He’s treating her like she’s fourteen and he’s a normal adult, acting like he’s taken her under his wing. Like he needs her detecting skills, same as Barrons did to Mac, and she’s falling for it, same as Mac. He’s lining up his dominoes, so they fall more easily when he feels like pushing them over, conserving energy so he doesn’t have to hunt her when he’s ready to kill her.
A bastard like him has one use for women. And she’s not old enough. Yet. I can’t decide which would be worse, if he killed her before she was old enough or waited and made her one of his endless string of women.
She’s not that kind of girl, the endless string type. You get a shot at something like her once in a lifetime. And if you screw it up there’s a special place in hell for you.
She breaks away from him suddenly and stomps off ahead. She’s pissed. I smile.
I pull out my knife, twist my arm over my shoulder and scratch my back with it. Blood trickles. I sigh with relief, but it doesn’t last long. Sleeping is a real bitch. My back itches all the time and human drugs don’t work on me. I twist to get a better scratch.
My blade hits bone with a dull clunk. I saw at it with the serrated tip of the blade but can’t get the angle right. I don’t have any friends that are glad to see me, nobody to lend a helping hand. I tried to get Dad to cut them out of my back. He said they’re attached to my spine and it would kill me. I don’t believe that. Nothing kills me. They itch. I want them gone almost as much as I’m beginning to want them.
Fucking wings.
Funny how things work out. Dani killed an Unseelie prince to save Mac, and I end up turning into the replacement for the prince Dani killed. But it’s not the lass’s fault. It’s Mac’s. For needing saving. Later, for forcing me to eat something I would never have eaten if I’d been in my right mind.
I wonder if my wings will get as big as Cruce’s. I wonder what it would feel like to fly the night sky with him and the other two. I see a vision in my head sometimes of the four of us, swooping down over the city, black wings beating air, filling the sky, owning the world. I can hear the sound we make as the four of us chime deep in our bodies. There’s a special, bloodcurdling song the Unseelie princes sing, sometimes it plays in my head while I sleep. The call to the Wild Hunt burns in my blood.
I back up to the corner of a small brick building on the roof that houses heat pumps, lean against it and drag my back from side to side across the edge, scratching, watching as they move toward a metal door in the ground.
He catches up with her and they walk together again.
She glides through the night. He punches into it, a boxing glove with razor blades for knuckles. When she passes, the world is a better place. He leaves bloody footprints in a graveyard of bones.
He lifts the door, light blazes up from a hole in the ground, and she descends, my angel into a sordid hell.
He squats at the edge and watches her go and, for a split second, I see an unguarded expression on his face.
It chills even a creature as cold as me.
I know that look. I’ve seen it on my own face.
Then the son of a bitch looks up at me and, this time, there’s no question in my mind that he sees me. He looks straight at me and inclines his head with a mocking smile. I return it coolly. My nod says, “Yes, yes, I see you, too. Be very careful.”
I can’t decide if what he just let me see was real — or another of his games. They don’t call him the master of manipulation for nothing. Barrons breaks heads. Ryodan turns them inside out. Barrons fucks you up. Ryodan makes you fuck yourself up. He pushes buttons and rearranges things according to his own private, coolly sociopathic plan.
I liked it better when I thought he was going to kill her.
I stop scratching.
I want those wings. They’ll make the fight that’s coming easier.
He’s a walking dead man.
If he wasn’t serious about what he just showed me, and he’s gaming me, he gamed the wrong Unseelie prince. I’ll kill him long before he gets around to killing her. I know how men like him work. I’m becoming one.
If he was serious about what he just showed me, he showed it to the wrong Unseelie prince. Because what he showed me is that he sees the same things in her I do.
He knows she’s worth waiting for.
And when it’s time, he intends to be the one. That’s why he’s keeping her close. To those of us who live forever, a few years isn’t long to wait.
Not for something worth waiting for. Not for a once-in-a-lifetime girl.
A few years are a mere blink of an eye to men like us, for whom women crush sweetly like rotting pumpkins after Halloween. Sex isn’t easy for me anymore. I’m always holding back. Human women are breakable.
Not this one.
He sees her like I do: at seventeen, twenty, thirty. Superimposed over the fourteen-year-old, he sees the woman she’ll become.
And he’s staking his claim.
Over my. Dead. Fucking. Body.
And I can’t die.
But I know one of his kind that recently did, and I know how. I hear there’s a Hunter up there in the night sky that likes Unseelie royalty.
Soon I’ll have the wings to find him.
My superpowers come back three blocks from Chester’s. I know because I’ve been trying to tap a finger in hyperspeed on my thigh the whole way back. Finally did it. I still haven’t managed to make only my eyes move like Ryodan but I’ve been practicing and can get certain parts of my body to speed up for short amounts of time. Only problem is, the place where the part connects to my body gets a little sore, like I stressed out the muscles where the slow-mo and fast-mo parts are having a kind of what-the-feck-are-we-doing-here battle with each other.
But it’s not like I could sit in the Humvee with the dude, who would love to know sometimes I’m helpless, and practice trying to freeze-frame my whole body. If he stopped sudden, I could go shooting straight through the windshield and then I’d be all cut up for days on top of my usual bruises.
I look at him, irritated. “Why are you never bruised?” What is he? Like the exception to everything? And if so, where do I apply?
“Participating and all that bunk,” he says. In other words, I don’t get to know because I’m not in whatever his inner circle is. Fine. Don’t want to be there anyway.
“You got some kind of magic salve, dude? Because it’s only fair to share stuff like that.”
He pulls up to the curb out front of Chester’s. I hop out of the Humvee the second he parks and instantly start bouncing from foot to foot, sideways, in between steps forward, to make sure I’m working right again. No way I’d go inside Chester’s with no superpowers. I whip out a candy bar, devour it then munch three more in quick succession, stockpiling energy. “Aren’t we done for the night? What else have you got for me to do?” I just spent an hour in an electrified sardine can with Ryodan, after losing my powers. He saturates confined spaces, like he’s got ten people’s stuff crammed into his body. He’s pissed at me for not inspecting the scene before it blew. I’m pissed at me, too, but it wasn’t like I had any choice. Without superpowers, I’m not getting anywhere near one of those scenes. It was a sucky drive. I want some time alone, or time with Dancer. He recharges me. Hanging with him is simple and pretty much perfect.
He doesn’t answer me and I look at him. He’s staring up at the roof of a building across the street and he’s got an amused, smug look on his face. I search the shadows of the roofline but I can’t figure out what he’s checking out. There’s nothing up there. “Dude, you listening to me? Hello? Do you even know I’m here?”
He continues looking at the roof like he’s seeing something I can’t see. Like that stupid drop of condensation I’m still not sure I believe was there.