Iced - Moning Karen Marie - Страница 15

Ryodan chains her next to me. She struggles but it’s like watching a fly batting at a window, trying to get outside. You know it’s never going to work.

I give her a look. “Got any more bright ideas, Jo? Try bringing a few babies for him to torture next time.”

She gives her chains a violent jerk. We’re bolted to a stone wall.

“Good luck with that.” If I couldn’t break them with my superstrength, she’s got a snowball’s chance in hell. I think he has the metal spelled. I think he has everything spelled. I want to know where he learns his spells so I can sign up for a crash course. If I’ve been down here three days, I should be, well, messier than I am. How did he keep me unconscious for three days? Put me in some kind of suspended animation? I seriously have to pee.

“I was trying to help,” she says.

“You should have just taken a baseball bat to my head. Put me out of my misery.” I could have held out down here forever until she went and served herself up to Ryodan as a weapon.

Ryodan stands in front of us, legs apart, arms folded over his chest. He’s a big dude. I wonder if Jo knows he has fangs. I wonder what he is. I wonder why she’s staring at him like that. She hates him.

I trash my pointless wonderings and cut to the chase. Procrastinating is number three on my Stupid List. You still end up exactly where you didn’t want to be, doing exactly what you didn’t want to do, with the only difference being that you lost all that time in between, during which you could have been doing something fun. Even worse, you probably stayed in a stressed-out, crappy mood the whole time you were avoiding it. If you know something is inevitable, do it and get it over with. Move on. Life is short.

If he tortures Jo, I’ll cave.

I know it.

He knows it.

Ergo, torturing her is a great big fat waste of time. His. Mine. Hers.

“What do you want from me, Ryodan?” I say.

“It’s decision time, Dani.”

“Deaf much? I said, what do you want from me?”

“You owe me compensation.”

“Dude, the bush is ready. Why you still beating around it?”

“I’ve lived a long time, kid, and I’ve never heard anyone mutilate the English language quite like you.”

“How long is that?” Jo says.

I yawn, big and dramatic. “Still beating. And me all bush-like.” I give an all-body, bushy bristle.

His eyes narrow on me like he’s thinking. Like maybe he hasn’t decided exactly what he wants from me yet. That worries me. It should be real simple: he wants me to work for him. I know he’s not as bright as I am, so I help him out.

“I’ll look into your little ice mystery, Ryodan. I’ll put it at the top of my priority list. Unchain us already.”

“It’s not that simple anymore. You complicated the fuck out of things when you decided to defy me publicly. Nobody does that and lives.”

“Breathing here,” I say.

“Do you have to keep saying ‘fuck’ around her? She’s barely thirteen,” Jo says.

“Fourteen,” I correct irritably.

“My men want you dead. They’re pushing for a dramatic execution, in the club. They say it’s the only way to appease the patrons of Chester’s.”

“I always wanted to go out in a big way,” I say. “Maybe we could do some fireworks, huh? I think there are some left up at that old petrol station on O’Clare.”

“Nobody’s executing anyone,” Jo says. “She’s a child.”

“I’m not a fecking child. I don’t think I was even born that way.”

“I told them I believe you can be useful,” Ryodan says. “That I can control you.”

I bristle and rattle my chains. Nobody controls me. Not anymore.

“They say you’ll never answer to anyone. Not even Barrons is on my side.”

No doubt because TP was telling Barrons to tell Ryodan to kill me. Or let her do it.

“It’s eight against one,” he says.

“It’s eight against two,” Jo says. “If you count her sister sidhe-seers — and you’d better — it’s eight against thousands.”

“Your numbers have been severely diminished,” Ryodan says.

“Worldwide, we’re over twenty thousand.”

“I didn’t know that,” I say to Jo. “Why didn’t I know that?” To Ryodan, I say, “Dude, kill me or free me.”

“If you kill her,” Jo says, “you’ll incur the wrath of every sidhe-seer in the world. They’ll hunt you. Dani’s a legend among us. We won’t lose her.”

“If I decide to kill her,” Ryodan says, “no one will ever know what happened to either of you.”

I blink, mentally replaying what Jo said again and again, but I can’t hear it enough. “Really? I’m a legend? Like, around the whole world they know of me? Say it again!” I preen. I had no idea. There might be a little swagger left in my body after all. I cock a jaunty hip.

“Let her go,” Jo says to Ryodan, “and I’ll stay in her place.”

“The feck you’ll stay!” I explode.

“You’re offering to stay here. Chained up. With me. In exchange for her.” A smile plays at his lips.

“As long as you have me as a hostage, she’ll behave.”

“The feck you’ll stay!” I say again since nobody reacted like they were supposed to, like, by obeying me. Or paying any attention to me at all.

“I haven’t forgotten what you did to my cell phone, sidhe-seer,” Ryodan says.

“You were taking pictures on our property. It’s private,” Jo says.

“You’re on my property. It’s private.”

“I’m not taking pictures. I came to take back something that’s ours. Something you had no right to take.”

“I’m not a something. Or a child,” I say.

“She had no right to kill the patrons of my club. She’d been warned. Repeatedly.”

“And you know how well she listens. You shouldn’t have brought her into your club and left her alone with a sword. Could you possibly be that stupid?”

“Dudes, quit talking about me like I’m not here!”

“Sidhe-seer, tread lightly,” he says to Jo, and his voice goes real soft. Soft from Ryodan is never good.

“Let me stay in her place. She’s just a kid.”

“I’m not a kid! And she’s not fecking staying here. Nobody’s staying here! Except maybe me!”

“You do understand what it would mean,” he says to Jo, like I’m not even having a violent, noisy fight with a wall and four chains. “If she makes a single misstep, you’re dead.”

I feel the blood drain from my face. I always misstep. Misstep is my middle name, right after Mega. I can’t not misstep. I have feet.

“I understand.”

“She doesn’t mean it!” I shout. “She doesn’t even know what she’s talking about! She doesn’t have any clue what you dudes are really like. Besides, I don’t really even care about her at all. You can kill her. So, you may as well let her go.”

“Shut up, Dani,” Jo says.

“You’ll have to sign an employment application,” Ryodan tells Jo.

“Don’t sign it, Jo! He’s got some kind of spell on it.”

“Am I being held hostage or applying for a job?” Jo says.

“I’m short a few waitresses. Some of them were—” Ryodan gives me a look. “—collateral damage the other day.”

“I didn’t kill any humans.”

“Two of them had enough Unseelie in them that apparently you couldn’t tell the difference,” Ryodan says.

I killed humans? How much Unseelie had they eaten?

“You want me to be a waitress?” Jo says, horrified, like it’s a fate worse than death. “I tried to wait tables in high school. I can’t. I drop plates. I spill drinks. I’m a researcher. A linguist. I live in my head. I don’t wait tables.”

“Conveniently, I have two applications handy.” Ryodan withdraws a folded packet of papers from his pocket.

“Why two? I ain’t waiting tables,” I say belligerently.

“I have to serve Fae? As in take orders and fill them? And bring things to their tables?” Jo can’t seem to wrap her brain around it. Like she’d rather stay chained to the wall than wait tables.

“And my men. Occasionally, I imagine, even me. With a smile.” He looks her up and down, slo-mo. “You’ll look good in the uniform. Do we have a deal.” In typical Ryodan fashion, his voice doesn’t rise at the end of the question. He knows they have a deal. He can read Jo like a book with see-through covers.