Frost (16 page)

“Kat, you still there?”

“Jack,” Barry said.

Jack threw him off. “Kat!” His heart bounced around in his chest.

I don’t know her. I don’t know any of them. Why do I care so much?

Because they’re my last tie to the world. All this craziness has pulled me so far from home. They’re all I have left.

“Kat!”

From the radio, more gunfire, a thousand tiny wasps in the palm of his hand. “Gant i—down.”

Barry tugged him. “Jack.”

“Kat, hold on. I can’t hear you.”

“Jack—” Kat’s voice cut out, and Jack’s ears exploded. The radio screamed in his hand, a wail worse than a thousand nails on as many chalkboards, crawling into his skull and hulling out his brains.

Kat’s voice reverberated amidst that endless screech, vanishing down into wailing oblivion. Jack dropped the radio and clapped his hands to his head. The scream died as the radio shattered on the crystal floor.

He blinked, the sound of his own breathing suddenly deafening. His hands wandered from his ears and he looked to Barry, whose outline flickered with tendrils of light, set against the vast subterranean jewel. “What was that?” he whispered.

Barry opened his mouth to speak, shaken and battered, his jacket torn again by the fall. Then his eyes widened and his entire body dimmed, great chunks of light sloughing off him like dead skin. He stared blankly at the ground, his breath coming in shuddering gasps.

“What is it?”

“Highcourt…” Barry blinked. “They’re gone. They’re all gone.”

Jack felt it, too. Just standing near him, he felt it. A lancing pain so much worse than heartache, the grief of a thousand deaths all at once. Somewhere out there, a great many things of power had screamed as one, and winked out.

Disturbance in the Force. I think they just hit Alderaan.

“Barry. Kaard! What
was
that?”

“My people.” Barry’s mouth worked, the expressionless stare of an infant.

The answer came from another, a voice that sent the hairs on Jack’s whole body standing on end. “It is the End,” hissed the creature suspended in the air, fifty feet ahead of them.

Echoes returned from the far reaches of the cavern, somehow stretched, as though he couldn’t have reached the other side if he walked for a month. In its centre stood a giant black tree, its limbs split off into so many branches that it looked like the profile of some delicate sea anemone.

It
s radiance almost blinded him. His mind reeled at having to hold his arm to shield his eyes, for all the absolute blackness of the cavern; an oppressive dark so deep, yet lit up so bright.

Suspended before the tree, ten feet off the floor, surrounded by filaments of that strange un-light, hung the creature.

When Jack had last seen Harper, his second sight had been but a glimmer. He had seen Harper as a suited, pasty-faced millennial, only the outermost hull of his true self showing through. Now there was no sign of the parted hair, the high cheek bones, or the thousand-yard stare. In its place, though still draped in the tailored jacket and the five-hundred-dollar loafers, was a beast of shadow: foot-long claws thrusting from the crook of each elbow; a pair of freight-train headlights for eyes, emitting beams of cold fire; a head ablaze with a halo of nothingness that permitted neither air nor even un-light to penetrate.

Around him the air undulated with ropey tendrils stemming from the tree’s branches, diaphanous and ever-moving, tied around Harper’s wrists and ankles and neck.

As the last traces of the radio’s screech faded, Jack became aware of the whispers emanating from the great obsidian tree. Voices of deep time. The tendrils that held the creature shifted to the rhythm of those voices.

Whispers, it’s the whispers that bind him
.

The crucified terror hung limp before the great tree, one dark sliver against the blinding light, one terrible voice above the thousands that imprisoned it. Upon it all, basted on top without grace or ceremony, a biting chill that might have sent any ordinary person mad.

“Subtle,” Jack said.

“All Where doesn’t do subtle,” Barry said.

Harper giggled, a quiet and constant tickle that seemed to crawl up between Jack’s legs and shrivel his particulars. “You feel it?” Harper turned his head skyward to the strange shifting clouds and breathed deep. “Sweet wonderful Frost. I have waited so long, so long, but finally, it’s time. At last, Highcourt lies in ruins.” His fangs protruded through the smiling lips. “The End is coming.”

Jack twitched as a mental prod came from Barry’s direction. Together, they began their approach unto the monster and the thousand-limbed tree.

The quasi-vampire hung aloft, watching them approach with childish interest written onto its face. “See the warriors of light, come to save the world,” Harper announced to the cavern, his sibilant tongue cutting through the swaddling whispers.

Will they hold him?
Jack thought, finding it easy to push outside his own head, now, projecting in Barry’s direction.

Barry looked at Jack, a flaming purple firefly in the dark, but Jack got no transmission in return. All the answer he needed.

“Sorry that you came all this way, but you’re too late.” Harper’s face, a paper-thin mask of youthful skin intermittently visible over the leering devil’s jaws, stretched into a hideous pout. “The party’s already started, Barry and Sally.”

Jack focused on the tree, following the tendrils of ectoplasmic goo back to the tips of the branches. Something was wrong, the strands’ glow tainted and riddled with threads of darkness as they drew close to their prisoner. Before Jack’s eyes, the darkness spread.

“He’s done something to it,” Jack said.

Harper bared his teeth in a great cheesy smile, an expression caught between comical and blood curdling. “You
guardians
always think you’re outsmarting us, stalling us with your boxes of tricks. You always underestimate the power of the light.”

Jack guffawed. “The light? You’re the good guy, now?”

“Oh, dear me. You people have your heads so stuck in your own culture, you’re blind to the truth. The fool beside you—the
Good Guys
—they’re the creatures of the night. It’s us who follow the light.”

Jack caught a glimpse of something through the monster’s eyes, a bright and insane, staring radiance he had seen before. Something once divine and fair, fallen. Eternal laughing insanity.

They stopped ten feet before the monster. Suddenly, the binding threads of light around Harper’s limbs didn’t seem half as secure. This close, there was no denying they faded and darkened further by the moment.

“What have you done?” Barry said.

“What nobody had the gall to do before. I
used
it.” The contempt in Harper’s voice could have melted lead. “The greatest crime your kind ever committed was to turn your back on the power right in front of you. And now your people are gone. You’re nothing now, one of a handful of scattered survivors. Just like anyone left in his world will be,” he jerked his head in Jack’s direction, “once I’m done.”

“Our job is to safeguard it, not use it. We could never use it. It destroys all it touches.” Barry spoke with defeated resignation, the unchanging rhetoric exchanged by two sides since time immemorial.

Jack cut in. “What was that sound? From the radio?”

Harper’s brows twitched in affirmation. “The End. As soon as this is done, it will cover all the world. I might have been stationed here a long time—too long—but it had its benefits. When all this is done and the two of you are bled out on the ground, I’ll have an army waiting out there for me. This world will be ours.”

“We’ll fight you. Even if we can’t stop you. Whatever’s left, will fight you,” Jack said.

Harper pulled a mocking baby face. “Without their precious gizmos? All those computers and radios and television sets, turned to dust? With that sweet song you just heard whiting out every channel?”

“You’re lying.”

Harper’s laugh came suddenly, with the force of decades’ pent up malice, possessing the great underground geode and magnifying it a hundredfold.

Jack pushed it away.
Think of Kat and the others. The rigged vaults. He’ll have no army.

It gave him the strength to stare Harper in the eye, just.

Harper sighed, the satisfied whistle of a diner after a succulent meal. “All that planning finally paid off. Beautiful harmony.”

The threads binding the monster frayed, falling away one at a time. Harper closed his eyes, smiling, as the darkness effusing from his body rotted the whispering threads.

“I’m sorry, boy, but things haven’t played out in your favour. With Highcourt gone, this little munchkin here doesn’t stand a chance,” Harper said, shaking his head with feigned sadness.

Jack couldn’t help turning his inner eye on Barry. The Scot-but-not was right. Something was missing, as though a roaring flame had been beaten down to a cinder by some great, merciless gale.

The monster floated closer to the ground, his toes approaching the crystal floor.

Jack reached out to Barry desperately.
What do we do?

This time, the reply came immediately, as loud as if Barry had spoken right into his ear.
Get to the tree.

And do
what
?

What you were made to.

Jack tentatively moved to the side, making to sidestep Harper.

Harper’s brow twitched in Jack’s direction, his lip curled upward subtly. His eyes were still closed, but he too saw everything.

Jack swallowed, turning back to Barry.
What about you?

Barry’s glowing form shrugged. A look of sadness that scared Jack more than anything else.
I’ll hold him.

You said…

Barry’s voice from earlier that night, loud and clear in his head: “He’s above my level, to be quite honest.” Then, another snippet from beside the dumpster. “Dying’s not my style. We don’t go in for that.”

Barry winked at him.
Hurry.

Jack hesitated a moment, then said aloud, “Hold him.”

The monster’s tiptoes touched ground at the same moment the Scot-but-not roared, “GO!”

Then Jack was sprinting over smooth crystal, and the air was full of the reverberating hiss of a serpent unleashed.

The cavern blurred. Jack’s footfalls fell silent as panic took hold, and he pumped his legs for all they were worth. Behind him a calamitous roar chased at his heels. Through a mayhem of jeering voices, the slap of his feet on the ground and the whistle of breath in his lungs, he heard Harper’s loafers tap over the ground.

The nape of his neck crawled, the primal sense of having a predator at one’s back.

Somehow he squeezed more from his legs, ignoring the tearing in his chest. He had been sure the tree had been close—so close he could have reached out and touched it. Yet as he ran, it drew no closer.

He passed spurs of crystal, jumping over forks in the nucleated floor, weaving his way toward the great obelisk. Yet, while his feet ate up the yards, and the roaring voices of Barry and Harper lost their deafening volume of proximity, the tree seemed ever distant, as though space itself warped to keep him at arm’s length.

Puffing, he reached out from within, and found the source: a strange push at his shoulders and shins, unseen and unfelt by any bodily sense. He ran into a ghostly wind.

It’s a skin, a shield, to keep things out. The same thing that snared Harper.

Nobody was supposed to be here. That much was obvious. Not Harper, nor Jack, not even Barry.

This was a place for no living thing. And it had its defences. He ran, never once stopping, yet still he made no progress, held in place by invisible hooks.

Yet he knew he could break those barriers, just as Harper had done. The certainty came along with the urge to
flex
, to
open up
, to let it see him.

See me. See me
.

A momentary repulsion, a reluctant extra push, then he stumbled forward as the intangible resistance vanished. The tree grew closer.

Behind him, Barry roared in the manner of some Homeric Ajax. With each grunt came a percussive crunch as the reverberations of a great impact made Jack’s eyes shake in their sockets. Jack didn’t dare look back. He didn’t need to. It was clear Barry fought for life or death.

It would have been comforting, were it not for Harper’s absolute silence.

Jack stumbled to the base of the tree, gut trembling with strange resonance. Power dwelled here, so rich and potent he felt suddenly fragile, like a glass in danger of shattering from an opera singer’s voice.

Groaning, Jack went against every instinct and looked over his shoulder.

Jack’s light-starved eyes watered at the flashes of very real light erupting from points of contact, as Barry blocked Harper’s barrage of blows with unveiled distress etched onto his face. Harper had become a mere blur, claws and snarling jaws. Jack watched two battles; one of top-level flesh, fists and sweat and nails flying, in the manner of some furious bar fight in pitch darkness; and that of their true selves underneath, where the real battle raged. A battle of wills.

Harper’s steak-knife claws moved so fast the air made a sound like tearing cloth, missing Barry’s torso and neck by inches. Jack had run for over a full minute to reach the tree, yet now he stood amidst its roots and looked back, he saw he had covered a mere twenty feet. If Barry’s luck ran out, and the beacon could do no more to keep the monster at bay, Jack would have moments.

He had power, sure. But being handed a bazooka wasn’t any use when he had no idea how to use it. Maybe he could match Harper, in some way at least, but how to do that? He had no idea.

“Jack, hurry!” Barry bellowed, backing away a bounding step with each blow Harper unleashed. “I can’t hold him. Hurry!”

Harper let fly a sound not merely serpentine, but saurian and primal, caught between the hiss of an alligator and the burner of a hot-air balloon. He landed blows with his fists upon Barry’s forearms, uttering a booming roar with each word. “
This—place—is—MINE!
”

“Jack! Now!” As he spoke, Barry stumbled back, gasping, sent sprawling upon the floor. He scrabbled in the direction of the tree, avoiding being disembowelled only by rolling clumsily on his stomach. “NOW!”