Iced

“Scream 4. Happy?”

“Wasn’t very good.”

“Dancer said it was,” I say crossly. Has everybody seen it but me?

“Shows what he knows.”

“You got a problem with Dancer?”

“Yes. He’s the reason you’re in a shit mood tonight and I have to put up with it. So fix the shit mood or I’ll fix Dancer.”

My hand goes to the hilt of my sword. “Don’t you even think about trying to take anything from me that’s mine.”

“Don’t make me.”

His fangs just slid out. I shake my head and whistle. “Dude, what are you?”

He looks at me long and hard and I see something in his eyes that I almost get but don’t. It’s a look that I feel like I should know but just can’t make sense of. There’s more of a breeze in the small, closed office than I usually manage to generate, and I realize he’s vibrating, too—and he makes wind, too. I’m beyond annoyed. Is there anything I can do that he can’t do? When I look down through the glass floor, I see that everyone beneath us is moving slo-mo. We’re both freeze-framing. I didn’t realize I’d shifted all the way up.

He drops back into slo-mo first.

It takes me a sec longer to get ahold of my temper. When I manage to shift down, I flop into a chair and sling a leg over the side. I speak belligerence in every language known to man. Sign language is my native tongue.

Ryodan is like the ocean. He is what he is. And he’s not about to change. There’s no point in fighting the tide. It ebbs. It flows. You ride it. He’s got me by the short hairs and he’s not about to let go.

“So, what are we doing tonight? Boss.” I put all my aggravation into the last word.

There’s that look again. Mystery to me. Sometimes I can read him like a book, other times the only things I see on his face are two eyes, a nose, and a mouth.

I roll my eyes. “What?”

“Something’s come up. I was going to tell you.” He goes back to his paperwork, dismissing me. “You can go.”

I sit up straight. “Really? You mean it?”

“Get out of my office, kid. Go watch your movie.”

I can’t get to the door fast enough. I yank it open.

“But watch out for icy spots. I hear they’re deadly.”

I pause on the threshold, getting mad all over again. I had a happy feeling for all of one stinking second before he went and squashed it. “You just had to say that. You can’t help yourself, can you? You think the only thing to do with a parade is rain on it. Some people know to enjoy the parade because, dude, the rain always comes back.”

“The wise man ensures his survival before enjoying it. The fool dies enjoying it.”

Skittles, jerky, and Dancer are calling my name. I rip open a candy bar, bouncing from foot to foot. “But what if the wise man never gets around to the enjoying part?” I got a lot of unlived experiences waiting for me. Sometimes I want to be just what I am. Fourteen and free.

“Perhaps the wise man knows being alive is the enjoying part.”

“Have more places gotten iced since last night?” I should have kept my mouth shut. I shouldn’t have asked. Responsibility adds weight and years to my shoulders when he nods.

He rubs salt in the wound. “But maybe you’ll get lucky, watching a movie with your little boyfriend, and nothing will happen. Bright side of it is, if something does, you’ll never know.”

’Cause I’d like, be dead instantly. Bright side, my ass. Ryodan knows just how to push my buttons.

I roll my eyes, close the door and sit back down. I’ll be fourteen later. Like probably next year. When I’m fifteen.

Without looking up, he says, “I said get out of here, kid.”

“Cancel your plans, dude. Folks are dying. We’ve got work to do.”

This one takes the cake, way out on the south side of Dublin, where things get rural.

Behind a shack that’s barely managing to stay upright, with a swayback porch and a roof that looks like a really old person’s mouth without dentures in, a man, a woman, and a little boy are frozen, doing laundry the old-fashioned way that Ro used to wash her Grand Mistress robes. She said it kept her humble. There wasn’t a humble bone in that porky old witch’s body, not even a nice hair anywhere.

The man’s hands are iced to an antique washboard and he has some weird kind of metal thing iced on his shoulders like part of a frame that holds your head still if you broke your neck. The child is frozen, banging a spoon against the bottom of a battered pot. I don’t let myself look at the kid long. It slays me when they die. He never even got to have a life. The woman got iced while she was lifting a shirt from a bucket of soapy water. I stand at the edge of the lawn, shivering, absorbing as many details as I can from a distance, getting ready to freeze-frame in. If this scene behaves anything like the others, it’s going to explode soon.

“How did you even hear of this one?” The pubs I understand, even the fitness center because it was in Dublin and Ryodan knows everything that goes on in the city. But these are farmers doing laundry out in the country.

“I hear everything.”

“Yeah, but how?”

“That was supposed to terminate your line of questioning.”

“Dude, news flash. ‘Supposed to’ never works with me.”

“Observations.”

“They knew it was coming, whatever it was.” Which makes me feel a whole lot better. I can stop worrying about dying with no warning. Although the boy was looking down at the pot he was holding, the grown-ups’ mouths were open, their faces contorted. “They saw it and screamed. But why didn’t they run? Why didn’t she drop the shirt she was washing? It doesn’t make sense. Does it freeze them mildly before it totally ices them? Could they have a small reaction but not be able to fully move? Did it sneak up on the other folks at the other scenes from behind?”

“I need answers, kid, not questions.”

I puff out a breath. It gets foggy but doesn’t ice. “It’s not as cold as the other scenes.”

“It’s older. It’s thawing.”

“How do you know that?”

“There’s a drop of condensation on the end of the man’s nose that’s about to fall.”

I squint. “I don’t see no stinking drop. You can’t see that far that clearly.” I have supereyes and I can’t see it.