I should cleanse the hounds immediately. With them pinned, it would be a relatively easy task, but it’d take time. I wasn’t going to give Jamie that much of a head start.
Any other day, netting two hounds at once would have induced a triumphant high, especially with the deluge of adrenaline bleeding from my tense muscles, but I kept replaying Jamie’s contemptuous expression and abandonment. How had we gone from getting along so well to him hating me? Could we recover from this?
I shoved through the undergrowth after him, my steps as heavy as my heart. Jamie’s trail proved easy to follow. If his hoof-size tracks in the mud had somehow been camouflaged, the slime trail of atrum would have been impossible to miss. I left the dark energy alone and concentrated on speed, fully aware that I’d catch Jamie only if he let me. What I’d do with him then, I wasn’t sure, but I couldn’t let his behavior stand. Playing with imps, protecting drones, besmirching Alex and then me with atrum, threatening Alex’s life, forsaking me to hounds, actively spreading evil through my region—each time he acted out, he escalated. At this rate, it wouldn’t be long before he embraced evil outright and wholeheartedly. When that happened, Niko would be called in, and with Pamela at his side, they’d kill Jamie.
I bent over and dry-heaved, hands braced to my knees.
As long as we’re still bonded, there’s still hope, I told myself. I didn’t know if it was true, but it helped me push back into action. I didn’t doubt we were still bonded, either. If my physical reaction to the thought of Jamie being harmed wasn’t proof enough, my urge to wrap him in a hug and never let go—despite everything he’d done—confirmed the bond still manipulated my thoughts.
Jamie’s trail angled up the hill to the road that circled the park. I clawed up the muddy bank and stood on the sidewalk, chest heaving. Atrum and muddy footprints led straight to the pavement, then vanished. I spun in a slow circle, scrutinizing the deserted sidewalk and neighborhood streets. No dogs barked. No imps rushed from the manicured lawns. No people stood on their front porches, convenient witnesses to point out the direction Jamie had gone.
He’d disappeared as surely as if he’d flown away.
I waited until I’d returned to the netted hounds before calling Brad. I’d put it off far too long already. In his capacity as warden, Brad had the ability to feel the movement of lux lucis and atrum in his region. He’d be able to help me track Jamie, but I’d have to first admit to losing control of the pooka.
“What’s going on?” Brad demanded. “I’m getting some weird readings.”
“I netted a pair of hounds. Corgis.” Delaying wouldn’t make this any easier, but I couldn’t bring myself to lead with my failure.
“Hounds? Since when did hounds get into our region?”
His words confirmed my suspicion. “They were likely pooka made.”
“Pooka made? What was he—” Brad cut himself off with a strangled sound, then much quieter asked, “Madison? You don’t sound— Tell me what happened.”
“Jamie and I had a fight. He ran off, apparently made the hounds, and mucked up the area with a lot of atrum.” The words tumbled out fast, as if I could lessen their meaning by rushing through them.
“Where is the pooka now?”
“Gone.” I braced for his explosion.
Silence reigned so pure I could hear a faint conversation between Rose and Pamela about their lunch plans in the background. I lifted the phone from my ear, preparing for the tsunami after the calm.
“Send me a picture of you next to the hounds. In Primordium.”
His calm, matter-of-fact tone and the absence of any candy-laced profanity worried me far more than a full-blown berating.
“Me and the hounds? Like some disgusting hunting picture?”
“Something like that.”
Frowning, I crouched beside the hounds, near their hind ends. Even with the net holding them, I didn’t want to tempt fate by sitting with my back to their muzzles. Activating the Primordium picture app, I snapped a selfie of the three of us and sent it to Brad.
“You’ve got it.”
Brad’s silence sat heavy against my ear, and if I hadn’t been straining so hard to hear something—anything—to clue me in to his thoughts, I would have missed his soft, relieved sigh. The picture combined with the sigh cleared up my confusion; Brad had feared the worst: that Jamie had tainted my soul. Asking me to send a picture with the hounds was his equivalent of getting my picture beside today’s dated newspaper: He’d made sure I had sent a current image of my soul.
“I’m still me. I’m just—” I heard the bewilderment in my voice and closed my mouth. I didn’t want to cry while on the phone with my boss. I didn’t want to cry at all. I wanted to be mad. I wanted to get Jamie back and teach him how to be a good pooka and make everything normal between us again.
I covered the microphone with my finger and cleared my throat before saying, “If you felt the anomalies in the park, can you point me in Jamie’s direction?” There. I had sounded professional and composed.
“Whatever the pooka was doing, he stopped before you called. I can’t sense him now.”
“You can’t? But—”
“It’s a good thing, Madison. It means he’s not actively using atrum.” Brad spoke with uncharacteristic calm.
My fingers clenched on the phone and I rubbed my temple with my opposite hand. Dried mud flaked off my fingertips, gritty against my sweat-damp forehead.
“How am I supposed to find Jamie?” I asked in a voice too small and distant to be mine.
“You need to take care of the hounds.”
“But . . .”
“Cleanse the hounds. Finish the frost moths. The pooka might be back by then.”
“Do you think so?”
“I think you’ll feel better—we’ll both feel better—if you eliminate the threats we can see.”
It wasn’t the assurance I wanted, but it had to do.
I hung up and stuffed the phone in my pocket. A pair of cyclists cruised by on the trail above me, out of sight but within hearing range. Birds chirped to each other, growing bolder now that I’d stopped crashing around their territory. Jamie didn’t materialize.
Pivoting on the ball of my foot, I faced the hounds.
“You don’t know it, but you want me to do this,” I said, talking to work my nerve up. The hounds growled, low and menacing. “Trust me, you’ll thank me when I’m done.”
I planted a hand on each of their flanks and gushed lux lucis from my palms. Both hounds jumped, yipping when the net shifted against their fur. Yips became snarls and growls, drool dripping from exposed fangs, eyes wild with fear and evil intent. Observing them revived some of my anger. Nothing I did physically hurt the corgis, but all their atrum-skewed instincts demanded they attack and kill me, and holding still while I extinguished the dark energy coating their souls was akin to torture for them. Jamie would answer for this, and I’d make him see his behavior for the cruelty it was.
In theory, it might have been faster to transform the hounds one at a time, but it would have been disastrous. Trapped up against a normal dog, a hound would attack. It wouldn’t remember that the dog next to it was its best friend and playmate. It would sense weakness and go for the jugular.
If the hounds had been imps or even vervet, they would have exploded into harmless glitter after the first three seconds of my assault. But they weren’t insubstantial creatures, and my soul’s energy fell into the hounds as if into a void. I stopped when dizziness tipped me onto my butt. After recharging from nearby trees, I returned to the hounds and repeated the process. Their atrum clung so thick and dense that I began to worry it’d never relent against my onslaught. Finally, the fur around my fingers turned gray, then white, and ever so slowly, shimmering lux lucis spread across the dogs’ flanks. I pushed the evil energy away from my hands in twin tides so their muzzles and toes were the last to lose flecks of black. Easing back, I continued to ply the corgis with lux lucis until I met a slight resistan
ce.
The dogs had long since quieted, and when I let go of them, they squirmed to peer over their shoulders at me, tongues nervously licking their noses. I ran my fingers through their thick fur, and two tails wagged tentatively.
“See. I told you I was on your side.”
I checked their necks, dismayed to find them both without a collar. It could have been Jamie’s doing or they could have escaped a backyard. I doubted they’d been abandoned. They were both too fat and, now that atrum no longer controlled their impulses, too friendly.
I started to lift the net, then thought better of it. If I let them loose, they might run off, and not necessarily straight home. I needed some way of leashing them. While I contemplated my next course of action, I stroked their foreheads. The one on the left lifted its head and laid it across the shoulders of the one on the right, and both dogs released contented sighs. Watching them, I realized I didn’t need two leashes. As long as I kept one corgi with me, the other was sure to remain close. Unclipping the sheathed knife from my belt, I shoved it in my bulging jacket pocket, then unthreaded my belt. The corgi nearest me meekly allowed me to twine the leather around its neck, proving it had had plenty of socialization in its life. Sliding a hand under the net to get a better grasp on the makeshift leash, I freed the dogs.
They stood and wagged bushy tails, rushing to sniff my feet and knees and hands. After doling out more pets, I straightened and headed for the nearest tree, the net draped over my shoulder. The leashed corgi trotted at my side. The unleashed corgi followed close behind.
When I reached the first frost moth, I tethered the end of the makeshift leash under a rock. Navigating the uneven terrain was difficult enough while holding a lighter and frost moths without adding corgis underfoot. Fortunately, the dogs’ earlier activities seemed to have tired them, and they flopped down together to wait while I meandered back and forth through the burned landscape, killing the remaining moths. I took my time, scanning constantly for Jamie, but eventually I ran out of frost moths and my excuse to linger.
A fleeting hope that I’d find the pooka at the car added energy to my flagging steps, but I slowed again when the Civic swung into sight, alone in the vacant lot. I loaded the corgis into the backseat and stowed the net in the trunk, then idly practiced shooting trees and signs and fence posts with the palmquell, trying not to think too hard about how desperately I wanted Jamie to bound out of the nearest thicket.
When the tinny notes of “Hail to the Chief” rang from my jacket, I almost sprained my pinkie in my haste to retrieve the phone.
“Did you find him?” I blurted out.
“No. Where are you?”
My shoulders slumped and I dropped to sit against the Civic’s bumper. “At the park.”
“And the hounds?”
“Collarless corgis. They’re in the car.” I peeked through the windshield. The dogs had fallen asleep on top of each other.
“Take them to the shelter and come to the office.”
“Now? What about Jamie?”
“We’ll keep an eye out, but we can’t wait much longer. The sjel tyv will return tonight and you need to be ready.”
I blinked to normal sight and turned to face west. The sun sat an inch from the horizon, a dull glow behind thick clouds. I’d been at the park for hours. I didn’t need Brad to spell it out for me: If Jamie hadn’t returned already, he wasn’t going to.
“Okay. I’m on my way.” The words choked me.
I hung up and slumped over my knees. The clouds opened up, releasing a torrent of freezing rain. Tilting my head back, I let it wash over my face, then shoved to my feet. I gave the park one last look. Jamie was somewhere out there, getting rained on, with no shelter to rely on. He’d been the one to make the decision to tear off on his own, and he could have been up to untold evil, but as I got into the car and drove away, I couldn’t shake the gut-wrenching sensation that I was giving up on him.
“I will find you, pooka of mine,” I promised. I wouldn’t abandon him, and I wouldn’t let him abandon me.
Halfway to the shelter, driving fifty miles per hour down the four-lane road, my heart tried to burst through my sternum. It jackhammered against my ribs, frantic and sudden, stealing my breath and yanking my awareness inward. Terror flooded my system, chased by a cold sweat. I couldn’t catch my breath. I couldn’t even pinpoint the source of my blind panic. It simply was—omnipresent and overwhelming.
The honk of a car horn jerked my attention back to the road. Gripping the steering wheel with trembling fists, I struggled to makes sense of the lines, the lights, the traffic. My vision darkened, tunneling. I jerked the car to the shoulder and screeched to a stop amid a spate of blaring horns.
My hands trembled when I pressed my palms over my frenzied heart. My rib cage bounced in shallow breaths barren of oxygen. I forced myself to inhale and hold it, first for a single second, then for two seconds on the next breath, until I stopped hyperventilating. Something warm and wet splashed against my hands. I stared at the clear liquid on my shaking palm, then patted my face. Tears dripped off my chin.
I blinked to Primordium. Nothing evil disturbed the interior or exterior of the car. The corgis were still corgis. My soul remained unblemished. I craned over the dash to check the roof. Nothing.
Traffic blasted past close enough to touch, each car’s passing rocking the Civic on its shocks. I snapped myself free of the belt and twisted backward, banging my head on the ceiling and my knee against the center console. The moment I squared off with the general direction of Roseville, my panic receded. Clutching the headrest, I squinted through the back window at a house with the misfortune of being located a driveway’s length from this busy road. In my head, I saw much farther, all the way back to my region. All the way back to Jamie, because every fiber of my being screamed that he waited at the other end of this invisible line.
The moment I acknowledged it, the tether became a tangible sensation. It hooked to the base of my brain, sending pulses to my heart and head, and it stretched out toward Jamie, so tight it thrummed with tension.
I’d driven outside of the tether’s range. I hadn’t even considered the possibility. I needed to get back, get close to Jamie. I needed to—
The tether tugged against my brain shaft, moving parts of me never meant to be touched. I scrambled over the center console, flopped into the passenger seat, and flung the door open in time to vomit in the dirt. I remained braced in the open door, eyes locked on a piece of glass embedded in the soil, letting the fresh air and gentle rain wash over me until my stomach ceased sloshing.
Struggling, I righted myself in the passenger seat and located a water bottle. After swishing and spitting, I closed the door. The corgis whined, but I couldn’t work up the energy to soothe them. Belatedly, I activated the flashers and listened to the rhythmic click timed with the lights.
Inhaling deeply, I rested a hand on my chest to confirm my slowing heartbeat. Jamie must have closed the distance between us.
Or the link had snapped.
Frantic, I probed my brain for the feel of the tether, encountering nothing. It had disappeared as if it had never existed.
With shaking fingers, I unhooked Val and opened him. Before I could say a word, text flowed across his page, the letters so slanted and jagged that I had trouble reading them.
This is beyond the bleed! We’re not going to take this, not from that soggy, good-for-nothing, two-toned abomination!
I partially closed him, flipping him over so I could check his cover. Dirt and ash flaked off in my lap, and several long scratches cut into the leather, but all his injuries appeared shallow enough to be buffed out with a good polish.
Turning him back over, I asked, “Val, are you okay?”
Scourge of the armpit of five-day-dead roadkill! That’s what that pooka is!
Ah. Straight to the point, then. “Did I— Do you know what just happened?”
Betrayal.
The word splintered my heart, inflati
ng spikes of guilt through my lungs. “I didn’t. I swear. I’m going back for him.”
You should never have trusted that pooka. Never bonded him. You let him too close and he stabbed you in the back, Val continued without a pause.
Of course. Val saw everything in black and white, and despite his dual nature, Jamie fell squarely on the black side in Val’s eyes. Unfortunately, it wasn’t so cut and dry. Jamie’s behavior today had been atrocious, but he hadn’t acted in a vacuum. He hadn’t deserved to be left behind, even if he’d abandoned me first. Damn it! Did this snarl of emotions mean the bond remained in place or merely that I had a conscience?
I told you he was trouble. I told you he’d tear you to confetti. He’s a despicable, deplorable, loathsome, scum-breathing bête noire!
“Okay. I get it. You don’t like Jamie. But what about me? What about—”
Pamela is going to be extremely disappointed. She told you what to do. She told you how to take charge. And you blew it. You were weak and useless.
With each word, my insides contracted, squeezing into a ball of misery. His text mirrored the dark voice of my conscience, and fresh tears lodged in my throat.
Now she’ll think I’m a horrible handbook. Any respect Pamela had for me is shot. All because of that skin-shifting, evil-soaked bugbear. Maybe if you talk to Pamela, you can convince her I was blameless. I couldn’t—
I gently shut Val, slid him into his strap, and closed my eyes, reaching for Jamie and the tether. The roar of vehicles rushing past, the rock of the wind-blasted car, and the steady tick of the flashers all droned together, weaving a shroud of numbness that saturated my mind.
Maybe the bond is just dormant again, I reasoned. Since day one, it’d manipulated my emotions, but up until a few minutes ago, I’d never sensed the metaphysical link.
I tried to take solace in the thought, but it didn’t stick.
I called Brad and explained my panic attack, listening to my own voice as if it were a stranger’s.
A Fistful of Frost Page 23
