He tells me a huge fire-world IFP almost burned the abbey to the ground! It evaporated iron and concrete and if it had made it to the abbey, nothing would have been left. But Ryodan’s men stopped it by tethering it stationary to the ground somehow. I don’t like that it’s out there by the abbey, tied up or not. It makes me nervous.
I tell him about the Boora-Boora books and he laughs his butt off about me chasing unruly sentences down. He fills me in on how WeCare started painting buildings white to let folks know it’s one of theirs, and if you go in and sign up, and attend meetings, they give you all kinds of food and stuff. I tell him about R’jan trying to take over as king of the Fae and that the ice monster has a name: the Hoar Frost King. I think it’s the most we’ve ever told each other about the daily details of our lives. He tells me food is getting really hard to find. I tell him about the Fae being totally inert at the scenes and about what R’jan said about it killing Seelie and Unseelie deader than dead, wiping them out of all record of existence. “I think it might be after folks’ life force,” I tell him.
“But why those scenes? How does it select the ones it chooses and why does it ice them? And if it wanted people’s life force, why wouldn’t it go where the greatest number were gathered? At some of these scenes, there were only a few people. ”
“You mean like why would it ice the small club beneath Chester’s when it could have iced the whole place?”
“It iced part of Chester’s?”
“That was the first place it iced that I know of. It’s the reason Ryodan dragged me into this mess. ”
“It can’t be after life force. It took out a church spire, too. There wasn’t a single person or Fae at that scene. ”
“Maybe it was just flying over that spire and accidentally iced it. Or maybe there was a tiny life force, like a mouse there, and it was feeling peckish. ”
He grins. “Maybe. ”
“I kind of doubt it, though. I think we should label them by order of occurrence. Maybe that’ll help us see something. ”
“What bites,” he says, “is we can’t even tell people something so simple as: stay in small groups and you’ll be okay. People are scared of their own shadows, Mega. The whole city is on edge, tempers are high, and people are getting into fights over nothing. We’ve got to figure out what’s going on because if they don’t freeze to death first, they’ll kill each other. They’ve lost too much and been afraid too long. While you were gone, there were no Dani Dailies getting out, and in times like these, no news isn’t good news. People need to believe someone is in the streets watching out for them. ”
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“What about WeCare? Aren’t they taking their job seriously? Dude, when I was gone, they should have stepped up to the plate, put out more issues! A newspaper’s got a responsibility to the people!”
“The only thing WeCare is telling people is that they need to ‘take the white’ and everything will be all right. Half the city is rushing in to blindly embrace faith; the other half isn’t buying it. Toss in the shortage of food and water, and the brutal cold, and we’re going to have riots on our hands any day now. ”
I push my hair out of my face and stare at the mystery board. I count twenty-four pins. My nine ziplocks are no longer representative of the scenes. “Did you collect debris?”
He gives me a what-kind-of-idiot-do-you-think-I-am look, and a grin, and picks a box up off the floor that’s crammed with more yellow envelopes like the ones on the slab. “I’ve been analyzing samples from the scenes, categorizing and isolating commonalities. I took photos, too. ”
I grin back because great minds think alike and it’s so fecking cool to be peas in the Mega-pod.
While he opens envelopes, I get back to pinning pictures of the scenes where they go on our mystery board. I thought my life force idea was right until he pointed out two glaring flaws. Feck. It’s a good thing I got my “impartial” ziplocks of evidence. I start to snicker then remember again that Ryodan’s dead. It’s hard for me to remember for some reason. Like I thought he was eternal or something. I got no clue why it feels like such a kick in the teeth every time I think about it. Sure, I let the Hag out, but he’s the dude that failed to dodge her. I don’t move as fast as him, and I managed to get away.
Eight hours later I can hardly see straight. Alternately staring at bits of debris then studying the map is making me bug-eyed.
I been awake for three days, juiced on a constant sugar rush from candy bars, sodas, and the pall of something hanging over me that makes me nuts. Guilt. Guilt is for losers. Guilt is for folks who have stupid things like regrets. I contemplate the notion that maybe regrets are a process of accumulation of time, as unavoidable as a closet full of clothes and more bags of them in the attic. Is accumulated baggage what makes people get old? If so, they need to clean out their fecking attics, send the stuff to consignment shops and remember how to walk around naked like kids, little bellies sticking out, always ready for a good laugh. The second I kill the Crimson Hag, I’m sending my guilt straight to hell where it can burn. Problem is, I’m stuck with it till then and it’s making me even testier than hormones. I don’t like feeling responsible for crap. Like little anchors holding me still on my happy sea that’s got an even grander adventure waiting just beyond the next wave.
There’s a bit of everything in the plastic bags. Splinters of wood from church pews, stained glass, hair, bits of bone and carpet and leather, dirt, plastic, food, human parts, Unseelie parts. There are chunks of white crystal and shreds of yoga mats, parts of phones, teeth, jewelry, fragments of various electronics, bits of iron bars, a piece of a washboard, metal racking. There’s paper and plastic wrappers, part of a fingernail with a finger bone fused to it, a hearing aid, half a driver’s license, and so on. We make a list of each scene’s contents, tack it to the murder board, and cross off anything that wasn’t in every single bag.
We’re left with “mystery debris,” which is what we decide to call the dirt stuff at the bottom of each ziplock, metal and plastic.
“Does this stuff feel … I don’t know, weird to you, Mega?”
I scoop a chunk of crystal into my palm and hold it a second. “It’s colder than it should be, like it’s still partly iced. It doesn’t warm up no matter how long you hold it. ”
“No, there’s something else. I can’t put my finger on it. ”
I wait. I didn’t go to school and I’m a little in awe of how much stuff Dancer knows. If he says there’s something else, there is.
He muses aloud. “If it’s not after life forces, how is it selecting its scenes? It might not be metal or plastic that the thing is after, which is at every scene in some form, but an ingredient in metal or plastic. The thing could be hunting infinitesimal traces of something. ”
I push a pile of old bones to the edge of a stone slab, stretch out next to them, fold my arms behind my head and begin mentally rebuilding the scenes to what they were before they blew, thinking it might be easier to find a commonality before they were reduced to rubble. “Like some kind of theoretical vitamin or mineral it needs in order to accomplish something it wants to do?”
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“Or a common element at the scenes that makes it think what it wants might be at that scene,” Dancer says.
“Huh?”
“It could be like a fisherman, going wherever there’s salt water, because he’s looking for a whale. We wouldn’t necessarily ever find a whale. But we would always find saltwater. If we can figure out what draws it, we’re halfway to stopping it. ”
“We still got three scenes we don’t have samples from. The two that R’jan said got iced in Faery and the one under Chester’s. ”
“Can you ask Ryodan to help us get samples? From what I hear, pretty much everybody owes that dude something. ”
All my mental pictures shatter when Dancer says his name, and suddenly I’m seeing two images a
t the same time: Ryodan on level four laughing, having sex, more alive than anybody I ever met ’cept of course me, and Ryodan, bled out in the alley, guts draping down the side of the building, cracking a joke while he dies, and I’m thinking the most fecked-up thought—I hardly even got to know him! “Yes, I did,” I mutter, pushing myself up because if I’m going to puke my candy bar, I’m not going to be on my back while I do it.
“Did what?” Dancer says.
I always fought with him and kept saying I hated him. “He deserved it. He was the most arrogant, irritating fecker I’ve ever known!”
“Deserved what? Who was?”
Looks like I’ll have to start calling Ryodan TP, too. ’Cause he’s making my stomach cramp. I don’t like him not being in the world. “Does this mean my contract expired, or can one of the other dudes call it in?” You just never know with dudes like them. I don’t ever want to go into Chester’s again, and I don’t want to go into BB&B again, assuming I could, because it’s just B&B now and the critical ingredients that made both places so exciting and larger than life had nothing to do with the places themselves.
“What contract?”
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.
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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. ”
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“ ’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.
THIRTY-THREE
“Who’s your daddy?”
Chester’s. Feckin-A, I hate this place even more than I used to. The line outside tonight is nuts. It’s zero degrees in Dublin, snow’s begun to fall in earnest, there’s a killer wind kicking up and still five blocks of folks are shivering outside, bundled in layers of clothing, huddled together waiting to get in.
I blast past them in fast-mo, skidding on an icy spot, whiz around one of Ryodan’s human bouncers who’s got his hands too full controlling the crowd to stop me, jump the ladder down to the main entrance and explode through tall black doors into the club.
It’s rocking tonight same as always: music thumping, lights flashing, folks partying up a storm. We got something icing our city, killing innocents everywhere, turning it into an arctic zone in June, and this is what folks are doing about it. Dancing, laughing, getting drunk, getting laid, acting like the walls didn’t fall, the world didn’t lose half the human race, and nothing’s changed.
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