Текст книги "Iced"

Автор книги: Karen Marie Moning

Соавторы: Karen Marie Moning
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Текущая страница: 26 (всего у книги 29 страниц)

Thirty-Six

“Oh the weather outside is frightful”

Beyond the frost-etched window of my bedroom, fat snow-flakes drift lazily to the ground. Unlike me, they know no urgency. At the abbey, snow obeys a simple prime directive: fall without cease. It began two days after Sean went to work at Chester’s, and has not stopped for twenty-three.

My heart suffers a similar accumulation, with chill piling in treacherous drifts and valleys. Despite our efforts to beat it back, winter claims more of our world with each passing day. Ours has dwindled to paths shoveled between waist-high white walls crusted by ice. I do not know how to navigate this new terrain. I fear my nana’s snow goblins lurk in these drifts, waiting to carry off those who stray into the blinding wintry white.

Sean has not been able to reach the abbey nor have I been able to leave for fifteen days. We venture into the countryside with hatchets and saws only to procure timber from hard-iced, felled trees so that we may keep our fires burning bright. We have run dry of gasoline; generators squat in silent reminder of auspicious times we no longer enjoy. We have precious few candles and lack ingredients to make more. If not for the batteries Dani spent obsessive weeks stockpiling as protection against the Shades months past, it is possible we would all be dead, unable to protect ourselves from the amorphous apparitions that may yet lurk within our walls, although we’ve yet to glimpse one since the night Cruce was interred in his subterranean sepulcher. Some say the Unseelie King took them with him when he left. One can hope.

Night sees us gathered in common rooms to conserve supplies. It is impossible to say when this snow will stop. The sky is night-black or storm-leaden but for an occasional shaft of brilliant sunshine piercing clouds. If we do not soon remove the weight of accumulation from the roof of our chapel, we will lose both roof and interior supports. Ice will crush our altar and drifts will take our pews. Early this morning the rafters creaked and groaned a somber hymn as I prayed: God, grant me serenity, wisdom, strength, courage, and fortitude.

But all is not snow at our abbey. Oh, no.

All is not chill within or without our walls.

My wing of the abbey is a temperate sixty-five degrees, with not one fire burning.

My chambers are nearer eighty, sweltering for one born and raised on the Emerald Isle. I mop my brow and tuck damp tendrils behind my ears. I unfasten the top button of my blouse and dab at my skin.

Beyond the window, the sharp-shaved crystalline fire-world funnel towers over the abbey, glittering bright as diamonds in a capricious ray of sun. Between it and the perimeter wall of my bedchamber, snow is conspicuously absent.

In that narrow boundary, grass grows.

Grass, by the saints, green as St. Patrick’s clover! Kelly green as the misshapen shamrock that symbolizes the mission and integrity of our order to See, Serve, and Protect.

Against the crumbling mortar flush to my bedroom wall, sultry flowers in every shade of boysenberry and orchid, cerise and Byzantium bend and sway with blossoms so heavy on delicate stems they droop and nod, deceptively dulcet on a breeze as conflicted as my soul; temperate one moment, frigid the next.

Were I to crank the window and part the leaded glass, the scent that drifted in would intoxicate me. The blossoms reek of spices that make me think of Persian carpets and far-off lands where hookahs are smoked for breakfast and sultans keep harems, and life is lazy, licentious, and short-lived.

But well-lived, Cruce would say.

I blot sweat from my palms and smooth a blueprint on Rowena’s stately desk. I must know and I do not want to know if what I have begun to suspect is true.

Although the IFP is tethered to a piece of earth that has been fired to a kiln-smooth, porcelain black gloss, were one to approach it, one would feel no heat. The fire world is contained.

Yet, between the IFP and our abbey grows that loathsome grass despite the snow, that grass upon which Cruce lays me gently back in my dreams, amid fragrant blooms where he makes me feel things for which I despise myself come dawn.

I am not wise in the ways of geography. I know east when the sun rises. I know west when it sets.

Rowena protected many secrets, clanking keys in the bracelet of power that remained on her wrist, held over our heads, until the day she died. I discovered a cache in her bedchamber four nights ago when, desperate to resist another torturous slumber, I occupied myself by studying every inch of the Grand Mistresses’ apartment, seeking telltale clues of false panels or retractable floorboards. In the faux bottom of a centuries-old armoire I found maps, sketches, and plans, many of places that baffle me, in which I am unable to divine her interest.

Also therein I found blueprints of the abbey on scrolls and bound in large flat volumes, both Upstairs and Underneath. It is the blueprint of the subterranean chamber and adjoining passages wherein the Sinsar Dubh was once entombed, over which I now place the transparent sketch I have prepared of my wing.

I smooth them together so they meet, corner-to-corner, and press my tongue to the roof of my mouth in silent protest, a technique I perfected when young to keep from crying out when lambasted by another’s intolerable emotion.

Cruce’s chamber is beneath my bedroom!

Begging the question: does the false summer that makes grass grow and flowers bloom come from the fire world adjacent or the iced prince below?

I decide maybe I can stand Ryodan, at least today, because when I say shut Chester’s down, the dude doesn’t even ask me another question!

He skirts the ice sculpture’s perimeter and heads straight for the metal door in the ground. The ice ends some fifteen feet from it, about which I’m real glad because the back way in that I’m not supposed to know about is a long way from here. Takes a lot of underground navigating. And knowing him, since he heard I knew of it, he probably shut it down and had his men make him another one. But I’ll find that one, too. It’s like a game with me. Him trying to hide stuff just makes me more determined to find it.

I follow, happy he takes my word for things. Jo and Christian sure don’t. They’re behind me, peppering me with questions that Dancer isn’t answering either, I think because he’s still busy putting together all the ramifications of what we just figured out. Either that or he’s as obsessed as I am about getting every single thing in our general vicinity turned off ASAP.

I’m still missing a few facts that I don’t think I can gather since the scenes all blew up. Speculation may be all we got to work with. I know the Hoar Frost King likes ice cream but I don’t know what flavor. And I’m pretty sure he’s picky. Or else we’d all have been iced months ago.

I follow Ryodan to his office, where he cuts the power to the subclubs. With each tap of the computer screen, one more subclub dies and it’s all I can do not to hoot and holler, especially when the kiddie subclub goes dark and still.

Lights dim. Music stops.

People – the fecking sheep who should have pulled their heads out of their asses weeks ago and banded together to save our city – protest vociferously. Some just keep dancing like nothing ever happened, like they’re hearing music in their heads.

Others shrug and get back to practically doing the dirty on the dance floor, clothes half off, like everybody wants to see their Baby-Roach-slimmed butts!

“Can I talk to all the clubs at once?” I say. “You got some kind of PA system in here?”

He gives me a look that says: nice try, like I’d ever let you address my patrons en masse.

I snicker. He has a point. I could rant at these folks for hours. “You got to explain,” I say. “They need to understand what they’re up against. You got to tell them about the Hoar Frost King and that they can’t go outside and make noise or else they might die. And you got to tell them how the scenes explode, so if anybody leaves they don’t do nothing stupid with the frozen folks up there and get all cut up on shrapnel! And don’t forget to tell them that even in here they need to stay as quiet as they can and—”

Ryodan presses a button on his desk. “There will be no lights or music until further notice.” He releases the button.

“That’s it?” I say. Fecking good thing he ain’t writing the Ryodan Rag! Through the glass floor I watch folks rustle angrily. Many are drunk and don’t like this new development. They want their bread and circuses. That’s why they come here. “Boss, what the feck was that? Maybe you could, like, tell them not to leave or they’ll die?”

He presses the button again. “Don’t leave or you’ll die.”

There’s a pregnant hush then, like they all think he’s God or something, and folks and Fae stop everything they’re doing and sit down. Only after a long moment do they begin talking again.

“I think you should lock the doors,” Jo says. “Don’t let them out for their own good.”

“I’d prefer they leave. Less to draw it here.”

“If you want me to tell you what to do to keep this place safe,” I say, “you better keep them safe.”

“I thought you were disgusted by the people that come to my club.”

“They’re still people.”

He presses the button again. “If you go outside, you will be killed. If you make noise, you will be sent outside. Don’t piss me off.”

Just like that, Chester’s goes completely silent.

Thirty-Seven

“The sound of silence”

I call my sidhe-seers to gather in the chapel beneath creaking eaves.

Our sanctum could once scarce contain the half of us. Seated now between marching rows of majestic ivory pillars, those who remain are swallowed in voluminous, echoing silence save the groaning of rafters and the hollow resonance of my footfalls as I walk the center aisle that leads to the sanctuary at the liturgical east of the church.

Dull, despairing eyes follow my progress. My girls occupy the front eleven pews in the nave. The ghosts of cherished friends fill the rest. It was a hard winter followed by the tease of stillborn spring.

Now this incessant snow!

I feel stronger in the chapel.

Here, the divine defies the devil at our door. Faith is an unquenchable flame in my heart. Although twice Cruce has followed me here, these hallowed floors remain inviolate. He has not been able to enter.

Reliquaries of polished ivory and gold, adorned with precious gems, attend the altar. More are sheltered at shrines where once candles flickered, until we were obliged to purloin them for other purposes. These urns and boxes hold sacrosanct bones and bits of cloth from saints canonized not by the Holy See but a more ancient church. I suffer no conflict that they reside beside acceptably venerated bones. Bones are bones and good people are good people. I beseech them all to watch over us in our time of need.

I enter the raised chancel in the sanctuary and approach the lectern. We have no power for the microphone but it is no longer necessary, as my voice will carry clearly to the few occupied front rows.

Two hundred eighty-nine of us remain.

I would weep if I had tears but they are drained dry each dawn when I awaken, exhausted, stained by semen that is not mine by right and guilt that is. Semen from one who has just dipped his fingers in the stoup of holy water and now traces a cross at his forehead, his lips, his heart!

He violates my sanctum. He mocks my rituals.

His fingers do not burst into flame nor is he struck by bolts of celestial retribution and banished to hell as Satan should be. I believed him barred at the door. Was he amused to deceive me or has he gained strength to project himself?

He winks at me as he walks the center aisle. Near the rood screen he pauses and unfurls his wings.

Dark angel. Black-winged and black-souled.

In my church.

In my church!

The girls rustle. I become aware my gaze is fixed on Cruce, exquisite, naked Cruce, standing in the center of my chapel, wings spanning the aisle, stretching half to heaven, and my first emotion is panic. I must not let them know I see him or Margery will stand in my stead!

I sweep my gaze over the pews and lower my barriers so that I may know the state of their hearts. I’ve been muffling their emotions for months, for they have known such anger, grief, and fear of late that I cannot tender the daily inundation.

Anxiety slams into me. Shame steals my breath. I press shaking fingertips to the hollow of my throat as if to release a catch hidden there that controls my inhalations.

I see clearly for the first time in more than a month.

If I am the only one who sees Cruce, I should be deposed.

If I am not, if others see him, too, and I have kept my silence this long, I should be damned.

For what is war renowned?

He divides. He carves down the middle and makes enemies of even brothers and sisters, parents and offspring. War has been dividing my family since birth. Perhaps, indeed, he has been paying me uncommon attention.

How best to divide?

Sean’s cousin Rocky kept a watch of gold and diamonds etched with his credo. He vowed, despite education, pedigree, or wealth, all prey fell indiscriminate to this simple strategy: isolate the mark.

Silence is the ultimate isolator.

Have I played into his hands?

He stands smugly certain of me, assured of our private complicity. How pleased he must be when each morning I remain an isolated berg in this winter that has claimed our world!

I turn back to the women in my care. “Who among you sees Cruce standing in the aisle?”

Ryodan calls a meeting in one of the rooms on the second floor. I never seen such quiet in the club. Folks sit alone, not talking. The lights are dim and all music is off. I can’t feel the tiniest vibration in my feet. A soft glow radiates at ceiling and floor level. He’s got some kind of illuminated tubing behind the moldings. I always assumed he had giant generators somewhere and I just couldn’t feel the vibration over the pounding, incessant music. If not generators, what’s keeping the lights on?

“Dude, I thought you were turning everything off.”

“Everything is off.”

“What’s powering the lights that are still on?”

“The bulk of Chester’s runs on geothermal power.”

I smack myself in the forehead with the butt of my palm. Of course. He’s got all the best toys. Why wouldn’t he dig all the way to the center of the Earth and harness planetary power? The dude, like, lives forever!

Me, Jo, Dancer, and Christian are joined by six of Ryodan’s dudes. Every time Jericho Barrons doesn’t walk into the room with me, I heave a sigh of relief. One of these days it’s going to happen. It’s inevitable. And one of these days it will probably be with Mac at his side. S’cool. I’ve lived most of my life under threat of “one of these days” for one reason or another. Superheroes do.

Ryodan sends three of his men down to the club to keep order, and sends the other three into the icy day to track what noise they find and shut it down. Jo tempers his orders with: “And bring any people you discover back to Chester’s so we can keep them alive.”

I watch him real careful when she adds to his commands like she has the right. Like she’s his girlfriend and they’re a team, out to save the world together or something. We’ll see if his dudes obey her. If they come back with a band of ragtag survivors, I might just be impressed. I can’t read his face. It’s like he’s got it totally closed to me.

He refuses to let me fire up a press and get a Dani Daily out. I argue but Jo makes a point: nobody is venturing out unless they absolutely have to anyway, so the time wasted printing and posting would be better used bringing everyone up to speed so we can make a plan. When did she become Ms. Voice of Reason? Oh, and Glam Girl! When she slips off her coat and unwinds her scarf, her boobs aren’t sparkly but she’s sure got a push-up bra on!

“Sound Slurpees? Dani, what’s going on?” Jo says.

“It’s being drawn by music,” I say. “At first I thought it was attracted to singing, but it’s not. It’s a component of music it’s after. Sound waves. Frequencies. Who knows, maybe a single note. And the sound doesn’t need to be made by a person. It can come from a stereo, a musical instrument, church bells, a car radio, even an Unseelie screaming a note high enough to shatter glass.”

“Like at Dublin Castle, the night it iced the cages,” Christian says. He’s been quiet but I can feel temper rolling off the dude. He’s barely keeping his cool.

“Exactly. Or it could be drawn by the chiming of crystal bowls.”

“The fitness center,” Ryodan says.

“Right. Or playing a washboard, banging on a pot and singing.”

“The Laundromat folks,” Dancer says.

“And the weird wire contraption around the dude’s head wasn’t a medical device for an injured neck. It was a harmonica holder,” I say. “With their primitive band, the small family managed to make whatever noise draws the Hoar Frost King.”

“The band in my subclub must have made it, too.”

“So why didn’t it ice the entire club?” Christian says.

“I’m guessing it’s drawn to a specific sound. The same way I like Life cereal but not Chex. They’re both little squares of crunchy goodness but they sure as feck ain’t equal to my taste buds. And all the audio equipment in your warehouse must have been hooked up and turned on. At the church where I almost died, they were singing and playing the organ. At all the underground pubs there was a band or a stereo playing.”

“The WeCare folks were singing and playing the organ, too,” Dancer says.

“So how do we figure out what noise it likes?” Jo says. “All the scenes got blown up, didn’t they?”

“I don’t think we need to,” Dancer says. “We just need to set up somewhere and make an enormous variety of sounds. Wait for it to come.”

“Great idea, kid,” Christian says. “Then we all bloody get iced!”

“Not necessarily,” Ryodan says.

“What do you mean? What are you thinking?” Jo’s sloe-eyed puppy-dog expression says she thinks he’s the smartest person she’s ever met. Gag me! Dancer’s the smartest person she ever met, and I’m second.

When he tells us I just shake my head. “It won’t work,” I say.

“Actually, Mega,” Dancer says, “it might.”

“Bull-fecking-crikey. He’s assuming a lot of things.”

“I think it’s worth a try,” Dancer says.

“Are you defending him?” I say.

“Only the idea, Mega.”

“Are you sure you can pull this off?” I ask Ryodan. “You know how many things could go wrong?”

Ryodan gives me a look.

Jo’s gone white. “You’re crazy. You’re talking about setting one monster free to destroy another.”

“The world is turning to ice,” Ryodan says to Jo. “If this continues, the Hoar Frost King will finish what Cruce started: the destruction of the world. Sometimes you plug the hole any way you can, and worry about fixing the boat later. If the choices are sinking today or tomorrow, I’ll take tomorrow.”

Him and me think alike a lot of times. I’d never tell him that.

To me, he says, “You and the kid get what we need. I want to be ready by nightfall.”

I am blasted by the crimson complexity of Margery’s rage.

She surges to her feet to demand my immediate resignation as Grand Mistress, but before she can incite the hue and cry upon which she so thrives, one by one heads bow and hands rise. White flags of surrender are hoisted until each woman has her arm above her head save one. My cousin reclaims her seat in the pew, fists clenched in white-knuckled balls on her lap.

I open myself with a tight, narrow focus. Her fury is bottomless, directed in its entirety at me. She believed she was his only one. She castigates me for the wanton ways of our enemy. She is a fool in too many ways to number: in affairs of infidelity, if a man strays, it is not the fault of the woman with whom he lays. A worthy heart eschews temptation, despite the magnitude. Clearly my heart is not worthy.

I dismiss her and regard my girls with regret and resolve.

In my silence, I failed my charges. It was not merely myself I isolated. I cut them off from one another.

“Did any of you tell someone else?”

I hear no replies and need none. I can tell from their faces that not one of them spoke of it. We became a group of close-huddled islands in our shame, eating and working and living side by side, in complete disconnect. For more than a month each of us waged the same hellish battle, and rather than sharing that burden, suffered it alone.

“We permitted him to separate us,” I say. “It was exactly what he wanted. But it is over. We have called his bluff and are now united against him.”

Cruce’s enormous wings rustle. It is the only sound I have ever heard the projected image of him make. Oh, yes, our enemy is gaining strength with each passing day!

Again I wonder if it is Cruce or the presence of the IFP that causes the grass to grow. If it is the IFP, might its location above Cruce’s cage also be weakening the integrity of those icy bars? I have not permitted myself to visit his chamber since last Sean and I made love. Failing my soul mate to anchor me, I risk nothing.

Did this clever, clever prince devise a way to summon a fire-world fragment to set him free? Were I to make the long descent into the bowels of this abbey today, what would I find?

Darkness, moss, and bones?

No bar where once one was?

“Must we leave the abbey?” Tanty Anna exclaims. “Is it the only way to escape him?”

“It’s our home! We can’t leave!” Josie protests.

“Where would we go? How would we get there? Dog sleds?” Margery says.

“There aren’t any dogs left. The Shades ate them all,” Lorena says.

“That was a joke. The point is we can’t leave,” Margery says. “Under any circumstances. This is our home. I will let no one drive me from it!”

Again I turn a tight focus on her. She wishes we would vanish, doesn’t care the how or why of it, so long as she gets him to herself. She has been in no way dissuaded by the fickleness of his affection.

I dab at my neck, my brow. The temperature in the chapel is rising. I smell blossoms, spicy and sweet.

I cannot move Cruce. But I can and will do something about the IFP.

I must find a way to contact Ryodan and his men. He already has my Sean. What more can he thieve from me?

We will move the fire world, send it back the way it came, and I will have my answer, if the grass dies. Fire world or ice prince; which is overheating our home? Did the Fates cackle when they stitched together the tapestry that froze our greatest enemy in our basement then parked a heater above it?

I do not believe fragments of Faery are one-way.

If it can be tethered, surely it can be towed.