“Blowing them up doesn’t work. Torching them is no good either. But what if we keep them from returning to a body? Any body. Human or their own. Wouldn’t that solve the problem? Our goal is to keep them from getting inside more people. They’re immortal, and your time is too important to waste running around after thousands of them with your sword. So, I started thinking what about a tough, impossible-to-escape spray-plastic? Encase them and keep them from being able to reattach to anything. I’ve been working on a formula. Once it’s done, we can fill those small fertilizer tanks we swiped from the hardware store and test it out. I already rigged up a couple of sprayers to fit.”

So, that’s where he’d been. And when he got done working last night he watched a movie to chill. No big.

“I’ve got something that sets hard at a quarter-inch thick. I’m still trying to get it to gel to the perfect degree of solidity. I think I’ve figured out a way to add iron to the mix without making it too rigid. How do the segments attach to Papa? Tentacles? Suckers? How do they get under human skin? Can you catch me a couple to test it on?”

“You’re the Shit, you know that,” I say.

“No, you’re the Shit,” he says and grins, and we say it back and forth a couple of times. He thinks I’m the Shit because I can actually catch them. I was born with my gifts. Dancer is always thinking, trying to find ways to do things better. Surviving the fall with no special powers and no friends wows the feck out of me.

We relax on the floor because sunshine in Dublin is rare, and we talk about anything and everything except things like where I was when he was wherever he was. I don’t tell him I was in a dungeon for almost four days and he doesn’t ask. I like that about him. Friends don’t build cages for each other.

We watch the sun move across the sky, and sometimes he gets up to get me things to eat. He tells me he’s been checking stores and nearly every single one has been wiped clean. I have to stop myself three times from almost spilling the beans about the iced stuff I’ve been seeing.

When it’s getting near seven o’clock, I start getting antsy and it makes me mad because I don’t want to have to leave but somebody else is pulling my strings and I’ve got to go. I have to get to Chester’s early enough to avoid Mac but not so early Ryodan gets all cocky about it.

I sigh.

“Something worrying you, Mega?” Dancer says.

“Just got to go take care of some things.”

“I thought we were going to watch a movie. I found a whole box of Skittles at the airport. And jerky. The hot stuff.”

I smack myself in the forehead. Skittles, jerky, and a movie. What was I thinking, saying hey, let’s watch a movie tonight. My nights don’t belong to me anymore. Somebody else owns them. That’s not just a bitter pill to swallow. For someone like me it’s a suicide tooth. It’s irrelevant that I want to go work on the ice mystery and keep more innocent folks from dying. I can’t handle that Ryodan gets to dictate when, how, and where I do it. It almost makes me not want to work on it at all. I hate being controlled.

I can’t not go to Chester’s because I don’t know what Ryodan will do to Jo if I don’t show, and there’s no way I’m running the risk of finding out. I don’t know if he’d hunt me down here, smash up the TV and DVD player, and take Dancer and put him in his dungeon. I never know what that dude will do next.

But I’m crystal clear about one thing he’s doing.

Ruining my life.

I bang into Ryodan’s office. “I been in enough cages in my life,” I say. I got worked up on the way over, talking to myself in my head about the unfairness of it all.

He glances up from his paperwork.

“Paperwork! Holy replicating reams! Is that all you ever do? It’s no wonder you want me coming around so much. Got to liven up your boring life with the superexcitement of the Mega.” I’m so mad, I’m vibrating and the papers on his desk flutter in the breeze. When I get really mad, I cause a kind of air displacement that does on a tiny scale what the Fae do on a massive scale, except I can’t affect the temperature. I do it sometimes to freak people out, get them off balance. It used to bug the crap out of Ro.

He catches a paper before it flies off the desk. “Something wrong.”

How does he do that? Say questions without them sounding like questions at all? I been practicing and it’s not easy. Vocal cords want to go up at the end of an interrogatory. I been trying to reprogram myself. Not because I plan to start acting like him (at least not around him) but because I think it’s good to test yourself, override compulsion. Learn more self-control.

My hair’s flying around my head in a cloud, getting in my eyes. I shove it back with both hands, wishing me and Dancer were eating jerky and hanging cool. “Yeah! Like, I might just have a life! Like I might just have plans for things that conflict with your stupid report-to-work-every-night-at-eight rule! Nobody else has to work every single night! Maybe I could get a couple of nights off to do something I want to do. Is that too fecking much to ask?”

“You have a date.”

Another nonquestion, but the word “date” in the same thought with Dancer makes me say, “Huh?”

Ryodan stands and dwarfs me. I live in a world of people who are taller than me, but Jo says she thinks I’m going to grow more. I measure myself a lot. I don’t want to be stuck at five foot two and three-quarters forever.

“You mentioned plans. You didn’t say what they were.”

“None of your fecking business.”

“Everything is my business.”

“Not my personal life. That’s why they call it personal.”

“This is about your little boyfriend.”

“Don’t talk about him. Don’t even think about him. And he’s not little. Stop calling him little. One day he’s going to be bigger than you. You just wait and see.”

“This isn’t the time to play house and get clumsy with a kid that doesn’t know what to do with his own dick.”

He just made me think about Dancer’s dick. The thought is so uncomfortable I start bouncing from foot to foot. “Who said anything about dicks? I just want to watch a movie tonight!”

“Which one.”

“How could that possibly matter?”

He gives me a look.