Hoarfrost (Whyborne & Griffin Book 6)

(Whyborne &
Griffin No. 6)

Jordan L. Hawk

Hoarfrost
© 2015 Jordan L. Hawk

ISBN: 978-1-941230-11-4

All rights reserved.

Cover art © 2015 Jordan L. Hawk

© ykumsri/Dollar Photo Club

© Depositphotos/ysbrand

© Shutterstock Inc./Lenar Musin

© Shutterstock Inc./Ryan Jorgensen

Model: Charles McGregor

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places,
and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used
fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or
dead, is entirely coincidental.

Edited by Annetta Ribken

This book is dedicated to

Rhys Ford

without whom none of this

would have been possible.

Griffin

Pa was
dead.

The wind
blew in from the ocean, breeze stiff and touched with October cold. It smelled
of salt and fish, seaweed and decay. Moonlight sparkled from the waves, and
lanterns lent false warmth to the scattered rock of the strand. But a part of
me could see only the flat plains of Kansas, the rich earth of the fields, the
fresh-painted house where I’d grown to manhood.

At least
others stood with me. Whyborne had asked me if I wanted to be alone, but I’d
numbly said no, because what sort of wake had only one mourner? So Christine
and Iskander rode out here with us in a carriage borrowed from Whyborne’s
father.

I’d been
so excited when Ma’s letter appeared in the mail. I hadn’t received any
correspondence from my adoptive parents in over two years. Surely it was a sign
they’d changed their minds, chosen to accept my love for another man after all.
Or, at least, decided they loved me more than they hated what they saw as my
sin. Perhaps they even wished me to visit. I was already considering train
schedules as I tore open the envelope.

But
instead of a new beginning, the letter contained an end.

Pa was
dead. Heart trouble. Don’t come for the funeral.

For two
years, I’d thought he might change his mind. Believed, on some deep level I
hadn’t even recognized, he would. He’d come to understand I loved Whyborne, see
our relationship wasn’t just some venial sin, some perverse gratification of
the flesh.

It was
too late. He’d never forgiven me.

And now
he never would.

There
came a soft splash from the heaving ocean. I’d guessed, when Whyborne chose the
beach at night as the location for the wake, he meant to summon others. A surge
of gratitude went through me nonetheless to see two ketoi rise from the waves.
They were thin and wiry, their bodies nearly sexless beneath the scant covering
of gold and jewels. A forest of tentacles, like the stinging arms of an
anemone, sprouted from their heads in place of hair, and row upon row of shark’s
teeth filled their mouths.

“Bloody
hell,” Iskander whispered from his place beside Christine, well back from the
incoming tide. Christine shushed him.

One of
the newcomers approached me with no hesitation, her stride made awkward by
long, batrachian feet. “Griffin, my dear boy,” said my mother-in-law, and
embraced me. “I’m so very sorry for your loss.”

Her skin
felt like a dolphin’s, sleek and firm. “Thank you, Heliabel.” I blinked
rapidly; I refused to cry.  Not in front of this gathering, intimate as it
was. “Niles sent a card of condolence.”

It was a
stupid thing to say, and I cursed myself immediately. I didn’t know if she
thought often of the man who had been her husband on the land, the father of
her four children, but I shouldn’t have brought it up in case the reminder were
in any way painful for her.

She drew
back and ran a clawed hand gently over my cheek. “I’m not surprised. For all
his faults, Niles always wished to do right by his family.”

“Yes,” I
said, glad not to have hurt her. And she was right; despite their damaged,
angry relationship, Niles never tried to separate Whyborne from me. Attempt to
convince Whyborne to enter into a convenient marriage with an heiress and keep
me as a lover in the shadows, yes. But from Niles’s point of view such an
arrangement would only be practical. Many would agree with him.

Pa
wouldn’t have. He believed in the sanctity of vows spoken before God. But he would
never have believed the vows Whyborne and I spoke to each other on this very
beach last year to be anything but blasphemous.

Heliabel
stepped away to greet Whyborne. Persephone, Whyborne’s twin sister who had been
raised beneath the sea, paused before me. Although I’d seen her regularly over
the last year, I didn’t have the same easy relationship with her as with
Heliabel. “Brother’s husband,” she said in her odd, formal fashion. “Mother
says it is polite to offer condolences. I am sorry your father-who-raised-you
died far from the sea. What will become of his body?”

How many
times had I stood in the little graveyard outside the church, flanked by Ma and
Pa while mourners lowered some unfortunate into the cold earth? Women who died
in childbirth, children from sickness, people of all ages and sexes from
accident. The occasional elder whose time had come in its fullness, rather than
succumb to the harshness of life on the prairie.

“They’ll
bury him beside his brother,” I said.

“In the
earth?” She looked revolted. “And they will not eat his heart, so his spirit
may remain with them, to be born again in its time?”

A part
of me wanted to laugh. She looked like a barbarian queen, nearly naked and
carrying a dagger of bone at her waist. Clearly, though, she thought us the
savages.

“Persephone,
please,” Whyborne said, before I could formulate a reply. “Not now.”

He looked
very somber in his black suit and top hat. Macassar oil slicked his unruly
hair, or tried to; it already stuck up on the sides once again. I was
unspeakably glad to have him with me tonight. For him to have arranged
this…whatever it was. Ceremony, perhaps. A farewell, certainly.

“I only
wish to understand your customs,” she replied. Given her inhuman nature, it
always startled me how much she and Whyborne still managed to resemble one
another. Both had their mother’s eyes, but it was more than that. A similarity
in nose and cheekbone, perhaps, or in the way they held themselves. “How else
shall I know what is appropriate?”

“There’s
nothing for you to do,” I said. “Other than be here. Thank you for coming.”

“Of
course.” She joined Heliabel, who conversed quietly with Christine. Iskander,
who had heard us speak of the ketoi but never before seen them, had a slightly
gray tinge to his brown skin. I couldn’t blame his reaction; at first glance I’d
thought the ketoi monstrous as well.

Odd, how
familiarity changes one’s perceptions.

“What do
you wish to do, darling?” Whyborne asked quietly.

I took a
sheaf of letters from within the pocket of my overcoat. I’d wanted, very badly,
to do
something
to mark Pa’s passing. A funeral of sorts, even if the
only thing I had to bury was hope. “What I mentioned. Perhaps it’s foolish,
but…”

“Only if
you deem it so.” His fingers brushed lightly against mine. Scars covered the
back of his hand, branching down to the very tips of his fingers, like a
pattern of frost on a windowpane.

“This
blasted wind is freezing the life out of me,” Christine complained. “Can we
open the whiskey yet, Whyborne?”

“Christine!”
Whyborne said, giving her a glare.

I
laughed, though. “Yes,” I said. “Please.”

Iskander
took the whiskey from the small basket we’d brought and poured us each a dram.
When he passed a glass to Persephone, she took a cautious sniff of it. Her
hair-tentacles retracted sharply, and she made a face. Did ketoi have alcohol?
I’d never thought to ask.

Whyborne
went to a small pile of driftwood, laid by Iskander while we waited for
Heliabel and Persephone. He said nothing, only looked at it for a long moment.
The dry wood crackled, then burst into flame. Within seconds, a small fire
burned merrily on the strand.

“Thank
you for coming,” I said to them all. “I know most of you never met Pa, so this
has little meaning for you.”

“We’re
here for you, dear,” Heliabel said gently.

Tears pricked
the back of my eyes again. “I suppose under ordinary circumstances, this is
where someone would say a few words, or we’d all exchange stories about the
deceased.”

“Well,”
Christine said dubiously, “he seemed…nice…enough. But honestly—”

“Christine,
this is a funeral,” Whyborne interrupted. “In other words, the last place for
your brand of honesty.”

“My
brand of honesty? What the devil do you mean?”

“Please,
both of you!” Iskander exclaimed, looking scandalized.

“I only
meant to say Griffin is a fine fellow,” Christine objected. “And if—”

“Christine!”

“Oh,
very well.” She scowled.

I found
myself smiling, despite everything. “Thank you, Christine,” I said. “I do
appreciate the thought.” I clutched the letters in my hand tighter. “The truth
is…the truth is, Pa was a good man. He worked hard to provide for his family.
When he and Ma couldn’t have children, they took in a frightened Irish lad from
the orphan train and raised him as their own. He told me to keep my birth name,
so I wouldn’t forget my parents, but he never treated me for a moment as if I
were anything but his blood son.”

Damn it.
I refused to cry. I might show my tears to Whyborne and Christine, but not to
the rest. Even though, God knew, they’d never judge me for them. I still had my
pride.

“He
saved me from the asylum, where they put me when I tried to warn them about
monsters beneath Chicago,” I went on. Of course, I’d never have gone to Chicago
in the first place if I’d not been caught with the neighbor lad. If Pa and Ma
hadn’t agreed it would be best if I left, while Walter married a local girl as
quickly as possible. “I won’t pretend he was perfect, but I owed him a great
deal. And I wish…”

I
trailed off. Wishes didn’t matter now. It was too late.

“Then
let us remember the good,” Iskander suggested, raising his glass.

The
whiskey went down smoothly. Persephone made a choking sound, then offered me a
grin to cover her lapse, exposing rows of serrated teeth.

The
gathering should have seemed stranger to me than it did. Pa would have been
horrified: two ketoi, my sorcerer husband, and a brown foreigner, all drinking
to his memory. He’d simply never been certain what to make of Christine, but
the rest…

I handed
my empty glass to Whyborne and walked to the fire. The flames crackled merrily,
their heat on my face something of a comfort. I shuffled the letters in both
hands, looking at the envelopes. Each held a letter I’d sent to him and Ma, all
of them returned unopened. Two Christmas cards, birthday wishes, even the
announcement card for our wedding, printed by a very discreet stationer I knew
from my days in Chicago.
Return to Sender
had been written on each one in
his firm hand.

“I want
to believe there’s a life beyond this one,” I said aloud. “And that, if there
is, the smoke will carry my words to him, and he’ll finally understand. So
things will be different, when I see him again.”

“God
rest his soul,” Iskander murmured.

“May the
dweller in the deeps speed his rebirth,” Persephone added solemnly.

Whyborne
looked faintly uncomfortable, but he didn’t believe in gods of any sort.

I tossed
the letters into the fire, one at a time so as not to smother it. The paper
curled and blackened, flames devouring my words. As the final envelope burned
away, I glimpsed a line of writing in my own hand, the rest of the message
already going to ash.
I love you.

Whyborne
put his arm around my shoulders, and I leaned into him. Iskander quietly
refilled my glass and pressed it into my hand. In silence, the six of us stood
and drank, until the fire burned down and nothing remained but ashes.

~ * ~

The
dusty tunnel stretched before me, dry air biting my skin. Pain burned through
me, like hooks sunk into my flesh, dragging me forward. I had to make it stop.

I
squeezed through the passageway that had been my only home, my refuge from the
burning light of the sun. Once I had stretched my wings and flown through it,
but now my form was crushed and distorted by the enclosing walls. But I was
fast, fast enough to stop the creatures I had been awakened to kill.

Fast
enough to stop the pain.

There—they
ran before me, their misshapen bodies awkward. They looked back at me, their
two eyes hideous, horrifying. They screamed and jabbered, incomprehensible
sounds, but I ignored the noise and focused on one. If I killed it, the pain would
end. I could sink back into sleep, into nothingness. I could forget I was
alone.

~ * ~

I jolted
awake, my hands clenching the blankets to either side of me. Where was I? What
had happened to the dry stone passage? My heart pounded and my head ached.

A body
stirred beside me. One of those who had been running away from me in the dream.
In the nightmare.

“It’s
all right, darling,” Whyborne murmured, his voice slurred with sleep. He slid
his arm across my chest, and flung a leg over my thighs. “You’re safe. You’re
in our home, in our bed. I’m here.”

Whyborne
was used to me waking him at odd hours of the night. The horrors I’d seen in a
basement beneath Chicago, where my partner Glenn had died so terribly, would
have been enough to give anyone nightmares. Coupled with the time I’d spent in
an insane asylum, while the doctors worked to cure me of both delusions and
desire, and the attendants…