have recognized her. She’s covered with blood, it’s on her clothes, matted in her curls, crusted on her face. Her long coat is flayed and hangs in tatters from her shoulders. It looks like she went through a dicer.

I don’t see her sword anywhere. I look around, nothing shiny in the streets but her.

I roar and she clamps her arms around her head and falls to her knees, and I remember how much noise I’m capable of making and kick myself. I deafened a human woman I recently had sex with. I broke her arm, too. I didn’t mean to. I can’t get used to what’s happening to me. Try living your whole life one way then abruptly being something else. It’s not easy to remember what you are every single bloody fucking second.

Except enraged. That, I’m aware of all the time. It never diminishes, never stops. The blackouts where I lose chunks of time are getting more frequent, lasting longer.

She topples in the street. I throw myself from the roof, land on
the balls of my feet, and gather her in my arms. Where was I when she needed me? Fucking another faceless woman. Trying to defuse the constant lust.

She feels so slight against my chest.

I’m not surprised to feel myself trembling. I’m touching my goddess.

“Och, lass, what’ve you done to yourself now?” I push hair from her face. There’s so much blood that I can’t see what’s causing it. How is she even walking? It makes me crazy that she’s in this city, without a guardian or consort, always getting into trouble. I want to lock her up somewhere I can keep her safe forever. Someplace white and shining and beautiful, where nothing ever goes wrong.

Her brain has more muscles than her body, and less sense. Her passion for life pushes her limbs further than they were meant to go. She’s going to burn herself to ash if she doesn’t find someone or something that takes her all the way down to ground zero and recharges her. She needs to crash as hard as she lives or she’ll die young. I can’t stand the thought of her dying. If I knew how, I would make her Fae so she would never die. Doesn’t matter that I hate being it myself, or that she would, too. Immortality is immortality.

I run with her, careful to move easy. I take her where I’ve pictured her a thousand times but knew better. I still know better. I’m doing it anyway.

Just one time before I turn into the villain of this piece, just one time before I become the fourth and final Unseelie prince, I want to be her Highlander. And her hero.

She’ll remember, when there’s nothing else left of me worth remembering.

I can’t wait till I grow up enough that I stop having superhero growing pains. Waking up confused and cross all the time sucks. My hair is in my face and it makes me so mad for a sec that I almost tear it out at the scalp, trying to get it out of my eyes, and it’s matted, then my bracelet gets stuck in it and there’s something crusty—“Ew,” I say irritably, then somebody else has their hands in my hair, trying to gently disentangle my wrist from my hair.

Who? What? Where?

I’m always doing a mental check when I first wake up, trying to remember what happened before I fell asleep so I can connect to where I am and how I got there. When I first got run of the abbey (dude, like a million times bigger than my cage with Mom!) I was constantly knocking myself out because I couldn’t get over how far and fast I was able to run and giddiness made me a freeze-framing train wreck. I’m never real sure when I first wake up if I went to sleep or just managed to brain myself unconscious again. Then that fecker Ryodan knocked me out, too, and now I have to add that in to my worries when I wake.

Memory slams me upside the head. I get so mad I yank my bracelet off my head along with a good chunk of hair, and feel frantically for my sword even though I know it’s not at my hip or anywhere else.

A man curses. My eardrums vibrate painfully and my head feels like it might split.

I open my eyes. “Christian, mute it!” I shove my hair out of my face and look up. I’m lying in bed and he’s sitting next to me, looking down at me. Something’s different. He doesn’t look quite so scary. I take that back. Yes, he does, but either I’m getting better at reading his expressions or he’s getting better at making them, because there’s like an ounce of remorse in his iridescent eyes. Dude. His eyes are full Fae now! They weren’t last time I saw him.

“Sorry, lass. But I almost had the bracelet free. You tore some of your hair out. You might have waited a second longer.” He picks up the thatch of hair I yanked out at the root and flattens it straight between his fingers. Curl springs back instantly. “Stubborn as the head it came from,” he murmurs. Then he does the weirdest thing. He puts it in his pocket. Maybe the dude collects hair. I got bigger worries on my mind.

“He took my sword! The fecker actually took my sword!” I can’t believe it. I have no way to kill my enemies. I could hunt them all day long—and do a great big fat nothing with them when I catch them. It makes me so nuts I can’t stand it. I try to push up from the bed but my legs aren’t a hundred percent.

“Who took your sword?”

“Inspector Jayne. I’m going to kill him.”

“HE DID THIS TO YOU?”

I get an instant migraine, flop down, cover my head with my arms and burrow beneath the pillows.

He sighs so loud I still hear it, even with my ears covered.

“Sorry, lass. Did he?”

I’m not taking my hands from my ears. I think about telling him yes so he’ll go after Jayne for me, but I don’t like to lie unless the payoff is huge. Lies are horny little buggers, they breed like rabbits and bound around just as insanely and then you have to try to keep track of them. “I got cut up myself but it’s his fault. He startled me and I freeze-framed too soon.” Speaking of cuts, I don’t feel as bad as I did and I don’t seem to be bleeding anymore.

“You want help killing him?”

He sounds a little too eager. Like homicidal maniac eager. “Don’t need no stinking help,” I say crossly. My eardrums hurt. “I mean not that your help is stinking or anything. Your help is totally cool. I just want to do it myself.”

“Would you come out from under there, lass?”

“Would you, like, never yell again? You’re slaying me. I got superhearing.” I poke my head out. “Where am I?” I’m in a cloud of down pillows and comforters, in a high bed, in the corner of a huge room.

“My place.”

I look around. Cool digs. He’s holed up in a rehabbed industrial warehouse, one of those kinds with a giant living area that has no walls except for the ones you make with furniture and stuff. There’s lots of brick and wood floors and exposed heating ducts, tons of light spilling in tall windows and a massive flat-screen 3D TV in front of a ginormous comfy-looking couch. There’s a pool table and some old video game machines and an awesome bar, a kitchen with stainless steel appliances, and no racks or torture instruments visible anywhere. It’s just the kind of place a college guy would die for—too bad he’s not one anymore, but hey, we all have the things we need to pretend. No scary-looking knife collections. No red, no black, their favorite colors. The place is totally
not
Unseelie prince.

A shaft of rosy light is shining on me and I look up. The bed is under a skylight, the sun’s setting and it’s got one of those new, strange Fae hues to it, brilliant orangey pink. I could sprawl in bed and watch the stars at night. I like it being pushed in the corner, giving me wall at my right and back, leaving only two sides to defend. Feels snug. Makes me think about rearranging some of my own rooms. I’m fascinated by the way other folks live, and love to look in other people’s houses. “Aw, man, you ever move out, I’m moving in!”

“Like it, do you, lass?” he says, and his voice sounds funny. Thick and weird.

I look down at him and jerk. “Something on my face?” He’s staring at me hard, eyes intense, and what’s looking out of them
doesn’t look like it belongs in this place of brick and wood and sunshine at all. It belongs in the dark somewhere, with razor blades, about to do something real nasty.

“No. Your face is lovely, lass. The sunset looks good on you.” He reaches a hand out toward my face and I go real still.

“Dude, you’re scaring me.”

He looks at me but it’s like he’s not seeing me at all, so I sit there with his hand about an inch from my face and look back and think about wild animals. About how they’ll attack if they smell fear, not that I feel it, but when you’re staring at an Unseelie prince, even though you know he started out human, it’s kind of hard to predict what might happen next. This isn’t a scenario I can lock down on my mental grid and freeze-frame through. This obstacle course has too many unknown variables.

He drops his hand without touching me, pushes up from the bed and goes to the kitchen. He braces his fists on the island and leans there with his back to me. He’s bigger than he was when I first saw him up on my water tower. The back of his shirt is stained with blood and his spine presses knobby and weird against it. It’s creepy.

I scoot to the exit side of the bed, thinking I’ll just be moseying along now, when I realize I’m not wearing enough to get up. I only got on a bra and underwear. I sink back down and tuck my knees up. Not that I want to draw attention to the fact, but looking around yields no results. “Where are my clothes?”