“Watched it last night,” he says absently, running a hand through his hair, making it stand up funny in a totally hot way, and I can tell by the way his eyes are unfocused that he’s lost in thought and not aware of stuff around him. He gets that way a lot.

“You watched it without me?” I’m hurt. Me and Dancer love horror flicks. We gorge on them because they make us laugh. They have a way of putting the world in perspective. We’d been hunting for Scream 4 for a while, planning to watch it. Dancer doesn’t usually watch movies alone, least not that I know of.

“But I’ll watch it again. It was cool.”

“Cool.” I still feel hurt, even though there’s no reason for it. He’s watching it with me tonight. So what if he saw it last night, too? And so what if he saw it with someone else? I don’t care about stuff like that. What happens when I’m not around ain’t got nothing to do with me. “What about Papa Roach?”

“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’sbeen 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.