Now that those critical ingredients are gone forever I got a bad feeling about Dublin, about the whole world. Like I might have tilted the planet on its axis into some strange, new, and not nearly as safe a position by eliminating them.
“Mega.” Dancer’s standing in front of me. “Talk to me.”
“We can’t ask Ryodan nothing,” I tell him.
“Why not?”
I rub my eyes and sigh. “I killed him.”
I wake up with my neck all crinked and a ziplock bag stuck to my cheek by drool. I lift my head an inch or two and peek out from under my hair, hoping Dancer isn’t looking at me, and when I find him staring at the mystery board, I swallow a sigh of embarrassed relief.
I peel the bag from my face, wipe the drool off with my shirt, and rub at the grooves in my cheek. I can feel part of a ring indent in it plus a couple of those zipper lines. I don’t even remember falling asleep. But somewhere along the way I just dropped my head on the stuff I was examining and passed out. A few hours? More? “What time is it?”
“What day, you mean.”
“Dude, tell me I didn’t sleep that long!”
“You needed it. I’m not sure you’re going to be able to move, though. I’ve never seen anyone sit on a stool, drop her head on a slab and not move for fifteen hours. I thought about getting you to stretch out somewhere more comfortable. You changed my mind.” He turns around and grins at me. He’s got a busted lip. “You had no intention of being moved. You decked me in your sleep.”
“Aw, dude, sorry!” I have no memory of it.
“No worries, Mega.”
My stomach growls loud enough to wake the dead, and he says, “I got something I been saving for you.” He rummages around in one of his bags on the floor, pulls out a box and tosses it to me.
I light up like a Christmas tree. “Fecking-A! Pop-Tarts! Where did you find Pop-Tarts? I haven’t seen any for months!” Even before the walls fell, they could be tough to find. “And they’re my favorites—chocolate with frosting!” I rip open a pack and munch happily away. I polish off the first two in a quick inhale then slow down to savor every delicious, preservative-packed, sugar-crammed crumb of the remaining six. When the walls fell, all the good stuff—which is the bad-for-you stuff—got taken off the shelves first. Soda and liquor went real fast. Candy, cake, cookies, pies, things like that were next. Pop-Tarts, all the sugary cereal, flew off the shelves, too. I’m as guilty as the next person. Funny thing is, nowadays I’d just about give my right arm for a hot meal of fresh slow-cooked pot roast, carrots, peas, bread, and gravy.
Still, Pop-Tarts are close to heaven and Dancer got them for me, which makes them taste twice as good. I eat, and he tells me everything he considered and discarded while I was sleeping so I can poke holes in his theories if there are any. When he’s done talking, we’re no closer to conclusions than we were before I fell asleep.
“So, all we’ve still got is that every scene has dirt, some kind of plastic, and metal at it.”
“Actually it’s dirt, plastic, and iron. The metal in every one of the ziplocks is largely iron.”
“Iron is what we use to imprison the Fae.”
“I know. Remember how much worse the Unseelie at Dublin Castle got iced?”
I nod. “I thought it was because there were so many of them.”
“It also happens to be the location with the most iron. Tons of the stuff was used to build those cages.”
“Where was the iron at the other scenes?”
“Old railroad tracks run right next to where they were washing clothes out in the country. I checked maps, and discovered railroad tracks run past four other scenes. I found iron bullets in two of the bags. The church steeple had enormous cast-iron bells. The fitness center had part of a cast-iron teapot and iron chime fragments. At another scene there were several older cars that had frames of iron. They don’t make them like that anymore. At Dublin Castle there are all those iron cages. The racking in one of the old warehouses was made of iron.” He goes on, detailing location after location.
“Why iron? Why not say … steel. Isn’t steel iron?”
“Iron gets turned into steel. What I’m seeing is a preponderance of unworked iron, like the railroad tracks, bells, and bars. Old stuff. You don’t see a lot of iron anymore. You see composites. Steel is stronger and iron rusts. You know how old railroad tracks are almost always red with it?”
“You think we need to go back to the scenes and see if it took the iron?”
“No. I’m wondering if iron is in the salt water. If that’s what draws it.”
“But what is it after?”
He shrugs. “Who knows? Who cares? I only want to know two things: how to lure it to us and how to get rid of it. Its goals are irrelevant.”
“But Fae hate iron.”
“I know. That’s what makes me wonder if it’s drawing it somehow. I’m not saying it’s coming to iron because it likes it. Maybe it’s trying to destroy the iron by icing it. Maybe one of the Fae summoned it to destroy the only means we have of imprisoning them. Maybe trying to understand something that can open a multidimensional portal, sail across the sky, open another portal and vanish, is as much an exercise in futility as trying to divine the motives of God.”
“You believe in God?”
“Dude. Only God could have created physics.”
I snicker. “Or Pop-Tarts.”
He grins. “See. There you are. Proof of the divine. All in the chocolate smudge around your mouth.”
“I got chocolate on my face?”
“Kind of hard to see with all those ziplock lines but yeah.”
I sigh. Someday I’m going to be around Dancer with no guts in my hair, no weird clothes on, no black eyes or blood, and no food on my face. He probably won’t recognize me. “But what about those two places in Faery?” I say.
“What about them?”
“There’s no way there’s iron in Faery.”
“Assumption. Potentially erroneous. The walls came down. Everything got fractured and Faery has been bleeding through to our world. Maybe parts of our world are bleeding through to Faery, and there are railroad ties or bells in those parts. We need samples from Faery.”
“And how the feck are we going to get those? Why don’t we just try to lure it with iron and see what happens?”
“That’s plan B. Let’s try to get samples first and I’ll keep analyzing this stuff. There’s something I’m missing. I can feel it in my gut. I need more time with the evidence. Besides, even if we got it to come, what would we do with it then? We need to know what draws it and how to stop it. You get the samples. I’ll work on the rest. If there’s no iron in Faery, we know we’re back at square one without having to round up tons of iron and find a place to stack it all up where nobody will get hurt.”
I push up and head for the door.
As I’m leaving, he says, “Don’t go to Faery yourself, Mega. Make a sifter do it for you. We can’t lose another month. I got a bad feeling about these iced places.”
“ ’Cause they keep exploding?”
He takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes. “No. Like there’s something worse about them. A lot worse. I can’t explain. It’s just a hunch.”
I know Dancer. When he gets a hunch, what that really means is his subconscious is seeing something he hasn’t wrapped his conscious brain around yet. Every time he’s ever told me he had a hunch, he’s worked his way around an epiphany. I trust him like I never trusted anybody. If he wants samples and more time, he’s got it.
I head up and out into the Dublin night. A light snow is falling. The moon has a blood red ring.
There’s one sure place to find a sifting Fae. Conveniently, it’s also the third place we need a sample from. With luck, I’ll be back here in a few hours with the final three ziplocks to complete our evidence chain.
My luck ain’t been so good lately.