Iced Read online

  There’s black blood on my hands, goop in my hair, and my eyes are so swollen from my earlier collisions that I can barely see, but I don’t need to see much. I’ve got a homing device where Fae are concerned. I sense Unseelie. I slay.

  I feel a big bad one behind me, worse than any of the ones I’ve killed so far, oozing all kinds of power. Sword back, poised for the killing blow, I whirl and bring my blade slashing down—

  And miss!

  The Unseelie ducks, rolls, and springs lightly to his feet half a dozen tables away. He flips his long black hair over a muscled, tattooed shoulder and hisses at me.

  I lunge after him without even thinking and am about to slam into him when I realize what he is.

  I change direction mid-lunge and scramble back, feet pedaling air. Feck, feck, feck, one of the Unseelie princes found me!

  This is a battle I’m not up to today! I wasn’t expecting this because I never heard of any of the princes strolling into Chester’s!

  I crash into a table, fall over backward, roll onto all fours and launch myself away. I’m about to find out if I can freeze-frame faster than it can sift. I rip open a power bar, shove half of it in my mouth and start shifting gears when the Unseelie prince says, “Lass, what the bloody hell are you doing? Have you taken a look around?”

  I’m seeing through slits from all the swelling in my face, and my vision is a little dim, but I scan the place quick-like. All activity in the club has stopped. Fae and humans are lined up at balconies, staring at me from every level.

  I tune in to what they’re saying.

  “Crazy. The kid’s nuts. ”

  “Somebody needs to put that bitch down. ”

  “I’m not going near her. Did you see her move? Do you see what she’s holding?”

  “The Sword of Light,” a Fae says icily. “Our sword. ”

  “Take it from her!”

  “How dare she?”

  “Kill her now. ”

  “I bet I can sift faster than she can slay,” one growls.

  I toss my hair from my eyes, on all fours, every muscle tense, waiting. We’ll sure as feck find out.

  “Who permitted that … that revolting … human … thing in here? Where is our host? This is neutral ground!”

  “He swore an oath to us. He has failed us!”

  I can’t help but smirk. Assuming Ryodan survives the collapse, he’s going to be seriously pissed. I just accomplished exactly what he’d tried to “hire” me to prevent. Ruined his rep. The whole club now knows Ryodan can’t guarantee safety at Chester’s. It’ll be all over Dublin within an hour. I might as well print up a special edition of The Dani Daily, broadcasting it. Good. If fewer folks come to Chester’s, fewer folks will die.

  Page 17

 

  I glance back at the dude I initially thought was an Unseelie prince. The moment he’d spoken, I’d relaxed. Now that I’m slo-mo again, I see the differences.

  I almost killed a human. Well, a human that’s in the process of becoming something else. If he hadn’t spoken up, I still might not be sure who he was, but I’ve never heard a Fae call anybody “lass. ” I don’t think they’d stoop to it, not even to fake someone out.

  It’s the Scot who crashed my water tower party the same night Ryodan did.

  They’d faced off with each other, all bristling hostility, giving me time to escape. It had seemed he was there either to help me or to feck with Ryodan. Whichever—that makes him good for me.

  This dude has problems as big as mine, maybe bigger. I consider him. He doesn’t like Ryodan. And he’s got some serious mojo. I can feel it shivering in the air around him. He could be a valuable ace in my hidey-hole. If he can be trusted.

  “You’re a MacKeltar, right?”

  “Christian,” he says.

  “Aren’t your uncles some kind of warlocks or something? They helped hunt the Sinsar Dubh. ”

  “Druids, lass. Not warlocks. ”

  “Can you fight?”

  He gives me a mocking look. “I don’t need to. I can walk you out of here without lifting a finger. ”

  Big talk. I decide to let him try.

  He flanks me and we head for the door. Between what he looks like and my sword, every last occupant of Chester’s draws back as we pass. I can’t help but swagger a little.

  Hisses, jeers, threats follows us.

  But no one makes a move.

  I could get used to this. Who needs TP? I got what looks like an Unseelie prince at my side and nobody, but nobody—not even the Unseelie—mess with their princes. Oh, yeah, this guy’s going to be a major plus in my column. I take a sidewise glance at him.

  If I can get past that he looks like the most terrifying of all the Unseelie.

  Beyond him I catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror. Between the bruises, swollen eyes, cuts, and blood of all colors, I’m not looking so hot myself.

  Sword up, I squint through puffy eyelids and memorize faces on the way out.

  Out in the streets, in the thick of battle, sometimes you have to make hard choices. Sometimes you can’t save everyone.

  Humans that hang at Chester’s are never going to be at the top of my list.

  FOUR

  “I want a girl with a mind like a diamond”

  I’m attracted to her.

  She’s fourteen. And I’m attracted to her.

  I’m eight years older than she is. Eleven if you count the three years I spent trying to escape the Fae Silvers. Eight or eleven: what’s the difference? It makes me one seriously fucked-up Highlander.

  Or whatever the hell I am.

  She’s a bloody mess, literally. Covered with guts and gore from killing, her nose is crusted with dried blood, she’s bruised, and she’s going to have two fierce black eyes before nightfall. It’s too late for ice to knock down the swelling.

  And she’s on fire.

  Light shines out of her delicate, battered face, blazes in her green eyes. She’s got a head of curly red hair that falls halfway down her back. Everything about her is brilliant and intense. She’s aware and invested in the world in ways most adults never get around to being. I know. I was once, too. Back when I thought hearing the truth in everyone’s lies was my biggest problem. She does everything one hundred and ten percent, with all her heart.

  That’s what gets me.

  Attraction isn’t always about sex. Sometimes it’s about something far subtler, and far bigger.

  I watched her fight.

  And something stirred inside me that I thought was dead.

  Not my dick. That’s working great. Better than ever. Always hard. Always ready.

  What stirred was like gentle rain on a warm summer day. Sweet. Tender. Something I used to be. With my clan. With my nieces and nephews.

  She reminds me of my Highlands—to which I can never return.

  I know exactly what she’s going to be one day. Bloody hell is she ever.

  Worth. Waiting. For.

  Too bad I won’t be here anymore.

  Take her now.

  “Fourteen,” I growl. I’ve gotten good at arguing with the voice inside my head. I get a lot of practice. An Unseelie prince wouldn’t give a second thought about her age. An Unseelie prince would see only that she has the right parts, and temper to spare. The bigger the fight, the better the feast.

  “Why the feck does everybody keep saying that like it’s some kind of insult? Like, maybe I managed to forget for a minute?” she says crossly. “Geez! I’ve never seen so many people obsessed with my age!”

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  Dani bristling is something to see. I smile.

  She takes a wary step away from me. “Dude, you planning to eat me or something?”

  My smile vanishes. I look away.

  I wear a mask. A face that isn’t mine.

  I used to have what women called a killer smile.
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  Now I have a killer’s smile.

  “ ’Cause, like Ryodan already bit me once today. I’m not in the mood for any more teeth in me anywhere. ”

  Ryodan bit her? One more reason to kill him. I look back at her, my face void of all expression. There’s no point in trying to look reassuring. This face can’t pull it off. “No biting. I promise. ”

  She squints at me suspiciously. “Dude, what are you? Unseelie or human? What happened to you?”

  “Mac happened to me. ” She flinches when I say it, and I wonder why. I blame Jericho Barrons, too. If I survive what I’m turning into, I’ll kill them both. Hate ripples through me, dense and black and suffocating. If not for them, I’d still be me. Then again, if Mac hadn’t done what she’d done, I wouldn’t be here at all. Then again, if Barrons hadn’t done what he’d done, or rather failed to do, what Mac did might not have turned me into this. Barrons didn’t check my tattoos before we performed a dangerous Druid ritual, then he abandoned me in the Silvers to die. When Mac found me in the Silvers, she fed me Unseelie to keep me alive. It’s impossible to decide which one of them I blame the most. So I blame both and I’m getting happier about that every day.

  I saw Mac a few nights ago, across the club at Chester’s, looking blond and beautiful and happy. I want to take all that shiny-happy-blondness, twist it into a garrote, and strangle her with it. Hear her beg, and kill her anyway, love every minute of it.

  Later that night, I’d stared at myself in the mirror for a long time. Arm bent behind my head, scratching my back with a knife—it itches all the time now—relishing the slide of warm blood on my skin as it ran down my spine into my jeans. I used to hate blood. Now I could bathe in it. Mother’s milk.

  “Yeah, she does that,” Dani agrees with a sigh. “She happened to me, too. ”

  “What did she do to you?”

  “It’s more like what she will do to me if she catches me,” she says. “Don’t want to talk about it. You?”

  “Don’t want to talk about it. ”

  “Better things to talk about anyway. So, what were you doing at Chester’s?”

  Good question. I have no bloody clue. I think the sheer number of Unseelie gathered calls to something in my blood. I don’t know why I go half the places I go anymore. Sometimes I don’t even remember the hours leading up to it. I just become aware that I’m someplace new with no memory of when I decided to go or how I got there. “I wanted a beer. Not many choices left in Dublin anymore. ”

  “No shit,” she agrees. “Not just for beer, for everything. Which side are you on?” she says bluntly. “Human or Fae?”

  It’s a good question. I don’t have a good answer.

  I can’t tell her I don’t discriminate. I despise everyone. Well, almost. There’s this fourteen-year-old redhead with a mind like a diamond. “If you’re asking if I’ve got your back, lass, I do. ”

  She narrows her eyes and peers at me. We’re standing outside Chester’s in a pool of light. The sky is so overcast it looks like dusk at three in the afternoon. I get a sudden image of us from above: slim, delicate-faced young girl in a long black leather coat, hands on her hips, staring up at a Highlander-going-Unseelie prince. The image is painful. I should be a good-looking twenty-two-year-old college student with a killer smile and a bright future ahead of me. We’d plot and plan and fight the good fight together. That version of me would watch out for her. Make sure nobody does to her what the voice in my head tells me the first Unseelie that catches her without her sword is going to do. What a part of me wants to do, too. Fury fills me. At them. At me. At everything. “You never take that sword off your body, right?”

  She backs up a step, hands going to her ears. “Dude, my hearing works great. You don’t need to yell. ”

  I didn’t know I was. But a lot of things come out differently than I mean them to now. “Sorry. I’m just saying, you do realize what will happen to you if one of the Unseelie catches you. Right?”

  “Never going to happen,” she says smugly.

  “With that attitude, it will. Fear is healthy. Fear is good. It keeps you on your toes. ”

  Page 19

  “Really? ’Cause I think it’s a waste of time. Bet you don’t fear nothing,” she says admiringly.

  Every time I look in the mirror. “Sure I do. That you’ll get sloppy and slip up and one of them will grab you. Snuff you out. ”

  She tilts her head, eyes narrowed on my face. Not many people look me full in the face anymore. Not for long anyway. “Maybe you aren’t all Unseelie prince yet. Maybe we can, like, work out some kind of arrangement. ”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “I want to shut down Chester’s. Torch it. Exterminate it. ”

  “Why?”

  She cuts me a look of scorn and disbelief. “You saw it in there! They’re fecking monsters! They hate humans. They use them and eat them and kill them. And Ryodan and his men let them!”

  “Say we do close down the place, say we burn it to the ground. They’ll just find another place to go. ”

  “No they won’t,” she insists. “They’ll pull their heads out. They’ll smell the coffee percolating and see we saved them!”

  A rush of emotion, cloyingly sweet as funeral lilies, floods me, swells my tongue with a taste both familiar and sickening. She’s tough, smart, capable, a stone-cold killer when she needs to be.

  And she’s so bloody naïve.

  “They’re at Chester’s because they want to be at Chester’s. Make no mistake about that, lass. ”

  “No. Fecking. Way. ”

  “Yes fecking way. ”

  “They’re confused!”

  “They know exactly what they’re doing. ”

  “I thought you were different but you’re not! You’re just like Ryodan! Just like everyone. Ready to write them all off. You don’t see that some people need saving. ”

  “You don’t see that most people are beyond saving. ”

  “Nobody’s beyond saving! Nobody! Ever!”

  “Dani. ” I say her name tenderly, savoring the pain she makes me feel.

  I turn and walk away. There’s nothing for me here.

  “So, that’s it, then?” she yells after me. “You won’t help me fight either? Gah! Sheep! You’re all big fat fecking sheep waggling big fat fecking sheep asses!”

  She’s too young. Too innocent.

  Too human. For what I’m becoming.

  FIVE

  “Our house is a very very very fine house”

  “Hungry?” Dancer says as I bang in the door and throw my backpack and MacHalo on the couch.

  “Starving. ”

  “Cool. Went shopping today. ”

  Me and Dancer love to go “shopping,” aka looting. When I was a kid, I used to dream that I got forgotten inside a department store after it closed with nobody around, which meant I could have anything I wanted.

  That’s the world now. If you’re tough enough to brave the streets, and got balls enough to go into the dark stores, anything you can carry out is yours. First thing I did when the walls went down was hit a sporting goods store and cram a duffel bag full of high-top sneakers. I burn through them quick.

  “Found some canned fruit,” he says.

  “Dude!” It’s getting harder to find. Plenty of the ick-stuff on the shelves. “Peaches?” I say hopefully.

  “Those weird little oranges. ”

  “Mandarin. ” Not my favorite but better than nothing.

  “Found some ice cream toppings, too. ”

  My mouth instantly waters.

  One of the things I miss most is milk and all the things it made possible. A while back, a couple of counties to the west, some folks had three milk cows that the Shades didn’t get, but then other people tried to steal them and they all shot each other. And the cows. I never did get that part of it. Why shoot the cows? All that milk and butter and ice cream re-moo-ved fro
m our world forever! I snicker, cracking myself up. Then I see the table and the spread of food and it cracks me up more. “You expecting an army?”

  “Of one. I know how you eat. ”

  And he’s fascinated by it. Sometimes he just sits and watches me. Used to freak me out but not so much anymore.

  I decimate the feast, then we sack out on the couch and watch movies. Dancer’s got everything wired for power, with the quietest generators I’ve ever seen. He’s smart. He survived the fall without a single superpower, no family, and no friends. He’s seventeen and all alone in the world. Well, technically he has family but they’re somewhere in Australia. With splinters of Faery reality slicing everything up, no planes flying and nobody about to take a boat out, they may as well be dead.

  Page 20

 

  If they aren’t.

  Nearly half the world is. I know he thinks they’re dead. We don’t talk about it. I know it from the things he doesn’t say.

  Dancer was in Dublin checking out Trinity College’s Physics Department, trying to decide where he wanted to go to grad school when the walls fell, leaving him cut off and alone. Home-schooled by multiple tutors and smarter than anybody I ever met, he finished college six months ago, speaks four languages fluently and can read three or four more. His folks are humanitarians, über-rich from old money. His dad is or was some kind of ambassador, his mom a doctor who spent her time organizing free medical care for third world countries. Dancer grew up all over the world. I have a hard time wrapping my brain around his kind of family. I can’t believe how well he adapted. He impresses me.

  I watch him sometimes when he’s not watching me. He catches me now.

  “Thinking how hot I am, Mega?” he teases.

  I roll my eyes. That kind of stuff isn’t between us. We just hang together.

  “Speaking of hot …”

  I roll my eyes bigger, because if he’s finally about to say something about how much prettier I am since the Gray Woman took my looks then gave me back a little extra, I’m out of here. He’s been cool so far about not commenting. I like it that way. Dancer’s … well, Dancer. He’s my safety zone. There’s no pressure here. It’s just two kids in a fecked-up world.

  “… try some hot water. Mega, you’re a mess. I got the shower working again. Go take one. ”

  “It’s just a little blood—”

  “It’s a bucket. Maybe two. ”

  “—and a few bruises. ”