WinterJacked: Book One: Rude Awakening

by Athena Grayson

  Lin lifted her brows at that. “They? But not you.”

  “Evergreen tribe belongs to the hilly places of the Realm. Places not so close to the primordial cold.” Her needles rippled with a delicate shiver. “This one is present at the Mother’s calving as tribe-memory witness.”

  “Fascinating,” Lin murmured. The Oddlings truly didn’t seem to understand individuality. Names were out of the question—her mother’s stories were peppered with cautionary tales against giving one’s name to a Youkai, or stealing a Youkai’s name and with the name, its power.

  A large chunk of ice from the wall separating the Mother fell to the floor. She glanced back through the hole again and saw Jack, head tipped back and eyeing the ceiling. Still wearing that intent, leave-me-alone-I’m-thinking look. I hope you know what you’re doing, you crazy fool. “Fascinating,” she repeated, “but some other time. You need to get out with the rest of them.”

  “Mistress must understand. Iceberghaal’s Kin are part of Iceberghaal. Without Iceberghaal, the Kin are unwhole. It is a cruelty beyond words to be an unwhole Kin.”

  Lin set her mouth as she pushed the Evergreen towards the exit. “Better an unwhole Kin than an squished Kin, wouldn’t you say?”

  “They are one and the same, Mistress.” Evergreen glided through the asymmetrical doorway. “All Kin need their place. It is their nature.”

  When she stepped through the narrow doorway, Lin understood. None of the Oddlings had moved more than a foot away from the structure’s outer wall. Many of them kept in physical contact with the building, unable or unwilling to untether themselves from it, even if it was about to fall to rubble.

  She peered upward at the looming ice shelf that could still turn them all into a frosty paste if the walls failed. She pressed her fingers against her lips. “Oh, Jack, you’d better know what you’re doing.” She refused to think about what the other side of the building was going through, or why she couldn’t see the open ocean she knew lay beyond the Mother. Time and distance worked differently here.

  The physics in this place are just messed up. If this place were designed by her developers, she’d have slapped them all collectively. But this wasn’t a game or a virtual world, and the very real sprites beside her would experience real deaths if the structure came down on top of them. As would Jack. This is supposed to be his Realm. It should go both ways—they should care for him if he cares for them.

  She turned to the Evergreen girl. “What do I have to do to get them to let the building go?”

  Her pine needles shifted with her smile. “Offer them another place.”

  Lin tried to remember what else she’d seen in this place. The castle she’d passed with Jack that first night when they were making their way home? No, whatever still lived there had pelted them with snowballs. With rocks at the center. Not exactly friendly territory.

  There was Jack’s building. The city zoning board probably wasn’t aware of the er, inter-dimensional nature of the building’s facade, but what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. She hoped. “I have an idea.” She pointed in the general direction where she thought Jack’s building lay. “Can we get them over there?”

  “You will force the kin who attend Majesty from their home?”

  Lin threw up her hands. “They can squeeze in a few temporary roommates, can’t they?”

  Evergreen glanced back. “A few?”

  Lin followed her gaze. The number of Oddlings had increased threefold in the few minutes she’d been turned away. Her eyes widened. “Where the hell did they all come from?” She looked harder. “Oh my god, they’re hurt!”

  The explanation made itself clear to her a few minutes later when another handful of Oddlings came leaping off the edges of the blocky walls, tumbling down from the roof via the crystalline edges of the striations until they landed in bruised and bloodied heaps.

  Lin’s throat caught at the sight of the broken little creatures. She bent down to help one spindly creature that seemed to be made from shards of ice. Bright aqua water leaked from one of its arm joints, which swung uselessly at its side. She unwound her scarf and fashioned a sling from the lilac cashmere, which she used to bind up the critter’s arm. It stared up at her with ice-chip eyes. Not so unlike Jack’s.

  “There is another place, Mistress.” Evergreen bent down next to her. “Snow Moon grotto lies just east of this place.”

  Time and distance are different here. “Yeah? Does this grotto already have residents?”

  “Not for some time. The grotto has no Proud patron to require the humble Kin to reside.”

  “I’m assuming ‘Proud’ refers to a bigwig around these parts?” Lin finished tying off the fringey ends of her scarf around the ice-shard creature and helped it to rise. Its body still bore some yellow-green residue and she used the ends of her scarf to wipe it away, wincing as the scarf’s threads curled in and charred. Better a scarf than this poor thing.

  “There are no more Proud Kin in this Realm, save for Majesty.”

  “Really?” Lin glanced at the Evergreen in surprise. She remembered the Mother’s remarks about Jack not growing up among his own kind and wondered if Jack—or the Mother—were aware that there were none of Jack’s kind around for him to grow up with.

  I can relate to that. You didn’t have to be an Oddling to have your feet stuck in two worlds. “So can they just squat in this Grotto or do we have to jump through hoops to get them there?”

  “Mistress can serve as the grotto’s Patron.” In her bark-brown skin, her light green eyes gleamed. “Then these orphan Kin become Mistress’s.”

  A shiver traveled down the nape of her neck. She sent a sharp glance in Evergreen’s direction. “You sell your fellow Kin like that to just anybody who stumbles into the Realm?”

  “Mistress misunderstands.”

  If the rumbling was any indication, she was running out of time to understand. They’d sort it out later. “Whatever. If you’re selling, I guess I’m buying. Let’s go.”

  ~*~

  “Child—”

  “I’m not your child!” Sudden rage threw shafts of white heat through him. “None of this is mine! You’ve all been muscling into my life for three years and the minute I stop resisting, I find out it’s a bigger mess than if I’d left it all alone! I don’t want it.”

  The mother surged up, her immense belly rising in front of him like a small moon over a horizon. “It is yours, my child. You are my child, as every Winterkin is mine. Your mother was mine, so are you mine. To deny me is to deny the blood in your veins, the water in your cells, the spark that drives you to sentience.” At her words, sensations rippled through Jack. His blood came to life, burning first, then freezing solid as he gasped for air. Sensations from pain to pleasure to pain again surged through him at the cellular level, until every exquisite pulse from every individual neuron demanded itself be acknowledged. His vision grayed out, then sharpened, then blackened again as the force of her declaration pounded through him.

  “You are mine.” The surge seemed to drain her and the mother fell back. The remains of Iceberghaal rumbled. The floor tilted sharply with the settle of her shoulders back onto the reclined angle carved into the ice. Jack’s legs, like the rest of his body already wrung out with the display of the mother’s power, folded under him.

  “My—mother,” he ground out, not ready to let her get the best of him, “—denied you. Right—up—to the moment—she died. Kept—me—away from you.” He clawed for purchase on the roiling floor, pushing himself back up to shaky knees. His joints screamed in protest and he had to use his hands to bend his legs for him. The worst case of pins and needles in recorded history sent cold fires to his feet and calves. “I refuse to be—yours.”

  “Child. Amaryllis turned away from her nature.” The walls shook with her words. “Amaryllis paid for her secret with her life, but that secret was never kept from me.” Her statement was punctuated with a deafening crack as the final load-bearing wall gave way and twi
sted. A great, diagonal crack raced up the wall and the two halves fell away from each other. “Aaah!” The mother fell back, out of her bower, curving her body around her swollen belly as huge chunks of ice collapsed in from the ceiling.

  The anger keeping him focused evaporated. The resentments receded, leaving him thin and empty, as hollow as the ringing thuds of collapsing ceiling raining down around them in greater and greater chunks. The fissure spread further, webbing across the ceiling and finally making it to the floor. The side of the hall that held the mother finally gave way and tipped a full ninety degrees. The waters swirled in around the mother’s body and angry be damned, Jack dove for her outstretched hand. “No!”

  Her fingertip, the size of his arm, brushed against his skin, freezing-solid. He couldn’t feel that arm anymore, but it somehow still obeyed the commands from his brain and his hands closed around her finger. As if he could prevent her fall into the indigo waters churning up between the cracks in the shattered floor.

  Her body tumbled off the edge of the floor and the waters engulfed her. “No!” He screamed again, scrabbling for a hold on her icy body, even if it was only by a fingertip. Great saves had been made before like that.

  The waters closed over her face. He met her huge, luminous eyes. “You are always mine, Black Ice.” Her words erupted in bubbles that geysered through the shattered remains of the ruined edifice. She surfaced one last time. “You are all I have left.”

  “No!” He clutched at her giant finger. “Help me! You can swim, can’t you?” All she had left? “All she had left” clutched at her the way a grasshopper clung to a blade of grass. Useless. He heaved back, causing hardly a ripple in the churning waters. Creeping cold made its way up his legs.

  “Your nature, Black Ice. Do not turn from your nature.” She separated from her lounge fully. His section of the floor still had some wall attached and part of the ceiling still arched over their heads, adding a counterweight to the ice that sent it pitching in the encroaching waves.

  Jack heaved backwards, succeeding only in bending her immense finger back a little. She curved her hand, removing herself from his grasp.

  She opened her mouth and exhaled, trapping him in a mound of brittle ice as the moisture in the air froze and coalesced. She rested her cheek on the chunk of floor that bucked beneath his feet and sighed again. “Stop, child. Winter…as it is…is not strong enough…to save me…as I am.” Her swirling irises slowed as her eyelids fluttered closed, then open again. “So…tired, my child. This form…asks so much.”

  “No, no, no.” Jack crouched as much as he could, given his lower legs were trapped in her careless breath. The power it would take to simply sigh and freeze a person solid baffled the back of his mind, but the front of it was consumed with helping her. Her shoulders heaved. He slipped his hands under a cheek the size of his torso and felt the life thrumming through her icy body, an electrical hum like a massive generator underneath a building. “Stay with me, here.”

  “So tired…my sleeping child. Winter…enfolds all…in sleep. But even Winter must…sleep.”

  “Sleep? No, no. No sleeping, ma’am.” He patted her cheek. A child ineffective in seeking a mother’s attention. He looked down at his hand. The Oddlings had called him the sleeping regent from the start. If only he’d stayed asleep to them. The Mother Glacier would be fine and things would have gone on the way they’d been going since before he was born.

  “It is time, child.”

  Jack looked around for help. Where were all the damn Winterlings when he needed them? “Hey!” He took his eyes off her to glance back towards the larger parts of the ruin that still nominally stood. Why had he sent Lin to evacuate all the Oddlings? “Anybody!”

  “Enough.” The Mother’s voice was barely above a whisper. Still, her words breezed over him, swirling in under his collar and chilling him solid beneath his clothes. “Be still.”

  She tilted her massive head back and closed her eyes. Her ice-filament hair floated around her face as she sank beneath the surface, her icy-translucent skin taking on an aquamarine hue as she submerged.

  “NO!” Jack lunged for her. Frozen in place as he was, he didn’t get very far. Her pearlescent body drifted down. Her hands floated out at her sides, tangled in her hair.

  Jack clutched the edge of the ice locking him in place, his eyes riveted to her shape as it blurred to a creamy opaque blob in the dark teal waters. He gasped as the blot burst, then diffused in a thousand different tiny pieces of midnight light, flashing far below like the scales of fish. “NO!”

  His hand curled into a fist and he slammed it against the ice. Again and again. He lost track of time, of feeling, of place beyond the dirty white surface his hand struck over and over. Webbed cracks appeared in the mound that held him still, and the crusty cracking of frozen water thundered in his ears.

  ~*~

  Settling the critters into the Snow Moon Grotto could have gone better. Lin wished she had time to look around at the incredibly intricate filigree of the ice-constructed gazebo or the pergolas sculpted of hard-packed snow. She wished she had time to admire the tiny white and lavender snowdrops that provided tender shoots of green in the landscape, but all she could do was glance, note, and move on as she and the Evergreen girl moved the more wounded creatures into the lee of the crescent-shaped area.

  Time enough for that later. If we make it through this. When the flood receded, she noticed Jack’s little Frostling companion, dancing from foot to foot and wringing her hands. As soon as Lin’s eyes met hers, the creature spoke. “Majesty.”

  Lin’s stomach tightened. “What is it?”

  The Advisor sent a mournful glance towards the shore. “Majesty is not well.”

  “Go,” Evergreen said. “Aid Majesty. Aid the Realm.”

  As she ran, the frigid air burned streaks into her lungs, and Lin decided then and there that, while Zumba classes were nice, maybe long-distance running might better equip her for the future. The little blue girl, toe claws digging into the crunchy snow, bolted along next to her, barely winded. Only her small size kept her from outpacing Lin. As they came to the structure, she lagged behind. But Lin had caught the urgency and sure as the sun rose, she knew from the crumbling structure before them, that Jack was Not Well. Not well at all.

  The Frostling stumbled and Lin scooped her up, the same way she’d scooped up one of Starla’s kids dozens of times. With every step, there was less and less ground and more water swirling up between the cracks. The Oddling’s little talons dug into her shoulders, sending prickles racing over her skin with every jarring, tentative step she took across the crumbling ruin. They were nothing compared to the icy claws of fear cutting through her midsection when she caught sight of Jack’s charcoal-grey scarf lying on a floating chunk of the crumbling edifice.

  Sick fear froze her. The little Frostling squeaked when her arms tightened around it. Lin pointed, unwilling to waste the words for either apology or explanation.

  “Majesty!” The Frostling’s hair, dulled since the exodus, fluffed itself right back up. They really are attached to other things, aren’t they? And this one’s attached herself to Jack. Even if she thinks he’s an ass.

  She spared half a second’s worth of pity for the creature’s lack of free will, another half-second of commiseration because she knew what it felt like to be attached to Jack, then plowed forward, right up to the edge of the ruin. “He’s out there, Addy,” she said. “Can you get us there?”

  The Advisor shot her a sharp look. “Humble Kin do as Proud Kin command. There is no question.”

  Lin could easily imagine how easily that little rule could be abused. No wonder the little creature didn’t trust Jack. “Well, I’m asking you, because I have manners.”

  The Frostling hopped down and skittered to the edge of the flooring. Her eyes swirled in varying speeds as she measured the distance between them and the ruin with the only thing in the landscape that wasn’t either blue or white. Then, she jumped.

/>   She gasped as the little blue girl disappeared into the water, leaving behind rimey frost where her body had touched the surface. As Lin watched, the pale oval stretched into a tube under the water. She was using her body—her nature—to freeze the water just enough to connect to one of the floating icebergs of floor.

  But she was not one of the freezing cold ones. Frostlings came from the softer parts of the place. Jack told her the Frostlings manifested as frost on windows, or the little touches of frost on plants and grass. Stuff that happened closer to fall and spring than in the deep part of Winter. Her nature became apparent when she surfaced on the floating floor. Her little body wracked itself with shivers and even from here, Lin could see her chest rise and fall rapidly. She stood on the edge, helpless.

  The little creature wasn’t all done, though. She flopped over and started to paddle with her hands, moving the berg back towards Lin. Lin caught on and tossed her scarf to the Frostling as soon as she’d drifted close enough. Further out, closer to Jack, the waters had begun to roil as the larger parts of the crumbled building lost their battle to the waves.

  Her shoes soaked through with icy water as soon as she attempted her first step. Together, she and the Advisor managed to balance the smaller iceberg until Lin could put her full weight on it. With an awkward push, she sent them drifting out towards the remnant and Jack. She saw him fall. “Can we go faster?”

  The Advisor dug her little clawed toes into the ice and doubled her paddling speed.

  When his anguished cry rode the wind to her ears, she flung off her mittens and plunged her hands into the freezing waters to help paddle. Her fingers went numb within seconds, and then on fire after that. It didn’t matter. Of course it matters, but I’m doing it anyway.

  “Stop!” The advisor pulled on her arm. Lin drew her hands up at the creature’s motion. Her swirling eyes slowed and she looked directly at Lin for maybe the second time. “You are not Winterkin.” She stroked Lin’s throbbing hands. “There.”