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

by Karen Marie Moning

  “They have to catch me first. Why do you keep saying my name like that?”

  “Wake up. You’re caught,” TP says. “I know you’re not stupid. What are you doing? Dani! Dani!”

  “Same thing you always did. Taking a stand. Not backing down. Even if I don’t have all the answers and can’t predict how I’ll get out of this one, I will get out of this one.”

  I’m still waiting for a spear through my gut. Instead TP smiles and says, “Hold on to that thought.”

  “Wake up, Dani!”

  My face stings like somebody slapped me. I squint my eyes open when I thought they already were.

  Jo’s standing in front of me. My cheek stings. I’d rub it but I’m chained.

  “Where did TP go?” I say, confused.

  “What?” Jo says.

  I lick my lips, or try to. My mouth is so dry my tongue doesn’t make any difference. My lower lip is split and crusted with dried blood. The base of my skull hurts. I must have banged myself a good one passing out, or got hit in the back of my head when I was fighting Ryodan’s men.

  “I’m sorry I hit you but I was afraid you were … oh, Dani! What did he do to you? He beat you! Then I hit you, too!” She looks like she might cry. She touches my face gently and I flinch.

  “Get off me!”

  “I’m going to kill him,” she whispers, and something in the softly spoken words surprises me. Like she’s turning all bloodthirsty, becoming like me.

  I try to figure out if TP was the dream or Jo is, or they both are. I have the weirdest dreams sometimes. As if TP would actually bother trying to give me advice. I should have known it was a dream instantly by the fact that she wasn’t killing me.

  “I ran into him,” I tell her. “As in collided. Twice. That’s why my face is so beat up.” Well, it’s most of the reason.

  “Are you defending Ryodan? Look what he’s done to you! Dani, has he brainwashed you? Are you getting Stockholm syndrome?”

  “What the feck’s Stockholm got to do with any of this? Ain’t that some city in Sweden?”

  She wraps her arms around me and gets all in my space. It’s awkward with my hands chained above my head and my ankles shackled to the floor. She sort of hugs me and I can’t get her off me because I’m stuck.

  “Dude!” I give a whole body shrug, trying to dislodge her. She’s tenacious, lopping all over me. “What are you doing?”

  When she pulls back I see she’s crying. I must look pretty bad.

  “Why did you do it?” She sniffs and wipes her nose with the back of her hand. “We talked and talked about it, and can’t figure it out. You didn’t just wave a red flag at a bull. You sauntered right up to it, punched it in the face then tried to dance on its horns. Dani, what were you thinking?”

  I sigh. People ask the stupidest questions. Sometimes you don’t think. You just do. Some moments are too golden to pass up. You play—you pay. I’ve always been okay with that.

  I peer at her suspiciously. Jo can’t be here. Not in the guts of Chester’s. “You’re not real,” I say.

  She feels my forehead. “You’re running a fever.”

  I know. I’m dripping sweat and freezing cold. I always get a fever if I get dangerously hungry. It’s another fecking weakness. So many superstrengths. So many limits. I don’t let folks know about them. “Must have caught a cold,” I tell her. I have food stuffed in every pocket, but with my hands chained above my head I can’t get to one bite of it.

  “Get a protein bar out of my pocket and feed it to me.” If this is really happening, I’ll get strong again and my body temp will drop back to normal. If this is a dream, at least I’ll get to dream the taste of food. I’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen a key to these manacles lying around somewhere convenient?” I say with no hope. Ryodan’s not sloppy.

  Four protein bars later I know I’m not dreaming. My head is still throbbing but starting to clear. TP wasn’t real.

  But Jo is.

  She tells me word spread everywhere that I’d single-handedly taken on a bunch of Fae in Chester’s then sauntered out all cocky-like with an Unseelie prince. Margery insisted the Unseelie prince had killed me, and managed to convince a lot of sidhe-sheep to write me off, taking up right where Rowena left off, smearing my name.

  Kat had seen things differently. She’d done some investigating before making her decision. According to onlookers, the “prince” who’d walked me out hadn’t been wearing a torque. The Unseelie princes have silver torques around their necks that glow like they’re radioactive. The necklace seems to be part of them, inseparable like their tattoos and wings. That told Kat all she needed to know: if the prince wasn’t wearing a torque, it had to be Christian who’d escorted me out.

  I’m not sure how she made the next deductive leap, but I’m glad she did. She sent a group of girls to Chester’s to search for me, believing Ryodan had gone after me and captured me.

  I’m amazed by how speedily she acted. Maybe Kat’s going to do all right by the sidhe-seers. “How did she figure out I was missing so quickly?”

  “You’ve been gone for three days, Dani.”

  I’m stunned. I’ve been chained down here for three days? No wonder I’m starving.

  “How the feck did you find me? I figured I was like, buried in the dungeon of Chester’s or something.”

  “You are. I saw Ryodan get off an elevator hidden in the wall outside the retroclub. The door didn’t close all the way and I slipped in when nobody was looking.”

  I close my eyes and sigh.

  There were three mistakes in that sentence. (1) Ryodan doesn’t get seen if he doesn’t want to. (2) The doors around this place don’t stay slightly open. (3) Nobody slips into them without being noticed.

  The only way Jo saw Ryodan get off an elevator was if he let her.

  Which means he hadn’t been able to find my “little boyfriend” over the past three days. But he’d sure found somebody else to use against me.

  On the insides of my eyelids I see Jo chained, beaten.

  Ryodan hadn’t even had to leave his club. He just sat back and waited for whoever showed up first, looking for me.

  I open my eyes. “Get out of here, Jo,” I say. “Now.”

  “Neither of you are going anywhere,” Ryodan says as he steps from the shadows.

  SEVEN

  “I fall to pieces”

  I’m absurdly easy to break if you know the right buttons to push.

  If you’ve read any comics, you know superheroes have a critical vulnerability: the society they protect.

  Jo’s part of my society. Fact is, any sidhe-sheep chained up next to me would have me singing a new tune. Well, maybe not Margery.

  Actually, probably even her, too.

  The hard thing for me is knowing I can take more than everyone else. Like that stupid bunny that used to be in commercials all the time, I take a licking and keep on kicking. And punching. And breathing.

  Not true other folks. They die so easily.

  Besides, I’m not afraid of the big sleep. I figure it’s just another adventure.

  I try to talk Ryodan out of chaining Jo up.

  He doesn’t listen to me.

  Jo goes ballistic when he grabs her. Screaming and yelling and kicking. I’m kind of impressed by how hard she fights.

  I think watching Dublin get destroyed on Halloween, seeing our friend Barb get taken by the Sinsar Dubh and ridden as a machine-gun-toting bitch to massacre so many of us, plus living in a world where you have to shake your shoes out before you put them on to make sure you don’t get eaten by a Shade faster than you can say “Aw, shit” is messing with Jo’s head.

  She used to be like Kat, all even-tempered and cautious with decisions, didn’t have a sharp word for anyone.

  “I’m going to kill you, you bastard, you won’t get away with this!” she’s shouting. “Let me go! Get your hands off me, you son of a bitch!”

  Ryodan chains her
next to me. She struggles but it’s like watching a fly batting at a window, trying to get outside. You know it’s never going to work.

  I give her a look. “Got any more bright ideas, Jo? Try bringing a few babies for him to torture next time.”

  She gives her chains a violent jerk. We’re bolted to a stone wall.

  “Good luck with that.” If I couldn’t break them with my superstrength, she’s got a snowball’s chance in hell. I think he has the metal spelled. I think he has everything spelled. I want to know where he learns his spells so I can sign up for a crash course. If I’ve been down here three days, I should be, well, messier than I am. How did he keep me unconscious for three days? Put me in some kind of suspended animation? I seriously have to pee.

  “I was trying to help,” she says.

  “You should have just taken a baseball bat to my head. Put me out of my misery.” I could have held out down here forever until she went and served herself up to Ryodan as a weapon.

  Ryodan stands in front of us, legs apart, arms folded over his chest. He’s a big dude. I wonder if Jo knows he has fangs. I wonder what he is. I wonder why she’s staring at him like that. She hates him.

  I trash my pointless wonderings and cut to the chase. Procrastinating is number three on my Stupid List. You still end up exactly where you didn’t want to be, doing exactly what you didn’t want to do, with the only difference being that you lost all that time in between, during which you could have been doing something fun. Even worse, you probably stayed in a stressed-out, crappy mood the whole time you were avoiding it. If you know something is inevitable, do it and get it over with. Move on. Life is short.

  If he tortures Jo, I’ll cave.

  I know it.

  He knows it.

  Ergo, torturing her is a great big fat waste of time. His. Mine. Hers.

  “What do you want from me, Ryodan?” I say.

  “It’s decision time, Dani.”

  “Deaf much? I said, what do you want from me?”

  “You owe me compensation.”

  “Dude, the bush is ready. Why you still beating around it?”

  “I’ve lived a long time, kid, and I’ve never heard anyone mutilate the English language quite like you.”

  “How long is that?” Jo says.

  I yawn, big and dramatic. “Still beating. And me all bush-like.” I give an all-body, bushy bristle.

  His eyes narrow on me like he’s thinking. Like maybe he hasn’t decided exactly what he wants from me yet. That worries me. It should be real simple: he wants me to work for him. I know he’s not as bright as I am, so I help him out.

  “I’ll look into your little ice mystery, Ryodan. I’ll put it at the top of my priority list. Unchain us already.”

  “It’s not that simple anymore. You complicated the fuck out of things when you decided to defy me publicly. Nobody does that and lives.”

  “Breathing here,” I say.

  “Do you have to keep saying ‘fuck’ around her? She’s barely thirteen,” Jo says.

  “Fourteen,” I correct irritably.

  “My men want you dead. They’re pushing for a dramatic execution, in the club. They say it’s the only way to appease the patrons of Chester’s.”

  “I always wanted to go out in a big way,” I say. “Maybe we could do some fireworks, huh? I think there are some left up at that old petrol station on O’Clare.”

  “Nobody’s executing anyone,” Jo says. “She’s a child.”

  “I’m not a fecking child. I don’t think I was even born that way.”

  “I told them I believe you can be useful,” Ryodan says. “That I can control you.”

  I bristle and rattle my chains. Nobody controls me. Not anymore.

  “They say you’ll never answer to anyone. Not even Barrons is on my side.”

  No doubt because TP was telling Barrons to tell Ryodan to kill me. Or let her do it.

  “It’s eight against one,” he says.

  “It’s eight against two,” Jo says. “If you count her sister sidhe-seers—and you’d better—it’s eight against thousands.”

  “Your numbers have been severely diminished,” Ryodan says.

  “Worldwide, we’re over twenty thousand.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I say to Jo. “Why didn’t I know that?” To Ryodan, I say, “Dude, kill me or free me.”

  “If you kill her,” Jo says, “you’ll incur the wrath of every sidhe-seer in the world. They’ll hunt you. Dani’s a legend among us. We won’t lose her.”

  “If I decide to kill her,” Ryodan says, “no one will ever know what happened to either of you.”

  I blink, mentally replaying what Jo said again and again, but I can’t hear it enough. “Really? I’m a legend? Like, around the whole world they know of me? Say it again!” I preen. I had no idea. There might be a little swagger left in my body after all. I cock a jaunty hip.

  “Let her go,” Jo says to Ryodan, “and I’ll stay in her place.”

  “The feck you’ll stay!” I explode.

  “You’re offering to stay here. Chained up. With me. In exchange for her.” A smile plays at his lips.

  “As long as you have me as a hostage, she’ll behave.”

  “The feck you’ll stay!” I say again since nobody reacted like they were supposed to, like, by obeying me. Or paying any attention to me at all.

  “I haven’t forgotten what you did to my cell phone, sidhe-seer,” Ryodan says.

  “You were taking pictures on our property. It’s private,” Jo says.

  “You’re on my property. It’s private.”

  “I’m not taking pictures. I came to take back something that’s ours. Something you had no right to take.”

  “I’m not a something. Or a child,” I say.

  “She had no right to kill the patrons of my club. She’d been warned. Repeatedly.”

  “And you know how well she listens. You shouldn’t have brought her into your club and left her alone with a sword. Could you possibly be that stupid?”

  “Dudes, quit talking about me like I’m not here!”

  “Sidhe-seer, tread lightly,” he says to Jo, and his voice goes real soft. Soft from Ryodan is never good.

  “Let me stay in her place. She’s just a kid.”

  “I’m not a kid! And she’s not fecking staying here. Nobody’s staying here! Except maybe me!”

  “You do understand what it would mean,” he says to Jo, like I’m not even having a violent, noisy fight with a wall and four chains. “If she makes a single misstep, you’re dead.”

  I feel the blood drain from my face. I always misstep. Misstep is my middle name, right after Mega. I can’t not misstep. I have feet.

  “I understand.”

  “She doesn’t mean it!” I shout. “She doesn’t even know what she’s talking about! She doesn’t have any clue what you dudes are really like. Besides, I don’t really even care about her at all. You can kill her. So, you may as well let her go.”

  “Shut up, Dani,” Jo says.

  “You’ll have to sign an employment application,” Ryodan tells Jo.

  “Don’t sign it, Jo! He’s got some kind of spell on it.”

  “Am I being held hostage or applying for a job?” Jo says.

  “I’m short a few waitresses. Some of them were—” Ryodan gives me a look. “—collateral damage the other day.”

  “I didn’t kill any humans.”

  “Two of them had enough Unseelie in them that apparently you couldn’t tell the difference,” Ryodan says.

  I killed humans? How much Unseelie had they eaten?

  “You want me to be a waitress?” Jo says, horrified, like it’s a fate worse than death. “I tried to wait tables in high school. I can’t. I drop plates. I spill drinks. I’m a researcher. A linguist. I live in my head. I don’t wait tables.”

  “Conveniently, I have two applications handy.” Ryodan withdraws a folded packet of papers from his pocket.

  “Why two?
I ain’t waiting tables,” I say belligerently.

  “I have to serve Fae? As in take orders and fill them? And bring things to their tables?” Jo can’t seem to wrap her brain around it. Like she’d rather stay chained to the wall than wait tables.

  “And my men. Occasionally, I imagine, even me. With a smile.” He looks her up and down, slo-mo. “You’ll look good in the uniform. Do we have a deal.” In typical Ryodan fashion, his voice doesn’t rise at the end of the question. He knows they have a deal. He can read Jo like a book with see-through covers.

  My chains rattle as I test them with everything I’ve got. He is not putting Jo to work in the kiddie subclub. She’s got the kind of face that’s so delicate and pretty that she can wear really short hair like she does and look totally hot. Even those stupid glasses she wears when she reads just make her look good because they make her bones seem even more dainty. She has something ethereal. She is not wearing a short plaid skirt, tight white blouse, socks, and baby doll heels. She will not be waiting on him and his men! Chester’s will swallow her up like a tasty morsel and spit out blood and gristle.

  “No, Jo,” I say flatly. “Don’t you dare.”

  “We have a deal,” Jo says.

  He unchains Jo, hands her the “application” and a pen.

  She flattens it out on the wall and signs it without even reading it.

  He folds it up and hands it back to her. “Take the elevator back up the way you came. Lor is waiting for you there. He’ll get you a uniform. You start tonight. You have a single priority—make my patrons happy.”

  “Lor is waiting for me,” Jo says. She pushes a hand through her short dark hair and gives him a look that kind of surprises me, it’s got so much balls in it. “I thought you said your men expected you to kill us.”

  “If you don’t hand him the signed application, he will. I suggest you make sure he sees it the instant you get off the elevator.”

  “What about Dani?”

  “She’ll be up soon.”

  “She comes with me now,” Jo says.

  “Never. Tell. Me. What. To. Do.” Ryodan’s talking soft again, and I don’t know about Jo but it gives me a shiver when he speaks like that.