I find Dancer in his favorite corner penthouse on the south side of the river Liffey. The two outer walls are solid floor-to-ceiling windows that look out over the streets. When I get there, he’s stretched out on a rug in the sunshine with his shirt off, eyes closed, glasses on the floor beside him.
Dancer’s going to be a big guy one day, if he ever gains weight. Last time we measured ourselves, he was fourteen inches taller than me, lanky and lean. He forgets to eat. His hair is dark with some wave and he never cuts it until it gets in his way, then he asks me to trim it. It’s soft. I like it to his chin as it is now, falling away from his face. When he wears his glasses, which is pretty much every minute he’s awake because he’s so nearsighted (he hates them and before the walls fell he was going to get Lasik), he looks like a hunky geek. I’d never tell him that! I like his hands. His feet are ginormous! His eyes aren’t green or blue, they’re aqua, like they’re Fae-brushed. He’s got better eyelashes than me.
When I see him I don’t say, “Dude where you been, I was starting to worry,” because me and Dancer don’t do that to each other. He survived the walls going down all by himself. So did I. And I don’t say, “What happened the night Ryodan showed up and took me, where’d you disappear to?” It doesn’t matter. We’re here now. It’s like somehow we know in our guts that it’ll never be too long, the other is always going to walk through the door one day, eventually.
He props up on an elbow when the door closes. He knows it’s me because I had to disarm ten booby traps before I got to the door. Nobody else could make it through one of his gauntlets without tripping some alarm. Well, except for Ryodan, who seems to be the exception to every fecking rule.
My heart squinches a little when I look at him. I never had siblings but I think he’s like a brother to me. I can never wait to see him again, tell him all the ideas I’ve been thinking, the things I’ve seen, and get his take on it all. Sometimes when we see each other we can’t stop talking for hours and hours and we get so excited we start to stumble over our words trying to say it all so fast. I consider telling him about the iced scenes and the mystery I’m looking into but I don’t want Dancer to be any bigger on Ryodan’s radar than he already is. That Ryodan even knows he exists makes me nuts. I want Dancer safe. And I know him. If he got the tiniest hint of a big mystery like this, he’d start poking into all kinds of places that could get him killed. It doesn’t matter how über-impressed I am with how smart he is. Ryodan’s worse than walls falling or the world melting down. You don’t survive if he doesn’t want you to.
“Mega, I’ve been thinking—”
“Stop the presses! Do I need to put out a special edition of The Dani Daily?”
“Might.”
He grins and I grin back. Dancer thinking has stellar results. You wouldn’t believe the bombs he can build. We blow up things sometimes just for fun. You know, things that need to be blown up anyway like places where a lot of Shades used to hide that maybe they would return to one day like birds along a migration route, if it was still there.
“You got me wondering about Papa Roach’s babies,” he says.
“Yeah?” I stretch out in the sun next to him, prop up on an elbow, too, facing him. I love being able to see his eyes without his glasses in the way. It’s a rare treat.
“Do you know how long they can stay separate from a body, either Papa or human?”
“Dunno. Dancer, I finally found Scream 4. Want to watch it tonight?”
“Watched it last night,” he says absently, running a hand through his hair, making it stand up funny in a totally hot way, and I can tell by the way his eyes are unfocused that he’s lost in thought and not aware of stuff around him. He gets that way a lot.
“You watched it without me?” I’m hurt. Me and Dancer love horror flicks. We gorge on them because they make us laugh. They have a way of putting the world in perspective. We’d been hunting for Scream 4 for a while, planning to watch it. Dancer doesn’t usually watch movies alone, least not that I know of.
“But I’ll watch it again. It was cool.”
“Cool.” I still feel hurt, even though there’s no reason for it. He’s watching it with me tonight. So what if he saw it last night, too? And so what if he saw it with someone else? I don’t care about stuff like that. What happens when I’m not around ain’t got nothing to do with me. “What about Papa Roach?”
“Blowing them up doesn’t work. Torching them is no good either. But what if we keep them from returning to a body? Any body. Human or their own. Wouldn’t that solve the problem? Our goal is to keep them from getting inside more people. They’re immortal, and your time is too important to waste running around after thousands of them with your sword. So, I started thinking what about a tough, impossible-to-escape spray-plastic? Encase them and keep them from being able to reattach to anything. I’ve been working on a formula. Once it’s done, we can fill those small fertilizer tanks we swiped from the hardware store and test it out. I already rigged up a couple of sprayers to fit.”