“For you. Today. Not always. And remember who gave you that back, lass.”
“Touch her, I’ll cut off your wings and use them to sweep the floor at Chester’s,” Ryodan says.
“Oh, I’ll touch her. And when I do, you won’t be able to do a bloody thing to stop me,” Christian says.
“Nobody’s going to be touching me,” I say. “Unless I say so. I’m not public property.”
“What is wrong with all of you?” Jo says. “People just got murdered in front of us and you’re all too busy arguing to—”
“Humans,” Christian cuts in. “Waste of space anyway.” He looks at Ryodan. “You’re alive. Pity. I was hoping the Hag did you in for good.”
“Not a chance.”
“You should have let them in,” Jo says to Ryodan. “Then they wouldn’t all be dead.”
“Don’t tell me what to do,” Ryodan says, soft.
“She’s right,” I say. “You should have let them in.” The flash of hurt in Jo’s eyes makes me mad. “And don’t you snap at her.”
“Right, dickhead,” Christian says. “You should have let them in.” When I give him a look, he shrugs. “Being supportive, lass. Part of a healthy relationship.”
I roll my eyes. “We’re not having a relationship and I don’t need your support.”
“If I’d let them in, the thing might have come inside after whatever it was that drew it to them in the first place, and iced the whole fucking club,” Ryodan says.
He has a point but I’m not about to admit it. “Don’t you snap at her,” I say again. “You be nice to Jo.”
“I can take care of myself, Dani,” Jo says.
“Difficult though you all might find it to believe,” Dancer says, “we’ve got bigger problems than your egos. Listen up. We need to talk. Let’s go inside. It’s bloody cold out here.”
Ryodan looks at him hard a sec and I can tell by the look on his face he doesn’t like what he’s seeing with his weird X-ray vision. “Whatever you have to say can be said here. Now.”
“You’re such an asshole,” Dancer says. “Periodically I suffer the brief delusion you might wise up. Brief.”
Jo and Christian look at Dancer like they think he must have a death wish. I snicker but keep it under my breath. Ryodan looks majorly pissed and I’m in no mood to be noodled over a shoulder. I want to hear what Dancer has to say because for him to hunt me down, it’s important. I look back at the iced scene and sober in a hurry. All those folks dead make me feel sick to my stomach. They died in a second, for no reason. Death is bad enough. Dying for nothing adds insult to injury.
I look at the ice sculpture. This evidence is as fresh as it’s ever going to be. The morning all those Unseelie got iced at Dublin Castle, I didn’t get to examine the scene. I want to get as close as I can today, without freeze-framing because that night in the church when I got bumped down into slow-mo and almost died, it seemed I could feel things better.
I move down the street, knowing they’ll follow: Dancer because he wants to tell me stuff; Jo because she’s … well, Jo; Ryodan and Christian because they got some kind of ownership issues with me like I’m a supercar they got the title to. They’re so deluded it’s laughable.
I open my sidhe-seer senses. I’m nearly suffocated by a feeling of … wrongness. Like the stuff that got iced is missing some essential ingredient, like they’re no longer three-dimensional, just cardboard cutouts stood up in the street.
“Talk, kid,” Ryodan says to Dancer.
I know Ryodan irritates him because he makes it clear he’s talking to me. “After you left, Mega, I sat there for hours, staring. I knew I was missing something. I wasn’t looking at things right. I started thinking about how I came to Dublin last fall to check out Trinity and see what I thought of their Physics Department. I wanted to know if I liked their professors and labs, if they had good enough equipment for the kind of research I planned to specialize in. Not that any of that’s relevant anymore. It’s just a hobby now. I never got around to checking the place out because two days after I arrived, the walls fell and going to college became a moot point.”
“For fuck’s sake, do you think I care who you are,” Ryodan says.
“Dude’s as bad as you say, Mega,” Dancer says.
I stop about fifty feet from the frozen folks and look around. Jo and Dancer stopped about ten feet back and are shivering miserably. Ryodan and Christian flank me. I’m pretty sure Ryodan could go farther than any of us but he doesn’t. When I exhale, my breath frosts in a suspended plume. My bones hurt with cold and my lungs burn. I can’t make it another step without freeze-framing. I shiver, taking it all in. What element is present at this scene that was also present at every other scene that got iced? The answer is right here, staring me in the face, if I can peel my preconception-blinders back and see it.