Before I could stop him, Jamie lifted his glove to his mouth and touched his tongue to the flake. It melted upon contact.
“Wicked cool,” he exclaimed.
My mouth curled in horror. Consuming the remains of an evil creature couldn’t be healthy. It definitely wasn’t hygienic.
Glancing around to see Pamela’s reaction, my gaze snagged on Summer. She watched Jamie, or rather, she watched Jamie’s lips, and the intensity of her stare didn’t look like a woman grossed out by seeing him eat flakes of a frost moth’s carcass or like an enforcer suspicious of all things pooka. She looked . . . hungry.
Summer stalked toward Jamie, smooth as a mountain lion after prey. Alarm bells clanged in my head. I stepped forward, breaking her fixation on the pooka. Pinning me with a venomous glare, she curled her fingers into a fist around her lighter and cocked back her arm.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m going to—”
Pamela slid between us and laid a gentle hand on Summer’s elbow, turning her toward the stadium. “Lead the way.”
Something hot flared in Summer’s eyes, then died. She gave herself a shake, and when she glanced over her shoulder at Jamie, mistrust tightened her expression once more. Whatever had been going through her head a moment ago, she’d safely tucked it out of sight.
“Keep up, Madison,” Pamela said before falling into step with Summer.
Frowning, I trailed after them, nudging Jamie to get him moving when a costumed mascot running down the next aisle distracted him.
“What the hell just happened?” I whispered to Val, discreetly tugging him from his strap and opening him.
Nothing. Just like nothing happened the minute before that and the minute before that and the minute before that and the—
I gave him a shake. “Val, come on. Right now, something happened with Summer.”
Sure. Probably.
“Val . . .”
How hard is it for you to hand me to Pamela?
“It’s proving very difficult since you won’t tell me anything I want to know,” I hissed, holding the spine of the book against my lips so he could hear my teeth grit.
If I tell you, you’ll let me talk to her?
“Yes.”
Frost moth.
I waited for more words to appear, feet dragging to allow the gap to widen between me and the inspector. “Val . . .”
Frost moth. Frost moth. Frost moth. Flip the page already.
Oh. I thumbed ahead to his entry on frost moths. Next to a black-and-white sketch of a moth sat a succinct paragraph. I skimmed over the description to the heart of the short entry:
Frost moths consume cooler emotions as they feed. This drain on a person’s calming sentiments, such as logic and patience, creates an emotional vacuum—one that is typically filled with a person’s hotter emotions until she stabilizes.
“The moth made her angry?” I asked, remembering Summer’s clenched fist.
Yes.
Anger hadn’t been her emotion when she’d looked at Jamie, though.
Pamela. Now. You promised.
“Yes, Master,” I said, sure Val would miss my sarcasm.
Picking up my pace, I joined Summer and Pamela at the back of the ticket line and waited until their conversation came to a natural lull.
“Pamela, do you have a moment to speak with Val?”
“Who?”
I held the handbook up. “Valentine, er, Valentinus Aurelius.” He’d introduced himself as such, though I suspected he’d made up the pompous name to make himself sound important. Fortunately, he’d been pleased at being given a nickname, and I’d been calling him Val since.
“Ah. I remember this book.” Pamela took Val from me and ran her gloved fingertips over the colorful ribbons on his cover. “It’s looking much healthier than the last time I saw it. Kudos to you, Madison.”
“Thank you. He’s been eager to be reacquainted with you.” I crossed my fingers that Val would play it cool.
She opened him and a flurry of words flowed across his page, but the angle prevented me from reading it. Whatever he said made Pamela chuckle and Summer glare at me.
“That’s incredibly flattering,” Pamela said, speaking to Val. “And what is your assessment of Madison?”
Of course she would ask that first. Val’s response was much shorter this time, and Summer laughed, covering it with a cough when Pamela shot her a look. I crossed my arms and pretended I wasn’t straining to read Val’s text. I should have reminded him we were supposed to be impressing the inspector, not airing grouchy opinions.
“I meant as a companion for you,” Pamela said, and the mirth in her voice stiffened my spine.
A trio of trumpet-toting teens pushed the wrong way through the line, jostling me against Jamie and ruining my chance to eavesdrop on Val and Pamela’s conversation. Settling back on my heels, I surveyed the crowd. Swap out the Vikings insignia on the stadium walls with Berkeley yellow jackets and add in another thousand people, and this could have been a commonplace scene from my high school days. Jamie, however, bounced on his toes, enthralled by the crisp winter air scented with competing aromas of caramel corn and nachos, the band’s music thumping through the stadium, and the jazzed-up crowd singing along.
A group of girls slowed to give Jamie a frank appraisal—which he completely missed, just as they appeared oblivious to my glare. I recognized Jamie qualified as “hot” by most women’s standards. I wasn’t blind. His striking golden eyes shadowed by thick, dark lashes were enough to turn heads, but combined with the kind of square jawline cartoonists loved to exaggerate and a devil-may-care smile, and he earned a phenomenal number of second glances. But when I looked at him, I saw a five-day-old pooka who needed protection. Even from horny teenage girls.
Dang it; I was back to feeling old.
I shoved my hands into my pockets, fighting the urge to whisk Jamie back to the car. I recognized the bond’s manipulation in the extreme reaction. Jamie wasn’t in danger here. If anything, he represented a threat to everyone else.
“Interesting,” Pamela said, openly talking to the handbook and managing not to look crazy in the process. “I would love to learn what you’ve been up to since we last talked, but right now, we’ve got work to do.” Pamela handed Val back to me with a rueful shake of her head. “I do so love the ones that still have their personalities.”
We reached the front of the line, and Summer stepped forward to pay the ticket taker. I used the opportunity to peek inside Val. His comments about me or anything else he and Pamela had discussed were gone. In their place were three exuberant words.
She remembered me!
“You’re hard to forget,” I grumbled before sliding him back into his strap. I’d ferret out what he said about me later. Forking over a twenty to the teen behind the booth, I accepted two tickets and handed the extra to Jamie.
“We should get food,” Jamie decided, eyeing the concession stand. If he’d been in his Great Dane form, his tail would have wagged right off his body.
I tugged him after Pamela. “Maybe later. Right now, we need to focus on impressing the inspector.”
“I could impress her with how much I can eat.”
“I don’t think that’s what Brad had in mind,” I said, but the idea made me grin.
A dozen frost moths fluttered around the outskirts of the crowd at the concession stand. They lit upon people walking alone or in pairs, feeding for a few seconds at a time before flapping to the next person. Each time they ate, their wings grew, and more than one frost moth flew on wings larger than hubcaps.
Pamela ignored them, weaving through the milling people until she reached a pocket of empty space at the edge of the stadium. Steep bleachers lined one side of the football field, the aluminum benches packed with patchwork-norm souls. A marching band danced across the field, a hundred teens playing at earsplitting volume. Without walls and people in the way, the brassy notes of Beyoncé’s latest hit bombarded my ea
rdrums. Baton twirlers and flag wavers circled the band in nonstop, spinning accompaniment, but their energetic antics couldn’t compete with the acrobatic feats of the tyv drones above the stands.
My fingers tightened on Jamie’s arm. Seeing the sketches of drones in Val hadn’t prepared me for the real deal. With wingspans as wide as my stretched arms and two-foot-long barbs projecting from their triangular heads, the drones looked like cartoon monsters come to life as they skimmed through the stands, striking victim after victim, their translucent abdomens swelling bright with lux lucis.
Jamie tugged at my fingers, and I released my death grip with a distracted apology. Summer said something, but her words were lost under the concussive beat of the drum section. Pamela pointed to her ear and shook her head, then gestured for us to circle behind the stadium.
I hesitated before following her. I didn’t want to turn my back on the drones—or all the innocent victims—but I also didn’t have a clue how to proceed.
“How can they hold that much lux lucis without dying?” I asked. Some of the drones’ bloated abdomens looked close to bursting. Consuming such large quantities of lux lucis should have countered their body’s atrum and killed them.
Pamela didn’t answer until the concrete wall of the restroom building stood between us and the band. “The sac in their abdomen allows them to metabolize the lux lucis at a manageable rate. Plus, the energy they steal is more than the surface lux lucis an imp or the like might take from a person. Tyver and drones cut deeper. That’s why a tyv can steal the entirety of your soul or whole memories from a norm. Drones are weaker, so they take only inhib—” Pamela cut herself off, her whole body tensing.
I spun, expecting a Kamikaze drone. Instead, I saw Jamie. He’d roamed a few yards away to a cluster of granite boulders edging a landscaped flower bed, and he jumped along the rocks with the enthusiasm of a goat, testing out his new hiking boots. Despite the crowds, no one paid him much attention. I suspected he wasn’t the first person to climb over those rocks, probably not even the first person tonight.
He was, however, the first pooka to do so, and imps came out of the metaphysical woodwork when they spotted him.
Shaped like sable chinchillas with bodies of coalesced atrum and very little brain matter, imps were the least threatening evil creature in existence. Discounting their disproportionately large mouths filled with rows of sharp teeth and their propensity to view me as a snack, imps were actually cute. Jamie thought so, too, which was the problem. Letting him play fun uncle with a herd of imps was exactly the sort of display Brad had warned me to avoid in front of the inspector.
Crap. I should have anticipated this. Crowds attracted atrum creatures, and atrum creatures couldn’t resist Jamie, imps least of all.
A handful of imps bounced up the boulders and leapt for Jamie’s legs, climbing his body like squirrels up a tree. Each sank their teeth into him as often as claws, but Jamie didn’t allow them to feed off his soul. He even went so far as to restructure his energy so atrum coated him from head to toe, hiding all his lux lucis beneath it. I had seen this transformation before, but it always stole my breath. Standing atop the boulder, his body a dark silhouette of pure atrum, Jamie looked as sinister as a demon and twice as powerful.
The first of the imps reached Jamie’s shoulders, and he sent them tumbling down his arms to his hands, where he windmilled them and launched them into the sky. The imps flew through the air, mouths open in unmistakable glee. Before they’d begun to fall back to earth, Jamie launched another handful.
Menacing, my pooka was not.
Smiling, I turned to explain his actions to the inspector, but my words died in my throat. Pamela’s tense posture hadn’t changed, but while I’d been distracted, she’d materialized a vicious hunting knife from somewhere on her person. Even more terrifying, she looked prepared to use it—on Jamie.
5
I Licked It, so It's Mine
I lurched in front of Pamela, breaking her line of sight on Jamie. Behind her, Summer clutched her sheathed soul breaker, her expression equally menacing.
“Hang on, let me explain,” I said, raising pacifying hands in front of both women.
Pamela shifted to the side, never looking away from the pooka. “You’re not going to let him—”
“Of course not.” Abandoning diplomacy, I scurried up the boulder to Jamie’s side before the inspector decided to intervene. With a knife.
My screwed-up pooka-bonded instincts clamored for me to keep Pamela in my sight, but I forced myself to turn my back on her. She wasn’t a threat. Not to me, and not to Jamie. Not really. He was my responsibility, and she wasn’t going to kill him over playing with a few imps.
Nevertheless, I positioned myself between Jamie and the blade-wielding stranger—
Aargh! She’s an ally! I insisted, wrangling my thoughts clear of the bond’s distortion.
Arguing with myself only partially worked. My shoulder blades tingled in response to the perceived threat of the inspector—or maybe from the force of her stare—but shielding Jamie with my body soothed my protective instinct enough to focus on the problem. Flooding a hand with lux lucis until it glowed five times as bright as the rest of my body, I held it between myself and Jamie.
The imps plunged from him to me, drawn like moths to the brightness of my soul. Jaws agape, they snapped rows of razor-sharp teeth into my hand, arm, and torso. Unlike Jamie, I couldn’t prevent them from feeding on me, but I didn’t want to. One by one, I pumped their tiny bodies full of lux lucis, overloading their simplistic systems. If allowed to eat at their own pace, imps could nibble their way through the entirety of my lux lucis, but forcing energy into them faster than they could handle caused them to explode into harmless puffs of atrum. The black dust fell to the rocks, fading to inert charcoal before it settled.
After the last imp died, Jamie dropped his arms to his sides and relaxed his soul. Atrum and lux lucis swirled under his skin, the white energy twisting vines around his black limbs. I read his unhappiness in those snarls of energy as much as I did on his face, but our imp rule was simple: As long as they remained on him, I wouldn’t touch them, but the moment they took a bite out of my soul, they died.
He understood I couldn’t let any creature of atrum feed on my soul, and I understood he saw the imps as harmless and fun. I used to take delight in killing imps. They were brainless and evil, with voracious appetites. They were also easy targets, and wiping them out served as a quick way to feel accomplished.
That was before I’d seen delight on an imp’s face—and before each imp’s death stole another piece of my pooka’s happiness.
Jamie gave me a sad smile that I returned.
“Come on.” I hopped to the ground and Jamie followed.
“Does that happen often?” Pamela asked.
I checked her hands, relieved to see them empty.
“No.” I’d seen Jamie play with imps on other occasions, but he hadn’t been alive long enough to do anything often. So what if I was splitting hairs?
Jamie stepped around us and reached for a frost moth gliding above our heads. It flapped higher, then circled back, angling to land on Jamie.
“Get that away from him now,” Pamela barked.
“Uh, let me . . .” I pushed lux lucis from my palm, and my hand flared bright; then the lux lucis splattered skyward. “Just a moment . . .”
Another moth joined the first, followed by a third and a fourth. Summer competently formed a net and captured the moth nearest her, bringing her lighter to bear. Show-off.
“Concentrate, Madison. You can’t let any moths feed off your pooka.”
The urgency in her tone alarmed me. “Why not? What will happen to Jamie?”
“Nothing,” Jamie said.
“It won’t be pretty. Hurry,” Pamela ordered, overriding him.
Eyes darting between them, I gave my lux lucis another push, clinging to it at the same time, and an infinitesimal net lifted from my palm. Rushing to Jamie
, I swiped my hand through the frost moth, and the net caught around the moth’s back legs, snaring it before it could land on the pooka. I spun, carrying the frost moth with me and away from Jamie—and I would have tipped right over if Pamela hadn’t caught my shoulders.
Dizziness swirled from my hand to my head, the intangible moth body displacing the lux lucis in my net. When the moth’s little legs wriggled, vibrations jittered through my soul and up my arm, and the familiar icy touch of atrum—one I’d experienced hundreds of times from imp and vervet bites—pervaded my hand, then faded.
This close, I could see the facets of the moth’s glossy eyes; its slender, delicate antennae; and the soft, downy fur that coated its black body. Its blue wings, so thin they all but disappeared when viewed head-on, stretched and retracted, gently fanning my face with bitter-cold air. I lifted my hand, entranced. The wings resembled the most complex snowflakes ever formed, twin sheets of ice-crystal fractals spiraling outward from the moth’s body to prism-spiked tips.
I held the push-pull balance of lux lucis with all my concentration and watched helplessly as the moth closed its tiny mouth on my wrist. Goose bumps rushed up my arm, and I shuddered at the renewed chill. As if to compensate for the cold generated by the moth, my body temperature flared. I reached for the zipper of my jacket. The moth flapped, passing its wing through my forearm, and I gasped at the bone-deep freeze that swept my hand and wrist.
Jamie stretched over my shoulder with atrum-coated fingers and trailed them along one wing. The moth’s antennae wriggled and it stilled, no doubt enjoying the pooka’s touch.
“You can’t let him do that,” Pamela said, her voice jolting me.
I glared at her over the back of the moth. What did she know about what I could and couldn’t let Jamie do?
“Get out your lighter and kill it already, Madison. You’re taking too long.”
“I’m working on it. Back off.” Did Pamela expect me to be perfect on my first try?
I rummaged in my pocket with glove-thickened fingers, pulling out my lighter as the moth began to struggle. I clicked the trigger on the lighter, thankful Brad had instructed me to get one that worked easily with gloves, and held it in the vicinity of the moth. Its wings flapped harder, generating a gust of cold air and magnifying the dizzy, disconnected sensation between my head and hand; then its wings shrank and its escape efforts slowed. The inky body dwindled against my hand until it nestled in my palm. Experimentally, I pulsed lux lucis into it the same way I had the imps, and the moth puffed to glitter. In normal sight, a confetti of snow blew from my palm.
A Fistful of Frost Page 6
