Joshua froze, becoming so still that it was as if he had stopped existing. In that instant, he looked more like a marble statue than a human being.
Something was wrong.
He had been lying on the rock for quite some time, alone, lost in thoughts, calmly content. Far enough from the town to be safe, he had let his ice magic loose. Cold, white mist was swirling around him, partly obscuring his body. The iciness he was radiating had formed frost flowers on the rock’s smooth surface, intricate little patterns that he had been tracing with his fingertips absentmindedly.
But something had jolted him into alertness and made him sit up.
He could sense a presence close by, instinctively knowing it was no human. With a whispered command, he made the mist dissipate to clear his vision. He scanned his surroundings.
There was nobody to be seen. Only endless fields of yellow-green, high, dry grass interspersed with a few hills and one wind-bent tree cowering beside the rock he was sitting on. The silver-blue snake of the river wound its way through the vast emptiness. To his far left, an impossibly high mountain range was jutting into the cloudy sky, hulking and looming in ominous grandeur with volcanoes sleeping fitfully beneath glaciers. To his right, a couple of miles off, was a range of hills. Behind those lay the suburb where he lived with Felicia.
Joshua sent his ice magic outward in the form he preferred, as a giant hand of icy coldness, its frosty fingers brushing across the terrain. Nobody. Nothing. Not even an animal.
He must have imagined the unsettling sudden presence. It had been a feeling not so much of being watched but rather of intruding on someone or stumbling upon a secret not meant for him to discover.
“Nonsense,” he muttered, shaking his head.
Felicia was right, he was being paranoid. They’d been living in Iceland for four months now, and of course nobody had suspected anything. So why was he still on edge, ever the watchful and suspicious spoilsport?
Joshua lay back down on the rock. He stared at the swirling masses of grey clouds up in the sky, chased along by heavy winds that were no more than a breeze down on earth. With a sigh, he closed his eyes and sunk back into the state of meditation he so loved to lose himself in, shrouded once more in a cold, private mist.
Shock zinged through him when he felt the presence more strongly. Not one being, but two, as different as they could be. He froze again and held his breath, and the feeling intensified. He grew strangely dizzy, as if he had lost his balance although he was lying down on firm, hard rock. His eyelids grew too heavy to lift, and tiny flashes of light zigzagged through the darkness behind them.
But do you really think the time is right?
Out of nowhere, a voice reverberated in his head, as if his skull were a mountain cave catching a voice and throwing back its echoes.
The voice sounded almost human. There was something androgynous about the tone, although it sounded more female than male, and harsh with frustration.
Joshua felt a stab of cold lash out at him. It was a bigger shock than anything before because he never felt cold. He was an ice wizard, how could anyone or anything make him feel the painful jab of coldness?
Before he could process the whole thing, another voice made itself known, this one decidedly male and fierce. It brought a wave of intense heat with it that burned right through Joshua’s protective mist and was a hundred times more unsettling than the onslaught of iciness.
Time, time. Of what importance is time to us? Don’t we rule over it? When we say it is right, then it is right.
The cold from before made itself known again, like someone elbowing his way back into a conversation. We are not in this alone, the female voice said accusingly.
It grew hotter and hotter in reaction to that. I do not care about the others. Neither should you. This was the male voice, grating on his nerves with its inner heat and brutal enunciation. It spoke again, yet more vehemently. Can’t you feel it? This decision isn’t ours to make anymore. We have to react. Now!
The coldness bracing itself against the force of the heat wavered slightly, but stood its ground. Yes, I can feel it. Was there less reluctance in the tone now? The cold gained a little strength. But we must not hurry, the risk is too high, the female voice spoke again.
There was an explosion of heat that had Joshua wince in pain, nearly blacking out from all the strange sensations enveloping him. To hell with your patience! The male voice roared deafeningly, and for a second Joshua thought his head would explode from the vibrations and the sound and the heat.
He gasped and opened his eyes wide, suddenly able to move again and break the spell. Sitting up, his head spinning, he braced himself against the ground and blinked. It took him a moment to realize that the roaring sound was still in his ears. But was it really inside his head? He blinked and tried to focus. It was as if…as if the sound came from beneath him, from inside the earth. Like the growl of a menacing beast or the rumbling of a giant’s stomach, the sound traveled through the ground.
Was he shaking, or was the ground shaking?
Joshua’s gaze fell on the tree beside the rock, and he saw it shiver and bend a little as if a strong gust of wind was tearing at it. He pressed his hands flat against the rock and felt the earth move.
The next moment, everything had righted itself. There was no roaring sound and no eerie sense of the ground being pulled away from under his feet like a carpet.
Earthquake. He had witnessed a short and probably small earthquake. His brain slowly processed the facts and calmed him down somewhat.
Joshua got to his feet and stared around, half expecting things to have been changed, himself to have changed. Everything looked perfectly normal again.
But what about those voices?
Chapter 2
Playing with Fire (Book 1 of the FIRE Trilogy) Page 40
