Iced

Before somebody a lot less capable and kind does.

Somebody like Margery, who’s even now watching the crowd through narrowed eyes, like she’s got a thermometer up its butt, taking its temperature. She’s a year older than Kat, and was part of Ro’s inner circle when the old witch was alive. She’s not going to put up with a changing of the guard that doesn’t include her. She’ll make trouble every chance she gets. I hope Kat knows how treacherous she can be. Anyone that was ever close to Ro for longer than like—one second—has something seriously scary about her. I know. I was closest to her of all. Sidhe-sheep politics. Dude, I hate them. They tangle you up like sticky spiderwebs. I love living on my own!

Still, I miss the abbey every now and then. Especially when I think about them baking cookies and stuff. Hearing voices in the background when you doze is nice. Knowing even if you are misunderstood, you aren’t totally alone in the world isn’t the worst thing.

Kat’s right: the Sinsar Dubh we used to have locked up and magicked down beneath our abbey is nothing compared to what we’ve got under our floorboards now.

The problem is it doesn’t look like the Sinsar Dubh anymore.

All of the darkest magic and power of the Fae race is no longer trapped between the covers of a book. It’s in the body of a Fae prince in all his naked, winged glory. And if you’ve never seen a Fae prince before, that’s one jaw-dropping, eye-popping, mind-scrambling amount of glory.

It’s only a matter of time before somebody sets him free.

Kat hasn’t even made her way around to the killer-critical fact yet: lots of people know he’s down there now, crammed to the gills with every last bit of the deadly magic of the Fae race.

I know people. I’ve seen all the shapes and sizes they come in. Somebody’s going to be stupid enough to believe they can control him. Somebody’s going to find a way through that ice.

Jericho Barrons is only one of a lot of different folks that hunted the Sinsar Dubh for thousands of years. None of them ever knew where it was. If they had, they’d have descended on our abbey back in the dark ages when a rough-piled, round stone tower was all that concealed the entrance to our underground city. And they would have pulled it, stone from stone, into rubble, until they got what they came for.

Now a whole bunch of humans and Fae know exactly where the most powerful weapon ever created is being stored.

Folks talk.

Soon the whole world is going to know it’s here.

I snort, imagining hordes descending on us, rioting, raging, brandishing weapons. Stupid sidhe-sheep too busy squabbling about the best way to fight back, to get around to fighting back. I sigh.

Kat glances up.

I stop breathing, hug my knees tight to my chest and stay perfectly still.

After a moment Kat shakes her head and goes back to the conversation.

I sigh again but softer.

She just made her second mistake.

Confronted by something she couldn’t explain, she pretended it wasn’t there. Dude, ostrich much?

Oh, yeah. Just a matter of time.

I wait a few minutes for things to get heated again, take advantage of the commotion and freeze-frame out.

I love moving the way I do.

I can’t imagine life any other way.

Whenever something is bugging me, all I need to do is zoom around the city, spy on all the slo-mo Joes trudging through, and I instantly feel a million times better.

I’ve got the coolest gig in the world.

I’m a superhero.

Until recently, I was the only one I knew of.

According to my mom, I didn’t make the normal toddler transition from crawling to walking. I went from lolling on my back, counting pudgy toes and cooing happily while she changed my diapers (I’ve never seen any reason to cry when someone is cleaning poop off you), to what she initially thought was teleporting. One second I was on the living room floor, the next I’d vanished. She was afraid the Fae had taken me—they used to do that to sidhe-seers if they discovered them—until she heard me rummaging around in the pantry trying to get a jar of baby food open. It was creamed corn. I remember. I still love creamed corn. Not much fuel-power there though. I burn through the punch of sugar-energy in no time.

I never got to go to school.

You don’t want to know how she kept me from leaving the house. There aren’t many options with a kid who can move faster than you can blink. And none of them are PC.

I’m not the only superhero in Dublin anymore, which annoys the feckity-feck out of me, but I’m slowly coming around to seeing it might be a good thing.

I was getting complacent. And that turns into sloppy if you’re not careful. Bored, too. It’s not much fun always being the best and fastest. A little competition keeps you on your toes, makes you try harder, live larger.

I’m all about that: living large.

I want to go out in a blaze of glory while I’m young. I don’t want to break piece by piece, lose my mind and die wrinkly and old. Given the current state of our world, I’m not sure any of us have to worry about that anymore.

Top on my list of dudes to beat are Jericho Barrons and his men. Like me, they’re superfast and superstrong. Much as I hate to admit it—they’re faster. But I’m working on it.

Barrons can pluck me right out of thin air (dude, why isn’t it thick air? The things people say!) while I’m freeze-framing, which is what I call the way I get around. I start at point A, lock down a mental snapshot of everything around me, hit the gas, and in a blink I’m at point B. It’s only got a couple of downsides. One, I’m constantly bruised from running into things at top speed because some of the things I lock down on my mental grid aren’t stationary, like people and animals and Fae. Two, freeze-framing requires a ton of food for fuel. I have to eat constantly. It’s a pain in the butt collecting and carrying that much food. If I don’t eat enough, I get limp and wobbly. It’s pathetic. I’m a gas tank that’s either full or empty. There’s no half tank with me. You know those movies where folks wear rounds of ammo on their body? I wear protein bars and Snickers.

At least once a night I whiz over to Chester’s, Dublin’s underground hot spot for partying and scoring whatever your fantasy is and angling for a shot at immortality, owned and operated by Barrons’s go-to dude Ryodan, and I start killing every Fae hanging around outside it. It usually takes all of five seconds for his men to show up, but I can do a lot in five seconds.