“Buying” nowadays operates on something solid and real: the barter system. Ryodan has the bartenders and waitresses at Chester’s coached to take certain items he either wants for himself or can turn around for something else he wants. If you have a big item he’s interested in, he’ll give you a line of credit. I hear he gets favors from the Fae in exchange for making them a place where they can prey on humans. Though I hate Jo working at Chester’s, in a way I’m glad because I’ll get more inside scoop now. Figure out what motivates Ryodan, what his weaknesses are. Dude’s got to have some chink in his armor. Everybody’s got their kryptonite.
I circle a pile of clothes and husks (fecking Shades, I hate them!) and head for my candy rack.
It’s empty.
Not a single Snickers.
Not a single anything for that matter.
I head down the cracker aisle.
The shelves are bare.
My stomach growls. Pissily. My knees aren’t wobbling yet but they’re close.
I turn my flashlight to wide beam and sweep it around the store.
The place has been cleaned out.
I’d blow out a melodramatic sigh but it’s an expenditure of energy I suddenly can’t afford. I’m no longer swinging my sword or bouncing from foot to foot the way I do a lot. I’m not moving a hair I don’t have to. My life just got harder. When you’re a supercar like me, you either need a huge gas tank, which I don’t have at five feet two and three-quarters first thing in the morning, or you need to live in a city with a lot of gas stations.
My gas stations are drying up.
It’s okay. I saw this coming. Dancer did, too. I squirreled away stashes of food, water, and medical supplies, in lots of hidey-holes around Dublin months ago. Me and Dancer have been building on those reserves in our spare time over the past few weeks. He doesn’t know where all my hideouts are, and I don’t know where he keeps all his stuff. That way if somebody tries to torture one of us to tell, we can’t totally wipe each other out. I tried to tell the sidhe-sheep to do it, but they thought I was crazy. They said that with more than half the population gone there was plenty of stuff in the stores to last a good long while. I said somebody was going to try to monopolize food distribution. Dude, barter system—food and water are the premium. They said everyone was too busy trying to survive. I said that wouldn’t last long and didn’t they read A Canticle for Leibowitz, see how things trend? They said what did A Canticle for Leibowitz have to do with food? And I said should I start calling you sidhe-simpletons instead of sidhe-sheep? Do I have to spell out everything? Can’t we metaphor some things?
I hate always being right, I mutter in my head. Talking takes breath and breathing takes gas I don’t have.
I Joe-walk out of the store and nearly have a fecking heart attack when I see the Unseelie prince standing there, half in the shadows. The half-out part of him is splashed with moonlight, but the moon doesn’t glow the same way it used to before the Fae came. It’s rarely the same color from night to night. Tonight it has a silvery purple luminosity, making half of him a black silhouette, the other half lavender-metallic. He’s tattooed and beautiful and eerie and exotic, and gets my heart thumping in a way that has nothing to do with fear.
My sword flashes up. My blade is long and alabaster. I lock my elbow so my arm doesn’t wobble.
“Easy, lass.”
“Fecking stop sneaking up on me like that!” How can I not hear him? Him and Ryodan can both get the jump on me. It makes me crazy. I have superhearing. My hearing is so good that I can hear air displacement when other people move, for feck’s sake. Nobody sneaks up on me. Both of them managed to do it that night on the water tower, and Christian just did it again. Got within five feet of me without me even knowing it. “Sword. Lower.”
“Why should I do that?” He’s turning erotic, like the other UPs. My used-to-be best friend Mac calls them death-by-sex Fae because they can kill with sex. And that’s the best-case scenario. Worst case? They turn you Pri-ya like they did Mac. They leave you alive, totally addicted to sex, insatiable and out of your mind. The other UPs corralled me once, kept me between them, and did things to me I don’t like to think about. I don’t want sex to be that way. Like you’re some kind of helpless animal. I’ve had helpless animal up to my eyebrows already in my life. What Christian is throwing off isn’t a tenth of what the other UPs have, but it’s bad.
“I’ll never hurt you, lass.”
“Says the Unseelie prince.” But I lower my sword, prop it against my leg. I wasn’t sure how much longer I was going to be able to hold it up anyway.
The muscles in his face ripple, like they’re competing to shape an expression, and rage is looking like the victor, and I get the feeling calling him an Unseelie prince might just have been a tiny error of judgment on my part. Been making a few of those lately.
“Say my name, lass.”
I cover my ears and look at him like what the feck? His voice just came out as big as a house.
“Say my fucking name!” Thunder rolls in the sky. I wrap my arms around my head to mute his voice. Times like this, I hate my superhearing. I look up. There’s no storm moving in. It’s him. Influencing the weather, just like Fae royalty. I look back down. A veneer of ice coats the sidewalk around him, a shimmer of crystals dusts his black boots and frosts halfway up his jeans.
“Christian,” I say.
He inhales sharp, like something hurts in him somewhere just from me saying his name, and closes his eyes. His face ripples, goes smooth like Silly Putty just out of the egg then ripples again. I wonder if I touched it, I could mold it into shape, maybe stamp some funnies from the comic section of the newspaper on it. Cracking myself up again!