“Look at her. She’s leaving herself defenseless—”
“Stick to the cover,” Pamela said.
Lux lucis blasted the drones behind Jamie, exploding three into black glitter, but the remaining dozen didn’t slow. My lungs constricted, bound by fear and a soul-deep sorrow when Jamie didn’t slow, either. His sharp snout jabbed through my chest and I crumpled beneath a wave of heartsickness. The drones struck a second later, and I bit down on a scream, collapsing to my hands and knees as pain crackled through me.
When I looked up through eyes blurry with unshed tears, Jamie burst through a cloud of black glitter, a handful of drones on his tail. Summer had planted herself in front of me, and she fired bullets so fast her soul’s glow visibly softened. Determination defined every line of her body. I gathered myself to tackle her but hesitated when Jamie zipped past her. She had plenty of opportunities to hit the pooka, but all her shots landed on the drones behind him.
I pushed to my feet, locating Pamela pressed to the closest building, holding off a line of drones. Summer should have been with her; instead, she had thrown herself in danger to defend me. I couldn’t fathom her motives, and I wasn’t going to waste time trying to decipher them now. I had a pooka to save.
“Jamie,” I called, and hope surged through me when he flew back to me, circling just out of reach. I spun with him, dizzy and tripping over my own feet. “I shouldn’t have changed the rules on you.” I could feel Pamela’s eyes on me, judging my words and actions, but I didn’t care. The tenuous, lingering hope I’d maintained of impressing her had died the moment she snapped that handcuff around my wrist. I was through trying to appease her. “I should have trusted you, Jamie. I do trust you. I love you.”
The pooka shot straight up, returning with a pocket of drones, but they all attacked Summer, driving her toward Pamela and away from me. Jamie split from them, skimming the ground, tracing a wide arc around me. I reached for him, yearning to close the emptiness between us.
“Come back to me. You’re my pooka. I’m your person. I won’t let anyone change that. You belong with me and I belong with you.”
Jamie darted toward me, then away, agitation plain despite his strange form.
“She’s moving! She’s coming this way!”
“Get your soul breaker ready.”
The panic in the inspector’s voice sent a tingle of alarm through me, but I was more afraid that if I looked away from Jamie or said the wrong thing now, I would lose him. Forever.
“Forget the prophecy, Jamie. I don’t believe it. You’re safe with me. I won’t let anyone hurt you. No one has to die today.”
Jamie flung himself sideways a split second before a wall of atrum and lux lucis crashed to the ground, cutting us off from the rest of the world. My heart skittered up my throat, choking me. I’d forgotten . . . I’d been so intent on Jamie—
The wall twisted, bringing into view a giant triangular head coated with a sea of malevolent ebony eyes. My thoughts scattered beneath the weight of the tyv’s ravenous regard.
25
Nevertheless, She Persisted
Time turned to molasses, clutching at my legs and arms. The tyv looked as if she had stepped from a Japanese horror movie titled Attack of the Mutant Mosquito. She dwarfed the nearby SUVs, her bulky abdomen swollen to elephantine proportions, her antennae clearing the second-floor balconies. Barbed hairs stabbed from her segmented legs and clawed feet, and fine black spikes bristled across wings longer than helicopter blades. My heart thundered in my chest as I cataloged all the ways she could kill me, fixating last on her proboscis. Protruding like a lance from between the hundreds of eyes coating her face, it ended in an obscenely sharp, angled tip that exposed the hollow interior. The sight of the tyv’s long tongue flicking out the opening to taste the air like a snake broke my trance.
I backpedaled, my steps slow and cumbersome. The tyv had walled Jamie and me off from Summer and Pamela, pinning us between a building and her body.
I locked eyes with the pooka, seeing past his foreign face to the fear radiating from him. His legs stretched toward me, as if he could pull me to him, and his body blurred into a streak of black and white, closing the distance between us with inhuman speed.
Time snapped, releasing me.
I ran.
My fingers scrabbled for my soul breaker, yanking it free—
Agony speared my torso and exploded outward. I crumpled, the world titling as I crashed to the frozen pavement. Pain tore through my body, each pulse impossibly sharper than the last, my soul ripping apart skin and muscle and bone as the tyv sucked it through my impaled torso. The bitter scent of copper assaulted my nostrils. My fingers spasmed, blindly searching for the soul breaker, but I couldn’t feel anything except terrible, breathless agony. The tyv shoved closer, her black pebbled eyes swelling to consume the light. I convulsed, thrashing, and my final breath gusted from my tortured lungs.
I rested against the chest of a prehistoric mammoth, cradled against his thick fur. Warm. Safe. A shiver wracked my body, and I snuggled closer. I didn’t want to think about the cold. If I did, I’d remember . . .
No. Here, now, this was all that mattered. The mammoth and me. I’d been here before, when Jamie had first bonded with me.
Jamie.
My eyes snapped open. A white haze misted my vision, fogging my view of the tyv hovering above me, her wicked snout poised to plunge back into my body. I sucked in a shuddering breath, lifting a feeble hand to ward off the unstoppable blow.
A tiny drone rocketed into sight, driving his body into the tyv’s head and knocking aside her proboscis.
“Jamie,” I screamed. It came out a thready whisper.
He zipped in a tight circle around me, and my lux lucis twirled beneath my skin, tracking him as if he’d become a magnet to my soul’s compass. Fighting dizziness, I closed my eyes, springing them back open because the darkness only made it worse. Jamie flew another lap around me, exposing the mist for what it was: a lux lucis net swelling from the pooka to cocoon me. Jamie zipped behind me, then shot overhead. Inside my chest, my soul rolled, then caught up against an internal hook and stuttered. The vibration rattled my organs, and I hunched to the side and threw up.
The net imploded, collapsing into my body and capsizing my equilibrium. I vomited again, shivering and sweating. When my vision cleared, I checked my hands. They glimmered with lux lucis, touting a strength completely at odds with the tyv’s attack. She had peeled my soul from my body; I’d felt every tortured millimeter she’d stolen. I should have been dead.
The tyv reared on her hind legs, wings spread, antennae twirling in agitation. She filled the sky, eclipsing the three-story buildings around her. A lone, minuscule drone flitted around her eyes, distracting her. She swiped at him with mandibles and antennae, her wrath temporarily diverted, but Jamie couldn’t hold her off much longer.
I staggered to my feet, gasping when icy-cold pain pierced my thigh, then warmed. I glanced down and blanched. I had found my soul breaker. The sharp hooks had sliced through my pants and embedded in my left thigh. Blood seeped from the twin wounds, soaking my jeans.
Gingerly, I grasped the weapon’s handle. My fingers didn’t want to work, clumsy from cold and trauma, and my fumbling jostled the razor tips in my flesh. Grimacing, I yanked the soul breaker free. Pain flared anew and fresh blood gushed down my thigh, but my leg held my weight.
Jamie dipped close to the tyv’s massive eyes, jabbing with his sharp mouth. She flailed, raking her front legs through the air. I wouldn’t get a better opportunity. Fist locked around the soul breaker’s curved handle, I charged the tyv and punched the weapon into her side with all my strength.
At the last second, she swept her abdomen away from me, turning a piercing blow into a grazing cut. I floundered for my footing, shuffling backward. Ignoring me, the tyv sprang toward Jamie, her clawed foot skewering his abdomen, the tip protruding out his back. Jamie spasmed. A scream welled in my throat, choked off by fear.
/>
The tyv landed over fifty feet away, half atop a row of parked cars. With a vengeful stomp, she pinned Jamie to the pavement. He struggled, his wings trapped beneath him, his slender legs scraping ineffectually against the tyv’s thick, barbed appendage. If he could have overpowered her with either atrum or lux lucis, he would have, and his unprecedented helplessness terrified me.
I lurched into a limping sprint, my heavy steps too slow. The tyv pivoted and plunged her proboscis into Jamie. His legs stiffened and his whole body convulsed.
“No!” The denial roared from me.
The sky dropped.
Hundreds of drones converged on me, choking the air with their thorny legs and distended abdomens and piercing mouths. Pain crackled through me, sharp but meaningless. Only Jamie mattered.
I had lost track of all my weapons except the soul breaker, which wouldn’t work on drones, but it didn’t matter. I was a weapon. I grabbed lux lucis and shaped it into a sword. The blade extended three feet from my hand. A remote part of me marveled at the weapon. I hadn’t known swords of pure energy were possible until an hour ago; I hadn’t known how to make one until it crystallized in my hand.
I pushed the wonder aside, formed a second sword on my other hand that protruded past the soul breaker clenched in my fist, and kept running. My grasp on my lux lucis slid, as if I were holding oiled glass. I had the uncanny feeling that if I lost my grip, the blades would detach and my soul would simply drift away.
If I had possessed any terror to spare, the foreboding sensation would have made me hesitate, but my desperation to save Jamie overwhelmed everything.
I lurched blindly through the drone-choked air, orienting on glimpses of Jamie’s limp form and the tyv greedily consuming his precious, powerful life force. My lux lucis blades scissored the air in front of me, extensions of my pumping arms, slicing through drones and exploding them into harmless glitter. I cleared a path, but each kill whittled away precious energy. Halfway to the tyv, the blades stuttered, shrank, and I tripped, my coordination faltering. I curbed my energy expenditure, extinguishing one sword, shrinking the other to knife length. If I reached the tyv but had no lux lucis left, Jamie and I would both die.
The tyv’s thorax lay across the hood of a Lexus three cars away. I couldn’t watch Jamie’s feeble struggles. Instead, I locked my gaze on the increasingly bright energy—Jamie’s energy—swirling within the most vulnerable part of the tyv’s body.
Rigid fingers clamped around my forearm, spinning me from my target.
“Stand down, Enforcer,” Pamela ordered.
“Let me go! She’s torturing him!”
I swung a punch at the inspector, but she caught my fist and forced my hand to my side. She evaded my kick just as easily. I’d taken Summer down so effortlessly earlier, but my fatigued limbs betrayed me now.
“You don’t have the strength. The tyv will kill you.” Summer clamped down on my right wrist, holding the soul breaker in front of me, where it couldn’t hurt anyone. As much as I struggled, I couldn’t budge either woman.
“She’s killing him!”
“Stop fighting us. We’re here to help,” Summer said.
Abruptly, the drone mob ascended, and only then did I realize the two women had been holding them at bay with lux lucis nets used like shields to surround us. A clot of drones broke from the main mass, sweeping under the tyv and lifting her. For a second, Jamie dangled from her clawed foot, then dropped back to the ground, limp.
“Now!”
Pamela and Summer released me, sprinting for the tyv. They struck blows across her underbelly before being swarmed by unencumbered drones. The tyv beat her massive wings, gaining altitude. If she had been wounded, it didn’t show. She and her minions cleared the nearest rooftop and disappeared.
I lurched to the pooka. “Jamie. Jamie!” My voice broke, and I collapsed to my knees beside his broken body. An oily mix of atrum and lux lucis seeped from his abdomen, spreading in an uneven pool across the pavement.
“You said I’d get to choose,” I sobbed. “I didn’t choose you. You were supposed to live.”
His legs twitched and he turned his head toward me. My heart lurched and I reached for him, hesitating over his unfamiliar body. I couldn’t stroke his head without touching his eyes. He had no hands to hold.
I pressed down on his abdomen, desperate to staunch the seep of his soul. Jamie’s insubstantial body shifted beneath my palms like the surface of a waterbed. Atrum ate into my fingers, sharp and stinging. I flinched but maintained pressure, only yanking my hands back when a violent shudder cascaded through Jamie’s body. Damn it, I was making things worse.
“What can I do? How can I help?”
Jamie thrashed, long legs clawing at nothing. I grabbed for him, and painful black bands seared my arms where he clutched me in return. Together, we righted him. He released me and stood on shaky legs, thrummed his wings, and wobbled into the air.
“Stand clear,” Pamela ordered.
I jumped, having forgotten the rest of the world existed. The inspector stood behind me, palmquell raised and aimed at Jamie. Summer sheathed her soul breaker and walked to stand with Pamela.
“Lower your weapon.” I glared at her, expending precious lux lucis to erase the coils of atrum from my arms before she saw them. “He’s hurt. He needs help.”
When she didn’t alter her stance, I struggled to my feet. Swaying, I planted myself between Pamela and Jamie.
“I won’t let you shoot him.”
“He’s wounded and that makes him twice as dangerous—to himself and others,” Pamela said. “We need to contain him.”
She took a step to the side. I tracked Jamie’s labored flight and shifted to keep my body between his and the inspector’s. He’d taken a lot of abuse tonight; a few lux lucis bullets might be too much for his system.
When Summer stepped forward, I tensed, but she only set a hand on Pamela’s forearm. The inspector shot her a sharp look.
“He’s not threatening anyone,” Summer said, surprising me again. “After all that’s happened, he’s still bonded with Madison.”
Pamela’s lips tightened, but she dropped her arm.
I spun back to Jamie, keeping Pamela in my peripheral vision. Black and white energy dripped from the pooka, dotting the pavement beneath his erratic flight. As surely as if he were losing blood, he wouldn’t survive if he continued to hemorrhage his soul’s energy. He needed to be bandaged, but nothing would stick to his drone body. I couldn’t even touch him. I hated this helpless feeling.
The next time we meet, one of us will die. I wouldn’t let his prophecy be true.
“Let me help, Jamie. What can I do?”
Jamie wriggled his proboscis, his tongue flicking out the sharp tip. Then he turned and flew away, his fatigued wings barely lifting him above the bushes next to the road.
“Jamie, please!”
I slogged after him, my inability to skim obstacles forcing me to take a longer route. When he disappeared around a building, I followed the trail of his bleeding soul, pushing extra speed from my fatigued limbs.
I lost my footing on the sloped ground, fetching up against a tree at the edge of a marsh bank. Jamie’s trail led straight to the cattail-choked water and vanished. My heart sank. I couldn’t track him across the soggy ponds. Scanning the far side of the marshes, I searched for any telltale movement of a drone.
“Jamie!” The swamp swallowed my shout.
Damn it, Jamie, why did you fly off?
Behind me, the lock on a sliding glass door clicked and the door rumbled open.
“Everything okay down there?” a masculine voice asked.
“We’re fine,” Summer said, laying an arm around my shoulders and surreptitiously supporting me. “Just a bad breakup. I’ll get her home.”
She discreetly tucked my palmquell and pet wood into my pocket, and I allowed her to turn me away from the marsh and guide me back to the parking lot. I needed to get to the other side of the marsh, wh
ich meant I needed my car. Orienting on the surrounding buildings, I determined the quickest route back to where we had parked and started walking. Summer dropped her arm but stayed close, as if she assumed I’d fall over and she’d have to catch me. Pamela trailed us, eyes on the empty sky, worry pinching her eyebrows.
Other than our footsteps scuffing the pavement and the distant sound of a car’s motor, the complex slept silently around us. It seemed impossible that the residents ensconced behind those walls could have been oblivious to the swarms of drones, let alone the whale-size tyv. I tried to muster concern for the tyv’s current whereabouts, but I couldn’t think past my worry for Jamie.
“Here.” Pamela thrust a small, familiar vial into my hand. Liquid lux lucis.
I unscrewed the cap and sipped, grateful for the rush of warmth that slid down my throat, hit my stomach, and burst outward to my extremities, refilling my depleted reserves. This wasn’t the first time my soul had needed a pick-me-up after a battle, and experience had taught me that the surge of strength was nothing more than a temporary stopgap until I got proper food and rest. It was also going to inflict one hell of a hangover when its effects wore off, but tomorrow’s pain didn’t matter. I’d risk far worse for Jamie, and I’d take any enhancement I could get right now.
I tipped the vial to my lips for a second draw, but Pamela plucked it from my fingers before anything hit my tongue.
“That’s enough,” she said.
I spotted a shortcut along a pathway between two buildings and cut in front of Pamela to take it. Urgency flooded me, but my coordination lagged, forcing me to walk; anything faster and I’d end up flat on my face.
“The pooka was commanding the drones. Do you know what that means?”
I pretended I couldn’t hear Pamela.
“It means his fourth form isn’t a drone at all. It’s a tyv. Given enough time and atrum, he will metamorphose into the smartest, most deadly sjel tyv this country has ever seen.”
A Fistful of Frost Page 36