Speaking of back by the dock …

My mood shifts and I glower. I still don’t have my sword. It got iced. The warehouse is now filled with iced Unseelie, the ceiling covered with stalactites, the floor deep with stalagmites. My sword got frozen in a stalactite way up high, and the place was way too deadly cold for anyone to enter, like freeze-you-to-death-instantly cold. We had to leave it stuck there, in an enormous icicle. Lor ordered Kasteo and Fade to stand guard until the scene thawed enough to retrieve it. Last I saw, the two Unseelie princes were still hanging around, too. If Christian was there, he was staying out of sight. No sign of Dancer. I didn’t want to leave but Lor threatened to potato-sack me over his shoulder, and seeing how he can do it as easily as Ryodan, I didn’t see any point in making myself miserable.

“It’s your fault,” I tell Ryodan. “You should never have let Jayne keep my sword. Now who knows what’s going to happen to it! If the scene explodes like the others …” I trail off because I can’t stand the thought of my sword blowing up into alabaster smithereens.

“That’s the least of our problems,” Ryodan says. “Tell me exactly what happened.”

“Lor just told you,” I say crossly. “What else do you want to know?”

“I want to hear it from you.”

I tear open another candy bar and around mouthfuls repeat most of what Lor said about the fog and the slit widening. The feeling of panic we all experienced. How all the sudden none of us could hear a thing, like we’d gone deaf. “Then this … this … thing that was twice the size of your office sailed out.”

“Thing.”

“Dude, Lor didn’t describe it any better. I mean, come on, ‘dark mass about the size of two semis, side by side’?”

“Try.”

I frown, thinking, then brighten. “Did you ever see the movie The Blob? It was like that. Only it was oblong. And I don’t know if it was slimy and it levitated instead of rolled. And I don’t know if it was dense. But it didn’t look like a Shade. It was nothing like a Shade.”

“The Blob.”

“Old movie, from way back in silent movie times.”

“It’s not that old,” Jayne says. “I saw it when I was a kid.”

“Which was like, way back during silent movie times, right? You shouldn’t even be talking to me. Don’t talk to me. You shouldn’t even be here. I should kill you. You’re lucky I’m not killing you right now. You left me for dead.” I look at Ryodan. “And you let him. Feckers. All of you.”

“I went straight to Chester’s and told Ryodan where you were,” Jayne says. “I wasn’t going to let you die. I didn’t like leaving you. I needed the sword. I couldn’t afford to pass up the chance.”

He told Ryodan where I was? “I said don’t talk to me. And that worked out real well for you, didn’t it? How many years do you think it might have taken you to kill a few hundred Unseelie?” I glare at Ryodan. “And you didn’t say nothing about him telling you where I was. You didn’t come neither.” Didn’t he care that I might’ve died?

“Boss sent me for you the second Jayne showed up,” Lor says. “You were gone by the time I got there. I was following your blood trail but it disappeared.”

“Texture,” Ryodan says to me.

“You mean did it have any? Not that I could see.”

“Then what happened.”

“It moved into the warehouse, all ponderous-like, and belched white fog out everywhere and we couldn’t see a thing. It iced the whole place, worse than anyplace we’ve seen yet. I mean, dude, the ceiling sprouted stalactites and the floor is covered with stalagmites so thick you can’t even walk in there! We never seen anything like that at the other scenes.”

“Postulate on why it got iced worse.”

I’d pondered that on the way back. There was only one significant difference I’d been able to isolate. “There were a lot more people and Fae at this scene than any we’ve investigated. There were hundreds of Unseelie in cages and they all got frosted. It’s possible more ice was necessary. Or maybe the thing had more juice today for some reason. We got iced, too, but it was only a thin layer, and once we moved, it cracked. We kept re-icing the second we stopped moving so I started doing jumping jacks and, like sheep can’t think for themselves, everybody copied me, then there we were all standing in the street doing jumping jacks. I got worried the commotion might make it turn around and come after us but the thing never even noticed us. It was like we were fish and it wanted chips. Or maybe we weren’t even noticeable as food. Then it vanished. Another of those slits opened inside the warehouse, all the white fog got sucked into it and the thing followed. Once it closed, we could hear again. Sort of.”

“Clarify.”

“There wasn’t any noise. Nothing. You’d think the ice on all those Unseelie might have popped or cracked a little like ice does when it settles because they were warm before they got iced but they didn’t. When we walked, our shoes didn’t sound right on the pavement. When we talked it was … flat. It was worse than flat. There was a feeling to the silence. A really bad feeling.”

“Elucidate,” Ryodan says.

“I just did. I think you mean speculate.”

Lor snorts. Ryodan gives me a look. Don’t even know why I bother answering him sometimes. Maybe I like to hear myself talk. I’ve got a lot of interesting things to say. “You know how sound is really movement, and vibration is what makes noise? Which is, like, total contradiction to its effect on things because when the world went dead quiet, it was still moving while making absolutely no noise. But what I’m saying is, after it departed, things never got back to normal. It’s like things weren’t vibrating all the way. Or maybe the sound waves weren’t bouncing off things the way they should. Or maybe the things the waves were bouncing off weren’t right.”

“Narrow it down.”

I shrug. “Got insufficient data to form conclusive deductions.”

“How long from the time it appeared to the time it disappeared.”

“That was the weird thing. It felt like it was happening in slow-mo but I figure two seconds from start to finish. It came. It iced. It vanished.” Sometimes I don’t have the most accurate sense of time because I’m in a kind of in-between fast-mo and slow-mo and don’t even realize it, which makes things around me seem to be happening more slowly. I’m pretty sure when it came, I was so wound up I was half freeze-framing. I look at Lor, who nods.