“I went straight to Chester’s and told Ryodan where you were,” Jayne says. “I wasn’t going to let you die. I didn’t like leaving you. I needed the sword. I couldn’t afford to pass up the chance.”

He told Ryodan where I was? “I said don’t talk to me. And that worked out real well for you, didn’t it? How many years do you think it might have taken you to kill a few hundred Unseelie?” I glare at Ryodan. “And you didn’t say nothing about him telling you where I was. You didn’t come neither.” Didn’t he care that I might’ve died?

“Boss sent me for you the second Jayne showed up,” Lor says. “You were gone by the time I got there. I was following your blood trail but it disappeared.”

“Texture,” Ryodan says to me.

“You mean did it have any? Not that I could see.”

“Then what happened.”

“It moved into the warehouse, all ponderous-like, and belched white fog out everywhere and we couldn’t see a thing. It iced the whole place, worse than anyplace we’ve seen yet. I mean, dude, the ceiling sprouted stalactites and the floor is covered with stalagmites so thick you can’t even walk in there! We never seen anything like that at the other scenes.”

“Postulate on why it got iced worse.”

I’d pondered that on the way back. There was only one significant difference I’d been able to isolate. “There were a lot more people and Fae at this scene than any we’ve investigated. There were hundreds of Unseelie in cages and they all got frosted. It’s possible more ice was necessary. Or maybe the thing had more juice today for some reason. We got iced, too, but it was only a thin layer, and once we moved, it cracked. We kept re-icing the second we stopped moving so I started doing jumping jacks and, like sheep can’t think for themselves, everybody copied me, then there we were all standing in the street doing jumping jacks. I got worried the commotion might make it turn around and come after us but the thing never even noticed us. It was like we were fish and it wanted chips. Or maybe we weren’t even noticeable as food. Then it vanished. Another of those slits opened inside the warehouse, all the white fog got sucked into it and the thing followed. Once it closed, we could hear again. Sort of.”

“Clarify.”

“There wasn’t any noise. Nothing. You’d think the ice on all those Unseelie might have popped or cracked a little like ice does when it settles because they were warm before they got iced but they didn’t. When we walked, our shoes didn’t sound right on the pavement. When we talked it was … flat. It was worse than flat. There was a feeling to the silence. A really bad feeling.”

“Elucidate,” Ryodan says.

“I just did. I think you mean speculate.”

Lor snorts. Ryodan gives me a look. Don’t even know why I bother answering him sometimes. Maybe I like to hear myself talk. I’ve got a lot of interesting things to say. “You know how sound is really movement, and vibration is what makes noise? Which is, like, total contradiction to its effect on things because when the world went dead quiet, it was still moving while making absolutely no noise. But what I’m saying is, after it departed, things never got back to normal. It’s like things weren’t vibrating all the way. Or maybe the sound waves weren’t bouncing off things the way they should. Or maybe the things the waves were bouncing off weren’t right.”

“Narrow it down.”

I shrug. “Got insufficient data to form conclusive deductions.”

“How long from the time it appeared to the time it disappeared.”

“That was the weird thing. It felt like it was happening in slow-mo but I figure two seconds from start to finish. It came. It iced. It vanished.” Sometimes I don’t have the most accurate sense of time because I’m in a kind of in-between fast-mo and slow-mo and don’t even realize it, which makes things around me seem to be happening more slowly. I’m pretty sure when it came, I was so wound up I was half freeze-framing. I look at Lor, who nods.

“Two to three seconds at most, boss. The fog rushed out, the thing came, the fog sucked back in and it was gone.”

“I assume it was Fae,” Ryodan says.

“Unequivocally,” I say.

“You’re a sidhe-seer. That means you should be able to get a read on it like Mac did with the Sinsar Dubh.”

“I could to a degree.”

“Intelligence.”

“Enormous sentience. Stupefying.” I wish I’d felt the Unseelie king. I’d have something to compare it to.

“Emotion.”

“None discernible. No malevolence. I got the impression destruction was a by-product, not a goal.” I notice everyone’s looking at me funny. “Dude,” I add and flash my best street-urchin grin at the room in general. “Fecking-A, was it ever cool!” Got to watch my tendency to geek out when I get excited.

“You think it had a goal.”

“There was … I don’t know … purpose to what it was doing. I could feel it. Some Fae feel simple when I focus on them with my sidhe-seer sense. They’re dumb, acting on instinct, capable of random destruction. Then there are things like Papa Roach, that Fae that breaks down into little parts,” I remind him, in case he missed that especially scintillating edition of my Dani Daily. “Papa feels … structured. It has plans. So does the Ice Monster. But there’s a big difference between Papa and the Ice Monster. Papa has a beady little mind. This thing is … vast in construct and purpose.”