“They have to catch me first. Why do you keep saying my name like that?”
“Wake up. You’re caught,” TP says. “I know you’re not stupid. What are you doing? Dani! Dani!”
“Same thing you always did. Taking a stand. Not backing down. Even if I don’t have all the answers and can’t predict how I’ll get out of this one, I will get out of this one.”
I’m still waiting for a spear through my gut. Instead TP smiles and says, “Hold on to that thought.”
“Wake up, Dani!”
My face stings like somebody slapped me. I squint my eyes open when I thought they already were.
Jo’s standing in front of me. My cheek stings. I’d rub it but I’m chained.
“Where did TP go?” I say, confused.
“What?” Jo says.
I lick my lips, or try to. My mouth is so dry my tongue doesn’t make any difference. My lower lip is split and crusted with dried blood. The base of my skull hurts. I must have banged myself a good one passing out, or got hit in the back of my head when I was fighting Ryodan’s men.
“I’m sorry I hit you but I was afraid you were … oh, Dani! What did he do to you? He beat you! Then I hit you, too!” She looks like she might cry. She touches my face gently and I flinch.
“Get off me!”
“I’m going to kill him,” she whispers, and something in the softly spoken words surprises me. Like she’s turning all bloodthirsty, becoming like me.
I try to figure out if TP was the dream or Jo is, or they both are. I have the weirdest dreams sometimes. As if TP would actually bother trying to give me advice. I should have known it was a dream instantly by the fact that she wasn’t killing me.
“I ran into him,” I tell her. “As in collided. Twice. That’s why my face is so beat up.” Well, it’s most of the reason.
“Are you defending Ryodan? Look what he’s done to you! Dani, has he brainwashed you? Are you getting Stockholm syndrome?”
“What the feck’s Stockholm got to do with any of this? Ain’t that some city in Sweden?”
She wraps her arms around me and gets all in my space. It’s awkward with my hands chained above my head and my ankles shackled to the floor. She sort of hugs me and I can’t get her off me because I’m stuck.
“Dude!” I give a whole body shrug, trying to dislodge her. She’s tenacious, lopping all over me. “What are you doing?”
When she pulls back I see she’s crying. I must look pretty bad.
“Why did you do it?” She sniffs and wipes her nose with the back of her hand. “We talked and talked about it, and can’t figure it out. You didn’t just wave a red flag at a bull. You sauntered right up to it, punched it in the face then tried to dance on its horns. Dani, what were you thinking?”
I sigh. People ask the stupidest questions. Sometimes you don’t think. You just do. Some moments are too golden to pass up. You play—you pay. I’ve always been okay with that.
I peer at her suspiciously. Jo can’t be here. Not in the guts of Chester’s. “You’re not real,” I say.
She feels my forehead. “You’re running a fever.”
I know. I’m dripping sweat and freezing cold. I always get a fever if I get dangerously hungry. It’s another fecking weakness. So many superstrengths. So many limits. I don’t let folks know about them. “Must have caught a cold,” I tell her. I have food stuffed in every pocket, but with my hands chained above my head I can’t get to one bite of it.
“Get a protein bar out of my pocket and feed it to me.” If this is really happening, I’ll get strong again and my body temp will drop back to normal. If this is a dream, at least I’ll get to dream the taste of food. I’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen a key to these manacles lying around somewhere convenient?” I say with no hope. Ryodan’s not sloppy.
Four protein bars later I know I’m not dreaming. My head is still throbbing but starting to clear. TP wasn’t real.
But Jo is.
She tells me word spread everywhere that I’d single-handedly taken on a bunch of Fae in Chester’s then sauntered out all cocky-like with an Unseelie prince. Margery insisted the Unseelie prince had killed me, and managed to convince a lot of sidhe-sheep to write me off, taking up right where Rowena left off, smearing my name.
Kat had seen things differently. She’d done some investigating before making her decision. According to onlookers, the “prince” who’d walked me out hadn’t been wearing a torque. The Unseelie princes have silver torques around their necks that glow like they’re radioactive. The necklace seems to be part of them, inseparable like their tattoos and wings. That told Kat all she needed to know: if the prince wasn’t wearing a torque, it had to be Christian who’d escorted me out.
I’m not sure how she made the next deductive leap, but I’m glad she did. She sent a group of girls to Chester’s to search for me, believing Ryodan had gone after me and captured me.
I’m amazed by how speedily she acted. Maybe Kat’s going to do all right by the sidhe-seers. “How did she figure out I was missing so quickly?”
“You’ve been gone for three days, Dani.”
I’m stunned. I’ve been chained down here for three days? No wonder I’m starving.
“How the feck did you find me? I figured I was like, buried in the dungeon of Chester’s or something.”