Iced: A Dani O'Malley Novel (Fever Series) (41 page)

I
stand there like an idiot.

I should run before she turns on me, too, but my feet seem to sprout icy roots.

Barrons and Ryodan are lying in the alley on their backs, blood staining the snow in widening circles around them, and I gape, thinking: They can’t die! Superheroes don’t die!

Misguided beliefs aside, they sure look like they’re dying to me. Nothing could get that mutilated and survive.

The Crimson Hag didn’t just puncture them, she flayed them from groin to neck, and split them clean through bone. In one quick yank she scrapped all their intestines and internal organs from their bodies. It’s a move she’s had hundreds of thousands of years to perfect. Puncture, fly, yank. Their chest and abdomen cavities are open and scraped empty. The only way the treacherous bitch could have done this to them was to catch them by surprise.

What the feck was I thinking, standing there saying anything besides “Run”? Bickering as usual, like we had forever and always would!

“I thought you guys would duck at the last minute,” I mutter at their bodies. Or freeze-frame away, faster than me. Or maybe Ryodan would use whatever secret weapon he used against Velvet against her. Never in a gazillion years did I think anything could actually get the jump on them!

But she exploded from the wall and her lances were through them before any of us could even react. Their bodies are still moving but I think it’s just the final twitches a body makes when it gets traumatized so abruptly and completely.

I hear a weird clicking sound that affects me the same way the ZEWs’ chittering does, terrifies me on a primitive level. Is she coming for me now? I grab my sword and whirl. It takes me a second to spot her. I follow the trail of blood.

Up.

The Crimson Hag is perched on the roof of the building behind BB&B, with ropes of entrails dangling over the side in long glistening strands, dripping on the sidewalk. The bony needles she used to flay Barrons and Ryodan are actually her legs, which bend weirdly, sort of like a praying mantis’s front legs, and have curved hooks on the ends.

With insectlike appendages, she’s knitting their guts into the hem of her dress. As her bony legs click and clack together, the guts sway over the edge, shortening, inch by inch, smearing blood up the brick.

It’s so disturbing that my stomach heaves and my body tries to burst into tears and puke at the same time. I swallow it all and choke.

I hear a guttural sound followed by a weak sigh and look back at the bodies.

“I’m going to kill the kid,” Barrons says faintly.

Ryodan makes a burbling sound like a bloody laugh. I don’t think he even has the parts left to laugh with. “Get in line.”

They both deflate and go still.

I stare dumbly.

They die like superheroes: cracking a joke. Like they’re just going to get up tomorrow and fight another day. No fear. Balls to the wall until the bloody end.

I feel like somebody ripped my guts out, too. I can’t stand to look at them anymore so I drop my head, and squinch my eyes up tight. My head’s a muddle. How did I get here? How did deciding to go to the Unseelie King’s library end up with Ryodan and Barrons dead? I can’t make sense of it. I mean, I can, because duh, I can follow the chain of events, but who the feck could have foreseen such a bizarre and preposterous outcome? How am I supposed to make small decisions when they can have such large, unforeseeable results?

“Well, that was fortuitous.” Christian skirts their bodies and moves toward me, laughing. “Two down, seven to go. I wonder if we can just point the bitch at the rest of them. Mac, too.”

My head whips up. He’s laughing. They died and he’s
laughing
. I start to shake. “Stay. Away. From. Me.”

“What did I do, lass?”

“You took me in there, that’s what you did! You didn’t warn me enough. I’m only fourteen! I don’t know everything! I can’t know everything! You’re older! You’re supposed to warn me about stuff! And now you act like it’s good that they’re dead!”

“I thought you wanted Ryodan out of the picture.”

“I just wanted him to leave me alone! And I never wanted Barrons to die! Aw, crap, Mac!” I wail. I look at the back of the bookstore, now even more miserable than before. Mac’s in there. How long before she comes out and finds Barrons in the alley, bled out in the snow? How long before she discovers my complicity in this, too? I can see her, finding him, flinging herself over his body, weeping. One more tragic loss in her life.

Because I opened a fecking bottle.

Because I was curious.

The night Alina died, I felt like I wasn’t … really there. I never been able to shake the feeling there was something wrong with me. I searched Ro’s journals from beginning to end but she never wrote a single fecking word about me. Never. Makes me think maybe she had other journals I ain’t found yet.

But tonight I’m all here.

I suffer that unpleasant shift I felt once before, the night I got Jo stuck working in the club. The one where I move sideways into a different way of being me, see myself different, and I don’t like it. It’s the shift where I’m a boat and there are all kinds of people capsized in my wake. No, not a boat. What did Ryodan say I was? A tsunami. That’s it. Crashing into things and leveling them. When he said that, he had no idea he’d be one of those things I leveled. Or that he wouldn’t live to see the one hell of a woman I’m going to become.

Above my head bony needles clack away. I hear the wet slap of intestines against the wall as they’re drawn up the side. I should be terrified. I should be running for my life so she doesn’t do to me what she did to them. Should I hide their bodies so Mac won’t find them and figure out what I did?

“Come, lass. We have to get out of here while she’s busy. The Hag gets obsessed with her knitting but she’ll be done soon,” Christian says.

My legs are made of cement and I have concrete blocks for feet. I just keep looking from Barrons and Ryodan to the bookstore and back. First Alina. Now Barrons. There isn’t going to be any place on the face of this planet Mac won’t hunt me down when she finds out what happened here tonight.

I look at Ryodan. How can he be dead? Who’s going to run Chester’s? Who’s going to keep the loser Fae and humans in line?
With both Barrons and Ryodan gone, is there any safe place in Dublin? Will BB&B and Chester’s get abandoned?

A hand closes on my shoulder and I just about jump out of my skin.

“We’ve got to get out of here, Dani. She’s finishing up.”

I shake him off violently. “Don’t you ever touch me again, Christian MacKeltar!”

He exhales sharp and sudden like I punched him in the gut. “You don’t mean that.”

“Try me.” I fist my hand around the hilt of my sword.

“I’m the one that gave it back to you, lass. I’m the one that watches out for you.”

“You’re the one that took me somewhere I didn’t know was as dangerous as it was. Folks got killed because of it. Did you at least manage to bring out the books you found?”

“I had other things on my mind. You were in danger.”

It was all for nothing. The books got dropped, forgotten. I look at the wall. Sure, I could go back in, but I can’t read any of the stuff in the library, so what’s the point? And who knows what else I might set free by opening anything else in there?

I look up. Blood drips down the side of the building. As the gruesome Hag knits away, she plucks a small bone from the mess of entrails and organs and tucks it into her corset, taking a moment to rearrange her obscenely human-looking breasts. Then she stops abruptly and looks down at me as if she’s suddenly realized there’s more prey in the alley and it’s watching her. After a moment she dismisses me and returns to her stitching, but I feel … marked somehow. Like she filed me away in her Unseelie-insect brain.

“How do I kill her? Will my sword work?”

“Might. But you’d never get close enough. Her needles are
longer than your sword. She’d have your guts in her dress before you even managed to swing it.”

“You said she gets obsessed while she’s knitting.”

“Not that obsessed.”

The ambience in the back alley changes abruptly and it takes me a minute to figure out why. A light just came on in the back of BB&B and is spilling out the window, across the bloodstained snow.

I know what that means. Mac’s moving around inside, looking for Barrons. I imagine it won’t be long before she looks out back to see if his car’s out there.

If Mac walked out that door and tried to kill me right now, I’m not sure how well I’d fight.

I take one last look at Barrons and Ryodan. I have to make this right somehow. I have to balance the scales and there’s a lot weighing in against me.

“Come near me again and I’ll kill you,” I say, soft like Ryodan used to talk.

I freeze-frame into the night.

I
spend the next two days slapping up terse
Dani Dailies
that describe the Crimson Hag and her M.O., hunting for Dancer, collecting the rest of the ziplocks I need from the other iced scenes (except for the club beneath Chester’s, which I’m in no hurry to go near), and packing my backpack full of samples. They’re some of the most miserable days of my life. I go up and down like a fecking psychotic elevator being controlled by some fecking psychotic little kid, punching random floor buttons. One second I’m swaggering, the next I’m drooping.

One minute I’m elated because I never have to go to work again. My life is my own. Jo can quit the subclub. She’ll stop wearing sparkly stuff between her boobs and boinking Ryodan. The next minute I remember that if Ryodan’s remaining men learn that I played even one tiny little part in their boss’s death, I’m deader than every doornail in Dublin. On top of that, the Crimson Hag is loose, the Hoar Frost King is still out there, Dublin is slowly turning into Ant-fecking-arctica, Christian and me are on the outs, and now Mac has double the reasons to kill me, assuming she knows.

I can’t decide if she knows. One minute I think she does, the next I don’t.

The bodies are gone. I went back in the middle of the night to hide them. I should have hidden them right away but I wasn’t thinking clear. Aside from blood in the alley and up the brick wall, no trace of them remained.

At first I thought Mac must have found and taken them somewhere for a proper burial, but then I decided she didn’t, because yesterday I saw her hurrying down the street toward Chester’s, all bundled up and shivering in the cold, and she didn’t look sad. I’ve seen Mac sad. I know what it looks like. She looked a little tense but otherwise normal. She had a trail of ZEWs behind her, chittering away. I wonder if, like crows, the ZEWs are harbingers of death. It worries me they’re following Mac. Her tension is probably because of what’s happening to Dublin. Everybody I’m seeing is tense. And shivering. It’s ten degrees in Dublin during the day, even colder at night. Snow’s been falling, piling up. The city isn’t set up to handle this kind of weather. Lots of folks don’t have power where they’re staying. They won’t survive these conditions long.

I wonder if the Crimson Hag ate Barrons’s and Ryodan’s bodies. Stitched up their entrails then dined on the rest. I’d think she’d have spit up a few bones but maybe she needed them all to spruce up her corset. Then I figured Christian probably went back to tidy up and hide the evidence. Trying to get on my good side again or something.

I wonder where the heck Dancer is! I need his superbrain to help me crunch the facts so I can save my city from turning into an iceberg. So then I can save folks from getting knitted up into a dress.

I got two more places to check for him, then I’m out of places to hunt.

I freeze-frame up O’Connell, yanking WeCare posters off streetlamps as I go. Stupid fecking stupid feckers are trying to take advantage of people not having power, encouraging them to come into prayer meetings, to get warm and “take the white.” I didn’t know what that meant till I saw a couple folks coming out of one of the churches the WeCare people have designated as their own, wearing long white robes over their clothes.

They were carrying bags of canned goods and smiling. In my experience, anybody besides your mom that feeds you is going to want something in exchange for it.

I whiz up to Dancer’s penthouse, where we like to stretch out in the sun, disarm his booby traps and poke my head in the door, calling for him. The place is silent and empty. I decide to see if he’s got any food in the pantry ’cause I’m starving. When I get there, I crack up. There’s a note taped to a stack of cans sitting smack in the middle of the floor. It’s a cryptogram. It’s how we leave messages for each other.

I pop open can after can of beanie weenies and gorge while I solve the puzzle that tells me where he is.

There’s a lot hidden away in Dublin, just like out at the abbey. When I first started hanging out in the city, I got one of those sightseeing books and visited all the hot spots like any tourist. I was embarrassed to be a stranger in my own town, never having been out of my cage much. I wanted to know everything everybody else knew, see it all with my own eyeballs instead of watching it on TV or reading about it in a book.

I went to Trinity College and toured all the cool stuff there. I never got to go to school so it was neat to see the classrooms and labs and libraries and folks being all social instead of being kept by themselves all the time. I couldn’t wrap my brain around
growing up that way. Mom taught me to read. I taught myself the rest.

I hit up the museums, dropped by the brewery, hung out in Temple Bar, visited the catacombs beneath Christ Church Cathedral and St. Michan’s Church, and eventually hunted down the underground rivers. I listened when college kids raved about their favorite places and went there, too. I paid attention when old folks talked on the streets about things that used to be.

That’s how I found Dublin-down. Couple of wrinkly old dudes playing checkers by River Liffey used to work for a mob family and knew some interesting stuff. Beneath a restaurant run by a dude name of Rocky O’Bannion, this big-time mobster that disappeared last year in the craziness of the walls coming down, I found it. A honeycomb of tunnels and hidden crypts beyond a pile of rubble and a series of grated entrances so complex only someone as curious as me or a criminal trying to hide bodies and booty would ever have gone through. Dancer and me mapped out parts but we still got a lot to explore.