The Last Winter (The Circle War Book 2)

by Matt King

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The sign next to the river announced that they had arrived in Portsmouth, Ohio, “Where Southern Hospitality Begins.” August wiped the sweat from his forehead as they passed, his mask long since stowed despite the frigid winds. He’d drawn leg duty while Aeris took Shadow’s bulky arms. It was Aeris’s idea to let the current take them down the river to avoid carrying her, but Shadow’s breathing had nearly stopped along the way and they were forced to bring her on shore. Portsmouth was the first city they’d found. He wished they could’ve gone anywhere else. The landscape was black with soot and ash, the worst he’d seen so far.

  “Over there,” he strained to say through gritted teeth. He nodded over Aeris’s shoulder to a steel mill. One of the warehouse doors had been torn off, but the insides looked like they’d been spared the worst of the snow.

  “Is it safe?” she asked.

  “Nobody’s crossing that river.” Polaris’s group of survivors would be traveling on the other side of the Ohio. Unless her magic purple shell had some power to create mile-long bridges, they’d never make it across the icy waters, and with her guards dead, he didn’t expect her to stray far from the group.

  He readjusted his grip on Shadow for the hundredth time. You’re going on a diet as soon as you wake up, young lady. It felt like he was carrying a truck. A bus, maybe. No, a Mack truck. Maybe a Mack truck with a bus in it.

  They brought her into the warehouse and managed to lift her onto an assembly line belt. Her arms hung limp on either side, claws raking against the floor.

  Aeris bent her head down to listen to Shadow’s breaths. She came back up with a frown. “She won’t last much longer like this. We need to take care of her wounds.”

  “You keep saying that, but I don’t think either one of us is trained as a combat veterinarian.” He put his fingers on the cuts slicing across Shadow’s chest. The gray crust around the edges was getting thicker, while the cuts themselves still seemed as raw as the day Talus made them. The rotting smell made his stomach lurch.

  “Whatever this is, it’s necrotic,” she said with a shake of her head. “It will soon eat through what’s left of her body’s defenses. If it does that, she will die. We will need to cauterize the wounds.”

  “With what, a blowtorch?” He watched as she flexed her hands and saw what she meant to do. “You’re not serious.”

  “I see no other way, unless you have a better suggestion.”

  “Let’s call that Plan B for now,” he said. Or C or D. He spied the mark glistening beneath her armor. “What if you used that to call Paralos? He can help her, right? Even if he can’t, he can bring Meryn.”

  “I can’t use it,” she said, her voice suddenly taking on an abrupt tone. “Not yet.”

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t. Not until Velawrath is to be called.”

  “Look, it’s not like you only have so many uses, right?”

  “I said I can’t!” Her eyes fell away from him immediately.

  “Okay,” he said, raising his hands in surrender. “We’ll go with your super-solid plan of burning her chest closed.”

  Aeris turned her attention to Shadow. The fire began to swirl in her palms, sparking the mist around her hands. She quickly dismissed it.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  “We should subdue her first.”

  He looked down at Shadow, then to her claws that sat dormant against the cement floor. He pictured her waking up to see Aeris burning her chest with fire. “Good point. I’ll look for some chains.”

  “There is no need,” she replied. “I can make it so she can’t wake up.”

  “How, exactly, do you plan to do that?”

  Aeris had trouble meeting his eyes. “If her body is like ours, the brain will have defenses against high temperatures. I can make it so her brain thinks it needs to shut down.”

  “Have you ever done this before?”

  “No,” she said. “But it has been done to me. When I was small.”

  “Will it hurt her?”

  “Not if she is like us. It may even make her feel good. Blissful.” Aeris hesitated. “There may be other effects, however.”

  That doesn’t sound good. “What kinds of effects?”

  “She may lose some of her memory. Perhaps so much that she may not be able to function.”

  A weak hiss of wind came from the largest gash across Shadow’s chest. The blood coating her wound bubbled and popped. He never imagined he’d have to be the one to stand over someone’s deathbed and make life decisions. He thought back to watching Bear hold vigil by Ray’s side at the hospital. The big guy had looked like he was at least more comfortable with his role as a caretaker than August felt now. He wished Bear was still around.

  “Do it,” he said. “Whatever you have to do.”

  Aeris nodded. She put her hands on either side of Shadow’s head, holding them just slightly above the scaled coating of her ears. A light grew in Aeris’s palms, a faint star compared to the fire she normally wielded.

  Shadow began to convulse.

  “Wait,” he said.

  She ignored him.

  “You’re hurting her!”

  “This is normal,” Aeris replied over the commotion. She climbed on top of Shadow and used her legs to keep the Elosian beast still while she worked.

  The convulsions grew weaker. Eventually, Shadow’s body relaxed. Her muscles went limp.

  The look Aeris gave him at the end was more relief than confidence. She took several deep breaths after she pulled her hands away. “She’s out,” she said finally.

  August looked into Shadow’s eyes. Her orange iris stared straight ahead beneath eyelids that hadn’t completely closed. She looked frozen in mid-sleep.

  “I feel more comfortable with this part,” Aeris said.

  When the fire returned to her palms, it was the normal brilliant white sphere, surrounded in mist. She held her open hand over the end of the gash and let out a thin jet of fire, following the cut across the width of Shadow’s chest. In her wake, a black, bubbling film sizzled.

  She did three passes, one for each of Talus’s cuts. When she was done, the gray crust around Shadow’s wounds cracked and fell away like ash. Left behind were three black scars the length of August’s arm, each with a deep groove as a reminder of the depths of Talus’s attack.

  “Can you wake her up now?” he asked.

  “No. She needs time to recover. Let her rest. We will wake her before it’s too late. A few days perhaps.”

  A few days? He wondered how much damage the fever would do in that time.

  Aeris looked around the steel mill. “We should sleep as well. I want to look for Dondannarin in the morning. She must have stopped to wait for us by now.”

  For the first time, August felt the chill of the empty building. He looked through a hole in a nearby window and saw a stand of homes down the block. His first thought was that they could find some beds inside, but the houses were barely recognizable, their walls black with soot and falling apart. Then he pictured what might be inside.

  “I’m gonna head upstairs,” he said.

  “What for?”

  “Hopefully to find something resembling a pillow.”

  The soles of his armor clanked against the metal stairs as he made his way to the second floor, which was more like a loft overlooking the large milling machines below. Scattered around the edges were small offices divided by what had been flimsy cubicle walls, now mostly burned away to ashes, leaving a skeleton of metal framework. He stepped past a door frame, kicking through a pile of snow that had blown in through a cracked skylight. A blackened container sat in the corner. He knelt and knocked on the dented metal side. The cabinet gave a dull thud in response. He felt around for a handle and gave a sharp pull when he found it.

  A charred pile of papers rustled inside. He brushed away the outer layers, churning up a cloud of black flakes from the ashes. Closer to the center of the pile, protected
by the rest of the papers, was a magazine. He pulled it out. Other than a border of black edges, it was mostly intact.

  “Check this out,” he said as he walked back down the stairs.

  Aeris settled beside him on the bottom stair. “What is it?”

  “A magazine.” He flipped the first page and saw a familiar yellow rectangle on top of the Table of Contents. “God, I haven’t read one of these since I was a kid. It’s a National Geographic.”

  “What is it for? A journal of battle?”

  “Uh, no.” He flipped past a picture of dead bodies littering a Middle Eastern landscape and found a photo essay on New York. “This was one of our largest cities.”

  “It’s beautiful.” She ran her fingers over the lines of the Chrysler Building, almost like she expected to feel its stone walls. “Did you live here?”

  “Not too far from it.”

  “There are so many people.”

  Were, he corrected silently. He flipped quickly to the next page, a fold-out image of runners in the New York City marathon. “We used to have contests to see how fast people could run long distances.”

  She pointed to a runner in a Spider-Man costume. “Were these people attacked along the way?”

  “No, that’s a, uh… Nothing.” He skipped ahead to avoid the finer points of explaining a man dressed up in Spandex. “This is Chinatown. People used to go there for the food.”

  “What was so special about it?”

  “No clue. I always thought Chinese food tasted like feet.”

  She laughed, a genuine laugh that seemed to catch her off guard as much as it did him. “You are a funny man,” she said.

  “I try.”

  “Even when you’re fighting, you make jokes.”

  “Keeps people off balance,” he said with a shrug. “No one expects you to talk to them in a fight. If I can make them stop for a second to think about what I’m saying, that gives me an advantage. Unless you’re a cyborg. Cyborgs don’t really appreciate my sense of humor.”

  She smiled again. “You certainly aren’t boring. I think I would like you under different circumstances.”

  A thought jumped into his head, one he would have considered impossible before. “What’s wrong with the circumstances we have now?”

  She smiled and looked away. “It is not meant to be, I’m afraid.” She rose and walked back to check on Shadow.

  Awkward silence. My Kryptonite. He cleared his throat and searched frantically for another picture to talk about. “Maybe after Velawrath gets here, we can start rebuilding this world again, you know? Make it like it was before.”

  “Can we please not talk about him?”

  He stopped looking through the magazine. “What is it with you and this guy? Every time I bring him up, you shut me down. I thought he was supposed to help us.”

  She gave him a sideways glance. “Please. Not now.”

  “But—”

  “Please,” she said.

  “All right. Fine.”

  Maybe he’s an ex. The thought came with a tinge of jealousy. He shook it off and looked around for a place to settle for the night, finally deciding on a section of the assembly line farther down from Shadow. A steady whistling noise rushed in through a hole in the window next to him. He closed his mask and let the wind flow across his shield.

  Aeris lay down next to a shelf. She took off her golden band and placed it in one of the nooks. She turned over, resting on her side with her back to him.

  He looked at her as she turned over to sleep, suddenly aware of Aeris the woman rather than Aeris the champion. She was tall and lean with a gentle curve to her hips. Her skin shimmered in the dying light.

  “We don’t have time for that,” she said.

  He looked away quickly. “Time for what?”

  “What you’re thinking about.”

  “I’m not thinking about anything.”

  “That’s not what your body is saying.”

  “My body lies. That’s documented.”

  She looked over her shoulder. “Go to sleep, August. We both need rest.”

  “Yeah, I’m bushed.” He fake-yawned. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  He closed his eyes and settled on the conveyor belt, hoping that crushing embarrassment wasn’t a trigger for insomnia.

  ■ ■ ■

  The morning breeze woke him. Something about it smelled more like ash than usual. He sat up with a start when he heard the crackling of a fire.

  “I thought it would warm the room some,” Aeris said. She’d built a small fire on the floor and opened a window above a stand of shelves to let the smoke out.

  “You been up long?” he asked through a yawn. He fumbled to find the trigger to his mask.

  “A bit.”

  He noticed a slight smile on her face. “What are you grinning about?”

  “I found Dondannarin’s trail,” she said. “They can’t be too far away.”

  “You went across the river by yourself?”

  She shrugged. “You were deep in sleep. I didn’t want to bother you.”

  “Well wake me up next time. I don’t like you going over there by yourself.”

  “Are you worried about me?” she asked, almost playfully. She didn’t wait for him to answer. “Come. We can find them before midday.”

  He rubbed his eyes. “What about Shadow?”

  “We can leave the fire going for her. I’ve seen no signs of others.”

  He hesitated, not liking the idea of leaving Shadow alone when she couldn’t defend herself. Something about the cheerful look on Aeris’s face was hard to deny, though. “Okay, but we come right back here.”

  “Yes, yes. Of course.”

  “And then we continue our trek out to beautiful Nebraska.”

  “As you wish.”

  They walked outside into the teeth of a morning snowstorm, complete with biting winds that smelled of soot. He closed his mask and followed her into the river, choosing a path between the ice sheets she’d broken through earlier. The cold helped wake him up. By the time they made it to the other side, he was warm from swimming so quickly.

  The warmth was short-lived. It took Aeris a while to find Dondannarin’s trail again. Snow had covered the fields in a blanket of white, hiding any footprints she might’ve found before.

  “Here,” she said pointing to a twig on the ground. “They came this way.”

  “How do you know? Anything could have done that.”

  “What is alive to break apart a tree?” she asked. “Especially one that is all the way over there.”

  He followed her stare to a tree off to their left. The light brown wood where the branch had been snapped off stood out like a star against the charred bark. Dondannarin was leaving breadcrumbs.

  “Does wilderness survival come natural to you people?”

  “We were trained at an early age,” she said. “Dondannarin was my teacher.”

  They passed by the remnants of a pond, now a dirty pit of black mud mixed with snow. Aeris found another breadcrumb at the entrance to a grove of trees. They eventually made their way through to the other side, where a hill stood in the distance. He squinted to look through the blowing snow. Just past the ridge of the hill were a group of dark shadows.

  “It’s them,” Aeris said.

  She jogged down into the valley, separating herself from him with a swift stride. He fell twice trying to catch up. They were getting pretty far away from the mill, far enough that he was starting to wonder if they’d be able to find their way back. He looked over his shoulder. The trees were a blur through the snow.

  He had to use his hands to climb his way to the crest of the hill. A wooden barbwire fence ran along the spine of the ridge. Aeris stood in front of it, motionless.

  “Where’d they go?” he asked. As soon as he got to her side, he saw what was waiting for them. His heart sank.

  The Vontani soldiers were strewn about, the snow around their corpses drenched in dark red blood. Their
armor was shredded. Limbs had been cut from their bodies, some still holding their weapons.

  In the center was Dondannarin. Her body had been placed in a sitting position against a fence post. Her eyes stared straight ahead, dead and unblinking. One chakram sat on the ground at her side. The other was plunged through her neck.

  Aeris approached the scene slowly. Her hand trembled as she reached to touch Dondannarin’s cheek, stopping before her fingers made contact. Her hand fell to the chakram instead. She gripped the handle and pulled it free. Dondannarin’s head slipped off the wood and onto the snow.

  “Polaris,” August said.

  Aeris’s voice crumbled as she spoke. “I know.”

  When she stood, he tried to put a hand on her shoulder. She shrugged away from his touch. She reached down for Dondannarin’s other chakram and held both in her palms, her knuckles nearly white from gripping them so hard.

  “Not like this,” she whispered. “They weren’t supposed to die this way.”

  August looked away, unsure of what she meant, or what he was supposed to do. “I can look for a place to bury them if that would help.”

  “No,” she said. She placed the chakrams on her back with Dondannarin’s blood still coating the blades. “We burn our dead. This poisoned world will claim more charred corpses this night.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The line of people stretched past the door of the throne room. From his vantage point in the shadows of the balcony, Michael could hear and see all of the commotion below, but couldn’t be seen himself. Amara wouldn’t allow it, telling him that she couldn’t afford another incident. She sat on her throne—

  (my throne)

  —with Galan’s Ministers on either side of her, ushering the men and women onto the stage to have a moment with their savior. Polaris was with her, smiling as the groveling survivors threw themselves at Amara’s feet and pledged their love and devotion. Fresh off the news that Dillon was back, Polaris had been attached to Amara’s hip, replacing Michael in the council meetings along with Galan and the latest arrival, Anemolie. Something was brewing between the four of them, some plan he was no longer privy to.