Iced

“Invalid. Those two statements have no relevance to each other. None. Zip. Zilch. Nada. The sword won’t protect you from getting iced. I left notes for you in the pantry of every hideout I’ve got and all of yours I could find. Do you know what I heard? Nothing. For almost a month.”

“Dude, I got the picture. You didn’t like not being able to find me. Too bad you can’t put a leash on me, huh? Maybe stick me in a cage somewhere?” He’s pissing me off. I think we’re having our first ever fight. It makes me feel sick to my stomach.

“Excuse the crap out of me for caring about you.”

“Dude, what’s wrong with you? This ain’t us. Why are you ruining us?”

“Caring about you is ruining us?”

“Caring is one thing. Trying to lock me up is another.”

He gives me a look that I just don’t get. Like I’m being obtuse when he’s the one being obtuse. I thought our way of hanging was clear and well-defined. We’re superheroes. He’s not sticking to the script. If he keeps deviating, I’m jumping comic books.

“My mistake. I won’t make it again.” Just like that, he goes back to being Dancer, all business. “That day at the castle was the first time I got a look at what’s been freezing things. A lot’s happened since then. It freezes a new place just about every day. Ryodan and his men have been tearing this city apart looking for you. He raided half my stoops. I moved down here to get the bloody feck away from him. He’s going to kill you when he finds you.”

“Not if I kill him first,” I mutter around a mouthful of candy bar, pretending I didn’t already. When you have a secret that folks would kill you for, you sit mum on it. From everyone. ’Course, if I’m learning from my mistakes, I should kill Christian like I didn’t kill those stupid lisping fairies that ate Alina and ratted me out to Mac. I’m a little irked that Dancer’s back to talking about stuff like we never even had our first spat, because it’s a big deal to me. It’s going to take me hours to stop feeling nauseous and confused inside. I eat when I get confused. I stuff another candy bar in my mouth.

“Even Barrons got in on the hunt. So did those abbey girls you sometimes hang with. The city keeps getting colder with each new place that’s iced. People are falling apart. Nobody knows what to do, how to stop it, or even where it’s safe to be anymore.” He steps back and looks at the map. “So far I haven’t been able to discern the pattern. We’ve got to figure out what it’s looking for.”

“What do you mean ‘looking for’?” That was exactly the feeling I picked up with my sidhe-seer senses, but Dancer doesn’t have those. I start to feel a little less sick. I don’t know if it’s the candy bars in my stomach or thinking about work.

“Unless it’s behaving in a random, illogical manner driven by absolutely no biological imperative—which I postulate is antithetical for any sentient life form—it has purpose.”

I beam, our fight forgotten. Got to love a dude that says stuff like “postulate” and “antithetical”! “I love hanging with you!” I tell him.

He gives me a look that’s vintage Dancer but a little wary, so I turn up the wattage on my grin till he grins back.

“That purpose may be alien enough,” he goes on, “to elude ready detection, but it’s there. It’s our methods that are lacking. We have to step outside our box and process the facts with no preconceptions. This thing isn’t from our world. It doesn’t follow our rules or any laws of physics. It appears capable of opening a portal wherever it feels like it. I’ve seen it do it twice now.”

“You saw it again?” I’m so fecking jealous I could spit.

“I’ve been keeping an eye on WeCare, trying to figure who the head honcho is. Nobody seems to know who started the organization up. A few nights ago I went to check out one of their prayer meetings. The church where they were holding it got iced when I was half a block away. One minute they were singing, the next I couldn’t hear a thing. Seemed like the whole world went still or I went deaf. I stood in the street and watched. It did exactly the same thing it did at Dublin Castle. Came out of a portal, fogged everything, iced it, opened another portal, and vanished.”

I flinch. He was half a block away! What if he’d been, like, one single minute earlier? Then I have a worse thought. What if I hadn’t been able to find him for a month? Would I have been freeze-framing from one ice sculpture to the next, waiting for them to melt, wondering if I’d lost my best friend?

I’m suddenly ashamed. “Dude. Sorry I was gone so long.”

His head whips up and he gives me a grin that fecking slays me. “Dude. Thanks. Glad you’re back.”

“I hear you saved my life at the church that night. You’re the Shit.”

“No, you are.”

We grin at each other for what feels like an hour of heaven, and just like that everything is okay between us again.

We start yakking our heads off like nothing was ever wrong. He tells me scoop about new gangs forming in the city. I tell him about the Unseelie King’s library. I can’t keep that kind of fascinating stuff to myself. I can tell by how bright his eyes get that he’s dying to see it.

He tells me a huge fire-world IFP almost burned the abbey to the ground! It evaporated iron and concrete and if it had made it to the abbey, nothing would have been left. But Ryodan’s men stopped it by tethering it stationary to the ground somehow. I don’t like that it’s out there by the abbey, tied up or not. It makes me nervous.

I tell him about the Boora-Boora books and he laughs his butt off about me chasing unruly sentences down. He fills me in on how WeCare started painting buildings white to let folks know it’s one of theirs, and if you go in and sign up, and attend meetings, they give you all kinds of food and stuff. I tell him about R’jan trying to take over as king of the Fae and that the ice monster has a name: the Hoar Frost King. I think it’s the most we’ve ever told each other about the daily details of our lives. He tells me food is getting really hard to find. I tell him about the Fae being totally inert at the scenes and about what R’jan said about it killing Seelie and Unseelie deader than dead, wiping them out of all record of existence. “I think it might be after folks’ life force,” I tell him.