Icebound

by Corinna Rogers

  As powerful as the Ice King might be, he’s certainly not above sounding like a petulant child who doesn’t want anyone else to play with his toys, Shane observes, trying not to smirk.

  “Yet you’ve had this one for nigh on a decade. How have you kept him viable?”

  “He is resistant. Unusually so.”

  “More than that,” she counters, and kneels in front of Shane, staring into his eyes with an expression that burns. He can feel her in his mind, in his heart, and only the frozen peace of the Ice King’s touch keeps her out of his very soul.

  “Sorry, Mistress,” Shane says quietly, feeling the fire surge inside him. “It’s pretty empty in there.”

  She flinches back, startled. “You still have feelings?”

  “Pretty much down to pain and lust these last few years. Unless drunk counts as a feeling.” Not for the first time, he wonders what the hell these two are, where they came from, along with the rest of the magic that invaded the world a century ago. Most of it had always been innocent enough, old wives’ tales that suddenly weren’t bullshit, bedtime stories about monsters that started turning up in the newspapers, word of folklore come to life in Europe and the Far East.

  These two, though…

  He can see the look on her face when she sees what he’s done, sees the wall of magic he’s slapped around whatever ragged scraps of feelings he has left, protecting them from the worst of the creeping ice. They’re dead and frayed around the edges, but the core survives, blazing hot whenever he needs them—notably, when Drake is nearby.

  “You see?” The Ice King demands, putting Shane’s soul away with a flick of his wrist, and the fingernail’s touch vanishes along with everything else, hardening into ice again. “He’s still useful to me. Leave him be.”

  “But for how long? How many of my creatures has he vanquished in the last few years, my King? For all his power, he has a mortal’s weak heart. Will you let him go to ice like the rest of them?”

  “He’s mine to do with as I choose. He has the price of his soul, given freely of my hand, and with no deceit. Is that not correct, Vassal?”

  Shane can’t exactly deny it. “Yes, Master. I have what I asked for.”

  “It pleases me not to give your soul back. You will serve me until you join my Frozen Court.”

  Fuck this.

  Shane’s lips curl into the barest hint of a smile. The cold is worse than ever, biting and howling in the wind, and it doesn’t feel quite so calming anymore. “Very well, Master. As you wish.”

  He closes his eyes, and starts to lower his barriers, the inner shields protecting his heart, his mind. Everyone who trades a soul to the Ice King freezes in the end, of course. That’s part of the price. Most of the Vassals who work for him want power, want everything the power will bring, can’t imagine themselves vulnerable with that sort of leverage.

  They’re idiots. It isn’t power that’s kept Shane alive longer than anyone’s ever spent in the Ice King’s service so far. It’s desire, hunger, because he alone traded his soul for something he still has no power to possess.

  “Vassal. What are you doing?”

  “Joining the Frozen Court, Master. I’m weary of the rankings. Rather get it over with right now.” It had seemed like vanity at the time, wanting to keep around whatever soiled remnants of himself had remained, but that’s fine. It’s over now. Seeing Drake again, working with him again…that had been nice. Fucking him again had been better. It was even funny, the way Drake had obviously missed him.

  The ice closes over that thought, and he doesn’t really remember humor anymore. Now it’s part of the ice, like the rest of him, with regrets and fear and happiness.

  “Stop. Vassal, I command you to stop!”

  “I’ve done nothing, Master. I undo none of your work. These are my own creation, and I merely remove them to serve you better.” He can hear his voice, toneless, emotionless, flat.

  “Stop!” The Ice King reinforces the word with his power, but that has no effect on the lowering of the barriers. The Ice King can’t control Shane’s magic, after all, and the addition of more of his own just hurries the ice along.

  Go on, Shane thinks with the last bit of satisfaction he’ll ever feel, regret this. I want you to regret this, because I was a good servant, and I had a few more years in me. Look at me and realize that all I’m going to be is a statue, and it’s because you took away my last chance to get him back.

  He can feel the ice creeping toward his last memories of experiencing pleasure, ready to take away the feeling of Drake’s strong arms around him, of Drake’s kiss, the hard press of Drake’s cock against his own. Shit, I’m gonna miss these.

  Except he won’t. Not really. Not any more than he’d missed fear, not any more than he misses humor now. Regret froze a long time ago.

  “Brother Husband, if you don’t—”

  “Fine!” The Ice King’s voice rings out like a crystal bell’s chime, and Shane slams up his walls again with all the power he can muster, clinging to those last few precious scraps of memory with all the desire he can still summon. Desire, pain, anger, and a bit of pleasure—that’s about all he has left now, but it’s enough. As long as he has the pain, it’s enough to keep him alive.

  “Yes, Master?” he asks, waiting pointedly.

  The Ice King glares at him, and Shane only stares back, expressionless. He probably would have found this funny, once.

  “If you are the one to slay the Soul-Thief, you may have your soul back,” the Ice King allows, though he doesn’t seem happy about it. “This won’t be easy. I’ll send everyone after it, and I’ll let them know the bounty on your head is still active.”

  Shane nods. “As you wish, Master.”

  He doesn’t need to look to see that the Ice King is gone, in a flurry of whirling ice razors. The Fire Queen is still there, looking at him as though he’s a curiosity, an intriguing anomaly. “Not many men have ever stood up to him and lived, Mage.”

  “No, Mistress.” Shane rises, no longer feeling the need to kneel. She’s not his Master after all.

  “I enjoy watching you, most of the time. I think I’ll like it less now that you’re no longer funny.”

  Shane shrugs. It’s not as if it matters to him, after all.

  “Do you know what they’re talking about in that Church right now?”

  “Where the Soul-Thief is?”

  The Fire Queen waves a hand, and an image resolves in flames in front of him, of the young priest handing Drake a long dagger. “It’s not much,” he says, as if from far away to Shane’s ears, “and it will only work once, but it should be enough for one of the Ice King’s Vassals.”

  “Thank you, Father. We have a few chasing us right now.”

  The priest grabs Drake’s arm, pulling him close. “Don’t forget the most dangerous one is the man that travels by your side. Don’t make the mistake of assuming he is the man you used to love.”

  Drake’s voice is hard when he says, “I know exactly who he is, Father. And who he isn’t. I’ll do what needs to be done.”

  There’s pain, aching in Shane’s chest, but that’s hardly new. He sort of loves the pain. It’s almost all he has left, along with the insatiable longing that fills him at the sight of Drake.

  The Fire Queen sighs. “I miss when you were fun. Maybe…” She scowls at him, shifting liquid-hot eyes searing into his, and pain shoots through him, ripping and burning into the frozen places, igniting all the parts inside him he’d thought dead, not just dormant.

  For the most part, he was right. Ice doesn’t just preserve, after all. It kills, thoroughly, and there’s no point trying to chafe and warm a black and rotting limb back to life after a night in the snow.

  But sometimes…

  Sometimes it’s possible to catch a limb that’s been frozen, and to nurse it gently back to life. Not always, and the Fire Queen isn’t gentle, no more able to be anything other than her nature than the Ice King is, and the fire in places that should be f
rozen hurts more than the ice ever has.

  Shane screams, not expecting the pain, collapsing to the ground in a twitching, spasming heap of agony as the Fire Queen straightens up, watching him intently. “I have my own stake in you Shane Conell. Believe me when I say that you do not want to prove useless to me, no matter what your arrangement with my brother husband.”

  She leaves no smoke behind. The hottest fire never does.

  Damn the Fire Queen. He’d been done with anger, with thinking life was unfair. It doesn’t feel quite right still, tingling and pricking against the inside of his skin, but he hoards it just the same, bringing that safely behind the shield.

  Already he can feel the ice advancing again.

  The tears freeze against his skin and he brushes them away, sending them flaking to the ground. How embarrassing, to cry like a child, like a needy little girl who can’t quite believe that her father will protect her from the monsters under the bed. What an idiot, he’d always thought. Any real monster could just crawl inside her father’s head.

  Third Interlude

  Thirteen Years Earlier

  Sometimes, Shane scares himself.

  It happens when a sneaky Inferna gets the drop on them, and nearly takes Drake’s head off his shoulders with a gout of flame. Shane lashes out with his power, not taking the time to stop and calibrate the strike the way he usually does, his hand moving before Drake even notices the danger.

  The explosion blasts a hole in the ground twenty feet wide, leaving nothing but a red-black smear to hint that there’d ever been an Inferna anywhere nearby.

  Drake finds him kneeling on the ground, vomiting at the backlash, and gets an arm around him. “Pull it together! There’s two more around and we’ve still got to rescue that boy!”

  Shane nods, finding his feet, breaking into a run as he gathers his power for another strike, this time far more controlled. He blasts the Inferna one after the other, this time managing not to level any buildings in the process, and after that it’s easy for Drake to defeat whoever’s in the building while Shane guards the exit, coming out with a terrified three-year-old boy under his arm.

  Drake, mercifully, says nothing.

  At least, he says nothing until later. When they’re counting money in their apartment, icing burns and paying bills as they snack on supermarket sushi, Drake says casually, “So, you pretty much fucked up a whole city block today. Wanna talk about that?”

  “It was aiming at you.”

  “A lot of things aim at me. It’s kind of a consequence of what we do.” Drake counts out twelve hundred for rent, setting it in the “out” pile. It’s more than what their neighbors pay for the same basic apartment layout, but it’s hard enough to find a landlord who’ll rent to a mage, let alone one that doesn’t have the decency to pretend he’s an accountant or something.

  “Yeah, well, I don’t tend to let them hit you. If you’ve got a problem with that—”

  “You don’t usually leave a mess like that.” Then, Drake slowly voices what’s obviously really on his mind. “I didn’t know you could. Not like that. Not just….destroy the whole street like that. I’ve never seen you do anything in that league before.”

  “I think…” Shane swallows hard, his heart fluttering a bit in anxiety, even as he counts out the water bill, the electric bill, and helps himself to a California Roll. “I think I’m getting stronger. It happens sometimes, when mages get older. Most stop once they hit adulthood, the way most people stop growing when they’re teenagers, but I guess some don’t.”

  “You guess?”

  “What do you want from me, Drake? My folks died when I was ten, I wasn’t exactly taking master classes. And it’s not like there’s some big secret Mage Council where we all get together and drink Hawaiian Punch and decide how much tax we should charge on love potions. I mean, okay, there probably is something a bit like that, but I’ve sure as fuck never been invited.”

  A strong hand closes around his arm, and the world spins for a second as Drake yanks him sideways to lean against his shoulder, running a hand through his hair. It should be patronizing, but as wound up as he’s been all day all Shane feels is relief. He nuzzles into the touch, relaxing at last into the reassuring weight of his boyfriend’s broad shoulders. Damned if it doesn’t feel like there’s nothing on earth that can touch him here.

  “I think it happens sometimes,” he continues, now a thousand times easier, cradled against Drake’s body. “Sometimes you go through a second adolescence, I think. The only other stories I’ve heard about mages who suddenly got a lot more juice are about idiots who make deals for power, trading away stuff like years of servitude, or even their souls.”

  He can feel Drake shiver beneath him. “Hey. Let’s make a rule right now, okay?” he rumbles. “No deals. No pacts, no treaties, no nothing that’ll ever lock us in. Nothing we can’t undo. Nothing that binds us to anyone other than each other.”

  Shane kisses him, deep, soft, the taste always familiar no matter how much things change. “I’d never want to be bound to anyone but you anyway. Yeah, it’s a rule.”

  Chapter Six

  “He’s dangerous. He’s far more dangerous than this creature you’re fighting, because you’d never even think that something like the Soul-Thief isn’t a threat.”

  “I know Shane is a threat.” Drake’s weary with the repetition of the words, of how many damn times he’s had to insist that yes, he knows the risks, and yes, he still wants to follow this thing as far as he can.

  He can’t be angry at the priest, though. Father Aaron is only doing his job, trying to protect the Champion.

  “He doesn’t respect the Church!”

  Drake has to actually crack a smile at that, no matter that it’s a crude thing to do under the circumstances. “I think I figured that out when he crashed service and told everyone he used to…well, you were there.”

  It took Drake nearly three years to stop being so angry he wanted to attack Shane whenever he saw him after that, after Shane had staggered into service drunk off his ass and announced that the only thing Drake Young was better at than killing monsters was sucking cock. The accompanying magical illustrations were, as far as Drake was concerned, a bit unnecessary.

  “Yet you still travel with him.”

  “I didn’t plan this, Father. The monster has Deborah’s soul. Shane agreed to help me save her before killing the Soul-Thief. He had no reason to, other than to try to buy my goodwill. I…” Drake runs a hand back through his hair, frustrated. “You know how powerful he is, or at least I know you’ve heard about it.”

  Father Aaron shifts uncomfortably. “I heard that he once killed a thousand people in an afternoon. And that he was the one responsible for the New York City Forest.”

  A brief smile flickers across Drake’s face. “The forest…okay, I’ll give you that one, it was a pretty cool piece of work. It made sense, if you knew what he was actually trying to do. And the other…that was after he turned. I know he’s killed a lot of people. He could probably wipe out Sunrise City with enough time to plan and access to resources.”

  “So can a bomb.”

  Drake shrugs. “That’s kind of what I mean by resources. There’s probably not much we could do to stop him if he was really intent on killing everyone. He’s good at making his magic work with technology. I’ve seen him start prank calls on telephones that called every single person who owned a phone in the state and told them the same stupid joke. And that was when we were seventeen. I honestly don’t know what he could do now.”

  “Yet you intend to still work with him?”

  “Do I have a choice?” Drake rubs his head, and damn it, this is unfair. He especially hates how little moral high ground he can take when he’s been having sex with Shane again, feeling as close as he can to the way it used to, even though he knows what a bad idea it is. “Father, all I want in the world is to have the man I love back. I can’t. He’s dead. He says he can get his soul back, but he’s been saying
that for nine years, and it hasn’t been true yet. I know that the man out there isn’t—look, Father, you folks are the ones who offered me the post, if you don’t like the fact that I’m gay you can find yourself a new Champion. I don’t feel like putting up with a lot of sidelong looks the whole time.”

  Father Aaron flinches at the sharpness in his tone. “My apologies. Of course we want you to remain Champion. But this is a sacred space. If you must discuss your homosexuality, please do it elsewhere. Or here,” he adds hurriedly, as Drake starts to unfasten the sword from his back. “Here is fine, really. I, ah, forget myself sometimes.”

  Damned right you do. I’m the only person who’s ever lasted more than a year against the things hunting your flock, and you should know better than to piss me off. Drake relaxes, eyes wary. “Okay, then. So stop thinking I’m gonna team up with Shane. I know what he is. There’s no risk of me getting emotionally involved.”

  Father Aaron doesn’t look convinced, but he nods nonetheless. “Here, I have something for you.”

  This part isn’t unusual. Sometimes the Church has a habit of collecting pretty fantastic weapons, and frequently manages to get convenient ones into his hands at the time of big oncoming battles. The priest turns, opens a small wooden box, and draws out a long, sharp, thin-bladed dagger. “Our order was given this as a token of gratitude by the Fire Queen herself, many years ago. It’s been purified by the mages who work for the Church, off in Europe, and they’ve deemed it safe for your immortal soul to use. It can unmake ice, as well and efficiently as any flame, but far safer to carry in your pocket.”

  “And it works on humans?”

  The priest’s mouth twists. “As well on a normal human as a normal blade. Better on a Frozen creature. At least, that’s what our mages say, and you know how unreliable mages can be.”

  “You haven’t tested it out?” Drake asks, pointedly ignoring the comment about mages.

  “It’s only to be used once. After that, it’s no more than a regular knife, if a well-made one. It’s not much, but it should be enough for the Ice King’s vassals.”