A Lick of Frost

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  “One, a gun is not truly comfortable. Two, if I had needed my gun in this bedroom, it would mean that all of you were dead. If that happened, Frost, one gun in my hands would not save me.”

  He turned with the shirt unbuttoned to his waist. He pulled it the rest of the way out of his pants. And tired as I was, seeing him tug the shirt out of his pants, watching him undo the last few buttons, made my pulse speed just a little.

  His skin was a strip of whiteness against the lesser whiteness of the cloth. He slid the shirt over his shoulders, exposing his muscled strength in inches. He’d learned that sometimes watching him slowly undress helped whet my appetite for him.

  He hung his shirt on an empty hanger, even buttoning the collar so it would hang right and not wrinkle. But in doing so, he let me see the long line of his back and shoulders. He’d even swung all that silver hair over one shoulder so that the muscled smoothness of his back was an unobstructed show.

  There were times when watching him hang up his clothes drove me nearly mad and had me making small eager noises before he was ready to come to bed. Today would not be one of those days. The view was lovely as always, but I was tired, and did not feel completely well. Part of it was grief and shock, but also the nagging knowledge that I was coming down with a cold or a virus. Frost had never had a cold. He had never had so much as the sniffles.

  He turned to face me, his hands sliding around the top of his pants. He’d had to undo the belt earlier to take off the rig of weapons. I had to be more tired than I knew to have missed him unbuckling his belt.

  He started with the button at the top of his pants, and I rolled over. I rolled so my face was buried in the pillow and I could not watch. He was too beautiful to be real. Too amazing to be mine.

  I felt the bed move, and knew he was on the bed with me. “Merry, what is wrong? I thought you enjoyed watching me.”

  “I do,” I said, still not looking at him. How did I explain that I was having one of those rare moments when my mortality seemed too real and his immortality too large a reminder.

  “Am I not enough to please you without Doyle by my side?”

  That made me turn and look at him. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, one leg bent at the knee toward me. His pants gapped where he’d undone the buttons but not the zipper, his belt framing the undone work. He was slumping a little so that the fine muscles and lines of his stomach bunched. I had a choice of looking down to his lap and what I knew was still covered by his pants, or up to the beauty of his chest and shoulders and that face. In a different mood I would have gone down, but sometimes a man needs you to pay attention to things above the waist before you move below.

  I sat up, keeping the cover in front of my breasts, because with me nude sometimes Frost forgot to listen, and I wanted him to hear me.

  He sat there with his hair pooling like silver fire around his bare skin. He would not look at me, even though I knew he could feel the bed move as I inched close enough to touch his arm.

  “Frost, I love you.”

  His gray eyes rose once, then went back to staring at his big hands where they lay in his lap. “Do you love me alone without Doyle’s body beside me?”

  My hand tightened on his arm while I tried to think what to say. This was certainly a conversation I hadn’t expected to be having. I did love Frost, but I did not always love his moods. “I find you as desirable now as I did that first night.”

  He rewarded me with a small smile. “That was a very good night, but you avoided answering my question.” He gave me the full force of his eyes then. “Which is answer enough.” He started to get up, and I pressed my hand on his arm, not to force him, but to try to keep him where he was. He let me keep him sitting on the bed though he was stronger than I would ever be. There, that note of regret again.

  I sighed, and tried to cut through his mood and mine to get to something better. “Is it because I turned away and did not watch you undress?”

  He nodded.

  “I don’t feel well. I think I am coming down with a cold.”

  He looked at me uncomprehendingly.

  “Remember that some of you thought that what happened inside faerie had made me immortal like the rest of you?”

  He nodded again.

  “If I’m coming down with a cold then it is not so. I am still mortal.”

  He put his hand over mine where it lay against his arm. “Why would that make you look away from me?”

  “I love you, Frost, but loving you means that I will have to watch you stay young and handsome and perfect while I age. This body that you love will not remain. I will grow old and I will know death, and I will be forced to look at you every day and know that you do not understand. When I am very old, you will still take off your clothes and be as beautiful as you are now.”

  “You will always be our princess,” he said, and his face showed that he was trying to understand.

  I took my hand away and lay back on the bed, staring up at that impossibly lovely face. Tears burned at the back of my eyes and tightened my throat so that I could choke on regret. With everything that had happened today, all that had gone wrong, all the danger around us, I was ready to cry because the men I loved would always remain as beautiful as they were today but I would not. It wasn’t death I feared, really, it was the slow decay. How had Maeve Reed’s husband borne watching her remain while he grew old? How do love and sanity survive such a thing?

  Frost leaned over me, and his shoulders were so broad that his hair fanned out around me like some shining tent, a waterfall caught in mid-motion to glitter in the dim light of my room. “You are young and you are beautiful this night. Why do you borrow such sorrows when they are far away, and I am right here?” He whispered the last words above my lips, and ended with a kiss.

  I let him kiss me, but didn’t kiss him back. Did he not understand? Well, of course he didn’t. How could he? Or…or….

  I pushed a hand against his chest and got enough space to look into his face. “Have you loved someone and watched her grow old?”

  He sat back abruptly and would not look at me. I wrapped my hand around as much of his wrist as I could. It was too big for me to encircle it. “You have, haven’t you?” I asked.

  He would not look at me, but finally he nodded.

  “Who, when?” I asked.

  “I saw her through a pane of glass when I was not the Killing Frost but just Frost. I was just the hoarfrost made into something alive by the belief of the people and the magic of faerie.” He looked at me, and there was uncertainty in that look. “You saw me in a vision once, what I began as.”

  I nodded. I remembered. “You came to her window as Jack Frost,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Rose. She had golden curls and eyes like a winter sky. She saw me at the window, saw me and tried to tell her mother that there was a face at the window.”

  “She had second sight,” I said.

  He nodded.

  I almost let it go, but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. “What happened?”

  “She was always alone. The other children seemed to sense that she was different. She made the mistake of telling them the things she could see. They named her witch, and her mother with her. She had no father. From the talk among the other villagers she had never had a father. I heard them as I painted frost on their houses whispering that Rose was begotten by no man, but the devil. They were so poor, and I was just another part of the winter cold that hurt them the most. I wanted so to help her.” He raised his big hands, as if he were seeing different hands, smaller and less powerful. “I needed to be more.”

  “Did you ask for help?” I asked.

  He looked at me, startled. “Do you mean, did I ask the Goddess and consort to help me?”

  I nodded.

  He smiled and it lightened his face, made a joy shine through that he hid most of the time. “I did.”

  I smiled back at him. “And you were answered
.”

  “Yes,” he said, still smiling. “I went to sleep, and when I woke, I was taller, stronger. I found them fuel for their fire, all that long winter. I found them food.” Then the joy fled from his face. “I took the food from the other villagers, and they accused her mother of stealing. Rose told them that her friend left it, her shining friend.”

  I took his hand in mine. “They accused her of witchcraft,” I said softly.

  “Yes and theft. I tried to help, but I didn’t understand what it was to be human, or even fey. I was so new, Merry, so new to being anything but ice and cold. I was a thought made into a being. I did not know how to be alive, or what it meant.”

  “You wanted to help,” I said.

  He nodded. “My help cost them everything. They were jailed and condemned to death. The first time I called cold to my hands, a cold so deep that it could shatter metal, was for Rose and her mother. I broke their bars and rescued them.”

  “But that’s wonderful.” Yet his hand convulsed around mine, and I knew the story didn’t end there.

  “Can you imagine what the villagers thought when they found the metal bars shattered and the two women gone? Can you imagine what they thought about Rose and her mother?”

  “Nothing they hadn’t already believed,” I said softly.

  “Perhaps, but I was a piece of winter. I could not build them a shelter. I could not keep them warm. I could do nothing but take them out into the dead of winter with every human within reach turned against them.”

  I sat up and tried to hold him, but he wouldn’t let me. He turned away and finished his story. “They were dying because where I went, winter followed. I was still too much an elemental thing to understand my own magic. When all was lost, I prayed. The consort came to me and he asked me if I would give up all that I was to save them. I hadn’t been alive very long, Merry, and I remembered what it had been like before. I didn’t want to go back to that, but Rose lay so still in the snow, her hair fading into the whiteness, that I said yes. I would give up all that I was if it would save them. It seemed a suitable sacrifice, since my meddling, no matter how well intentioned, had brought about their misery.”

  He stopped talking for so long that I came to him and wrapped my arms around him from behind. This time he let me do it. He even leaned back against the pull of my body so that I cradled his upper body against my kneeling one.

  I whispered, “What happened?”

  “There was music in the snow, and Taranis, Lord of Light and Illusion, came riding on a horse made of moonlight. You have no idea how amazing a golden court could be when they rode out in those days, Merry. It wasn’t just Taranis who could make a steed out of light or shadow or leaves. It was truly magical. He and his men lifted them out of the snow and began to ride away toward the faerie mound. I was content to lose her if it meant she lived. I waited to be blasted back to nothingness and I was content. I had saved them, and my existence for theirs seemed right. I won’t say my life for theirs because I wasn’t alive yet then, not as I am now.”

  I hugged him close, and he gave me more of his weight, so that I leaned back against the foot of the bed, and cradled him. I kept one hand on his chest so I could feel his words rumbling up through his body.

  “She woke, held in the lap of one of the shining court. My little Rose woke. She cried out for her Jackie, for her Jackie Frost. I came to her as I had from that first moment. I came to her because I could do nothing else. She pushed herself from the arms of that shining lord of the sidhe and came to me. I was not as I am now, Merry. I was young and childlike. The goddess gave me a body that could do more. But I was not one of the shining court. I was a lesser fey in every way. I suppose to human eyes I might have appeared as a boy of perhaps fourteen or younger. I looked a good match for my Rose.”

  He lay still in my arms.

  “What happened to her mother?” I asked.

  “She is still a cook at the golden court.”

  I kissed his forehead, then asked, “What happened to Rose?”

  “We found shelter, and I used my magic to carry her far away from her village. People didn’t travel then as they do now, and twenty miles was enough distance that we never saw any of the others again. She taught me how to be real, and I grew with her.”

  “What do you mean, you grew with her?”

  “I looked like a boy of fourteen, as she was a girl of fifteen. As she grew, so did I. It was not sword and shield that I first learned with these arms, it was axe and any other work a strong back could do to help take care of his family.”

  “You had children,” I whispered.

  “No. I thought it was because I wasn’t real enough. Now, since you remain without child I wonder if it is simply not my fate to have children.”

  “But you were a couple,” I said.

  “Yes, and a priest who was more friendly than Christian even married us. But we could not stay in any one village for long, because I did not age. I grew with my Rose until I am as you see me now. Then I stopped, but she did not. I watched her hair turn from yellow to white, her eyes fade from the blue of winter to the gray of snowy skies.”

  He looked up at me then, and there was fierceness in his face. “I watched her fade, but I loved her always. Because it was her love that made me real, Merry. Not faerie, not wild magic, but the magic of love. I thought I was giving up what life I had to save Rose, but the consort had asked if I would give up everything I was, and I did. I became what she needed me to be. When I realized that I would not age with her I wept, because I could not imagine being without her.”

  He came to his knees and put his hands on my arms, and stared down into my face. “I will love you always. When this red hair is white, I will still love you. When the smooth softness of youth is replaced by the delicate softness of age, I will still want to touch your skin. When your face is full of the lines of every smile you have ever smiled, of every surprise I have seen flash through your eyes, when every tear you have ever cried has left its mark upon your face, I will treasure you all the more, because I was there to see it all. I will share your life with you, Meredith, and I will love you until the last breath leaves your body or mine.”

  He leaned down and kissed me, and this time I kissed him back. This time I melted into his arms, his body, because I could do nothing else.

  CHAPTER 16

  WE ENDED WITH HIM ABOVE ME. HIS HAIR HAD COME UNBOUND and fell around us like silver rain, if rain could be soft as silk and warm as your lover’s body. Our skin glowed as if we’d swallowed the moon, and it was shining out of every inch of our skin. I knew my hair was a mass of red shining fire, because I could see the light of it from the edges of my eyes. His hair began to spark and shine as he moved above me, catching the light the way snow glitters in moonlight. I’d had other lovers who brought the sun to bed with them, but Frost was a winter’s night with all that meant of beauty and harshness.

  He was too tall, or I was too short, for him to lie down on top of me. It was neither enjoyable for me nor easy to breathe, so he held his upper body above me with the shining strength of pale, muscled arms. Gazing down the length of our bodies, watching him slide in and out of me, made me cry out, made me look away as if the sight of it was too wonderful and I had to find something else for my eyes to meet. What I met were his eyes. His eyes were gray like a winter’s sky, but now with his power riding him they were more than just gray.

  In the gray of his eyes was a glimpse of a snow-covered hill with a bare winter tree upon it. There was a moment of vertigo, as if I could have fallen into that landscape, into his eyes, and been somewhere else. I closed my eyes then, because I was never certain where that hill was, or what tree it would be.

  The rhythm of his body in and out of mine, the size of him gliding in and out of my body, was beginning to fill me up. The first faint glow of orgasm began to build.

  “Merry, Merry, look at me.” There was urgency in his voice, that rough urgency that said that he too was close.

>   I opened my eyes, and his were just above mine, wide, staring, demanding that I not look away. He moved one hand so that he gripped my hair near one cheek. “I want to watch your face,” he said, his voice breathy and deep with effort.

  There was snow in his eyes, falling on that lonely tree and the hillside beyond. Something moved in his eyes, a figure.

  The rhythm of his body changed, grew more urgent, and it was too much. I could not watch his eyes while his body ran through mine. I tried to watch his body moving above mine, but his grip on my hair tightened, forcing my face to look up into his. His face was the face of my beloved, Frost. There was no vision in his eyes to distract me from the beauty of his face, the fierceness in his eyes.

  I whispered, “Almost, almost, almost.” Then one last thrust, and almost was now.

  I screamed, and only his grip, gone almost cruel in my hair, kept my neck from bowing. He kept our faces staring into each other, tolerated no looking away. We stared at each other as our bodies rode the pleasure. His strength demanded that we share this, the most intimate of moments, with no flinching, no looking away, nothing to save us from the wildness in each other’s eyes.

  We fell into that wildness, that near-frantic fierceness. He cried out above me as I screamed my pleasure, then his body collapsed atop mine, and he lifted me in his arms, with his body still sheathed inside me. He knelt, pinning me to the headboard. I grabbed the wood to keep me where he seemed to want me. He had gone, but he was not spent. He proved that as he began to pound me against the wood, the bed shivering with the strength of it, the entire frame of the bed protesting the abuse.

  I screamed for him, and fought to keep my hands on the wood to hold myself in place as he plunged inside me as deeply as he could. Deep enough from this angle that pleasure and pain rode each other, as Frost rode me.

  I let go of the bed and ran my nails down his white skin. Where I bled him the glow of his skin split, but it wasn’t blood that ran out. Blue glowing lines followed the lines of my nails and painted our skin. There was a moment when I saw a thorn vine around my forearm, and the head of a stag traced across his chest. His body shuddered against mine, inside mine as I painted his body with my pleasure and his pain.