Iced: A Dani O'Malley Novel (Fever Series) (2 page)

Feck that! I knew what would happen if she found out I killed her sister. Got no business being mopey about it. If you know what’s coming and don’t do anything to stop it, you got no right to act all surprised and pissy when the crap hits the fan. Rule #1 in the Universe: the crap always hits the fan. It’s the nature of crap. It’s a fan magnet.

“She said it won’t respond to her,” Margery says. “She thinks the king did something to it. Barrons and his men tried to muscle it closed, but no luck. It’s stuck open.”

“Just anyone can wander in,” says Colleen. “We found the Meehan twins standing down there this morning, hands around the bars, staring up at him like he was some kind of angel!”

“And what were
you
doing down there this morning?” Kat says to Colleen. Colleen looks away.

Tainted blood or not, I’ve got no complaints about being a
sidhe
-seer. I got the best gifts of all. None of the other
sidhe
-seers know how to deal with me. I’m superfast, superstrong, have superhearing, supersmell, and wicked sharp eyesight. I don’t know if I taste better or not. Since I can’t taste with anyone else’s tongue, I guess I’ll never know. The superfast part is the best. I can whiz through a room without people even seeing me. If they feel the breeze of me passing, they usually blame it on an open window. I open windows everywhere I go. It’s my camo. If you walk into a room with a lot of open windows, look sharp at breezes that seem contrary to what’s coming in from the outside.

“That’s because he
looks
like an angel,” Tara says.

“Tara Lynn, don’t you go there for even a second,” Kat says sharply. “Cruce would have destroyed us all if he’d thought he had something to gain by it, and that was
before
he read the Book and absorbed its power. Now, he
is
the
Sinsar Dubh
—the darkest, most twisted magic of the Fae race. Have you forgotten what it did to Barb? Don’t you remember how many people the Book massacred when it
didn’t
have a body? Now it has one. And it’s beneath our abbey. And you think it looks like an angel? That it’s pretty? Have you lost your mind?”

I wasn’t beneath the catacombs last night so I didn’t get to see what happened with my own eyes. I’d been keeping a distance from that person whose name I’m not saying. I heard what happened, though. It’s all anyone’s talking about.

Dude, V’lane is Cruce!

He isn’t even Seelie. He’s the worst of all the Unseelie princes.

I can hardly believe it. I had the wickedest crush on him! I thought he was the one who was going to save us all, fighting the good fight, on the human side of the war. Turns out he
was
war—literally, as in the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’s War, riding alongside his three Unseelie prince brothers: Death, Pestilence, and Famine. Sure enough our myths were right. When they rode our world again everything went straight to hell. Nobody even knew he was alive. Cruce was supposed to have been killed three-quarters of a million years ago. Instead he was masquerading as V’lane all that time, disguising himself with glamour, infiltrating the Seelie court, manipulating events, orchestrating the prime opportunity to take what he wanted—dominion over both races.

Fae have patience like beaches have sand. ’Course, I guess patient is easy to be when you live, like, for-fecking-ever.

I also heard he was one of the four who raped M—that person whose name I’m not thinking—that day at the church when the Lord Master turned the princes loose on her.

And I’d told him I was going to give him my virginity one day! He’d brought me chocolates, been all flirty-flirty!

V’lane is Cruce.
Dude
. Sometimes that’s all you can say.

Tara holds Kat’s glare defiantly. “That doesn’t mean I want to set him free. I’m just saying he’s beautiful. Nobody can argue with that. He has wings like an angel.”

He
is
beautiful. And we have big, big problems. I went down to the catacombs last night, the instant everyone finally cleared out. I made my way through the underground maze until I found the chamber that once held the
Sinsar Dubh
. And still holds it—just in another skin.

V’lane doesn’t look like V’lane anymore. He’s sealed in the center of a block of ice, surrounded by a cage of glowing bars. His head is back, his eyes are iridescent fire, he’s roaring, and his enormous black-velvet wings are spread wide. Brilliant tattoos snake beneath skin that shimmers like gold dust. And he’s naked. If I hadn’t seen other penises in movies, I’d be worried about losing my virginity.

“Black wings, Tara,” Kat says. “As in black magic, as in ‘deadly.’ He was dangerous before. He’s a thousand times worse now. The King never should have let him read the whole Book. He should have stopped him.”

“Mac said the King didn’t want to leave the
Sinsar Dubh
split up,” says Colleen. “He was worried we wouldn’t be able to keep it locked down in two places.”

I dig around in a pocket of the backpack I always got over a shoulder—you never know what you might need when, and I’m always on the go—and pull out another Snickers bar. There’s that fecking name again. Eating soothes the bruise I’m getting from repeated sucker-punches to my belly.

“We couldn’t keep it locked down when it was in only one place,” Kat says.

“Because Rowena
let
it out,” Val says.

I learned that part of the story earlier this morning, listening to
sidhe
-seers talking in the showers. When the
Sinsar Dubh
took possession of Rowena last night, that person I’m not naming killed her. But not before Ro bragged about how she set the
Sinsar Dubh
free. And still, some folks are talking about having a service for the old bat! I say the Grand Mistress of the
sidhe-
sheep is dead. Hoo-fecking-rah! Break out the cake and party hats!

“It weakened Rowena,” Kat says.

Rowena was
born
weak. Power-hungry witch.

“Maybe Cruce will weaken us,” Kat says.

I plaster a sigh around a bite of candy bar and swallow it. The new temporary leader of the abbey and interim Grand Mistress of
sidhe
-seers around the world just made a big mistake. I learned a thing or two from that unnamed person when we used to hang together.
Sidhe
-sheep need a firm hand. Not firm like Ro’s, which was bullying, belittling, and tyrannical, but firm in a way that doesn’t make the herd stampede. Fear and doubt are major stampeders. Kat should have said something like what a good thing it was they were all so much stronger than Rowena. Even a kid can see what’s going on in the room down there. The
sidhe
-seers are afraid. Rowena is dead. Dublin is a riot-ravaged mess filled with monsters. One of the good guys turned out to be the bad guy. Their lives changed too quickly in too many ways for them to deal with. They’re easy targets to be swayed by the most persuasive, strongest leader, and that means Kat needs to become one, fast.

Before somebody a lot less capable and kind does.

Somebody like Margery, who’s even now watching the crowd through narrowed eyes, like she’s got a thermometer up its butt, taking its temperature. She’s a year older than Kat, and was part
of Ro’s inner circle when the old witch was alive. She’s not going to put up with a changing of the guard that doesn’t include her. She’ll make trouble every chance she gets. I hope Kat knows how treacherous she can be. Anyone that was ever close to Ro for longer than like—one second—has something seriously scary about her. I know. I was closest to her of all.
Sidhe
-sheep politics. Dude, I hate them. They tangle you up like sticky spiderwebs. I love living on my own!

Still, I miss the abbey every now and then. Especially when I think about them baking cookies and stuff. Hearing voices in the background when you doze is nice. Knowing even if you are misunderstood, you aren’t totally alone in the world isn’t the worst thing.

Kat’s right: the
Sinsar Dubh
we used to have locked up and magicked down beneath our abbey is nothing compared to what we’ve got under our floorboards now.

The problem is it doesn’t look like the
Sinsar Dubh
anymore.

All of the darkest magic and power of the Fae race is no longer trapped between the covers of a book. It’s in the body of a Fae prince in all his naked, winged glory. And if you’ve never seen a Fae prince before, that’s one jaw-dropping, eye-popping, mind-scrambling amount of glory.

It’s only a matter of time before somebody sets him free.

Kat hasn’t even made her way around to the killer-critical fact yet: lots of people know he’s down there now, crammed to the gills with every last bit of the deadly magic of the Fae race.

I know people. I’ve seen all the shapes and sizes they come in. Somebody’s going to be stupid enough to believe they can control him. Somebody’s going to find a way through that ice.

Jericho Barrons is only one of a lot of different folks that hunted the
Sinsar Dubh
for thousands of years. None of them ever knew where it was. If they had, they’d have descended on
our abbey back in the dark ages when a rough-piled, round stone tower was all that concealed the entrance to our underground city. And they would have pulled it, stone from stone, into rubble, until they got what they came for.

Now a whole bunch of humans and Fae know exactly where the most powerful weapon ever created is being stored.

Folks talk.

Soon the whole world is going to know it’s here.

I snort, imagining hordes descending on us, rioting, raging, brandishing weapons. Stupid
sidhe
-sheep too busy squabbling about the best way to fight back, to get around to fighting back. I sigh.

Kat glances up.

I stop breathing, hug my knees tight to my chest and stay perfectly still.

After a moment Kat shakes her head and goes back to the conversation.

I sigh again but softer.

She just made her second mistake.

Confronted by something she couldn’t explain, she pretended it wasn’t there. Dude, ostrich much?

Oh, yeah. Just a matter of time.

I wait a few minutes for things to get heated again, take advantage of the commotion and freeze-frame out.

I love moving the way I do.

I can’t imagine life any other way.

Whenever something is bugging me, all I need to do is zoom around the city, spy on all the slo-mo Joes trudging through, and I instantly feel a million times better.

I’ve got the coolest gig in the world.

I’m a superhero.

Until recently, I was the only one I knew of.

According to my mom, I didn’t make the normal toddler transition from crawling to walking. I went from lolling on my back, counting pudgy toes and cooing happily while she changed my diapers (I’ve never seen any reason to cry when someone is cleaning poop off you), to what she initially thought was teleporting. One second I was on the living room floor, the next I’d vanished. She was afraid the Fae had taken me—they used to do that to
sidhe
-seers if they discovered them—until she heard me rummaging around in the pantry trying to get a jar of baby food open. It was creamed corn. I remember. I still love creamed corn. Not much fuel-power there though. I burn through the punch of sugar-energy in no time.

I never got to go to school.

You don’t want to know how she kept me from leaving the house. There aren’t many options with a kid who can move faster than you can blink. And none of them are PC.

I’m not the only superhero in Dublin anymore, which annoys the feckity-feck out of me, but I’m slowly coming around to seeing it might be a good thing.

I was getting complacent. And that turns into sloppy if you’re not careful. Bored, too. It’s not much fun always being the best and fastest. A little competition keeps you on your toes, makes you try harder, live larger.

I’m all about that: living large.

I want to go out in a blaze of glory while I’m young. I don’t want to break piece by piece, lose my mind and die wrinkly and old. Given the current state of our world, I’m not sure any of us have to worry about that anymore.

Top on my list of dudes to beat are Jericho Barrons and his
men. Like me, they’re superfast and superstrong. Much as I hate to admit it—they’re faster. But I’m working on it.

Barrons can pluck me right out of thin air (dude, why isn’t it thick air? The things people say!) while I’m freeze-framing, which is what I call the way I get around. I start at point A, lock down a mental snapshot of everything around me, hit the gas, and in a blink I’m at point B. It’s only got a couple of downsides. One, I’m constantly bruised from running into things at top speed because some of the things I lock down on my mental grid aren’t stationary, like people and animals and Fae. Two, freeze-framing requires a ton of food for fuel. I have to eat constantly. It’s a pain in the butt collecting and carrying that much food. If I don’t eat enough, I get limp and wobbly. It’s pathetic. I’m a gas tank that’s either full or empty. There’s no half tank with me. You know those movies where folks wear rounds of ammo on their body? I wear protein bars and Snickers.

At least once a night I whiz over to Chester’s, Dublin’s underground hot spot for partying and scoring whatever your fantasy is and angling for a shot at immortality, owned and operated by Barrons’s go-to dude Ryodan, and I start killing every Fae hanging around outside it. It usually takes all of five seconds for his men to show up, but I can do a lot in five seconds.

Chester’s is a safe-zone. Killing Fae is prohibited there, no matter what they do. And they do some sick stuff.

Killing humans, however, isn’t prohibited at Chester’s. That’s a major issue with me, so I keep giving Ryodan grief and I’m not about to stop.

One of these nights I’m going to be faster than him, faster than all of them.

Then I’m going to slay every Fae in Chester’s.

Second on my list of competition are the Fae I hunt. Some of
them
can
teleport. They call it “sifting.” I don’t understand the physics of it. I just know it’s faster than freeze-framing. Which would worry me more if I didn’t have the Sword of Light, one of two weapons that can exterminate their immortal asses, so they leave me alone for the most part. She-who-isn’t-getting-named has the other weapon, the Spear.