TWELVE
“Life is a highway, I wanna ride it all night long”
I slo-mo Joe it across Halfpenny Bridge.
We didn’t learn a single new thing at the latest ice sculpture. Like the others, it blew shortly after we arrived. I freeze-framed out of there through flesh-colored shrapnel I pretended wasn’t parts of fingers and faces I’d failed to save.
The new places that got iced have nothing in common that I can see. There were two of those small underground pubs that’ve been springing up all over the city, and a fitness center where three people were frozen doing yoga in the middle of a bunch of crystal bowls. How weird is that? People doing yoga in times like these!
So far I’ve got an underground club at Chester’s, a warehouse on the outskirts of the city, two inner-city small pubs, and a fitness center. Humans, Unseelie, and Imperial guards all at some places but not others, so whatever’s happening doesn’t appear to be targeting a certain person like Ryodan or group of victims. It’s looking more like a random, spontaneous event with each scene I see.
I’m trudging, which I don’t usually do, because I’m thinking hard and when I’m thinking hard plus freeze-framing I run into things a lot. My bruises are fading and sometimes I try to be my normal-colored self for like a whole day. I’m too wired for sleep. I get like that sometimes and can’t do anything about it but ride it out. I need something to do or I’m going to drive myself nuts.
I find Dancer in his favorite corner penthouse on the south side of the river Liffey. The two outer walls are solid floor-to-ceiling windows that look out over the streets. When I get there, he’s stretched out on a rug in the sunshine with his shirt off, eyes closed, glasses on the floor beside him.
Dancer’s going to be a big guy one day, if he ever gains weight. Last time we measured ourselves, he was fourteen inches taller than me, lanky and lean. He forgets to eat. His hair is dark with some wave and he never cuts it until it gets in his way, then he asks me to trim it. It’s soft. I like it to his chin as it is now, falling away from his face. When he wears his glasses, which is pretty much every minute he’s awake because he’s so nearsighted (he hates them and before the walls fell he was going to get Lasik), he looks like a hunky geek. I’d never tell him that! I like his hands. His feet are ginormous! His eyes aren’t green or blue, they’re aqua, like they’re Fae-brushed. He’s got better eyelashes than me.
When I see him I don’t say, “Dude where you been, I was starting to worry,” because me and Dancer don’t do that to each other. He survived the walls going down all by himself. So did I. And I don’t say, “What happened the night Ryodan showed up and took me, where’d you disappear to?” It doesn’t matter. We’re here now. It’s like somehow we know in our guts that it’ll never be too long, the other is always going to walk through the door one day, eventually.
He props up on an elbow when the door closes. He knows it’s me because I had to disarm ten booby traps before I got to the door. Nobody else could make it through one of his gauntlets without tripping some alarm. Well, except for Ryodan, who seems to be the exception to every fecking rule.
My heart squinches a little when I look at him. I never had siblings but I think he’s like a brother to me. I can never wait to see him again, tell him all the ideas I’ve been thinking, the things I’ve seen, and get his take on it all. Sometimes when we see each other we can’t stop talking for hours and hours and we get so excited we start to stumble over our words trying to say it all so fast. I consider telling him about the iced scenes and the mystery I’m looking into but I don’t want Dancer to be any bigger on Ryodan’s radar than he already is. That Ryodan even knows he exists makes me nuts. I want Dancer safe. And I know him. If he got the tiniest hint of a big mystery like this, he’d start poking into all kinds of places that could get him killed. It doesn’t matter how über-impressed I am with how smart he is. Ryodan’s worse than walls falling or the world melting down. You don’t survive if he doesn’t want you to.
“Mega, I’ve been thinking—”
“Stop the presses! Do I need to put out a special edition of The Dani Daily?”
“Might.”
He grins and I grin back. Dancer thinking has stellar results. You wouldn’t believe the bombs he can build. We blow up things sometimes just for fun. You know, things that need to be blown up anyway like places where a lot of Shades used to hide that maybe they would return to one day like birds along a migration route, if it was still there.
“You got me wondering about Papa Roach’s babies,” he says.
“Yeah?” I stretch out in the sun next to him, prop up on an elbow, too, facing him. I love being able to see his eyes without his glasses in the way. It’s a rare treat.
“Do you know how long they can stay separate from a body, either Papa or human?”
“Dunno. Dancer, I finally found Scream 4. Want to watch it tonight?”
“Watched it last night,” he says absently, running a hand through his hair, making it stand up funny in a totally hot way, and I can tell by the way his eyes are unfocused that he’s lost in thought and not aware of stuff around him. He gets that way a lot.
“You watched it without me?” I’m hurt. Me and Dancer love horror flicks. We gorge on them because they make us laugh. They have a way of putting the world in perspective. We’d been hunting for Scream 4 for a while, planning to watch it. Dancer doesn’t usually watch movies alone, least not that I know of.
“But I’ll watch it again. It was cool.”
“Cool.” I still feel hurt, even though there’s no reason for it. He’s watching it with me tonight. So what if he saw it last night, too? And so what if he saw it with someone else? I don’t care about stuff like that. What happens when I’m not around ain’t got nothing to do with me. “What about Papa Roach?”
“Blowing them up doesn’t work. Torching them is no good either. But what if we keep them from returning to a body? Any body. Human or their own. Wouldn’t that solve the problem? Our goal is to keep them from getting inside more people. They’re immortal, and your time is too important to waste running around after thousands of them with your sword. So, I started thinking what about a tough, impossible-to-escape spray-plastic? Encase them and keep them from being able to reattach to anything. I’ve been working on a formula. Once it’s done, we can fill those small fertilizer tanks we swiped from the hardware store and test it out. I already rigged up a couple of sprayers to fit.”
So, that’s where he’d been. And when he got done working last night he watched a movie to chill. No big.
“I’ve got something that sets hard at a quarter-inch thick. I’m still trying to get it to gel to the perfect degree of solidity. I think I’ve figured out a way to add iron to the mix without making it too rigid. How do the segments attach to Papa? Tentacles? Suckers? How do they get under human skin? Can you catch me a couple to test it on?”
“You’re the Shit, you know that,” I say.
“No, you’re the Shit,” he says and grins, and we say it back and forth a couple of times. He thinks I’m the Shit because I can actually catch them. I was born with my gifts. Dancer is always thinking, trying to find ways to do things better. Surviving the fall with no special powers and no friends wows the feck out of me.
We relax on the floor because sunshine in Dublin is rare, and we talk about anything and everything except things like where I was when he was wherever he was. I don’t tell him I was in a dungeon for almost four days and he doesn’t ask. I like that about him. Friends don’t build cages for each other.
We watch the sun move across the sky, and sometimes he gets up to get me things to eat. He tells me he’s been checking stores and nearly every single one has been wiped clean. I have to stop myself three times from almost spilling the beans about the iced stuff I’ve been seeing.
When it’s getting near seven o’clock, I start getting antsy and it makes me mad because I don’t want to have to leave but somebody else is pulling my strings and I’ve got to go. I have to get to Chester’s early enough to avoid Mac but not so early Ryodan gets all cocky about it.
I sigh.
“Something worrying you, Mega?” Dancer says.
“Just got to go take care of some things.”
“I thought we were going to watch a movie. I found a whole box of Skittles at the airport. And jerky. The hot stuff.”
I smack myself in the forehead. Skittles, jerky, and a movie. What was I thinking, saying hey, let’s watch a movie tonight. My nights don’t belong to me anymore. Somebody else owns them. That’s not just a bitter pill to swallow. For someone like me it’s a suicide tooth. It’s irrelevant that I want to go work on the ice mystery and keep more innocent folks from dying. I can’t handle that Ryodan gets to dictate when, how, and where I do it. It almost makes me not want to work on it at all. I hate being controlled.
I can’t not go to Chester’s because I don’t know what Ryodan will do to Jo if I don’t show, and there’s no way I’m running the risk of finding out. I don’t know if he’d hunt me down here, smash up the TV and DVD player, and take Dancer and put him in his dungeon. I never know what that dude will do next.
But I’m crystal clear about one thing he’s doing.
Ruining my life.