Iced

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.