Iced - Moning Karen Marie - Страница 72

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“Dude, this is fecking awesome!” I say as I step inside.

Dancer looks up and the grin he gives me is blinding. His whole body changes, like he was strung up on wires hanging him from the ceiling and they just got cut. His shoulders ride lower, his limbs slide smoother, the hard planes of his face relax into the Dancer I know. “Mega!” he says. Then he says it again, “Mega!”

“That’s my name, dude. Don’t wear it out.” I swagger into the chamber and see he’s been collecting things from the scenes, too. Behind him is the piece de resistance: a mystery board! He blew up maps and pieced together an enormous topographical survey of Dublin and the outlying areas and has pins and notes plastered all over it. I beam. I couldn’t have done better myself. “This place is the Shit,” I say.

“Thought you’d like it.” He picks his glasses up off the slab, pushes them back on his nose and grins at me. His eyes are red like he’s been studying too long. He’s tall and lanky and pretty much perfect. I grin back and we just grin at each other for a few seconds, ’cause we’re so happy to see each other again. It’s a big city. Sometimes I feel alone in it. Then I see Dancer.

I toss my backpack on a nearby folding table and pull out my ziplocks and photos to add to his board. He comes over and we sort through them in happy silence, brushing shoulders and grinning at each other. He keeps looking at me like he can’t exactly believe I’m there. Dude’s acting like he really missed me. We’re always glad to see each other, but something’s different today.

I go to start pinning my photos of the scenes on the board, and I look back at him, ’cause something don’t make sense to me, besides how strange he’s acting. “There ain’t this many iced places in Dublin!” I gesture at the pins on the board.

“There weren’t a few weeks ago. It’s been escalating.”

“Dude, there were only ten. You got, like, twenty-five pins on this board! You telling me fifteen more places got iced in the past few days?”

“Mega, the last time I saw you was nearly a month ago. The day we tried to get your sword back from Jayne.”

I gape. “That wasn’t a month ago. That was a couple days ago!”

“Nope. I haven’t seen you for three weeks, four days, and”—he looks at his watch—“seventeen hours.”

I let out a low whistle. I knew time moved different in Faery but it didn’t occur to me that the White Mansion was part of Faery. No wonder Ryodan was so pissed at me! I missed work for weeks. I snicker. It must have been driving him crazy. My snicker dies. I forgot for a sec that he was dead. I feel sick all the sudden so I tear open a candy bar and eat it.

“I was worried.”

I look at him. He’s looking me right in the eyes, more serious than I ever seen him. It makes me uncomfortable. Like I’m supposed to say something and I don’t know what.

I stare back and we just look at each other for a few seconds. I root around in my repertoire and come up with: “Dude, get over yourself. I’m the Mega. You never got to worry about me. I been on my own forever. I like it that way.” I flash him my trademark grin.

I get a faint smile in return. “Got the message, Mega. Loud and clear.” He turns around, walks back to the slab. He’s not moving smooth anymore. Some of those wires are back. I don’t like those wires. They look … I don’t know, grown up to me.

“Just saying, don’t worry about me. Stupid to worry about me. I can take care of myself.”

“Now I’m stupid.”

“I didn’t say you were stupid. I say it was stupid to worry about me.”

“And it — the act of worrying — isn’t to be confused with the person doing it.”

“Exactly. I’m the Mega, remember? I kick butt all over Dublin!” I don’t know what’s wrong with him. He’s not responding right to anything I’m saying!

“Ability to defend oneself has absolutely no bearing on or relevance to deportment or emotional comportment of others.”

“Huh?”

“Don’t tell me what I can and can’t feel. If I feel like worrying about you, I buggering well will.”

“Dude, no need to get snippy.”

“I’m not snippy. I’m offended. You were gone nearly a month. Between dodging the psychotic jackass that stalks you day and night, analyzing evidence, and trying to save this city, I’ve been haunting every iced scene that pops up. Visiting them two and three times a day. Do you know why?”

“To collect more evidence?”

“I’ve been waiting for them to melt enough that I could see if you were in there. Dead. Never to be talking to me again.”

I stare at him. We never talk about stuff like this. It reeks of a cage to me. Like there’s one more person I’m supposed to check in with now. Like my life isn’t already owned by too many other folks. “I got my sword back now,” I say stiffly. “I’m not going to get iced.”

“Invalid. Those two statements have no relevance to each other. None. Zip. Zilch. Nada. The sword won’t protect you from getting iced. I left notes for you in the pantry of every hideout I’ve got and all of yours I could find. Do you know what I heard? Nothing. For almost a month.”

“Dude, I got the picture. You didn’t like not being able to find me. Too bad you can’t put a leash on me, huh? Maybe stick me in a cage somewhere?” He’s pissing me off. I think we’re having our first ever fight. It makes me feel sick to my stomach.

“Excuse the crap out of me for caring about you.”

“Dude, what’s wrong with you? This ain’t us. Why are you ruining us?”

“Caring about you is ruining us?”

“Caring is one thing. Trying to lock me up is another.”

He gives me a look that I just don’t get. Like I’m being obtuse when he’s the one being obtuse. I thought our way of hanging was clear and well-defined. We’re superheroes. He’s not sticking to the script. If he keeps deviating, I’m jumping comic books.

“My mistake. I won’t make it again.” Just like that, he goes back to being Dancer, all business. “That day at the castle was the first time I got a look at what’s been freezing things. A lot’s happened since then. It freezes a new place just about every day. Ryodan and his men have been tearing this city apart looking for you. He raided half my stoops. I moved down here to get the bloody feck away from him. He’s going to kill you when he finds you.”

“Not if I kill him first,” I mutter around a mouthful of candy bar, pretending I didn’t already. When you have a secret that folks would kill you for, you sit mum on it. From everyone. ’Course, if I’m learning from my mistakes, I should kill Christian like I didn’t kill those stupid lisping fairies that ate Alina and ratted me out to Mac. I’m a little irked that Dancer’s back to talking about stuff like we never even had our first spat, because it’s a big deal to me. It’s going to take me hours to stop feeling nauseous and confused inside. I eat when I get confused. I stuff another candy bar in my mouth.

“Even Barrons got in on the hunt. So did those abbey girls you sometimes hang with. The city keeps getting colder with each new place that’s iced. People are falling apart. Nobody knows what to do, how to stop it, or even where it’s safe to be anymore.” He steps back and looks at the map. “So far I haven’t been able to discern the pattern. We’ve got to figure out what it’s looking for.”

“What do you mean ‘looking for’?” That was exactly the feeling I picked up with my sidhe-seer senses, but Dancer doesn’t have those. I start to feel a little less sick. I don’t know if it’s the candy bars in my stomach or thinking about work.

“Unless it’s behaving in a random, illogical manner driven by absolutely no biological imperative — which I postulate is antithetical for any sentient life form — it has purpose.”

I beam, our fight forgotten. Got to love a dude that says stuff like “postulate” and “antithetical”! “I love hanging with you!” I tell him.

He gives me a look that’s vintage Dancer but a little wary, so I turn up the wattage on my grin till he grins back.

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