Jack darted forward, shoving past the Rider. “Shane!”
He caught his friend as he stumbled forward and the quiet night split under Shane's incoherent roar of rage. He lowered his head and flailed against Jack, knocking him in the neck and landing a shot against Jack's upper thigh that was going to leave a bruise. He sagged in Jack's grip and Jack staggered back towards the hay bales.
“Shane!” Jack grabbed him by the hair and pulled his head up, none too gently. Shane's pupils were dilated and his mouth pulled back into a snarl.
“Leave me alone!”
“Shane! It's me!” Shane fought him, driving an elbow into his solar plexus. Jack glanced at the advisor. “A little help?”
The slight creature wrung her hands. Jack sighed, then grunted when the elbow that had been in his gut jammed downward and only his belt buckle saved him from becoming a falsetto. “Dammit, Shane, watch your elbows! I have a use for those now.” To the Frostling, he said, “Just a little help--grab an ankle or something!”
Jack wrestled his arm in between Shane's arm and his body, then drove upward until he got his fingers hooked around the back of Shane's neck. The move immobilized Shane's jabbing elbow, but sent them both reeling backwards over the hay bale and Jack landed on the ground, pinned hard by Shane and losing air with the smaller, stockier man's weight on his lungs.
He brought his knee up into Shane's left buttock, jarring the other man to the side. Together they rolled until he had Shane pinned facedown on the ground. It wouldn't last long--Shane could throw him--but Jack suddenly remembered he did have an advantage. He hunched his shoulders and the raggedy wings whooshed down and thunked into the ground on either side of them, sending a shock of pain into his back that his brain didn't quite know how to process. He grunted and jerked his head to the side to avoid Shane's head before it bloodied his nose. “Jesus, you stink. When's the last time you took a shower?”
“Arrgh—Jack?” Shane stopped moving. His body sagged. Jack leaned back--just enough for Shane to turn his head. “What the—where the hell are we?”
Jack glanced back and got a better look at his wings--magnificent, but moth-eaten things that had seen better days, and he wondered from what Freudian nightmare that came. But more importantly, he got a good look at the rider, who'd shed the robe and stood bared to the waist, crouched and ready to pounce. He scrambled up. “About to be chased by something we don't want catching us.”
“Am I drunk?”
Jack hauled his friend to his feet. “Probably.”
“Are you drunk?”
“I wish.” He glanced back and found the Rider had gone down on all fours. And despite the human body, looked pretty comfortable in that position. He straightened his back and felt the wings snap into place.
Shane's eyes widened blearily, then cleared as the growl sounded from behind them. Without another word, they turned and bolted through the cornfield.
Shane panted beside him. “Nice wings.”
Jack was a runner, but not a sprinter, so he panted right back. “Thanks. We're in a dream.”
Shane glanced back. “Must be a good one. That thing isn't catching us.”
Jack didn't reply. He was busy wishing for more distance between them and the rider.
He glanced back. The rider had slowed and risen back up on two legs. A mournful howl split the night. Between one instant and the next, the cornfield was lit with unnatural purplish light, then with a flash, the night became nothing more than starlight and the moon. Jack slowed to a halt. The air quality felt different. Normal. Out of the dream.
And his wings were gone.
~*~
Lin had had just enough time to build up a good head of steam when Jack burst out of the cornfield like a serial killer.
She screamed and jumped, because that’s what the victim did in the slasher movies. Fortunately for her, the slasher wasn’t a slasher. But that didn’t mean one of them wouldn’t become a killer tonight. “Jack Winters! How dare you leave me here alone in the middle of nowhere while you go risk your—” He toppled forward, face-first, at her feet. “—Shane!”
Half-carried by Jack, Shane fell on top of him and peered up at Lin. “Oh, hey Linny. I think we pissed some people off.”
Rage blew out her breath, and if she’d been more invested in her mother’s beliefs, she might have turned into a dragon just then and burnt both of them to crispy doneness. As it was, she tossed her purse into the car and grabbed them both by an arm. “Guess I’m driving the getaway car, then.”
Jack met her eyes. His own looked sunken, hollow. Whatever happened in there must have been hard on him. Well, then, that makes two of us. She was about to climb in herself when another figure tumbled out of the cornfield. The little blue critter squeaked. “Wait! Majesty!”
Lin gaped. “You, too?” She sighed. “Get in. Fill me in on the way down.”
~*~
Jack had never been so happy to see his own place. He’d let the Frostling talk on the ride down while he caught his breath, tried to unscramble his brain.
Shane sprawled in the backseat, making incoherent commentary while the Advisor told the story with her own flair. He couldn’t find enough breath to correct her when she seemed to suggest he’d fought an epic battle with the Rider for Winter’s honor, because they were driving past the highway rest stop and he was busy nursing a nosebleed as he crossed the Boundary back to Winter territories.
Now, he just wanted to get inside, get settled, and stop thinking about Oddlings for ten minutes. He slumped against the wall of the elevator. The Advisor cleared her throat. “Majesty must know that—”
“Stop.” He held up a hand. “Just—stop. Majesty doesn’t want to know anything else for the next year! Majesty is done, okay? Done, done, done!”
She clamped her little blue lips shut.
It didn’t last. Together, he and Lin helped move Shane into his loft and onto the couch. “I’d rather dump him right into the shower,” she muttered, ducking out from under Shane’s arm while Jack pulled his friend’s shoes off his feet. “I guess I’ll call his mother, let her know he’s all right.”
While Lin was off under the balcony making her calls, the Advisor approached him again. “Majesty must know the Lawless will seek retribution.”
Acid anger burnt the back of his tongue. “Screw the Lawless. And maybe screw Winter, too. I’ve had enough of all this crap. I can’t drive past the rest stop while Puck gets to live and work where he doesn’t belong? Fuck the rules, I’m done. You people have made one to many messes of my life! I’m done with being your Majesty!” He stalked into the bedroom and stripped out of his wet shoes and socks.
Her lips snapped shut into a tight line. “This cannot be. The nature of the crown cannot be to destroy the Realm.”
It was refreshing to have someone who didn’t seem to abjectly worship him like the Chillsprites did. But— “Hey. I never said I wanted to destroy the realm!” He bent forward to meet her hazy eyes. “I have told you people from the word ‘go’ that I was a bad choice, but nobody listened.”
In the other room, he could hear Shane giggling. He prayed it was in response to something witty Lin had said. He worried that it wasn’t. Frozen Sal came to mind, her prophetic nonsense words haunting him now in Shane’s voice. That’ll never happen to him. If I have to tie him to the couch every day and tie him to the bed every night. “I’ll fix Iceberghaal like I said, but Shane comes first.”
“Human-tribe can care for human-tribe! Majesty must care for the Realm! It is Majesty’s nature.” She folded her arms. “The Realm needs Majesty now, more than ever before.” Her brow lowered in a glare and her aurora-eyes swirled with barely-suppressed anger. “Majesty gives free rein to Proud cruelty. Surely Majesty also feels Proud loyalty.”
“I’m not cruel!” He could agree with her opinion about his incompetence, but not his maliciousness. “I’m sorry, okay? I can’t help you right now.” As annoying as they may be, he didn’t hate the Oddlings. H
e just wished they’d stop screwing with his life. “Find someone else. Someone better.”
The Frostling, apparently, had had enough. “There is no one else!” She hopped her half-sized body up and down, coming down surprisingly hard on the concrete floor. Her toenails clacked as she stalked forward, a tiny menace that he couldn’t take seriously, size-wise, but if height were measured in attitude, she’d be seven feet tall. “Majesty is all that is left of the bloodline of the crown. There are no other choices!”
He leaned back under the force of her glare. A little crop-circle of frost had spread out around her, lightening the floor before melting away to condensation. Her hair crackled with static and her eyes swirled. “All Kin know their nature, save for the Crown-bearer. But perhaps Majesty’s Proud nature has blinded him to nature of the Realm and its truth. If Majesty abandons the Realm, there will be no more Realm. And if there is no more Realm—” She turned her face up to him, “—then Majesty must be informed that there will be no more Majesty, either!”
She knew what to say, and how to say it. The weight of the words she spoke hammered into him like a line of icicles falling off a roof and piercing ignorant assumptions.
Jack was glad he was sitting down, because his legs suddenly felt numb. The heavy truth of her words, the knowledge that squatted, low on his forehead, weighed down the front of his brain until he feared his head might just roll off his shoulders. “Oh God, I can’t get away from it.” He didn’t mean to say it out loud, but it wasn’t like she couldn’t read it in his face.
~*~
Lin stood in the doorway to Jack’s sleeping area and watched his illusions shatter. It was a painful, private moment to watch a man lose his truths, and she wanted to look away. But to do so would betray Jack—betray herself—as surely as if she’d framed him for murder.
If she’d put any weight to her doubts at Starla’s earlier, they lifted and drifted away like tiny swirls of snow dusting black ice on the road. His lost expression burned away the rockstar illusion and left the real, fractured man, slumped on the floor in his socks as his world upended itself. Her fingers curled around the edge of the divider. It wasn’t stationary, not made to support much weight, but she just needed something solid to keep her own balance while Jack was clearly in free-fall. Just one little anchor to reach out a steadying hand. One little anchor to hold her steady while she didn’t look away.
“I get it now.” Her words came from a rougher part of her throat than she’d expected.
His head jerked up. He looked at her as if she were a stranger for a moment. She plowed on. “It’s really kind of obvious if you really think about it. The slide down into the Realm, the blocky building without proper supports, the entrance from the ice rink.” She took a step into his bedroom. Let the anchor go. Set herself as the next anchor. “Iceberghaal, Jack.” She rubbed her hands together. More to keep herself from rushing to him—rushing him—than anything else. “Iceberghaal…is yours.”
The Advisor’s little toe-claws tapped on the floor as she skittered between them. “Mistress speaks true, Majesty.”
Lin took a step forward, crouched down by him. She didn’t touch him, yet—it might be too much. “You asked if Iceberghaal was built by a child. I think it was, Jack. It’s got a really cool slide to get to it. It’s built out of ice pops.” Of course, the Mother Glacier would be drawn to a place designed by a child and built for his mother, whether he’d realized it or not. “I think that kid was you.”
Jack stared down at his hands. “It’s always been part of me.”
She nodded. “It’s a broken part of you. Let’s go fix it.” Carefully, slowly, she slid her hands into his. The cold chilled her, but she had enough warmth for both of them.
“Shane—”
“Is fine. None the worse for wear, and still babbling about pancakes, but I called his mother and she knows he’s here for the night. It’s going to be a crazy Christmas, but lucky for us, Starla likes to cook a lot of extra ham.”
The mention of ham seemed to shake him out of his stupor. Sweep the pieces into a pile, first, then start sorting them out. Find the most broken ones first. His grip tightened around her hands.
He pulled her forward, into his lap, and without warning, covered her mouth with his. The calm anchor she thought she’d established flared up and she met his kiss with an insistence of her own. She straddled him and offered him a second lifeline with her touch, strengthening a gossamer thread of connection with each accelerating beat of her heart.
He wrapped his arms around her, fitting his hands up under her sweater, under the tunic beneath, to her bare skin, sending chills over her flesh. Her fingers curled through his snowy hair, down to the light scruff of his cheeks, to the open collar of his shirt where she held on for dear life against the give and take play of their lips. His fingers brushed the top of her jeans at her hips, came up to the lacy edge of her bra, curved around her breast. Need liquefied her limbs, except for her hips, which had begun a slow back-and-forth against his, and the swelling ridge there. The hammering of her pulse, their shared breaths, pushed everything else to the background.
Until a very direct, “Ahem!” sliced through the haze.
She lifted her head, tearing her mouth away from his, leaning back only until she could bring him into focus. His fade-blue eyes smoldered. The rise and fall of his chest sent shocks of awareness through her.
“Ahem!”
The second interruption dissipated the haze. Jack held her gaze for a long moment, nothing more in his gaze than desire and connection, before tearing his attention away to focus on their little blue audience. He sat up straight, which put him into more contact with her, and tightened his grip around her for a moment.
She scooted back, the friction of their clothing more than a little maddening. He stopped her as she was about to rise to her feet. “This.” He motioned between them. “Isn’t over.”
She nodded. “Just a pause.” She pushed to her feet and turned away while he rose as well. She smoothed her hair while he adjusted himself and she fanned her face down from five-alarm flush.
He reached for the jacket on the bed and turned to the Advisor. “Let’s go.”
~*~
For the third time in a day, Jack entered the Otherworld. This time, via the front door of his building. “I really, really, really hope that I’m the only tenant this happens to,” he muttered when he pulled open the outside door and stepped into the middle of an impossible blizzard.
Lin followed behind him. “I think the other tenants might have said something.” She glanced around. “We’re a dozen blocks away from the Square.”
“Time and distance are different here, remember?” He held out a hand and she took it. Together, they stepped forward and covered the distance in as many strides. Iceberghaal loomed in front of them. This time, he saw it all. The ice-pop construction, the slide, the childlike simplicity of thought that said, ‘Just use enough tape and the cardboard will hold together long enough for your book report.’
“I see where your mind is going.” Lin poked him in the side. “Don’t go there. You were a child, not an architect. See it with a child’s eyes.”
I don’t know if I can. He did see the Winterlands in a new light, though. The landscape didn’t seem so alien anymore. Just— “How am I supposed to make it a part of me without letting it take me over?”
She squeezed his hand. “Start by fixing this part.”
The little blue female leapt forward. “This one will announce Majesty to all and sundry.”
Jack grimaced. “Uh, can’t we just keep this informal? I’d like to stay low-key if possible.”
The Frostling made a face. “Does Majesty remember why he chose this one as his Advisor?” She put her hands on her hips.
“Um, yeah.”
“This one promised honesty and guidance to Majesty. Majesty does not skulk about his own realm ‘low-key.’ Majesty must be a Presence in the realm.”
Jack shifted fro
m foot to foot. He scowled, looked away.
Lin sighed. “Oh, just do it, Jack. Honestly, what happened to you? The Jack I know would have been sucking up the attention like a vacuum cleaner.”
Jack hunched his shoulders and glanced sideways at her. “Really? You think I’m an attention whore?”
Her dark eyes pinned him. “You really want me to answer that, Mister ‘I coded EvoWorld’s graphics with my initials in so many places they made an Easter Egg Hunt out of it’?”
He looked away. She had a point. “EvoWorld was one thing.” He could get away with indulging the urge to make his mark on his creations. “Edifice wasn’t as welcoming to employees playing fast and loose with the corporate image.”
“You shouldn’t have left, you know.” Her voice was quiet enough that it almost blew away on the wind. But his hearing in this realm was perfectly clear, right down to picking up the note of sadness in her tone.
“I did what I had to do. Mom’s bills weren’t going away, and I couldn’t ask Bailey to pay me more than what he was making.” His mother’s care had eaten into his and Nancy’s long-term plans.
“I’m not talking about EvoWorld. I’m talking about us. All of us. All of this—” she waved her hand at the iceberg-shaped structure, “—wasn’t even on your radar when you stopped coming around us in favor of Nancy’s friends. Or business contacts or whatever. It hurt, Jack.”
“I—” He thought he was making a fair trade-off. Nan had never signed up for a plan that involved long-term hospice care for an ailing parent. The least he could do was to keep her career from faltering even if his had run off the rails. So he’d shelved his flair for the dramatic to allow Nancy to shine. He became invisible to try to save his marriage. And that was long before he’d set out on his campaign to become invisible to imaginary creatures.
WinterJacked: Book One: Rude Awakening Page 30
