A Fistful of Frost
A Madison Fox Adventure, Book 3
Rebecca Chastain
Contents
About A Fistful of Frost
Copyrights
1. Sometimes I Question My Sanity; Sometimes It Replies
2. Everyone Complains about the Weather, but No One Wants to Sacrifice a Virgin
3. Speak Truth to Power
4. No Good Deed Goes Unpunished
5. I Licked It, so It's Mine
6. Led Astray by Good Intentions
7. I'm Like a Candy Bar: Half Sweet, Half Nuts
8. Happiness Is a Great Dane
9. Only Left-Handed People Are in Their Right Minds
10. Dignity? I Gave That Up Years Ago
11. I Don't Have a Dirty Mind; I Have a Sexy Imagination
12. Your Jealousy Gives Me Energy
13. Where Am I Going and Why Am I in This Handbasket?
14. I Don't Have a Short Temper, I Have a Prompt Reaction to BS
15. Long Live the Queen
16. Don't Run; You'll Only Die Tired
17. Whirled Peas
18. It's Okay if You Disagree with Me; I Can't Force You to Be Right
19. Caught between a Strong Mind and a Fragile Heart
20. Inconceivable!
21. The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves
22. I'm a Woman. What's Your Superpower?
23. I May Not Always Be Good but My Intentions Are
24. Are Your Reflexes Good? I Want to Try Something
25. Nevertheless, She Persisted
26. I Want to Be the Person My Dog Thinks I Am
27. Time to Get Chocolate Wasted
28. Without Me, It's Just Aweso
29. What Doesn't Kill You Will Probably Try Again
30. Some Cause Happiness Wherever They Go, Others Whenever They Go
Author Gift
Also by Rebecca Chastain
Sneak Peek: Magic of the Gargoyles
Acknowledgments
About the Author
About A Fistful of Frost
Madison’s job—and soul—are on thin ice.
Madison Fox is determined to reform Jamie, her half-evil pooka, but the bond linking her to Jamie works both ways. Already, it has manipulated her into bending the rules. If she continues down this path, she could doom her soul. Since her judgment can’t be trusted, a high-ranking inspector now dictates Madison’s every interaction with Jamie, and each directive drives them further apart.
Unfortunately, Madison has bigger issues than the potential degradation of her soul. Winter has struck with a vengeance. Frost moths plague the entire state, reinforcing the artificially frigid temperature. Worse, cold-blooded, soul-stealing enemies are flocking into her region from the north—creatures Madison has little defense against.
With the inspector scrutinizing her every misstep, Madison is in for the battle of her life. If she hopes to survive, she must make an impossible choice: save herself and her region or save Jamie.
An imaginative urban fantasy filled with heart, humor, and plenty of butt-kicking action—A Fistful of Frost is a book you won’t want to miss.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, dialogue, places, and incidents either are drawn from the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, locales, or events is entirely coincidental. Any resemblances to actual cats are 100 percent intentional. Mack Fu shamelessly insisted on being immortalized in the pages of this novel and all novels in the Madison Fox series. He gracefully agreed to share the literary limelight with his sister, Zenzo, whose kitten likeness is used herein with her permission.
Copyright © 2018 by Rebecca Chastain
Excerpt from Magic of the Gargoyles copyright © by Rebecca Chastain
Cover design by Yocla Designs
Author photograph by Cody Watson
www.rebeccachastain.com
All rights reserved. In accordance with the US Copyright Act of 1976, scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without permission of the author constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. If you would like to use material from this book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained from the publisher. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights.
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Mind Your Muse Books
PO Box 374
Rocklin, CA 95677
ISBN: 978-0-9992385-6-1
For Mom, whose compassion, empathy, and love have shaped my life—none of my successes would have been possible without you.
1
Sometimes I Question My Sanity; Sometimes It Replies
Inspector Pamela Hennessey leaned close, shouting to be heard above the enthusiastic marching band pounding its way across the football field. “Remember what I said, Madison: Show me you’re in control of the pooka. Take charge. You’re not helping Jamie by being soft.”
Avoiding her eyes, I nodded, keenly aware of Jamie standing less than three feet from us. With luck, he hadn’t heard her over the bleating trumpets.
We stood against a retaining wall on the outer rim of the track wrapping Oakmont High’s football field. A flailing, cheering quilt of bundled and blanketed people packed the bleachers, and a steady string of teenagers and their parents filed past on their way to and from the concession stand amidst waves of popcorn and hot dog fumes. Normally Jamie would have been at my elbow, begging for a bowl of nachos, and I would have indulged him, but not with the inspector present. I’d met her less than an hour ago, and I’d already lost track of how many times I’d made a fool of myself in front of her. From here on out, I needed to be a shining example of a perfect pooka-bonded enforcer if I stood a chance of saving face—and saving my region.
Jamie edged closer, his shoulders hunched in a dejected curl, his dichotomous soul churning in agitated waves of black atrum and white lux lucis. I strangled the impulse to comfort him. Like Pamela said, I needed to be firm. Authoritative.
Even if it was my fault Jamie looked lost.
I flexed frozen fingers, encouraging blood and heat back into the digits. A freak cold snap had struck Roseville, California, plummeting the temperature below freezing, and local meteorologists threatened we’d see snow before morning. The novel phenomenon would have been a lot easier to appreciate if I were holed up inside my apartment like a normal person. Normal, however, had hopscotched right over me when I’d been born with the ability to use my soul as a weapon.
A dark shape zipped overhead, and I ducked, my free hand spasming around the clunky necklace resting on my chest. My jerky reaction drew stares, but I pretended not to notice. Quick reflexes could make the difference between living and dying in my line of work. Besides, if the norms could see the swarm of tyv drones buzzing above the stadium, they’d do more than duck; they’d run in terror.
Pretending fear didn’t stretch taut across my nerves, I examined the latest enemy to invade my region. The drones bore an uncanny resemblance to mosquitoes—if mosquitoes grew to the size of pterodactyls. They possessed spiky legs, multifaceted ebony eyes wrapped around triangular heads, and two-foot-long, needle-sharp proboscises for mouths. Where mosquitoes drank blood, the drones devoured lux lucis, the white energy of good people’s souls. This bright, undigested energy in the drones’ translucent abdomens made it possible to track the otherwise black creatures against the obsidian sky, and
I told myself it was a blessing. But since I was Roseville’s illuminant enforcer and the person responsible for defending the citizens inside my small region from pernicious, soul-snacking creatures, each glowing drone served as neon-white proof of all the people I’d failed to protect.
An entire sky lit with evidence of my inadequacies as an enforcer, and me standing next to an inspector here to assess my competence. Could this night get any worse?
Pamela gestured to the other enforcer accompanying us and then pointed toward the stands. “Summer, take point but stay close.”
Like a perfect little suck-up, Summer Potts jumped to obey, rushing to kneel in front of the stuffed bleachers, out of sight of the crowds but still able to target the soul-hungry creatures dining on them.
“Here they come. Hold your ground, Madison, and aim for the thorax.”
Five drones tore themselves from the smorgasbord and whipped toward us on blurred wings. If it’d been just me and the inspector, I would have said the drones were attracted to the pure white shimmer of our souls. I’d yet to meet an evil creature who could resist our untainted lux lucis, not even those smart enough to know they gambled with their lives when they snacked on an enforcer. But with the pooka at my side, his soul surging with restrained power, I might as well have been invisible to the drones.
I reached blindly for Jamie’s arm with my left hand, pushing him behind me without taking my eyes off the incoming drones. “Stay close and don’t feed them.”
Here goes nothing. I yanked my palmquell from my pocket, fumbling with the unfamiliar weapon. Painted in eye-watering shades of mustard, the palmquell resembled a gun, which meant I couldn’t use it with impunity. People tended to frown upon guns—real or fake—being brandished at crowded high school events. Improvising, I pretended to blow on my gloves as if to warm my hands, disguising the palmquell in my fists. With luck, holding it closer to my eyes would improve my atrocious aim.
The drones dove for us, dropping into range before I had steeled my nerves. I shoved a dollop of my soul’s energy into the palmquell, the transfer of lux lucis passing through my wool glove and disappearing into the balsa wood gun’s bone chamber. When I jerked the trigger, a bright white slug of lux lucis arced through the air . . . missing all five drones by several feet. They didn’t slow. I pushed more energy into the gun and fired, missing again. The drones closed the distance between us too fast, and I backed up, jostling Jamie. The urge to flee flooded my body with adrenaline. Giving up on accuracy, I shot nonstop, hoping the sheer quantity of lux lucis in the air would deter the drones or—if I was extremely lucky—hit at least one.
The drones dodged around the scatter of bullets.
I sucked in a sharp breath, fear coiling in my chest. They’d dodged. Not a lot of evil creatures were smart enough for such a simple act of self-preservation. Imps practically killed themselves. Vervet might taunt me first, but ultimately their appetites ruled their actions, making them easy prey. Hounds couldn’t stop themselves from attacking, which made them as predictable as they were dangerous. But drones were the lower caste of a more evolved and terrifying creature called sjel tyver. According to my boss, sjel tyver were the brains of the species, which is why I’d assumed that as their scouts, the drones would fall squarely in the “I think with my stomach, so let me help you kill me” category.
Dodging proved that the drones were not stupid and that they might actually be intelligent.
I expected to hear a buzz when the drones zoomed past, but if their wings made such a prosaic sound, the marching band drowned them out. Without slowing, they swept back over the crowded bleachers, blending in with the rest of the swarm. It should have upset me to watch them revert to attacking defenseless norms; instead, I breathed a sigh of relief for my reprieve.
Stomping my chilly feet in my boots, I shook tension from my limbs and monitored the nearest drones swooping along the rim of the stands. They speared their sharp mouths into people’s shoulders, necks, and most disturbingly, their faces, feeding without slowing. With bodies constructed not from sinew and blood but from atrum, evil energy coalesced into shape and form, the drones existed exclusively in the metaphysical plane of Primordium. In other words, only people like myself and the inspector could see them. The norms should have been equally oblivious to the sharp jabs of the drones’ insubstantial needle snouts, but every single person acted out immediately after being struck: a girl in skintight jeans jumped to her feet and boldly picked her underwear from her crack; an elderly man pelted a woman a few rows in front of him with popcorn, temporarily silencing the woman’s obnoxious noisemaker while she looked around for the culprit; a mom in so many layers of coats that she looked like a walking sleeping bag grabbed her purse and shoved toward the aisle, only to stop, confused, on the stairs. It was as if the drones’ bites prompted people into action, and the action itself didn’t matter.
The deafening performance of the band died for three blissful seconds, and in the relative silence, I heard Jamie laughing. My heart warmed until I realized the source of his humor was the peculiar actions of the helpless victims. Pamela sliced her disapproving glare from Jamie to me, and I flinched, mentally adding another mark against us. Then the band launched into Pharrell Williams’s “Happy,” and the crowd went wild, drowning out any chance I had of remedying the moment. Pamela’s attention jerked to the air above my head, and I spun back toward the stands. A trio of drones had split from the swarm, pulled to us by the siren song of my pooka’s soul.
Raising my palmquell, I fired a blast of lux lucis bullets into their midst and pivoted to track two that darted in the same direction. The turn faced me toward the field, Jamie, and—
The inspector was missing.
Wild-eyed, I searched for Pamela, finding her hugging the retaining wall more than twenty feet down the track, almost back to the stadium entrance. Without lifting her hand from her hip, she fired on the attacking drones, and her white bullets streaked through the air as if drawn to their targets.
Panic receded and I sucked in a breath. She hadn’t abandoned me.
Shame chased the thought. I shouldn’t need Pamela to do my job, especially since the inspector hadn’t distanced herself to assist me; she’d backed off so she could dissect my skills—or lack thereof—from a better perspective.
Shunting lux lucis into the palmquell, I sighted on the zigzagging drones. A detached part of me considered how ridiculous I looked to the norms, seemingly staring into the halogen lights, my gloved hands cupped a few inches from my face and my eyes darting back and forth as I tracked drones they couldn’t see. The rest of me didn’t care. In Primordium, the blinding light of the halogens didn’t exist, and I’d work on my covert drone-killing techniques some other time, when we weren’t under attack.
The lead drone faltered—no thanks to any of my shots—and then exploded in a puff of harmless atrum glitter that faded to lifeless gray as it settled on the gravel. I squinted at the next-closest drone, pulsing lux lucis into the palmquell and firing so rapidly it looked as if a single white beam of light extended from the palmquell’s tip.
“Hold still, you stupid inflated mosquito,” I growled.
The drone took two shots from Pamela before I aligned on it; it died with the inspector’s fourth slug of lux lucis before I landed a single hit.
I whirled, hunting for the third drone. It had circled wide, approaching from the hill. I brought my palmquell to bear but hesitated, catching Jamie’s rapt expression. The pooka raised a hand to the drone, a hint of a smile tipping the corners of his mouth, his posture completely at odds with the threat.
He looked like a person caught in a spell.
The sounds of the marching band receded. The crowd ceased to exist. My world narrowed to Jamie and the drone. I pumped lux lucis through the palmquell, but my shots were too slow, and the slender drone flitted through them untouched. No streaks of white bullets came from Pamela’s direction either.
What is she doing? Why did she stop shoo
ting?
The drone bore down on us, zipping wide around my lux lucis stream to strike Jamie. Not going to happen. I shouldered the pooka out of the way, and the drone’s barbed proboscis flicked through my chest as painful as a whip crack. I screamed, short and sharp, clutching my breastbone with my free hand.
Incorporeal creatures weren’t supposed to hurt when they fed!
The drone spun back toward us, angling for Jamie again. Screw this. No way was I going to let a drone inflict that pain on my pooka. I tossed the useless palmquell aside and yanked my pet wood from my pocket. A flick of the wrist extended the telescoping petrified wood weapon into a three-foot wand, every inch of it glistening bright white with as much lux lucis as it could hold. Planting my feet, I raised the wand in front of me like a sword.
The drone’s skittish flight brought it into range, and I burst into motion. Channeling an extra blast of lux lucis down the length of the pet wood, I slashed through the drone’s wings and thorax. The drone exploded. Black glitter rained down on Jamie and me, temporarily obscuring the world.
“We’re leaving. Now.” I grabbed Jamie’s hand before he had a chance to adjust his soul, and his atrum slid cold across my palm. I slapped it back with lux lucis. Jamie flinched and shoved all his soul’s atrum to the far side of his body.
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