Iced, стр. 17

I try it again.

Still feeling the breeze from that guillotine.

One of Ryodan’s dudes, Lor, hands me a flashlight. “Gee,” I say, “thanks. A whole flashlight against a city of Shades.”

“They moved on. Mostly.”

I roll my eyes. “ ‘Mostly’ might be okay with you ’cause, like, they don’t eat whatever you dudes are. Why is that?”

Lor doesn’t answer me, but I didn’t expect him to.

The second we reach the door, I freeze-frame.

I can outrun anything.

Even myself.

Eight

I click on a flashlight and head for the nearest store I know of that still has Snickers on the shelves so I can replenish my supplies. I have a bottomless stomach and it hurts from hunger. That’s a feeling I take pains to avoid. Especially when my head’s still throbbing so bad. I’d put ice on it, but if I’ve been out for three days, it’s too late. Ice only works if you use it right away. I root through my hair, find the swollen, bruised patch at my nape that’s causing so much pain, and sigh, wondering what I hit and when. Some folks think since I’m always banged up I’m a glutton for pain. I’m not. It’s just the way my life is.

Like I thought, it’s night, so the streets are pretty much deserted. Folks do their “shopping” during the day. Those that do hunt at night, do just that — hunt. They come out in packs, armed to the gills, and go after any Unseelie they can find.

A lot of the night-hunters have a death wish. They don’t know how to live in the world the way it is now, so they take crazy risks. I end up bailing out vigilantes left and right. Sometimes they run into Jayne, and before anybody can say, “Don’t shoot, we’re human,” there’s casualties. Everybody’s got jumpy trigger fingers.

Things sure have changed since the walls fell last October. Seven months ago the streets were easy. Hit the night, kill some Fae, then kill some more. The Unseelie were simple to take by surprise because they had such a low opinion of humans. They didn’t see us as a serious threat.

They do now.

They’re on guard, more dangerous, harder to trap, and impossible to kill unless you’re me or Mac or a Shade. Shades are cannibals. Life is life. They don’t discriminate. We have humans fighting Fae, humans fighting humans, Fae fighting each other, and all of us trying to get rid of the Shades.

I slow to a Joe-walk, running out of steam. I need food fast. I already ate everything I had stuffed in my pockets. Three days of starvation does a number on me. Swinging my sword around my wrist (it took me months to perfect that move — and it is smooooth!), I duck into a convenience store with broken-out windows, shelves spilled sideways, cash register open and overturned. I can’t see why anybody would bother stealing money. It doesn’t get you anything. People’s eyes are finally open, money’s as worthless as it always really was. Used to amaze me when I was little how everybody passed around pieces of paper that they all agreed to pretend meant the same thing when everybody knew it didn’t mean anything. It was the first adult conspiracy I became aware of. Made me think maybe no adults should ever be the boss of me. I’m the smartest person I know. Except maybe for Dancer. Not bragging. It’s a real pain in the ass a lot of the time.

“Buying” nowadays operates on something solid and real: the barter system. Ryodan has the bartenders and waitresses at Chester’s coached to take certain items he either wants for himself or can turn around for something else he wants. If you have a big item he’s interested in, he’ll give you a line of credit. I hear he gets favors from the Fae in exchange for making them a place where they can prey on humans. Though I hate Jo working at Chester’s, in a way I’m glad because I’ll get more inside scoop now. Figure out what motivates Ryodan, what his weaknesses are. Dude’s got to have some chink in his armor. Everybody’s got their kryptonite.

I circle a pile of clothes and husks (fecking Shades, I hate them!) and head for my candy rack.

It’s empty.

Not a single Snickers.

Not a single anything for that matter.

I head down the cracker aisle.

The shelves are bare.

My stomach growls. Pissily. My knees aren’t wobbling yet but they’re close.

I turn my flashlight to wide beam and sweep it around the store.

The place has been cleaned out.

I’d blow out a melodramatic sigh but it’s an expenditure of energy I suddenly can’t afford. I’m no longer swinging my sword or bouncing from foot to foot the way I do a lot. I’m not moving a hair I don’t have to. My life just got harder. When you’re a supercar like me, you either need a huge gas tank, which I don’t have at five feet two and three-quarters first thing in the morning, or you need to live in a city with a lot of gas stations.

My gas stations are drying up.

It’s okay. I saw this coming. Dancer did, too. I squirreled away stashes of food, water, and medical supplies, in lots of hidey-holes around Dublin months ago. Me and Dancer have been building on those reserves in our spare time over the past few weeks. He doesn’t know where all my hideouts are, and I don’t know where he keeps all his stuff. That way if somebody tries to torture one of us to tell, we can’t totally wipe each other out. I tried to tell the sidhe-sheep to do it, but they thought I was crazy. They said that with more than half the population gone there was plenty of stuff in the stores to last a good long while. I said somebody was going to try to monopolize food distribution. Dude, barter system — food and water are the premium. They said everyone was too busy trying to survive. I said that wouldn’t last long and didn’t they read A Canticle for Leibowitz, see how things trend? They said what did A Canticle for Leibowitz have to do with food? And I said should I start calling you sidhe-simpletons instead of sidhe-sheep? Do I have to spell out everything? Can’t we metaphor some things?

I hate always being right, I mutter in my head. Talking takes breath and breathing takes gas I don’t have.

I Joe-walk out of the store and nearly have a fecking heart attack when I see the Unseelie prince standing there, half in the shadows. The half-out part of him is splashed with moonlight, but the moon doesn’t glow the same way it used to before the Fae came. It’s rarely the same color from night to night. Tonight it has a silvery purple luminosity, making half of him a black silhouette, the other half lavender-metallic. He’s tattooed and beautiful and eerie and exotic, and gets my heart thumping in a way that has nothing to do with fear.

My sword flashes up. My blade is long and alabaster. I lock my elbow so my arm doesn’t wobble.

“Easy, lass.”

“Fecking stop sneaking up on me like that!” How can I not hear him? Him and Ryodan can both get the jump on me. It makes me crazy. I have superhearing. My hearing is so good that I can hear air displacement when other people move, for feck’s sake. Nobody sneaks up on me. Both of them managed to do it that night on the water tower, and Christian just did it again. Got within five feet of me without me even knowing it. “Sword. Lower.”

“Why should I do that?” He’s turning erotic, like the other UPs. My used-to-be best friend Mac calls them death-by-sex Fae because they can kill with sex. And that’s the best-case scenario. Worst case? They turn you Pri-ya like they did Mac. They leave you alive, totally addicted to sex, insatiable and out of your mind. The other UPs corralled me once, kept me between them, and did things to me I don’t like to think about. I don’t want sex to be that way. Like you’re some kind of helpless animal. I’ve had helpless animal up to my eyebrows already in my life. What Christian is throwing off isn’t a tenth of what the other UPs have, but it’s bad.