Gathering Frost (Once Upon A Curse Book 1)

by Davis, Kaitlyn

  "For what?"

  "To meet General Willis." Asher grins at my reaction. "He wants to talk to you, to show you some things."

  A general of the rebellion wants to speak with me? My mouth goes dry. I should have expected this, seen it coming. I am, after all, a valuable prisoner. But still. Weeks ago, I yearned to put a knife in this man's chest. Now, I want to impress him.

  We take a few long corridors, ones I am sure I have not yet traversed, until we reach a large metal door sealed with a circular wheel. One tug, and the door swings open easily, proving just how safe the rebels feel in their underground haven. The locks aren't even being used.

  But I forget that thought quickly as my eyes take in the scene before me. The room is blinking, small bulbs turn on and off, switchboards display lines that disappear and reappear each second. A big screen illuminates a map, unlike any I have beheld in the books I've studied. Men and women sit with large headpieces encasing their ears, typing on keyboards that I have only before seen coated in dust.

  I now know what most of the solar electricity they gather is used for. The gadgets are beyond me, and I do not understand their uses, but I know without a doubt that the purpose of this room is defense.

  "Asher," a deep voice booms.

  A large man walks forward, taller than me, taller even than the commander. His clothes are spotted different shades of green, and the word Willis is stitched onto his chest. The general.

  "Jade, I assume?" He extends his hand and I take it, gripping hard. The skin around his eyes is wrinkled, his back hunches just slightly. Though he is imposing, his prime years have come and gone already.

  "General Willis." I nod, unsure of what else to say.

  "Jade, welcome to the northeastern command center. Ground zero in the fight against Queen Deirdre, one of the many freedom fighter bases around the world."

  Years of training come flooding back to my system, and I straighten my stance, bringing my feet together and elongating my spine until I am as tall as I can be. My voice grows even, controlled. "Happy to be here, sir."

  "Are you?"

  He leans in, peering deep into my eyes, and I swallow. This man does not trust me. So I glance around, noticing other stares, some blatant, some peripheral, and I understand that no one in the room trusts me either. I am still the enemy in here.

  "I am," I respond, no hint of hurt in my words, "and I would like to help in whatever way I can."

  The corner of his lip twitches. "Good."

  Putting a hand at the small of my back, he leads me around the desks toward the front of the room where a map of Kardenia glows green on a tabletop. The wall, the old city, the broken down skyscrapers, the castle. Everything is outlined there, but immediately I also notice that parts of it are wrong.

  I open my mouth, but close it, waiting for orders.

  "Go on," he drawls, and I meet his gaze only to see amusement on his features, as though my attempt at control entertains him.

  "It's nothing." I bite my lip, then breathe. "It's just the layout of the wall is not correct. Most of Kardenia is outlined well, and the old city too, but the wall…" I shake my head, leaning over the map, using my fingers to show him the differences. "The south section is where I normally work, and it's about a hundred yards lower than where you've placed it. These streets here fill out into dead ends, and then we have practice grounds on the inner loop of the wall, and the entrance gate has been moved closer to the west side of the city."

  "Drew, are you recording all of this?"

  I follow the general's eyes to a man a few feet to the left of me, hunched over his computer and furiously typing. A nod is his only response and then a few moments later the screen blinks and my changes have been implemented.

  "Can I?" I pause, waiting until the general gives me permission, "Can I ask how you knew all of this already?"

  "Asher," General Willis tells me, looking over our shoulders to where Asher waits patiently by the door, not stepping too far into the room, but watching us. He grins as our gazes meet. A thrill travels up my back, but I quickly turn to the map as the heat reaches my cheeks. "When he first arrived as a boy, he told us everything he could remember about his former home. We cross-matched his descriptions against old maps of New York. Pretty good, right?"

  I smirk my consent, and then continue talking about Kardenia, describing the layout of the streets, different buildings that have been changed since they last gathered information. The northern side is all farmland, empty and open, a difficult place to hide. So we move onto the old city, and I give them the exact locations of our mines, which streets we have cleared out and will be the easiest to traverse, and also the areas we know are too fragile to walk upon.

  My stomach is completely at ease as I give the guard's secrets away, as I betray everyone from my former life, as I work against the queen. In fact, my body relaxes the more I speak.

  Betrayal, it seems, comes naturally to me.

  But I throw that thought aside, sparing a glance at Asher who watches me with a satisfied expression, in a way that makes me think he might almost be proud.

  "That's everything I can think of." I lean back, hands at my waist, scanning my brain for any other morsel of information. But I come up blank.

  A beefy hand lands on my shoulder. "That was great," the general tells me. And I believe him. Though he might seem like the commander, this man doles out praises I've never heard back home. Genuine. Kind. As I look around, I realize he is followed out of respect. A feeling I don't quite understand.

  Scanning the room, I also sense that I've been dismissed. The general has turned away from me, discussing a plan I am not privy to, and the room surges back into motion. The rebels are done listening to me talk.

  I'm not.

  I crave more information. An entire world is depicted on the screen before me, and I want to know what waits for us out there. What my freedom might really mean. My mind wanders to my paintings, to the gardens of France, the canals of Venice, the rainforest of the Amazon. Are they still there?

  "Can we ever go back?" I ask aloud, unintentionally.

  "No, Jade." Is the general's soft reply. Maybe he hadn't dismissed me after all.

  He steps closer, following my stare to the large map flashing on the front wall, to a world forever changed. The continents look different, are narrow where they should be wide, long where they should be short. Islands sprout in oceans that were once vast.

  A red dot depicts our location, and directly north of it is a large hazy circle where no details can be seen. All around the world, more misty circles interrupt clean shorelines, and I know that is the magic. The electric instruments in this room cannot penetrate the aura it holds, so those areas are menacingly vacant, are unknown.

  "No one really knows why or how the merge happened. Cindy over there," he says, pointing to a woman scrawling on paper, bent over her desk, "is our resident physicist. Ask her, and she'll bore you to death with string theory, quantum mechanics, long words none of us normal people understands. But the best guess we have is that the magic world was running parallel to our own—the animals are similar, the plant life, the atmosphere. Then somehow, one of us got pushed off course, and boom," he exclaims, slapping his hands together, loud enough to shock a few people around us, "hello earthquake, hello two worlds becoming one."

  "And they can't be separated?"

  He shakes his head.

  "Then why fight?"

  "Why not?" He shrugs. "We can't change the past, but we can shape the future. Asher!"

  The shout catches me off guard, and I jolt. But Asher walks over now that he's been called. His eyes too are on the map, and I realize that he still isn't completely comfortable in this room either.

  "Sir?" He inquires, and I bite down a laugh, listening to Asher act so formal.

  "Tell Jade what you told us all those years ago."

  His eyes darken, retreating into his memories. "My world wasn't always the way it is now. The magic used to live in th
e sky and the earth, providing little miracles to the populace in ways unseen. It was not harnessed for individual use, but all of that changed hundreds of years ago. A king found a way to absorb the magic, to contain it within his body and use it for his own desires. Other monarchs discovered this and did the same, until all of the magic in our world was bottled up in royal families."

  Asher pauses, glancing at me and wetting his lips, hesitant. He is about to reveal a secret he does not wish me to know, one of the few he has been hiding.

  "But the magic came with consequences the royals did not realize, with curses laid down upon generations of their families, and the power was addictive. In order to preserve their bloodlines and their reigns, the magic became transferable only to a first-born heir. If a monarch dies without an heir, the magic is released back into the wilds."

  I don't understand. I'm grasping at air, hating how it flows through my fingers, unattainable. I know Asher has just revealed a truth he had been concealing, I know because he will not look at me, won't meet my gaze. Instead, his face peers only at the blinking map before us, and I wonder what world he sees.

  "So," the general finishes for him, "all we need to do is kill the queen and voila, the magic is released and hopefully everything goes back to normal. No more humans under her thrall. No more anti-electricity bubble. Almost like old Earth again."

  "Kill the queen…" I say slowly trailing off. Kill the queen and the magic is released. But that's not right. Not quite. "But—"

  I stop sharply as fingers grip my hand, squeezing tightly, pleading. My heart stops. I turn slowly, meeting Asher's strangled gaze.

  Kill the queen and the magic transfers to her heir.

  To Asher.

  An alarm goes off in my head, pounding, ringing so loud that all of my other senses are blocked off.

  He can't mean…

  But he does.

  All defenses down, I see the real meaning of the words in his eyes, in Asher's sorrowful, apologetic eyes. And suddenly I'm falling. My grip is loosed, I'm tumbling over the cliff, and there is nothing I can do to stop it.

  When he inherits the power, Asher means to do the one thing no one else in his family ever could. To give up the power. To let it all go. To kill himself.

  My fingers tighten on his.

  I won’t let him do it. I won’t.

  "Ash—" I start to plead, voice shaking as dread floods my system. But the words are cut short by an alarm blasting through the air, reverberating around the room so loud that I know the ringing is no longer just in my head.

  The beeping grows closer, quicker.

  Echoes drift down from above, loud booms that sound almost simultaneously, that shake the room around us.

  The general has moved into motion, shouts commands, and subordinates run to do his bidding. But I am stuck. Asher is stuck. In a frenzied room, we remain alone at the center, the eye of the storm.

  I have not released his fingers. He clutches onto mine.

  The alarm continues to scream, but time is halted. Everything is about to change, is about to end. I know it. We have reached the peak, Asher and I, our climb is over, our highest height has been met, and now all that remains is the drop.

  So we hold onto each other, to this last moment. I remember the lake, where everything seemed so perfect, the future limitless, the possibilities endless. From now on, the course is set. Unchanging. Doomed.

  The lights in the room die out, slowly fade until it is dark and the ghost of a glow remains in my eyes.

  All sound stops.

  All movement.

  And then a crash sounds from directly above our heads, sinking through the ground, muffled but more menacing in the ebony that surrounds us.

  Time rushes forward.

  The moment has snapped. It's over. And I know we will never get it back.

  The lights switch back on and it is chaos. People run in every direction, turning the machines back to life, trying to determine what waits for us above ground.

  I have a guess, but I can't be certain.

  "Asher!" The general's voice calls and we both turn. He charges through the crowd, face determined, and grabs Asher by the shoulders. "It's time."

  "Yes, sir." Asher nods, mission completely clear to him. "How long do I have?"

  "A week, no more."

  I'm not sure what just transpired, but I know I cannot leave Asher alone, not now, not when I know his real plan.

  So when he turns to run from the room, I follow, feet pounding down the empty halls to the same beat as his. He knows he cannot shake me, so he doesn't try. The stomping above our heads continues, shaking dusty particles free from the ceiling, and I become more certain about what waits, but push the images from my mind. I have room for only Asher. After a few silent minutes, we slow and enter a new chamber.

  Weapons.

  All along the walls are guns, knives, swords, even arrows. We've reached an armory, and my fingers itch to curve around the hilt of a blade, twitch to pull the trigger of a gun. I miss the fight. My muscles ache to be used.

  "Jade." Asher's voice pulls me away.

  I turn to him, anticipating what his next words will be. "No."

  "Jade, I'm going back to Kardenia. It's too dangerous for you to come."

  I raise an eyebrow. "Too dangerous? I lived there longer than you did. I know exactly what waits for me."

  Asher steps closer, warm hand cupping my cheek, eyes begging me to listen to him just this once. "You only just escaped, freed yourself from my mother. You'll lose everything if you go back."

  I'll lose you if I don’t.

  But I can't bring myself to say the words out loud. They are too bare, too raw. So I smile encouragingly, warming my features as I lift myself an inch higher, closer to his lips.

  "Then it's your job to make sure I remember," I whisper just before our lips meet, soft and tender, barely grazing. When I pull away, it is Asher who digs his fingers into my hair, urging me closer. His lips are ferocious, pressing hard against mine, hungry.

  Passionate.

  Desperate.

  My balance fails, but he holds me up, arm wrapped around my waist. And then another crash sounds, reverberates around the room, and the weapons jingle on their hooks, reminding us both that there is no time. Asher lets go and I drop back to my feet, breathless.

  "I'm coming with you," I force the airy words out. "You can't stop me."

  Asher pauses, squints, and then releases a prolonged exhale. "Grab whatever weapons you can. We don't know what waits for us above ground."

  Another stomp booms.

  I jump into action, first discarding my sweater and then replacing it with a bulletproof vest hanging on the wall. I'm back in uniform, back on the guard, and I pull out the black heart pin I had tucked into my jeans. I'm stronger when I wear it, more formidable, more ruthless. Then I strap two handguns to my hips and tuck knives into the open spaces of the vest. The far wall is lined with heavy machine guns, and I throw one over my shoulders, just in case.

  When I turn, Asher looks much the same as me. Decorated in deadly metal, ready to fight. Our minds are synced. I can read the thoughts that flutter over his features. Concern. Thrill. Trust. The same things prick my heart as well. Without words, he leaves the room, and we make our way to a ladder leading to the outside.

  I wish I could run back to my room and grab the books that Asher gave me. To turn their crisp pages once more, to lose myself in the lives he chose to give me. I wish I could find Maddy, hug her goodbye, thank her for showing me how to open myself up, to be vulnerable. I wish I could visit the missing persons room, glance once more at the people I'm indebted to, the ones I need to free. I'll miss the showers, the lights, the movies. But most of all, I will miss the freedom. My stay here has been a dream. Without the sun, time felt stalled, prolonged as though I were in a perpetual sleep. Forever stretched like a promise before me.

  But now I return to the outside world. To the sunrise. The sunset. The never ending passage
of time, the undulation from dark to light that whispers I will never be free.

  For Asher, I willingly throw myself back behind bars.

  It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust to the sun, to blink away the brightness. When I do, I know the time for thought is over. Queen Deirdre grew tired of waiting for the rebels to act, of waiting for me to bring her son back. She sent us a gift to spurn the rebellion along.

  Giants.

  Nine monstrous beasts loom before us, taking turns slamming their fists into the ground, trying to break the rebel camp apart, to rip the dirt open and dig their way inside. The stories from the wall were correct, almost. They are not two times the size of any man—they are three. I do not know how the queen kept them contained all of these years, but now that they are released, they are feral. Grunting mouths drip with drool. Hunched backs ripple with muscles. Clawed nails tear through the grass. If they ever looked like humans, they do not now.

  As soon as my feet touch the ground, I swing the gun from my back and drop into a kneel. Taking an instant to aim, I pull the trigger. My body bounces with the force of the machine, but I keep my arms steady. Nearly an entire clip is emptied before the giant's head explodes, and he comes crashing back down to the ground.

  The other eight stop, wide eyes alert, searching for me.

  They land.

  We stare at each other and then I run, pulling a shocked Asher with me.

  But they are smarter than I anticipate and they divide into two groups of four, prepared to conquer us both as we split into two different directions.

  Outrunning them for very far is impossible, so I make for the trees about fifty yards away, hoping Asher is doing the same. But I cannot think about him. My body is alert, and every ounce of effort I have is focused on the fight.

  The booms of large feet get closer.

  I reach the trees, ducking behind a large trunk while I reload the machine gun in my hand. Barely a second has passed before I peer around my hideout, locating another head, and I fire.

  Three to go.

  Bullets sound in the distance, coming from more than one weapon, and my heart feels easier. Asher must be safe. The rebels have come to his aid. But for now, I'm on my own.