Like a Freeze

by Olivette Devaux

  LIKE A FREEZE

  BOOK 6 OF THE DISORDERLY ELEMENTS

  OLIVETTE DEVAUX

  Mugen Press

  Pittsburgh, PA

  Like a Freeze

  Copyright ©Olivette Devaux 2018

  Published by Mugen Press

  www.mugenpress.com

  This book is a work of fiction. All characters, places, and events are the products of the author’s imaginations and any resemblance to real persons, places, or events is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, known or unknown, or shared for free. Please don’t be a pirate.

  It is allowed (and encouraged) to quote a brief paragraph for editorial or review purposes.

  Cover Art

  © 2018 Pavelle Art

  Cover content is for illustrative purposes only and any person depicted on the cover is a model.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Dear Reader,

  this book takes place during the winter holiday one-week time skip toward the end of LIKE A PHOENIX. The developments in this book not only explain a lot of what’s happening with Jared, but they also set up what will happen in future volumes.

  This being said, please note that I ended up writing this series out of order. This is as frustrating for me as it is for you. If you own previous volumes, and if your reader’s app doesn’t automatically update to new versions, you can download the uploaded file from your e-book store. I am renumbering two current volumes, and will insert a new #3 book after LIKE A TORRENT.

  Please note the titles in italics – those titles are short stories, and I expect to write more as ideas arise. The numbers indicate the story’s place on the timeline. One of the stories is being published by the Heart’s Kiss Magazine in October 2018. I recommend that you check out this diversity-conscious romantic fiction magazine – I’m always thrilled to see my name next to best-selling authors in the field.

  Here is new World Order (horrible pun, I know):

  0. Zero Power Signature Short Story

  1. LIKE A ROCK (remains the same)

  1.5 Forbidden Kiss of Life Short Story (HeartsKiss.com, October 2018)

  2. LIKE A TORRENT (remains the same)

  2.5 Within a Crowded Blade Short Story

  3. LIKE A JETSTREAM (currently being written)

  4. LIKE A SURGE (formerly #3)

  5. LIKE A PHOENIX (formerly #4)

  5.5 Three Solstice Gifts Short Story

  6. LIKE A FREEZE (new, remains the same)

  7. LIKE A DERVISH (currently being written)

  8. LIKE A VOID (planning stages)

  9. LIKE A SPIRIT (planning stages)

  Wow! I never knew this world would grow to encompass all this – this world we are building! (Yes, you and me. Dear reader, this wouldn’t be here without you.) Thank you for bearing with my disorderly creative process, and enjoy!

  ~Olivette Devaux

  CHAPTER 1

  JARED

  The spirit world within the sword was dry except for the stream of water banked by carefully built walls of rough-hewn stone. It was just narrow enough for Jared to step across without falling in, which is what he did in order to get close to a pile of artfully arranged rocks. A Japanese stone lantern sat in the sand by the rocks, and a dead, withered cherry tree haunted the nebulous boundaries of the sword’s spirit world.

  The tree used to be alive, pendulous branches lush with white-pink blossoms and pale, green leaves. Its foliage had shriveled as soon as Cooper became the sword’s wielder, and the Old Woman that lived in the old, shoji-screened house had been appalled at the profusion of red poppies that belonged to another climate, another continent. She was the most visible aspect of the sword’s spirit, speaking English as well as Japanese, and seemed to be Jared’s only interpreter.

  Jared sat on the flat-topped rock next to the lantern, settled into a meditative pose. He stretched his mind, grasping past the sword’s boundaries the way he would in a dark and unfamiliar room.

  “We’re moving,” he said aloud.

  Even without opening his eyes, he knew the Old Woman materialized next to him. “Will he want to use your talent again?” Her voice was curious. Excited, even.

  He smiled. This business of bringing the outside world in amused the sword spirit, and since the Old Woman had been useful in her crotchety, no-holds-barred way as he struggled to get oriented, Jared was happy to tickle her curious streak. “He’s taking us out of Pittsburgh. I don’t feel the node anymore, and we’re well away from the ley lines leading to it.”

  She harrumphed next to him. Prodding. Not quite begging, though. Never that.

  “I don’t know. Cooper may have a project of some kind. He might need our help.” He said “our” instead of “mine,” courteously including the Sword Spirit, whose existence allowed him to lend his talent of seeing elemental and spiritual energies to Cooper. With their help, Cooper would see what was unseen as though lines and power fields were drawn in the air with day-glo markers.

  When he opened his eyes and looked up at her veiled form, her ancient face smiled down at him. “An adventure, then. We haven’t had a proper adventure since our old Wielder invaded Okinawa.” Her eyes narrowed, the skin around her corners wrinkling in a wistful look as she looked far, far away. “His name was Setsuma-san, and that was at least four wars ago, little one.”

  ASH AND COOPER

  This early in the morning, just four days before the New Year, it might have as well been midnight. Street lights glowed as Ash steered his ancient minivan across Pittsburgh’s 40th Street Bridge. The Allegheny River snaked under them and he felt him and his spirit as the watery depth called their greetings from beneath the icy crusts that shifted on the Old Man’s water surface.

  “Glad we left early,” Ash said when Route 28 turned out to be moving fast, as opposed to crawling like a hung-over slug. “And we’ll be driving against the flow of traffic going north, so we’re good.”

  Cooper groaned next to him. Ash didn’t have to peek to know that he rubbed his eyes again. A metal coffee cup clicked out of the holder, then back in. “I know.” His voice came out as a croak.

  Suppressing a chuckle was hard, but the drive from Pittsburgh to Michigan would be long. Ash knew better than to antagonize his morning-averse partner. A shower had helped. So had coffee – but not enough. When Cooper had to meet a new client at his or her building site, or supervise a key element in the house’s construction, he had no problem getting up at six in the morning, but those were the only times he rose to the occasion.

  Secretly, Ash harbored the belief that Cooper was an adrenaline junkie, and that the rush of ushering a new project along without errors and damage to either persons or property was the true love of his life. And no wonder. As an earth elementalist, Cooper’s affinity for architecture and anything connected to the Earth was what gave him that special boost.

  That hardly helped now, though.

  “Do you mind if I put on the news?” Ash asked softly. It was almost six. Surely that wasn’t too late to find out what new disasters happened around the world.

  “Please don’t,” Cooper said in a whisper. Then, thinking Ash couldn’t hear him over the road noise, he repeated himself a bit louder. “I don’t know why I’m so nervous about this trip,” he said next.

  A surprise, then.

  “We’ll be seeing your family. I’m the one who should be nervous. I’ve never met the whole clan, and I’ve never been part of those traditional New Year celebrations.” He paused. “Although I’m glad Paul is getting a grip on his powers.”

  The van rocked a little as Ash took a sharp turn onto the exit ramp and careened toward route 279, heading north.

&n
bsp; “Yeah.” Cooper smiled. “He and Russ sort of complete us, you know?”

  They both smiled, then laughed.

  “Don’t worry about my family,” Cooper said once another two miles passed. “I have never done any big, traditional celebrations with the whole clan either. We did this little secular Christmas tree thing since my family didn’t think I had any talent. They couldn’t even detect my own power signature.”

  “I know, love,” Ash said as he soothed Cooper with his hand on his thigh, as well as with the tone of his voice. “We are all doing our own catching up. And they love you.”

  “They love you, too.” The words were imbued with Cooper’s smile. Aha, a turning point! The morning grumpies would dissipate in five...four... three... two...

  “Hey, let me know when you want me to drive, okay?” Cooper said, all chipper and alert. It was like flipping a switch.

  “I will. How’ve bout you find a place where we can get either a brunch or a lunch, and then we can switch seats.” With two drivers taking turns behind the wheel of an old soccer-mom van, plus a few strategic meal breaks, Ash was sure they’d reach their destination by dinnertime.

  THEY ATE AN early lunch of eggs and pancakes somewhere west of Cleveland, Ohio. Not that they were starving for food – well, they were hungry – but Cooper appreciated getting off the road and not feeling the continuous movement of the earth under him. He still didn’t know how to turn off his inner vision of the structures that lay underneath. The upturned strata and the too-thin seams of coal left behind next to the old mining shafts of Pennsylvania had long given way to an unfamiliar land. Slightly tilted stratigraphic units of the Michigan Basin lay like pancakes, infiltrated by the occasional salt domes full of brine water and natural gas.

  Mining that natural gas wasn’t a problem. Extracting the gas trapped in the deep-buried Devonian shale using high-pressure fracturing extraction, however, was. The liquid injected into the earth caused microcracks that didn’t belong, and not in just the targeted shale.

  The land would settle.

  The low-level earthquakes that got the news people so excited were just a small side-effect of more energy and more jobs. More serious were the stream diversions, and the subsequent aquatic life die-off. Not that Cooper was much of a water person – he feared water, actually – but anything that harmed the rivers and their tributaries hurt Ash on a visceral level, as though someone cut into his flesh and let it bleed.

  He had heard it say that the “answer to pollution is dilution” more than once, but there were limits to that vein of thinking, especially when the extraction companies refused to release the chemical composition of the caustic fracking liquid, which they later dumped.

  Kill the streams, kill off your drinking water.

  Here, in the middle of Ohio, Cooper did feel the potential for that kind of damage. As a result, he didn’t like area much. The sooner he got Ash out of the region, the easier he would breathe.

  Ash came out of the gas station’s mini-mart with refilled water bottles tucked under his arms, holding two bottles of soda in one hand and a bag of spicy corn chips in the other.

  Cooper finished fueling up. He slid behind the wheel, and as Ash joined him and positioned Cooper’s Coke and his own Mountain Dew, Cooper had to crack a smile. “Junk food for the road?”

  “Like you don’t know that’s the only excuse I have to chug soda and eat over-salted chips!” They weren’t hungry, but Ash tore the bag open anyway and extracted a violent orange triangle. He popped it in his mouth with obvious relish.

  “Dude,” Cooper said with a laugh.

  “You want some? It will chase that pretty mediocre coffee we had with brunch right out of your mind!”

  They had just eaten. The road ahead of them was long, though, and that coffee had been pretty terrible. Cooper waited, then waited some more, resisting the lure of extra salt and crunch and additives.

  He snaked his hand out and pulled a chip out of the bag. Just one wouldn’t kill him, right? Yet it was just the thing. He gave a satisfied sigh.

  Next to him, Ash chuckled under his breath.

  “Shaddap,” Cooper said with lightness in his heart. “You’re so damn smug over those chips.”

  “We’re going to Michigan, the land of eternal snow and ice. I need to keep up my strength.”

  ASH TOOK OVER in Toledo, Ohio. They had long abandoned the detective audiobook, mostly because the narrator’s style was putting both of them to sleep, and chose a mellow playlist from Cooper’s phone instead.

  Then north again, into Michigan and through Ann Arbor, flying between white fields that stretched to forever as they reflected the blinding glare of the early afternoon sun. The land used to be familiar to Cooper. Then he had left for Rhode Island at the age of eighteen. Coming to think of it, he had been back only twice in the last nine years.

  Did he miss it? The land knew him, or he used to think that he should know it, but his gift had not wakened till he left for college. He realized he knew the formations and the feel of the hills of the Southwestern Pennsylvania a lot better by now. “By the time we head west again, it will be dark already,” he said as he winced in sympathy when he saw Ash reposition the visor. “You sure you don’t want me to drive? I know where I’m going.” This was meant as a joke, because Ash tended to orient himself in space by his constant awareness of the river’s flow.

  No river, no sense of direction.

  “I really wanted to cross the Mackinac Bridge,” Ash said. “That’s one thing I’ve never done before.”

  “Well,” Cooper said, thinking hard. “That’s about two hours away. I can drive now, and you can drive when we get closer. If you want, that is. Or you can enjoy the feel of Lake Superior from the passenger seat.”

  Cooper ended up driving, which was convenient for Ash, because Cooper was a lot easier to question when his eyes were on the road.

  “I meant to bring this up at some point on this trip,” he said. “But about Jared. We’re brining the sword so your folks can have a look and a feel, and also so we can see whether Jared can be set free again.” A pause. “Have you... have you thought about what you’d like to happen with all this?”

  The salt-gray road rumbled under them, stretched ahead of them with cars zipping by a lot faster than their seventy miles per hour. Cooper’s jaw had tightened, though. A sure sign that he was thinking about it.

  “I’d like Jared back. Thing is, if we try to get him out by force, I’m afraid he could actually die.”

  And he wasn’t dead. Ash knew that in a second-hand way, because the katana that had once belonged to him wouldn’t talk to him anymore, and because when an elementalist had dematerialized, it meant that he or she put all of their energy, both elemental and physical, into their Working.

  He wondered whether the Einstein equation would hold for that, and whether a fat elementalist would’ve had a better chance than the skinny Jared. More matter to convert would’ve taken more energy, after all. And Jared had disappeared with all his clothes on. Could a dematerialization be prevented by wearing a massive suit of armor?

  Probably not. A silly notion, that.

  “Does he talk to you in words?” he asked, careful not to voice idle speculations.

  Cooper laughed. “If only. No, I get what I think is his gift, and I get the occasional opinions. I think they are Jared’s but I’m not always sure. Like after you stuck the sword in the lava flow,” Cooper said while Ash winced, “and there was no other way, I get that, and the sword’s temper got ruined halfway up? When we thought whether he could get cut shorter, into a wakizashi? Yeah, that ‘No!’ opinion was all Jared. But sometimes I get a sense of amusement that doesn’t seem to be all him.”

  More miles passed while the soft techno punk beat propelled them forward. “I just can’t tell. All I know is that he is inside the sword, and that he isn’t alone.”

  CHAPTER 2

  JARED

  The inside of the house gave Jared a welcome respi
te from the bright sun outside. He sat kneeling at a low table, Japanese-style, having tea with the Old Woman. His immaterial form allowed for kneeling like that for as long as his heart desired, and that, at least, was an improvement as compared to his previous state.

  “I wish the cherry tree would blossom again,” the Old Woman said. Her voice resonated on a discordant note, the way it always did when she was voicing the opinions of many.

  Jared turned the raku ceramic teacup in his hands, enjoying its warmth. “Cooper’s element is Earth,” he said, reiterating what he had already said so many times. “Ash was the one who gave your tree enough rain to make it bloom.”

  “Ash stuck us into fire! Ruined us!” The dissonance would’ve torn at Jared’s nerves, had he still had nerves. Which he did not.

  “I am so sorry,” he said, meaning every word. “There was no other way.”

  The conversation followed along well-worn tracks, although the want of a blooming tree was a newly-voiced gripe against the regime imposed by the new Wielder. Although... Cooper and Ash worked on the same resonant frequency. Their powers amplified each other, true, but this might also open new doors.

  “I think I could reach Ash through Cooper,” he said slowly, keeping eyes on his tea. Few things had angered the sword’s spirit as much as when he had openly stared in the Old Woman’s eyes. Surely a resonance of a cultural bias from one of the previous Wielders.

  Silence.

  “Ash could bring you water, and water would make the tree bloom again. It’s not dead yet. I can tell.”