A Fistful of Frost

by Rebecca Chastain

  Fully aware I was stalling, I slid Val from his strap and opened him to his first page. Rushing up to the apartment so I could force Jamie to talk to me, and likely start an argument, would be foolish. Plus, if I gave Jamie a little space and time with the cats, maybe he’d forget about being angry at me.

  Cowardly? Possibly. Prudent? Definitely.

  “How’d you hold up in our first foray with drones?” I asked Val.

  I thought the goal was to impress Pamela, not to impress upon her how unsuited you are for the job.

  “Says the book who trash-talked me to the inspector.”

  You didn’t expect me to lie to Pamela, did you? She would have seen right through that. I mean, she’s AMAZING! Did you see the way she took out those drones? What about how big her nets were? She’s strong and fast and smart and so talented! She didn’t even need you or Summer there.

  “Yeah, I got that impression, too.” My stomach churned and I blamed it on the ice cream. I couldn’t be jealous of my handbook’s infatuation with another person, could I?

  “Why do so many evil creatures prey on emotions?” I asked before Val could compose a ballad in Pamela’s honor. “Last week, the citos were amping up everyone at the mall; now we’re plagued by frost moths. Even the drones mess with emotions in their own way.” The question had been knocking around in my head all night, but I hadn’t wanted to voice it in front of Pamela. I didn’t want to leave myself open to potentially looking like an idiot. Or rather, more like an idiot.

  Technically, citos aren’t evil; they only make it easier for humans to do evil.

  “I don’t want to argue semantics, Val. You know what I mean.”

  Fine. Imagine if you had no physical form. How would you feed?

  “On something equally intangible?”

  Precisely. If you think about it, all atrum creatures feed on emotions. The only constant among humans is your propensity to allow your emotions to dictate your actions. Imps and vervet drain lux lucis, which weakens a victim’s sense of morality and makes him or her more likely to succumb to baser desires, or rather, baser emotions. The person then willfully accumulates atrum, making it a by-product of their own emotions.

  “That seems like a stretch.”

  If you need another example, there’s the demon that turned you into a lust machine . . .

  “Okay, you made your point.” He knew about the demon? Someone must have blabbed to him, because that incident had happened before we’d been paired up.

  A bitter wind gusted through the open stairwell, solidifying ice crystals in my wet jeans. The heated apartment beckoned, and I mulled over this new perspective as I climbed the stairs.

  Sometimes emotion-manipulating creatures aren’t a bad thing. Take the frost moths. They only recently evolved to feed in a way that’s truly evil.

  “What prompted the change? Was it Isabel?”

  Ha! Oh, wait; you’re serious. I always forget what small increments humans measure time in. No. The frost moths evolved to host and spread atrum in the last 10,000 years or so.

  “So, by recently, you meant sometime before the last ice age, give or take a handful of millennia?”

  Exactly, Val said, missing—or ignoring—my sarcasm.

  “How were they ever helpful?”

  Moths have a symbiotic relationship with humans. During the darkest, coldest months of the year, they encourage warmth.

  “You mean anger,” I said, thinking of how quickly the argument between Summer and I had escalated.

  Sure, they can get your blood pumping. With frost moths around, your ancestors worked through their disagreements quicker.

  By ancestors, he probably meant the Neanderthals.

  But I meant warmth as in affection. Frost moths enhanced warmer emotions, pulling tribes together, ensuring the renewal of the species.

  “Are you talking about sex?” I blurted out, belatedly checking my surroundings. I stood alone on the second-floor landing, talking to a book. Conscious of the peepholes on the apartment doors and my budding reputation as the weirdo neighbor, I shuffled up the next flight.

  Until the last couple of generations, infant mortality rates were drastically higher. Procreation was imperative for you guys to survive. Frost moths singling out a village was a sign of good fortune.

  I remembered Summer’s hungry perusal of Jamie and my instant aggression. Val had the benefit of an archaeologist’s detachment, not to mention the sexual experience of a leather-bound book. I, on the other hand, had a hard time imagining those ancestral villagers appreciating the interference of another species in their relationships or their love lives.

  Since humans were transitioning to living indoors and always around a heat source, Val continued, only the frost moths that could double feed—lux lucis and emotions—survived.

  “Thank you for explaining,” I said, forestalling a full-blown lecture. Three more steps and I could remove these boots and see if my heels were a solid mass of blood and blister or if the pain only made it feel that way. “Any chance you’ll tell me what you said about me to Pamela?”

  Nothing worse than you proved tonight.

  I grimaced and closed the book. I allowed myself one last self-pitying sigh before straightening my shoulders and lifting my chin high.

  It was time to face Jamie’s wrath.

  8

  Happiness Is a Great Dane

  A welcome blast of heat stung my chilled cheeks when I shoved open the front door. Peeling off my coat and scarf, I draped them over the half wall to the right of the door, laying Val on top. Jamie’s apparel littered the front room, and I blinked to normal vision to skim the piles of garments, determining from the lack of underwear and long johns that he was still human. A second later, I heard him in the bedroom.

  “Ow, no, Dame Zilla! My fingers are not the toy!” Jamie darted out of the bedroom and down the hall toward me, a long string dangling from his hand. His pounding feet rattled the bookcases against the walls, but I couldn’t bring myself to admonish him, not with that ear-to-ear grin.

  A tiny tabby kitten ripped around the corner, claws digging into the carpet, front feet flying high in clumsy pounces. Mr. Bond, my overweight adult Siamese, trotted after them, eyes locked on the kitten. Jamie thundered around the single chair in the front room, and Dame Zilla leapt through the air, claws splayed, mouth agape. All five-point-six pounds of her landed on the string, and Jamie let it drop as if she’d yanked it from his hands.

  Mr. Bond spotted me and his tail lifted. Chirping, he trotted to me.

  I wasn’t the only one who’d had her life upended in the last few weeks. Mr. Bond had gone from being an only and much spoiled cat to sharing a house with a man who turned into a Great Dane, and last night we’d added a kitten to the mix. He’d handled it all with an aplomb I was both proud and jealous of.

  I bent to pet Mr. Bond as he stropped my ankles. He paused mid-rub to sniff all the scents on my boots, then flopped atop my toes and swam across the damp leather. Dame Zilla tore past us in pursuit of a foam ball, pointy tail wagging as happily as a dog’s.

  Contentment washed through me, sapping the last of my tension.

  I looked up, meeting Jamie’s golden eyes across the room. His easy smile slid off his face, and he sat, drawing his knees to his chest. His long johns rode up his calves, exposing the tops of his wool socks. Mr. Bond’s purr filled the room, punctuated by muted thumps of Dame Zilla’s ball chase through the bathroom.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, holding Jamie’s gaze. “Tonight sucked.”

  Jamie blinked but said nothing, and the silence wedged between us.

  “We needed to impress Pamela, for Brad and for me. She’s smart and knows a hell of a lot more than me.” Especially about pooka rearing. “With tyver coming, I need to learn everything I can as fast as I can, because I don’t want to be turned into a vegetable.”

  “A tyv wouldn’t hurt you. I’d make sure of it.”

  The statement would have made Pamela happy
.

  “You shouldn’t have to. I should be able to defend myself.” And you. If I were a better enforcer, I wouldn’t have had to let Jamie be used as bait. I could have shot the drones from the sky before they got close to him, and I could have done it while standing right beside him.

  Mr. Bond wrapped his claws around my ankle, his enthusiastic cheek rubs bordering on an attack, and I shooed him away. He rushed to the carpeted cat tree, sharpening his claws with a gusto that quivered the heavy frame.

  “Why wouldn’t you let me clean up the lux lucis on the ground?” Jamie asked.

  I considered lying but didn’t see the point. “Pamela says it’s better if you don’t use atrum.” Seeing his frown, I added, “Especially not on something so trivial.”

  “But you wouldn’t have let atrum remain on the ground.”

  “No.” I maintained eye contact with difficulty, feeling like a hypocrite for changing the rules. Neither energy belonged on inanimate objects, but only atrum would cause harm if left in place.

  “Because lux lucis is better than atrum?” he asked.

  “Because lux lucis never steered a person toward malicious actions.” I chose my words carefully. I believed with all my heart in lux lucis’s superiority over atrum, but I wasn’t going to say as much to my half-atrum pooka.

  “Who determines what is good and what is evil?” he asked.

  “You do. I do. The easiest way is to check your heart. Does whatever you’re doing feel right? If you put yourself on the other side of the equation, would you still think it’s right? If not, it’s probably evil.”

  “If an imp killed you, it’d be evil, so how is it not evil when you kill imps?” He made the logic leap so fast he must have had some version of the question already prepared. Standing as bait in the field had given him plenty of time to think.

  “It’s not evil because I’m protecting myself. Allowing an imp to chew on my soul and slowly convert my lux lucis to atrum wouldn’t be good, either. Imps make the choice to harm me. Defending myself isn’t evil. If I sought out someone harmless and tried to hurt or kill them, that’d be evil.”

  Jamie mulled over my answer, and I tensed for his next question.

  “Can I take the first shower?”

  “Uh, sure.” Hiding my relief, I bent and unzipped my boots. I had little doubt we’d return to this topic, but I was grateful to let the conversation go for now.

  While Jamie trotted off toward the bathroom, I finally eased free of my torturous shoes. Peeling my socks down, I examined my heels. Neither looked half as bad as they felt.

  Dame Zilla burst from the bedroom, tripping Jamie, and tore down the hall. At the last second, she puffed staticky hair, arched her back, and bounced sideways at Mr. Bond where he stood beside the cat tree. Two of her tiny paws could fit in a single print of Mr. Bond’s and her arched back barely came up to his breastbone, but she didn’t let their vast size difference intimidate her. Ears canted sideways in obvious befuddlement, Mr. Bond sat back on his haunches, but when Dame Zilla reared up and swiped at him, he batted her aside. Undeterred, she launched for his shoulder. Mr. Bond pinned her to the carpet with a single paw to her head. Twisting free, the kitten darted away. Mr. Bond’s plaintive meow made me laugh.

  I didn’t feel completely human until I stepped from the shower, warm and clean. The yellowing splotches on my forearms from last week’s battles had almost faded, but I’d added fresh purple to my knees tonight. I should have expected as much. Since I’d become an enforcer, I hadn’t enjoyed a single bruise-free day, which said more about my ineptitude than it did about the job.

  Stretching biceps sore from tonight’s unaccustomed use, I towel-dried my hair, then eased my feet into my softest socks and dressed in worn yellow polka-dot flannel pajamas adorned with pink bunnies. Per his request, I’d purchased Jamie an identical outfit. He wore the pastel pajamas with unabashed happiness tonight as he cavorted on the floor with the cats, using a wand with a long feathery string to drive Dame Zilla nuts and occasionally entice a pounce out of Mr. Bond. Predictably, when I headed for the kitchen, Mr. Bond and Jamie came running.

  Ignoring my first instinct to root through the drawer of takeout menus, I opened the pantry cupboard instead. I typically viewed cooking with the same enthusiasm as dusting—something to be done once every two to three months—but my budget didn’t have the wiggle room to accommodate a roommate who ate enough for three people. Home-cooked meals were the heinous solution, and Jamie and I had spent yesterday wending up and down the grocery aisles to stock the refrigerator and cabinets.

  Bridget was going to laugh until she passed out when I told her my credit card company’s fraud department had contacted me after that abnormally astronomical grocery bill.

  I put Jamie in charge of feeding the cats, and as the new, proud pet parent of Dame Zilla, he leapt at the opportunity to win her affection. Mr. Bond got dry kibble in his bowl in the dining room; Dame Zilla feasted on special kitten food atop the cat tree, out of Mr. Bond’s gluttonous reach.

  I’d rescued Dame Zilla and her siblings from ignorantly neglectful teens two weeks ago, and the kittens had been in the care of Alex and his staff since. The others had adopted out quickly, but for reasons I couldn’t fathom, no one had swooped Dame Zilla up. With the tiniest nudge from Alex and his assurance that the company of a kitten would be beneficial for Mr. Bond, I’d adopted her. Bringing home a kitten last night after a remarkable first date with the hot veterinarian who’d nursed her back to health ranked high on my all-time best moments. Seeing Jamie’s face when I’d explained she was his pet came a close second.

  The pooka took care with his soul, always presenting a solid shell of lux lucis when near Mr. Bond and Dame Zilla. In return, they adored him. If he let his soul relax to its usual chaotic mix, the cats shied away. I considered using the cats’ reactions in my argument for lux lucis, but remembering how much Jamie enjoyed the affection of imps who approached him when he cloaked his soul with atrum, I kept my mouth shut. His dual nature provided him optimum opportunities to interact with all the creatures he loved. Why would he want to give up one for the other?

  Mood souring, I filled a pot with water, another with a jar of marinara sauce, and set both on burners I hadn’t used since Bridget had insisted we make s’mores last winter. I rummaged through the cupboard for noodles, jumping when my cell rattled out “Hail to the Chief.”

  “Here, Jamie. When the water boils, pour these in and turn the burner down to medium,” I said, thrusting the box of noodles into his hand and rushing across the room to my coat. Rifling through the pockets, I tugged free my bright green phone. I’d named it Medusa and it held the honor of being my first-ever cell phone. My initial enthusiasm had waned substantially in the weeks since I’d purchased Medusa; the cell phone meant I never had an excuse for being out of reach.

  “Hello, Brad.” I plopped down at the dining table, where I could keep an eye on Jamie in the kitchen.

  “How’d your training with Pamela go?”

  “Didn’t she tell you?”

  “I’d rather hear it in your words.”

  Atrocious summed it up. So did catastrophic, deplorable, and depressing. “It could have been better.”

  Brad grunted. “Any flaws in the palmquell?”

  “Other than user error? No. It’s the perfect size for me. The soul breaker is . . . nice, too. Thank you. You have an eye for weapons.” After my disastrous performance tonight, I wasn’t above softening Brad up with flattery.

  “I’m glad you think so, because you’re paying for them out of your next paycheck.”

  I jerked straight, fingers tightening around the phone. Enforcer weapons weren’t cheap. They weren’t even reasonably priced.

  “Hang on. How much did they cost? Am I going to have any money left in my check?” I still had rent to pay and my car payment, not to mention a pooka literally eating through my savings.

  “You will if we get to permanently expand our region. More region equ
als more pay.”

  “It does?” Summer’s comment about me gouging her paycheck snapped to the front of my thoughts before Brad responded. If more region equaled more pay, the opposite had to be true. When Brad and I had taken control of a slice of her region, she had taken a pay cut. No wonder she harbored a grudge against me.

  The region we stood to assimilate if Pamela granted us a permanent expansion was more than triple the amount we’d gained from Summer. My next question came out fast and hopeful: “How much more?”

  “Enough to cover your expenses. But this is about more than a raise. I don’t think you grasp how unique this opportunity is. Regional boundaries rarely shift. Having our borders expand twice in one week is about as likely as you bonding two pookas in the same amount of time.”

  I glanced at Jamie. He’d opened the box of noodles and cracked three into his mouth, chewing loud enough to hear over Mr. Bond crunching through his kibble. Contentedness radiated through the bond, but this evening’s turmoil lurked fresh in my thoughts. Being pulled around by one pooka, teaching him right from wrong, was a full-time job. Two pookas at once would be insanity.

  “We need this, Madison. We need to keep as much territory as the inspector permits, because we’re not ever going to get another chance like this.”

  Brad sounded earnest, and he’d never struck me as greedy, but I wished we were having this conversation in person so I could read his expression.

  “Aside from money, what would more region mean for us?”

  “You’ll gain experience faster, and it’ll add weight to your résumé when you transfer.”

  You’ll gain experience faster was code for you’ll have more work. It wouldn’t simply be a matter of more square miles to cover, either. If we kept our part of Isabel’s territory, we’d gain responsibility for a mall and a jail—two labor-intensive, high-risk locations. I’d spent the morning cleaning up the flotsam of atrum around the jail, and I didn’t relish retaining permanent rights to protecting that particular piece of land. Nor did padding my résumé in preparation for a transfer add any appeal. Most of my friends and my parents lived within a short drive of my apartment, and I liked Roseville. I didn’t see myself wanting to move anytime soon.