You can have my soul if you fix him.”
With the last feelings he’s ever going to have, Shane looks down at Drake’s sleeping face, then watches the ice melt, the wound close. Drake opens his eyes and grins, sitting up. “That was a close one, huh?”
Shane gives him a smile, the last one he’ll ever feel. “Baby, you have no idea.”
Then the Ice King rips away his soul.
One of Shane’s boots hits the ground before his car’s wheels have entirely stopped spinning, crunching satisfyingly against the gravel. He shrugs on his coat, a thick leather jacket that has just about no effect on how much cold he feels, and buckles on his swordbelt, then checks his hair in the mirror. Huh. Black today. Maybe he was looking forward to this.
It does feel good, he supposes, to stretch his legs. It’s been a week since the last time he left the Ice King’s fortress, concealed under a wholesale illusion covering an obscure government-sounding office. Even then, he’d only left to get drunk and pass out at Drake’s doorstep—or was that the time he’d crashed service? It’s hard to remember the things that don’t matter. Mostly it just feels cold.
He unclips the GPS from his windshield, palming the little device. He taps it with a finger, flicking it to life. “Hey. Where is he?”
“Turn left. In four hundred feet, turn right onto Seventeenth Street.”
“Who the hell measures in feet anyway?” he grumbles, stuffing it into his pocket along with his hands, strolling off down the street.
“Turn left.”
Shane pauses, then pulls the GPS out to scowl at it. It’s a new model, and should be able to handle the spell he’d put on it for a year, at least. “You said turn right.”
“Turn left,” it repeats, stubbornly.
“Look, this isn’t complicated. Find Roy. How many feet?”
“Your destination is on the left. Right. Left.”
“Fucking piece of shit.” Shane jabs at the buttons, succeeding in changing her voice to Arabic, then Japanese, then Dark Fae, which he’s pretty sure wasn’t included with the regular package at Radio World.
“Snearthen Asghar.”
He’s so preoccupied with snarling every Dark Fae curse he knows at the thing that he doesn’t notice the men creeping up on him until the cold barrel of a gun presses against his temple.
“Your wallet and your keys. Don’t turn around. Don’t fucking look at me.”
Oh, this man wants to be menacing. Shane tries, with limited success, not to smirk. “My keys?”
“You got a sweet ride.” One of the men sneers, pressing closer to him. “Maybe you’d be a sweet ride too, huh, faggot?”
“Well, if you’re offering.”
The wandering hand freezes, then pulls back in obvious confusion. “What the fuck did you just say to me, shithead? You wanna eat lead?”
“Probably tastes better than your dick.”
That does the trick. A thought from Shane freezes the hammer on the gun a split-second before it clicks, leaving one thug cursing at the damn thing as Shane moves, slamming the heel of his hand up into the second man’s nose, hard enough to drive bone splinters into his brain.
“Cheap trick,” he says with a shrug as the dying man collapses to the ground, twitching and bleeding from the nose and ears. “Effective, though. How about you, big man? You wanna bleed?”
The second thug tosses his useless gun to the ground, hands in the air. “N-no, man, I didn’t—”
He doesn’t bleed. Shane freezes him where he stands, an unguarded touch of his finger lowering the man’s temperature to somewhere that he vaguely remembers from high school only registers on the Kelvin scale. “It’s a cute conceit, that you can unfreeze someone,” he remarks casually, shaking off the ice clinging to his finger. “They come back to life a hundred years later and wake up and say, ‘hey, what did I miss?’ Just like that, their heart starts beating again, and their flesh hasn’t atrophied at all. Why don’t you tell me how that works out for you?”
On second thought, there’s no reason to leave that kind of evidence behind, and there’s enough of his power in the death to make a certain mortician of his acquaintance ask awkward questions. He stoops down, picks up the “broken” gun, and unfreezes the hammer. “This is cleaner. Well. Not for you.”
The shot is loud, as is the sound of the man shattering into a hundred thousand pieces, landing in frozen bits around the alley. Shane flicks a piece off his jacket, then pulls out his GPS, shaking it. “Gonna work now?”
“Snearthen Asghar.”
“If you say so.”
He sets off at a trot, jogging left around a corner, only to see his target lying unconscious on top of a dumpster. “Dumbass. Wake up, Roy.” He accompanies his words with a flick of cold wind, and Roy yelps as he wakes, patting himself down.
“Boss? What are you doing?”
“Tracked you. Shit, how long did it take to wipe the floor with you?”
Roy groans, sitting up and squirming around, grabbing at his own back. “I don’t know, boss. Ten seconds? It’s, uh, bigger than I thought. Tried to suck out my soul.”
Shane laughs. “I hope that’s the only trick it has. Turn over.”
“I—”
“Turn the fuck over, I’m gonna track its signature.”
It’s the work of a few annoying moments to feed the sensory magic he gets from the impression in Roy’s back into the GPS, and the thing stutters hesitantly to life. “Get that?” he asks the spell, pressing a few buttons for the hell of it.
“Snearthen Heirge.”
“Cool.” He tosses Roy his keys, already following the directions. “Get the fuck out of here. This is obviously too big for you.”
Roy glares at him, but it’s more wounded pride than anger. “I could have caught you in the rankings.”
“Sure. Out you get, I’ve got to Sneathen Heirge. Tell the King he’ll have its head by tonight.”
“You’re a fucking bastard, boss.”
And you wouldn’t have been anywhere near me in the rankings if I’d bothered hunting a single thing in the last two years. There’s something to fucking brag about.
Sure, it’s nice being on top in the rankings, like it’s nice having the penthouse room, the bank account with nine figures,
