Frostbite (Modern Knights Book 1) Read online

  “Veruca is likewise too valuable. I’m sending a Corporate Response Team to you. You will brief them and they will handle things during the party. Keep it simple for them, they are former military, but you don’t have to pretend the wendigoes are just normal animals. They’ve faced supernatural-level threats before. Make sure the team understands their tactics, their tendencies, and the importance of fire and steel. The CRT will handle the rest.”

  “And then what?” Truth be told, I was a little disappointed. I still wanted a piece of the monsters for what they did to Dorothy.

  “After you brief the CRT, come home to Boston. I need you here. I’ve needed the advice of a real wizard for some time now.”

  That prompted me to ask something that had been gnawing at me. “Sir, with all due respect, why did you hire so many fakes before me? I mean, I haven’t heard Duchess or Veruca say a single nice thing about any of them.”

  “A valid question, Mr. Fisher. The fae courts insisted on it. They refused to treat with my emissaries unless they were wizards, something about ancient traditions to keep. Most of the talented ones are already in the employ of the military, so I had to make do with what I could find.” The short silence that followed felt contemplative, as if Lucien was debating how much to tell me. “I can’t afford to lose the fae courts, Colin. FBI, CIA, Interpol, they could turn on me and I could handle it. On the other hand, the faeries scare the hell out of me.”

  My mind returned to the forgotten whispers of the Eye of Winter. I shivered despite the heat radiating from Veruca’s body. “Me too, Lucien. To tell the truth, I would think anyone who isn’t frightened by them is either a liar or an idiot.”

  Veruca kissed my shoulder. “Let me talk to him, Colin.”

  His voice came from my other side. “I heard that. Put her on.”

  Veruca leaned back as she took the phone from me, but her legs snaked up around my stomach, preventing me from leaving or turning around to face her. She wasn’t applying pressure, but I got the feeling she could make this hurt if she wanted to. “So are we keeping him?”

  A second passed. “Good.”

  Another. “Absolutely. Not a doubt, sir. He’s the real deal. He downplays himself, but I suspect he could go rounds with any of the guys Cell Thirteen is using.”

  This time Lucien’s response must have been longer. “Understood, though I may have trouble getting him on the plane. He’s a little bit technophobic…and he has a smoking car. It would be a shame to leave her here.”

  Her grip loosened, her big toe absently stroking my thigh. “Actually, sir, remember that favor you owe me? I’d like to collect. Let me act as his bodyguard whenever you don’t need me elsewhere. I’ll drive back with him and make sure nothing unfortunate happens to him.”

  I would’ve given the rest of my chocolate supply to hear whatever Valente said in response. “Yes, sir, that favor.”

  A pause. “It’s not a little thing. Not to me.”

  The pause that followed nearly drove me insane. “Yes.”

  “Insanity is a short drive for us.”

  The phone appeared over my shoulder again. “He wants to say goodbye to you.” Coming from his private assassin that phrase scared me, but I didn’t feel in mortal danger.

  “Yes, sir?”

  Lucien’s voice sounded deeply impressed. “We will talk when you get here, Mr. Fisher. Whatever it takes to keep you in my employ, it can be arranged.”

  “I already told you my terms, Mr. Valente. Freedom of conscience and Sarai. The paycheck is just the icing on top.”

  “I will have a file ready for you when you arrive with everything I can find on the girl. Do you need your second check deposited before you arrive?”

  “No, sir. It can wait.”

  He laughed. “Sorry, that wasn’t what I meant to ask. I’m afraid Miss Wakefield has me a little flustered. Her request caught me by surprise…you haven’t bewitched her mind, have you?”

  “No, sir. I wouldn’t. I think she just has that effect on people.”

  “She saved my life once.” He paused to compose his thoughts. “Apparently, staying attached to you is worth my life, as she has decided to call in the debt. Is that acceptable to you?”

  I turned around to face her and her upper thighs loosened their grip to let me. I stared down into her eyes, watching them shift from a silvery blue to a deep emerald. We each knew what the other was, but neither was pulling away. It wasn’t love, but then again, maybe that’s what love really is: knowing and staying anyway. I kissed her lightly on the lips, before bringing the phone back up to my mouth. “Yes, sir, that’s acceptable.”

  9

  The room was darker when I woke up. Veruca must have drawn the curtains shut, because no evidence of the coming full moon penetrated into the room. I sat up, planning on stumbling blindly towards the hotel room’s bathroom. That attempt at motion signaled to me just how much was horribly wrong in the room. I know, after the week I was having, I should have been quicker on the uptake.

  Slender arms, not Veruca’s, were clutching at me. The girl on the bed next to me was wide-eyed, the whites of her eyes bright with fear. By their pale light, I could make out a mess of blond curls framing a face too young to be sharing a bed with me. I renewed my efforts to sit up, but the bed under me was unstable. The girl fell into my arms. “Shh, Teddy. If we make noise, he might come back.

  My vision flickered, blurred, as if I were looking beyond her for an aura. The world split in two and I was simultaneously a resident of both. In one, the tangible world where a little girl no more than twelve clung to me, I was not a man, but a dark-furred teddy bear with kind, round eyes, a sewn nose, but no mouth. In the other, the world where the bed had shifted and collapsed, I was me, but the bed was a pile of dead bodies. The frame had decayed into skeletons. The box spring was full of feminine corpses in varying stages of decay. All were older than the girl, but most were still younger than me. The mattress was a jumble of teenage beauty queens, all naked, most in the last stages of dying. It might have been easier on me if they had been dead, not gasping with putrid bursts for one last breath. The pillow the bear rested upon was, in this shadow world, a fifteen-year-old red head with a syringe sticking out of her jugular. If she was still alive, I was grateful she wasn’t moving.

  I stifled a scream. I sensed that if I did yell, it would mean horrible things for the child who held me. He would return and that would be bad, very bad. I tried to whisper to her, to tell her I would help, that I would get her out of here before the bad man could hurt her again. I couldn’t; the teddy bear had no mouth. I struggled but I couldn’t force out anything through those missing lips. By default, I did what teddy bears do: I held her.

  It was a dream, just a dream. If I could just close my eyes and ignore the stench and the writhing, I would wake up in a hotel room in Oklahoma. It was just a dream.

  “Not for them, my love. Not for her.” I knew that voice. Somewhere between a dusky soprano and a high alto, hers was meant for romantic suspense on Broadway. Hearing it comforted me, confirmed the dream state, and yet simultaneously made the bed of corpses more solid, more real. Details of the girls’ faces, skin tones, and manner of demise were noticeable now.

  I answered in my that-realm voice, where the lips moved…if I could ignore the dying girl’s hair in my mouth. I couldn’t turn my head without breaking the physical link to the motionless teddy bear. “What’s killing them? A serial killer?”

  “Criminal neglect,” Dream-Sarai answered. “I need you to listen, my love, my hope. Our time is short.”

  I took in a deep breath, pressed the stuffed animal closer to the girl, and closed my eyes. “Hurry.”

  “You won’t save them, my love. Maybe you could, but you won’t. You need to save her, though. Whenever you’re distracted, whenever you’re tempted to call it splits, remember the one clutching the teddy bear. Save her and the rest will be avenged at least.”

  “It’s just a dream, Sarai. I’m a stuffed
animal. How can I save her?” My voice was weak and tired, like I was speaking in the real world, but hearing the faint echoes of it in dreamland.

  “It’s real for her, my love. Her father is horribly abusive. Tomorrow, she will run away. The day after and the week after, there is nothing you can do for her. Even the year after, the world will still be a terrible place. But when the time comes, when she holds you again as she clutches you now—save her, save the world.”

  “Save the world?” I mumbled, more awake than asleep now.

  “Save her. Even if you have to let me go to do it…save her. No matter what Lucien asks of you, no matter how dark and vicious the valley becomes, hold the course. Save her and we can finally rest.”

  When I awoke in the hotel room, the moonlight of the midnight hour was softly falling through the curtains. For a moment, I thought I saw Sarai standing there in the pool of silvery light. Then she was gone.

  I stumbled into the bathroom. In the dark, I took care of business, then splashed water on my face while trying not to look into the mirror. The dead girls and, worse, the dying might be looking back out at me. On my way back, I checked to make sure the Necronomicon was safely tucked away. It was still in the same drawer, though the Gideon’s Bible had disappeared. I eyed the vile book nervously, half-expecting it to burp out a single corner of a page, like the cartoon cat post-canary.

  When I laid back down, a sleeping Veruca draped one arm over my bicep without waking. I had to bite down on my tongue not to scream. It had been a week like that, where even the best things got twisted.

  10

  The CRT team leaders met us at an office building downtown the next morning. I didn’t have much experience with the military mindset, but I was fairly impressed with what I saw. After talking to us yesterday, Lucien dispatched not one, but two, of Valente International’s CRTs. Mr. Valente was committed to making sure wendigoes became an extinct species.

  I had expected something different from a Corporate Response Team. The phrase made me think of spin doctors and ad executives. Given what they were sent to do, my brain married that image with upscale security guards. I would have been closer if I would have pictured Samuel L. Jackson playing a former military blacktops soldier turned private sector after an early retirement, then cloned multiple times. All six of the leaders struck me as being qualified to take over a third world country with a rubber band, a paper clip, and a few loyal followers.

  The difficulty that concerned them wasn’t so much the wendigoes as the presence of civilians. While Valente International was allowed by law to recruit, train, and equip any number of such CRTs, it was illegal for them to operate on U.S. soil. They were worried about how to take down a pair of supernatural predators while attracting minimal attention from the nearby picnickers. I was worried about little things, like the wendigoes killing all of them.

  In the end, it was decided that half of one team would go in plain clothes and form a loose ring outside the picnic. The rest would be in full tactical gear and spread out along the top of a hill north and east of the party area. I would arrange for Tia to lead the wendigoes through an open valley below it, but the CRTs were going to deploy thermal sensors throughout the woods in case my “inside man” proved less than reliable in getting the wendigoes into position. Valente told me to keep it simple, so I neglected to mention that my co-conspirator was an adolescent female lake spirit. I’m not sure which of those elements they would have found most objectionable, but I was sure they wouldn’t like it.

  I was glad to be done with it. I had been disappointed when Valente first pulled me out of the game, but I had both time to think about it and a night lying next to Veruca. One made me realize just how lucky I had gotten the first time around. The second made me feel like I still had something to live for. Dorothy would be avenged whether I was the one pulling the trigger or not.

  The meeting did have one upside to it. I had been curious as to how their plainclothes men would have enough firepower to deal with a wendigo, if one managed to sneak through. I doubted they could carry a flamethrower and still look inconspicuous. Apparently, fire was a common enough job requirement for a Valente CRT that they were well ahead of me. One of them showed me a small black cylinder, only slightly larger than a can of mace. He insisted it was a single-use handheld flamethrower. Unless they were pulling my leg, and they didn’t seem like the type to joke about anything (especially about weaponry), it produced a ten foot long cone for five seconds and would burn in excess of two thousand degrees. In short, it was easily twice as powerful as the burst I had called up through the candles and without any reference to magic.

  I asked how I could get one, not really expecting a positive answer. The team leader surprised me by saying I could keep that one, so I did. If I ever ran into another wendigo, it would come in handy. No sooner did I slide it into my pocket then I wondered what I could get a gremlin to build for me if I traded the device off to him.

  “Don’t even think about it.”

  11

  What bothered me the most was how perfectly it all went down. Tia didn’t balk at the yellow and purple polka-dot beach umbrella I brought her in payment for her wendigo-baiting services. I got the feeling that either my fight with Hungry Winter or my conversation with the Eye of Winter had impressed her to the point that she wasn’t likely to try anything slick with me again.

  No tourists or park rangers stumbled along at the wrong moment to discover a small army setting up on the hill. No random meteors crashed down out of the sky on Dora. There wasn’t a single pimple on Veruca’s face. I wished there would have been. It would have relieved me to know that not everything was going our way. As rough as it had been for me lately, I found it impossible to believe that fortune favored me completely.

  Technically, Veruca and I should have been cruising down the road in Dora, possibly on the other side of Tulsa, heading toward the Missouri border. But while neither of us was clamoring for a spot on the front lines, we both wanted to be there in case something went horribly wrong. Besides, it was a Valente company picnic and we were Valente employees. Given all of the subsidiaries involved, I doubted anybody would notice we weren’t locals. We mingled and ate hot links, all the while keeping one ear open for the sound of gunfire. I had a digital thermometer and kept checking the ambient air temperature around me, but there were no unnatural dips, just the slow, steady progress of night.

  Nothing happened. Around midnight, a pair of men tried to fight each other, but they were both far too drunk to be any good at it. One of the plainclothes I recognized from the setup meeting broke it up with little more than a flick of the wrist and a stiff arm. By one o’clock, it was down to just us and the plainclothes.

  I walked up to the one who had played peacemaker. “I guess they decided not to show up. We go to all this trouble...”

  He held up one hand, then placed the other over his ear wick. When the hand came back down, he said, “Actually, sir, we did. We killed one and wounded the other. The out team is following its blood trail to ground to finish the job.”

  “What? When did they show up? Why weren’t we notified?” I had a sickened image of the female wendigo dragging around a wounded animal in its teeth to create a fake pathway of vitae. It was smart enough to plan an ambush of its own.

  “Two hours ago, sir. And there was no need, sir. Your plan went over near-perfect. No injuries, no civilian encounters.”

  I felt like stealing a line from Rambo, something about his men already being dead, but maybe I was just punch-drunk on paranoia. Before I could think of anything better to say, his hand returned to the ear wick.

  “It’s over, sir. Out team called in. They’re both dead.”

  I tried to smile for his benefit. To me, it still felt very far from over.

  Fourth Interlude

  Carrie Ann Womack edged her way closer to the Hispanic man. She was traveling alone, but didn’t want to look like she was alone. The middle-aged man appeared to be by himself,
too. Carrie didn’t know what she would do if a plump wife and a pack of children suddenly appeared from the bus stop restroom.

  She had thought about taking a Greyhound before, but it was different today. Today, she had courage. She bought two tickets from the Asheville station to New York City. Either the clerk believed her when she said her dad and her were going to visit his sister or the clerk didn’t really care. Somehow, she thought he would’ve cared if she had said she was an unaccompanied minor. Adults had the funniest ideas about what eleven-year-olds could and couldn’t do.

  Carrie wasn’t old enough to travel all the way by herself, but she was going to, whether Greyhound said she could or not. She wasn’t supposed to have to deal with abusive adults at her age, but that hadn’t stopped the drunken slob who used to be her dad. He was still passed out when she left for school that morning. Carrie had looted his wallet and discovered he had just gotten paid the day before. He didn’t keep jobs long enough for her to figure out the pay schedule, but luck was with her. She took it all instead of the usual five she sneaked when he wasn’t looking, then doubled back to her room to add a change of clothes to her backpack. If her luck held, she’d be in the Big Apple by morning.

  Carrie corrected herself: it wasn’t luck. Her knight had come to her last night in her dreams. He hadn’t been clad in shining armor, but in teddy bear fur. She couldn’t hear what he was saying, but she knew why he had come: he was going to save her from the monster. That’s what knights did. Every girl dreamed of a knight coming to her rescue, but she really had one. Of course, most girls she knew didn’t really need rescuing.

  It had been all right before Mom died. But the onset of her puberty, his growing alcoholism, and their mutual grief had twisted her dad into an evil dragon. She wanted to kill him, but that was a knight’s job. Carrie’s job was to run, to get away. Her knight would find her in New York.