WinterJacked: Book One: Rude Awakening

by Athena Grayson

  She glanced down. Her hands were covered in fuzzy frost, like a package of meat in a badly-sealed freezer. But when she flexed them, the frost didn’t flake off. “I…don’t know that it’ll help.” Her hands had started to burn underneath the coating and, if physics worked the same here, the frost would melt in a few seconds.

  She put her hands back into the water. The little fuzzy layer stayed around her skin, neither freezing nor thawing, but the pain lessened and she paddled with renewed energy towards Jack, through increasingly angry waters. He must be going through something. Whether he wanted to admit it or not, Jack was connected to this place.

  Their pathetic craft drifted towards the larger shard and Lin pulled her hands out of the water. They were red and chapped and hurt like hell. At least I can still feel them. She knew frostbite had to be a concern here, but she didn’t know all the rules yet. She glanced down at her hands. The tip of one pinkie had a tiny, indigo fish attached to it. Her eyes widened. “Ew!” She shook it off. It landed on the ice, turned once to flash its teeth at her, and slipped back into the water.

  The tip of her pinkie had taken on a bloodless, gray hue. “I’ll be damned,” she said bemusedly. Then she realized that the little critter was probably some sort of manifestation of frostbite and cursed more heavily. She shook her hands and massaged the tips of her fingers. She blew on her fingers and the white spots faded, leaving only the very tip of her pinkie white and pulsating with pain.

  A sudden wave hit them, washing over their ice and leaving them reeling. Lin clutched a piece of wall, her finger forgotten. The Advisor, meanwhile, had fallen to her knees. She let out a soft, keening moan.

  “What is it?”

  The Advisor—fuck, it’s getting to be a pain thinking of her like that. Addie—turned her face towards Lin’s. “Sh-she is no more,” she whispered. Her swirling, inhuman eyes brimmed with very real, very human tears and Lin’s heart contracted.

  “Who? I don’t understand.”

  On the other side of the larger float, Jack had fallen to his knees in a pile of ice, head bowed, and one fist steadily rising and falling into the rubble. That can’t be good. Even he could hurt himself here. She stumbled from their small float to the larger one and picked her way on numb feet over to Jack.

  Addie scampered to the edge of the float, staring down into the dark waters where Jack’s gaze seemed pulled as well. “She is…gone.”

  So was Jack if Lin didn’t snap him out of wherever he was. “Jack.” She touched his shoulder. He kept repeating one phrase over and over again. His words held a pain-soaked, rhythmic cadence and he seemed not to notice they were there.

  He jerked violently, as if she’d gut-punched him. “I never wanted this.” His fist kept pounding at the ice. “I. Never. Wanted. This. I. Never. Wanted. This. I. Never. Wanted. This.”

  Her next touch wasn’t as gentle. She grabbed his wrist. She hissed at the cold coming off him. “Stop!”

  ~*~

  Warm hands touched his shoulders. The light contact was such a shock it cleared the haze from his eyes and the fog from his brain. The sound of his name in her voice shattered the glass encasing him. “Jack!”

  “She’s—she’s down there. I couldn’t—couldn’t save her.”

  Tight bands constricted his chest. He fought for breath around them. “She’s—she was one of them—” He coughed, air and salt-sea spray mingling in his lungs over top of the sounds of the structure still coming apart. “They never did anything to help her—” Stinging cold burned behind his eyes, washing out the aquamarine hues of Iceberghaal and leaving behind clean, cold, clinical white.

  The white of a hospice room.

  White of bleached and starched anti-microbial medical bed sheets.

  White of paper-thin skin stretched over frail bones and fading strength.

  White of eighty-pound bond, starkly bisected by thick lines of charcoal drawn by a hand so much stronger than hers, and so very powerless.

  Lin moved her hands from his shoulders to cup his cheeks. “Jack. Oh, Jack.” She pulled him down to her, pushing his cold-burning face into the crook of her neck, warming his body with hers that seemed too slight, too ephemeral. “It’s not your fault.”

  Her fingers, almost searing to his cold skin, brushed over the back of his neck, up under his hair that no longer had any color to it. The white blizzard behind his eyes that obscured everything—meaning, purpose, ability—began to show clouds of the palest blue.

  Her fingertips seared azure spots where they touched his eyelids. “You were her child, Jack. She’d never expect you to be her savior against time itself.” Her thumbs painted his cheekbones in warm lilac that became islands of clarity against the opaque white.

  ~*~

  They floated, adrift, on an uneven chunk of Iceberghaal in cold, dark waters. Jack stared hard into the deep, looking for…something. Answers. Meaning. Absolution. Some clue as to what came next. “Why here?” He turned his head, to where the Advisor—Addie— perched on a mound on the opposite end of the ice. “Why now?” He and Lin sat on the narrow end, their combined weight preventing the imbalanced fragment from upending.

  “While Majesty slumbered, this realm was the safest place, but when Majesty crossed the Boundary, Majesty Awakened.”

  He shook his head. “That’s the rudest awakening in history, then.”

  “Well, you’re up now. No longer AFK—away from keyboard.” Lin rubbed her temple. “God, I think I’ve been working in video games for too long.” Her features shifted to artificial brightness. “At least that problem was solved for me.”

  Jack eyed her. “Are you...are you all right? I’m still kinda waiting for you to wake up and freak the hell out.”

  Her dark eyes met his. She held her hands out, palms up, and shook her head. “I know. But...part of me has always sort of expected stuff like this to be here. Maybe it’s because of my mother, or maybe it’s because Starla’s always been into the woo-woo stuff...but think of all the stuff we created with pixels and code. There’s a code to this, too, it’s just waiting for us to find it.” She laced her fingers with his. “You’re in play now, Jack. The machine ate your quarter and the clock is ticking.”

  He looked out at the ruined edifice, now just a crumbled pile of icy rubble. Their iceberg bobbed in the freezing waters when the Advisor shifted. Jack peered down at the uneven, snowy surface. Why not? It wouldn’t hurt to at least try, would it? He closed his eyes and pointed his hand towards the edge of the ice floe, and concentrated.

  When he opened his eyes, a thin crust of new ice had formed in a half-moon shape off the edge of the iceberg. Delicate, tenuous, and in no way able to support anyone’s weight, it nevertheless stilled some of the back-and-forth. He closed his eyes and pictured a second “wing” on the ‘berg.

  The nausea-inducing roll of the iceberg stabilized to the gentle bobbing of calmer waters. “If that was Tutorial Island, I think I failed the game already.”

  The Advisor slipped cold, scaly fingers into his other hand. “Nay, Majesty. She is eternal. For as long as Absolute Zero exists between the stars, the Mother will be.” She pointed another blue, clawed finger into the dark waters.

  What he thought was merely the color of the icy sea shifted and he realized the darkness was something massive, moving beneath them. “Is that—her?”

  “It is potentially the Mother. It has the chance to become Her, in time. If Her children shape their Realms to create her again.”

  The rolling quieted to a gentle motion in the lapping waves. Jack stared at the dark, chill waters for a long time before speaking again. “Without a Mother Glacier—er, manifested, I guess, what happens to the rest of you?”

  “Us.” The Advisor’s correction was gentle, but unmistakable.

  Jack heard the Mother’s words again. Thousands of my children live their lives outside the Realms. I am sorry you cannot be one of them. His own mother’s dream for him must have been to live outside the Realms. Why else would she ha
ve kept all the secrets? “Us,” he repeated.

  “Without the Mother Glacier manifested, all our Boundaries become fluid. Even the powerful Realms in the north and south will find their borders vulnerable. Even the Great Polar Icefields, where the most ancient and primitive of Winterkin slumber, will feel Her loss.”

  “What happens if the borders are breached? And who breaches them?” Lin wrapped her arms around her knees. “The Lawless?”

  Jack noted that the heat of her body had melted a little depression in the ice where her rear end was. He pulled her into his lap while Addie answered. “The Lawless, perhaps. But Lawless are not found everywhere. Only where they are displaced by locale. All Lawless are kin of other realms elsewhere.” The Advisor looked back towards the remains of Iceberghaal. “It is the Summerkin we must fear.” Her childlike face scrunched up in worry. “Too many of our boundaries rest right up against those of Summer now, where the human tribe’s reach once extended into the Realms between us.”

  Jack licked cracked lips gone dry from the stinging salt-wind. “Can’t we negotiate with Summer like we did the Lawless?”

  Addie’s aurora-eyes dulled. “Majesty knows it is not in our nature to seek peace with Summer.”

  The slice of revealed knowledge coming undone in his brain didn’t shock him so much anymore. And now that he thought about it, of course he had no desire to do anything but obliterate any bunch of creatures that included acid sunshine slugs that preyed upon pregnant glaciers and baby icebergs. In fact, just thinking about it made something in the back of his mind curl up its lip and snarl. “So how do you—how do we—shore up those boundaries?” In his mind, he heard the shing of whetstone on steel, and while most of him thought it came straight out of a second-rate movie trailer, a small part of him said that was the exact answer he sought.

  The rest of him slapped mental duct-tape over that part, at least for the time being. I’m not entirely one of them yet.

  “The strength of the Crown strengthens the Realm.” The Advisor curled up in the depression Lin had left. She looked away. “Our Realm will fall.”

  “Don’t be a pessimist. I know this guy.” Lin’s voice resonated through their clothes and behind his ribcage. “He’s a quick study.”

  His arms tightened around Lin’s body, even if her vote of confidence was unfounded. He pressed a kiss into her hair and smelled her herbal shampoo with that underlying hint of woodsmoke and mint that was uniquely her. Only twice before had he faced the fissure forming in his soul—first when he had to make the decision to put his mother in hospice, and then when it hit home—long after Nancy had actually moved out—that his marriage was truly over. “I guess we’ll have to re-invent ourselves. Draw new boundaries.”

  Snapshots of his life strung out in his mind. A path that started out as clear-cut and fast as fresh-packed snow on a black diamond ski slope fell away to muddy slush the further he got from its origin, leaving him adrift and floundering on a tiny, bobbing chunk of murky ice surrounded by an ocean of uncertainty. “Figure out who we are, and this time, mean it.”

  She shifted to look up at him. “Jack?” Her expression turned wary.

  One of her electric blue locks of hair tangled in his fingers as he pushed it out of her face. “I thought if I kept all the parts that didn’t fit hidden well enough, I could—I dunno—pick up where I left off? Keep going in the same direction? Put the pieces back together to make a whole man?” He felt as thin and insubstantial as the Scarecrow they’d met the night of his birthday. Patches and rags and shaggy bits of scrap pulled together while he squinted himself blind and lied and called it “normal life.”

  “Jack—”

  “I wanted to keep things between us separate from this. Normal. See if we could start something see where it went, just the two of us as regular people.”

  She laid a hand on his cheek. Her fingers were hot. He felt an answering flush in his cold skin. Even his cells wanted to meet her halfway.

  Her eyes hardened. “If that’s your proposition, I don’t even want to start something.” Before the first tremor went through the frayed pieces of him, she blazed on. “I don’t want to start anything with just parts of you. I don’t want just the pretty parts, the polished parts, the put-together bits you show people you don’t know. Start anything with just that, and it’s doomed right out of the gate.” Her hand left his cheek and left him cold as she gestured to the dark waters around them. “This is part of you. Part of who you are.”

  She pushed up from his lap, sending their makeshift watercraft bobbing dangerously, in spite of the stabilizers he’d added. “Anything we start together—this will be part of it. Part of us, if we decide to make a go of it. Christ, Jack, if I’d wanted just the pretty parts and the image, I’d have gotten the hell over you years ago.” Her arms dropped to her sides. “I’m over the illusion. I’ve waited too long for a chance at the real.” She held her hands out to him. “Nothing less than everything you are, Jack Winters. If you can’t do that—” She looked away for a moment, then met his eyes again, “—then let’s not even try.”

  I’m sorry. He took one of her hands in his, touched her bottom lip with the thumb of the other. A crack splintered in the growing distance between them and the ruin of Iceberghaal as another wall of the poorly-designed edifice buckled under the weight of neglect.

  The icebergs of his life that had fallen away had drifted so far from him. Reaching for them, clinging to them, had become a habit. A meaningless exercise. Iceberghaal had fallen because the walls failed to support the roof. The structure wasn’t designed to hold the Mother Glacier—it was all form, no function. It was the house of a child’s imagination, untempered by the physics of experience.

  His ideas, preconceptions, that damn life plan he’d made when he was young and stupid. All the boundaries he’d drawn around the spaces in his life. Form, but no longer function.

  And the petal-softness of her lower lip a glow of warmth in chill uncertainty. “I don’t know what will happen.”

  Her lip moved under the pad of his thumb. “Nobody does. All we can do is guess and hold on. Or let go.”

  He lifted his gaze to the Frostling perched on the tip of the iceberg. “I accept the Crown.”

  The Advisor blinked. “This one did not hear Majesty’s words properly.” Her aurora-eyes swirled behind narrowed lids.

  Lin’s fingers tightened around his hand. “Jack, do you realize what you’re doing?”

  What was bound to happen all along, the fatalistic part of him supplied. The part of him that knew better answered. “Letting go.” He said a mental good-bye to the crumbling scaffold holding up the facade of normal, and held up their still-joined hands. “Hold on?”

  Her dark eyes were an ocean in themselves as she knotted her fingers with his. “As tight as I can.”

  ~*~

  This time, he felt it. Just before the world inverted, a twinge at the back of his neck prepared him for the deep-freeze of the Seneschal’s presence. Beside him, Lin gasped at the hooded figure, floating just above their iceberg. “Majesty takes the crown.”

  A tight ache began in his jaw. “Yes.” He felt the presence of the obsidian band, hovering over his head as it had since the day his mother died. It started to pulse, sending waves of pressure down through his skull and making his sinuses sting. Lin squeezed his hand back after his fingers involuntarily clenched around hers.

  “It is done.”

  The bone-deep chill of the circlet seared into the skin of his forehead. Chill so cold it stole his breath and whited out his vision for a moment. Then just as suddenly, it was gone, and so was the Seneschal. The world straightened itself out, and they bobbed gently on the ocean once again.

  The Advisor squeaked. “Majesty is with us!” She dropped to her knobby little knees and bowed.

  “Hey, now. Cut that out.” Jack’s face went red. And…warm. He placed his free hand against his cheek. Instead of the usual inside-of-the-refrigerator sensation, he felt warmth. Th
e warmth of blood coloring his skin, the warmth of humanity, the warmth of life. He pulled Lin’s hand to his face.

  Her eyes widened. “Jack, you’re warm! I mean, you never really felt that cold to me, but I’ve seen you do the thing with water, and—”

  “I know!” Something began to bubble inside him. He hoped it wasn’t some weird physiological thing where his blood started boiling at above-freezing temperatures—because that would mean he’d be exploding very shortly. “I don’t—I mean, the crown. It’s on my head. And frickin’ freezing. But my skin—”

  She stepped towards him and pressed her mouth against his. “Jack Winters, you’re de-frosting.” He felt her smile as her lips curved up.

  “Majesty has awakened!” The little Advisor crowed.

  The two of them stood in silence, wrapped in each other’s arms, as they drifted further from the shattered remains of the Mother Glacier’s last sanctuary, and into the Christmas morning sunrise.

  The fun’s not over for Jack and Lin. Re-imagining your life is a process, not an event, and while they’ve got a good start at a second chance, so do their troubles. Aches and pains are a normal part of life after a Certain Age…or are they? Jack may have the crown, but Winter’s still hiding a lot of secrets, and more than one hits too close to home. Find out more in Book Two of the WinterJacked cycle.

  For snippets from the series, inspirations, and interesting visuals, seek out the Pinterest board for the cycle on Pinterest.

  Thank You

  Dear Reader,

  Thank you so much for joining Jack and Lin through their Otherworldly mid-life crisis! I hope you have enjoyed yourself at their expense, and that you have decided that you’re never too old to believe in the magic of the world all around us. Don’t forget to subscribe to the newsletter at bit.ly/AthenaNews to stay updated on news for the next book in the series, special offers, and upcoming free reads! There are plenty of stories to tell in the otherworldly universe—don’t miss out!

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