He pulled the ladder, sliding me half up onto the ice. A ring on his finger glowed, and even with my blurred vision, I knew it was a spell meant for me. I let go of the ladder and slid back into the frigid water.
Chapter Fifteen
The water was over me before I could grab the edge. I kicked, but my legs were sapped. I barely moved in the water.
An arm shot down, snagging first on my hair and pulling me toward the surface. Then the hand snagged the back of my sweater and another plunged in to grab my arm. I twisted, trying to get out of the Sorcerer's hold, but his hands were strong—much stronger than my numb, weakening body.
I crashed through the surface of the water and he heaved me half onto the ice. I wrenched sideways, trying to roll away.
"Hel, stop fighting me!"
It took a second to place the voice, but I stopped resisting. Frigid strands of hair covered my face, sticking to my mouth as I gasped for air. They blocked my vision, but the arms that had pulled me up dragged painfully under my arms. Something clicked behind me, and I felt my weight supported by a strap around my back.
"Kick, girl, kick!" Jaesung shouted. I tried, but my legs were too heavy, and I only managed a few weak thrashes at the water.
It seemed like enough. The strap around my back pulled me forward and with Jaesung's help, I struggled over the edge. Then he was dragging me. No, not him—the strap was dragging me, dragging both of us in short jerks. He’d clipped the lanyard around my back to a D ring on his harness and now, on his side, was using one hand to help maneuver us across the ice.
Back at the SUV, people pulled the line, and in the glowing light of flares, I saw paramedics bending over a slice of red jacket.
"Is h-he a-l-l-live?" I choked it out, and Jaesung waved at the line-pullers. Apparently, it was far enough in that he seemed confident in the integrity of the ice. Without answering, he dragged me to my knees, hands strong even through the numbness. He shook me. He wasn't gentle. It jerked the lanyard between us tight. I wanted to twist away, but couldn’t manage it.
"Are you insane or just completely fucking stupid? You don't just run out onto the ice! You don't just jump in the water with no gear and—and wearing freaking wool and-"
"You were going to!"
"Helena, I have a harness! And I wouldn't have gone in the water—I'm not that stupid!" On the last word, he shook me again. Only once, but hard enough to piss me off.
“Stop it!” I snapped. I thrust my hands up between us, catching his chest and shoving against it. He let go, but the lanyard caught us, conspiring to hold me near him. I was shuddering now, the cold air eating through my wet clothes and into my flesh. His chest was soaked, cold water pressing out onto my fingers as I held myself at the end of the lanyard.
"I got that kid out," I managed, though my teeth chattered. "He'd drifted too far from the hole. I couldn't let him—I just—I can swim, okay? The water was cold, but I'm really, really good at swimming. And I had a line."
"Which you took off."
"I couldn't reach him!"
Jaesung's face was hard, and the look he gave me seemed to bore into me like fire. I was used to anger. I was used to abuse. I was used to being scared. But I was not used to this kind of anger, the kind that was on my behalf. My throat tightened as I looked up at him, stripped to a half-drenched gray hoodie, harness covering his chest and looking almost like a tactical vest.
His glasses rested askew on his nose, and there was a rapid pulse throbbing in his neck. I watched his irises flick this way and that as he scanned my face. Then his hands found my shoulders, lightly this time, and he bent his head forward with a sigh.
"Look. The cardinal rule of rescue? Don't make yourself a second victim."
I sucked in my lips, glancing back over his shoulder toward the hole and the Sorcerer. The ladder lay abandoned on the ice.
"Where'd he go?" I asked.
Jaesung's skin had seized into goosebumps across his neck. "The ladder guy?" he asked. "I don't know. I stopped paying attention to him when you went under."
Jaesung reached between us and, fingers clumsy, unclipped the lanyard. He shoved himself up and offered me a hand, and though anger still crackled around his head like a storm, that hand looked like a peace offering. I took it. My legs did not want to work, and my bare feet were little more than blocks of ice themselves. I grabbed onto Jaesung’s harness, my weight jerking down against it. His hands found my waist, fingers threading through my belt loops.
"Steady, Miami.” A slow, warm tone blunted the edge in his voice, and he no longer sounded angry. This was more like the voice he used with frightened dogs—that low, smooth sound that made my sternum vibrate. I took a few breaths, wind cutting across us and stinging my ears. He stepped forward, cutting off the breeze with his shoulders.
It was too cold to think. All my concentration went into staying vertical. Jaesung put an arm low around my back and half dragged me to the edge of the lake.
Five EMS workers lifted the boy onto a backboard. They'd cut open his clothes, and the pads of an AED stuck to his pale chest. A woman stood at his head, holding a breathing mask to his face. His border collie sat at the doors of the EMS van and was only prevented from hopping in by a technician. I was glad to see the comforting scratch she gave the dog in consolation.
One officer was busy interviewing the hysterical teens that had been on the far bank, and the other was with Krista, who shot us a look of patent worry.
As we reached the SUV, Jaesung hugged me against his side, turning his face into my wet hair. For a second, I was stunned, thinking it an affectionate gesture. Then he spoke.
"Do you have a medical record?" he asked, breath hot across my forehead.
I tensed. "Not really."
He nodded, then took a breath for a second question. I felt him shivering under his harness and hoodie, and my fingers tightened on the dry fabric at the small of his back.
"Do you think your parents have reported you missing?"
"My parents are dead."
I said it immediately, and simply. The truth of it sank deep and cold into my bones. It was true. Both of them were gone now, not just Dad. I guess I qualified as an orphan.
Jaesung's breath hitched. His body went rigid. You'd have thought I stuck a knife in his gut. A beat of silence hung between us, populated only by the puffs of our exhales. Then, at last, he pulled me around the dark side of the SUV. The flashing lights of the emergency vehicles patterned the trees, glimmering through the windows of the car now blocking us from sight.
Then, weirdly, Jaesung started to undress me. I was stunned for a second, barely able to react because, of everyone I had ever expected to take advantage of my state, he was on the list only slightly ahead of Poo-stank. I was so shocked, in fact, that I let him get my sweater and shirt hiked halfway up my abdomen before I asked, "What are you doing?"
"These clothes’ll freeze right to you," he said.
I let him pull off my sweater, and the shirt under. I probably would have let him go on, but he grabbed a towel from the back seat. Apparently, my sports bra and jeans were a line he wasn't willing to cross.
"I d-don't usually strip on the f-first rescue," I said. He glanced up, and I knew by the annoyed look he gave me that he must be blushing. I dried off my arms, my stomach, my chest. Frost clung to the ends of Jaesung's hair. He shrugged out of his own hoodie.
He turned away slightly when he pulled off his shirt, which was odd because he was... actually better-formed than I'd realized. His chest had mass to it, and though he didn't have the perfectly defined abdominals of a model, there was a pronounced furrow down his midline. His arms were bulkier than I'd thought, too, given such narrow wrists. His mass simply stretched out down long bones, which made him look thinner than he actually was.
And yet even with the hints his physique offered, I still couldn't guess his sport. Something that worked everything, apparently.
I shimmied out of my jeans, keeping the towel around my wa
ist, and Jaesung, shirtless, reached past me into the van for more towels. That was when I saw his back, and the reason he’d turned away.
A network of small scars webbed the left side, most of them stretching across his shoulder blade. Some went lower, cutting across the big muscle along his spine. They were too irregular for knife wounds and too deep to have been something like welts from a belt. It looked like the scars one gets in a car accident, or being thrown through a window.
Jaesung came back up with two scruffy wool blankets and handed one to me, wrapping himself in the other. He opened the driver's door, stepped up into the SUV, and turned the keys in the ignition. I struggled into the back seat. The whole place smelled dank and familiar, like the kennels. I laid down on the stack of old blankets kept for the dogs, nesting into them.
My hair crunched, pressing cold against my head where strands had frozen. I closed my eyes. My whole body trembled. Probably a good sign. I felt the vehicle move as Jaesung climbed up into the back with me. I kept my eyes shut, but I knew it was him—his teeth were chattering.
Something thick and heavy spread over me, and I smelled that combination of night air, burning leaves, and sweat he always brought home with him. His presence moved away again and the back door shut. Then the driver's door opened and closed. I cracked my eyes enough to see him fussing with his watch, alternately holding his hands and it up to the vents.
The charcoal wool up near my face was his coat.
The air in the car got warmer, and I must have drifted to sleep, because it seemed like only seconds later when Krista climbed in the passenger's seat.
"One of his friends is taking the dog."
"What did they say?"
"They're not sure how long he was without air. No telling if there'll be any brain damage. The news crews are here."
Jaesung grunted. "Did they ask about Hel?"
"Yeah. They want to talk to her."
"She's out. And I doubt she wants to talk to them any more now than she did at the pub."
Krista shrugged. "It's police. What are we supposed to say?"
He didn't have an answer for that.
They brought an officer around to the SUV. Neither Jaesung nor Krista said anything when I told them my name was Mildred Johnson. I'd seen the girl's ID at the grocery store a few days before, when she'd handed it over to the clerk that rang up her cider. I gave him her home address, to increasingly bunched eyebrows from my companions. I let the officer have my cell number in case of follow-up calls.
The news crew stood nearby, casting bright lights across the churned up ground as I gave my statement behind the shelter of the SUV. It was lucky I still shuddered with cold, because the officer let me off the hook with a lecture about leaving the rescue to the rescue crew.
Once he left, Krista slammed the driver’s side door and wrenched the car into reverse. "You know, if Hel were a dude, they would have been calling you a hero, but you’re a girl, so instead they're going all…all...."
"Patriarchy?" Jaesung offered.
"God, it makes me so mad! I mean, you're a moron, but you saved that kid's life."
"Emphasis on the moron part," Jaesung added. "Kris, I think we might need to get a moron jar."
"Honeypots, we'd have that shit filled in no time."
"Because I'm the only one with common sense?"
“I hate to break it to you, bruh, but you climb cell towers. You qualify as a moron."
As they discussed the relative merits and drawbacks of a moron jar, I huddled back into the pile of blankets and pulled Jaesung's coat up to half cover my face. The whole ride home, I sat up only once, to satisfy myself that we were alone on the streets.
I managed the stairs only because Krista was in front of me, holding my hands on her shoulders. Then came the most excruciating bath of my life. It felt like boiling water, though Krista assured me it was room temperature. My skin went a bright, livid red.
Finally, I climbed into dry clothes and the now-familiar comfort of my couch. Krista brought down the hair-dryer and went to work on my hair while Jaesung, now in fuzzy-looking batman pajama bottoms and several layers of long-sleeved shirt, made us all enormous cups of tea.
It wasn't until the third cup that I noticed my sketchbook on the coffee table and remembered what I'd done that afternoon. I smiled into my mug, inhaling the grassy-smelling steam of green tea.
Even if the Guild or some rogue Sorcerer had found me, I could fight back. I had fought back. If they caught me, the only thing they'd get out of it was my death. Not my pack. Not the book.
Part of me wanted to call Morgan and tell him the good news, but a thin thread of uneasiness kept me from reaching for my phone. In his last text, Morgan had told me not to contact him unless it was an emergency.
Krista had settled into the chair across from me and, after drying his own hair, Jaesung sank onto the couch, so close he practically sat on my throbbing feet.
"Sorry if I scared you," he said.
I looked up, uncertain when he meant. Grabbing me from the water? Yelling? Taking off my shirt? He seemed to note my confusion.
"When I shook you," he said. "I’m—that wasn't... I'm-" he wiped a hand across his mouth, as if punishing it for not knowing what to say.
"It's okay," I said, shrugging it off.
"It's not."
“It didn't scare me.”
"Still. It's not right for me to be aggressive like that." He looked up at me, brows furrowed. "If it didn't bother you, it should have."
I shrugged, and he glanced at Krista. She shook her head.
After another beat of silence, I gave Jaesung a nudge with my foot. "I'm sorry for scaring you too."
"Um, and me?" Krista said. "Because I'm pretty sure you both left me on the bank, wondering whether I'd still have roommates tomorrow."
"Sorry," we said in unison. Jaesung and I glanced at each other, and I saw the smile that threatened at the edges of his mouth.
"I mean, the dog's fine," Krista went on. "So, like, mission accomplished. But damn.”
Jaesung laughed. "The damn dog came out better than any of us!" He reached out then, settling a hand on my shoulder. I wasn't certain what the gesture signified—forgiveness, or affection, or relief—but when he pulled away, I leaned after the touch.
"Kay," Krista said, setting her empty mug on the coffee table and heaving herself from the chair. "I need to go check on the babies. You-" she pointed to me "-stay warm. Get rest. And you-" she trained her finger on Jaesung, who halted halfway off the couch "-are unnecessary this evening. Go to bed."
She disappeared down the stairs, the door falling shut behind her.
For a moment, I thought Jaesung would sit back down, but he didn't. Instead, he picked up Krista's empty mug, then his own, then mine, and took them to the dishwasher. I listened to him open it and load them in, leaning my head against the back of the couch.
I didn't realize my eyes had closed until a light touch on my wrist startled them open. Jae stood above me, dark hair sketching a jagged edge across his forehead. I wasn't used to seeing it not spiked back away from his face. He looked younger this way. I actually believed he was nineteen.
"I just wanted to tell you that... the reason it's not okay. What I did."
I bit back a groan and blinked up at him, wondering if I should push myself up straighter, if only to look more attentive than I felt. It was such a small thing for me, that moment of anger he’d had. Before a few weeks ago, I’d have been lucky to escape an entire day without the threat of much worse. I didn’t care to assuage his privileged sense of guilt.
But his face was troubled, and he had just pulled me from a frozen lake. I sat up.
He knelt by the arm of the couch, one long forearm propped alongside mine, wrist to elbow.
Despite the flannel pajamas I had on, and the down comforter, and the quilt, Jaesung looked unfairly warm. Something about the way his body looked in dark colors, kneeling there next to me. Or maybe it was the warm gold of his
skin, reminding me of hot beach sand or baked terra-cotta tiles. I caught myself leaning toward him.
Luckily, he wasn't looking. Instead, he studied our forearms—the light blue of my sleeve against the black of his, like two different skies—and plucked at a wrinkle near my elbow.
"I told you I was born in Korea, in Seoul," he said. I nodded. My hair swept onto the arm of the couch, across the back of his hand. His fingers twitched. "Mom and I moved here when I was ten. We had to move in with her sister. She’d married an American guy—her ESL, teacher, actually. Gene's Dad."
I didn't know what ESL was, but I didn’t interrupt to ask. It seemed like a tough thing for him to talk about, his past in Korea, though he'd only ever spoken of the country like he missed it. Maybe he didn't miss all of it, or maybe, like my feelings on Miami, his past complicated his feelings about the place.
"There's a stereotype about Korean men hitting their wives but it doesn't happen that much anymore. Probably about the same as America. The difference is in how difficult it is, socially, to get a divorce. Most women don't leave, and when they do, a lot of times their whole family gets upset at them. It’s just not done."
I moved my hand then, fingers crawling up onto his forearm. It wasn't a natural gesture, but it felt like the right response. His opposite hand lifted, covered mine. His thumb swept over the back of it a few times before it settled.
"Anyway, Mom—she put up with it for years, I guess. Dad was a boxer back in the late eighties, a really good one. When the craze died down, he opened a gym and trained other people. Then he got in an accident, a few years after I was born, and..." Jaesung shrugged. "Couldn't fight anymore. Even train. It got to him, I guess. He probably needed therapy, but that's another no-no in Korean culture. He'd flip his shit if someone suggested it to him. Anyway, he took it out on Mom."
My teeth clenched. This was not an unusual story, but it was weird to hear it from someone like Jaesung. He wasn't from a drug-torn family, or a gang, or any of the people I was used to hearing that story from. He was middle class. And in college. He was clean, and smart, and...nice.
Unleash (Spellhounds Book 1) Page 13