Текст книги "Iced"

Автор книги: Karen Marie Moning

Соавторы: Karen Marie Moning
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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 29 страниц)

Eighteen

“I can be your hero, baby”

I find her stumbling through the streets, bleeding to death. If not for all that hair, I might not have recognized her. She’s covered with blood, it’s on her clothes, matted in her curls, crusted on her face. Her long coat is flayed and hangs in tatters from her shoulders. It looks like she went through a dicer.

I don’t see her sword anywhere. I look around, nothing shiny in the streets but her.

I roar and she clamps her arms around her head and falls to her knees, and I remember how much noise I’m capable of making and kick myself. I deafened a human woman I recently had sex with. I broke her arm, too. I didn’t mean to. I can’t get used to what’s happening to me. Try living your whole life one way then abruptly being something else. It’s not easy to remember what you are every single bloody fucking second.

Except enraged. That, I’m aware of all the time. It never diminishes, never stops. The blackouts where I lose chunks of time are getting more frequent, lasting longer.

She topples in the street. I throw myself from the roof, land on the balls of my feet, and gather her in my arms. Where was I when she needed me? Fucking another faceless woman. Trying to defuse the constant lust.

She feels so slight against my chest.

I’m not surprised to feel myself trembling. I’m touching my goddess.

“Och, lass, what’ve you done to yourself now?” I push hair from her face. There’s so much blood that I can’t see what’s causing it. How is she even walking? It makes me crazy that she’s in this city, without a guardian or consort, always getting into trouble. I want to lock her up somewhere I can keep her safe forever. Someplace white and shining and beautiful, where nothing ever goes wrong.

Her brain has more muscles than her body, and less sense. Her passion for life pushes her limbs further than they were meant to go. She’s going to burn herself to ash if she doesn’t find someone or something that takes her all the way down to ground zero and recharges her. She needs to crash as hard as she lives or she’ll die young. I can’t stand the thought of her dying. If I knew how, I would make her Fae so she would never die. Doesn’t matter that I hate being it myself, or that she would, too. Immortality is immortality.

I run with her, careful to move easy. I take her where I’ve pictured her a thousand times but knew better. I still know better. I’m doing it anyway.

Just one time before I turn into the villain of this piece, just one time before I become the fourth and final Unseelie prince, I want to be her Highlander. And her hero.

She’ll remember, when there’s nothing else left of me worth remembering.

I can’t wait till I grow up enough that I stop having superhero growing pains. Waking up confused and cross all the time sucks. My hair is in my face and it makes me so mad for a sec that I almost tear it out at the scalp, trying to get it out of my eyes, and it’s matted, then my bracelet gets stuck in it and there’s something crusty—“Ew,” I say irritably, then somebody else has their hands in my hair, trying to gently disentangle my wrist from my hair.

Who? What? Where?

I’m always doing a mental check when I first wake up, trying to remember what happened before I fell asleep so I can connect to where I am and how I got there. When I first got run of the abbey (dude, like a million times bigger than my cage with Mom!) I was constantly knocking myself out because I couldn’t get over how far and fast I was able to run and giddiness made me a freeze-framing train wreck. I’m never real sure when I first wake up if I went to sleep or just managed to brain myself unconscious again. Then that fecker Ryodan knocked me out, too, and now I have to add that in to my worries when I wake.

Memory slams me upside the head. I get so mad I yank my bracelet off my head along with a good chunk of hair, and feel frantically for my sword even though I know it’s not at my hip or anywhere else.

A man curses. My eardrums vibrate painfully and my head feels like it might split.

I open my eyes. “Christian, mute it!” I shove my hair out of my face and look up. I’m lying in bed and he’s sitting next to me, looking down at me. Something’s different. He doesn’t look quite so scary. I take that back. Yes, he does, but either I’m getting better at reading his expressions or he’s getting better at making them, because there’s like an ounce of remorse in his iridescent eyes. Dude. His eyes are full Fae now! They weren’t last time I saw him.

“Sorry, lass. But I almost had the bracelet free. You tore some of your hair out. You might have waited a second longer.” He picks up the thatch of hair I yanked out at the root and flattens it straight between his fingers. Curl springs back instantly. “Stubborn as the head it came from,” he murmurs. Then he does the weirdest thing. He puts it in his pocket. Maybe the dude collects hair. I got bigger worries on my mind.

“He took my sword! The fecker actually took my sword!” I can’t believe it. I have no way to kill my enemies. I could hunt them all day long – and do a great big fat nothing with them when I catch them. It makes me so nuts I can’t stand it. I try to push up from the bed but my legs aren’t a hundred percent.

“Who took your sword?”

“Inspector Jayne. I’m going to kill him.”

“HE DID THIS TO YOU?”

I get an instant migraine, flop down, cover my head with my arms and burrow beneath the pillows.

He sighs so loud I still hear it, even with my ears covered.

“Sorry, lass. Did he?”

I’m not taking my hands from my ears. I think about telling him yes so he’ll go after Jayne for me, but I don’t like to lie unless the payoff is huge. Lies are horny little buggers, they breed like rabbits and bound around just as insanely and then you have to try to keep track of them. “I got cut up myself but it’s his fault. He startled me and I freeze-framed too soon.” Speaking of cuts, I don’t feel as bad as I did and I don’t seem to be bleeding anymore.

“You want help killing him?”

He sounds a little too eager. Like homicidal maniac eager. “Don’t need no stinking help,” I say crossly. My eardrums hurt. “I mean not that your help is stinking or anything. Your help is totally cool. I just want to do it myself.”

“Would you come out from under there, lass?”

“Would you, like, never yell again? You’re slaying me. I got superhearing.” I poke my head out. “Where am I?” I’m in a cloud of down pillows and comforters, in a high bed, in the corner of a huge room.

“My place.”

I look around. Cool digs. He’s holed up in a rehabbed industrial warehouse, one of those kinds with a giant living area that has no walls except for the ones you make with furniture and stuff. There’s lots of brick and wood floors and exposed heating ducts, tons of light spilling in tall windows and a massive flat-screen 3D TV in front of a ginormous comfy-looking couch. There’s a pool table and some old video game machines and an awesome bar, a kitchen with stainless steel appliances, and no racks or torture instruments visible anywhere. It’s just the kind of place a college guy would die for – too bad he’s not one anymore, but hey, we all have the things we need to pretend. No scary-looking knife collections. No red, no black, their favorite colors. The place is totally not Unseelie prince.

A shaft of rosy light is shining on me and I look up. The bed is under a skylight, the sun’s setting and it’s got one of those new, strange Fae hues to it, brilliant orangey pink. I could sprawl in bed and watch the stars at night. I like it being pushed in the corner, giving me wall at my right and back, leaving only two sides to defend. Feels snug. Makes me think about rearranging some of my own rooms. I’m fascinated by the way other folks live, and love to look in other people’s houses. “Aw, man, you ever move out, I’m moving in!”

“Like it, do you, lass?” he says, and his voice sounds funny. Thick and weird.

I look down at him and jerk. “Something on my face?” He’s staring at me hard, eyes intense, and what’s looking out of them doesn’t look like it belongs in this place of brick and wood and sunshine at all. It belongs in the dark somewhere, with razor blades, about to do something real nasty.

“No. Your face is lovely, lass. The sunset looks good on you.” He reaches a hand out toward my face and I go real still.

“Dude, you’re scaring me.”

He looks at me but it’s like he’s not seeing me at all, so I sit there with his hand about an inch from my face and look back and think about wild animals. About how they’ll attack if they smell fear, not that I feel it, but when you’re staring at an Unseelie prince, even though you know he started out human, it’s kind of hard to predict what might happen next. This isn’t a scenario I can lock down on my mental grid and freeze-frame through. This obstacle course has too many unknown variables.

He drops his hand without touching me, pushes up from the bed and goes to the kitchen. He braces his fists on the island and leans there with his back to me. He’s bigger than he was when I first saw him up on my water tower. The back of his shirt is stained with blood and his spine presses knobby and weird against it. It’s creepy.

I scoot to the exit side of the bed, thinking I’ll just be moseying along now, when I realize I’m not wearing enough to get up. I only got on a bra and underwear. I sink back down and tuck my knees up. Not that I want to draw attention to the fact, but looking around yields no results. “Where are my clothes?”

“Destroyed.”

He undressed me! He must have washed me, too, because I’m not covered with blood. Holy high wire! An Unseelie death-by-sex Fae that’s having all kinds of temper problems undressed and cleaned me up. “Do you, like, have any other clothes I could wear?”

“Don’t use that tone with me.”

“What tone?”

“The one that thinks I’m some kind of freak predator that molests children. I’m not a freak and you’re not a child. I undressed you, lass. I cleaned you up. I healed you. I will never hurt you.”

“How did you heal me?”

“Fed you my blood.”

My gag reflex is instant and uncontrollable. I retch dry and noisy. Unlike a lot of other folks I know, drinking blood doesn’t sound cool to me at all. It grosses me out. Same with eating Unseelie flesh; I’ve never done it and never will. I’m staying an Unseelie-flesh virgin all my life. I’m not even tempted by the possibility that it could make me stronger and faster than I already am. Dude, you got to draw your lines in the sand somewhere and hold them. It’s especially important when the sand keeps shifting beneath your feet.

“It’s potent. Works better than Unseelie flesh. A few drops in your mouth and …” He turns around and smiles at me. I think. Tattoos rush beneath the skin of his face, shadowing the planes and valleys, making it hard to decide just what that twist of his lips means. “There’s really only one question: would you rather have died?”

That’s an easy one for me. I’d never rather that. Not under any circumstances. I’ll take survival at any price. Always. “No. Thanks for the blood, dude. Means a lot.” I hate admitting this next part but I’m pretty sure it’s true. “You saved my life. I won’t forget it.” I smile back at him, then I just sit there trying not to gape at his reaction. He totally changes and I see the Highlander he was. His eyes go brown and playful and he looks college-guy hunky again; the tattoos recede from his face. Even his muscles change, smooth, and suddenly his body is more human.

He tosses me a candy bar. I catch it, rip it open and munch it, and begin making plans to get my sword back. I know Jayne. He knows if I survive I’ll come after it, so he’ll take it somewhere he thinks I can’t get to it. He won’t want to waste too many of his men guarding it because he wants them out on the street, fighting. I waste a couple secs trying to figure out where he’d take it, then realize I don’t have to. All I have to do is spy on him and follow him back to wherever he takes the Fae he catches to be slaughtered. I can’t believe he’s so stupid he really thinks he’ll be able to keep it!

“Stay there and I’ll get you some clothes,” Christian says.

He lopes off, moving long-limbed and easy, not gliding in the weird way the princes do. Down the other end of the long room he rummages through an armoire, and comes back with a pair of flannel pj bottoms with a drawstring waist and a huge cream fisherman’s sweater.

I suit up under the covers, tying off my waist tight and rolling up the legs and arms about a hundred times. When he tosses me a pair of balled-up socks as he heads off to the kitchen, I’m distracted, still thinking about Jayne, and miss them. They go sailing past me, hit the wall and fall down in the crack. I roll over and reach down, rooting around for them.

It takes me a second to figure out what I close my hand on.

Hair. Attached to a head. There’s a head in the narrow space between the bed and the wall. I freeze, totally horrified and massively grossed out.

I jerk my hand back and just sit there, swallowing the creeped-out sound trying to claw its way out of my throat, then look over my shoulder at him. He’s humming a weird song under his breath that sounds a lot like the music they play at Chester’s and disappearing into a pantry off the kitchen.

I force myself to reach back down and pat around, never taking my eyes off the pantry door. “I’m hungry, Christian,” I call. When he answers, I can make a good guess at how deep the pantry is, how far in it he’s gone. How much time I have to figure out what the feck is going on here.

The head has a neck attached to it, and sure enough there’s a body, too. It’s naked and female and human. She’s stiff with rigor mortis and ice cold.

I barely let myself breathe. I hear boxes being moved around on shelves.

“Sorry, lass, I’ll have more for you in a second. I thought I had some Snickers in here but so far I’m only finding Almond Joy.”

I yank my hand out of the crack and scoot back to the middle of the bed, and when I answer him I sound relaxed, playful. “Aw, dude, keep looking. You know how I love my Snickers.”

The boxes stop moving. “Something wrong, lass?”

There’s a dead woman wedged between Christian’s bed and the wall. Normally I’d say that’s a whole lot of wrong and I’d get real vocal about it, but I’m in the killer’s apartment, wearing his pjs with no shoes and I got no fecking sword that kills Fae because that fecker Jayne took it, so I’m in no hurry to do that right now.

There’s no way I tipped him off. My delivery was perfect. “No, nothing. Just starving out here!” Another flawless lie. I may not do it often but I shine at it like I do most things.

He steps out of the pantry and looks at me. The Highlander is gone. He’s full Unseelie prince, iridescent eyes tinged with crimson. “Och, lass, Mac never told you, did she?”

“Told me what?”

“I’m a walking lie detector, Dani, my darling.”

“Nobody is.”

“It’s inherited, like your sidhe-seer gifts.”

“Which I’m going to use to kick your ass from here to next week.”

“And that was one big fat fuck of a lie. You found her, didn’t you? I knew I should have put her away. But you were here, and bleeding so much, and I needed her off the bed. Saving you was all that mattered.”

“So you shoved her off the side of the bed and thought I wouldn’t notice? You stuffed her in a crack!” My hands are fists. The ignominy of it. Dead and disposed of like a used condom. If I hadn’t missed the socks, I’d never have known. I’d have left thinking Christian was wicked cool for saving me and not been one ounce the wiser that I’d been in bed next to a dead woman, eaten and dressed without even seeing her two feet away. “Dude, you are one sick feck.”

“Och, Dani, my love,” he says, gliding toward the bed, “you’ve really no idea.”

Nineteen

“I stand alone”

I kick up into freeze-frame without even thinking. I don’t lock one thing down on my mental grid. I hope I do a lot of damage, break everything I hit and just don’t knock myself out, because I have a feeling if I do, I’ll wake up strapped down to a rack with an insane ex-Highlander about to do seriously fecked-up things to me.

If he can sift, I’m dead meat.

I make it to the door but he’s there in front of me, arms spread, crouched low, looking like he’s about to bum-rush me and take me off my feet. His face is contorted with anger, kaleidoscopic tattoos rush beneath his skin. His eyes are full black. Only thing that’s missing to complete the Unseelie prince picture is a radioactive torque and huge black wings spreading, getting ready to crush me in a deadly embrace. I backpedal frantically and he lunges.

Then I’m on the floor and he’s on top of me, and I know the second he hits me that Christian is so much stronger than me that I don’t stand a chance of taking him. I can’t believe the strength I feel in his body! The Unseelie part of him has kicked in with a vengeance. It’s not just power oozing off him. He’s turning into pure sex just like the rest of them. I shake my head, trying to keep it clear. I think about horrible things like the dead woman stuffed into the space between his bed and the wall, and how I don’t want to end up like her.

I’m flat on my back and he’s got my wrists and he’s stretching my hands above my head. I curse and struggle and kick but it’s like fighting a concrete wall. Nothing, and dude, I do mean nothing, seems to have any impact on him. I head-butt him. He laughs and drops his face into my shoulder, and sniffs me!

I bite his ear, try to tear it off his head. Blood fills my mouth, gagging me, and I let go.

“Dani, Dani, Dani,” he says like he doesn’t even feel it. “Don’t fight me. You don’t need to fight me. I’ll never hurt you. Not you. You’re my brightest shining star.”

I ain’t nobody’s bright shiny nothing! He’s a certifiable lunatic! “Get off me!” Up close the death-by-sex Fae part of him is doing wicked bad things to me. Things I don’t like feeling. My mouth is dry and I’m seeing those graphic images plastered inside my skull. Christian. Naked. Doing the things I seen Ryodan doing. And I want to watch and I don’t want to watch and I have to get the feck out of here now! “Can you even feel? Or are you as dead inside as that woman? Why did you even bother saving me? So you could kill me slower?”

“It’s not like that. Would you hold still and listen to me for a second?”

“There’s nothing you can say that matters!”

“It’s hard to talk to you when I’m touching you.”

“Dude, quit sniffing me! That’s just rude. Get off me!”

“I can’t. You’ll run.”

“If you really didn’t kill her, you’ll let me go. You’ll trust me to come around. Give me room to breathe.”

“If I let you go, will you sit down and hear me out, lass?”

He’s relaxed since we’re kind of negotiating but he’s a lie detector and I know I can’t answer that last question, so I take my best shot and knee him in the balls with everything I’ve got. There’s no such thing as a dirty fight when you’re fighting to win.

He roars so loud my head just about blows apart. Then he’s off me and curled in a ball, howling. I’ve kneed a few dudes before. Got to out there on the streets sometimes. Never seen one react so bad. I wonder if it’s because he was hard as a rock when I hit him, so I had to twist really hard to get to his balls and I came up on them from underneath and probably mashed his … uh, yeah, Mega, now’s a good time to run.

I blow out the door so hard I blast it off the hinges.

This morning when I left Chester’s after almost dying and coming back to life – I think it was this morning, I spend so much time unconscious lately that I’m never sure if I’ve been out for a few hours or a couple of days – I was trying to decide what to do with the rarity of a whole day of free time. But then I nearly got killed again, this time by exploding frozen people, then Jayne took my sword, then I passed out from blood loss, got cleaned up by an Unseelie prince and drank his blood, found a dead woman practically in bed with me, and now I’m out on the streets again and feck if it’s not time for me to report to work again!

I can’t decide which of those things is the worst.

Dude, sucky day. Free time, my ass. I barely survived it.

I bounce from bare foot to bare foot, freeze-framing with all I’ve got, skinning up my heels something fierce, waiting for Christian to sift into the spot in front of me. Knowing if he does, I’m going so fast I’ll knock myself out cold on him and probably wake up dead. Knowing I don’t have the one weapon that would protect me from him because Jayne took it.

Mac has one, though.

Bet I could take her.

Way I see things, I got three options.

Go to Chester’s, use Ryodan as a shield against Christian while making him help me get my sword back.

Go straight after Jayne myself, knowing Christian is hot on my heels.

Go after Mac and take the spear. Barrons might be in the way. Who am I kidding? Barrons would definitely be in the way, and even if he wasn’t and I took her spear, he’d come after me. Then I’d have Christian hunting me, Ryodan pissed at me for missing work, and Barrons breathing down my neck.

A day in the life of me. The stuff I have to put up with.

I’m always thinking things are as bad as they can get and they get worse. I nearly crash into something in the street, one of those fecking variables that move off my predicted grid, like people, animals, and Fae.

“Stay out of my way, human!” it hisses.

I want to drop out of freeze-frame and kick this monster’s ass all the way to dead. I haven’t seen her since the night Mac saved me from her, and forced her to give me back my good looks. I almost died that night, too. I almost die a lot. Superheroes do.

“You stay out of mine, you ugly old bitch!” I hiss back at the Gray Woman.

Then she’s gone on her way and me on mine. She’s off to hunt and kill and I’ve got an itch I can’t scratch. My hand closes on nothing at my waist.

I need my sword like I need to breathe.

I detour into a sporting goods store, jam shoes on my feet, grab an oversized fleece pullover to pull on over my sweater because its fecking cold for May, and dash off again, heading for my best shot at success. Trying to take on Jayne and his men with Christian trying to kill me is a weak shot. I don’t have any idea where he’s taken my sword. There are times, like Ryodan said, when Batman needs Robin. Well, I don’t need Ryodan, but he sure will make it easier. He can watch my back like Mac used to. I’ve got no time for pride. I want results and I know how to get them. He’s always telling me to ask. Tonight I’m asking.

I feel naked without my sword.

I feel exposed. It’s throwing me all kinds of off balance like I don’t even know who I am anymore without it.

When I blast into Ryodan’s office, I’m going a million miles a minute, feet and mouth. Every one of his dudes scowls at me on the way in, even Lor, and I have no idea why. Guess Ryodan told them to be pissy to me or something. You never know what’s coming next with him.

I blurt out what happened with the frozen car and Jayne and tell him how we have to go get my sword back like right now, like this very instant.

“Drop down, kid,” he says without raising his head from his stupid paperwork. “You’re messing up my office.” Papers are flying around his head.

I drop down from hypermode and he looks up. He’s looking at me weird. Takes me a sec to figure it out. It’s like he’s looking at a stranger. One he doesn’t like and is thinking about killing. Why the feck is he mad at me?

“You reek of Highlander. The whole club can smell him on you. You’re wearing his clothes.”

I don’t think I’ve ever heard him talk so soft. “Dude, who cares? Didn’t you hear anything I said? Inspector Jayne took my sword!”

“Explain why you’re wearing his clothes.”

Softer still. If I wasn’t so hot with temper I’d get a chill. I don’t understand him. What does what I’m wearing have to do with anything that’s actually, like, relevant? How could it possibly matter? I don’t even understand why it registers! But I can tell by the look on his face he’s not budging until I explain, and if I don’t get my sword back soon, I’m going to go crazy. I also know if I tell him Christian killed some woman and I was next, he won’t pay any attention to the problem of my sword, he’ll go after Christian, when I need him to go after Jayne. I’m not sure he can take Christian. Not with what he’s turning into. But with my sword, I know I can.

“The explosion cut up my clothes. He gave me some of his.”

“You were together at the explosion.”

“He found me after.”

“And you changed in the street.”

“Huh?” Stymied is me. This isn’t where I expect the conversation to go at all.

“Elucidate upon where you changed.”

“What the feck does that have to do with anything?”

“Answer me.”

“I ducked into a convenience store. That’s why they call them that. So they can be, like, convenient.”

His gaze shivers up and down me. “If ice splinters tore up your clothes so badly that you needed to change, I’d think your injuries would be greater.”

I gape at him, baffled. Somebody took my sword and he wants to talk about what I’m wearing and where I got dressed, and that he doesn’t think I look hurt bad enough!

“He healed me. I was bleeding a lot. Holy hurrying hurricane, how’d you get next to me so fast?” Ryodan isn’t behind his desk anymore. He’s standing practically on my toes. I didn’t even see him move. Or feel a breeze or anything! “Give me some personal space!”

He drops his head forward and smells me. “Healed you how?”

What is the deal with everyone sniffing me? If Dancer starts doing it, too, I’m so out of here. “I drank his blood. Got a problem with that?”

“Three.”

“Huh?”

“I have three problems with that.”

“That was a rhetorical question. Maybe you can’t hear me talking or something so I’ll say it again: Jayne has my fecking sword. I’m in deep shit without it and need it back. You going to do something or not?”

Just like that he’s back behind his desk, head bent over his paperwork, all but ignoring me. “No.”

I’m incredulous. “What? Why? You know I’ll go after it myself! Is that what you want?”

“Jayne stopped by a few hours ago.”

“That took a fecking lot of nerve! He left me for dead. In the middle of a street. Wouldn’t even give me a fecking candy bar. Did he tell you how bad off I was? Why didn’t you come help me?”

“You look fine to me.”

“Whose side are you on?”

“He told me why he took the sword, and agreed not to kill any Fae within five blocks of my club. That’s more than you do.”

“Why would he agree to that? Jayne hates all the Fae!”

“He knew you’d come to me and ask me to help you get it back.”

“And you’re on his side?” How dare Jayne predict my moves and avert them while I’m busy dying and then being chased by a homicidal maniac! All of which was his fault to begin with!

“Truth is, kid, I prefer you without it.”

“Why?”

“You can’t kill my patrons. And now maybe you’ll start exercising caution. Or at least learn how to spell it.”

I glare at his bent head. “I’m asking for your help here, boss. You keep telling me to, and I’m asking.”

“I also said how you treat me is how I’ll treat you.”

“What am I doing wrong?”

“The answer is no.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” I tap my foot hyperfast, hoping maybe I’ll crack his stupid floor.

He doesn’t say anything. Just keeps working on whatever it is he works on.

“You know what, dude? If you don’t help me get my sword back, you and me are through! You solve the ice mystery yourself,” I bluff, not about to give it up. “I’m not working for you. You don’t help me, I don’t help you.”

“Jo.” He doesn’t even raise his head. Just murmurs her name.

“I don’t care if you keep boinking her! Just get me my sword back! And don’t be making any more deals with folks about me behind my back!”

“That’s not our arrangement. You signed a contract. Jo’s life is only one of many prices should you renege. There are repercussions for your actions. You can’t walk away from me, Dani. Not tonight. Not ever. You’re not the one calling the shots. Sit down.” He’s standing again, and again I didn’t see him move. He kicks a chair at me. “Now.”

Sometimes I think everybody else in the world knows something I don’t know. Like they’re all in on some kind of conspiracy and if I just knew that one secret thing, too, the things adults do that baffle me would make perfect sense.

Other times I think I know something extra that the whole rest of the world doesn’t know and that’s why nothing they do makes sense. ’Cause they don’t know it and all their actions stem from flawed logic. Unlike mine.

I told Mac that once and she said it wasn’t something everyone else knew; the missing ingredient was that I didn’t yet understand my own emotions. They were new and I was just learning them for the first time. She said I was never factoring other people’s feelings into things, so of course everything grown-ups did seemed mysterious and weird.

I said, dude, you just said I don’t understand them, so how can I factor them in?

She said you can’t, so just accept that teenage years are a great big clusterfuck of insecurity and confusion and hunger. Try to survive them without getting yourself killed.

A-fecking-men to that. Except for the insecurity part. Well, without my sword, plus the insecurity part.

As soon as I sit down, Ryodan says, “Get out of here.”

“Bipolar much?”

“Go take a shower and change your clothes.”

“I don’t smell that bad,” I say crossly.

He writes something, then turns the page in whatever-the-heck-stupid-thing he’s reading.

“Dude, where do you want me to go? I can’t go anywhere without my sword. I can’t outrun the sifters. Every Fae in your club has a hard-on for killing me. You want me dead? Just do it yourself and get it over with.”

He stabs a button on his desk. “Lor, get in here.”

Lor blows in like he was plastered to the other side of the door.

“Escort the kid to clean the fuck up and get that stench off her.”

“Sure thing, boss.” He scowls at me.

I scowl right back.

Lor points through the glass floor. “See that blonde down there with the big tits? I was about to get laid.”

“One, I’m too young to hear that kind of stuff, and two, I don’t see you carrying a club to knock her over the head with, so how were you going to accomplish that?”