“What? You can’t! You fucking psycho!”
“Don’t look so freaked out,” Drake says, sheathing the sword on his back. “Really, you’re already dead.”
Like a chicken with its head cut off.
He fights a couple more Vassals on his way. They bleed. He cleans his sword off carefully before putting it away, just as he reaches the door to what’s ostensibly a large bureaucratic building housing fat old men making obscene amounts of money off of suggesting laws about taxes and tollbooths.
The foreboding is strong, filling his body, almost dragging physically on his hand as he reaches for the doorknob. By the time his fingers brush against it, his teeth are gritted against the pull, trying to force his hand to work in spite of the force pulling against it.
“The hell with this,” he grunts, and pulls his hand back, lashing out at the door with the most powerful kick he’s ever dealt in years of teaching martial arts. Brittle and cold, the hinges snap, the door slamming to the floor with a boom.
Drake isn’t quite ready for what he sees.
He’s known for nine years that someday, the man he’d been in love with for most of twenty years would turn to ice. He’s known that the easy laugh and long-lashed eyes would freeze over, that there would be nothing left of Shane’s jokes and kisses but a statue.
He hadn’t expected to have to see it.
Shane is on his back, legs spread wide, completely naked, mouth contorted into a scream. Every part of him Drake can see is white-blue and still, smooth and glassy as the rest of the statues in the Frozen Court. There are Vassals all around, the Ice King himself standing by the figure, and in the background Drake can see several dark shapes, any of which could be the Soul-Thief.
Right now, none of that really matters.
He can hear himself screaming as he runs, sword clutched in his hands, and the smart ones run. He cuts down a Vassal too scared to move, another that bleeds most satisfyingly, a young man who fails to prepare a magic strike in time to do any good. A few of them don’t bleed, springing back in shock from the blows, unharmed by the magic sword. Most bleed. The Frozen Court isn’t a place where much of humanity lingers.
Drake doesn’t care. If he’d had a gun, he’d have killed the ones who bleed and the ones who don’t, and never thought twice about it. All he can see, no matter where he looks, is Shane’s frozen body.
The closer he gets to the Ice King, the more vassals throw themselves in front of him, hurling spell after spell, throwing daggers and icicles and even a grenade or two. Drake knows better than to let them hit, knows all about the way a vassal’s weapon turns the whole man to ice with a single graze, and he’s never moved this fast on his feet.
The Ice King, damn him, just watches, eyes cold and unamused, arms folded across his chest.
There’s a thing coming at him on several legs out of the corner of his eye—damn it, someone always turns into a fucking centaur—and Drake leaps out of the way, flying back into the wall as the centaur lunges with a spear in one hand, a short sword in the other.
Drake shoves off the wall with one foot, going into a twist that brings his sword crashing down one-handed into the centaur’s rump, spraying blood everywhere as it morphs back into a young man, clutching his backside and screaming.
Drake leaves him there to heal himself with ice. He’s got more important things on his mind.
The red haze only clears from his eyes when the Court is silent, but for his own labored breathing and the pathetic groans of the people he’s defeated without killing. No one stands between him and the Ice King, still standing unworried and almost bored. “You,” the Ice King says, surveying his Court, “are not endearing yourself to me, Champion.”
“I’m not terribly fond of you either.”
“Yet until today you were intelligent enough to stay away from this place. Why has that changed?” The Ice King’s smile isn’t kind, showing pointed ice chips of teeth. “I’ve certainly tried enough times to lure you here.”
“I remember.” That had been years earlier, just after he’d taken up the Church’s offer. All of a sudden he’d been sent message after message, telling him that Shane was in trouble, that he had to go to the Frozen Court immediately if he ever wanted to see him alive again.
“I was impressed that you never came. He traded his soul for your life. It takes a special kind of man to have no gratitude for such a thing.”
Drake doesn’t look over at Shane’s body, twisted and contorted in a rictus of pain that will never fade. “I never wanted him to make that deal. I never wanted this for him.”
“Would you do the same?” The Ice King’s smile curves larger, his toes flexing against the floor. “I’ll offer it to you, Champion. His life for your soul.”
“No deal.”
“He’s still alive. I could save—”
Drake swings at him, powerful arms slicing through the air as he brings his sword down with all the force he can muster. There’s a resistance, a force opposing him, but there’s the power granted to him as well, the one that makes him more than just a man, and he bears down with every fiber he can, physical and mental. The blade turns, and he misses cleaving through the Ice King’s neck, but a chip of ice hits the ground, knocked from the King’s shoulder.
Everything goes silent.
The white-cold fury of the Ice King surges through the hall in a heartbeat, a soundless cry that sets every nerve Drake has on edge, and the Soul-Thief crawls out of the shadows, whole and healthy with all six legs intact. Next to it, another, and another, and another of the same emerge from the shadows, scuttling out to surround the two of them.
There’s no escape. There’s no hope. Drake will die here, he knows, and all he can hope is that it’ll be a clean death instead of being rent to pieces and corroded beyond recognition by the acid of the Soul-Thieves.
His next thought is a bitter one, something he hasn’t felt since he was an angry teenager railing against the unfairness of life, picking up a shotgun for the first time.
At least no one will miss me.
Hell, maybe some people are even waiting.
That’s no reason not to go down without a fight. Drake reverses his grip on the sword, transferring it to one hand as he leaps, the other going to the dagger Father Aaron gave him at the Church what seems like forever ago. He strikes up with the sword, and the Ice King catches the blow on his hand, wrenching savagely enough to twist Drake’s arm out of its socket, something that hurts a lot worse when the Ice King knocks the sword from his hand.
The power that’s surged through him since the previous evening, when he’d strapped the sword to his back, vanishes. Drake is left shaken and in pain, trying not to black out from the sudden aches and injuries coursing through his nervous system, subsumed until now by the power granted to him as Champion.
That’s one of the prices of being Champion, after all. Unless he holds the sword, he’s no more than a regular man. He tries to bring up the dagger, but his arm is heavy, unresponsive. The cold is agonizing, shockingly painful without his protection, and Drake can barely breathe, blinking back tears.
“Little fool who thinks himself large. This is your final chance to make a bargain with me.”
Drake falls to one knee, struggling to keep his eyes open. “Yeah, I’d rather not. Just don’t put me in an embarrassing position, okay?”
The Ice King’s smile flashes and in his hand a long, slender sword materializes. “As you wish, Champion.”
Before the sword can come down, ice shatters behind Drake, sending chips everywhere as a tortured scream echoes through the Court, startling the Ice King enough that he pauses. His eyes narrow, even as Drake resolves not to turn around, just in case it’s a trick.
Except.
Except he knows that voice, even if he’s never heard it scream like that before. The adrenaline from just the possibility gives him the energy to throw himself to the side, the Ice King’s sword missing him by a millimeter. He can feel the wind from it, the icy ch
ill permeating through him, but everything’s damn cold in this place. If something wants to hurt at this point, it needs to get the fuck in line.
The Ice King snarls, brings the sword up again while he lashes out with power with his other hand, keeping Drake stationary on the floor with just the force of his mind. He tries to move, tries to even twitch, but he’s held, pinioned, as the sword comes down for one final blow.
It doesn’t hit him.
Something warm and solid hits him instead, knocking him away from the blade, sheltering him, and Drake’s mouth goes dry as Shane lifts his head. “Hey,” he says wearily, eyes flickering between amusement, surprise, joy, and pain.
Drake can’t speak. He can’t even blink around the shock of seeing Shane alive, seeing him be Shane again. The only thing that makes sense is that he’s died as well, but damn, if he has, Heaven is a lot more painful than he’d been hoping.
Shane appears to be suffering from no such injuries. He’s still stark naked, but he grabs the dagger from Drake’s hand, flipping it once before grinning, going into a somersault so fast he blurs in front of Drake’s eyes.
He comes up and leaps, all long limbs and grace, bounding off the nearest wall to build up speed as he runs around behind the Ice King, dagger outstretched.
As fast as Shane is, the Ice King is just a shade faster. He turns, his own blade whipping up so fast Drake’s sure he’ll hear a sonic boom in a second, and the deadly sword draws a trail of blood down Shane’s arm.
Drake cries out, knowing what follows, watching the scratch turn ice-blue and spread as Shane lands in a tumble, coming up to clutch at his arm. Something flares in his eyes, and he snarls, “This is your own fault, Master! You never thought it was important that I was so damned resistant to you? Maybe now you’ll see why!” He wipes at the blood, and the ice falls away to the floor, leaving pink healthy skin beneath.
The Ice King stares. It slows him down, the surprise, and when Shane comes at him in a whirling fury of magic, some of his strikes hit. “Here,” he yells, “catch this!”
He tosses the dagger, missing the Ice King by less than an inch, and it buries itself in the wall behind him.
The Ice King laughs. “That little dagger is the best you can do, Child of Flame? Why waste your last move on such a throw?”
Shane grins. “I wasn’t throwing it at you.”
Drake wrenches the dagger from the wall with his good arm, putting the absolute last of his energy into one last thrust.
The blade sinks into the Ice King’s back, and Drake screams with the force of the backlash. Ice travels up his arm, threatening to turn him to ice, to blast him out of existence, as if he’s at the epicenter of a howling blizzard full of daggers.
“Hold on!” Shane shouts over the wind, and Drake tries, he does, even as the Ice King thrashes on the blade. He can hardly do anything else, not when his hand feels frozen solid on the hilt.
Shane tackles him, wrenching him free of the writhing mass of destructive energy, and the next second the cold vanishes, the whirling ice rebounding off a clear dome of light surrounding the two of them on the floor.
“Neat trick,” Drake gasps, trying to flex the pins and needles out of his hand. “That something you learned recently?”
Shane laughs, warm and genuine and so, so real. “You have no idea how much I’ve learned.”
His kiss is as familiar as it is welcome, soft and hungry, nipping at Drake’s lips, and it’s shocking how it can taste the same as it has for the last nine years and yet wholly, completely different. It doesn’t matter that the world is destroying itself around them, that the floor is ripping up in great chunks of ice and statues are shattering, ice chips whirling up in a massive tornado. None of it matters but the touch of Shane, the real Shane under Drake’s hands, against his lips, pressing up between his legs.
He tastes salt, and it’s impossible to tell which one of them is crying until Shane pulls away, wiping his eyes on the back of his hand. “Sorry. God, I can’t stop.”
“It’s okay.” That’s not the word for what it is, but Drake can’t really think of a better way to say it. “You’re kind of behind on feelings. I don’t mind if you play a little catch-up.”
He expects Shane to wipe his face and put on a fake smile. He’s never really known how transparent he is when he’s upset, always thought he was better than he was at hiding his feelings. Instead of laughing it off, Shane sort of collapses, burying his head in Drake’s chest and shaking with silent sobs, tears landing hot on his shirt.
Drake tries to put his arms around him, but what with the one that’s still trying to turn to ice and the other that’s dislocated, he doesn’t manage much more than ineffective flopping.
That seems to snap Shane out of it, dragging a hand back through his hair to get it out of his face. “Sorry,” he mutters, sniffing as he reaches down for Drake’s icy hand. “Sort of lost control there. Forgot how good it felt. Here, try to flex?”
The roof falls down, bouncing harmlessly off the shield as Shane chafes his hand slowly between his own. The feeling returns painfully, less pins and needles and more swords and daggers, but it does return, which is an immense relief. It’s only a few minutes before Shane’s letting go of his hand, turning to the shoulder. “Not as great with this. I can only pop it back in, I can’t make it stop hurting.”
He doesn’t give any more warning than that before grabbing Drake’s arm, using his own considerable strength to lever it properly into position with a swift, agonizing jerk.
The throbbing uselessness fades, replaced by a much more bearable pain. Then Shane collapses down to his chest, burrowing and nuzzling as Drake’s arms come back around him. The rest of the building finishes falling, leaving them in the dark, the strange otherworldly chill finally gone.
It’s quiet, in the settling dust, kept out by Shane’s barrier. It’s too dark to see much of anything, but after a moment, Shane carefully lowers the barrier. “Everything sort of fell around us. Well, on top of us, but it looks pretty stable now.”
“How can you see?”
“Okay, it feels pretty stable. You know, for the wreckage of a fallen building.”
“Can’t be that hard to bust our way out, can it?” Drake asks, experimentally prodding at a slab of wall propped at a 45 degree angle. It doesn’t move any more than it did before it fell, as solid as anything.
“Nah. But I was sort of thinking…” Shane’s hands are hot on Drake’s shoulders, gently guiding him onto his back. “We’re tired, right? And we’re safe, and we’re stuck, and my magic’s gonna take forever to recharge after a fight like that, and—”
“And?”
Shane’s mouth swipes against his neck, wet and warm. “And I’ve missed you for nine years.”
Drake tries to remember composure, that he has a million questions, but being with Shane is a million times more distracting than being with the thing that had been Shane, and he wasn’t even great at resisting that. “What do you remember?”
“Some. Parts. Mostly everything that happened in the Frozen Court. Everything that…everything that I did to you.” Shane stops his wandering hands, moving them to cup Drake’s face instead. “I’m sorry, baby. I broke every rule we had. It’s only coming back to me now, but, shit, I—”
“Shh. It’s okay.”
“No!”
“So you made a deal. So you were the stupidest idiot I’ve ever met.” Drake gives him a quick kiss, tasting salt again. “Nothing I didn’t already know.”
“But I outed you to your Church. I said—god, the most horrible things. I killed people, and things, and I slept with—”
“Shane. Stop. I’ve had nine years to come to terms with that stuff. It wasn’t you, anyway.”
Shane sniffs, holding back a nervous laugh. “You got older. I saw, in the Court.”
“Yeah, well, not all of us were frozen in time. You think you’ll snap back to how you’re supposed to be? Get a few matching wrinkles like mine?”
/> His eyes have adjusted to the darkness just enough to see the appalled look on Shane’s face, and just laughs and pulls him close. “You’re gonna make it up to me for the next nine years, okay? Sound fair?”
“Next twenty. Next fifty.”
“Masochist.”
Shane manages a watery chuckle at that. “Some things never change. You were the only thing I never stopped wanting.”
Just like that, something inside Drake breaks. He feels his own chest heaving, the choked little sobs becoming real ones, and somehow it winds up with him sitting, Shane kneeling behind him, holding, warm and solid and so, so real.
“Knew it wasn’t you,” he mutters, and he hates the sound of his own voice when he’s crying. He didn’t cry when he woke up and Shane wasn’t Shane anymore. He didn’t cry all the times an empty shell that just looked like his boyfriend showed up drunk and angry on his doorstep, using every bad thing Drake had ever thought about himself against him.
God, he hasn’t cried since he was sixteen.
“You—I mean, it’s just that it wasn’t you. Not the guy I’ve been dealing with for the last fucking decade.”
“Careful,” Shane warns, and Drake can see some of the humor in his face now that his eyes are adjusting. “You’re all churchy now. Can’t go around swearing like that, they’ll think I’m a bad influence on you.”
“I knew,” Drake repeats, insistent to the point of ignoring the other man. “No matter what you—he said, I knew it wasn’t you.”
Shane’s mouth is on his neck again, wet and hot and sloppy, teeth grazing over a birthmark, hands sliding down over Drake’s chest. “Well, baby, who the hell did you think it was? Just because it wasn’t my good self doesn’t mean it was somebody else possessing me.”
“But you’d never do that.”
“Do what?”
It’s harder to think with Shane unbuttoning his shirt, deliberately running his thumb down his sternum. “Like—” He tries to gather his thoughts, tries to be coherent while wanting nothing in the world more than for Shane to continue doing exactly what he’s doing. The real Shane touches him differently, waits to see his responses after doing something, takes obvious pleasure in the sheer closeness of their bodies, nuzzling into his neck. It’s difficult to think about the bad things, the bad times when it feels like they’re over. “You’d never…show up at my apartment and threaten to kill the next person that comes out of their apartment if I didn’t let you blow me.”
Icebound Page 11