Карен Монинг - Iced

“You’ll figure it out.” He moves to his desk, opens a drawer, pulls out a sheet of paper and hands it to me. “Complete and sign this.”

I take it and look at it. It’s a job application. I give him a look. “Dude. Post-apocalyptic world. Who does job applications anymore?”

“I do.”

I squint at it, then him. “What are you paying me?” I angle.

“Dude. Post-apocalyptic world. Who does money anymore.”

I snicker. First sign of any sense of humor he’s shown. Then I remember where I am and why. I wad it up and throw it at him. It bounces off his chest.

“You’re wasting time, kid. The sooner you do what I tell you, the sooner you can get out of here.” He goes to his desk, gets another and hands it to me with a pen.

I relax. He plans to let me leave. Maybe even soon.

I skim the application. It has the usual blanks: name, address, date of birth, education, prior job history, places for signature and date. Fanciest application I’ve ever seen, with the name CHESTER’S worked into an ornate border that frames the page.

Everybody clings to something when the world melts down. I suppose Ryodan likes having his business details all squared up, no matter the chaos at his door. It’s not like it’ll kill me to fill out the stupid thing, agree to do whatever he wants, then get the feck out of here and go into deep hiding. I sigh. Hiding. Me. I pine for the days when I was the only superhero in town.

“If I fill this out, you’ll let me leave?”

He inclines his head.

“But I have to do some kind of job for you?”

He inclines his head again.

“If I do that job, are we through? For good? Just one job, right?” I have to make this convincing or he’ll figure out I plan to disappear.

Once more he gives me that imperial nod that’s hardly a nod, like he’s stooping to acknowledge my puny existence.

I don’t ask him what the job is because I have no intention of ever doing it. I’m never going to be anyone’s solution to folks’ problems again. I crossed lines for Ro. Big lines. Deep lines. She’s dead. I’m free. Life starts now. I study him. He’s perfect stillness, with the light behind his face as usual, features in shadow.

Cats get still like him. Before they pounce.

Something’s going on here, bigger than I’m seeing.

My face hurts. My eyes are puffy and the left one’s trying to swell shut. “You got any ice?” I need to buy time to figure out what’s going on. Plus, if he leaves for ice I can snoop through his office.

He gives me a look I’ve seen men do before, especially to women: chin down, looking up from beneath his brows, with a faintly mocking smile. There’s something in that look I don’t get but the challenge is unmistakable. “Come here,” he says. “I’ll heal you.” He’s sitting behind his desk, watching me. Still, so still. It’s like he’s not even breathing.

I look at him. I don’t know what to make of him. Part of me wants to get up, go around that desk and find out what he’s talking about. “You could do that? Make my bruises and cuts go away?” I’m always beat up and my muscles are constantly strained from overuse. Sometimes I burn through my shoes and scrape the skin right off my feet. It gets old.

“I can make you feel better than you’ve ever felt in your life.”

“How?”

“There are some secrets, Dani O’Malley, that you learn only by participating.”

I consider that. “So. You got any ice?”

He laughs and presses a button on his desk. “Fade. Ice. Now.”

“Gotcha, boss.”

A few minutes later I’m sitting with an ice pack on half my face, squinting around it to fill out Ryodan’s stupid application. I’m almost done and ready to sign when I get the strangest feeling in my hand, the one holding the page.

It’s my left hand, my sword hand, the one that turned black a little while ago, the night I stabbed a Hunter through the heart and killed it. Or rather, the night I thought I killed a Hunter. Truth is, I’m not actually sure I did but I’m not about to print a retraction. The public needs to believe in certain things. When I went back to take pictures of it for The Dani Daily to show folks it was gone, completely. Not a trace remained. Not a single drop of black blood anywhere. Barrons says they can’t be killed. After the incident I thought I was going to lose my hand. My veins turned black and my whole hand went cold as a block of ice. I had to wear a glove for days. Told the sidhe -sheep I got poison sumac. Rare around these parts but there used to be some. Don’t know if the Shades ate it all. Wonder if they did, if they got itchy bellies inside.

Now it’s all tingly and weird. I study it, wondering what might go wrong with me next. Maybe stabbing the Hunter did something to me. Maybe that’s why I stalled. Maybe there are worse things on the horizon.

That is so not me! Optimism is me. Tomorrow’s my day. You never know what grand adventures wait around the next corner!

“Kid, you going to sit there all day daydreaming, or sign the fucking thing.”

That’s when I see it. I’m so stunned my mouth opens, and hangs there catching flies for a minute.

I almost signed it!

He must have been sitting over there, laughing his butt off inside, congratulating himself.

My head snaps up. “So, what exactly does the spell in the border of this thing do?” I’ve never seen anything like it. And I’ve seen a lot of spells. Ro was a pro at them. Some really nasty ones. Now that I’m seeing it, I can’t believe I missed it. Cleverly tucked into the ornate black border are shimmering shapes and symbols, slithering, in constant motion. One of them is trying to crawl off the page and onto my lap.

I wad it up and throw it at him. “Nice try. Not .”

“Ah, well. It was possible you would sign. It was the simplest solution.”

He’s completely unperturbed. I wonder, does anything shake him up, make him lose his cool, get hot about something, scream and yell? I can’t see it. I think Ryodan glides through life in the same coolly amused mood all the time. “What would it have done to me if I’d signed it?” I ask. Curiosity. I have it in spades. Mom swore it was going to be the death of me. Something’s got to be. There are worse things.

“Some secrets—”

“Yeah, yeah, blah blah, participating and all that bunk. Got it.”

“Good.”

“Didn’t want to know anyway.”

“Yes you did. You can’t stand not knowing things.”

“So, what now?” We’re at an impasse, him and me. I suspect his “application” was really a contract. A binding contract, the kind that knits up your soul and tucks it in someone else’s pocket. I heard of them but never believed they were real. If anybody had a way to sew up a soul in a business deal, it would be Ryodan. Jericho Barrons is an animal. Pure lawless beast. Not so Ryodan. Dude’s a machine.

“Congratulations, kid,” he says. “You passed my first test. You may just get the job yet.”

I sigh. “This is going to be a long day, isn’t it? You serve lunch around here? And I’m going to need more ice.”

A door I didn’t even know was there in the glass wall of his office opens, revealing a glass elevator.

Chester’s is way bigger than I thought. As we ride the elevator down, I’m riveted by the view.

And a little worried.

That he’s letting me see so much means that whether I signed his stupid application or not, he thinks he has me buttoned up.

Ryodan’s glass office isn’t the only place he can watch things. It’s the tip of the iceberg, and, dude, I do mean iceberg, as in megatons of stuff hidden beneath the surface. The central club part of Chester’s — the interior half, a dozen levels the public sees — is barely a tenth of it. That main part where everybody hangs out and dances and makes deals with the devil is constructed inside a much larger structure. Ryodan and his dudes live behind the walls of that club in what’s beginning to look like a vast underground city, from where I am. All the walls are two-way glass. They can go to any level, by elevator or catwalk, and watch anything that’s happening at any time. Serious thought went into designing this place. There’s no way they built it all since the walls fell last Halloween. I wonder how long it’s all been here, beneath the polished, glitzy, glamorous Chester’s that used to exist, hot spot for movie stars and models and the überrich. I wonder if, like our abbey, their underground world has been beneath a changing exterior for millennia.