I fast-up as fast as I can go so things transpire in the slowest motion possible.
The fire-world fragment swallows the Hoar Frost King.
It engulfs it.
Sound returns.
I hear ragged breaths. Gasping. Somewhere, folks are crying.
It’s gone.
The Hoar Frost King is gone.
Just like that.
It worked so well I almost can’t believe it. I stand there stunned, feeling wary. I’m not the only one out of sorts. Ryodan’s got his eyes narrowed suspiciously. Lor is kind of hunched like he thinks the sky is going to fall on him. I’d snicker — because, dude, it’s pretty sad when you can’t just take a happy ending for what it is — but we still got major trubs. The IFP is devouring the mountain of iced speakers and heading straight for the abbey.
Kat, Dancer, and the other sidhe-seers are running toward us. “Cruce is below the abbey!” Kat screams. “You’ve got to stop it!”
Ryodan and Lor begin chanting but I can tell from the look on Ryodan’s face he’s got no expectation of finishing in time. The ten or twelve seconds we got before it hits the wall isn’t the thirty he needs to do the job.
Kat starts screaming at Ryodan because he’s not going fast enough, and Jo starts screaming at Kat for screaming at Ryodan because he’s doing everything he can. Then all the sidhe-seers get in on it, and since Ryodan and Lor are looking down at the totem cord they’re trying to ward, nobody’s looking at the IFP and I’m the first one to see what’s happening.
I knew it died too easily!
Ice is forming at the base of the fire-world fragment.
The bottom of the funnel is turning blue, crusted with white hoar frost.
The IFP sure swallowed the Ice Monster, but now the Ice Monster is icing the fecking IFP!
As I watch, frost spreads rapidly upward.
“Uh, guys,” I say.
“Are you bloody kidding me?” Dancer explodes. “It’s coming back out?”
Lor looks up. “Aw, shit.”
“Motherfucker,” Ryodan agrees.
The Hoar Frost King freezes the IFP from the inside out.
I don’t know if the fire world is a roaring inferno that makes the sound the HFK likes to eat or if they just had a big battle of fire and ice, and ice won.
But the IFP cracks and hisses, steams and pops, as superfire gets supercooled.
Ice weighs it down and it slows to a stop. As the giant funnel gains substance, it becomes too heavy to drift and crashes thunderously to the ground like an icicle dropping from a gutter, lodging in the snow.
We all just stare at the giant ice funnel rooted in the ground, trying to process the sudden reversal of events. First, the Ice Monster was dead but the abbey was in danger. Now the abbey is safe but the Ice Monster isn’t dead.
We didn’t succeed in killing it, and virtually everyone standing here that can’t freeze-frame is going to die the instant it comes back out.
The walls of the IFP begin to shiver and shake like the Hoar Frost King is trying to find the weakest point to hatch from its icy eggshell.
I narrow my eyes.
Eggshells are delicate. Fragile. But it’s not a shell. In fact, the entire interior of the fire world must be solid ice right now.
Which means, at the moment, the Hoar Frost King is completely encased in one of its own ice sculptures.
Trapped in a moment of perfect vulnerability.
Perhaps the only moment of vulnerability it has ever known.
I know what happens when an iced scene gets vibrated.
It explodes.
“Dancer,” I shout, “use the whip! Make sonic booms!” To Ryodan and Lor I say, “Freeze-frame around it!” To the sidhe-seers, “Dudes, get the feck out of here now!”
Then I freeze-frame in myself, moving as fast as I can on a nearly empty gas tank.
Dancer cracks his whip and we freeze-frame like maniacs.
The frozen IFP trembles and the surface suddenly blossoms a million tiny fissures.
The ground shudders, then there’s this rumble like galaxywide thunder rolling inside the IFP.
All the sudden I hear the most awful noise ever, like maybe all the sounds the Hoar Frost King ever collected erupt in one huge dissonant, fingernails-on-a-chalkboard belch and then — fecking-A, I love being a superhero! — just like I thought they would, the fused monsters explode!
Forty-Three
I’m glowing. There’s no denying it. Beaming from every pore. I never had such an amazing adventure in my whole entire life, and I’ve had some whoppers.
We’re hanging in the great room at the abbey, warming up in front of fires blazing on three sides. There’s a kettle of instant cocoa (mixed with water, not milk) being warmed in the main hearth, smelling up the room like a chocolate factory, and Kat broke out a hidden stash of — stale, but who cares? — marshmallows and a tin of hard-as-a-rock biscuits she’s been saving for a special occasion, and some scrumptious, weirdly gelatinous honey. It all tastes like heaven. Every time I eat, I’m acutely aware we might not have any more of this stuff soon.
We won! We engaged in battle against the biggest bad I ever seen and we won. Unlike the last big battle fought around these parts, I was there to see it all go down with my very own eyeballs. I didn’t have to hear about it the next day secondhand from folks that were lucky enough to be there. And no all-powerful Unseelie King swooped in and bailed us out at the last sec either. We did it ourselves!
When the IFP holding the Hoar Frost King exploded, splinters of ice went sky-high, ground-low, and every place in between. We all ducked and dodged and grabbed someone slower, freeze-framing for the shelter of the abbey. Still, we’re a pretty ragtag lot, all beat up with scrapes and cuts and bruises. There was no avoiding the fallout.
We waited inside until it was quiet for a few secs and it seemed the debris had settled, then headed back out to poke around in the chunks and convince ourselves the threats were really gone. Dancer studied the stuff for a good five minutes before flashing me a grin and pronouncing the debris inert. He plans to take samples back to Trinity’s labs but he said he was ninety-eight percent certain nothing was going to rise up from the remains.
“How did you know it would work?” Jo says to me.
“I didn’t,” I say around a mouthful of sticky honey-slathered biscuit. I lick crumbs off my fingers. “But once I saw the Hoar Frost King was icing the fire world from the inside, I realized it was stuck in one of its own frozen scenes, like a bug in amber. And every time Ryodan and me ever freeze-framed near a frozen scene, it exploded into shrapnel-sized slivers.” I shrug. “Who knows? Maybe it would have stayed stuck in there and exploded all by itself in time. But I sure thought it looked like it was coming back out.”
“I thought so, too,” Lor says, and everybody agrees with him.
“Bloody brilliant about the whip, Mega,” Dancer says.
I preen.
“It was close. We got lucky,” Kat says.
“Lucky, my ass! You got superheroes on the job!” Part of superheroness is precision timing and delicate maneuvering, and if she wants to pretend it’s luck, I’m not going to waste breath I could be using to eat arguing.
“Today, Lady Luck had a name.” Ryodan looks at me.
“No shit.” Lor says. “Nice work, honey.”
I just about lose my biscuits then. I glow so hard it almost hurts. I think my skin is leaking light.
I swagger over to the hearth and gulp three marshmallows in quick succession.
“Can you believe what that Unseelie prince did?” goth-chick Josie says.
I choke on the last marshmallow I’m trying to swallow whole. I kick up into fast-mo and try to fast-cough it out but it doesn’t work. Belatedly it occurs to me fast-mo might not have been the brightest move. Friction and mucus expand the confection like a waterlogged tampon. It swells in my throat and shuts down my airway.