A Fistful of Frost

by Rebecca Chastain

  “That look is all the rage in LA,” Doris said.

  Jamie perked up and wagged his tail.

  “Does it pinch anywhere?” I asked.

  He barked and shook his head.

  “Okay. Stay close, please.” I gave him another stroke across his wide forehead, then patted his rear to signal he was free to go.

  He barked again and trotted off to explore the landscaped planters.

  Doris’s face twisted through a series of emotions. She didn’t give voice to any of them, but I got the gist. I’d just petted Jamie. I knew he wasn’t a dog. If he were in his human form, I wouldn’t be okay with running my hands over him. Patting his naked human rear was out of the question. But when he wore the guise of a Great Dane, he was as much dog as pooka, and he seemed to enjoy the different style of affection. When human, we occasionally held hands when he needed comfort. Petting him when he was a dog was little different.

  I hoped my logic was my own, not the bond’s manipulations.

  Doris gave herself a shake. “Let’s get started. Pull out your palmquell and take a shot.”

  My stomach churned, last night’s failures gelling into a knot of dread when I grasped the palmquell. “At what?”

  “Anything you think you can hit.”

  As tempting as it was to shoot the Civic—only two feet behind me, it was a sure hit—I fixed my sights on the nearest frost moth. If any part of the moth had possessed true mass, the entire creature would have crumpled, but in the metaphysical realm of Primordium, its black cylindrical body floated effortlessly on fragile wings of lacy ice tipped with dendrite crystals. Giving a lackadaisical flap, the moth coasted in a smooth arc. Hitting it should be easy.

  I fired a bolt of lux lucis. It streaked across the black sky and splatted to the pavement.

  “What were you aiming for?” Doris asked.

  I pointed at the moth. Doris walked up to my shoulder and squinted. The white energy smeared the charcoal pavement at least seven feet to the right of where I’d aimed.

  “Annie Oakley you are not. What was with your stance? You’re not a gunslinger at the O.K. Corral. Don’t shoot from the hip. Lift your gun and aim using the front sight.”

  “The what?”

  “The little thing sticking up at the tip of the palmquell. Center your target on that. Pamela didn’t teach you any of this last night?”

  “We were at a high school. She didn’t want us to draw attention.”

  “Oh. I see her point. People are real jumpy about guns in schools.”

  “People are jumpy about guns anywhere. What if someone sees me?”

  “Now?” Doris glanced around the empty parking lot. Every few minutes a clot of cars gusted past on the boulevard, but the well-placed trees did a good job of screening us from them.

  “Not now. When I’m out at night. Shouldn’t I learn how to shoot discreetly?”

  “First you have to be able to hit something; then we’ll work on discretion.”

  The frost moth landed on my forearm and sank tiny inky teeth into my soul. A trickle of heat slid through me. I shoved the palmquell into my pocket, retrieved my lighter, and bubbled my soul around the moth’s tiny legs, making a lux lucis net on my first try.

  “Don’t kill it,” Doris said, showing a complete lack of appreciation for my new skill. “Scare it off a ways and try again.”

  Irritated, I collapsed the net and flamed the moth. It launched into a tight, skyward spiral. Swapping the lighter for my palmquell, I held the gun at arm’s length, sighted down the top of the barrel, and fired. Nothing hit the moth until it spread its wings and settled into a slow, lazy loop above my head. When I finally nailed a wing with a splotch of lux lucis, the moth didn’t react, its bright blue appendage impervious to the energy.

  “I did it!”

  “As long as the drones come at you in slow motion, you’ll be fine,” Doris said, cutting off my celebration before it began. Her gaze slid past me, and her hand dropped to a single, extra-large knitting needle protruding from her coat pocket. “What happens if a moth feeds on Jamie?”

  “Nothing bad.” He’d said he wouldn’t feed anything, but given his rebellious impulses this morning, wariness compelled me to pivot and check on him.

  Two frost moths, both with wings as large as my steering wheel, coasted to Jamie and settled on his back. Without looking up from the bush he had his head buried in, Jamie pulsed atrum down his body. The evil energy flowed like wet paint from his spine to his toes, saturating him in absolute blackness as dark as the empty sky above us. The frost moths fluttered away. I expected them to circle back for a second attempt at feeding, but they drifted higher, dismissing him.

  I performed my patented head-shake sobriety test, reassured by my lack of dizziness. Jamie had followed through on his promise.

  “See? Nothing.” I checked Doris’s expression. Her hand clutched the knitting needle in a death grip. “No need to poke anyone.” I kept my eye roll to myself.

  “I’d do a lot worse than poke him.” Doris whipped the wooden instrument from her pocket. Ending in a blunt tip coated with a coarse substance like a match, it resembled an obese drumstick until she snapped it in half vertically. The tip split into two sharp hooks and the long length became two arms connected at the base by a hidden rivet.

  “Is that a soul breaker?” I couldn’t take my eyes off Doris, not while she brandished the weapon like a knife. Not when she’d said she’d do a lot worse than poke him. Hooks that sharp would pierce a pooka as easily as a tyv. If she made a move toward Jamie—

  “Yep. I designed it myself.” She smiled, a bare twitch of her mouth. Tension tightened her body, and her grip on the soul breaker never slackened. “You do realize that if you shoot me, it won’t do anything to me, right?”

  I stared in shock at my arms held rigid in front of me, pointing the palmquell at Doris’s chest. Oh crap! Dropping my arms, I took firm rein on my emotions. Jamie wasn’t in danger. Doris wasn’t a threat. And a palmquell wasn’t a real gun.

  Thank God.

  “I, ah . . .” Another purity test loomed in my future when Doris reported this incident to Pamela.

  “You’re jumpy.” Doris snapped the soul breaker back into a single stick and slid it into her coat pocket. “Use those reflexes on the frost moths, and we won’t have a problem.”

  I nodded, my head bobbing too many times, but I couldn’t make it stop. Sucking in air through my nose, I forced my feet to turn away from Doris. Oblivious to my turmoil, Jamie trotted to the next planter box, nosing through the bushes and startling a pair of towhee into flight.

  Stupid pooka bond. It made me crazy while Jamie got to coast along, feeling nothing.

  Three moths approached on lazy spirals and I channeled my frustration into the palmquell, firing lux lucis in a steady stream. One in a dozen shots hit a target.

  “Whoa, there, Rambo. Spraying the whole sky will only wear you out. Slow down, aim, and fire with purpose.”

  I took a deep breath, closed one eye, sighted down the barrel, and fired. The shot went wide. With the same aggravating care, I prepped and fired another shot. Doris jogged around me so she could study my face during the next near miss.

  “Aha! There’s your problem. You’re left-eye dominant and right handed. Close your left eye and try again.”

  I did and put two successive shots through a frost moth’s wings as it plummeted toward me.

  “Did you see that?” A kernel of hope took root in my chest. Maybe I had a chance of defending my region and myself against the drones after all.

  “It’s a start. And Val’s right. You should kill that moth,” Doris said, waving the open handbook in my direction. “There’s plenty more. With the next one, try to shoot it when it’s more than four feet away.”

  I didn’t duplicate the same success with the next moth, but I missed less often. Squeezing my left eye closed caused my cheek to cramp, but when I opened both eyes, my shots became erratic. On a whim, I swapped the palmq
uell to my left hand, closed my right eye, and fired. My shot hit a frost moth five parking spaces away. It flapped and twisted up an invisible air current, and I chased it with seven more shots, every other bolt of lux lucis hitting a wing.

  Doris cheered. “Now we’re getting somewhere!”

  Over the next half hour, my skills improved until I could reliably hit a slow-flying creature the size of a turkey from less than ten feet away. I wouldn’t win any prizes with my marksmanship, but I savored my accomplishment nevertheless.

  As a reward for my improvement, Doris increased the difficulty, insisting I walk in between shots, pacing back and forth across the parking lot and stopping only when a moth flew into range. When I got the hang of that, she made me run circles around her, staying close enough to rescue her from frost moths.

  “Any chance you’re going to help?” I asked as I wiped out my twelfth and thirteenth—or was it my thirteenth and fourteenth?—moths. Doris stood useless next to me, too busy chatting with Val to form a net or even to hold out her lighter and melt the buggers faster.

  “You need the practice more than I do.” Doris took in my glower and gave me a sweet smile. “Besides, learning to deal with the emotional backlash of a moth is part of the training.”

  How much was Brad paying her for this lesson? Maybe I should let him know she didn’t do anything but stand there with her thumb up her—

  I drew a deep breath of cold air into my lungs and squelched my unjustified, moth-fueled anger.

  “Maybe you could”—make yourself useful and—“answer a question for me. When I trap a moth in a net, it doesn’t feel wrong. If you took away its emotional exploitation, it’d be less intrusive than an imp. But when Pamela put her hands in my soul for the purity tests, it felt like . . .”

  “Like a metaphysical Pap smear by an indifferent doctor?”

  I cringed at the analogy but nodded.

  “It’s a bit logical, a bit woo-woo,” Doris said. “You’re built to take out evil creatures, so using your lux lucis to trap a frost moth is natural, and killing it feels right. Having a stranger feel up your soul doesn’t. Or I should say, having this particular stranger feel up your soul rubs you the wrong way. Oh, pipe down, Val. I’m not disrespecting Pamela. I’m saying she and Madison aren’t compatible.” Doris rolled her eyes and tilted Val so we couldn’t see his protests. “That’s the woo-woo part. With the right person, combining souls doesn’t feel wrong at all.” Doris’s exaggerated wink lent the weight of an innuendo to her words.

  Her phone chirped in her pocket, and she pulled it out to read a text, walking away as she did so and cutting short the start of an interesting conversation. I took the opportunity to massage my burning shoulder and bicep. The palmquell weighed less than a pound, but I wasn’t used to holding my arm extended and steady for minutes, let alone hours.

  I tugged my phone from my pocket and stared at the display. Make that hour, singular. At this rate, my arm would fall off before tonight’s drone hunt, saving me another embarrassing evening with the inspector.

  Sacrificing an arm was almost worth it.

  Doris took pity on me. “Let’s take a break from the palmquell and get you proficient at netting while moving.”

  “Why?”

  “The idea is to hone your muscle memory. Building a net while your brain is partially occupied with keeping you from falling on your face will speed up the process. Do you remember the first thing I ever taught you?”

  “How to kill an imp? Yeah.” Duh.

  “Not that; what I told you about lux lucis.”

  I thought back to our first training session. It’d been only a few weeks earlier, but with everything that had transpired since, it felt like half a lifetime ago. “You said to use it every chance I get.”

  “Exactly. I meant it, too. You’ve had a busy start to your career, and it’s kept you on your toes, but that’s not enough. If you’re going to stay on top of your region, you have a lot of catching up to do as an enforcer. Most people in your position have had years to perfect their skills, and their use of lux lucis is automatic. You’re going to have to work harder to get there faster. So let’s see you jog and net. And be careful not to light yourself on fire.”

  Words to live by.

  I trotted around the parking lot, floundering to make a net, my steps clumsy and my lux lucis pulsing with frustrating erraticism in my palm. Jamie chased me for a while before loping off, tongue lolling. At least one of us was enjoying themselves.

  By the time I had control of a peach-size net, I had a stitch in my side and sweat beading my upper lip. Snaring a moth, I slowed to a walk to kill it before looking for my next victim. If I’d known I was going to be running a marathon, I would have worn sneakers. At least my thick socks prevented fresh blisters from forming on my heels.

  “Most of the moths are in the back now,” I said, returning to where Doris sat on a bench.

  “Why don’t you do laps?” She looped her finger through the air to indicate the entire center.

  Scowling, I shoved back into a jog and angled through the wintry center courtyard separating the two halves of the complex, exiting onto the back patio rather than taking the long way around. Frog croaks and red-winged blackbird warbles cut short at the sound of my pounding steps, and at least twenty moths, each as large as a hawk, fluttered from the frost-limned marsh grasses.

  Turning right without slowing, I bubbled a net on my palm on my sixth attempt, just in time to snare three moths at once. A surge of heat flared through me as three mouths fastened on my soul, and my eyes watered from the bluster of cold air stirred by their wings. Whipping the lighter back and forth through their bodies, I urged them toward a faster death, then blinked away tears and examined my surroundings. The other moths stalked me, coasting closer on silent wings.

  Jamie rounded the corner, an imp riding his shoulders. Tiny dark claws pierced the pooka’s hide, and the imp’s round face lifted to the sky as if it could feel wind through its dense atrum body. I pulsed lux lucis into my palm, meaning to brighten my hand, but a net swelled instead. Jamie veered wide, but the imp couldn’t resist the glowing ball of light, and it leapt onto my palm, disappearing into the net. Startled, I released the lux lucis. Part of me expected to see the imp sitting in my hand, but my palm was empty. The imp had vanished without even a trace of explosive glitter.

  I double-checked the remaining moths, flashing the lighter’s flame at the closest to scare them off before turning to Jamie. “Where did the imp come from? Show me.”

  Tail drooping, Jamie led the way to the opposite end of the patio. A smear of atrum spilled from a bar’s fenced-in patio outward, the puddle roughly the size of two tables. Whatever had left the evil stain had long since moved on. Given the location, I suspected the source had been the predictable combination of alcohol and humans. A fight, physical or verbal, might have been enough to produce this atrum.

  “Please clean it up.” I’d seen Jamie clear three times as much atrum with a single paw’s blast of lux lucis. Trying to sound casual, I added, “Go ahead and wipe out any other traces of atrum you encounter, too.”

  Jamie glanced from the atrum to me, then back the way we’d come.

  He wouldn’t.

  “Jamie.” I sank a warning into the two syllables.

  His ears twitched, but he didn’t look back at me. Slowly, he turned and walked away.

  “Jamie!”

  Soul spiking with aggravation, Jamie tucked his tail and loped out of sight around the corner.

  I took two steps after him, then jerked to a stop. Even if I could catch up to a Great Dane on foot—and I couldn’t—then what? Grab him by his vest and drag him back here? Rub his pooka nose in the atrum? I couldn’t force him to clean it if he didn’t want to. Strong-arming him would accomplish nothing but pissing us both off.

  This was the crux of the problem with my responsibilities as a pooka rearer: I couldn’t enforce anything. In every form, Jamie equaled or outstripped me in mas
s, and he possessed enough atrum to win a head-to-head fight against three of me. He was smart and naïve, powerful and impressionable. I’d fractured the delicate framework of my authority last night, or so it seemed, but according to Pamela, it’d been built on quicksand anyway. Jamie’s rebellion stemmed directly from my leniency.

  Now what? Where was Pamela and her advice when I really needed it?

  Squatting, I rolled lux lucis off my fingertips. The white energy ate through a swath of atrum, leaving behind clean charcoal-colored concrete. Shifting, I repeated the maneuver twice more to erase the atrum completely, then walked to the marsh’s edge and recharged from the sturdy trunk of a cottonwood.

  I forgot about the frost moths until frozen wings raked through my chest and stomach, constricting the air in my lungs. Heat blossomed in its wake, overpowered by ice again when a second, then a third, fourth, and fifth moth landed on my head and shoulders. More swarmed, diving to land on my thighs and ankles, tiny mouths fastening on my soul. Sweat broke across my back and scalp, and I formed a hasty net, swiping it down my body and capturing four moths before scaring off the rest with the lighter.

  Melting four moths at once took time, and I paced the patio to evade the others, arguing with Jamie in my head. By the time the moths puffed to snow, my hands were sweating inside my gloves and I’d verbally eviscerated Jamie fifteen different ways.

  “Who wants to die next?” I asked the moths, raising my arms wide.

  The drove of moths descended.

  Wiping out the entire flock kept me occupied for twenty minutes, but did Doris come check to make sure I hadn’t fallen in the marsh and drowned? No. Did she worry I might need help? Of course not. She languished on her sun-warmed bench with her new best friend, Val. Two useless lumps. They were perfect for each other, swapping old war stories and getting off on dragging the new girl through ridiculous, pointless tests. Training should involve instruction. If all Doris wanted to do was sit on her ass soaking up the morning sun, she could have at least let me sleep in.

  When the last frost moth died, I stomped across the patio hard enough to knock mud from my boots, kicking a bolted-down metal table in passing for the hell of it. Jamie hadn’t shown his face again, either, which was just as well. I’d rather wait until he resumed human form and I had him somewhere captive, like in the car, before giving him the reaming he deserved.