His Touch of Ice Read online

  Trust me, Guy had said, when he had taken hold of my head and pressed his lips to mine.

  Trust me, he’d said, when he pressed his hand into the small of my back and sent me to a completely different place.

  Trust me, he’d said, the moment before he flung us over the railing.

  Trust me.

  Trust me.

  “Trust me,” I whispered.

  The world took on a sudden chill.

  I opened my eyes.

  The crystallization taking place around us was like something you would only see in a chemistry lab. Spiderwebbing across the globules of water within the air, cocooning us in a fine thread of hot-white thread, expanding, then contracting as what looked like crystals bloomed and then began to thicken—the giant peaks of mountains and the great gorges of rivers formed within the crystalline surface and continued to build upon itself until they stopped no more than a few sheer inches away.

  I turned to look at Guy’s face.

  His eyes glowed like an aurora borealis on the coldest night of the year.

  The crystals closest to our bodies chipped away, fell just above Guy’s head to collect upon the bottom of the structure, then swirled around us, smoothing the ice like snow.

  The whole sight was almost too much to behold.

  Sadly, I had not the time to revel in such great magic.

  We hit.

  The jarring impact was nothing compared to what we would’ve experience had we not been encapsulated inside the crystal. Contoured around our bodies and angled just perfectly, we hit the second level of the fountain and then slammed into the bottom before the crystal flipped and finally struck the ground below, the sound of streaming water and rolling concrete deafening in the enclosed space.

  “Keep your head down,” Guy said.

  I bowed my face to his chest just in time for the crystal to explode, depositing Guy on the dirt ground with a grunt and me with a near-senseless breath of relief.

  “Come on. We can’t stay here.”

  Upstairs, the door cracked open.

  I took Guy’s hand as he dragged me to my feet and kept a tight hold on the backpack filled with our lifesaving supplies that thrashed behind me.

  The trees on the opposite side of the fence seemed too far away.

  We’d never make it.

  Never—

  Guy slammed the brunt of his weight into the flimsy wooden gate and snapped it free of its hinges. I jumped over it and ducked just in time to avoid a lingering branch before we darted into the copse of trees before us.

  Gasping, I took a deep breath.

  Where the hell were we?

  “We can’t stop,” Guy said, dragging me by the wrist. “We have to keep going.”

  “How far?”

  He lifted his eyes, which had still not lost their shimmering translucent hue. “A mile or two,” he said. “Then more hill country.”

  “Can we avoid them?”

  “We better hope.”

  The roads were easy enough to navigate. Filled with empty spaces and shadowed by the darkness which had not been held back by the streetlights, we ran through the far end of Fredericksburg without pause and broke out onto the opposite end of town just in time to hear police sirens rev up.

  Talking was too much of a waste of energy.

  Instead, we ran.

  Scattered treelines and fenced-off sections of farmland made for tricky maneuvering. The obvious inclination was to continue forward and bounce from copse to copse, hoping that in the meantime the cops wouldn’t catch up or a police helicopter wouldn’t swoop in and spot us in its headlights, but Guy’s face told otherwise. His eyes scanned the distance for what I hoped would be a possible escape—searching, constantly, the woods to our right, the distant north. His mouth curled into a frown and his hand balled into a fist just in time for another series of sirens to go up.

  “Guy,” I said. “What’re you doing?”

  “Looking,” he said.

  “For what?”

  He didn’t respond. Now that his eyes had returned to their usual, albeit-strange color, he resembled more of a human than he did one of the Kaldr, but nonetheless appeared just as troubled.

  Standing there, clutching the backpack in my hand to the point where I thought my fingers would go numb, I was just about ready to take off on my own. Let him deal with it if he was just going to stand there like an idiot.

  I expelled a breath, bull-like in my unease. “Guy,” I said. “What’re you waiting for?”

  “I don’t want to lure them north.”

  I frowned. “Why?”

  “My father—”

  “We don’t have time for that!” I grabbed him arm—monolithic in structure and stone-solid in weight. “Come on! Even if we don’t end up going to your father, we have to go. Now.”

  “Jason—”

  I tore my grasp from his arm and slung the backpack over my shoulders, grimacing from the dull but still-familiar pain in my back. I glanced once, then twice out the treeline, both ways, before taking off.

  Away from him, my heart hammered in my chest.

  What the hell was I thinking? I was a goner without him.

  The crunch of earth beneath my heels was a horrible reminder of how fragile this entire situation was. The heat painstaking in its intent, globs of sweat ran down my face and fogged the lenses of my glasses. Twice I had to reach up to wipe them clean with my thumb, and even then that did little to prevent them from fogging up again.

  Something shot into sight.

  I backpedaled and attempted to screech to a halt just as something entered sight.

  The backpack, bloated with supplies, sent me forward.

  Its glimmer, its teeth, materializing from the darkness—

  A hand snared around the back of my shirt and caught me just before I could land face-first into a barbed-wire fence.

  “I got you,” Guy said.

  I took in a deep breath of lost air as Guy pulled me back and thanked whatever merciful God was out there that he’d shown up.

  “Shit,” I breathed. “I didn’t think there’d be fences out here.”

  “City boy, I take it?”

  I nodded—even managed to smirk, given the slight drawl that his voice had taken on.

  “There’s people all the way through here,” Guy said, pointing to the distance beyond the fence. “We’ve been lucky in that we’ve missed the pastures and peach farms so far, but this is it from here on out. We’ll have to climb these fences and make sure we don’t spook any of the cows while we’re here.”

  “You have anything to weigh this down?”

  Guy’s method was meticulously straightforward and worked based only on the fact that certain sections were graced with the unfortunate ingenuity for practical stupidity. After snaring his belt through several loops of wire, he passed the leather strap to me before pulling his shirt free of his body and draping it over the wire.

  “You first,” he said, taking hold of the belt.

  I pulled my eyes away from his well-muscled chest before stepping forward.

  With the nerve any man could hope to muster, I maneuvered my foot over the wire, then straddled it before swinging my leg over. I repeated the same with Guy before he removed his shirt and freed his belt, pleased with the makeshift results.

  “Guess this is the way we’ll do it,” he said.

  I nodded before we continued on.

  Guy determined that our path would be less likely detected if we’d followed an irregular pattern. Heading straight north would configure the idiot fool’s approach—that getting as far away from a location as possible was what would ultimately prevent them from being captured. But heading east, Guy said, and then cutting north, would provide the advantage of the less-populated areas and the bare dirt roads that the elements would be swift to wipe clean. The only problem was, they also presented the danger of being discovered discovery.

  If they put our pictures on the news, he said, we’re fucked
.

  I took him for his word and decided to trust his opinion.

  We passed a power plant and an array of lighting fixtures that initially unsettled me. While still hidden behind the thick cluster of trees, its light pierced through the darkness and offered clear sight of the surrounding area. Guy’d been right. Going that way would’ve surely gotten us caught.

  “Don’t look,” he whispered. “Keep going.”

  I did as he asked and continued to follow him east.

  I wasn’t sure how long we were walking. Between alternating through farmland and beneath trees, it was hard to tell whether or not we’d been going for minutes or hours. We crossed a huge cattle farm, which nearly sent me into hysterics when I bumped into a stray cow in the middle of the night, then had to head northeast when we caught sight of buildings in the foreseeable distance, but eventually we returned to the trees and my nerves once more died down.

  When I felt as if I could go no more, I leaned against a tree and slid to the ground.

  “Hey,” Guy said, crouching beside me. “You all right?”

  “Tired,” I said, rolling my head and taking my deep breath.

  He pressed a hand against my cheek and cupped the left half of my face, his touch comforting despite the irregular chill that permeated its surface.

  “You’re weak,” I managed.

  “Just as you are,” he replied, “but only in a different way.”

  “I can’t keep going.”

  “Neither can I, but it wouldn’t be smart to just stay out here in the open, now would it?”

  I didn’t reply.

  He turned his head and pointed east. “A ways beyond those trees,” he said, “there’s a community with I don’t know how many people. It’s too far away from a major highway for them to go there first, but that doesn’t mean any of the locals won’t be wandering the woods.”

  “You really think any of them would bother us?”

  “No, but it’s going to look awfully suspicious when they see two guys out in the middle of the woods without any camping gear, especially when my picture and the video of you going in and out of the convenience store comes out.”

  “Shit,” I said.

  “Shit is right.” Guy took my hand. “Besides—we’ve been lucky so far. I don’t want to risk it.”

  “I know.”

  “I’ll make it up to, Jason. I promise. We just need to go a little further so we’re a little ways from civilization.”

  Who knew when that would be.

  Someone had seen us.

  He’d caught sight of us after we tried to sneak across a break in the trees on the outskirts of his property. Illuminated by the pale moonlight and deathly close to his place of residence, it’d been a longshot to even think we could make it—but there we tried, like the desperate idiots we were.

  The farmer—whom I supposed had to have been sitting on his back porch—stepped from the darkness with his rifle in his hand.

  “I saw you out there,” he said, the crunch of gravel beneath his boots painfully obvious in the near-silence of the night. “Told you boys you can’t be on my property.”

  “I told you this was a bad idea,” I whispered.

  “Shh,” Guy said, clamping a hand over my mouth.

  The man stepped into the moonlight and lifted his rifle. Unaware of our location, he trained it in the direction where he’d initially detected the sound—further southeast than where we currently stood.

  “Dunno what you be doing out here,” the man continued on, “but this is private property, and I expect to be respected.”

  Guy took hold of my hand. Tugging my wrist, he gestured to the flatter parts of the underbrush and started to pull me along.

  “I’ll give you one last warning,” he said. “Get off my property now and I won’t—”

  My foot snapped a twig.

  Even the sound of my heart throbbing in my head wasn’t loud enough to compare to what came next.

  A shot was fired.

  Though I expected it to strike me, it didn’t, though I wasn’t sure where it went. Guy had already taken off into a full-out run and was tugging me directly behind him, our footfalls soft upon the fertile ground.

  “Get out of here!” the man yelled. “Get out—”

  Guy jerked me to the side just in time to avoid running directly into a very sour, very angry-looking bull.

  I was always told not to look a bull in the eyes.

  I did anyway. It wouldn’t try and give chase, would it?

  It did.

  The metal fence that lined the property would be the only thing that would keep it in place if we were lucky enough to get past it.

  The barbwire only lined the top, the links of the bottom in need of replacement.

  “Go,” Guy said.

  I needed no encouragement.

  He threw the backpack over the fence.

  I dove under the fence and rolled as though on fire just in time to see the bull collide with the fence, its gargantuan weight sending ripples along the barbwire coils

  “Guy?” I asked. “Guy? Where are—”

  A pair of hands ripped me to my feet and pushed me forward.

  “Go,” Guy said.

  I ran.

  We found the safest place possible after fleeing the property and crossing a dirt road.

  From our place in a secluded thicket, we could see the beginnings of a rocky scar of land that extended into the foreseeable distance until its geography became too indistinguishable. Before that lay the bare-boned skeleton of a building whose time had come and gone. Masonry littered the ground alongside a road that might once have been used for construction purposes before the project had been abandoned. What remained of the early-morning moonlight flickered across a pool of water that had accumulated amidst it all.

  “You think we’ll have to worry about that?” I asked.

  Guy’s tired eyes inclined in the direction I was inquiring over. “No,” he said. “It looks dead. I doubt there’ll be people there.”

  “I’m not just asking about people.”

  His eyes fell on me. They looked tired—which wasn’t surprising, considering what we’d been through—but in their depths existed an unease I’d never seen from him.

  “Guy?” I asked, unsure if he heard my question or if he’d even processed it.

  “Nothing’s going to bother us,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “How can I—”

  A third gaze silenced me.

  Something about the way he looked—from his eyes, to his pale expression, down to the purse in his lips—made me realize that arguing would get me nowhere.

  “I’m a light sleeper,” he said, as if to remedy his action. “If that makes you feel any better.”

  “You think the farmer will call the cops?”

  “‘Course he will. We ran his bull into the fence and most likely stirred up the whole herd. But don’t worry—we’ll be fine. We’re far enough away to where I doubt they’ll come looking, let alone find us.”

  “You’re sure?”

  Guy nodded.

  I shook my head and patted the space beside me. “Come on.”

  After crawling over, he settled down beside me, stretched out with one arm under his head and the other across my side, and spooned me against his body.

  “We’ll leave in a few hours,” he whispered. “I’m tired of acting like vagrants. I’d much rather act like hitchhikers instead.”

  I nodded.

  The morning’s light had just begun.

  The morning came and went. No cops, no sirens, no men in the bushes yelling at us to come out with our hands up, guns drawn, the trigger-happy quick to mow us down in a rain of bullets as one small action was interpreted to be something else—it appeared that our dog days were over, though I knew better than to jump to unlikely conclusions.

  Disgruntled from a night of sleeping on the hard dirt ground, I rolled over in an attempt to adjust my posture and ramme
d my elbow into the exposed root of a tree.

  “Ow,” I said.

  “You ok?” Guy asked.

  “Just the usual. Rough morning on this side of the law, you know?”

  Guy lifted his head from his place near the high ground and frowned. The lines etched throughout his eyes told of a night spent with misery, a battle fought well but not valiant enough to avoid the discoloration that swamped his upper cheeks. My immediate response was to ask if he was ok, but he merely turned his head to survey the west before I could.

  “Road’s been clear all morning,” Guy said, as if knowing I would listen even though we were off to a rough stop. “No cops at all.”

  “Were there any helicopters?”

  “Some passed over us last night. Thank God their spotlights were trained on another direction, otherwise we’d be screwed.”

  My mouth parted in question. Guy lifted his hand and extended a finger to the far side of the canopy—where, no more than a few feet from where we’d slept, appeared a break in the trees, undetectable by the shadow of night.

  “Shit,” I said. “We could’ve been fucked.”

  “Which is why I think it’s important that we move as fast as possible.” Guy jumped down from his perch and crouched, offering a hand. “You ready to move on in a few minutes?”

  “You sure it’s safe to walk along the roads?”

  “At this point, I think anything is safer than dealing with farmers and their homicidal cows.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” I mumbled.

  Guy pulled a bag of potato chips out and tossed them at my chest. “Hey Jason,” he said. “How do you like your beef?”

  “Ha ha,” I replied. “Very funny.”

  The agony wrought by the overhead sun was excruciating. Nearing at least one-hundred degrees and aided by the humidity, it almost reduced me to tears I felt would’ve dried anyway. We’d yet to see a truck pass and we’d been going for almost an hour. I wasn’t sure how much more I could take.