“You are. I saw Ryodan get off an elevator hidden in the wall outside the retroclub. The door didn’t close all the way and I slipped in when nobody was looking.”

I close my eyes and sigh.

There were three mistakes in that sentence. (1) Ryodan doesn’t get seen if he doesn’t want to. (2) The doors around this place don’t stay slightly open. (3) Nobody slips into them without being noticed.

The only way Jo saw Ryodan get off an elevator was if he let her.

Which means he hadn’t been able to find my “little boyfriend” over the past three days. But he’d sure found somebody else to use against me.

On the insides of my eyelids I see Jo chained, beaten.

Ryodan hadn’t even had to leave his club. He just sat back and waited for whoever showed up first, looking for me.

I open my eyes. “Get out of here, Jo,” I say. “Now.”

“Neither of you are going anywhere,” Ryodan says as he steps from the shadows.

SEVEN

“I fall to pieces”

I’m absurdly easy to break if you know the right buttons to push.

If you’ve read any comics, you know superheroes have a critical vulnerability: the society they protect.

Jo’s part of my society. Fact is, any sidhe-sheep chained up next to me would have me singing a new tune. Well, maybe not Margery.

Actually, probably even her, too.

The hard thing for me is knowing I can take more than everyone else. Like that stupid bunny that used to be in commercials all the time, I take a licking and keep on kicking. And punching. And breathing.

Not true other folks. They die so easily.

Besides, I’m not afraid of the big sleep. I figure it’s just another adventure.

I try to talk Ryodan out of chaining Jo up.

He doesn’t listen to me.

Jo goes ballistic when he grabs her. Screaming and yelling and kicking. I’m kind of impressed by how hard she fights.

I think watching Dublin get destroyed on Halloween, seeing our friend Barb get taken by the Sinsar Dubh and ridden as a machine-gun-toting bitch to massacre so many of us, plus living in a world where you have to shake your shoes out before you put them on to make sure you don’t get eaten by a Shade faster than you can say “Aw, shit” is messing with Jo’s head.

She used to be like Kat, all even-tempered and cautious with decisions, didn’t have a sharp word for anyone.

“I’m going to kill you, you bastard, you won’t get away with this!” she’s shouting. “Let me go! Get your hands off me, you son of a bitch!”

Ryodan chains her next to me. She struggles but it’s like watching a fly batting at a window, trying to get outside. You know it’s never going to work.

I give her a look. “Got any more bright ideas, Jo? Try bringing a few babies for him to torture next time.”

She gives her chains a violent jerk. We’re bolted to a stone wall.

“Good luck with that.” If I couldn’t break them with my superstrength, she’s got a snowball’s chance in hell. I think he has the metal spelled. I think he has everything spelled. I want to know where he learns his spells so I can sign up for a crash course. If I’ve been down here three days, I should be, well, messier than I am. How did he keep me unconscious for three days? Put me in some kind of suspended animation? I seriously have to pee.

“I was trying to help,” she says.

“You should have just taken a baseball bat to my head. Put me out of my misery.” I could have held out down here forever until she went and served herself up to Ryodan as a weapon.

Ryodan stands in front of us, legs apart, arms folded over his chest. He’s a big dude. I wonder if Jo knows he has fangs. I wonder what he is. I wonder why she’s staring at him like that. She hates him.

I trash my pointless wonderings and cut to the chase. Procrastinating is number three on my Stupid List. You still end up exactly where you didn’t want to be, doing exactly what you didn’t want to do, with the only difference being that you lost all that time in between, during which you could have been doing something fun. Even worse, you probably stayed in a stressed-out, crappy mood the whole time you were avoiding it. If you know something is inevitable, do it and get it over with. Move on. Life is short.

If he tortures Jo, I’ll cave.

I know it.

He knows it.

Ergo, torturing her is a great big fat waste of time. His. Mine. Hers.

“What do you want from me, Ryodan?” I say.

“It’s decision time, Dani.”

“Deaf much? I said, what do you want from me?”

“You owe me compensation.”

“Dude, the bush is ready. Why you still beating around it?”

“I’ve lived a long time, kid, and I’ve never heard anyone mutilate the English language quite like you.”

“How long is that?” Jo says.

I yawn, big and dramatic. “Still beating. And me all bush-like.” I give an all-body, bushy bristle.

His eyes narrow on me like he’s thinking. Like maybe he hasn’t decided exactly what he wants from me yet. That worries me. It should be real simple: he wants me to work for him. I know he’s not as bright as I am, so I help him out.

“I’ll look into your little ice mystery, Ryodan. I’ll put it at the top of my priority list. Unchain us already.”

“It’s not that simple anymore. You complicated the fuck out of things when you decided to defy me publicly. Nobody does that and lives.”