Iced

I pull my wrapper closer and thrust myself forward on hobbled feet with stunted, stumbling steps, blind in eye but not purpose. I pray, and with the whimsy of dreams the gold cross I wear upon my neck begins to glow. I do not deserve such comfort in this dark night of my soul!

I shuffle for time uncounted through darkness, until finally I reach the chamber wherein the erotic, deadly prince is iced.

There, no darkness preys, no moss grows, no water trickles. There are no bones in this forbidden place. Only flesh. Extraordinary, exquisite flesh.

The walls have been gold-leafed in my absence. The chamber is radiant with brilliant light.

Cruce is still caged!

Nude, towering, wings unfurled, he snarls with animalistic rage.

Iced solid.

I weep with joy. My fears were for naught!

Upon trembling legs I hurry to his cage, celebrating that it holds.

One of the bars is missing.

“Stop. Vibrating.” Ryodan plucks a paper out of the air and slaps it back down on his desk.

I wonder if he cleans it. How many tushes have been on that thing? I’m never touching it again. “Can’t help it,” I say around a mouthful of candy bar. I know what I look like: a smudge of black leather and hair. “It happens when I get really excited. The more excited I get, the more I vibrate.”

“Now there’s a thought,” Lor says.

“If you mean what I think you mean, you want to shut the fuck up and never think it again,” Ryodan says.

“Just saying, boss,” Lor says. “You can’t tell me you didn’t think it, too.”

Five of Ryodan’s dudes are in his office and it’s like standing in the middle of heat lightning, closed in with them. Jayne is here, too, but I’m totally ignoring him because, like, if I didn’t, I’d have to kill him with my bare hands and that would get messy, then Ryodan would probably make me mop his fecking office.

I never understand half of what these dudes are talking about and don’t care. “You can touch me if you want to,” I say to Lor magnanimously. I’m so pumped on adrenaline and excitement that I’m feeling downright sociable. I poke one of my shoulders toward him. “Check me out. It feels really cool.”

All heads swivel my way, then they look back at Ryodan.

“He doesn’t own my fecking shoulder. Why you looking at him?”

Lor guffaws but doesn’t reach for my shoulder.

I don’t know why. I like touching myself when I’m vibrating like this. It vibrates me twice. If I was really cold and started to shiver, I’d be vibrating three times! “So, what the feck are we going to do to stop this thing?” I beam. We got plans to make and implement. I thrive on times like these! They bring out my best! I’m a riser-to-the-occasion kind of girl. I’m feeling so excited and generous about having such a wicked cool adventure to live that I’m finding it hard to be mad at folks right now. We got an enemy that’s bigger and badder than anything I’ve seen. Fecking-A, it’s good to be alive! ’Cause, like, for a sec there by the dock, I wasn’t sure I was going to be. I wasn’t sure any of us were!

Speaking of back by the dock …

My mood shifts and I glower. I still don’t have my sword. It got iced. The warehouse is now filled with iced Unseelie, the ceiling covered with stalactites, the floor deep with stalagmites. My sword got frozen in a stalactite way up high, and the place was way too deadly cold for anyone to enter, like freeze-you-to-death-instantly cold. We had to leave it stuck there, in an enormous icicle. Lor ordered Kasteo and Fade to stand guard until the scene thawed enough to retrieve it. Last I saw, the two Unseelie princes were still hanging around, too. If Christian was there, he was staying out of sight. No sign of Dancer. I didn’t want to leave but Lor threatened to potato-sack me over his shoulder, and seeing how he can do it as easily as Ryodan, I didn’t see any point in making myself miserable.

“It’s your fault,” I tell Ryodan. “You should never have let Jayne keep my sword. Now who knows what’s going to happen to it! If the scene explodes like the others …” I trail off because I can’t stand the thought of my sword blowing up into alabaster smithereens.

“That’s the least of our problems,” Ryodan says. “Tell me exactly what happened.”

“Lor just told you,” I say crossly. “What else do you want to know?”

“I want to hear it from you.”

I tear open another candy bar and around mouthfuls repeat most of what Lor said about the fog and the slit widening. The feeling of panic we all experienced. How all the sudden none of us could hear a thing, like we’d gone deaf. “Then this … this … thing that was twice the size of your office sailed out.”

“Thing.”

“Dude, Lor didn’t describe it any better. I mean, come on, ‘dark mass about the size of two semis, side by side’?”

“Try.”

I frown, thinking, then brighten. “Did you ever see the movie The Blob? It was like that. Only it was oblong. And I don’t know if it was slimy and it levitated instead of rolled. And I don’t know if it was dense. But it didn’t look like a Shade. It was nothing like a Shade.”

“The Blob.”

“Old movie, from way back in silent movie times.”

“It’s not that old,” Jayne says. “I saw it when I was a kid.”

“Which was like, way back during silent movie times, right? You shouldn’t even be talking to me. Don’t talk to me. You shouldn’t even be here. I should kill you. You’re lucky I’m not killing you right now. You left me for dead.” I look at Ryodan. “And you let him. Feckers. All of you.”