“Does that mean we get to meet him?” Dad asked.
I rolled right past the question and gave them superficial details of the date, like the restaurant we ate at and a brief background on Alex: He grew up in Newcastle, a twenty-minute drive up the freeway; he had two older siblings, a sister who worked as a lawyer in San Diego and a brother who lived in LA working as a physical trainer for celebrities I’d actually heard of. His parents were divorced, and his dad had kept the house in Newcastle while his mother had landed in San Diego near the sole grandson.
When I’d prattled on long enough to give the illusion of having told them all the interesting facts, I decided to have a little fun with them.
“Then the date ended in the most spectacular way you can imagine,” I said, infusing innuendo into my voice.
“Whoa! La-la-la-la,” Dad said, and hung up.
“Madison, don’t be crass,” Mom chastised.
“Ew! I’m not the one with my mind in the gutter,” I said with false innocence. “I adopted a kitten from Alex’s clinic.”
“You got a kitten? Oscar, she wasn’t talking about S-E-X.”
She spelled it out. I’m twenty-five years old, and she spelled it out.
“What’s it like?” Mom asked as Dad clicked back onto the line.
“Her name is Dame Zilla, she’s a tabby, and she’s rambunctious and adorable.”
“How’s Mr. Bond taking it?” Dad asked.
“Really well. I think they’ll be good for each other.”
“Too bad you won’t be home today, or we’d pop over to meet her,” Mom said.
“We’ll have to meet her when we get back,” Dad said.
“Okay. We’ll chat then.” My words came out strangled, but I managed to get them off the phone without making any official plans.
Crap. So much for waiting until Christmas to figure out how to explain Jamie’s presence in my life—and my apartment. Maybe something brilliant would occur to me in the next two days.
I stared at the phone until the screen went dark, but when no inspiration struck, I turned it back on and texted Bridget that something had come up at work. Our plans for lunch would have to wait. I held back mentioning Niko—she’d demand details and I didn’t feel like typing them out. Bridget texted back immediately, understanding that work came first. There were benefits to having a workaholic friend.
Wait. I was the one working on a Sunday. Was I the workaholic friend? When had that happened?
Right about when my job and my survival became interwoven. Nothing motivated me to work overtime quite like trying to save my own skin.
I shoved from the car. Jamie’s five minutes were up five minutes ago. I made it halfway up the walkway when I heard Jamie lock the front door and pound down the steps. He carried a grocery bag loaded to the brim, colorful cellophane chip bags protruding from the top.
“I said to grab a snack.” Not to pack for a weekend in the woods.
“Oh, did you want me to get some stuff for you, too?” Jamie started to turn around.
I shook my head. “Come on. We’re going to be late.”
No one mentioned if all pookas had the metabolism of hummingbirds or if it was just mine. Given the state of my savings account, it seemed like an important detail to not overlook. Maybe I could get a clause put in the enforcer contract stating the CIA had to immediately issue a Costco membership and small farm in the event of bonding a pooka. It was too late for me, but future enforcers would thank me.
While Jamie munched his way through a bag of Doritos, I powered over a gauntlet of speed bumps before turning onto Sierra College Boulevard and kicking it up to fifty-five, speeding to make up for lost time. Playing with Dame Zilla had soothed the kinks from the dual energies of Jamie’s soul, leaving him as relaxed as a lava lamp. If I brought up his earlier refusal to clean up the atrum puddle at the shopping center, and worse, to follow my order, I’d ruin his mood. I took the coward’s way out, telling myself my reprimand would carry more weight if I waited until he acted out again.
“So, you can tell prophecies,” I said, relaxing into the calm energy seeping through the bond.
“Yep.”
“Can you tell me what you told Niko?”
“Nope.”
I hadn’t thought so, but it didn’t hurt to ask. “What about me? Do you have a prophecy for me?”
Jamie set his bag of chips in his lap and squinted at me. “Sometimes.”
“What does that mean?”
“Our lives are so connected it makes your future fuzzy to me. But every once in a while you do something that makes a future moment clearer or erases it.”
“Oh.” I didn’t know if I should be disappointed or relieved. “What about right now?”
“Fuzzy.”
I let that absorb, changing lanes to pass a slow SUV. “How does it work with other people?”
“Sometimes when I look at people, their energy creates bubbles, and those show me the future.”
“Bubbles? Like the bulges in a warden’s soul?”
Jamie scrunched his face and shook his head. “Have you ever had a soda?”
I nodded, guessing he’d been introduced to the sugary carbonated beverage when he’d been out with his friend and I’d been on my date.
“It’s like that. The bubbles are inside people’s souls, floating around. When they rise to the surface, I can see pictures inside them. It’s usually a cluster of images, not what will happen, but pictures of what could happen. When I give a prophecy, I describe the pictures.”
I tried to imagine it and failed. The world must look drastically different through pooka eyes.
“If you only tell people about possible futures, how is that helpful?”
I glanced at Jamie to make sure he hadn’t taken offense to my poorly worded question.
He shrugged. “They want to prevent the bad stuff from happening.”
“Can they?”
Jamie shrugged again.
Maybe Doris had the right idea. What good was a prophecy if a person couldn’t act upon the information and change things for the better?
Niko’s car sat alone in the carpool parking lot, and I pulled into the space next to him, shrugging out of my coat, scarf, and beanie before getting into his car. I still wore a sweater and a long-sleeve shirt, but the act of stripping anything in Niko’s presence made me self-conscious. I piled my garments on the seat behind Niko, and Jamie added his outerwear, making a huge mound on the leather seat. Tugging a hair tie from my pocket, I pulled my long dark hair into a snarled ponytail as I walked back around to the passenger side. I’d seen snow bunnies make this layered, mussed style look sexy, but I suspected the best I attained was the ever-cringe-worthy “cute.”
Jamie transferred his bag of snacks to the seat beside him, then climbed into the back. Niko’s eyes tracked him in the rearview mirror. If he had a problem with being in a confined space with the pooka, Niko’s face didn’t show it.
I buckled myself into the front seat, settled Val on my lap and my purse at my feet, and did my best not to take obvious deep breaths. Niko’s intoxicating scent, a subtle combination of roasted cinnamon, coffee, and heat, swirled through the cabin of the car, mingling with the aroma of rich leather and, even fainter, vanilla.
My heartbeat kicked up, every nerve in my body sensitizing to Niko’s presence.
Zero frost moths in the vicinity, and I was primed to jump the man because he smelled so good.
I cracked my window and prayed for a miracle: Please don’t let me make a complete fool of myself today.
11
I Don't Have a Dirty Mind; I Have a Sexy Imagination
“Are there going to be a lot of enforcers meeting us?” I asked, hoping I could put a buffer of strangers between myself and Niko.
“We mustered fourteen from nearby regions. The wardens made a grid of the affected land, and you and I are taking one of the larger areas.”
“Just us?”
“Even with the extra hands, there�
�s too much ground to cover to have enforcers overlap.”
Then why not spread the two of us out to different sectors as well? Why was I the only enforcer being escorted by the optivus aegis?
Because I’m the only enforcer whose competence is in question. As Pamela had noted, Niko had spent a lot of time in my region. In the last few weeks, he’d trained me on how to net a hound, backed me when I bonded Jamie, and he’d been instrumental in thwarting Isabel’s most diabolical plans. If I’d been a full-fledged, experienced enforcer, I wouldn’t have needed his assistance at all. In reality, I’d be dead several times over without his intervention. Niko more than anyone else understood the limits of my proficiency.
My propensity to behave like a lust-crazed fool in his presence likely hadn’t done much to raise his opinion of my capabilities, either. I wished I could say this morning’s humiliating performance had been unique, but it merely ranked top of the Madison’s Most Embarrassing Reactions to Niko list.
I sneaked a peek at Niko through my lashes, waiting for him to comment on my earlier foolishness. He merged onto the freeway and we blew past Loomis, then Penryn without him so much as parting his lips.
“Whoa! Look,” Jamie said, his voice full of wonder.
I twisted in my seat. Jamie had abandoned his bag of snacks and faced backward, his body contorted around his seat belt so he could stare out the back window. The freeway climbed into the foothills in a long, straight line, and at the peak of a hill, the view stretched behind us to the high-rises of downtown Sacramento and beyond.
“It’s so big,” Jamie breathed.
“What is?”
“The world.”
Guilt stabbed me. All I’d shown him since he’d risen was my tiny sliver of a region. Aside from a smattering of shopping trips and one short outing during my date, we’d spent all our time running from one emergency to the next. Even his first venture outside Roseville wasn’t for fun.
I shifted to face forward again, fresh insight dawning. “Was a stipulation of my involvement in today’s efforts that you kept an eye on”—I pointed to Jamie but said—“us?” Wardens were all about reducing the level of evil inside their borders, and bringing a pooka through their territory increased the odds of an escalation of atrum. No one would be throwing out the welcome mat for me and Jamie until I’d convinced him to embrace lux lucis.
Niko flicked his eyes to mine, then back to the road. “I suggested you come.”
“Thank you. He needed this,” I whispered, too soft for Jamie to hear.
“You both did.”
Not sure what he meant by that, I let my eyes drop. Niko had pushed the sleeves of his sweater up, revealing smooth, muscled forearms. The tendons in his right arm flexed as he changed his grip on the steering wheel, then adjusted the vents. When I realized I was contemplating the texture of his skin—would it feel as silky as it looked?—I gave my head a little shake of admonishment and turned to stare out my window.
Silence thickened in the car, and my thoughts spiraled outward, latching on to the most pressing worry. “My parents are going to Reno tomorrow. Are they going to be in danger? Should I make them cancel their trip?”
“What are they doing in Reno?” Niko asked.
“I don’t know. Gambling, I think. Maybe seeing a show. They’re taking the train, so they won’t have a car.”
“They should be fine. It’s probably safer in the mountains than in the valley right now. Reno and all the regions in the Sierra Nevada have defenses in place for tyver.”
“Really? Then why don’t we have those, too?”
“Because most of the defenses are built into the architecture. I could tell you all about county building codes and regulatory hoops the CIA had to jump through to make sure our safety measures were included in general construction laws for chimneys of homes above a certain elevation and how all this was accomplished without tipping off the norms, but I don’t want to fall asleep while driving.”
I’d forgotten the tyver laid their eggs in chimneys.
“Why weren’t those laws used in Roseville?”
“It would have been an unnecessary pain in the ass. The lower elevations rarely maintain the arctic temperatures tyver require. Occasionally an enterprising sjel tyv dips down into undefended territory, but the weather usually chases it back up the mountains before it can do much damage. With all the frost moths turning the foothills into an ice box, we can’t count on the weather to help out this time.”
“Unless we can kill enough today.”
Niko shook his head. “Probably not even then. At best, we’ll prevent the freezing from spreading farther. When the tyver come, we want to narrow their options as much as possible.”
I slumped in my seat. I hadn’t realized how much I’d gotten my hopes up. So long as the drones were around, I didn’t stand a chance of impressing Pamela. Plus, I wasn’t looking forward to pitting myself against a creature that could steal my entire soul.
“There are going to be some confused meteorologists trying to explain the cold pockets around here over the next few days.” Niko grinned, perfect white teeth flashing. He sobered when he saw my glum expression. “Your parents are going to be fine. You don’t find a lot of chimneys at casinos. They’re also norms, right?”
“Yes.”
“Even if a sjel tyv does get them, they won’t lose their souls. Right now, your parents have far less to fear than we do.”
Such backhanded comfort.
Niko pulled off the freeway in Auburn, parking in front of a small deli. Jamie ordered three sandwiches, proving that despite his sheltered life, he knew his way around a restaurant menu. I picked a veggie-loaded—and therefore a lux lucis–loaded—sandwich, hoping it’d get me brownie points with Niko, and I insisted on paying for everyone since Jamie’s selection had tripled the bill. The pooka polished off a sandwich before we reached the car. The rest got packed into an ice chest in the trunk to be saved for a later lunch.
Niko merged back onto the freeway. Hills and trees streamed past, blanketed by high, rolling clouds. After minutes of silence, in which Niko exhibited no inclination to burst into a lecture, I relaxed into my seat. My worries quieted, soothed as much by Niko’s calming presence as by my proximity to Jamie. I practiced forming nets in my palms, but the pooka’s innocent wonder and enthusiastic reactions to the most ordinary of sights became a fun distraction. I pointed out hawks and buzzards, deer grazing in a meadow, water reservoirs tucked into a hillside, and homes nestled among the trees, and Jamie gawked at them all like a child who’d grown up in a hole in the ground. Go figure.
“If there’s all this space, why don’t the people in Roseville spread out?” Jamie asked.
“Some people like to live closer to conveniences like restaurants and shops. And some people prefer to live way out here and drive to the city when they need something.”
“There aren’t any restaurants out here?” Jamie asked, appalled.
That’s my pooka. “A couple, but not like in Roseville.”
Colfax raced by, a series of car dealerships, building supply companies, and chain restaurants plastered to the edge of the freeway, with promises of a historic downtown hidden behind the hills. The freeway had long since narrowed to two lanes, and as we left behind civilization, the median shrank on either side of the freeway until a concrete barrier hugged the fast lane and trees crowded the slow lane.
We drove for miles without spotting a single home, road, or off-ramp, rapidly ascending in elevation, and just when I was getting ready to ask Niko where he was taking us, an exit appeared around a wide corner and we coasted off the freeway. Ten minutes of weaving along a twisted frontage road dumped us onto a narrow paved lane barely wide enough for two cars to pass. A few homes huddled next to the road, windows lit and chimneys smoking, and even more gravel driveways disappeared into the thick forest of pines and oaks. The pavement gave way to a one-lane chip-and-seal road, and Niko braked to accommodate a flock of quail darting across the
bend in front of us. I’d lost all sense of direction, but Niko didn’t hesitate at each fork in the road, not even when it transitioned to a muddy path with a spare foot of clearance between his car’s glossy body and the overgrown, sharp manzanita branches on either side.
Occasionally, a house peeked through the foliage, the thick forest disguising all but the brightest windows. I blinked to Primordium and gasped. The road twined like a charcoal ribbon through a riot of pristine white lux lucis that shimmered with varying degrees of understated and ancient strength. Above us, the lace of barren white oak limbs and sprays of white pine needles overlaid the black sky. I pressed to the window, soaking in the beauty. When I turned to check on Jamie, I found him in an identical position, and we shared a grin.
“We have to walk from here,” Niko said, easing his car into the weeds of a narrow turnout and cutting the engine.
I snapped the locks shut before Jamie could leap from the car. Unhooking my seat belt, I twisted in my seat to face him.
“Do you want to be a human or a dog?” I asked. Even if no witnesses were close enough to view his transformation once we got out, the terrain was too muddy for him to switch back and forth, and I had no desire to hike around carrying his clothes if he suddenly decided he wanted to be a Great Dane.
Jamie cracked his window, sniffing the air. “Dog. Definitely dog.”
“Okay. When we get out, you have to stay in sight the entire time. It’d be too easy to get lost if we were separated. Do you promise?”
“I promise.” He tugged on the door handle, but it didn’t budge.
“Do you have enough room to change back there? I don’t want your clothes to get wet.”
Jamie yanked his sweater over his head, taking the long-sleeve shirt underneath with it. I popped my door open and jumped out as he reached for the button of his jeans. Niko stepped out, too, but he observed Jamie’s transformation through the window.
Crisp air slid into my lungs, soaked with a woodsy pine aroma and spiked with the tangy notes of the forest undergrowth crushed beneath the BMW’s tires. I breathed deep. Department stores attempted to mimic this clean scent every Christmas, but the bitter, cloying candles and perfume-doused pine cones never came close.
A Fistful of Frost Page 14