“She just wanted to find Dancer,” Jo says. “I think it’s important. Sometimes you have to trust her.”
“Do you love her?” I push.
Jo groans likes she’s going to die of embarrassment. “Oh God, Dani, shut up!”
I expect him to scoff at me, say something bullying, throw an insult back in my face, but he just says, “Define love.”
I stare straight into those clear, cool eyes. There’s some kind of challenge there. I don’t get this dude. But the definition he wants is easy. I had a lot of time in a cage to think about it. I saw a TV show once that gave the perfect definition, and I say it to him now: “The active caring and concern for the health and well-being of another person’s body and heart. Active. Not passive.” In a nutshell, you remember that person all the time. You never forget them. You factor their existence into yours every single hour of every single day. No matter what you’re doing. And you never leave them locked up somewhere to die.
“Think about what that entails,” he says. “Providing food. Shelter. Protection from one’s enemies. A place to rest and heal.”
“You forgot about the heart part. But I didn’t expect anything else. ’Cause you ain’t got one. All you got are rules. Oh, and yeah, more rules.”
Jo says, “Dani, can we just—”
Ryodan cuts her off. “Those rules keep people alive.”
Jo tries again. “Look, guys, I think—”
“Those rules strangle folks who need to breathe,” I say, talking right over her. Nobody’s listening to her anyway.
All the sudden he has me by the collar, hanging in the air, my feet dangling off the ground, our noses touching.
“By your own definition,” he says, “you don’t love anyone either. An argument could be made that you only ever do one of three things to the people closest to you: make enemies of them, kill the people they love, or get them killed. Careful. You’re on thinner ice than you’ve ever been with me.”
“Because I’m asking if you love Jo?” I say coolly, like I’m not hanging helpless by my shirt. Like he didn’t just take a mean shot at me below the belt.
“It’s not your business, Dani,” Jo says. “I can take care of my—”
“Pull your head out of your ass and see the world,” Ryodan says.
“I do see the world,” I say. “I see it better than most folks and you know it. Put me down.”
“—self just fine.” Jo is sounding kind of pissed now, too.
“And for that very reason, you’re blinder than most,” Ryodan says.
“That doesn’t make sense. Still dangling here, dude.” I try to toe the ground by pointing my foot but I think I’m a few feet above it.
“You don’t see the forest for the trees.”
“Ain’t no forest. Shades ate it. Let me go. You don’t get to just dangle folks in the air when you feel like it.”
He drops me so abruptly I stumble on the ice and almost fall, but he catches me and puts me back on my feet. I shake his hand off my arm.
“There doesn’t need to be love,” Jo says. “Sometimes it’s not about that.”
“Then you shouldn’t be boinking him!”
“It’s my own business who I boink,” Jo says.
“I don’t ‘boink’ anyone. I fuck,” Ryodan says.
“Thank you for that much-needed clarification,” I say with saccharine pissiness. “Hear that, Jo? You get fucked by him. Not even the decency of a boinking. Screwed. Plain and simple.” I’m beyond irate. I’m seeing through a red haze. The fecking fire-can folks are singing so loud they’re hampering my ability to think straight. I want Dancer. Ryodan drives me insane. Jo’s a hopeless case. Dublin’s dying.
I can’t stand things anymore so I punch Ryodan in the nose.
We all kind of freeze for a second and even I can’t believe I just hauled off and decked Ryodan with no warning and no real provocation. At least no more than he’s always giving me.
Then Ryodan manacles my arm and starts dragging me back toward Chester’s, looking madder than I ever seen him, but Jo gets my other arm, trying to make him stop, yelling at him and yelling at me. I’m slipping and skidding on the ice, trying to get them both off me.
We stumble across snowdrifts, fighting each other, when all the sudden the day gets foggy and I can’t hear a sound any of us are making. My mouth’s moving and nothing’s coming out. I can’t hear the fire-can folks either. I can’t even hear my breath in my ears. Panic compresses my chest.
Me and Ryodan look at each other and have a moment of perfect communion like me and Dancer do sometimes. No words necessary. We’re made of the same stuff. In battle there’s nobody else I’d rather be hanging with. Not even Christian or Dancer.
I grab Ryodan and he grabs me and we sandwich Jo between us.
Then we freeze-frame the hell out of there like the devil is on our heels.
Or more precisely, the Hoar Frost King.
Thirty-Five
Like we’re chained together or something, Ryodan and me stop about three-quarters of the way down the block. We go just far enough to escape danger, while staying close enough to get a look back at Chester’s.
By the time we glance back, it’s too late. The temperature where we’re standing just plummeted a good thirty degrees. The Hoar Frost King is vanishing into a slit in the air just above the street about a hundred yards away. The fog sucks in, the dark blob glides into a portal, the slit vanishes and noise returns to the world.
Sort of. Jo’s crying but it sounds like she’s doing it in a paper bag beneath a pile of blankets.
One day, in the field near the abbey, a cow head-butted me in the stomach because I freeze-framed into her and woke her up, startling her. I feel exactly the same way now: I can’t get a breath into my lungs. I keep trying to inflate them but they stay flat as pancakes glued together. When I finally do manage to breathe, it’s with a great sucking wheeze that sounds hollow and wrong and it’s so cold it burns going down.
I stare bleakly down the street.
They’re all dead.
Every last one of them is dead.
Chester’s topside is a sculpture of frozen statues shrouded in ice and silence.
“Feck, no!” I explode and wail all at the same time.
Where, moments ago, people were talking and singing, worrying and planning, living, for feck’s sake, living, not a spark of life remains. Every man, woman, and child we were standing in the middle of is dead.
The human race is down by another few hundred.
Hoar Frost King: 25. Human Race: 0.
Dublin’s going to be a fecking ghost town if this keeps up.
I stare. White bumps and knobs and pillars, folks are coated with hoar frost then glazed with a thick shiny layer of ice. Icicles hang from their hands and elbows. Breaths are frozen plumes of frosted crystals on the air. The cold the scene radiates is painful, even from here, like part of Dublin just got dunked into outer space. Kids are frozen, huddled around the fire cans, warming their hands above them. Adults are frozen, arms around each other, some swaying, some clapping. It’s eerily silent, too silent. Like the whole scene is heavily baffled and all noise is being absorbed.
Beside me, Jo is crying soft and pretty. It’s the only noise in the night, heck, it sounds like it’s the only noise in the whole world! Figures she even cries like a dainty cat. Me, I blubber like a snot-nosed hound with big wet, gulping sounds, not tiny sighs and mews. I stand in silence, shaking, gritting my teeth and fisting my hands, to keep from blubbering.
I retreat like I do when things are too much for me to deal with. I pretend they aren’t people under all that milky frost and ice. I refuse to let what happened touch me because grief isn’t going to save Dublin. I pretend they’re puzzle pieces. Nothing but evidence. They’re the way to keep it from happening again, if I can interpret the clues they left. Later, they’ll be folks to me again, and I’ll make some kind of memorial here.