Through the fire, p.22
Through the Fire, page 22
It wasn’t him. That was a thin line to hold on to, nothing against the weight of freak power scrambling his skull, but it was something. Kaleigh was a freak, a grendel, not one of the all-out monsters like the vampires or whatever, but like Nick, human but…gifted. Cursed. Powered, anyway, whether for good or bad.
Definitely bad, Chris thought, and it felt like something of a triumph, having a thought of his own. In this case, the grendel power was definitely bad. Or at least, how it was being used was bad.
Too bad that didn’t help one good god damn little bit at all. Guilt surged through him, drowning out every other memory, tainting anything it touched, and where guilt couldn’t reach, anger or fear did, until it felt like there wasn’t anything left. Black dog on his shoulder, turning decent memories murky and bringing worse ones to the front. He wanted to scream the way he had at the funeral pyre, and couldn’t even tell if he did or not.
It was cold. Colder than it had been, making his head and face feel hotter still. It felt good in his lungs, though, cutting and sharp, clearing them until he didn’t feel like he was drowning in emotion inside his own body. If the rest of him could get cold, he might be okay. He knelt, not really sure if it was his own idea, but there was ice under his hands, and that helped too. The impulse to smash his hands against the ice rose, faltered, and strengthened again, although the first crash of his fists told him it was way, way too thick there. He’d never break through. If he could get his head under it, though, into the cold water, the sensation of boiling his own brain might stop, and that would help. He got up again, following an ideation that felt both intrusive and like a huge fucking relief, toward the distance.
Not just following it. Running after it, like something was after him. That black dog, maybe, its weight starting to crack the ice as he ran. Part of him was screaming now, probably not the out-loud part, but part of him didn’t like what he was doing, and the rest of him said nah, it’s fine, keep going, in a way that didn’t use words, just overwhelming, convincing emotion.
The ice snapped, radial crack beneath his foot, whiter cloudy lines shooting through the its wider translucent body, and black water seeped over the fresh lines. Even the black dog couldn’t keep him moving forward then, a survival instinct shrieking inside him, freezing him in place. Another horrible crack sounded, and panic clawed at his mind, trying to get him to back up. He couldn’t even do that, not even when the water crept toward the sole of his boot.
Right about then the mental fog cleared, the black dog backing off, as somewhere behind him Nick said, “Get your fucking mind off my brother,” and made all the darkness stop.
The good news was nobody had tried to use the back door as an escape route. The bad news was, it was locked and Nick spent a couple precious minutes looking for a key before wondering if he could just…break it. He’d put nails through wood, using the grendel power. Breaking a door lock couldn’t be that much harder. Or at all harder. And the power was there, waiting, without any siryn songs of warning or darkness tangling up in it. Nick took a breath, put his hand on the knob, and turned it with all his strength, trying to back it up with the power.
It screeched under his hand and the whole lock dislodged inside the door, twisting and breaking into pieces. Nick stared at it a couple of seconds, then shook the bits free of his hand and pushed the door open, stepping inside as quietly as he could.
Because silence was important after making metal scream with his bare hands. He mumbled something not even he could understand at himself and crept forward, listening toward the front of the house. Chris was out there, talking—arguing—yelling at—somebody, probably the bounty. The door between the front and back halves of the house was closed, presumably trapping warmth in the front, because the air in the back felt somehow both thick and cold as shit. There were skis for both snow and water in the dimness, boxes, various warm-weather gear, like this room was meant primarily for storage. Nick glanced around, looking for something weapon-like, because if there was one thing snowsuits weren’t good at, it was making weaponry easily accessible.
Fishing poles. A badminton set that looked like it had never been opened, which made sense because there was nowhere to play badminton here. Same with the croquet set, like somebody had an idea of what a hideaway house should have in it, without any concession to where the house was situated. There was a telescope with enough dust on it to suggest it hadn’t been used since it was purchased, too. Nick thought he’d spend every night with that thing set up, if he lived on a lake thirty miles from the nearest meaningful light pollution, but maybe being rich meant not appreciating the stars, he didn’t know.
In the meantime, at least he could hit something with the croquet hammers, if he had to. He opened the package, took one out, and went forward as Chris’s voice faded.
The damn interior door was locked, too. Nick stared at the handle a moment, irritated. Locking even one exterior door seemed ridiculous for the only house on the lake. Locking an interior door spoke to a kind of paranoia that made no sense at all. It wasn’t as if anybody was going to break in out here.
Anybody except him and Chris, obviously. The irony, Nick thought, was palpable. He glanced around for a key, didn’t find one—it was probably on the other side of the door—and broke the handle again, stepping through with what felt like a dramatic flourish.
There was no one in the front room.
For a couple of seconds Nick couldn’t process that, even staring at the emptiness where only his own faintly neon reflection looked back at him from the windows. The windowed door stood open, but the air in here felt thick, too, like it had in the back room. Thick and hard to breathe, like mugginess hung in the cold air, carrying a bad taste into the back of his throat. The bounty’s brother—Nick couldn’t remember his name from social media—stood on the deck, looking over the lake. The bounty herself was on the dock, which stretched several feet out over the frozen water.
And Chris was out in the middle of the fucking lake.
Panic and anger spilled through Nick in equal parts, clawing for dominance, and the bounty turned toward him as if she knew he was there. Her eyes looked bright under the cloudy sky, like the snow was reflected in them. Panic won out, clutching Nick’s chest with a spiked grip, crushing his lungs like the thick air couldn’t be breathed, and the croquet mallet fell from fingers gone suddenly numb. The bounty turned away, now smiling with a satisfaction visible even at the distance. Chris took a few more steps out there on the ice, then braced, arms going wide as the ice began to change color as water spilled over it.
Mindless terror shot through Nick, liquifying his guts and turning the protest he started into a tiny, frightened sound. The air weighed him down, disintegrating his ability to think, leaving overwhelming emotion in thought’s place. He’d been scared before; he’d been miserable with fear, even paralyzed with uncertainty. But this felt external, like he was being pushed into a too-small space that he didn’t belong in. He felt squeezed, almost the opposite of the grendel power erupting out of him.
That idea snaked through his mind, catching fire, waking that power and burning away the weight of fear, the weight of the air. The air wasn’t heavy: the bounty's magic was. She was using grendel magic somehow, fucking with his mind. Fucking with Chris’s mind, sending him out to where the ice grew dangerously thin.
He saw her realize it when he threw her enchantment off and burned it away. He could almost see the shape of her magic: it was the tendrils that had sunk into Chris’s mind, the thin whip-like strands that had tried to seize his own mind, but lost their grip when they met his magic. Nick chased those strands back, following the shape and the form, studying them as he stalked onto the deck with rage and retribution on his mind. The bounty's brother yelled, either warning his sister or trying to scare Nick off, but brushing his attack away was effortless, thoughtless, a swing of unseen force that knocked him into the snow piled across the deck’s surface. A few more long strides took Nick to the dock, and by then the bounty had turned away from Chris, her hands curling as she faced Nick.
She knew how to use the magic she commanded. She lashed it at him in vicious coils, searching for an entry point to his mind. He followed them back, finding vulnerable points in her own mind. She was scared of going to jail, of losing her cushy life, of the people she ran drugs for. But she also didn't believe she would ever be caught, not permanently, because manipulating emotion was so very easy. Just as manipulating Chris’s guilt was easy.
That was an easy thread for Nick to follow, that contemptuous pride she had in turning Chris’s mind against himself. There was so much darkness buried under Chris’s surface, it hardly took anything to set it free. Nick couldn’t quite hear her thoughts. He could just feel—sense—her emotion, her strength of conviction in what she was doing. A flick of her hand sent another coil of weighted emotion toward Chris, and Nick heard himself snarl, “Get your fucking mind off my brother.”
It wasn’t so hard, really. Mostly just copying what she did, but he had more raw strength, the angel fire burning under his skin, dark streaks of magic eager to be used. Her talent folded under his, crumpling back into her mind, and the rest of her, he seized, making it impossible for her to move beyond breathing, beyond blinking. She was a marionette, a puppet, easy to manipulate. He could almost use the power like that, as strings, tugging at her foot, moving it forward. She made a terrible noise deep in her throat, rage and fear tangled up into one. The temptation to let her drown in her fear, the way she had nearly drowned Chris, the way she'd tried to drown him, rose in Nick's chest. All it took was chasing down the emotion, giving it more to feed on, and he could make someone do nearly anything. As could she. No wonder she kept getting away with her crimes, even if she kept getting caught.
Nick shuddered. All he needed to do was get her back to Denver for processing, not turn her own mind against her. She wasn’t about to walk out of here under her own volition, though, and the iceboat was right there. Nick came down the deck steps toward her, hardly recognizing his own voice. “You can get in the boat or I can make you get in it.”
For a heartbeat, he almost admired the defiance in her snarled, “Make me.”
In the next, another sound like a shot cracked across the ice as it weakened further, and the smug, superior sensation he’d been reveling in shattered. Alarm replaced it, followed by a bitter sort of appreciation for the woman’s skill. She’d nearly had him again, more subtlety this time. She had wanted him to concentrate on her, because after a few seconds longer of focusing solely on her, the ice holding Chris would break.
Disappointed fury flashed across her face. Nick growled, wrapping power around her in a way similar to how he'd held Saboac in the air: telekinesis, he guessed. She bellowed with outrage, trying to free herself from his psychic grip as he stalked out to the end of the dock to yell, “Chris?”
A low growl of Chris’s own came back, carried only by the echoing ice and the thin winter air, like he was afraid an out-loud answer would send him into the water.
“I’m gonna grab you, Chris, like I did at the quarry.” More like he was doing with the bounty, really, but it didn’t seem like the time to explain all the details. Chris growled again and Nick stretched the grendel strength toward him, not actually certain it would reach that far. Maybe it didn’t have to, or at least, maybe not enough to grab his brother. Maybe he could make a sheet that would slide under him, shore up the ice until Chris could get himself back to safer ground.
The ice cracked again, sending Chris lurching downward this time, and Nick forgot about the best way to do something, or testing his skills, in favor of dropping the grip he had on the bounty and grabbing for Chris with all the power at his disposal. Black water surged up as he yanked his brother forward, pulling him across the ice with grendel magic, until the bounty picked up the croquet mallet he’d dropped and hit him in the back with it.
Nick, bellowing with pain, dropped Chris and spun on the girl, who let go of the mallet and backed off. Power roared through him again and he grabbed her, much less carefully than he’d grabbed Chris, and marched her, shrieking and furious, into the iceboat. She thrashed on its floor, screeching, and he kept her pinned down with threads of power that looked back at him with burning eyes. Chris, sliding on the ice with wet feet, skidded to the dock a couple of seconds later, panting with effort and residual panic. “Dude, you okay?”
“Bitch hit me,” Nick said through his teeth. “Right in the fuckin’ ribs.” He could already feel a bruise starting.
“Yeah. Good thing she didn’t aim three inches lower and get your kidney.”
Nick, wheezing, stared at his brother, who shrugged. “I’m just saying. If any of the Geography Girls had picked up that mallet you’d be a bloody pulp on the ground by now.”
Despite the pain radiating near his spine, Nick gave a cracked laugh. “You’re not wrong. Even Dayton would’ve hit harder, and not stopped. Go. Go. C'mon. Go get in the boat."
"What about the brother?"
Nick looked that way, at the kid—'kid,' like the guy wasn't probably older than he was—sitting up in the snowbank on the deck. "He can stay here. Somebody will come get him before it thaws."
A smirk twisted Chris's mouth and he nodded. A couple seconds later they were both in the iceboat, Nick unfurling the sail as Chris said, "How the hell do you know how to do that?" and almost literally sat on the still-shrieking bounty. "You shut up," he told her. "I've had enough mind-fuckery today."
"Stephanie's dad has a sailboat." Nick heard his own voice go tight and tried to loosen it, but at least Chris didn't push it. It took a minute or two, but he got the sail correctly situated and shoved the boat away from the dock. Metal scraped across ice, a low hiss that somehow sounded too much like Saboac. The bounty shrieked again, overpowering the sound. By the time she lost her voice, they were speeding down a channel of ice that the wind had blown more or less clear of snow.
Chris yelled, "We shoulda taken one of these up here!" gleefully as they sped past the trail they'd painstakingly broken.
"Well, if you'd thought of it…!" Nick's teeth got cold in the space of a grin, but it was worth the dirty look Chris shot him. Getting back to the campground where they'd started their snow-breaking hike from took almost no time, compared to the journey in; the ice, while too snowy for people on ice skates, was plenty clear for the iceboat's larger blades and greater speed.
And at least there was a more or less clear trail back to the park'n'ski. Their bounty—Kayleigh—kept shrieking about not being dressed for this, until Chris snapped, "You would have been if you'd just come with and not tried mind-fucking me."
"Oh, I didn't try, bitch," she said with a sniff. "You were full-on mind-fucked."
"I don't like her very much," Chris muttered to Nick, and stomped ahead, leaving Nick as a buffer between them.
A couple of times he felt tendrils of her power trying to catch hold of his emotions, and put up a wall that felt like cold flame between her attempts and himself. When her focus moved to Chris, Nick, in a low voice, said, "Don't even think about it."
Her gaze skittered off his uncomfortably, and she stopped.
It was still light when they got back to Lucille, and Chris dragged Nick aside, staring grimly at their bounty. "If we just hand her to local LEOs she'll manipulate her way out of custody before they can get her to court."
"Which means you won't get paid."
"We," Chris corrected. "But yeah. You don't have anything that'll knock her out for eighteen hours or so, do you?"
"Just the power of my mind."
Chris stared at him. "Can you do that?"
"I…don't know."
"Man, I do not think you should try."
"It'd make the trip back a lot easier." Nick lifted his eyebrows hopefully.
"Dude, that is one hundred percent the path to the Dark Side."
"Nah, that's fear."
"You telling me you're not afraid?"
Nick's breath caught in a hitch and he scowled, looking away. "I don't know."
"You frickin' well should be, if you're not."
"You're the one who told me I had to learn how to use it so I could not use it."
"I didn't mean by taking over people's brains!"
"She did!"
"Dude!" Chris threw his hands up. "If she jumped off a bridge, dude?"
"Oh, come on, that's not the same thing at all."
"It totally is. You," Chris snapped at Kayleigh. "Get in the van and, like, sit in the cast iron frying pan."
Both the bounty and Nick gaped at him. "What?"
"Iron's supposed to disrupt magic, right? It does in fairy tales, anyway, right?"
Nick, thoughtfully, said, "Well, fuck. That's a pretty good idea." He herded Kayleigh into the van and actually made her sit in, or at least on, Chris's frying pan while Chris, from the front seat, said, "Well?"
He could feel her grendel power stuttering and scraping, not entirely obstructed, but unquestionably disturbed. "Know what, I think it'll work? We should get some iron handcuffs if we're gonna run into more grendels."
The bounty's eyes flashed with suspicious interest. "Grendels?"
"Freaks like you and me."
She scowled, looking away, and muttered, "Grendels is cooler. I hate being a freak."
"Yeah. I get that." Nick lifted his voice. "C'mon, Chris. Let's get this done."
CHAPTER 16
The drive back took for-fricking-ever, most of a day even without stopping for food, bathroom breaks, or the sleep Chris so desperately needed. Lauren at the bond agency gave him a weird damn look when he told her Kayleigh Parker needed to be kept in iron cuffs, if at all possible. "This some kind of weird sex thing, Chris?"
"Oh, darlin', you'd be the first to know." Lauren was just about old enough to be his mother, but she laughed anyway as Chris shook his head, unsure of how much he should tell her. "She's just…she's unusual, all right? The iron makes her less dangerous."
