Текст книги "Iced"

Автор книги: Karen Marie Moning

Соавторы: Karen Marie Moning
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Текущая страница: 28 (всего у книги 29 страниц)

Forty

“Is it the end, my friend? Satan’s coming ’round the bend”

The Crimson Hag explodes from the night, slicing through lavender lights on a cloud of putrefaction, tattered hem of her gut-gown snaking out behind her, to the bizarre accompaniment of “Purple Haze.” She swoops us then shoots straight up to the highest dormer on the abbey roof and perches there.

We’re all on our feet. “How did she find us?” I say. “You think noise draws her, too?”

She sways from side to side, moving only from the waist, creepily reptilian, surveying us with black empty holes where eyes should be.

“I think the bitch is after me,” Christian says. “I’m the weakest Unseelie prince with immortal guts. At least for a while yet.”

“She’s like a bat, isn’t she? It’s not like we weren’t making enough noise. She can’t see so she uses echolocation!” I exclaim.

“Don’t know, don’t care. Let’s bag the bitch,” Christian says.

“How the fuck do we get past her legs,” Ryodan says, and I look at him. I can see he’s got a personal itch on to kill her.

I look at Jo when I say, “What? You don’t feel like dying again today?”

Then Ryodan isn’t standing next to Jo anymore. He’s got me and he freeze-framed me twenty feet away before I could even blink. “If the Highlander says something to Jo about that, she’ll think he’s lying. She might believe you. My men will kill her if she knows. And I won’t be able to stop them.”

I look at him hard and realize for maybe the first time ever he’s telling me a simple truth. “She’s not allowed to know you can’t be killed?”

“Never.”

“Why am I?”

He’s gone. Back to Jo. Got his arm around her, protecting her.

The Hag swoops!

It’s like some weird rock-opera battle that gets even weirder when the next song Lor cued up comes on and Black Sabbath starts playing “Black Sabbath” at about a gazillion decibels. As if the Crimson Hag ain’t disturbing enough, we need that freaky song in the background. Don’t get me wrong, I put it on my playlist because sometimes I like to listen to it. But I got to be in a real mood, because, dude, the song makes me feel unsettled and disturbed and pretty much everybody I ever talked to feels the same way about it.

First thing on my mind is Dancer! I grab him and yell at him to hold on to me no matter what. When the Hag swoops us, we duck like we’re one big wave then freeze-frame in different directions.

She veers at the last second toward Christian and I see he was right. It’s him she wants. But when she just about nabs Lor with one of her bony lances, I realize she’ll take anyone she can get those terrible knitting needles on.

We’re all freeze-framing or sifting, ducking, and dodging. I’m trying to hold on to Dancer and keep an eye on Ryodan, who’s got Jo, and it’s making me nuts that she’s even here, in the middle of this fight. She ain’t got nothing special to protect her except Ryodan and that ain’t enough for me.

I can’t move fast enough, watch out for her, and hold on to Dancer, so I freeze-frame him to the far side of the abbey and dump him with the sidhe-seers.

“Mega, what are you doing?”

“You got no chance against her. I hardly do. Don’t get me killed because I get stupid worrying about you!”

He snaps real cool, “Didn’t mean to be a liability.”

“Well you are, so don’t be,” I snap back. I’d die if something happened to him.

He shakes his head, disgusted, like he can’t believe I’m such a traitor when I’m just trying to keep him safe.

“Take me back. Buy me time to rewire things. We can electrocute her with some of the stuff we brought, snake a live cable around her!”

“We don’t even know if electrocution would work! Maybe she’d just suck it up and use it for fuel!”

“We don’t know it won’t!”

Me and him are nose-to-nose, yelling at each other.

Jo explodes from a blur and stumbles into us. “Hey!” she shouts at what I think is Ryodan’s vanishing backside. “You can’t just dump me here!”

“Don’t you two fecking move!” I say.

Then I’m back down by the tower of sound equipment, where we’re all whizzing around, trying to evade the bitch and figure out how to get past her bony lances!

Ozzy wails away. I ain’t never heard this song through a hundred speakers and Black Sabbath this loud makes the hair on my arms stand up on end. I feel like I really am at a Black Mass and Aleister Crowley himself might spontaneously manifest. It’s funny how songs can make you feel different ways. I wonder if whatever sound it is that the Hoar Frost King collects makes him feel something and that’s why he goes after it.

As I zig and zag, I think about how the things that the Unseelie king created turned out so ugly and incomplete when the Seelie are so beautiful and whole.

And I start thinking how all the Unseelie are after something, and it seems to be whatever they don’t have. Why would the Hoar Frost King be after sound? Things go totally silent when he appears. Because he takes the sound, or because his mere existence eradicates sounds?

Or is it more complex than that? What if the Hoar Frost King is after what all the Unseelie lack on the basest, most profound level? What if he’s the only Unseelie smart enough to go straight for the root of the problem and, unlike the simple-minded Gray Woman who spends her life trying to collect beauty that can never be hers, or the Hag who’s trying to finish a gown that can never be completed, the Hoar Frost King is trying to collect the song they were created without? Is it after the Song of Making? Eating chunks of it, bit by bit?

“Duck, you fucking idiot!” Lor roars, and I roll and freeze-frame. Then folks slam into me from opposite sides and just about squish me flat. I hear a couple of my ribs make protesting noises.

“Dudes, get off me!” Christian and Ryodan are both trying to get me out of there. “I lost focus for a couple secs ’cause I was thinking hard! It won’t happen again!”

“You bet your ass it won’t,” Ryodan says.

Then I’m over a shoulder and wind is whizzing through my hair, then I’m being dumped in the sheep pen!

Me! The Mega! Put out to pasture!

“You can’t stick me down here!” I say, indignant as all get-out. I freeze-frame back toward the action the second I hit my feet but slam into Christian, who noodles me over a shoulder and tosses me back to Ryodan, who dumps me in the middle of the sheep pen again!

“Stop it!” My ribs hurt. They need to quit noodling me.

“Don’t be a liability,” Ryodan says, and is gone.

I blink.

“Feels real good, doesn’t it, Mega?” Dancer gives me a chilly look.

“I ain’t no liability!” I wait until they’re all back down the other end then freeze-frame back to the action. I’m a fecking superhero. Superheroes don’t sit on sidelines.

The Hag is trying to take out Christian.

And Lor and Ryodan ain’t doing nothing to help him! In fact, I can’t figure out what they are trying to do. They’re working hard to stay on opposite sides of her, one front, one back, and they keep whizzing in, only to get blocked by one of those deadly legs lancing out. They retreat, whiz back in, get blocked, retreat, whiz back in, get blocked. It’s a cool, methodical attack, and if they had all the time in the world, it might eventually work.

Might. Eventually.

And so what if it does? How do they plan to kill her? Doesn’t look like the best-thought-out plan to me. I don’t see no weapons on them.

The Hag shoots, straight up and dive-bombs Christian. He stumbles on ice and goes down.

He sifts out then all the sudden he’s right back where he was. Looking startled, like his sift didn’t work the way it was supposed to.

That split-second screwup was all she needed.

The Hag’s going to get him this time!

And nobody even cares. Nobody’s trying to save him.

Black Sabbath sounds more evil with each second, and it’s all getting on my last nerve. I yank out my sword and throw it straight at the bitch’s head. She hears it slicing through the air, veers sharply to the side and blasts into Lor, who goes flying backward.

Then suddenly she’s gone!

My sword lodges in a snowbank. Already my hand hurts from the absence of it.

Christian looks from it to me, his alien, iridescent eyes bright. “You threw your sword for me.” He looks stupefied.

I feel stupefied. I never let my sword go. Unlike Mac, I won’t share in battle. Ever.

Ryodan has his head down, looking up at me from under his brows in a way I only ever seen him do once before, and Lor looks major pissed.

“Dude,” I say, because I got no other clue what to say, “would you, like, toss it back now?”

Christian slides long black hair over his shoulder and flashes me a killer smile. “Princess, I’d build you a fucking White Mansion.” My sword slices through the night, alabaster steel flashing violet fire.

“Where the fuck did the bloody bitch go?” Lor snarls. “I want a piece of her.”

“No clue,” I say, and we all look around warily.

That’s when the sidhe-seers start screaming.

Forty-One

“You must whip it, whip it good”

The Hag couldn’t get anywhere with us so she went after weaker prey.

We all freeze-frame or sift. I’m the last one there.

When the feck did I become the slowpoke?

Two sidhe-seers die instantly, guts trailing up into the sky.

After a moment their entrails are dropped back to the snow in a wet glistening tangle.

My jaw locks and I get a muscle cramp in it the size of a walnut. My teeth clamp so hard they hurt.

The Hag isn’t even knitting with them. She didn’t even want them. She just killed and threw them away like trash!

She wants Christian. And it looks like she’s ready to kill every last one of us to get him.

“Get inside!” I shout at the women, trying to herd them back toward the abbey.

Sidhe-seers duck and scatter like a herd of gazelles running from cheetahs. Stupid sheep are supposed to be pack animals and that means, duh, run in a pack!

The Hag swoops and takes two more of my sisters! Blood sprays everywhere and folks are screaming like crazy.

I’m so mad I’m shaking. It’s total chaos. Before, it was just us we had to watch out for. Now the Hag is dive-bombing hundreds of helpless humans and I don’t know who to help first.

Ryodan’s covering Jo, Kat, and a dozen others.

Lor’s protecting a bunch of pretty blondes – figures!

Christian has like fifty women around him. I realize he’s turned on his death-by-sex Fae lure and it’s working like magnet-to-magnets. He’s got a second skin of pretty sidhe-seers. I wonder if he did it on purpose for a shield or if it’s just taking everything he’s got to stay out of her reach and he can’t suppress it. If he did it for a shield, I’ll kill him myself.

How are we going to kill the Hag? None of us can get close enough, past her lethal legs. Not even my sword is any good. I can throw it, but the bitch is faster than a witch on a quidditch broom! Dancer’s idea of trying to snake a cable around her and electrocute her is starting to look like a good one. Too bad we don’t have any cables handy down this end.

“Holy sonic booms!” I exclaim. I may not have a cable but I do have something that’s long and thin, and Indiana Jones sure made good use of it in desperate times.

I yank out my whip, freeze-frame to the outer edge of the crowd for a good shot, and crack it straight up at the Hag!

It flails limply, puddles back down on my head and I get tangled up in it. I can’t even get the stupid thing off me. I swear those black holes in her face regard me with amused contempt. Apparently there’s some skill to cracking a whip and I don’t have time to learn it. It never looked hard on TV.

“Mega!” Dancer yells. I see him in the crowd, jumping up, waving both hands in the air.

I ball it up, knot the cord around the handle for weight, and toss it to him. He catches it, unties it and snaps it at the swooping Hag.

It explodes within a foot of her lethal left leg and sets off a small sonic boom.

She inhales, a horrific, wet, screeching sound, and rockets straight up into the sky. I don’t know if it’s because she can’t believe something got so close to her leg or if her hearing is so sensitive that the sonar explosion gave her a migraine. Whatever – she doesn’t like it one bit.

When she dives again, Dancer goes for her head this time and sets off a sonic boom right next to her ear.

She reels backward and vanishes upward into purple lights.

Me and Dancer beam at each other.

He cracks the whip triumphantly.

But this time it doesn’t crack. It makes no sound at all. Not even a tiny little hiss as it slices through the air.

Because, like, all sound just disappeared.

Figures that when the fog finally rolls in, every last one of us is on the wrong end of the playing field.

Forty-Two

“Try to set the night on fire”

I think the reason I didn’t feel panic preceding the Hoar Frost King’s arrival this time is because I was already feeling too much panic for more panic to penetrate. The Crimson Hag butchering sidhe-seers had me so frantic, I forgot why we were even out in the snow to begin with.

Like, to summon the Hoar Frost King.

And he’s here.

And somebody’s got to cut that fecking tether because if we don’t turn the IFP loose, the Hoar Frost King is going to ice the speakers and vanish and it’ll all have been for nothing! Worse still, if it’s as smart as I think, it won’t fall for the same trick twice. The sentience I feel rolling off it is gigantic. This is no simple-minded Unseelie. I don’t know ’cause I haven’t seen them all yet but it could be the most complex one the King ever made. I wonder if he maybe swirled a dash of himself into its beaker.

What happens next feels like it happens in slow-mo though I know it doesn’t take any time at all.

Ryodan and Lor vanish, fast-mo-ing it to the other end of the field. I look from the sidhe-seers to the slit that’s opening, stymied, trying to figure out how to protect the sidhe-seers and cut the tether at the same time. Do I save the women I care about who are standing right next to me or do I save the world? I may be a superhero but I got everyday Joe feelings.

I see Christian and he’s looking at me hard. He says without making any sound at all, You can’t do both, Dani, my love.

I know that, I mouth pissily.

It’s me she’s after.

Your point?

He vanishes.

I can’t find him anywhere for a sec.

Next thing I see is him standing, just standing there in the middle of the field between me and the other end, with his arms spread wide, head tossed back, wearing a “come and get me” expression.

What are you doing? I scream, but not a peep comes out.

The Crimson Hag swoops.

I jerk violently, like I’m the one that got stuck when she guts him.

She doesn’t flay him, though. She pierces him with one leg like he’s a shish kebob and draws him up toward her skirt. As she folds him into her dripping embrace he gives me a look. I can’t make sense of it. I don’t get it. Why did he do that? I don’t get it! Why would anybody do such a stupid thing!

As he vanishes up into the sky, clutched in her hideous legs, I shut it out. Refuse to process what he did. I can leave the sidhe-seers behind now in relative safety. I’ll think about what he did later.

Assuming there is a later.

I freeze-frame toward the Hoar Frost King. It’s major weird not being able to hear a sound. I’m not feeling any vibrations either. At least deaf people can feel vibrations. This is worse than a sound deprivation chamber, it’s a sensory deprivation world with the HFK in it.

As I get close, I see Lor and Ryodan are pushing toward the black box in what looks like slow-mo. Both of them are covered with thick white ice that keeps cracking when they move. It’s cold like the night I died at the church.

The Hoar Frost King is hovering silently over the mountain of speakers, icing them one by one. It’s lingering longer than usual, I guess all those decibels make the food source richer, and I think maybe it’s licking chocolate off its fingers.

When I freeze-frame in behind Ryodan he turns and roars silently: Get the fuck out of here!

Icy needles spear my lungs with each breath, my heart labors to pump. My head feels heavy and I realize it’s ’cause my hair has iced. I toss it, and the stuff shatters, white crystals rain from my head.

You’re not going to make it in time! I yell back, eyeing the distance between ice monster and IFP. When it opened its slit and glided into our dimension, it appeared in the worst possible place – between the IFP and speakers, not between the speakers and the abbey. Although it didn’t ice the IFP, it’s too fecking cold in the vicinity of the box for us to get there to cut the tether.

I look at Ryodan. He can survive this cold like I can’t. I don’t know why. Guess it’s something to do with him surviving a gutting, too. He’s always been able to get closer to the iced scenes than me.

But I can freeze-frame in faster for some reason. He gets bogged down when he gets closer to the center of the cold. Like he’s trudging though concrete.

I don’t pause to think. It’s possible, it’s the only plan I got, and there ain’t no time for second guesses.

I blast into Ryodan’s back and force him forward. As we go fast-mo-ing toward the black box, he totally gets my wavelength: I’m his locomotive and he’s my shield. I can push us, but he’s got to steer and slice.

I feel him yanking my sword from my coat and drive us forward. He ices, and cracks a half-dozen times, shaking off the crystals like a dog shaking water. I die a thousand icy deaths and come to life again. My lungs feel bloody and raw with each breath so I hold it. My bones hurt. I swear my eyeballs have iced in my head. My vision is getting all fractal-like.

Still I push us into the pain because this is my world and no fecking Fae is taking it from me. My mouth is open on a silent howl. Ryodan shakes violently as I force us to the icy epicenter.

He slices down with the sword and cuts the tether.

We’re expecting the IFP to move real slow.

Based on the rate of movement Kat documented when the sidhe-seers had been tracking its progress toward our home, it takes about a minute between cutting it loose and the fire-world fragment hitting the far wall of the abbey. Giving us plenty of time to retether it, because according to her figures, we really had at least two minutes.

Her figures were wrong. Way the feck wrong.

Like a redlined supercar with stockpiled torque, the IFP explodes free and smashes into the Hoar Frost King.

I fast-up as fast as I can go so things transpire in the slowest motion possible.

The fire-world fragment swallows the Hoar Frost King.

It engulfs it.

Sound returns.

I hear ragged breaths. Gasping. Somewhere, folks are crying.

It’s gone.

The Hoar Frost King is gone.

Just like that.

It worked so well I almost can’t believe it. I stand there stunned, feeling wary. I’m not the only one out of sorts. Ryodan’s got his eyes narrowed suspiciously. Lor is kind of hunched like he thinks the sky is going to fall on him. I’d snicker – because, dude, it’s pretty sad when you can’t just take a happy ending for what it is – but we still got major trubs. The IFP is devouring the mountain of iced speakers and heading straight for the abbey.

Kat, Dancer, and the other sidhe-seers are running toward us. “Cruce is below the abbey!” Kat screams. “You’ve got to stop it!”

Ryodan and Lor begin chanting but I can tell from the look on Ryodan’s face he’s got no expectation of finishing in time. The ten or twelve seconds we got before it hits the wall isn’t the thirty he needs to do the job.

Kat starts screaming at Ryodan because he’s not going fast enough, and Jo starts screaming at Kat for screaming at Ryodan because he’s doing everything he can. Then all the sidhe-seers get in on it, and since Ryodan and Lor are looking down at the totem cord they’re trying to ward, nobody’s looking at the IFP and I’m the first one to see what’s happening.

I knew it died too easily!

Ice is forming at the base of the fire-world fragment.

The bottom of the funnel is turning blue, crusted with white hoar frost.

The IFP sure swallowed the Ice Monster, but now the Ice Monster is icing the fecking IFP!

As I watch, frost spreads rapidly upward.

“Uh, guys,” I say.

“Are you bloody kidding me?” Dancer explodes. “It’s coming back out?”

Lor looks up. “Aw, shit.”

“Motherfucker,” Ryodan agrees.

The Hoar Frost King freezes the IFP from the inside out.

I don’t know if the fire world is a roaring inferno that makes the sound the HFK likes to eat or if they just had a big battle of fire and ice, and ice won.

But the IFP cracks and hisses, steams and pops, as superfire gets supercooled.

Ice weighs it down and it slows to a stop. As the giant funnel gains substance, it becomes too heavy to drift and crashes thunderously to the ground like an icicle dropping from a gutter, lodging in the snow.

We all just stare at the giant ice funnel rooted in the ground, trying to process the sudden reversal of events. First, the Ice Monster was dead but the abbey was in danger. Now the abbey is safe but the Ice Monster isn’t dead.

We didn’t succeed in killing it, and virtually everyone standing here that can’t freeze-frame is going to die the instant it comes back out.

The walls of the IFP begin to shiver and shake like the Hoar Frost King is trying to find the weakest point to hatch from its icy eggshell.

I narrow my eyes.

Eggshells are delicate. Fragile. But it’s not a shell. In fact, the entire interior of the fire world must be solid ice right now.

Which means, at the moment, the Hoar Frost King is completely encased in one of its own ice sculptures.

Trapped in a moment of perfect vulnerability.

Perhaps the only moment of vulnerability it has ever known.

I know what happens when an iced scene gets vibrated.

It explodes.

“Dancer,” I shout, “use the whip! Make sonic booms!” To Ryodan and Lor I say, “Freeze-frame around it!” To the sidhe-seers, “Dudes, get the feck out of here now!”

Then I freeze-frame in myself, moving as fast as I can on a nearly empty gas tank.

Dancer cracks his whip and we freeze-frame like maniacs.

The frozen IFP trembles and the surface suddenly blossoms a million tiny fissures.

The ground shudders, then there’s this rumble like galaxywide thunder rolling inside the IFP.

All the sudden I hear the most awful noise ever, like maybe all the sounds the Hoar Frost King ever collected erupt in one huge dissonant, fingernails-on-a-chalkboard belch and then – fecking-A, I love being a superhero! – just like I thought they would, the fused monsters explode!