Winter Kiss

by Deborah Cooke

  By midday he’d be dead, anyway.

  Delaney trudged toward the Serpent Mound with purpose, the snow as deep as his knees. The gate was easily breached, and there was no one present to challenge him. He was struck by the magical aura of the place, the sense that it was potent and special. The wind seemed to still as he drew nearer to the effigy itself, if more piercingly cold.

  The headache erupted between Delaney’s ears as soon as he left his car. It throbbed with an insistence he remembered from his recurring nightmare, and he refused to let its dark promise invade his thoughts.

  He didn’t have the luxury of letting his resolve be weakened.

  Delaney followed the song in his blood, the siren’s call of the vestige of Elixir in his veins being drawn to its source. Delaney didn’t like the place, much less his sense that its purpose had been subverted and twisted by Magnus.

  The sooner he could destroy the Elixir, the better.

  Delaney passed the Serpent Mound, following the footpath. He slid down to the river when he tried to take the narrow path he’d used the other day, filling his jeans and boots with cold snow. He pulled himself to his feet with the help of a pair of sturdy cedars, then followed the course of Brush Creek upstream.

  He could have shifted shape, but Delaney knew that Magnus’s awareness of him would be sharper when he took that other form. He didn’t expect to arrive unannounced, but stayed in human form longer than might have been ideal.

  Maybe it was a way of delaying the inevitable.

  He climbed the fence that marked the boundary of the land owned by the historical society. He caught the first whiff of dragonsmoke and sensed a break in the territory mark.

  Was Magnus losing his edge?

  No. Delaney had sensed other breaks in the dragonsmoke perimeter mark around the sanctuary and he guessed they were deliberately left. Magnus wasn’t interested in keeping Pyr out of the sanctuary, not if they came for that first sip of the Elixir that would leave them beholden to the old Slayer forever.

  Delaney continued to the point where the river slid underground, the hole almost hidden by the thick growth of cedars. He’d found this spot earlier in the week, but it marked the full extent of his exploration.

  His head was pounding, the headache growing stronger with every step he took closer to the sanctuary, and he winced against the brightness of the snow. He didn’t know what he’d find inside this hole, except that the Elixir was there. The scent of Slayer was strong and Delaney guessed that several of them had also come recently to this spot.

  He lifted his gaze, scanning the horizon, and eyed the house perched in the snow, not far across the fields. It was the closest residence. Delaney wondered whether that person owned this land, whether he or she had any idea that an access to another world lurked on the property. The house looked new, of low and broad construction, and its driveway was gated as few driveways were in the area.

  The scent of Slayer emanated from it in such strong waves that Delaney suddenly guessed who owned it. He narrowed his eyes and worked through the individual scents, not surprised at the identities of the Slayers in that house.

  Balthasar.

  Mallory.

  Jorge.

  Three of Magnus’s henchmen.

  And three other Slayers whom Delaney couldn’t name. They might have come and left, or they might still be in the house, hidden in its depths. Their scents were faint yet worrisome.

  There was no scent of Magnus himself, but Delaney knew that some of the older Slayers had learned to disguise their scent. He had no doubt that Magnus was present and accounted for.

  The scents that approached the point where the river dove into the earth were overwhelmed by the smell of the Elixir. Its scent was overwhelming, intoxicating, spicy and exotic. Seductive. Promising. Deceptive. It tickled Delaney’s senses, teasing him with false possibilities and empty promises.

  And the nightmare vision that had tormented him sharpened, shoving its way into his thoughts. He saw darkness and ice, saw the shadow devouring the earth in the same way as an eclipse appears to consume the moon.

  But the earth would never emerge from the Elixir’s shadow.

  Delaney shoved the dream out of his thoughts and glared at the distant house. Magnus needed to watch the elimination of his source of power. It was a dare the old Delaney would have made, a bold gamble that he would have offered before he had been imprisoned.

  It was the right choice, to die as once he had lived. Delaney sent three words toward the quiet house, dispatching them to Magnus in old-speak.

  “Come stop me.” It was a taunt, one he knew Magnus would take.

  Delaney didn’t wait for an answer. He scrambled to the lip of stone, slid into the hole, and let the river take him down into the earth. It was like a waterslide, albeit a bumpy one, and he braced himself for his arrival at its foot. It was dark, as dark as pitch, the light of the morning disappearing behind him quickly as he slid downward.

  And it was as cold as ice.

  He sensed a pulse of red light before he saw it, the scent of the Elixir growing impossibly strong. His body tumbled out of the access route, and he rolled across hard stone. The river danced and gurgled, carving its underground course. Delaney stood and eyed the red glow coming through the opening before him, the one that the water had abandoned. His headache pounded in time with the red pulse.

  As if he were already a part of the Elixir’s toxin.

  There was an iron grate locked over the opening, one that would provide a formidable barrier to a human intruder, but was no more substantial than a gate of straw to a dragon.

  Delaney shifted shape with lightning speed, motivated by the Elixir’s shadow growing in his mind. He felt large and strong, more powerful and determined than he had in a while. It was a gift of the firestorm, a surety born of his conviction that his legacy would continue.

  Delaney would make a difference and he would make it now.

  He reared back, hovering before the gate, and released a stream of dragonfire. The iron heated to red, then white, then began to melt. He ripped the weakened steel loose with one claw, broke the hinges and the locks, and cast it aside.

  Nothing would stop him now. He flew into the labyrinth, moving with all the speed he could muster, determined to put his destiny behind him.

  The destruction of the Elixir’s source was long past due.

  The Serpent Mound parking lot was the weirdest place for Delaney to have stopped and the last place Ginger would have expected to find him.

  But the car tracks had led her directly there, and the rental car was the same brown Pontiac that she’d ridden in the night before.

  It even had that big scratch across the dashboard. Ginger eyed the footprints that made a trail from the car into the snow. Why on earth would Delaney come to a park before it was open, and in the middle of a blizzard, as well?

  She admitted there could be a great many things she didn’t know about her sexy lover.

  And maybe she was about to find out one of them.

  The snow fell steadily, cloaking the park in silence. The wind was almost nonexistent, and the stillness combined with the relentless cascade of snow might have been soothing under other circumstances.

  As it was, Ginger was nervous. She didn’t know why, couldn’t name her fear, but didn’t like this development one bit.

  She followed Delaney’s tracks. She remembered there was a footpath running between the effigy and the river, intended to give visitors a good view of the mysterious earth mound.

  She strode through the deep snow, trying to remember whether she’d last been to the park in sixth grade or seventh. Maybe Delaney had missed his school trip.

  Ha. It was better, Ginger told herself, to discover that he’d come to a national monument than to find he’d gone to another woman’s home, or back to his halfway house, or . . .

  She stopped when she saw Delaney’s footprints veer from the footpath to continue alongside the creek. There was nothing bu
t bush along there, at least as far as she knew. A cedar branch had been broken and it looked as if he’d slipped on the snowy slope, sending a spill of fresh snow down to the frozen surface of the creek.

  The tracks carried on, though, unmistakable. There was no one else in the park. Why would Delaney go down there? Why now? Ginger nibbled her bottom lip, her bad feeling suddenly amplified.

  Was Delaney doing a drug deal, out where it couldn’t be witnessed? That would explain his secrecy and the imperative of making the meeting. People who bore scars could get themselves into all kinds of complicated situations, without really understanding what they were doing.

  Ginger couldn’t think of a single other plausible explanation. The snow fell, piling on her hood and her shoulders, dusting the backs of her hands, filling his tracks. It might be foolish to continue, but there was no question of Ginger abandoning her quest now. She was too curious to leave without knowing the truth.

  Whatever it was. If she was wrong about Delaney, she wanted to know what mistake she had made, and just how wrong she was. The only way anyone ever learned anything, her gran had taught her, was to review a bad choice.

  Even if she still had a strong sense that Delaney was a keeper. Was her intuition that far wrong? Ginger needed to know for sure.

  But she wasn’t going to follow him blind and unprotected.

  Ginger went back to the truck, loaded the rifle, and retraced her footsteps. She took a deep breath, then followed Delaney’s trail, albeit with a little more caution than she’d used before.

  She hoped that curiosity didn’t have to kill the cat.

  Things didn’t get any more promising as Ginger progressed.

  Delaney’s tracks followed the creek. She knew that he had headed upstream, even though there was a thin coat of ice on the creek that obscured its moving surface. The ice wasn’t strong enough to support much weight, probably because of the current running beneath. Ginger saw where the paws of raccoons had broken through to the cold water.

  The last thing she wanted was a soaker, so she didn’t step on the ice. Even so, Ginger had a hard time keeping her footing on the sloped bank. She saw that Delaney had held on to cedars and brush as he went—their boughs were occasionally bent and many were devoid of snow—so she did the same.

  She paused for only a moment where he had climbed the fence that marked the perimeter of the property held in trust for the protection of the monument. The property beyond would be private, and she would be trespassing.

  On the other hand, Ginger doubted anyone would follow her on a day like this one.

  She climbed the fence herself.

  There were open fields visible beyond the brush that lined the creek, and she could see several houses. The closest one was new, a low-slung, large bungalow, complete with a gated drive. A lazy swirl of smoke rose from its chimney on this chilly morning.

  The others, farther afield, were old farmhouses like her own. She thought that maybe the next one was the Van Vliet farm. They kept dairy goats, brown ones. She narrowed her eyes and was sure she saw brown animals moving beside the barn behind the old house.

  Her gaze flicked back to the newer house as she recalled Paul van Vliet bragging about the sweet price he’d gotten for selling a piece of land to some businessman from down east.

  That had been on one of her visits to Gran, maybe ten years ago. She recalled everyone joking about Paul giving this businessman their number. Cash was never easy to come by in Adams County and there had inevitably been those who resented the Van Vliets’ sudden good fortune.

  Was this house Delaney’s destination? It made a kind of sense that he as a stranger might have a connection with the only other stranger in the area.

  If so, why not just drive there and knock on the door?

  Maybe she was seeing connections that didn’t exist.

  Ginger followed Delaney’s tracks, noting that they continued to cling to the same side of the creek, the side opposite the house. How far would he go? She rounded a bend and saw the tracks slide into a hole in the snow.

  The water burbled and bubbled there. Closer inspection revealed that a part of the creek went underground from this point and that a hole had been worn in the rocks. Ginger brushed away some overhanging snow and peered into the tunnel that looked like it fell toward the center of the earth. It was about three feet in diameter, dark and wet.

  She looked around, but there was no doubt of what had happened. There were no departing tracks.

  Delaney had gone into the hole.

  He hadn’t come out yet.

  But another set of tracks came up from the creek’s edge, partly obscuring Delaney’s tracks. They, too, were the size of a man’s boots, like Delaney’s but with a different tread. They had less fresh snow in them than Delaney’s tracks.

  Someone else had followed him into the tunnel.

  Did Delaney know?

  Was this the person he’d planned to meet?

  Ginger intended to find out.

  She was in the hole, sliding down the wet tunnel on her backside before she realized the pursuing tracks had materialized from nothing. The tracks began at the lip of unbroken ice over the creek. The man hadn’t marred the snowy surface by crossing the creek or broken the ice by coming from the water. He hadn’t followed the same trail as Ginger and he hadn’t come from any other point.

  It was as if he hadn’t existed before he left his boot prints not twelve feet from the entry to the tunnel. He could have parachuted down from Mars.

  Except there was no parachute.

  Maybe he had been standing there, waiting for Delaney, as the snow filled the tracks that marked his arrival.

  But then, why was there so much difference in the amount of snow in the two men’s tracks? If he’d been waiting for Delaney, surely they would have entered the hole together?

  Ginger’s bad sense got stronger, but it was a bit late for that.

  She slid on the wet stone, gaining speed like a child on a slide in a water park. She couldn’t stop; she couldn’t see where she was going in the darkness; she didn’t know how far she’d already fallen or where it would stop.

  Until she tumbled—ass over teakettle, as Gran would have said—into a small antechamber. The water leapt into a bed it had carved into the floor, gurgling and splashing into darkness. The floor of the chamber was dry and the walls had been carved from rock.

  Ginger stood up and winced at the wetness of her jeans. She shivered at the chill against her skin. That was when she realized she could see, because the chamber was lit with a dull red light. The light seemed to pulse.

  It gave her the creeps.

  Her cell phone made the perky little combination of beeps that meant it was out of juice. Ginger pulled it out of her pocket, only to confirm that it really was dead.

  She was on her own.

  Ginger checked her rifle. The red light came from a fissure on the far side. There had been a gate locked over the gap, but that piece of metal had been torn from its hinges and cast aside.

  Ginger approached with caution, laying her hand on the discarded grate. The metal was so hot that she quickly pulled her hand away.

  Whoever was with Delaney, whoever was melting steel gates, wasn’t too far ahead of her.

  Great.

  Ginger told herself that she wasn’t hearing the spooky organ music that always played in horror movies, the music that always accompanied the heroine’s bad decision to go down the basement stairs and find out what was lurking there. It was the music that indicated the heroine was heading straight for trouble, serial killers, and nasty situations.

  There was no music in the cave.

  Because, because going forward was the sensible thing to do.

  Uh-huh.

  Ginger didn’t believe it, but she went anyway. She had to know. She took a deep breath and eased through the opening. She stepped silently, as she had when stalking that coyote, except that this time she had no idea who or what was her prey.

&nb
sp; She hoped the victim wouldn’t be herself.

  Delaney halted before the repository of the Dragon’s Blood Elixir and stared at it in horror and awe. He didn’t know what he had expected, but it hadn’t been this.

  His body responded to its proximity, that gnawing hunger taking hold of him.

  It would be so easy to drink of it.

  So easy to surrender.

  Delaney took a step back, shaking his head.

  When he had been imprisoned in Magnus’s dark academy, the Elixir had been brought to Delaney in a cup or a syringe, forced down his throat or injected into his veins when he was incapable of resisting.

  It had been dark and cold in the academy, with no hints of day or night, no sense of time’s passage. But the Elixir had made his moments darker yet.

  Delaney remembered the icy collision between the Elixir and his body, the shivers that had rocked him as it spread its vile darkness through his veins. He’d been given it three times and he’d never forget how each administration was more horrific than the last. He remembered the dissociation from his own nature, the phantasms and nightmares, the brief moments of clarity and the accompanying conviction that he was losing his mind.

  What he had been losing under the Elixir’s influence was his heart.

  The third and last cavern, after the third iron gate, was distinguished by its size. The floor of the cavern was uneven, scored with the passage of water and liberally embellished with mineral deposits. The ceiling dripped with stalactites, some of them white and others ochre, all of them bathed in the red light that emanated from the far side of the cavern.

  The light came from a massive rock crystal vial that seemed part of the opposite wall. Delaney couldn’t tell if it had been formed naturally—which was unlikely—or so cunningly carved and installed that it looked to be part of the cavern’s natural development. A set of stairs had been carved from the rock crystal and spiraled around it from foot to lip. The crystal was cloudy and obviously thick, its surface gleaming dully.

  It wasn’t so thick, though, that its contents couldn’t be discerned. A cloudy red liquid filled it to the brim, emitting a bit of steam into the chamber. It was humid in this cavern, the chilly air smelling of decay and blood and destruction.