The Darkest Frost: Vol 2 of a 2-part serial (TDF, #2)

by Tanya Holmes

  He watched with steady eyes as I gasped at the feel of him. “It’s me, D. And I remember everything.” He shifted, rubbing up against my clit. “This is how it was between us. Every. Damn. Time. You think I could ever forget that?”

  I opened my mouth—in protest? In surrender? I wasn’t exactly sure, but before I could say anything, he set a finger across my lips, gently tracing the outline, making the sensitive skin there tingle.

  “Days ago,” he breathed, “I awoke in a room much like this, bewildered and aching for you, and I’ve been aching for you ever since.” He dropped his hand to my breast and covered it possessively, circling his thumb around my nipple until he’d worried it into a rigid peak. “What I said back at the house still stands. The truth is here, in my eyes. So the next time you go looking for something in them, don’t be surprised when you find yourself there. ‘Cause that’s where you’ve been all along.” His fierce gaze swept over me once more. “I fucking love you. Don’t ever doubt that.”

  He slammed his mouth over mine in a kiss that was so fiery hot, I lost all semblance of my surroundings. The alarms. The wind. The guards banging on the door. The thunder and lighting—all the chaos around us fell away, and it was just Ian and me, clinging, breathing, and longing.

  A tortured groan thundered in his chest as he snatched me closer. Kissing me thoroughly, he staked his claim, reminding me of what we had, and who I belonged to. But just as quickly, he released me and stepped back, leaving me swaying like a single blade of grass in an empty field.

  “You asked me for a sign,” he said, his voice thick with emotion…and desire, “well, this is all I have. Now that I’m Joined, and I’ve got you close, I can sense your wariness, but most of all, I sense your grief.”

  My gaze hit the floor. “Ian, I—”

  “At the bunker, I said I was so caught up in the past, I couldn’t see what was right in front of me. Well, you’re doing the same thing, D. You’re mourning two people who aren’t dead.” He pressed a hand to his chest. “We’re alive. I’m alive. How long is it going to take for you to realize—”

  Three large and extremely creepy-looking guards materialized beside us. Nordicly blonde, they had to be at least seven feet tall. The biggest one immediately seized Ian, and like a lioness protecting her cub, I lunged at him, but the second one grabbed me around the waist and swung me away.

  “Get off her!” Ian roared as he struggled, his hands outstretched. “D!”

  My name was the last thing he said before the third guard tapped his temple, and in the next instant, Ian went completely limp.

  I screamed in horror as they dragged him off, his still body as lifeless as a ragdoll.

  * * *

  YORECK OUTPROCESSING CENTER

  BOULDER, COLORADO

  Denieve

  Hagatha

  ____________________________

  Three months—at minimum!

  That’s how long those fascist bastards planned to keep Ian in quarantine. I had no idea what they were doing to him or how he was coping.

  The next several days went by in a blur of activity. The Yoreck transported Angela—now “Brumhilda Pissley”—and me—“Hagatha Weener”— to one of their secret facilities in Boulder for what they called “Debriefing.” Angela said our new names were likely payback for the incident with Ian. Thankfully, they were only temporary—a Yoreck sleight of hand to get us out of the country. Our permanent identities, well at least the ones we’d be using for the next two to three decades, would come in a couple months.

  The debriefing facility reminded me of one of those horrible military B-movies. Assembly line stuff, you know? A flurry of passport photos, health screenings, inoculations, and interviews. It also included a trip to the beauty salon for a trim and highlights. But they could’ve shaved me bald and I wouldn’t have given a damn.

  I’d always been a strong person. Always risen to every occasion, but this had broken me. I was weak now. Totally out of my element, and you know what? I didn’t give a shit anymore. The only thing that kept me hanging on was my baby and the hope of seeing Ian again. But until then, I was a walking vegetable. Stick a fork in me. I was done, which is why I checked out mentally.

  Angela tried to pull me from my shell, but my mind, despite her assurances that Ian would be okay, wouldn’t give me peace. She wasn’t there. She hadn’t felt his disappointment, hadn’t seen his look of betrayal.

  Even with my doubts about Ian, even if I hadn’t known instinctively who he was, what he was, or whatever, he didn’t deserve what I gave him. He’d lost decades—seventy-plus years of having his identity split in two. His life put on hold. And the only thing he was sure of was me.

  But what did I do? Left him agonizing over where we stood. Left him doubting my feelings for him. If only I could explain my confusion, to assure him that I just needed time. But our time was spent, and now here I was, guilt ridden, devastated, worried, and yes, missing him.

  In sadness I boarded a Yoreck private jet with Angela to the UK. We left America—and Ian—behind. After a two-day processing layover in Wales, we arrived at Stembridge Manor House in Cambridge. The five-hundred-year-old castle, which came complete with a drawbridge and a watchtower, used to belong to a Yoreck celebrity who died in a prison fire. Naturally, his death was faked. They threw him in Detainment after he went berserk and killed a bunch of people. This was the scandal Braeden had mentioned at Xavier’s bunker.

  Now the castle served as a halfway house for Asylum Yorecks like us. Not that I cared. About anything.

  Seeing my dark state of mind, Angela, who’d been assigned a two-bedroom apartment in the castle main, suggested I bunk with her until Ian’s release. Rather than moving into my own apartment—the one I would share with Ian—I took her up on her suggestion, because frankly, the thought of living alone was too depressing. I couldn’t even stand to look at it. The pain was too unbearable.

  And it only got worse.

  Two months, several hundred phone calls, texts, faxes, and verbal threats to those soulless bastards at Torrance later, I still had no idea how Ian was.

  CHAPTER 32

  THREE MONTHS LATER

  STEMBRIDGE MANOR HOUSE

  CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND

  ELMER

  (BRAEDEN-XAVIER)

  IAN

  ____________________________

  The Elders were true dicks to the end. Considering how I upset their Detainment plans with the Join and the baby, I wasn’t getting off easy. Add to this an infraction list that included an unauthorized Ëâpsut, fifty thousand in property damage at Torrance, arson, an arrest, and all the other chaos and destruction I’d wrought before that. Needless to say, the old mummies had a score to settle.

  Temporarily strapping me with the name ‘Elmer Grubbs’ was just the start of their reign of terror. Light deprivation. Sound deprivation. Sleep deprivation. All “legitimate” techniques to test the Join—their way of pushing me to fracture. I didn’t. If anything, their cruelty solidified our resolve.

  We lived to piss them off.

  After five days in a black room, I asked for five more. The sound deprivation was met with cheerfulness, then sorrow when they took it away. Sound, I told them, interfered with my 24/7 meditation routine. Next, when they finally put salt back in my food, I begged them to start boiling it again. I deserved the punishment, I confessed. In fact, I suggested they give me bread and water to make my penance more meaningful.

  By using strategy, patience, strength of will, determination, and psychology, I had them dancing to my tune.

  The end result? A bloody masterpiece.

  Pulling pranks one minute and killing them with kindness the next, I controlled them, instead of them controlling me. I had nothing but time to think and strategize. It kept the guards on their toes, the Elders pissed, and me feeling like I’d won the universe. They couldn’t deny we were working in concert as One, hence my ability to be content in all circumstances.

  But that didn’t
stop the bastards from hitting below the belt.

  —Three months of writing letters that never reached Denieve: Torrance burned them.

  —Three months without hearing her voice: no phone privileges.

  —Three months without knowing where she was: security precautions.

  Were she and my mother together? Was the baby okay? Had Caryn crawled out of her hellhole? This is what I spent my time worrying about when I wasn’t thinking up ways to annoy my captors. Their information blackout was meant to break me, but I didn’t break. I refused to give them the satisfaction.

  I had a solid Join, and they knew it, but they still wouldn’t let me out of solitary, because again, they were dicks, every last one of them.

  When they finally released me, I had my orders and not much else. All I knew was Caryn hadn’t gotten to Denieve. The Elders, in a surprising show of kindness, had kept tabs on her. So I had to fly to England with nothing, save the knowledge that the love of my life and my mother were together at Stembridge Manor House, an old English castle I was very familiar with. It dated back hundreds of years.

  I had no names or numbers, which was problematic. Without Angela and Denieve’s new aliases, I couldn’t contact them ahead of time. Even telling the Stembridge idiots my temporary name over the phone and my Torrance discharge info proved pointless. Until I showed up at Stembridge’s gates with Asylum credentials in hand, I was out of the loop.

  The rain was coming down in buckets when I landed in Cambridge. This would be the norm for the next few days according to forecasters. But I didn’t care because a flame of hope burned bright in my soul. That I was free and at peace for the first time in centuries, and that the woman I loved was within driving distance, had me seeing rainbows.

  Toss a blizzard my way and I’d be playing in the snow. Hurricane? No problem. I’d dance in it. Obviously, my internal sunshine came with a huge caveat. There’d be nothing but shade if Denieve was still grieving her imaginary ghosts. The men she mourned weren’t dead. They were me. So how the hell was I supposed to compete with myself?

  My biggest fear? That she wouldn’t be here, that the Elders had sent me on a wild goose chase as a final “fuck you.” I’d stood tall for three months against them, but if this was another one of their games, I was prepared to lose it.

  The piece of shit car they gave me belched and shuddered the whole trip to the castle. It was a little after five in the morning when I pulled into Stembridge. The landscape had changed a lot since the last time I was here, and this early, people weren’t in the mood to give directions, but I eventually found my way around.

  I picked up my keys at the admin office and was about to head upstairs, when I caught sight of Angela in the mailroom sifting though a stack of papers she’d pulled from a manila envelope. I didn’t run up on her. I just wanted to take her in—my mother, the one person who never stopped believing in me. Missing me. Hoping against hope that someday I’d be in my right mind again.

  Angela had swept her hair—now black—into a messy bun. She wore a pair of blue jeans, a T-shirt that had a happy face with a bullet hole in it, and a short leather jacket. The impeccable Ms. Pierce wouldn’t have been caught dead in that outfit.

  Five feet behind her, I whispered, “Hey, gorgeous.”

  She whirled around, her eyes already filling with tears. “Oh, my darling boy. I can’t believe you’re here!”

  With a girlish squeal, she threw herself at me. That I was wetter than a drowned rat didn’t seem to matter. She held on for dear life as if I might disappear if she let go. It had been an eternity since I’d hugged my mother like this. Sure, there’d been plenty of other hugs in between, but I wasn’t at peace then. A war had raged inside me most of my life. Thirteen is when I started fracturing. The full split centuries later had been a relief, but now? Nothing compared to this. I was whole again, whole and happy.

  Moments later, I pulled back and wiped her tears away with my thumbs. “What are you doing up at this hour?”

  “I opened a vintage clothing store in town.” Angela sniffed and swiped another runaway tear. “We’re expecting a huge shipment this morning. So I’ve got to get in early. But forget about me. I’d rather talk about you.” She looked at me, noting the changes they forced me to make. “Oh, my goodness. I haven’t seen that face in so long.”

  “They didn’t give me a choice.”

  “Well, it could’ve been much worse,” she said.

  Much worse, indeed. Like the face I showed Denieve and scared poor Hannah with. The latter would haunt me until the end of my days.

  “Ian? Are you all right?”

  Shaking off the memory, I faked a smile. “Yeah. So where’s D? Still asleep?”

  Angela’s brows lifted. “You mean Hagatha? Yes, she’s off today.”

  “Hagatha?”

  “We have the Elders to thank for that one. Vindictive jerks.”

  “Well, they got me too. I’m Elmer Grubbs.”

  “Not anymore.” Angela rifled though the envelopes in her hand until she found what she was looking for and handed it over. It had already been opened. “Sorry, I couldn’t resist. I know the mail guy. I had all your mail delivered to my box. You’re Ian McBride again.”

  I kissed the envelope. “Thank you, God.”

  “And I was Brumhilda.” She squinted at the embossed letter she held. “Now I’m Amanda Louise Rogers.”

  “Did D’s papers come?”

  She fished an unopened envelope from the stack and gave it to me. “There you go.”

  I tucked it into my jacket pocket. “So how is she?”

  Hidden within that question was this one: Did she miss me?

  Shadows darkened my mother eyes. “It started the day they put you in solitary. The depression. She hasn’t been right since. If it wasn’t for her shifts at the shop, she’d never leave the apartment. And when she’s home she does nothing but sit in front of the TV and watch The Weather Channel. She was up till three this morning. Insomnia.” Angela gave a helpless shrug. “She stays up half the night and sleeps past noon. She misses you, Ian. She misses you terribly.”

  Was I a bastard for wanting to do a fist pump? No question. But I wasn’t happy she was hurting. I was happy she was sad because that meant I’d gotten through to her. It meant she knew who I was. That everything we’d gone though over these past five months mattered to her.

  Angela looked sick. “Did you hear me? I just told you she’s miserable. Why are you smiling?”

  I dropped the stupid grin and headed for the stairwell. “I’ve got to go.”

  “Wait!” She started working a key off her chain, but I kept walking. “She’s been living with me. It’s apartment 305—”

  “I don’t need a key,” I said over my shoulder.

  Seconds later, I teleported and was standing at the foot of Denieve’s bed. Three things filled me at once: love, awe, and pain. So much pain. She was lying on her side, arm over her face, in the middle of a queen-sized bed. Her position allowed me to see and appreciate the child growing in her belly. Our child.

  That was the love and awe part. The pain came when I looked closer. What I saw drove an invisible knife through my heart.

  There, resting in the center of her outstretched hand was a photo of me—Braeden and Xavier—in Baltimore. I don’t remember when it was taken. Twenty years ago, maybe more? Angela had snapped the shot during a lobster dinner. She’d dragged me—us—to Phillips restaurant to celebrate one of my birthdays. As I recall, the evening ended like most of Xavier and Braeden’s earlier encounters.

  Not well.

  Denieve let my mother believe she missed me because that’s what Angela needed to hear. But the truth lay right there in her hand. It didn’t matter that I loved her still or that I fell for her twice. She’d spent the last ninety days grieving a lie. The assurances I gave her before the Join, the things I said afterward to prove who I was—none of that moved her.

  Three months ago, she’d looked at me as if I wer
e a stranger. She even told me as much. I felt the distance. I felt her frantically searching for us. And apparently the search was still on. Yet I…we were standing right here, in front of her, and she couldn’t see us. Couldn’t see me.

  What did I have to do to get her to recognize what’s been there all along? Chop my other hand off? Shower her with diadems? Kick another door down? Renounce my contempt for that hack Christopher Marlowe? Oh, I know. I could let her shoot me in the head one more time. Doing it made her realize she loved me. Maybe it would work again. Hell, at this point, I was willing to try anything.

  Ten minutes later, while I paced a hole in the hallway outside her room, an idea finally came to me. Sure, it was a Hail Mary, but it was all I had.

  * * *

  STEMBRIDGE MANOR HOUSE

  CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND

  Denieve

  Hagatha

  ____________________________

  I sat lounging on the balcony of Angela’s apartment drinking sweet tea. It was a bright, sunny day of ninety-seven degrees, a miracle considering it was the dead of winter. That I’d finally made it outside was a huge accomplishment. I hadn’t gone anywhere since we arrived. Hadn’t even toured the castle. Ever since we left Ian in America, I’d floated around in a daze, feeling lost.

  Other than the work I did at the vintage shop, I couldn’t summon the energy to do much of anything. I didn’t know how Ian was holding up or if they were treating him fairly. He was alone with those monsters. Doubting me. Doubting us.

  “When you look into my eyes, I can’t help but feel like you’re still looking for them. Like you’ll always be looking for them. As if we’re lost. As if we left you.”

  It was true. I was looking for them. Grieving them. Needing constant signs and reassurances they were Ian. But everything became crystal clear when they dragged him off. Whether he was Braeden or Xavier…or both, I didn’t care. I just wanted him back. My heart knew him. My body needed him. My soul was empty without him.