I plaster a sigh around a bite of candy bar and swallow it. The new temporary leader of the abbey and interim Grand Mistress of sidhe-seers around the world just made a big mistake. I learned a thing or two from that unnamed person when we used to hang together. Sidhe-sheep need a firm hand. Not firm like Ro’s, which was bullying, belittling, and tyrannical, but firm in a way that doesn’t make the herd stampede. Fear and doubt are major stampeders. Kat should have said something like what a good thing it was they were all so much stronger than Rowena. Even a kid can see what’s going on in the room down there. The sidhe-seers are afraid. Rowena is dead. Dublin is a riot-ravaged mess filled with monsters. One of the good guys turned out to be the bad guy. Their lives changed too quickly in too many ways for them to deal with. They’re easy targets to be swayed by the most persuasive, strongest leader, and that means Kat needs to become one, fast.
Before somebody a lot less capable and kind does.
Somebody like Margery, who’s even now watching the crowd through narrowed eyes, like she’s got a thermometer up its butt, taking its temperature. She’s a year older than Kat, and was part of Ro’s inner circle when the old witch was alive. She’s not going to put up with a changing of the guard that doesn’t include her. She’ll make trouble every chance she gets. I hope Kat knows how treacherous she can be. Anyone that was ever close to Ro for longer than like—one second—has something seriously scary about her. I know. I was closest to her of all. Sidhe-sheep politics. Dude, I hate them. They tangle you up like sticky spiderwebs. I love living on my own!
Still, I miss the abbey every now and then. Especially when I think about them baking cookies and stuff. Hearing voices in the background when you doze is nice. Knowing even if you are misunderstood, you aren’t totally alone in the world isn’t the worst thing.
Kat’s right: the Sinsar Dubh we used to have locked up and magicked down beneath our abbey is nothing compared to what we’ve got under our floorboards now.
The problem is it doesn’t look like the Sinsar Dubh anymore.
All of the darkest magic and power of the Fae race is no longer trapped between the covers of a book. It’s in the body of a Fae prince in all his naked, winged glory. And if you’ve never seen a Fae prince before, that’s one jaw-dropping, eye-popping, mind-scrambling amount of glory.
It’s only a matter of time before somebody sets him free.
Kat hasn’t even made her way around to the killer-critical fact yet: lots of people know he’s down there now, crammed to the gills with every last bit of the deadly magic of the Fae race.
I know people. I’ve seen all the shapes and sizes they come in. Somebody’s going to be stupid enough to believe they can control him. Somebody’s going to find a way through that ice.
Jericho Barrons is only one of a lot of different folks that hunted the Sinsar Dubh for thousands of years. None of them ever knew where it was. If they had, they’d have descended on our abbey back in the dark ages when a rough-piled, round stone tower was all that concealed the entrance to our underground city. And they would have pulled it, stone from stone, into rubble, until they got what they came for.
Now a whole bunch of humans and Fae know exactly where the most powerful weapon ever created is being stored.
Folks talk.
Soon the whole world is going to know it’s here.
I snort, imagining hordes descending on us, rioting, raging, brandishing weapons. Stupid sidhe-sheep too busy squabbling about the best way to fight back, to get around to fighting back. I sigh.
Kat glances up.
I stop breathing, hug my knees tight to my chest and stay perfectly still.
After a moment Kat shakes her head and goes back to the conversation.
I sigh again but softer.
She just made her second mistake.
Confronted by something she couldn’t explain, she pretended it wasn’t there. Dude, ostrich much?
Oh, yeah. Just a matter of time.
I wait a few minutes for things to get heated again, take advantage of the commotion and freeze-frame out.
I love moving the way I do.
I can’t imagine life any other way.
Whenever something is bugging me, all I need to do is zoom around the city, spy on all the slo-mo Joes trudging through, and I instantly feel a million times better.
I’ve got the coolest gig in the world.
I’m a superhero.
Until recently, I was the only one I knew of.
According to my mom, I didn’t make the normal toddler transition from crawling to walking. I went from lolling on my back, counting pudgy toes and cooing happily while she changed my diapers (I’ve never seen any reason to cry when someone is cleaning poop off you), to what she initially thought was teleporting. One second I was on the living room floor, the next I’d vanished. She was afraid the Fae had taken me—they used to do that to sidhe-seers if they discovered them—until she heard me rummaging around in the pantry trying to get a jar of baby food open. It was creamed corn. I remember. I still love creamed corn. Not much fuel-power there though. I burn through the punch of sugar-energy in no time.
I never got to go to school.
You don’t want to know how she kept me from leaving the house. There aren’t many options with a kid who can move faster than you can blink. And none of them are PC.
I’m not the only superhero in Dublin anymore, which annoys the feckity-feck out of me, but I’m slowly coming around to seeing it might be a good thing.
I was getting complacent. And that turns into sloppy if you’re not careful. Bored, too. It’s not much fun always being the best and fastest. A little competition keeps you on your toes, makes you try harder, live larger.
I’m all about that: living large.
I want to go out in a blaze of glory while I’m young. I don’t want to break piece by piece, lose my mind and die wrinkly and old. Given the current state of our world, I’m not sure any of us have to worry about that anymore.
Top on my list of dudes to beat are Jericho Barrons and his men. Like me, they’re superfast and superstrong. Much as I hate to admit it—they’re faster. But I’m working on it.
Barrons can pluck me right out of thin air (dude, why isn’t it thick air? The things people say!) while I’m freeze-framing, which is what I call the way I get around. I start at point A, lock down a mental snapshot of everything around me, hit the gas, and in a blink I’m at point B. It’s only got a couple of downsides. One, I’m constantly bruised from running into things at top speed because some of the things I lock down on my mental grid aren’t stationary, like people and animals and Fae. Two, freeze-framing requires a ton of food for fuel. I have to eat constantly. It’s a pain in the butt collecting and carrying that much food. If I don’t eat enough, I get limp and wobbly. It’s pathetic. I’m a gas tank that’s either full or empty. There’s no half tank with me. You know those movies where folks wear rounds of ammo on their body? I wear protein bars and Snickers.
At least once a night I whiz over to Chester’s, Dublin’s underground hot spot for partying and scoring whatever your fantasy is and angling for a shot at immortality, owned and operated by Barrons’s go-to dude Ryodan, and I start killing every Fae hanging around outside it. It usually takes all of five seconds for his men to show up, but I can do a lot in five seconds.
Chester’s is a safe-zone. Killing Fae is prohibited there, no matter what they do. And they do some sick stuff.
Killing humans, however, isn’t prohibited at Chester’s. That’s a major issue with me, so I keep giving Ryodan grief and I’m not about to stop.
One of these nights I’m going to be faster than him, faster than all of them.
Then I’m going to slay every Fae in Chester’s.
Second on my list of competition are the Fae I hunt. Some of them can teleport. They call it “sifting.” I don’t understand the physics of it. I just know it’s faster than freeze-framing. Which would worry me more if I didn’t have the Sword of Light, one of two weapons that can exterminate their immortal asses, so they leave me alone for the most part. She-who-isn’t-getting-named has the other weapon, the Spear.
My stomach hurts again. As I peel open a protein bar, I decide to start thinking of her as “That Person,” abbreviated to TP. Then maybe my mind will slide over thoughts of “TP” without hitching and kicking me in the stomach.
Last are the Unseelie princes. There used to be four. Cruce is out of the picture for now. Two are at large, in Dublin, no longer under the Lord Master’s rule, which makes them way more dangerous than they used to be. They’ve begun fighting with each other and are striking out on their own. There’s major trouble coming from those two. Not only can they sift, just looking at them makes you weep blood. And if you have sex with them … well don’t! Enough said. Already cults are forming around them. Sheep are always looking for a new shepherd when the terrain gets rocky.
I don’t test myself against the princes. I keep my distance. I sleep with my sword in my hand. I shower with it. I never let anyone else touch it. I love my sword. It’s my best friend.
I killed the other Unseelie prince. I’m the only person who ever has. Dani Mega O’Malley slayed an Unseelie prince! Gotta love it. Only problem is, now the two that are left have a wicked hate-on for me. I’m hoping they’ll be too busy fighting with each other to come after me.
My life consists mainly of watching my city. Keeping tabs on all that’s changing. I love knowing the details, spreading the important news around. I don’t know what Dublin would do without me.
I run a newspaper called The Dani Daily that I put out three times a week. Sometimes I’ll do a special edition if something big comes up. I collect messages at what’s left of the General Post Office, from folks who are having problems with tough-to-kill Fae. I like to swoop in and save the day! I take my beat seriously, like Inspector Jayne and the Guardians who patrol the streets at night. Dublin needs me. I’m not about to let her down.
I just published my first book, Dani Does Dublin: the ABCs of the AWC. Dancer helps me print and distribute it. The reviews have been great. Only problem is, whenever I learn new stuff, which is like constantly, I have to put out a revised edition. I’m on the fifth already.
Some of the folks I help are real basket cases, afraid of their own shadow. I can tell just by looking at them they won’t survive long. It makes me sad but I do all I can.
I decide to pop over to the General Post Office now, see if anybody left notes for me.
I polish off my protein bar in two gulps and pocket the wrapper. Don’t know why I can’t bring myself to litter, considering the streets are covered with debris from the riot the night Dublin fell, but adding to it feels wrong.
I narrow my eyes, look down the street far as I can see, plot each obstacle on my mental grid until it all snaps into place: abandoned cars with open doors just waiting to slam me if I’m off by an inch, streetlamps ripped from the pavement with chunks of concrete attached at the base and strips of metal sticking out that are going to kill my shins if I’m not careful, tables flung through pub windows blocking the sidewalks. You get the idea.
I take a deep breath and give in, set that sidhe-seer place in my head free and slide into a different way of being. Ro used to try to get me to explain it to her, like maybe she could figure out how to do it if she tried hard enough. The best I can come up with is this: it’s like picking your whole self up mentally and shoving it sideways, till suddenly you’re … just something else. I shift Danigears, I guess. The rush is megaintense and, well … I can’t imagine life without it because there’s no such thing as life without it.
I do it now, shift hard and fast, and then I’m whole and free and perfect. Wind in my hair! Freeze-framing! Can’t even feel my feet, because I got wings on them! I scrunch up my face in concentration and push harder, faster, every nanosecond is going to count if I’m going to beat—
I slam into a wall.