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.”