Chains of Fire

by Christina Dodd

  “I’m not fragile, you know. I work out and my body mass index is right on target.” And why did she feel like she needed to defend herself to him?

  He swung the pickax and broke the lock. “You look great.”

  What was she supposed to say to that? “Thank you,” she said.

  He gestured to her. “See what you can find.” He started on the next locker.

  She went to work. She drank her iced coffee—might as well put a good face on it—looked through the clothes, found a wool scarf, and wrapped it around her neck and head. Found a good pair of gloves, warm but tactile, and went to work. He was right: The problem wasn’t food or water. It was heat and light. If they didn’t get out soon enough, they were going to freeze to death in the dark. She looked up at the ceiling again, at the heat ducts hung from metal straps and the steel and oak beams. “Samuel, why isn’t anything creaking? This whole place seems solid as a—”

  “Tomb?” He turned back to the locker he was excavating. “I’m not a structural engineer, but here’s my theory. You’ve got a medieval castle, some major construction, reinforced for modern life. An avalanche comes down, because it had a little help from our boys with the Others. It wipes out the castle all the way to ground level. But it’s like a tornado: It doesn’t dip down; it blasts past. The beams and the floor hold, the heat down here rises, and the snow melts, then re-freezes into ice. I think we’re in an ice cave.”

  “So we can’t even dig our way out.”

  “I’ve got the ski patrol’s shovels and pickaxes. We’ll give that a shot, but if it doesn’t work”—he grinned like a boy—“I found the dynamite.”

  Chapter 14

  “The dynamite?” Isabelle carefully placed the empty glass bottle, formerly full of cappuccino, on the ground.

  “Yeah! The ski patrol are the people who set off charges to create controlled avalanches. They stored their dynamite down here in their lockers.” His eyes sparkled with glee. “I’ve got it.”

  “Samuel. You are a lawyer.” And lawyers were supposed to be logical, although she was starting to think there was as much chance of that as of men being logical. “When did you learn to use dynamite?”

  “How hard can it be?”

  She needed to remember that he was also a boy at heart. “To blow things up? It’s easy. Not to blow yourself up at the same time? It’s a bitch.”

  “Isabelle.” He imitated her patient voice. “How would you know?”

  “I did learn how to use dynamite.”

  “Where did you learn that? In finishing school?”

  “I learned in basic training.” She really enjoyed telling him that. Enjoyed watching expressions of amusement, skepticism, and dawning belief chase across his face.

  He put down the pickax. “Basic training? Like . . . in the military?”

  “Like in the military,” she confirmed.

  “Pull the other one.”

  She stepped up to him, challenging him toe-to-toe. “Let’s face it, Samuel. We occasionally collide like dual suns in a single orbit. But we’ve spent years apart, and you don’t know everything about me.”

  He leaned down so his nose was close to hers and challenged her right back. “I know Mrs. Mason’s little girl wouldn’t join the military.”

  The smug, nasty rat. “I didn’t join the military. After I realized you’d betrayed me, I needed some way to take my mind off the humiliation. So I joined a basic-training course run by an old marine drill sergeant up in the Rocky Mountains in Wyoming. Three months of physical training, survival preparation, and hell. When I was done . . . you weren’t so important anymore.” She relished the way he looked, brown eyes wide, mouth half cocked open. She’d astonished him at last.

  Take that, Samuel Faa.

  Being Samuel, he recovered at once. “So you can set the charge. Even if the blast doesn’t break through the ice, the sound should get the rescuers’ attention.”

  “First of all, Samuel, there are no rescuers.” In the depths of the night, while she was listening to Samuel snore, she’d thought out the situation. “No one knows for sure where we were when the avalanche swept through, but since we’ve disappeared, they’re pretty sure we were buried in snow. And not in a good way. In a ‘they’re frozen or asphyxiated’ way.”

  “Or in a ‘they were swept off the road and down the chasm’ way.”

  Good. He wasn’t under any illusions. “More important, we’re trapped in what apparently is an airtight room. We’ve only got so much oxygen in here, and an explosion will use it up. We’d be lucky if the rescuers, supposing they heard or saw the explosion, could dig down to us quickly enough to get us out before our oxygen was depleted.”

  “Don’t sugarcoat it. Give it to me straight.” He was joking around. Of course.

  She wasn’t. “We’ve got to save the dynamite until there’s no hope left.”

  He stared wistfully at the box of dynamite. “All right. Fine. But in the meantime”—he slung the pick over his shoulder—“hey-ho, it’s off to work I go.”

  She followed him as he headed toward the far corner. “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know where these double doors go, but the snow didn’t bust them in, so I’m prying them open.”

  “Have you thought about just unlatching them?”

  “They swing out.”

  “Of course they do.” Because exits always swung out. “Something’s blocking the way?”

  “It might be snow and debris from the castle. But it might lead to a tunnel or something. Aren’t castles supposed to have secret tunnels?”

  “I wouldn’t hold my breath.” Because that would be too convenient. “What happens if you get it open and snow fills the room?”

  “Then I guess we don’t have to worry about whether to use the dynamite.” He sounded cheerful.

  “You don’t think this is going to work.”

  “No.” He stopped by the doors. “But we have to try the obvious stuff before we go on to do the difficult stuff.”

  She nodded, seated herself on an overturned bank of lockers, and watched as Samuel hooked the point of the pickax into one door near the bottom and started prying the metal back layer by layer. As the gap widened, he shed his cap, his coat, his ski pants, and he was down to a long-sleeved T-shirt and a pair of too-loose jeans that sagged on his hips and gave her glimpses of black, tight underwear. Sweat stained his chest and back.

  And she wanted to lick it off his skin.

  Damn him. He had no business looking so good.

  “You’re still boxing?” she asked.

  “It keeps me off the streets.” He flashed her a smile.

  “Really? I thought that’s what sent you into the streets.”

  His smile disappeared. “Honey, I was picking pockets as soon as I could toddle. The bitch who kept me until I was five used to send me around the clients in her shithole of a bar to pull their wallets.”

  She swallowed. Sometimes she forgot about his background before her mother plucked him out of the gutter. “I didn’t mean then. I meant in Boston. When you were in high school.”

  “No. Boston was a whole different ball game. I was going to a rough public school. I was Romany. I was short for my age. And I went through puberty late.” He smashed the flat end of the pickax into the door, pulled it out, smashed it again. “I was getting killed every day, and I did something about it. I learned to defend myself. I would think you’d approve of my taking such rational action—as opposed to buying a gun and blasting those bullies to hell. Which, if you watch the news, more than a few kids do. I was an adolescent like them, with more than a few reasons for rage.”

  Which, if the way he was hitting that door was any indication, he still fought. “Why did you go to a public school?”

  “My father wouldn’t pay for a private school, and he wouldn’t let your mother pay for one, either. He said it would give me illusions above my station.”

  “Your father is medieval.”

 
; “He’s an English butler. He comes from a long line of English butlers. And what’s good enough for him should certainly be good enough for an illegitimate Rom pickpocket.”

  She half expected him to shoot her a rueful grin.

  He didn’t. Instead he swung the pickax as hard as he could and smashed the door again.

  So he was still hacked off about that. Not that she blamed him.

  “I wonder what your father thinks of me?”

  Samuel placed the pickax head on the floor, leaned on it, and considered her unsmilingly. “It’s not a discussion we ever conducted. He would consider it impertinent to”—Samuel’s voice changed, became upper-class English—“converse about his employers and their progeny.”

  She didn’t really want to ask. She knew she wasn’t going to like the answer. “But?”

  His voiced changed back to his own. “But if I were guessing, he would say you’re an orphan who has the wisdom to appreciate your good fortune and those who gave it to you, and he would commend your sincere desire to repay them with obedience to their wishes.”

  “Samuel, that’s awful!”

  “You asked.”

  Her feelings were hurt, yet she asked, “Is that what you think of me?”

  “I think you’re overly worried about your mother’s good opinion.” He didn’t choose his words carefully. But that was Samuel. Truth above all—or at least what he perceived as the truth.

  “My mother has always done what she thought was right for me!”

  “Who would you be if your mother had encouraged you to do whatever you wanted?”

  Isabelle got to her feet, her fists clenched at her sides. “I would be who I am, Samuel. I would raise funds for the World Children’s Literacy Foundation. I would work for the Gypsy Travel Agency as a healer. One has my mother’s blessing. The other does not. But they’re both who I am.”

  “Why did you join the Gypsy Travel Agency?”

  “I always knew I was given my gift for a reason, and the Gypsy Travel Agency provided a chance to use it for the good of mankind.” She lifted her chin. “And I don’t care if you think it’s corny. It’s the truth.”

  “I know you, Isabelle.” He took a step toward her.

  She held up her hand against his words.

  He halted. “I know you better than anyone else knows you. I know it’s the truth.”

  “And you know it’s corny?”

  “That, too.”

  “At least I didn’t have to practically get thrown in prison before I would join.”

  “The Gypsy Travel Agency directors set me up.”

  “They had to, didn’t they?”

  “No. Really. Why would I be reluctant to give up my quite profitable law practice for all this?” He swept his hand around the room. “Didn’t it occur to you that I might be picked for the team?”

  “Yes, but I thought the Gypsy Travel Agency was going to be a big, bustling concern and I would hardly ever see you.” She remembered this all too well. “Then the building blew up, everybody was killed, and you and I were together all the time.”

  “Without your mother’s encouragement, you wouldn’t have gotten engaged to that pissant senator.” He hooked the point of the pickax in the widening edge of the door and yanked, peeling back metal in a teeth-grinding racket.

  “True,” she said pleasantly. “But I also wouldn’t have gotten engaged to that pissant senator if I hadn’t been royally screwed over by the man I loved.”

  He yanked again, curling away a good-sized piece of door to reveal a patch of frozen-solid, immobile avalanche. “Son of a bitch!”

  Although she knew he wasn’t really cursing the snow, she said, “We knew this probably wasn’t going to work.”

  He slammed the pickax at the ice. And swore louder when it bounced back and punched a hole through his jeans and into his thigh.

  He jerked it out.

  Blood spurted.

  “Sammy!” She ran toward him.

  He looked up at her, wildly surprised that his temper had produced such results. “I’m sorry!”

  “Don’t apologize.” She reached for him. “It’s okay.”

  “No, it’s not.” He held a hand out to stop her. “Don’t touch me!”

  “Honestly, Samuel! Lighten up. I fixed your last injury and survived.”

  “Yeah, but this one hit the femoral artery. It’s a fatal wound.” He went down hard on the floor. “If you try to help me, you’ll die, too.”

  Chapter 15

  Samuel came to consciousness feeling like shit on a shingle. And guilty, because Isabelle sat beside him, stroking his hair, murmuring his name as if trying to bring him back from the dead. Which she had done—again.

  The effort left her looking as white, drawn, and as close to death as she had appeared last night. Only this time she was covered in blood. His blood. Both of them were going to have to strip down in this frozen prison and wash themselves in slushy water—and it was his fault.

  He hated when it was his fault, and with Isabelle, it seemed like it usually was.

  Taking a deep breath, he looked into her eyes.

  “You’re going to be okay,” she whispered.

  “But are you?” he asked.

  “Soon,” she said.

  Fact was, her healing always lagged behind her patients’, so he was probably feeling better than she did.

  He dragged himself into a sitting position, and the effort was even more than he’d imagined. “We almost died that time, didn’t we?”

  “It was deep and gross, but it wasn’t as bad as you thought.”

  “What would have happened if I had been right?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never had to heal a femoral artery before.”

  His temper rose. “You should have kept your hands to yourself. You could have died trying to help me.”

  “Don’t yell at me.” Color blossomed in her cheeks as she got mad, too. “You know I have had to make the decision to let people go. If they’re hurt too badly, I just . . . I’m not going to do any good in this world if I’m dead.”

  “So you would have let me go?”

  “It was a dilemma, since I so frequently want to kill you,” she snapped.

  Like any good lawyer, he interrogated her with his silence.

  She caved, of course. “Okay. There wasn’t a good choice. I figured I had to heal you for selfish reasons.”

  “What kind of selfish reasons?”

  Reaching out, she once more stroked his hair back. “You’re my best chance to get out of here—if you will stop throwing the pickax.”

  He laughed. “Oh, honey, I do love you.”

  She stiffened, pulled her hand back, offense in every line of her body.

  And he didn’t know how to recover. It was nothing more or less than the truth, but she didn’t want to hear it. She didn’t believe it.

  Somehow, he would make her believe it. He was smart. Brilliant, in fact. Being trapped down here sucked, no doubt about it. But he also recognized the opportunity he’d been given.

  Before they got out, he would convince her to give him another chance.

  Hefting himself to his feet, he picked her up and headed toward the tent.

  She lifted her head as if to protest, then dropped it back on his chest.

  “Smart girl,” he said.

  “There’s no use talking sense to you. You can’t even hear me.”

  “I listen to every word you speak. I just don’t always do what you tell me.”

  “Don’t I know it.” Her mouth curled in a smile. “Unless I’m talking about my underwear.”

  Sixteen-year-old Isabelle walked into the house, dropped her backpack on the chair, shed her coat, ignored her mother’s call, and ran up the stairs to the third floor. Striding into the bedroom, she pulled open the curtains on the window seat. Hands on hips, she glared at Samuel’s long length stretched out in the sun. “Have you lost your mind?” She got a good look at him. “And what did you do to your hai
r?”

  “I shaved it off.”

  “I can see that. But why? I loved—” She stopped. He did not need to know she loved his hair, so black and thick.

  “Because it’s a liability when I fight.”

  “You shouldn’t be fighting!”

  “Yeah, princess. You would think that.” Putting his finger in his book to hold his place, he looked her over, a slow, appreciative sweep that lingered on her prep-school white shirt, blue sweater, pleated plaid skirt, and knee socks.

  “Knock it off.” He’d started doing this, trying to distract her when she gave him trouble about stuff. His grades. His clothes. His attitude.

  He patted the cushion. “Come in and shut the curtains behind you.”

  She hesitated. They hadn’t met here in years, ever since he got too big to bother with her, while she turned eleven and went to St. Theresa’s Girls’ School.

  “Come on.” He lifted the book and showed her the title—Machiavelli’s The Prince. “I’m just reading.”

  He was going to bother with her now. She was going to make him bother with her.

  She climbed in and shut the curtains. “I talked to Mother today. She said you had quit school!”

  “News travels fast.”

  “The saying is ‘Bad news travels fast.’ I guess that’s right.”

  “Are you really surprised?”

  “Yes, of course I am! How else will you be able to get into college and make something of yourself?”

  “Why would I need to go to college to wait on the table while you have a party?”

  She caught her breath.

  “Had you forgotten? Or did you merely think it was nothing more than my proper place in life?”

  Yes, she remembered. Every year at her birthday party, Samuel would be forced into a miniature suit and sent in to serve the other little girls at the table. None of the children or the attending parents thought anything was amiss; indeed, most of the mothers cooed over him. But Isabelle always saw his resentment in the flash of his dark eyes.

  “I am not a servant,” he said. “Specifically, I’m not your servant.”