by Tanya Huff
“And you’d know,” Katie muttered.
“No one told me that’s what marshmallows were made of.”
“Gabi said it took the girls a week to come down.”
Probably an exaggeration although Jack wouldn’t guarantee it. “Old news.”
“I can’t see why the Pixies would care about a broken freezer.”
Jack shrugged. “Depends what’s in it. Tell Allie I’m not going to be home for supper, okay?”
* * *
It was dark and snowing lightly by the time Jack got to Lethbridge.
“Turn left here,” he muttered circling the building. “And here. And here. And here. You have reached your destination. Unless there’s another freezer in Alberta where at least one Frost Giant has gone to ground.” Even from a hundred meters up, he could smell the UnderRealm in the familiar white/blue ice that covered the west end of the building and spilled over the edge of the loading dock. White/blue ice that smelled of the UnderRealm? That meant Frost Giant. He assumed the building’s doors were behind the ice.
All the parking lot lights were on and the crowd around the doors suggested they hadn’t given up on getting in, even if nothing they’d tried so far had worked. Nothing they could get their hands on anyway. The military might have the firepower, but since all Jack knew about the military came from American movies and television, maybe not. He’d never seen a movie about the Canadian military, and he doubted the Americans would lend out either Jeremy Renner or their giant robots to get into a freezer.
If Charlie were here, she’d Sing and the men with the blowtorches and the men with the chainsaws and the men with the axes and the men with the clipboards would suddenly realize there were places they’d rather be.
But Charlie wasn’t here. Even if she was, she’d be on the ground because she wouldn’t have accepted a ride.
And he’d ruined her life.
His stomach growled. Allie had him so well trained he hadn’t even considered eating the men in his way, but it would certainly simplify things.
If he were any kind of a sorcerer, if he were the sorcerer the family—the world—needed, he could put these men to sleep, or create an illusion so real they’d believe it, or stop time long enough to get in and out and save the day. But he wasn’t that kind of a sorcerer, or any kind of a sorcerer really, so he fell back on what he knew.
A car blew up on the far side of the parking lot.
The men with the clipboards turned at the sound, and after a short discussion, one walked briskly around the corner of the building. He ran back.
Confused by the amount of talking—Humans were usually a lot more attached to their cars—Jack blew up an SUV and a pickup truck. Roar of sound. Pillars of flame. Full-on movie special effects.
That got everyone’s attention. The area around the ice emptied of witnesses.
He landed as gently as he could, but the asphalt cracked beneath him. Wings in, head down, careful to stay behind the building, he examined the ice. The axes had etched thin lines, evidence that in a hundred years or so the men wielding iron would actually reach the doors. The chainsaws had done more damage, but from the number of broken chains tossed aside, the ice stood a good chance of winning by attrition. The blowtorches had melted deep grooves. As Jack watched, the ice filled them in.
He took a step back, drew in a deep breath, and flamed. Dragons and Frost Giants were natural enemies. The ice didn’t melt, it vaporized.
As a patch of the steel door began to scorch, one of the tanks fueling the blowtorches exploded. Most of the shrapnel melted in the superheated air, but a sudden pain in his left shoulder snapped Jack’s teeth together as instinct took over before he could gasp. The flame cut off.
Inhaling while flaming was fatal; his mother had told him that when he first started to smoke. Fatal, and messy.
The wound was minor; the shard had barely penetrated the scale. He touched it with his tongue, checked for poison out of habit, and ignored it to examine the building. The door was clear, so Jack hooked a claw under the handle and pulled it open.
Off was like open.
He changed to skin to walk into the building, stumbled, and remembered, as blood dribbled down his arm, that the injury wasn’t proportional to the change and an eight-centimeter cut at twenty-meters tall was an entirely different matter at just under two meters. Plus, it hurt. A lot.
Spine twisted to try and get a better look the cut, he felt rather than saw the ice spear whistle through the space his head had recently vacated. For another heartbeat he stood silhouetted in the doorway like an idiot with a death wish, then dove to the right as the second spear passed. He froze, tucked into the deep shadow at the base of the wall, biting back an adrenaline-fueled snicker. Seriously? Froze?
The freezer was huge, but except for the light spilling through the door, it was also dark. It never got truly dark on the ice fields and his uncles had told him that Frost Giants had terrible night sight. Dragons, however, saw almost as well at night as they did during the day. The moment the giant stuck a snowball out from behind a hanging half of frozen cow, he’d see it. On the other hand, while his internal temperature would keep him comfortable for a while, sustained cold was not a dragon’s friend. When he’d pointed that out, his first year with Allie and Graham, Graham had pointed out in turn that Alberta winters were no one’s friend. The giants, however, could stay in the freezer indefinitely. Or until they needed to eat. Jack had no idea what Frost Giants ate, but if it was . . .
The water vapor in the air five centimeters above the floor froze solid. If the wave hadn’t started back in the shadows and moved in a glittering curve toward the door, it would’ve caught him. Trapped him. Jack jumped for a tabletop, knocked a digital scale flying, and flattened as another ice spear smashed against the wall.
“Hey! Dial it back! I come in peace! I know the Courts screwed you over. You’d have never come through, here and now, had it been your choice. I’m here to help!”
“Who are you to help us, Dragon Lord?” The words cracked and groaned like ice breaking up in the spring. Sirens spoke the language seduction required, the Courts needed to be understood when they yelled, “I’m open over here!” But the Frost Giants refused to speak any language other than their own with such vehemence they made Quebec’s language police look like mall cops. Since they never left the ice fields, that wasn’t usually a problem. Fortunately, understanding language was a Dragon Lord thing.
“We talk, they listen,” had been Uncle Viktor’s explanation.
“Why not allow prey to try and talk their way free?” Uncle Adam had said, after Uncle Viktor had gone off to lick his wounds. “They have no other means of defense.”
Jack sighed. His lips were already chapped from the flaming, but the Frost Giants would have no idea who Jack Archibald—turned out it was his father’s father’s name—Gale was when he was home. His actual name, his dragon name, involved ten minutes of lineage and a few sounds the Human mouth wasn’t designed to make. It hurt, and he licked away blood when he finally finished.
“Highness?”
Something about the voice, the fear and relief combined, made Jack think of his cousin Penny. Who was twelve.
Two moving glimmers of white/blue slid between the rows of meat about halfway down the freezer. The taller was no more than four meters tall, if that, height mostly torso over short, thick legs. A teenager by Frost Giant reckoning. The second giant was half a meter shorter. Half a meter younger.
“Look, I can see you, you can’t see me, so I’m going to turn the light on to even things up, okay?” Straightening, Jack patted the wall until he found a switch.
“It is true! You are a sorcerer!”
Jack looked at the light switch and squinted at the two Frost Giants who stared at him from much closer than he’d expected. As he was a sorcerer, and as both of them gripped three-meter shafts o
f ice, he decided to skip the lecture on technology. “So I’m guessing a couple of butt munches from the Courts said land of ice and snow, have a great time, something to brag about, yadda yadda, created a gate, and closed it after you went through. Am I right?”
“I do not know this yadda,” said the taller.
“Not important,” Jack sighed.
“The Courts told us lies,” said the other, clutching the ice spear like a pointy security blanket.
“They promised adventure.”
“Promised enjoyment.”
“But there was only warmth until we found this shelter.”
“Now we are trapped and the meat has died.”
“Yeah, well, you’d love this place in February.” Jack jumped off the table, skidded a bit, and slapped half a cow. “And the meat was dead when it got here.”
“Not that meat.” The taller straightened and gestured with one long, angular arm, fingertips drawing frost lines in the air. “That meat.”
A middle-aged man stared out of a block of ice, dark eyes narrowed, brows drawn in, mouth open. He wore a puffy red parka and a toque with the name of the packing plant knit into it. He looked like he originally came from somewhere warm, and he’d died angry not afraid.
“The meat ran at us to make us leave,” the taller explained.
And they’d stopped it. Him. Jack didn’t blame them. He blamed the Courts.
“You are meat, Dragon Prince. Is he yours?”
“Yes. He’s mine.” Not when he lived, but the Courts wouldn’t have sent the Frost Giants through if he hadn’t told them about the asteroid.
“We are off the ice.” The shorter one looked panicked. “You may claim . . .” Water debt was as close as the translation came although that wasn’t quite what it meant.
“I don’t want one of your body parts.” Beginning to feel the cold through the soles of his feet, Jack moved toward the door. “If we return to the gate, to where the gate was, I can send you home.”
“We go into the warmth?” The taller grabbed for the shorter one’s arm and shuffled back between the swinging beef. “No.”
“It’s night now. Less warmth and a little snow.”
“Snow.” The shorter giant planted its feet and they stopped moving. From where Jack stood, it looked as if its feet were frozen to the floor. “If it is cold enough for snow, we will not be harmed.”
“We will not be harmed by the warm.” Jack thought the expression the taller turned his way was a frown, although given the glittering planes and angles of the Frost Giant’s face, it was hard to tell for sure. “Outside this shelter you will be stronger. I do not trust you. Why should we trust you, Dragon Prince?”
“You shouldn’t.” Not that they’d believe him if he said they should. “But I don’t want you here, and if I open the gate you came through, you’ll end up where you left from.”
The shorter giant’s lipless mouth moved, working that through. “We will go home?”
“You will.”
“The one we calved from will be angry.”
“Dude, I have family problems of my own.” Out over the threshold, he could hear approaching sirens. “And other problems coming in fast. Let’s go. Stay unseen. I’ll follow in the air.”
The taller’s suspicions left him unconvinced. The shorter really wanted to go home. Their argument sounded like a Zamboni drag race, and Jack had started to worry he might have to blow up another car when they pushed past him—the push was totally unnecessary, he would’ve moved—and raced across the parking lot to the darkness beyond. In spite of the stumpy legs, they could really boot it.
The Courts had opened the gate barely half a kilometer away from the plant within a triangle formed by two hotels and a church. They’d wanted the giants seen and that meant they wanted Jack and/or the Gales to know about it.
“Dirtbags.” Snow steamed as Jack landed. Which is when he realized he had no idea of how to open a gate. He’d opened a gate to save Charlie’s life, but that had been need more than sorcery and as much as he needed to get these guys home before someone with a camera left the marshmallow roast on the other side of the meat packing plant, it wouldn’t be enough.
Because he was useless.
He could feel the form of the gate, but he had no idea of what sorcery the Courts had used to open it.
“This is the place. Right here. This. Is this not the place?”
The taller smacked the shorter on the back of the head. “This is the place. Dragon Prince?”
“Give me a minute.” Charlie could open it. Charlie had disappeared out of his room without even a potted plant. But Charlie was a G . . . “I’m an idiot.”
The shorter giggled. Seemed that had translated just fine.
“Get ready, I’m a little short on supplies so you’ll only have until the smoke dissipates.” Jack changed, breathed out a cloud of smoke, and formed it into the charm Allie used to open things—pickle bottles, CD cases, and the bag inside cereal boxes for the most part, but the theory was sound. Gales used the charm to open things. He was a Gale. He had a thing he needed to open. “World’s most complicated smoke ring,” he muttered, tugging the outer swoop into a fuller curve. When it was right—mostly right—he tossed it into the imprint of the gate. The air filled with the scent of burnt butter, and the gate opened. “Go!”
To his surprise, they went. Way too trusting. “And stop listening to the Courts,” he yelled after them, “they’re dicks!”
Then the giants were gone, and the smoke was gone, and only an ice slick remained on the pavement. From the blue/white gleam under the streetlights, Jack had a feeling it was permanent.
But, hey, it was Alberta. Who’d notice?
Kiren blinked up at the sky half expecting to see the asteroid dominating the stars, blazing so brightly familiar constellations had ceded their positions to the harbinger of death.
“Harbinger of death?” Apparently, when exhausted, the writers at FOX News provided her mental voice. She rummaged a half-eaten power bar out of the bottom of her tote, picked a bit of tissue off the damp end, and wondered what day it was while she chewed. Thursday? Friday? If it was actually still Wednesday, then the video conference with Houston and Washington must’ve created a small black hole. That was the only possible explanation for the time dilation. Too bad a few of the politicians hadn’t been sucked into it.
The problem with NASA was that too many of the people who worked there were capable of putting two and two together and getting pi divided by the number of liters in a gallon minus three.
Although it sounded illogical, it turned out that the more people who put the pieces together and came to the correct conclusion, the more people there were who subsequently needed to be told.
She’d been running simulations for . . . well, it probably only felt like years. Most of them were for fellow scientists and she’d already started getting data back. One, however, had been stripped down to the “rock hits planet, planet goes boom, almost everyone dies” level, and even after that there’d been an extensive argument over both boom and almost everyone. Dr. Adeyemi had been driven to banging her head against the conference table.
Here and now, in the star-strewn sky over JPL, the asteroid was not visible.
The stars meant she’d missed the last bus to the east parking lot again—although as usual would be the more accurate observation. Her ass ached, her eyes burned, her skin felt like it didn’t quite fit her body, but on the bright side, when . . . no, if the asteroid did finally hit, she’d welcome the chance to fall over.
The sole of her right shoe dragged against the asphalt, the rubber shrieking in protest, the sound eaten up by all the empty space around her. Even though she knew there were half a dozen engineers in the Assembly Facility . . .
“On the one hand, we might be going the way of the dinosaurs.” Howard grinned at
her. “On the other hand, they’re letting us play with the really cool toys.”
...she felt like the only person alive. Wall-E, not Will Smith, doing her job at the end of all . . .
Hoofbeats?
Kiren stopped under a lamppost and squinted in the direction of the Angeles National Forest. There were deer in the forest, there were occasionally deer in the parking lots, but as far as she knew, there’d never been deer actually inside the perimeter fence. It had been specifically built high enough to keep them out.
The sound was definitely coming from this side of the fence.
The banging two coconuts together sound of hooves on pavement.
Coming closer.
With no actual idea of how a running deer would sound, Kiren didn’t think that sounded like deer. It was too . . . purposeful. This was an animal running with intent. This was . . .
A unicorn.
Large and muscular, it looked like a draft horse crossed with a narwhal, two species even Kiren—an exhausted non-biologist—knew were incompatible. It gleamed in the shadows between the streetlights, muscles moving fluidly beneath its coat. Silver-gray hooves struck sparks from the ground—impossible, but unicorn, so Kiren let it go—and its mane and tail both flowed and rippled so perfectly she had to remind herself it wasn’t CGI.
The ivory, spiraled horn had surprisingly deep, dark grooves.
As she watched, too tired to do anything more than stand and wonder if the power bar had been a little too far past its best before date, the unicorn’s nostrils flared—they were impressively red on the inside—and it pivoted on one front hoof, turning almost a full ninety degrees from its original path and heading directly toward her.
“Sweetheart, given the traditional criteria, you’re way too late for . . . um . . .” Heart racing, sweat rolling down her back, her hindbrain took over and spun her behind the lamppost as the unicorn passed. She could feel the impact of each hoof with the ground. Smell salt and something sour that coated the roof of her mouth. Hear the damp snort that ended each breath. See that the shadows on the horn were stains, red-brown not black.
