by Rin Chupeco
For once, Tala’s agility failed her. Her foot hit a patch of slippery ice, and she slipped, landing flat on her back. Her momentum and the icy tracks continued to propel her forward, sliding past the startled Alex and the woman with panicked, high-pitched yelps. She hit the row of opposite lockers with a loud, metallic thunk that seemed to echo throughout the room, as if to further mock her inadequacy.
“Tala,” Alex groaned.
“Ah,” the lady whispered, her smile cruel. “An eavesdropper.”
Tala scrambled to her feet. Or tried to. Her feet refused to listen, and both legs shot out, in opposite directions. She tried to regain her balance, but continued to slide along the wet floor a few more seconds before finally finding a spot that still held friction. She swallowed and tried to reassure herself that she still had the basketball in her hand, like this was an advantage. “Let him go!” she ordered.
The woman’s face split into another grin, wider than a normal face allowed for. Her freezing ice-blue eyes glittered, the irises relegated to even tinier pinpricks. “You smell like irrelevance and spit,” she purred. “No whiff of magicks and spells to protect yourself from me. Is this the best you can do, Your Highness? A little useless commoner to defend your honor?”
“I said let him go!” Tala tried her best to appear threatening. A chihuahua, she thought miserably, would have been more intimidating.
The lady drew nearer in response, her hands forming talons. “I shall enjoy sucking the marrow from your bones, little commoner. I will tear out your soul from your twitching body, draw out your agony for a hundred years and back. I will—”
Ice spiraled out from her fingers toward her just as Tala threw the basketball as hard as she could. The ball shattered its way through the attempted attack, the spell crumbling upon impact, and hit the woman’s face with an unexpected and terrifying crack…and stuck there. The lady toppled backward, hitting the wall behind her not with a loud thud, but with the sound glass made when it shattered. Alex had stopped struggling, staring at Tala in horror.
“Uh,” Tala said. “I wasn’t expecting that. Did I kill her?”
“You ninny!” Alex hissed. “Run! She’s an ice maiden!”
“A what?”
“You’re being a huge butt! I said run!”
“You’re the butt, disappearing without telling anyone! And I’m not going to leave you here!” The boy was already blue, teeth chattering. Tala tried to free his legs from the blocks of ice jutting out from the floor, bashing desperately at them with her sticks. Each swing broke off a few chunks, but her progress was not fast enough for her liking.
“T-tala! Leave!”
“You can’t honestly think I’m gonna—”
“Foolish mortal!”
The now-frozen basketball fell to the floor, shattering into a million pieces. The woman’s hand was clasped against her face, and something liquid and colorless was dripping down her fingers. The wound on her cheek gaped, black and empty and devoid of blood, as if the woman herself were hollow. Her skin was now translucent and silvery. Underneath that pale, mirrorlike face, she glittered, like multitudes of tiny stars were contained inside of her.
A burst of wind flung Tala across the room. The ice maiden’s face twisted and stretched around her head, and Tala found herself staring at something not quite human.
Then the cold assaulted her, cutting air from her lungs. She pawed at her throat, choking.
A faint rustle, a quick flap of wings, and the firebird was there, hovering inches away from what was left of the woman’s face. Its beak yawned, and its body shimmered.
The ice maiden shrieked, raising her hand, but she was half a second too slow.
A blazing ball of fire enveloped the creature. Screaming, she stumbled, but could only manage a few steps before crumpling to the ground, water trickling out from every part of her body. The winds died down as she melted, the noise falling away.
By the time Tala worked up the courage to approach, nothing remained of the ice maiden but some small tattered strips of cloth, a few puddles of water and melting snowflakes, clear and sharp, embedded deeply into the tiles.
11
In Which Fighting Ogres Is a Popular Team-Building Activity
What was that?” Tala asked, watching as the firebird made short work of the rest of the icicles trapping Alex, the last shards melting into the ground. “The curse that ice maiden mentioned. ‘In shifting sands a prince you’ll kiss,’ and all that.”
Alex didn’t respond at first, gazing blankly at the puddle of water that was all that was left of the creature. He was still clutching the cell phone like it was a lifeline. “My curse,” he finally said. “It’s always been about my damn curse.”
“The frog spell?” By association, Tala cast a worried look around the room and relaxed when she saw the little frog hopping in between lockers, unharmed.
“It’s a threefold spell. The frog curse was just the first of it.”
“That…thing also said something about an old witch…”
“Yeah. A Baba Yaga.”
“A what?”
“A Baba Yaga. They’re powerful enough to rain down curses on people if they’ve a mind to. And one of them had a mind to, on me.”
“But why would she do something so awful?”
He looked away. “She didn’t,” he said quietly. “I asked her to.”
She should have pushed for answers. When she’d met him for the first time and she’d been suspicious about the extent of his curse, she should have asked, wheedled as much of his history as she could out of him, because he’d proven over the past year that he was willing to take on everything and bear the pain on his own with no one the wiser, refusing help because he thought it wasn’t fair to accept assistance for whatever it was he kept hidden and blamed himself for.
She should have known all these months ago instead of today, with her ass numb from the cold and from the wet floor, saddled with a firebird breathing warmth back to the room. “Tell me now. You owe me that much.”
Still he said nothing, looking tired and worn out, and in some other lifetime, Tala would have taken pity and allowed him time to process the last couple of days, but she was done with his secrets intruding into her own life.
“Damnit, Alex, tell me!”
“What do you want me to say?” he snapped, voice loud and angry in the stillness of the chilly room. “That I saw my parents killed in front of me? That my father fought to make sure my mother and I could escape, and was impaled through the heart for his troubles? That my mother tried to protect me, and paid for it when the Snow Queen encased her completely in ice, then shattered her remains? That they were going to kill me next? That I had to run, and run, and run, scrambling to hide, terrified because I was five years old and didn’t know better?”
“Alex…”
“I hid. I hid in a mirror that wasn’t a mirror, in a room that wasn’t a room, and the Baba Yaga was there. I was five years old, but I knew who she was. She offered me a three-pronged curse, and I took it because she promised me I would survive if I accepted. So I did, and I survived, exactly like she said.” He looked down at his hands.
“I was eight the first time I kissed someone,” he said harshly. “That’s how I learned about the first of the curses. Who knows? Maybe if I find the right person, it would break the frog’s curse, but that’s no one else’s business but mine.” His voice dipped lower, rough. “I don’t know what the rest of the curse means. The Cheshire’s been trying to figure out that riddle for years. You’re my best friend, Tala, but I don’t owe you or anyone else an explanation.”
Tala listened silently, combing the icicles out of her hair. “Point taken,” she said, just as quietly. “But at least tell me why you left without saying anything to anyone. You may have the right to hide your curse, but you just up and disappeared for no reason.”
They were photos of Alex and another boy Tala didn’t recognize; he had curly black hair, green eyes. The latter’s arm was wrapped around her friend’s waist. Alex was grinning up at him.
“He’s part of the family I stayed with before I moved here,” Alex mumbled. “They’re practically European royalty.”
“You mean, you guys were official?”
“No. Neither of us were out, and it lasted for about two days, tops. Should have deleted these from my phone when I moved, so that’s on me. Hughes saw, thought it’d be good blackmail. Like, I’d insulted his sister by being gay, apparently.”
“You should have told Lola Urduja or—”
“They don’t know about him, all right?” he interrupted fiercely. “It’ll be harder on him if it comes out, and I won’t have that. No one else can know but you.”
Tala closed her eyes. “You like him that much?”
Alex’s thumb moved, pressing the delete button, and his screen lit up, asking for confirmation. “And that’s the damn irony,” he said shortly. “I don’t.”
He hit yes. The photos disappeared.
The door flew open, ignoring the bench Tala had previously lugged across because it swung outward instead of in.
Zoe stood in the doorway. She held a needle in one hand and a whip looped around her waist like a hipster’s belt, with Lola Urduja and Tita Chedeng on either side of her.
“I see you’ve found him,” Zoe said calmly. “A pleasure to meet you, Your Highness. I’m sure you’ll offer us some sound explanations later, but we must get going. Loki and West are back. Apparently, the rabbit hole at the Doering residence has been completely decimated. We don’t have much choice but to head back to the looking glass outside Invierno if we want to leave quickly.”
“Where’ve you all been?” Tala demanded.
“We had our hands full fighting off a sudden army of shades that sprouted up. Had to draw them away from the bonfire crowd. Ken and the others are still fighting. Your sharp-eyed Tito Jose spotted the firebird flying away from the celebrations several minutes earlier, though, and Loki thought it might be heading back to Elsmore.”
“You’ve given us a hard time, hijo,” Lola Urduja said severely, and Alex had the grace to look ashamed. “But there’s no time for pointing fingers. Anak ng Diyos, what the hell happened in here?”
“Ice maiden,” Alex admitted.
“An ice maiden was here?”
“We killed it,” Tala said defensively. “I don’t really see how this is our fault.”
“You didn’t kill her,” Zoe said tersely, her eyes trained on the floor. Was it Tala’s imagination, or did one of the puddles move, just a little? “Ice maidens are the Snow Queen’s right-hand women, her elite bodyguards. If she’d truly been killed, no trace of this ice would be left. Most likely she’s reconstituting herself somewhere else. She can only build herself back up in colder climate and it’ll take a while, so you’ve bought us time to escape, at least.”
“Wait!” Alex dashed toward the bench and scooped up the frog, which was nearly forgotten in all of the excitement. “You have to make sure she’s somewhere safe when she changes back,” he muttered, cheeks pink.
Lola Urduja accepted the frog without comment. “Very well. Follow Chedeng and the general. They’ll lead you back to Tala’s parents.”
“Am I leaving with Alex?” Tala asked hesitantly.
Lola Urduja nodded. “We all are. None of us have any choice in the matter. We’re all targets.”
The hallway was the scene of a bloodless massacre. The corridor was littered with the bodies of the zombie-like students who’d tried to accost Tala earlier.
“Are they all right?” She stared down at Langdon. The boy’s chest rose and fell, his glassy pale eyes fixed on the ceiling.
Zoe slid her needle into a thin cannister, then pocketed it. “They’re better off asleep, anyway. There’s nothing we can do for them at this point.”
“They’re among the Deathless now,” Alex said soberly from behind her.
“Deathless?”
“Named after Koschei. One of the most powerful weapons in the Snow Queen’s arsenal are shards from a particularly foul mirror, constructed by forbidden magic. Once any of those shards gets into your eyes, you become her thrall.” Zoe stepped carefully over one of the prone bodies. “There’s no known cure for it, I’m afraid. They’ll still be Deathless once they wake, and there’s nothing much we can do for them now.”
Mirror shards. The ice maiden had tried to place one of those in Alex’s eye.
“Yeah,” Alex said quietly, as if sensing where her thoughts had gone. “Thanks for rescuing me from that, by the way.”
Tala shuddered, realizing Alex’s panic then. If the ghoul had succeeded, all their work to protect him would have been for nothing.
“Punyeta!” they heard General Luna curse from somewhere up ahead.
“That’s our cue!” Lola Urduja snapped. “Let’s get out of here before the ogre catches up.”
Tala blinked, convinced she hadn’t heard her right.
So did Zoe. “Ogre? What ogre?”
A loud roar shook the building. Bits of concrete rained down on them from above. Out in the hallway, the lights flickered once, twice, then went dead as another hard tremor jolted through the corridor.
“That ogre,” Lola Urduja said.
* * *
An ogre, as it turned out, was a creature of mismatched rock and granite. Its lower jaw jutted out to reveal a pair of hideously long tusks and several rows of jagged, decaying teeth. It was an odd gray color, and carried with it a foul stench, like burning tires on a hot summer day.
It slammed a hand the size of a small car against the roof, and the whole place shuddered with every blow. Beady eyes, small in its monstrous face, raked through the throng of fleeing, screaming humans. Tita Teejay had hot-wired a nearby car, and they’d taken off quickly, leaving the ogre behind.
“It’ll be bespelled to find Alex,” Lola Urduja predicted grimly.
“There’s a blockade just outside of town,” Tita Nieves reminded her. “Probably swimming with agents.”
“Perhaps they’ll consider the ogre the more dangerous one and act accordingly. Any distraction they can provide, I’ll accept.”
They’d managed to make it back to the desert, which was now noticeably empty, the ogre several minutes behind them. The frozen bonfire was still unchanged, dripping water.
Kensington was already there, cleaving through several shades with his swords and limping ever so slightly. Her parents were there too, much to Tala’s relief. None of the shades could get within a few feet of her mother; a flick of her fingers sent them recoiling, their light-starved bodies wilting from her presence alone.
Her father was more hands-on with his methods. He wielded an ax nearly as tall as Tala, and chopped at every shadow that kept outside her mother’s magic-negating reach.
“Where have you been?” Tala yelled at them.
“Ambushed!” was the reply, as her mother drove her agimat into three shades at once, forcing them all to dissipate. “They attacked us on our way to the bonfire.”
“Tried to attack us,” her father corrected her, splitting another shadow in half.
“Your Highness,” Ken called out to Alex, pausing in midstroke to bow. A dark shape rose up from the ground behind him, but the boy lopped off its head with a swing of his shining sword without even turning.
“Would you put ‘rampaging ogre’ as a pro for the looking-glass route, Zo, or a con for the rabbit hole?”
“I think ‘rampaging ogre’ is a con however you put it,” Loki said, appearing from around the corner. Unlike Ken, they carried a long pole, which they bat
ted at the shadows, keeping them at bay. “And the rabbit hole’s been destroyed, so that’s a no-go.”
“Destroyed?”
“Where did you think that ogre came out of?”
Ken shuddered. “I’m glad we weren’t going down that while it was on its way up, then.”
A black shape slithered toward them. Loki swung their rod almost aimlessly and would have been short of the snakelike shadow by several inches had not the stick lengthened on its own. There was a searing sound as the weapon passed through the shade, which promptly dissolved, squealing in anguish.
“Is that the firebird?” Ken asked. “Looks round enough to roll up like a hedgehog, doesn’t it?”
The firebird bared its beak at him, as if daring him to try.
“It’s adorable, is what I’m saying. Zo, you and His Highness should hightail it back to the sanctuary while we cover your asses.”
A large brown bear lumbered up, and Tala backpedaled several feet in panic. The animal blurred briefly, and where the bear once was, West now stood, peeking out from underneath his blanket of fur. “What’s wrong with your foot?” he asked Ken.
“I might have sort of broken a library,” the boy said. “It’s a long story.”
“I like stories.” West bowed politely to Alex. “Nice to meet you again, Your Royaltiness.” His face disappeared under the fur. The air darkened briefly, and a large tawny lion took his place, roaring and loping toward the direction of the ogre’s howls.
“How exactly do you ‘break’ a library?” Zoe asked, untying the whip from around her waist. It promptly changed color, now looking like it was made of an odd opaque glass that appeared nearly invisible at first glance, as if she were gripping something composed entirely of air.
“With lots of bookcases,” Ken said. “And an ogre, barreling into the wall. An actual, freaking ogre! When is the last time anyone has even seen an ogre? Behind you, Zo!”