“You can replace it for me when we get back to your place, okay?”
Nicola nodded, then wiped her nose and sniffled.
“You’re going to tell my dad about this, aren’t you?”
I let out a sigh. Telling her father what had happened would be a good way to get her locked up in the house for the foreseeable future — something that’d make my job a hell of a lot easier if I wasn’t fired. And that was a pretty big if. I’d been in charge of ensuring exactly this kind of thing didn’t happen. It was as much a failing of mine as it was Nicola’s bad behavior. Besides, I didn’t think telling her father would do much to improve the already strained relationship between the two. If Nicola was acting out this much now, being punished while her father was out drinking and entertaining investors several nights a week wasn’t going to make her start playing the loving and respectful daughter all of a sudden.
“No,” I said. “This stays between us.”
Feeling the cold start to creep in, I hugged my arms and set off down the alley. The car service would most likely be waiting out front where we’d been dropped off. The chilly air had ceased being refreshing, and I was ready to go home and get into bed.
Nicola hurried to catch up to me, her heels scratching on the ice as she struggled to run without wiping out.
“Thanks,” she said quietly when I waited for her. “For everything.”
“All in a day’s work,” I told her.
Left unsaid was the thought that I wasn’t sure I could handle an entire week of this.
Chapter Six
It was still dark when something heavy landed on my face, waking me from a vividly lucid dream of being stuck in a bar and struggling to make my way through a never-ending crowd. The object turned out to be a bulky ski jacket. When I peeled it from my face, I saw Nicola standing in the door holding the matching pants and grinning like last night had never happened.
“No. It’s way too early,” I groaned. “And I don’t ski.”
“I don’t ski either,” she informed me. “We’re going snowboarding. First gondola leaves in forty minutes, and I’m going to be on it. From what I remember of yesterday, you were hired to look after me. That means you’re going to have to get your ass out of bed if you want to do your job. Ada has breakfast waiting downstairs, so hurry it up already.”
I looked at the time and saw that it was only four hours after we’d staggered home from our misadventure at the bar. The three shots and several beers I’d downed had caught up with me, leaving me dehydrated and battling a headache that a normal night’s sleep would have easily taken care of. As it was, I could barely focus my eyes while I tried to make sense of the ridiculous clothing Nicola had left draped over the foot of my bed. The padded socks came up to mid-calf, and the pants were about two sizes too big. Even belted, they hung low enough on my hips I could barely walk without tripping over the bunched up fabric that sagged around my feet.
The thick brushed fleece shirt she’d left for me to wear beneath the jacket was comfy enough at least. I collected the jacket and assorted other nonsense like gloves, helmet, and goggles before stumbling downstairs. After depositing my gear in a pile in the hallway, I joined Nicola for a quick but hearty breakfast in the kitchen. Ada worked quietly to serve up large plates of bacon, eggs, and toast. For the first time since I’d arrived, Nicola ate heartily. She put away nearly as much as I did, even managing to drink two coffees while I struggled to get one into my roiling and unhappy stomach.
“Time to get amongst it,” Nicola said as she pushed up from the table. “We’re going to have to hurry if we want to get to the lift in time.”
Nicola and I finished dressing in the hallway, then clomped out the front door in our bulky boots, boards tucked under our arms. From the looks of it, the snow that had been falling when we’d left the bar hadn’t stopped all night. Knee deep drifts of dry light snow had piled up in the driveway, and I worked up quite a sweat on the short walk into the village. Nicola set a fast pace, strolling right past the long line of people waiting to get into gondolas that would take them up the mountain. She nodded at the lift attendant who greeted her by name, then stepped right in front of people that had probably been waiting for the coveted first spot in line since before I’d been roused from bed.
Nicola ignored the shouted complaints of the people whose places we’d stolen. She flashed a what-can-you-do look at the lift attendant, and he just shook his head and gestured for us to walk right on.
“Having one of the most hated men in the area as your father does come with some perks,” she said. “He’s got enough pull with the resort owners that I can do pretty much whatever I want around here.”
The doors slid shut, and the gondola lurched forward. I stood in the middle of the large compartment and tried not to think about how precarious the whole system felt while we zoomed up into the pea soup conditions that shrouded our cabin in fog.
“Is this a bad time to tell you I don’t know how to snowboard either?” I said.
“It’s easy,” Nicola told me. “Just keep the slippery side of your board on the snow and you’ll be fine.”
“Somehow I doubt it’s quite that easy.”
“I’ll show you what to do,” she said. “Consider it my way of saying thanks for stepping in last night. I know that got a little out of hand.”
“A little?” I asked with a huff of incredulity. I thought of the vampire that could very well have decided Nicola was going to be his last meal before he escaped to the city. “You have no idea how dangerous that was.”
“I’m used to dealing with guys like that,” she said. “Without beating the shit out of them. You’re lucky Skylar didn’t call the cops and press charges.”
She was right. I didn’t want to admit it, but the fact that Skylar threatened me wouldn’t have been much of a defense in light of how much damage I’d done to him. He’d most likely ended his night in the hospital. Only the embarrassment of having to explain why he’d been beaten up by a girl in the first place stood in the way of him pursuing legal action against me. I was confident he wouldn’t be eager to disclose the details of how he’d provided cocaine to an underage girl, but it was still stupid of me to have let my anger get the better of me. If I was going to have any hope of maintaining clients of Bloedermeyer’s standing, I'd have to have to learn to control my impulses a little better.
The upper-mountain gondola station appeared from within the mist, looming above us like a concrete monster about to swallow us whole. Once inside, the gondola cabin slowed down and the doors slid open. I followed Nicola out into a wide snowy expanse filled with several empty ski racks. Other than a few mountain employees, we were the only ones up there.
“Come on,” Nicola said while she strapped her foot into the front binding of her snowboard. “Let’s get going before the plebs get here.”
Figuring out the binding was easy enough. Mastering the kicky push slide that Nicola did to get through the flats was another issue entirely. I’d ridden a skateboard a few times when I was younger, so it wasn’t a completely new concept. After a few false starts and awkward tumbles, I managed to figure out how to push and glide across the snow to where Nicola waited for me. I was just starting to feel good about myself when I saw what waited for us.
“Sit down and put your other foot in the binding,” Nicola ordered.
Tilting the board back into the slope, she strapped herself in then did a neat little hop to flip herself around so she was facing me. Once I was locked in as well, she reached out to take my hand, helping me into a standing position.
“This is hero snow,” she said. “It won’t hurt if you fall, so just give ‘er.”
“Give ‘er?” I repeated. “That’s your lesson? Give ‘er?”
Nicola let go of my hands and started sliding backwards and away from me. She leaned to one side, and the nose of the board curved downhill, sending her into a long smooth turn.
“Just do what I do!” she shouted over her
shoulder.
“This was not in the job description,” I muttered, transferring pressure off my heels and onto my toes.
Board still parallel to the slope, I slid forward several feet before face-planting with enough force to turn me into a human snowplow. Having opened my mouth to scream, I ate almost as much of the fluffy white stuff as went down my jacket and into my shirt. In scrambling to get my face up out of the snow, I flailed about until I managed to somehow roll onto my back. After a few more feet, my shoulder hit a bump, flipping me head over heels so I was on my knees facing uphill. Abs already aching from the effort of pushing myself upright in the light snow, I leaned forward into the hill, the frontside edge of my board wedged into a little platform of snow.
I knew if I leaned too far back, I’d just repeat my nosedive with the back of my head. Trying to think of it like a skateboard, I figured that if I put just a little pressure onto my front foot, I could angle myself downhill.
It worked fabulously at first. The board slid downwards, and I was able to turn myself in a wide arc so that I was facing downhill and cruising sideways across the slope. Exerting similar pressure on the toes of my other foot, I curved inward again, gliding down the short stretch of mountain to where Nicola waited by another chairlift. I was feeling pretty proud of myself as I linked two more overly wide and slow turns. Then everything went sideways.
On the last turn, I leaned a little too far forward and began picking up more speed than I knew what to do with. Scared of pitching forward, I leaned back and stood up straight. This turned out to be exactly the wrong thing to do. The board went squirrelly, sliding out of control until I hit a bump that rocked me forward and into another acceleration. I knew I had to lean one way or another to initiate a turn that would break my speed, so I twisted my hips and tried to muscle the board onto its backside edge.
The world spun around me. Something slammed into the back of my head a second before my knee cracked me in the chin. I exploded upwards, cartwheeling through the snow. My poorly buckled helmet flew off my head, followed shortly afterwards by my goggles. I felt one glove tear free from my hand, the other mercifully staying on as I tumbled yet again. The rolling and somersaulting eventually slowed, leaving me staring at the sky with my snowboard acting as a sort of anchor that piled enough snow over the lower half of my body to partially bury me. The snow I’d scraped from the side of the mountain and onto my body was much denser than the fluffy stuff on the top layer. When I tried to right myself, I discovered that I couldn’t lift my legs.
“That was an epic yard sale,” Nicola said when she cruised down to me from above.
I was confused until I realized she’d seen the fall coming and had taken the small t-bar lift back up the hill in order to fetch me and my lost gear.
With Nicola helping dig me out, I managed to get to myself back into some semblance of order. She showed me how to tighten the chin strap so I wouldn’t lose my helmet on the next fall, then guided me down the last few turns.
“That was fun, I guess,” I said. “How hard was that run?”
“Run?” Nicola laughed. “That was just the access to Peak Chair.”
She pointed up to the imposing flat expanse of snow sandwiched between deadly looking rocky spines. A lone skier carved a perfect line down the face of the slope, looking to me like he was defying the laws of physics to even stay up there.
“It’s not as steep as it looks,” Nicola said when she saw my hesitation. “There’s a nice easy green run you can take down the side. You can watch me from there while I do something more fun.”
“I don’t know about this,” I told her. “I really don’t think it’s safe for me to go up there.”
“The only way you’re going to know is if you try.”
Before I could protest, Nicola scooted off towards the chair lift. I had to unbuckle my back foot and skate after her as quickly as I could. I caught up with her just seconds before the next chair swept around the bottom station to scoop us up with a violent snap. Nicola showed me how to hook my foot onto the little peg that came down with the safety bar, and I nearly threw up from fear after looking down at the gleaming whiteness way down below us. Although still cloudy and gray lower on the mountain, the weather had cleared above. Blue sky peeked out beneath the few remaining patches of cloud. It would have been a beautiful sight had I not been distracted by the sick feeling in my stomach at the thought of having to get back down somehow. The farther up the chairlift took us, the rockier the ground became. I had no idea where the ski run even went anymore.
Nicola lifted the bar as we approached the upper station. My pants felt slippery on the seat, and I had a terrible vision of me plunging off the lift and onto the ground twenty feet below. When we did eventually crest the top of the ridge without me falling to my death, Nicola had to grab hold of my jacket to keep me from pitching sideways while we rode down the short ramp leading away from the chair lift dump zone.
“See that run called Peak to Creek?” Nicola said, pointing down at a somewhat manageable track. “That curves gently around the side of the peak. I’ll go with you for a bit, drop into one of the bowls, then wait for you where your run cuts back again, okay?”
Standing atop the blustery peak, I didn’t see how I had much of a choice. I could either accept her attempts to work with me, or I could piss her off and watch her disappear down any one of the black diamond runs leading away from us.
“Are you sure I can make it down on my own?” I asked.
“Sure. You made it this far, didn’t you?”
Nicola sat down and strapped into her binding, so I did the same. I managed to stand up again without too much trouble. With a few more tips from Nicola about transferring weight from heel to toe and back leg to front leg, I even managed a few little turns that almost felt like something I could replicate.
Despite its precarious route along the top of the mountain, the Peak to Creek run was wide and mellow. So long as I didn’t stray too close to the edges, I ran little risk of killing myself with a wipeout. I did my best to follow Nicola’s instructions, eventually realizing I could cheat a little by using a subtle pillow of kinetic energy to keep me from falling over if I leaned to hard to one side or the other. It was exhausting work, but not worrying about breaking my neck gave me more time to focus on the technique of mastering turning without having to rely on magic to keep me upright.
Not far down the run, Nicola announced she was going to peel off to ski something called Bagel Bowl. It sounded like something a stoner would have for breakfast, but when I followed her to the side of the run, I saw it was something considerably more serious. Not as steep as the runs we’d already ridden past, it was still severe enough to give me a bit of vertigo. A lip of snow had formed over the edge of the bowl, making it so that the only way in was to drop several feet down to the fresh unmarked snow below.
“See you at the bottom!” Nicola shouted as she launched herself off this edge.
I watched in awe when she landed with a puff of snow then began a long and graceful series of turns that had her carving through deep powder. Fat white waves of snow flew into the air behind her when she laid herself out so far she was almost parallel to the ground. The open area she ripped down must have been five hundred yards or more, yet she covered the distance in a matter of seconds before disappearing into the trees below.
I had to get my own ass moving if I was to stand a chance at catching up to her. Scooting back to safer ground, I returned to my comparatively flat run. While still relying on little puffs of magic to keep me from pitching over after leaning too far into a turn here and there, I actually felt like I was getting the hang of it. By the time I rounded the corner to see Nicola waiting for me on the wide track where our runs intersected, I was actually having fun.
“Holy shit, that was amazing,” I said breathlessly when I plopped to the snow beside Nicola.
“It’s not that big a deal,” she said. “My dad took me up there for the first time when I w
as seven. I ate shit so hard I rolled almost all the way down to the tree line before coming to a stop. Broke my arm and spent the rest of the season in a cast.”
“I guess it paid off in the end, huh?”
“I guess.”
“So where to now?” I asked.
Nicola hopped to her feet, this time not offering me a hand. “All the way to the bottom, then back up again.”
In hindsight, I should probably have been more sympathetic to Nicola’s attempt to open up a little. Had I engaged in a little heartfelt girl talk, maybe I wouldn’t have been forced to use every trick I could think of to keep myself charging downhill after her while she raced ahead of me. Zipping from one side of the run to the other, she popped off little jumps with a spin of her board, generally tearing up every bit of the terrain while she powered down to the village. My quads burned from the effort of dropping low to control my turns. The cold air burned my lungs as though I’d been sprinting for twenty straight minutes. The soles of my feet ached from digging my toes in to keep the board from sliding out from under me. And my head and throat pounded from the magic I was forced to expend just to survive the chaotic ride down the mountain.
Once at the bottom, Nicola zoomed right into the lift line, unstrapped her bindings, and strolled onto the next available gondola. I barely made it on with her, rushing past a shouting lift attendant and squeezing between the doors just as they tried to close on me.
“You picked that up pretty fast,” Nicola said as we lurched upwards. “I’m impressed.”
I leaned on my board and sucked air into my lungs. My legs were like Jello, and I didn’t have the energy to reply. We rode in silence. Nicola stared out the window while I pulled my glove off with my teeth and dug out my phone. We’d only been out for an hour. I didn’t know how many more runs like that I could take.
We repeated the process of transferring from the gondola to the peak chairlift. Although tired, I was feeling a lot more confident and strangely excited. My whole body ached from the effort of my first run, but I was eager to push myself even harder this time. When it had been working naturally, riding through the soft snow had been beautifully serene. Gliding from one smooth turn into the next was addictive, and I found myself wishing I could follow Nicola into the stretches of deep light snow still relatively unmarked in the less accessible terrain right off the peak.
Black Ice (Black Records Book 3) Page 6
