Cold Days

“Harry!” Sarissa screamed, grabbing uselessly at the ogre’s wrist. It was as thick as her own leg, and the ogre didn’t even seem to notice her struggling.

The Redcap kept hold of my arm, my wrist pulled up against his sternum and still trapped in the tie. He smiled broadly and walked backward in a small circle, the pain and the leverage forcing me to scramble along the floor in front of him. A gale of lovely, cold laughter went up from the Sidhe like a chorus of frozen chimes.

The Redcap took a miniature, mocking bow to the crowd and spoke to me. “I was worried for a moment, mortal. You’re faster than you look.”

He kicked me in the dislocated shoulder. He wasn’t trying to kick my arm off. He was just doing it for the hell of it. It hurt a lot.

“You should see the look on your face, mortal,” the Redcap said. “This is fun.”

“You know what, Red?” I gasped. “We’re all having fun.”

I took my weight onto my knees and back, and slammed the heel of my right hand into the side of the jackass’s knee.

I don’t know how much stronger Mab’s gift had made me, because I’d never been much of a weight lifter until I’d started therapy. I didn’t know too much about how much weight lifters could, for example, bench-press. So I didn’t have a very good idea how I stacked up against plain old me. Or plain old anybody. Plus the weights for the bench press were marked in metric units, and I kind of fell asleep the day we learned to convert them to pounds.

But I’m pretty sure four hundred kilos isn’t bad.

The Redcap’s knee popped like a balloon from the force of the strike, and bent in toward his other knee. He howled in startled agony and tried to throw himself away, but just as I hadn’t been able to move for a few critical seconds after he’d injured me, his body wasn’t responding properly either, and he fell next to me.

The left side of my body felt like it was on fire, but me and pain are old buddies. His grip on the tie had loosened, and I couldn’t move my left arm enough to get it loose. So before he could recover, I punched him in the neck with my good hand. He gagged and thrashed, and I was able to unwrap the silk from my useless arm. I tried to pull the tie away from him, but he’d already shaken off the hits I’d given him and held on. I jerked on it as hard as I could, but I had only the one arm and was fresh out of leverage. I could feel the tie sliding through my fingers.

So I let go without warning and snapped my hand at a different target as he fell back.

He dropped into a backward roll and came up six feet away. He perched on one hand and a knee, still gripping the tie.

I casually settled his red ball cap onto my head, touched a forefinger to its brim, winked at him, and said, “You have hat hair.”

Again there was a chorus of marrow-curdling laughter from the Sidhe. It wasn’t any more pleasant to have them laughing with me than it had been to have them laughing at me.

The Redcap’s face flushed a furious red, and I could see the blood vessels in his eyes bursting.

Hell’s bells, the twit hadn’t been particularly perturbed when I’d crippled his leg. But touch his hat and embarrass him in front of his peers and the dude flipped out. Nobody has their priorities straight anymore.

I made it to my feet before he simply leapt at me. He hit me before I could get my balance and we both went down. His eyes burning, he ignored the tie and latched onto my throat with both hands.

He was strong. I think I might have been stronger than he was, but I had only the one arm. I slammed it at his forearms—if he kept his grip on me, those nails would almost certainly draw blood. He hissed and jerked his hands away at the last second, and I slammed my knee against his injured leg. I bucked him off me while he screamed. I went after him.

We rolled a couple of times, and I cannot tell you how much it hurt both of us to do it. He had the use of both arms. I was able to use both legs to stabilize myself—but he was a hell of a lot squirmier than me, and in a blur of confusing motion he somehow managed to slither around to my back and get an arm across my throat. I got a few fingers underneath it, and started trying to pry him away. It wasn’t a winning move. I managed to lessen the pressure, but I couldn’t pull him off me, and my head started to pound.

Another group inhalation went up from the Sidhe, and I could feel them leaning closer, their interest almost frenzied, hundreds and hundreds of gemlike eyes sparkling like stars as the light started dimming. Sarissa stared at me with wide eyes, her expression horrified.

But . . . she’d lost one of her shoes.

I watched as she reached out with her toes and managed to pluck one of her fallen glassy chopsticks up off the floor. The freaking yeti holding her didn’t notice. It was staring far too intently at the fight.

Sarissa passed the chopstick up to her hands, gripped it with both of them, and snapped it in the middle.

Shattered pieces of black glass fell away from a slender steel rod. Without looking, she simply lifted her hand and pressed the rod against the underside of the yeti’s wrist.

Faeries, be they Sidhe or any other kind, cannot abide the touch of iron. To them, it’s worse than molten plutonium. It burns them like fire, scars them, poisons them. There’s a lot of folklore about cold iron, and it’s a widely held belief that it refers only to cold-forged iron, but that’s a bunch of hooey. When the old stories refer to cold iron, they’re being poetic, like when they say “hot lead.” If you want to hurt one of the fae, you just need iron, including any alloy containing it, to hurt them.

And man, does it ever hurt them.

The ogre’s wrist burst into a sudden coruscation of yellow-white flame, as bright as that of an arc welder. The ogre howled and jerked its arm away from Sarissa’s head as if he’d been a child experimenting with a penny and an electrical outlet.

Sarissa spun on her heel and slashed the little steel rod across the ogre’s thigh.

It howled in primal fury and flinched back, sweeping one long arm at her in pure reflex.

Sarissa caught only a tiny fraction of the blow, but it was enough to send her staggering. She fell only a couple of feet away from me and looked up, her eyes dazed.

Her lower lip had been split wide-open.

A large ruby droplet fell from her lip and hung in the air, shining and perfect, and stayed there for half of forever. Then it finally splashed down onto the icy floor.

There was a shrieking hiss as the blood hit the supernatural ice, a sound somewhere between a hot skillet and a high-pressure industrial accident. The ice beneath the drop of blood shattered, as if the droplet had been unimaginably heavy, and a web of dark cracks shot out for fifty feet in every direction.

The music stopped. The Redcap froze. So did everyone else.

Mab rose out of her chair, and somehow in that instant of action she crossed the distance from her high seat, as though the simple act of standing up were what propelled her to the space nearby. As she came, the pallid finery of her dress darkened to raven black, as if the air had contained a fine mist of ink. Her hair darkened as well to the same color, and her eyes turned entirely black, sclera and all, as did her nails. The skin seemed to cling harder to her bones, making her beautiful features gaunt and terrible.

The Redcap flinched away from me and dragged himself back with his arms, getting clear. Give credit where it’s due: He might have been a sadistic, bloodthirsty monster, but he wasn’t a stupid one.

The furious, burned ogre wasn’t bright enough to realize what was happening. Still smoldering, still enraged, it came stomping toward Sarissa.

“Knight,” Mab said, the word a whipcrack.

Maeve came to the edge of the platform and clutched her hands into fists, her mouth twisted into a snarl.

I didn’t get up off the ground. There wasn’t time. Instead, I focused my will upon the advancing ogre and funneled my anger and my pain into the spell, along with the frozen core of power within me. I unleashed the energy as I thundered, “Ventas servitas!”

The ogre was only a couple of yards from Sarissa when the gale of arctic wind I’d called up slammed into the