A Fistful of Frost Read online

  “Shouldn’t we—”

  “No. It’s too dangerous.” So long as Jamie was present, the drones wouldn’t stop attacking. Despite looking like a teenage boy, the pooka was still a child, having taken physical form for the first time less than a week ago when he’d imprinted on me, tethering us together for the foreseeable future. He needed protection from so many dangers, not the least of which were evil creatures mesmerized by his power.

  I hauled Jamie across the track and shoved through the crowd milling between me and the exit. Jamie stumbled behind me, and I squeezed his hand tighter, afraid I’d lose him. Monitoring the skies for drones, I used the pet wood to poke my way past people who lollygagged in front of us.

  “Where are you going?” Pamela demanded.

  I hadn’t heard her approach, and I spun, bringing the wand up between us.

  “I’m getting Jamie to safety.”

  She crossed her arms. “Just Jamie?”

  “I can’t protect him out in the open like that.”

  “Interesting.”

  Between one breath and the next, all the urgency bled from me. I blinked, confused, and frowned at Jamie’s hand imprisoned in mine. He’d been in danger. The drone had been about to hurt him, and it’d made sense to get him out of the stadium. But—

  But I’d killed the drone, and I should have stayed to kill the rest. Furthermore, Jamie had never been in real danger. As a half-evil creature who possessed a frightening amount of atrum himself, the pooka didn’t have anything to fear from a drone. Even if it had taken a bite from him, the drone wouldn’t have gotten anything for its efforts; unlike me, Jamie could prevent creatures from consuming his soul.

  Where had that rationality been a moment ago?

  Rubbing my chest where the sting of the drone’s bite had already faded, I checked Jamie’s expression, surprised to see wariness pinching his brows. The twin energies of his soul sloshed with agitation on the far side of his body, but his hand in mine—and his entire arm and side—were draped in safe, white energy.

  Oh! I’d used my lux lucis against him. I’d hurt him.

  What the hell was going on?

  Scowling, I turned back to Pamela. The shorter woman stood just beyond reach of my—extended! blazing!—wand. It’d been the most natural thing in the world to draw the weapon in front of the entire stadium. I hadn’t given one thought to the attention I might attract. And how many people had I stabbed with its sharp tip as I’d fled the stadium?

  “The first time is the worst,” Pamela said.

  “Huh?”

  Jamie and I shook the ache from our hands when I released him. I collapsed the pet wood and tucked it into my pocket, dismayed when I realized I’d lost the palmquell. I had a vague memory of chucking it . . .

  Pamela extended her hand, holding my palmquell out to me. Feeling like I was moving in a dream, I accepted it.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Come here. You need to recharge.”

  Pamela led the way to a clump of pines, and I removed a glove and examined my soul. The lux lucis capacity of a palmquell bullet was negligible, but given the quantity of shots I’d fired, it was little wonder my normally cotton-white soul flickered faintly. I planted my hand on the nearest tree, and a cool wash of lux lucis flowed into me from the bark as the pine selflessly replenished my reserves.

  “Why did I—” I stopped myself, not sure how to complete the question. Why did I forget all my training? Why did I believe it was imperative to get Jamie away from the drones? Why did I feel like I’d been a different person a few minutes ago? I settled for repeating my original question. “What happened?”

  “Drones feed off pieces of souls and inhibitions. They take away your restraint, so whatever it is you want to do in that moment, you do it. The effect tends to last about ten seconds, give or take; then you’re back to normal.”

  The anomalies clicked into place: the woman picking her underwear from her butt, the old man chucking popcorn like a child in a food fight—the drones hadn’t evoked action so much as freed people to act. Whatever impulse they’d had the moment the drone fed, they’d acted upon it.

  When the drone took a bite from my soul, I’d been concerned with protecting Jamie. After it had fed, nothing else had mattered. I hadn’t thought about the people watching, about my goal to prove myself to Pamela, or even about securing my weapons. My top priority—my only priority—had been Jamie’s safety.

  Like a person hypnotized, I’d made the decisions and experienced the emotions, but I hadn’t been in control. Not fully. Which left me playing catch-up even though I’d lived through the events.

  “That last drone, why didn’t you shoot it before it struck me?”

  “I thought it’d be more informative to see how you reacted.”

  Of course. What better way to test an enforcer than to have something strip away her inhibitions to see how she reacted? I released a slow, deliberate breath, telling myself it was the inspector’s job to evaluate my proficiency. Using the drone to do so had simply been pragmatic.

  Nevertheless, irritation sharpened my tone when I asked, “And?”

  “You confirmed my earlier assessment. You need serious target practice, and you coddle the pooka when you should lead. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” Behind Jamie’s back, she gestured to the dark energy pulsing in his soul, her not-so-subtle use of the cliché coming through loud and clear.

  As a newly risen pooka, Jamie’s powerful soul encapsulated a fluid, perfect balance of lux lucis and atrum, but his energies wouldn’t stay harmonized for long; he’d gravitate toward one side or the other, and it was my job to ensure Jamie made the kinds of decisions that would transform him into a pure lux lucis creature like myself—only vastly more powerful.

  If I failed, he’d turn dark, and because of the bond linking us, I’d be altered in the process, too.

  I couldn’t afford to ignore Pamela’s advice.

  Still . . .

  “Protecting Jamie from harm is not coddling.”

  “Between the two of you, you need protection more than the pooka.”

  “The drones wouldn’t hurt me,” Jamie said softly.

  “Wouldn’t the drone have taken away your inhibitions?” Surely Pamela would agree that an inhibition-free pooka should be avoided.

  Jamie shrugged. “I’m not human.”

  Pamela gave me a pointed look.

  “Well, good.” I sounded petulant even to myself. The drones can’t hurt Jamie, so why aren’t I ecstatic?

  “Indeed,” Pamela agreed. “With the drones drawn to him, we can use the pooka to lure them away from the crowds.”

  Bingo. “You want to use Jamie as bait?”

  “Is there a problem?”

  I held my body stiff, wanting to look away from the challenge in the inspector’s eyes, wanting to check Jamie’s face. Hell yes, there was a problem. Jamie was my pooka, bonded to me and under my protection, even if he claimed he didn’t need it. The idea of using him made my stomach knot. But Pamela was an inspector. She outranked me and my boss. More important, she had actual experience in dealing with pookas. If she said I needed to be firmer with Jamie, then I needed to stiffen my backbone. I couldn’t let the bond manipulate me into spoiling him.

  “No, no problem here.”

  How had this evening gone to Sucksville so fast?

  2

  Everyone Complains about the Weather, but No One Wants to Sacrifice a Virgin

  An hour earlier, I’d parked next to my boss’s orange Fiat at the nether reaches of the Oakmont High School parking lot, a familiar buzz of prehunt anticipation tingling through my limbs. Two days off, even if they had been mandated for recovery, had gone a long way toward restoring my enthusiasm for my job. Squeezing in a much-delayed date with Alex Love last night had done the rest.

  I’d had a crush on Alex since the first time I’d shown up at his veterinary clinic with my cat, Mr. Bond, when he was still a kitten. It’d ta
ken a few visits, spaced across a few years, before Alex had asked me out, and then I’d had to postpone. Twice. My reasons had been valid—I’d been a teensy bit busy being bonded by the most powerful pooka born in the last decade and stopping a megalomaniac from setting fire to my entire region—but to Alex, who knew nothing about enforcers and my ongoing battle against evil creatures he couldn’t perceive, I’d simply looked flaky. Fortunately, he’d stuck around. Even better, we’d both agreed the date had been worth the wait.

  Mmm, so worth the wait. That man could kiss!

  “Are you hungry?” Jamie peered at me from the passenger seat.

  “What?”

  “You made a nummy noise.”

  “Oh. Ah, no. Just thinking.” I deliberately closed the door on the memories of Alex’s firm lips and focused on the here and now.

  The final gloomy rays of the sun had disappeared behind the cloud-choked horizon, and the gray sky bled to a starless black. I’d thought that after revealing the neighboring warden Isabel to be a vengeful rogue and facilitating her removal, my region would thrive and I’d be able to coast for a few weeks. After all, Isabel had been behind most of the evil I’d fought since I’d become Roseville’s enforcer, and with her gone, it stood to reason my workload would be lighter. Even factoring in the temporary expansion of my region to include a third of Isabel’s old territory, I’d expected to be done with today’s work by noon.

  I should have known better. Isabel’s actions had warped my region, leaving it primed for a whole new evil creature to invade: sjel tyver. If that wasn’t bad enough—and from everything I’d learned about sjel tyver, it was pretty bad—the higher-ups in the Collaborative Illumination Alliance had decided to send an inspector to monitor the situation. A pooka, a rogue warden, and now sjel tyver proved to be too much unusual activity for the CIA to ignore.

  I rolled my shoulders, the creep of nerves tightening my muscles. An inspector outranked my boss, and she would be scrutinizing my every move while in town, including my interactions with Jamie. The pooka’s dual nature had everyone on edge, and they wanted reassurances that I had him under control. Which I did.

  Mostly.

  Maybe.

  I shook my head and shoved from the dim interior of the car, squinting against the harsh blue LED lights illuminating the parking lot. An icy breeze cut through my jacket, and I zipped it closed beneath my chin, fluffing my scarf around my neck for good measure. If I wanted something to worry about, I should start with my boss’s plan for me to fix Roseville’s new arctic environment. Though we hadn’t discussed how yet, he literally expected me to raise the temperature of our slice of the planet.

  If it didn’t kill me first, this job was going to give me a major superiority complex.

  Bundled in a black leather coat, plaid wool scarf, and dark jeans, Brad Pitt leaned against his pocket-size car. Not the Brad Pitt; Warden Brad Pitt, my boss. Squat, with a balding round head and puffy frog lips, he more resembled Danny DeVito than the hunky actor whose name he shared. If he ever resented the inevitable unflattering comparison, Brad never mentioned it and I never asked.

  Jamie bounced from the car, a family-size bag of potato chips in hand, his head whipping back and forth to take in the rapidly filling parking lot and the stream of people trekking to the stadium. He might appear old enough to be a recent Oakmont High alumnus, but my pooka had less experience in the world than a toddler, and everything fascinated him, including the yellow school buses strung in a line along the front of the school, each swarmed by teens in letterman jackets weighed down with instruments. I narrowed my eyes at the scene, groaning when I spotted the bright sign above the entrance.

  “What?” Jamie asked, tugging his beanie low over his ears.

  “It’s not a football game. It’s a marching band competition.”

  “What’s a marching band?”

  “A lot more fun when there’s a volume knob included.”

  “What?”

  “You’ll see.”

  I greeted Brad, then popped open the back door of the Civic to retrieve a pair of wool gloves. Since cold in Roseville usually meant temperatures in the high forties, Jamie and I hadn’t been equipped for a night out in subfreezing elements, and nearly everything we wore had been purchased today. It’d taken three stores to find gloves made from natural fibers rather than synthetic, but wool would conduct lux lucis without adding any resistance, so it’d been worth the hunt. We’d also picked up matching black coats, black beanies, black scarves, and dark jeans. In the flat lamplight, even our hair color looked like it matched, though mine was several shades lighter than Jamie’s onyx locks. With our identical height, strangers probably mistook us for siblings.

  If only they could see the difference between our souls.

  Underneath our outer layers, we both wore black zip-up sweaters, dark shirts, and long johns—mine neon green because they were cheap, Jamie’s gray because men didn’t get color choices. Short of waterproof pants, we were ready to walk through a blizzard.

  “We don’t have much time before the inspector arrives,” Brad said as he scurried around the hood of his car. “Hold out your hands.”

  I did, and he dumped an item in each cupped palm.

  “The soul breaker goes around your neck. Don’t take it off until you’ve chased the sjel tyver out of our territory.”

  I examined the two items. One masqueraded as a mustard-orange glue gun, but its balsa wood frame and straight nozzle said otherwise. Process of elimination made the other item the soul breaker. By weight and appearance, I would have guessed it to be a replica of a barbaric Celtic necklace or perhaps a Southwestern saddle adornment. A sturdy leather cord coiled in my palm, the ends sewn to a band of stiff leather from which hung a curved chunk of bamboo as thick as a roll of quarters through the middle and tapered up the arms. If it’d been a smidgen larger, it could have passed for connected cow horns. As it was, I could slide my fist through the arms of bamboo with room to spare. Bold black Celtic knots adorned both the leather and the apex of the knocker. The whole soul breaker could be summed up in one word: hideous.

  Reluctantly, I slid the leather cord over my head and settled the soul breaker against my chest. Hoping it’d look more attractive on a different visual spectrum, I blinked to Primordium. Color siphoned from the world, redefining it in a deceptively simplistic black and white. Everything inanimate—from my green Civic to the churned mud at the edge of the lot to the beige stucco school buildings—became the same shade of charcoal. Electric lights didn’t register in this spectrum, but a vague, ambient illumination prevented the landscape from being washed flat, casting enough shadows to provide definition to objects without ever creating true black. Only two things registered as black in Primordium: evil, or atrum, and the vast nothingness of the sky.

  Earth’s atmosphere didn’t register in Primordium, and while the void of space wasn’t filled with atrum, it simply wasn’t occupied by anything. I’d worked hard to ignore the insignificant-speck sensation that wormed through my gut whenever I stood beneath the ebony dome, and I’d been so intent on ignoring the sky that it hadn’t occurred to me until now to wonder: How was I supposed to track a flying atrum-bodied creature against a black backdrop?

  “Are you sure there aren’t any sjel tyver here?” I asked.

  “Positive. Drones are nearby but not tyver.”

  “Nearby? Where?” I spun in a tight circle, scanning the skies.

  Brad pointed to the stadium. “At the buffet.”

  Crass, but he had a point. Why would a creature that ate people’s souls linger over the slim pickings of the parking lot when it could feast from a congregation?

  “I don’t see them,” I said.

  “You can’t from here. Focus, Madison. We’ve got a lot of information to cover before the inspector gets here.”

  “Are you sure we shouldn’t head in? Letting the drones feed on all those people can’t be good.”

  “A few unprotected minutes isn’t
going to hurt them much. But if you go charging in there without knowing how to defend yourself, and a tyv shows up, you’re as good as dead.”

  “Right. Val made that abundantly clear.”

  Val was an often irritable, usually sarcastic, undeniably insecure sentient leather-bound enforcer manual Brad had saddled me with when it became obvious I wasn’t learning fast enough. I wore Val against my hip on a leather strap that draped across my chest. This enabled the handbook to “see,” which went a long way toward improving his general mood. It also ensured he experienced everything I did, which gave him a stake in my survival. I’d put up with hip bruises and occasional strap snags if it meant Val gave me sound, lifesaving advice.

  Along with telling me that sjel tyver meant soul thieves in Norwegian and providing a picture of a tyv—which resembled a human-size mosquito—Val had informed me that tyver were “mortally perilous.” After reading that bone-chilling phrase, it was little wonder Val’s entry on sjel tyver was burned into my brain:

  When sjel tyver feed off normal humans, they steal memories along with pieces of their victims’ souls. However, the fluid nature of an enforcer’s soul makes it vulnerable, and when a tyv feeds off an enforcer, it can steal the entirety of that person’s soul, leaving her little more than a mindless husk. If the enforcer survives the attack, she will be as good as dead, her body permanently comatose.

  Drones, the lower scout caste of the tyv species, looked similar to tyver but had been classified by Val as “mostly harmless” for norms and enforcers. They merely stole scraps of souls when they fed, but if they collected enough soul fragments, they could metamorphose into full tyver.

  My job was to make sure none consumed enough soul bits to evolve.

  “Is there ever going to be a time when our region isn’t facing a catastrophic threat?” The question blurted out unbidden, whine and all. I’d been an enforcer for less than a month, and I’d been running nonstop, tackling everything from a demon to rampaging, fire-breathing salamanders. Now we had an unprecedented swarm of sjel tyver bearing down on us. Not to sound too juvenile, but . . . it wasn’t fair!