Iced - Moning Karen Marie. Страница 60

He doesn’t get that I’m not interested in a superhero boyfriend.

I’m going to be the superhero that can kick his ass from one end of Dublin to the other.

“Oh, sweet fecking day,” I sigh raptly around a mouthful of chocolate, anticipating it. Peanuts and chocolate get stuck in my throat and I almost can’t swallow. I been eating too many candy bars lately because I’m on the go so much and it’s all I got handy. I’m having a major salt craving. Sometimes when I eat too much sugar I start obsessing about my mom’s corned beef and cabbage with her fresh rosemary bread and potatoes and chives and — Holy Ashleagh Falls, my mouth is watering!

I whiz into a grocery store. Empty. I head north three blocks to Paddy’s Stop ’n’ Go. Empty. I dash ten blocks south to Porter’s. Also completely cleaned out. What I wouldn’t give for a bag of chips! Useless for an energy punch but a hopping St. Patty’s Day Parade on the tongue! I’m practically drooling I’m so hungry for something besides chocolate. A can of beans. Crimeny, even tuna would cheer me up!

I get over it. Wasted energy. There is no other food right now, and one thing I learned in a cage is you either pretend you have what you want or you don’t think about it. And if you pretend, make it real, milk it for every nuance, every succulent taste, scent, touch. I don’t have time for that kind of indulgence right now. I got a crazy Unseelie prince gunning for me with my own sword. I got a nutty nightclub owner out there who thinks he has a point to make with me and wants to lock me up to do it. I got a bloodthirsty ex — best friend who’s after my ass. I got an Ice Monster killing all kinds of innocents.

I can deal with the first three. Dublin needs to know about the last one!

I got several places in the city I can print a daily. It won’t take Ryodan long to find them all, so I know I don’t have much time. If I can print off even just a thousand and get them up, word will spread fast. Then I’ll get down to the business of figuring out how to get my sword back from Christian.

I head for the old Bartlett Building on the south side of the river Liffey, whizzing over Ha’Penny Bridge, freeze-framing parallel to the water. Stars are twinkling on it, ice crystals on a silver slide. It’s all kissed with the new lavender-metallic shade the Fae brought with them.

A few seconds later I blast in through double doors, dump my backpack on a table, and fire up the presses, blowing on my hands to warm them. I set up my little miniprinter and hook up my phone to print out the photos I been taking all day. My hands are clumsy with cold. I think the Iceman is starting to screw up our weather or something. Usually in May we run a low of forty, high of sixty. And I run hotter because, well, I run everywhere. But I been cold all day. Feels like no more than twenty-five or thirty outside right now. I wish this place had a fireplace like Mac has at Barrons Books & Baubles. I been avoiding that part of town for weeks. Can’t stand the thought of seeing her coming and going, knowing I’m dead to her. Knowing I’ll never step foot inside BB&B again and laugh with her, feel like I fit somewhere. I wish I had a place like Mac has at Barrons Books & Baubles.

“Wishes. Horses. Fecking waste of time.” I was alone a lot as a kid, and at night sometimes there was nothing on TV and the silence would get ten times as big as our house. I used to talk to myself to fill it up. I was scintillating, too, always up on the latest news and stuff because I was stuck in a cage watching it all the time. Maybe that’s where I got my love of broadcasting it. I had so much to say and nobody to say it to. Now I got the whole city! I keep up a running monologue as I work on my rag, mostly venting my irritation with current circumstances.

I don’t have time to write anything real entertaining, something I try hard to do whenever I put a Dani Daily out because any writer worth their salt knows you got to give folks bread and circuses along with the information they need to save their own asses. Otherwise they won’t read it. There was this whole series on TV when I was nine about how to write and keep folks reading and I was riveted by it because I knew I’d be writing my memoirs one day.

I had no idea I’d start running a paper when I was still only thirteen and get a book published when I was fourteen!

NEW MONSTER LOOSE IN DUBLIN!!!!

The ICEMAN slays hundreds!!!

READ ALL ABOUT IT!

AND BY THE WAY I’M NOT DEFENSELESS. DUDES, YOU THINK I’M DEFENSELESS, YOU JUST TRY. BRING IT ON! I GOT ALL KINDS OF SECRET WEAPONS UP MY SLEEVE!

You heard it from me first and nobody else!

There’s some kind of big, bad Unseelie loose in Dublin, icing folks to death. You hardly get any warning that it’s about to be in your space. It’s hit churches, pubs, gyms, warehouses, rural yards, and spots smack in the middle of the street. No place is off its grid! You got to watch for it real careful. At best, if you’re paying close attention, you’ll see a kind of shimmery spot in the air then a slit opens, fog spills out, and the monster comes. In like, just two seconds it ices everything in its path TO DEATH INSTANTLY then disappears.

Lie low, stay off the streets! I’ll keep you posted, Dublin.

Oh, and if you stumble across one of its iced scenes, steer clear — they explode!

“They’re not worth it.”

I just about squirt right out of my skin like a dab of toothpaste in a tube squeezed too tight. I expected Ryodan to find me first.

I freeze-frame.

And slam into Christian.

“I’m a full sifter now, lass. You’ll never outrun me again. It was driving me bugfuck that you could get away from me. No more.” His hands close on my waist and I try to twist free but it’s like I got steel vises biting into my body, clamping down on bone. I look up at him. The faint outline of a torque is luminous at his neck. His eyes are iridescent fire. If insanity has a color, it’s swirling in there.

“Humans,” he says coldly, and his face is like chiseled ice. Pale against midnight hair. Brilliant tattoos rush up his neck, around his jaw, back down his body, a kaleidoscopic storm just beneath his skin. “Puny. Stupid. Frightened of their shadow. Why do you bother with them? Why waste your time? You’re worth so much more than that.”

“Dude. I am one. Give me my fecking sword. It ain’t yours.”

“No you’re not. You’re beyond human. You’re what the race should aspire to be.” He leans in, sniffs my hair and sighs. “Stay the fuck away from Ryodan. I bloody hate it when you smell like him. It turns my stomach.”

I search my brain for a way out of this one. With my sword. Is it on him somewhere? I let my lids drift down, peek at his lower body. Don’t want to telegraph. I don’t see it anywhere. Jeans, hiking boots, cream fisherman’s sweater that strains across shoulders way wider than they used to be. To support the wing structure he’s developing? Does he miss who he was? Is that why he’s dressed like this? No visible sign of any weapons on him anywhere, but then he’s so far past needing a weapon. He is a weapon. There’s blood all over his sweater. I don’t even want to know why. “You’re human, too, remember?” Obviously with some part of his brain he does. The Unseelie princes rarely wear clothing.

“Not anymore, Dani, my sweet darling. You know how I’m so sure? I’m a lie detector. I said, ‘I’m human’ and heard my own lie.” He laughs, and there’s madness in it.

“You are what you choose to be,” I say. All the sudden I can’t breathe because his hands have slipped up over my ribs and he’s squeezing me so tight I think they’re going to crack.

“I would NEVER have fucking chosen this!”

“Ow! Volume control, Christian! And you’re hurting me!”