The Future Falls (38 page)

Even without Charlie's ears, Jack could hear the bitterness mixed with fear in Katie's voice. It made him feel like he was eavesdropping on something private and he wondered if Charlie felt that way all the time. Or if privacy wasn't something Gale girls worried about.

“. . . either way, she'll be dead and you'll be free so I, personally, feel sorry for Charlie. It's her whole life, however long that life happens to be, it's a small fraction of yours.”

“You think I'm ruining her life?” No one else had put it like that. He'd been stuck on how her constant refusal to break the rule was messing up his life. And hers.

“I think . . .” Katie sighed and stared at him for a long moment. “I don't think you're doing it on purpose,” she said at last. “Now, open a window and let the smoke out. Some things in here, like me, don't react well to being sprayed with a few hundred liters of water.”

Jack hauled himself up onto his feet. He was ruining Charlie's life. She'd never said he was ruining her life. She never hesitated about telling him when he pissed her off. Did she not know? Or worse, was she lying to him? Charlie could tell a lie even the aunties would believe. Would she lie if she thought she was protecting him? Sure she'd agreed that the whole situation, the liking each other too much, sucked, but there was a world of difference between sucked and ruined.

The window was stuck.

His father's protection hexes had long since been removed, but they'd warped the frame.

Claws hooked under the lower lip, he put his back into it. The window slammed open. Cracked. Before he could announce it had been an accident, a pack of Pixies slammed into his chest.

A whole pack of them hurt, moth-sized or not. Jack stumbled back, braced himself on his tail, and winced as all but one of the Pixies circled his
head, shrieking. Message delivered, they swooped back outside, ignoring the Pixie who'd been stunned by the impact. Jack scooped it up off the floor, but Katie snatched it out of his hand before he could decide what to do with it.

“I'm not eating them anymore,” he muttered, rubbing his chest.

She took it to the window and, as its wings started to move, first slowly then into the familiar blur, she gave it a gentle toss into the air. “Little bastard!”

“Bit you, didn't it?”

“Shut up. What did they say?” she asked around the finger in her mouth.

“There's an iceberg in Lethbridge.”

*   *   *

“There's a mention of a freezer malfunction at a meat processing plant.” Katie glanced up from the laptop. “Happened right before dawn and it's still so iced up they can't get into it. There's no report of injuries.”

“Iced-up meat fridge.” Jack raised one hand, palm up. “Iceberg.” And the other. “Close enough.”

“You think the Pixies were telling you about a freezer malfunction in Lethbridge?” she asked as he leaned forward to read over her shoulder. “I thought packs of Pixies never left their territory.”

“They don't.”

“And their territory's only about a square kilometer.”

“If that. But news spreads fast from pack to pack. Only trouble is, there's a few hundred packs between here and Lethbridge . . .”

“One pack per kilometer makes two twelve.”

For someone who worked at a freaky happenings tabloid, she was way too fixated on accuracy. “Yeah, that's what I said. Filter information through a hundred packs and the end result is about as accurate as what you'd get from preschoolers on a sugar high playing telephone.”

“And you'd know,” Katie muttered.

“No one told me that's what marshmallows were made of.”

“Gabi said it took the girls a week to come down.”

Probably an exaggeration although Jack wouldn't guarantee it. “Old news.”

“I can't see why the Pixies would care about a broken freezer.”

Jack shrugged. “Depends what's in it. Tell Allie I'm not going to be home for supper, okay?”

*   *   *

It was dark and snowing lightly by the time Jack got to Lethbridge.

“Turn left here,” he muttered circling the building. “And here. And here. And here. You have reached your destination. Unless there's another freezer in Alberta where at least one Frost Giant has gone to ground.” Even from a hundred meters up, he could smell the UnderRealm in the familiar white/blue ice that covered the west end of the building and spilled over the edge of the loading dock. White/blue ice that smelled of the UnderRealm? That meant Frost Giant. He assumed the building's doors were behind the ice.

All the parking lot lights were on and the crowd around the doors suggested they hadn't given up on getting in, even if nothing they'd tried so far had worked. Nothing they could get their hands on anyway. The military might have the firepower, but since all Jack knew about the military came from American movies and television, maybe not. He'd never seen a movie about the Canadian military, and he doubted the Americans would lend out either Jeremy Renner or their giant robots to get into a freezer.

If Charlie were here, she'd Sing and the men with the blowtorches and the men with the chainsaws and the men with the axes and the men with the clipboards would suddenly realize there were places they'd rather be.

But Charlie wasn't here. Even if she was, she'd be on the ground because she wouldn't have accepted a ride.

And he'd ruined her life.

His stomach growled. Allie had him so well trained he hadn't even considered eating the men in his way, but it would certainly simplify things.

If he were any kind of a sorcerer, if he were the sorcerer the family—the world—needed, he could put these men to sleep, or create an illusion so real they'd believe it, or stop time long enough to get in and out and save the day. But he wasn't that kind of a sorcerer, or any kind of a sorcerer really, so he fell back on what he knew.

A car blew up on the far side of the parking lot.

The men with the clipboards turned at the sound, and after a short discussion, one walked briskly around the corner of the building. He
ran
back.

Confused by the amount of talking—Humans were usually a lot more attached to their cars—Jack blew up an SUV and a pickup truck. Roar of sound. Pillars of flame. Full-on movie special effects.

That
got everyone's attention. The area around the ice emptied of witnesses.

He landed as gently as he could, but the asphalt cracked beneath him. Wings in, head down, careful to stay behind the building, he examined the ice. The axes had etched thin lines, evidence that in a hundred years or so the men wielding iron would actually reach the doors. The chainsaws had done more damage, but from the number of broken chains tossed aside, the ice stood a good chance of winning by attrition. The blowtorches had melted deep grooves. As Jack watched, the ice filled them in.

He took a step back, drew in a deep breath, and flamed. Dragons and Frost Giants were natural enemies. The ice didn't melt, it vaporized.

As a patch of the steel door began to scorch, one of the tanks fueling the blowtorches exploded. Most of the shrapnel melted in the superheated air, but a sudden pain in his left shoulder snapped Jack's teeth together as instinct took over before he could gasp. The flame cut off.

Inhaling while flaming was fatal; his mother had told him that when he first started to smoke. Fatal, and messy.

The wound was minor; the shard had barely penetrated the scale. He touched it with his tongue, checked for poison out of habit, and ignored it to examine the building. The door was clear, so Jack hooked a claw under the handle and pulled it open.

Off was
like
open.

He changed to skin to walk into the building, stumbled, and remembered, as blood dribbled down his arm, that the injury wasn't proportional to the change and an eight-centimeter cut at twenty-meters tall was an entirely different matter at just under two meters. Plus, it hurt. A lot.

Spine twisted to try and get a better look the cut, he felt rather than saw the ice spear whistle through the space his head had recently vacated. For another heartbeat he stood silhouetted in the doorway like an idiot with a death wish, then dove to the right as the second spear passed. He froze, tucked into the deep shadow at the base of the wall, biting back an adrenaline-fueled snicker.
Seriously? Froze?

The freezer was huge, but except for the light spilling through the door,
it was also dark. It never got truly dark on the ice fields and his uncles had told him that Frost Giants had terrible night sight. Dragons, however, saw almost as well at night as they did during the day. The moment the giant stuck a snowball out from behind a hanging half of frozen cow, he'd see it. On the other hand, while his internal temperature would keep him comfortable for a while, sustained cold was not a dragon's friend. When he'd pointed that out, his first year with Allie and Graham, Graham had pointed out in turn that Alberta winters were no one's friend. The giants, however, could stay in the freezer indefinitely. Or until they needed to eat. Jack had no idea what Frost Giants ate, but if it was . . .

The water vapor in the air five centimeters above the floor froze solid. If the wave hadn't started back in the shadows and moved in a glittering curve toward the door, it would've caught him. Trapped him. Jack jumped for a tabletop, knocked a digital scale flying, and flattened as another ice spear smashed against the wall.

“Hey! Dial it back! I come in peace! I know the Courts screwed you over. You'd have never come through, here and now, had it been your choice. I'm here to help!”

“Who are you to help us, Dragon Lord?” The words cracked and groaned like ice breaking up in the spring. Sirens spoke the language seduction required, the Courts needed to be understood when they yelled,
“I'm open over here!”
But the Frost Giants refused to speak any language other than their own with such vehemence they made Quebec's language police look like mall cops. Since they never left the ice fields, that wasn't usually a problem. Fortunately, understanding language was a Dragon Lord thing.

“We talk, they listen,”
had been Uncle Viktor's explanation.

“Why not allow prey to try and talk their way free?”
Uncle Adam had said, after Uncle Viktor had gone off to lick his wounds.
“They have no other means of defense.”

Jack sighed. His lips were already chapped from the flaming, but the Frost Giants would have no idea who Jack Archibald—turned out it was his father's father's name—Gale was when he was home. His actual name, his dragon name, involved ten minutes of lineage and a few sounds the Human mouth wasn't designed to make. It hurt, and he licked away blood when he finally finished.

“Highness?”

Something about the voice, the fear and relief combined, made Jack think of his cousin Penny. Who was twelve.

Two moving glimmers of white/blue slid between the rows of meat about halfway down the freezer. The taller was no more than four meters tall, if that, height mostly torso over short, thick legs. A teenager by Frost Giant reckoning. The second giant was half a meter shorter. Half a meter younger.

“Look, I can see you, you can't see me, so I'm going to turn the light on to even things up, okay?” Straightening, Jack patted the wall until he found a switch.

“It is true! You are a sorcerer!”

Jack looked at the light switch and squinted at the two Frost Giants who stared at him from much closer than he'd expected. As he
was
a sorcerer, and as both of them gripped three-meter shafts of ice, he decided to skip the lecture on technology. “So I'm guessing a couple of butt munches from the Courts said land of ice and snow, have a great time, something to brag about, yadda yadda, created a gate, and closed it after you went through. Am I right?”

“I do not know this yadda,” said the taller.

“Not important,” Jack sighed.

“The Courts told us lies,” said the other, clutching the ice spear like a pointy security blanket.

“They promised adventure.”

“Promised enjoyment.”

“But there was only warmth until we found this shelter.”

“Now we are trapped and the meat has died.”

“Yeah, well, you'd love this place in February.” Jack jumped off the table, skidded a bit, and slapped half a cow. “And the meat was dead when it got here.”

“Not that meat.” The taller straightened and gestured with one long, angular arm, fingertips drawing frost lines in the air. “That meat.”

A middle-aged man stared out of a block of ice, dark eyes narrowed, brows drawn in, mouth open. He wore a puffy red parka and a toque with the name of the packing plant knit into it. He looked like he originally came from somewhere warm, and he'd died angry not afraid.

“The meat ran at us to make us leave,” the taller explained.

And they'd stopped it. Him. Jack didn't blame them. He blamed the Courts.

“You are meat, Dragon Prince. Is he yours?”

“Yes. He's mine.” Not when he lived, but the Courts wouldn't have sent the Frost Giants through if he hadn't told them about the asteroid.

“We are off the ice.” The shorter one looked panicked. “You may claim . . .”
Water debt
was as close as the translation came although that wasn't quite what it meant.

“I don't want one of your body parts.” Beginning to feel the cold through the soles of his feet, Jack moved toward the door. “If we return to the gate, to where the gate was, I can send you home.”

“We go into the warmth?” The taller grabbed for the shorter one's arm and shuffled back between the swinging beef. “No.”

“It's night now. Less warmth and a little snow.”

“Snow.” The shorter giant planted its feet and they stopped moving. From where Jack stood, it looked as if its feet were frozen to the floor. “If it is cold enough for snow, we will not be harmed.”