Frost Page 4

  Just like that, the ice drained from Jack’s bones, and the ugly sensation fizzed out. Fresh air gushed in over his skin, and he could breathe again. In the same moment, Barry seemed infinitely stronger, and jerked from his grip with a wry smile. “You’ll get the hang of it.” He twitched his head over his shoulder. “That way?”

  Feeling numb, Jack nodded. “It’s moving fast.”

  Whatever it is. He. Whoever he is.

  Barry’s grin framed his bearded face, his eyes twinkling with madness. “Then we better catch up.”

  His beefy hand closed around Jack’s collar, and he hurtled along the street again, Jack ever the rag doll bobbing along in his wake.

  5

  Harper stepped into the phone booth and smoothed the creases from his jacket, gritting his teeth at the black slick of drying blood on his lapels. Grimacing with displeasure at the primitive tick-tock machinery of this world, he put the receiver to his ear and dialled.

  A rapid series of clicks and whirs followed as the line was re-routed and scrambled all over the world, then a dull voice said, “Yes?”

  Harper slammed a hand against the booth wall, ignoring the gaggle of obese Australians who leapt back, squawking at the spider-web of splintered glass that blossomed from his palm. “Just what the hell is going on? Last I heard, some of the vaults were waiting on incoming.”

  “Sir.”

  He waited, but the booth rang with silence.

  “Well?” he screamed.

  “There are… problems. Four more teams have been taken out. Two are cornered. Some of the VIPs are missing.”

  Harper closed his eyes and prayed to the master for strength. He spoke very carefully into the receiver, cradling it lest he crush it in an instant, uttering every word with a shaking voice. “The countdown is already fixed. We’re on the clock, here. Need I remind you what happens if everything isn’t perfect?”

  “No, sir. I understand.”

  “You do? Because it sounds like you’re reporting on the stock market. Now, why don’t you use that wonderful piece of machinery inside your skull for once, and try doing something about it.”

  “We’re doing everything we can.”

  Harper took a five-second-long inhalation, diffusing a spark of rage that could have blown the whole street to atoms. “If I have to call again, I’ll kill every last one of you. I worked too long putting everything in place to watch you people fuck it up in one afternoon.”

  How did they know? How could so many know so much about us—know without me sensing something?

  Milton’s rage rippled and parted in the wake of something he hadn’t felt in aeons: a black widening deep in his chest, a kind of vomit-inducing vertigo. Fear.

  These idiots faced death at his hand if they screwed up, but if he failed, something far worse awaited him.

  He swallowed, grinding his teeth at the fact that he could feel so weak and degraded, and fumed, “Tell me they’re ready for me.”

  “They’re ready. You just have to make your way to the rendezvous and activate the Beacons.”

  “Fine. Fix this.”

  He slammed the receiver back onto the bracket, but in his anger the whole assembly imploded and clattered to the floor. More worried looks flooded in from passers-by, and it took everything he had not to burst through the glass and gut them all.

  “Unbelievable.” He stepped out of the booth and looked at the book-store across the street, cordoned off by the bomb squad. But there was no bomb here. The entire place was frozen solid, one big icicle.

  6

  Barry paused at a red light, caught by speeding traffic on both sides of the street.

  “Get your hands off me, I can move on my own,” Jack snapped.

  Barry let him loose, watching him with narrowed eyes.

  Jack splayed his hands. “What can I do? Run away? Where would I go?”

  “To put your head between your legs.” His hand still hovered close to Jack’s collar.

  “After the crap I’ve just seen? I’m not letting you out of my sight.”

  “Uh huh.”

  Jack gritted his teeth. “Look, if the world’s about to go down the toilet, and I’m some kind of destiny child, what else can I do?”

  “If you cared about being a hero, you’d have said that first.”

  Jack blinked as the traffic cleared and Barry set off again at his same crazy speed, striding on legs that seemed to propel him with the power of a racehorse. Jack sprinted for all he was worth, just about managing to keep pace. “I’m no damn hero,” he grated.

  He realised their quarry’s location had taken them in a big loop. They were moving back towards Fifth, and the book-store.

  Back to the scene of the crime.

  But what were they going to do when they got there? He was a divining rod, some kind of walking map, but so what?

  For a moment he faltered and his legs twinged beneath him. He seldom hit the gym, and already his stamina was running dry. In that single moment he dropped back over ten feet, and the gap between him and Barry suddenly seemed a gulf only set to grow.

  “Wait,” he called. “Wait!”

  “Move your arse, lad!” Barry cried from up ahead. “We’re almost there.”

  “Exactly. You need to tell me the plan,” Jack answered, trying to ignore the startled looks from people he left in his wake.

  Barry made a noise somewhere between a guffaw and a giggle. “Plan? Kill ’em.”

  “I mean a way to do that.”

  Barry said nothing.

  Jack cursed, and kept up the sprint. With a thrumming in his throat he realised that he did want to turn tail. Where he would go, he had no idea. To his box apartment, and his anime collection, and his PJs. For the nearest psych ward. Mexico.

  Barry had been right to hold onto him.

  But Jack wouldn’t let the bastard have the satisfaction.

  And, you know... that saving the world stuff, too.

  He kept running, right until the world seemed to rush up through the base of his stomach. Ice poured down his spine from the base of his skull, the same feeling that had filled him before, only tenfold. He jerked in a full-body flail, and lurched sideways uncontrollably into a store-front window.

  Darkness took him, welling up at his flanks and engulfing him. But somewhere far away he felt hands on him, steadying him and guiding him gently to the ground. A bearded figure danced somewhere in the vaguest distance.

  “Easy, easy.”

  You knew. You knew I’d fall. That’s why you tried to keep hold of me.

  “Why me?” he muttered, fighting nausea as the world span.

  Jack swallowed. He held his hand up in front of his face, twirling the fingers before his eyes. All his life he’d never felt much more than a queer species of embarrassment, one of not quite fitting the curves of his own life, sitting askew and awkward in a world pitched to sneer at him.

  Now he was between two possibilities. Either he actually sat in a pool of his own foamy saliva on his bathroom floor with an empty bottle of pills beside him, or this was really happening. And if this was really happening, then that meant the feeling now welling up inside him was also real.

  A feeling of knowledge, of certainty, and power.

  An Itch. That’s what it is, he thought. There was no doubting it, an iron rod of immutable knowledge come down from the ether.

  Whatever black power had come through before Barry, one with evil intent that stained the world-behind-the-world, was slowly revealing itself to him through this blinding new second sight; a syrup-like clot hanging far behind all the physical matter between them.

  The S-Man’s X-Ray vision, with an extra step towards freaky, he thought. He saw through thousands of tonnes of concrete and steel, bodies and parked cars, watching it squirm like a black maggot. But there was another dimension to this new sense, something visceral that he felt deep in his head, and along the surface of his skin: that maggot
wriggled in the deep flesh of his body, an ugly thing that shouldn’t be.

  He resisted the urge to shudder.

  “What is it?” Jack said.

  “A pain in my arse.”

  “Are you going to kill it?”

  A glassy film passed over Barry’s eyes for a moment. “If that was possible, it would have been done a long time ago.”

  “Why can’t you?”

  “It’s against the rules.”

  Jack frowned. “There are rules?”

  Barry smiled, but it was a thin expression devoid of humour. “Don’t make the mistake of thinking we’re the ones holding the keys. We’re just more bit players in a game much bigger than any of us can imagine.”

  Jack thought of the Frost, of Barry’s superhuman strength, his talk of other worlds. “You seem pretty powerful to me.”

  Barry’s face tightened. There was no trace of that smile now. “We might live long and travel far, and worlds rise and fall by the wars we wage, but we’re still bound to the fabric of All Where as much as anyone else. Powers much bigger than us are turning all the cogs.”

  Jack nodded slowly. “How far up does the ladder go?”

  Barry shrugged. “Dunno.”

  “You never wondered?”

  “’Course I did. Can’t live as long as I have without taking a few centuries off to play Great Sage in the mountains somewhere. I’ve been many men before this charming Casanova.” His eyes twinkled with the gazes of a thousand men, the experiences of as many lifetimes. “I’ve seen wonders that would melt your face, crimes that would crush your heart, I’ve watched my friends die one by one. Every step of the way I’ve asked what it all means.” He stood up, and offered Jack a hand. “Not once have I ever had so much as a whisper in reply.”

  Jack shook his head. “Then why keep fighting? How do you know you’re on the right side?”

  Barry nodded down at him. “That feeling inside you right now, can you look me in the eye and tell me it comes from a place that’s fighting on the wrong side?”

  Jack looked at him for a few moments as Manhattan and all the Earth buzzed around them, oblivious, and then said, “No.”

  “Then come on. This place might be backward, but it’s a hell of a lot better than some other places. It’s worth saving.”

  Jack hesitated a moment further, then gripped his arm, and got shakily to his feet. “How? If we can’t kill it—him?”

  He felt that too, now. Whatever it was, it was male.

  A mote of amusement crept back into Barry’s glistening eternal eyes. “Just because he can’t die doesn’t mean he can’t hurt.” A snide grin touched the corner of his mouth. “You can make anything hurt, if you know how. And if you squeeze hard enough, everything screams in the end.”

  7

  “Jesus, he’s on fire,” Jack said. They were back on Fifth and Barnes & Noble lay directly ahead. Night had fallen in earnest, and the city had become a glistening Christmas tree, a million store displays and streetlights and neon flashes. Jack was almost close enough to see their quarry, but he barely noticed the visual information his eyes transmitted. His new sight had taken over.

  The dark smudge had grown close enough to resolve into focus. The silhouette of something man-like—close, but not quite—rippled with undulating, licking flames of purest black. Jack’s first description of it had hit the mark: an absence in the world.

  He felt it just as much as he saw it; not hot, yet his skin burned. The raw power of something elemental searing his pores and the light down upon his skin.

  Traffic lay between them, zipping back and forth. Between the blur of taxis and SUVs he could just make out the police cordon around the store, and the relative emptiness of the sidewalk. The crowds had dispersed.

  Jack grew giddy with the ugly intensity of the black thing, which faced the store and looked up with its head cocked to one side. It would have looked innocent and child-like, were it not for the curved sickle-like claws trailing from each forearm.

  He shivered, glanced at Barry, and steeled himself.

  The lights changed, and the traffic ground to a halt.

  Jack blinked. His vision flickered, melded; his true sight overriding the otherworldly glow. Briefly there was no sign of rippling darkness, nor claws. A lithe, immaculate young professional stood there instead, beautiful and manicured. Dressed in a tailored double-breasted pinstripe and Gucci loafers, he had swept back hair that seemed to defy gravity, and a jaw-line that had clearly sent plenty of panties gliding down as many ankles.

  Jack read about double-takes all the time. But people didn’t really do that. Life was more disordered and subtle.

  But right then he performed a perfect double-take. He even had time for a cohesive, treacherous thought to well up from the back of his mind.

  What a beautiful man.

  “Harper,” Barry growled.

  The Adonis turned to face them, nose twitching with feral independence, and hissed. Hissed, like a six-foot viper. His lips retracted, revealing rows of needle-pointed teeth.

  “Too late!” he roared. The air itself rippled with the tenor of his voice. “Always a step behind.”

  Barry seemed to swell beside Jack, a blinding heliotropic light in the corner of his eye. “Wanker,” he muttered.

  This would be so cool if I wasn’t about to die, Jack thought.

  Then the two creatures from another world were flying at each other in the night, screeching in tones foreign to any living ear, and met in a burst of blinding black light.

  The impact was a clash between titans. A rumble cut through Jack, one that didn’t come via the air or ground, but one that seemed to ripple through the inflexible substance of space itself.

  Half blinded by some intensity he couldn’t fathom, he saw sharp canines bared, Barry’s great beefy arms swinging, and claws—no mere pair of talons; no manicure could fix this; but claws, foot-long spears protruding from those immaculate cuffs, two to a hand.

  They moved at inhuman speed, ducking and diving and cursing. Blows were struck and parried, earth-shaking impacts that split the windshields of nearby taxis.

  Screams were erupting all around from onlookers, but Jack barely heard them. It was as though a bubble had slammed down over the three of them, him and the two titans, and the rest of the world had faded into unreality.

  It all happened in the space of moments, a war waged in the time taken to blink. In those precious few seconds, Jack realised something was very wrong. It was no battle between a pair of immortals.

  Between the flashes of otherworldly blackness that burst forth with each blow, Jack saw the expression on the face of the Scot-but-not. No hero’s thin-lipped determination. His lips were pulled back in a wide simian grin of shock and pain.

  Barry was fighting for his life.

  They reached the centre of the street, flailing to and fro. There was no doubting the fanged monster had the upper hand, bearing down on Barry with relentless barrages of those talons.

  With enormous effort, Jack hauled his gaze away from them, and gasped, sidestepping a blossoming stalagmite. The ground under his feet and in a twenty-foot radius around the warring other-worlders erupted with shafts of ice. At least a hundred people stood beside him, and all of them wore the same expression.

  The look of people confronted with a simple choice: accept what they were seeing, and go insane there and then; or shut down, and stare.

  A snarl of pain drew his eyes back to the brawl. Barry wind-milled his arms, skidding backwards, heels tearing up the asphalt, and collapsed against the hood of a Prius. The fender folded with a groan, like putty around his shoulder.

  His coat had torn along the lapel, shocking as an open wound, the thick oxblood leather cleaved as though a mere sheet of cotton. Blood coated his beard and hands, but from where Jack couldn’t see. His eyes were wide and bloodshot, unmistakable childish surprise written onto his face.

  Christ, he’s on th
e ropes.

  Barry struggled to rise then slumped back onto the crumpled Prius. Barry's whispering voice carried clear as the ice blossoming at Jack’s feet: “Shit.”

  Jack started forward despite himself, then laid eyes on the suited man, and froze.

  The man hadn’t moved from the middle of the street, standing in the dignified repose of a business professional awaiting the end of some tiresome pleasantry. He wouldn’t have looked out of place in any boardroom, were it not for the bloodied sabres trailing from each hand.

  He was looking right at Jack. “So he’s got himself another fool sprinkled with pixie-dust.” He spat the words, as though they were sour in his mouth. Then, a sibilant sigh that slackened Jack’s bladder, “There’s always one.”

  Jack could only look back at him. He felt he should say something, anything, stall until Barry could right himself. But nothing came, not even a whimper. He just stared.

  The ghost of a smile flashed on the suited man’s lips.

  What’s the point of getting special powers if they get you ripped open five minutes later? The thought throbbed in the forefront of his mind, and then the man in the suit was walking towards him.

  Jack had never been one to act first and think later. Two decades of being the proverbial deer in the headlights left him expecting to stand there frozen in place, as the monster crossed the street to disembowel him.

  Yet he moved. Without any input from his consciousness, his body sprang to life, and he bolted from a standing-start like a racehorse out of the box. After the headlong run through the city, he couldn’t believe his unexercised muscles were capable of such a feat. He had no idea where he was going, even in which direction, only that he was moving.

  Dozens of faces flashed past and he vaulted the halo of ice, hurtling into the safety of the crowd. He came closer to losing control of his bladder then, than he had in memory, driven by a livid screaming dread. He could sense the clawed monster, not just behind him, in pursuit; but feel him, up close, as though they stood but a hair’s width apart.