Текст книги "Iced"

Автор книги: Karen Marie Moning

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

Forty-Three

“Celebrate good times, come on!”

I’m glowing. There’s no denying it. Beaming from every pore. I never had such an amazing adventure in my whole entire life, and I’ve had some whoppers.

We’re hanging in the great room at the abbey, warming up in front of fires blazing on three sides. There’s a kettle of instant cocoa (mixed with water, not milk) being warmed in the main hearth, smelling up the room like a chocolate factory, and Kat broke out a hidden stash of – stale, but who cares? – marshmallows and a tin of hard-as-a-rock biscuits she’s been saving for a special occasion, and some scrumptious, weirdly gelatinous honey. It all tastes like heaven. Every time I eat, I’m acutely aware we might not have any more of this stuff soon.

We won! We engaged in battle against the biggest bad I ever seen and we won. Unlike the last big battle fought around these parts, I was there to see it all go down with my very own eyeballs. I didn’t have to hear about it the next day secondhand from folks that were lucky enough to be there. And no all-powerful Unseelie King swooped in and bailed us out at the last sec either. We did it ourselves!

When the IFP holding the Hoar Frost King exploded, splinters of ice went sky-high, ground-low, and every place in between. We all ducked and dodged and grabbed someone slower, freeze-framing for the shelter of the abbey. Still, we’re a pretty ragtag lot, all beat up with scrapes and cuts and bruises. There was no avoiding the fallout.

We waited inside until it was quiet for a few secs and it seemed the debris had settled, then headed back out to poke around in the chunks and convince ourselves the threats were really gone. Dancer studied the stuff for a good five minutes before flashing me a grin and pronouncing the debris inert. He plans to take samples back to Trinity’s labs but he said he was ninety-eight percent certain nothing was going to rise up from the remains.

“How did you know it would work?” Jo says to me.

“I didn’t,” I say around a mouthful of sticky honey-slathered biscuit. I lick crumbs off my fingers. “But once I saw the Hoar Frost King was icing the fire world from the inside, I realized it was stuck in one of its own frozen scenes, like a bug in amber. And every time Ryodan and me ever freeze-framed near a frozen scene, it exploded into shrapnel-sized slivers.” I shrug. “Who knows? Maybe it would have stayed stuck in there and exploded all by itself in time. But I sure thought it looked like it was coming back out.”

“I thought so, too,” Lor says, and everybody agrees with him.

“Bloody brilliant about the whip, Mega,” Dancer says.

I preen.

“It was close. We got lucky,” Kat says.

“Lucky, my ass! You got superheroes on the job!” Part of superheroness is precision timing and delicate maneuvering, and if she wants to pretend it’s luck, I’m not going to waste breath I could be using to eat arguing.

“Today, Lady Luck had a name.” Ryodan looks at me.

“No shit.” Lor says. “Nice work, honey.”

I just about lose my biscuits then. I glow so hard it almost hurts. I think my skin is leaking light.

I swagger over to the hearth and gulp three marshmallows in quick succession.

“Can you believe what that Unseelie prince did?” goth-chick Josie says.

I choke on the last marshmallow I’m trying to swallow whole. I kick up into fast-mo and try to fast-cough it out but it doesn’t work. Belatedly it occurs to me fast-mo might not have been the brightest move. Friction and mucus expand the confection like a waterlogged tampon. It swells in my throat and shuts down my airway.

I thump myself on the chest with a fist. Doesn’t help. I’m about to give myself the Heimlich over the back of a chair when Lor pounds the center of my back and the marshmallow splats out onto the coat of arms above the fireplace.

“Dude, no need to shove,” Dancer says. “I give her the Heimlich all the time. She doesn’t chew when she eats.”

I turn around and Dancer’s picking himself off the floor, looking irked. And tired. I wonder when he last slept. I forget he’s not superpowered like the rest of us just because he’s got a superbrain.

“Clean it up, Dani,” Kat says. “It’ll bake onto the medallion.”

I grab a napkin off the biscuit tray, not feeling so cocky anymore. There were casualties. I’d managed to let myself forget that for a sec. “Christian sacrificed himself because I couldn’t make up my mind.”

“An Unseelie prince sacrificed himself,” Kat echoes, like she has no clue what to make of it.

I don’t either. Why did he give himself up just to make my decision easier? I would have made a decision in another sec or two. We would have lost a lot more sidhe-seers to the Crimson Hag. Was it his way of proving he wasn’t full Unseelie yet? Maybe he was trying to make up for killing the woman he had sex with, or it was his idea of another wedding present.

“It’s pretty clear he’s obsessed with you, honey,” Lor says.

“Was obsessed,” Ryodan says. “The Hag took him out. Saved me the trouble and good fucking riddance.”

Now I have double the reason to track down the bitch and kill her. I have to free Christian so we can be even and call it quits between us. “We lost sidhe-seers,” I say. “One of them was Tanty Nana. She was too old. She should never have been out there to begin with.”

We’re all quiet a sec, thinking about her and the others that died.

Then Ryodan stands up and says to me, “Come on, kid. Let’s go.”

“Huh? Where?”

“You live with me now.”

“Bull-fecking-crikey!”

“She’s moving back into the abbey,” Kat says.

“Bull-fecking-crikey!”

“The Mega can take care of herself,” Dancer says. “If you bloody idiots didn’t just see that, you’re blind. Give her room to breathe.”

“Fecking crikey!” I agree totally. I adore Dancer. I shoot him a look that doesn’t bother trying to pretend otherwise.

Ryodan says, “She needs rules.”

Lor says, “Boss, all she needs is somebody to train with, vent some of that boundless fucking energy.”

Kat says, “What she needs is—”

While they’re all busy discussing my needs that they don’t know the first fecking thing about, I make like the wind and blow out, sure to bang the door loud on the way.

I steal Ryodan’s Humvee and head for the city.

He’ll never catch me in one of the buses or big trucks that are the only other vehicles at the abbey.

I wish I could have brought Dancer with me but I never would have escaped if I’d slowed myself down.

Ain’t nobody knows what I need better than me. They’re probably all back there, still bickering, trying to decide how to control me and run my life.

I snicker. “Dudes. Never. Going. To. Happen.”

Forty-Four

“This is not the end, this is not the beginning”

So I’m blowing through the streets of Dublin after ditching the Humvee on the main road where Ryodan or one of his dudes is sure to spot it on their way back to Chester’s because no matter how bugfuck he makes me, I got no desire to take something of his permanent-like. He’d probably hunt me for for-fecking-ever, instead of just trying to boss me around for-fecking-ever. That dude’s radar is something I don’t want to be any bigger on.

Live at Chester’s, my fecking petunia!

“Ass,” I mutter with a scowl. Petunia is one of Mac’s words. Her and Alina grew up so stupid and sweet they never even said “feck” until their early twenties when they started seeing Fae. Up till then they had their own cute little vocabulary for things. I hate cute. I hate thinking about Mac. I remember seeing her for the first time, sitting on a bench at Trinity looking all soft and pretty and useless, then finding out she was really made of steel like me and my sword. I remember feeling like my world was finally going to change and bygones might somehow miraculously turn into never-fecking-have-beens.

I miss her. I hate knowing she’s in this city somewhere, walking up and down streets just like me, thinking thoughts about killing Fae and saving the world and killing me, and she’s on one street and I’m on another and those streets can never meet or one of us is dead.

After how great my day was I can’t believe I’m thinking broody thoughts. I hurry through Temple Bar, dodging cars and streetlamps and all kinds of stuff half buried in piles of ice-crusted snow. Now that the Hoar Frost King is gone, the snow should start melting. I couldn’t be more ready for summer! I don’t tan. I freckle. Dancer likes freckles.

“Summer,” I say, grinning. It can’t come fast enough! They’ll plant gardens at the abbey, grow a mixed veggie medley like the one I had at Chester’s. I’ll definitely be dropping by more once stuff starts growing! I can load myself down with bars and take a few long freeze-framing trips around Ireland, looking for cows or goats or sheep. Maybe even pigs. “Fecking-A, bacon!” My mouth waters just thinking about it.

Right now I got a ton of stuff to do, and getting around in all this snow is tedious. I can’t freeze-frame for long because I have to keep dropping down and replot my mental grid. There are too many drifts and piles of ice that weren’t there yesterday. Every time I drop down I just about freeze my fingers and toes off. It’s night, a wicked breeze is blowing in off the ocean, and I swear it’s twenty below with the windchill.

I snap my grid into place, whiz a quarter of a block, stop, re-plan. Freeze-frame forty feet, turn the corner on a slide, smash into a drift, roll, and remap while sliding some more. I slam into the side of a building and my breath frosts the air in a sharp white gasp. I curse and rub my side. I’m going to be one big bruise tomorrow.

First up on my list of things to do is get a new Dani Daily out there before We-don’t-really-fecking-Care does and totally skews the news. Folks need to know all the scoop: that the villain icing peeps is dead, they can start making noise again, the snow is going to melt, and even though it don’t look like it right now, summer is going to come. They need to know I got my sword back and ain’t defenseless anymore. I’m back on my beat 24/7, watching over things and hunting the Crimson Hag, who’s going to bite the dust as soon as I can figure how to kill her and get Christian back.

Tomorrow I’ll cruise around Dublin slow-mo Joe style, listening for survivors over the crunch of snow and taking them in for food and shelter, which means Ryodan is about to get a lot more folks at Chester’s. Our city just keeps getting hammered with walls falling and riots happening, food getting stolen and stockpiled, and now this killing winter in spring. I’m thinking we better get used to things never being predictable again. I suspect we’ll lose a lot more folks before the tide starts to turn. Change is hard for most people. Not me. I love re-creating myself. Change means you get to choose again. Become something new. Unless you’re dead like Alina. Then you never get to choose again. That’s why I’m going to make Ryodan give me whatever secret he’s got so I can live forever.

I ease back down into slow-mo to skirt a mound of ice-crusted snow. I’m standing there, starting to get all broody again thinking about all the ghosts I see in these streets sometimes, when I feel the tip of something sharp and pointy in my back.

“Drop your sword, Dani,” Mac says, real soft-like behind me.

“Yeah, right. Like I’m actually falling for this.” I snicker. Me and my overactive imagination. Like Mac would actually be able to sneak up behind me without my superhearing tipping me off. Like she would ever walk around at night with no MacHalo on. I got mine on and I know exactly how bright it is. If she was standing behind me, we’d be making double the light I’m throwing.

I freeze-frame.

Or try to.

Nothing happens. Just like those two times with Ryodan when all the sudden I just didn’t have any juice. No gas in the tank, no engine in the train.

I squeeze my eyes shut hard and try again.

Still standing there.

Still feeling the tip of a spear in my back.

“I said ‘drop your fucking sword,’ ” Mac says.

For Alex, my hero

BY KAREN MARIE MONING

THE DANI O’MALLEY TRILOGY

Iced

THE FEVER SERIES

Darkfever

Bloodfever

Faefever

Dreamfever

Shadowfever

GRAPHIC NOVEL

Fever Moon

NOVELLA

Into the Dreaming

THE HIGHLANDER SERIES

Beyond the Highland Mist

To Tame a Highland Warrior

The Highlander’s Touch

Kiss of the Highlander

The Dark Highlander

The Immortal Highlander

Spell of the Highlander

About The Author

KAREN MARIE MONING is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Fever series, featuring MacKayla Lane, and the award-winning Highlander series. She has a bachelor’s degree in society and law from Purdue University and is currently working on the next novel featuring Dani O’Malley.