The Frozen Witch Book One (11 page)

Two days ago I’d been nothing but a
waitress. Today? Today I would die, singed to a crisp in the shifty
basement of an equally shifty nightclub.

With manic glee shifting through his
expression, he sliced towards me with the sword.

I had a single second where terror pulsed
through me. More violent than any sensation I had ever felt, it was
as if somebody had taken a hammer to me and crushed me
completely.

I screamed – screamed with everything I
had.

I also grabbed at my bangles. The move was
instinctual, something inside me suddenly seizing hold of my hands
and moving them of its own accord.

Vali had told me never to remove these
locks.

But now? Now I had no choice.

The bangle unlocked with an echoing click.
The click shifted through more than this gloomy basement. It shook
right through me.

I felt it – felt it running through me, felt
it burning along my skin, cascading up my back, playing along my
face.

The symbols.

John jerked back, drawing a hand up to
protect his face. His cheeks slackened as his eyes pulsed wide.
“What- what the hell are you?” He brandished his sword.

That cold sensation in the center of my
chest – it suddenly took up my entire world. Though the flash of
steel was close to my throat, and death just a step behind,
suddenly I was completely absorbed by that sensation. By the cold
eddying in my soul.

It was like a set of hands spreading towards
me, beckoning me onward. And all I had to do was reach out.

So that’s what I did.

I shifted to the side just as the man’s
sword sliced across the tip of my shoulder. It did not, however,
have the opportunity to travel through my neck and cut my head from
my body. Instead, I reached forward, accepting the cold within.

And the cold – it spread out from my
fingers, out from my arm, out from my body as I was pressed against
the wall. This enormous wave of frozen power.

In an instant, the room around us froze,
frost spreading across the floor and up the walls until it looked
as if we were trapped within an ice cave.

At the last second, the man lost his
balance, slipping to the side, body jerking out as he lost grip of
the sword and stumbled over the ice. The tip of his sword sliced
across the tip of my shoulder, but missed my neck.

That’s not all that happened. For the ice
started to climb him. Relentless, like a river breaking its banks,
it climbed up his legs, marched up his thighs, and powered over his
torso. He screamed as he bucked back, body skidding over the floor.
Desperately, he tried to scrape the ice from his legs, but his
movements became slow, broken.

I watched in total, astonished fear,
incapable of moving as blood trickled down my shoulder, splashing
against the icy floor by my crumpled body with a wet tap, tap,
tap.

The man let out a rattling, desperate
scream, clearly using the last of his energy as he jerked his head
around and stared at my bulging eyes. “Please. Just stop.
Please.”

His terror was the only thing that could
move me. With a jolt that rattled my spine, I realized I was about
to kill him. My relentlessly marching magic would freeze him to the
spot.

I bolted forward, shifting over the ice with
ease. I wasn’t cold, either. Even though this basement now looked
as if it belonged in the heart of the Arctic, I wasn’t shivering.
The man? His lips were blue, his skin whiter than powdered
snow.

He had time to shoot me one last desperate,
pleading look, then his head rolled back and thumped against the
floor, cracking the ice. But the ice did not remain cracked for
long – it kept growing. The power kept pulsing out of me, covering
this room in more and more frost as the symbols over my body danced
brighter and brighter.

“Stop. Please stop,” I begged myself,
voice rattling in my throat as I desperately tried to control my
power. I begged my mind to switch the magic off. And when that
didn’t work, I began to scratch at the symbols on my exposed
wrist.

Just as the man’s chest drew silent with one
final, shuddering breath, I spied my bangle. I skidded over to it,
the move snagging my nylons and tearing them to the knee. With no
time to spare, I snapped over, grabbed my bangle, and slammed it
over my wrist.

It took several agonizing seconds to work,
but slowly the light dimmed and no longer played so brightly over
my flesh. A second later, the ice stopped its inexorable march up
the man’s body.

I bolted over to him, skidding on my knees
and slicing them clean open. I ignored the warm blood as it
pattered down my legs. I took my jacket off in a jerky move,
rolling it up and placing it under his head. Then I pressed a hand
over his mouth, checking for any signs of breath.

When that didn’t work, I pressed my fingers
into his neck, and finally, finally felt a pulse.

I couldn’t crumple in relief just yet. For,
as my fingers pressed against his neck, my body warmth thawed the
ice. In fact, the longer I kept my hand gently locked on his
throat, the more the ice receded. It was as if my mere presence was
chasing it back.

I watched in stunned astonishment as the ice
pulled back like a curtain or a receding river. It still covered
the room, but in a few short seconds the man thawed out.

I incessantly checked his pulse and
breathing, and when both seemed steady, I realized I had to go for
help.

Checking him one last time, I got to my feet
and threw myself at the door. I was usually an uncoordinated girl,
and yet I could walk over the ice with all the elegance and grace
of an Olympic skater. It couldn’t affect my balance, couldn’t chill
me. It was almost as if it was still a part of me even though it
had spread throughout the room to cover every space, corner, nook,
and cranny.

I reached the door and yanked it open,
getting ready to scream.

I stopped.

Not only was there no one in this abandoned
corridor, but what was I thinking? That entire room was full of
ice. There was still a burning, glowing sword on the ground, and
even though the man was unconscious, his wrist was still blazing
under the light of his magical mark.

These were all things a normal person could
not see.

I stood there, frozen, immobilized.

Then that sense returned. I shoved a hand
into my pocket, and I went to dial Megan – she’d given me her
number on the same small square of paper that had contained a brief
bio on John Lambert. Just as I pressed my phone to my ear, I
realized I had no reception down here.

I screamed in anger, turning over my
shoulder to check on the man once more. The ice had not grown up
and encroached over his body again, but I could hardly leave him
there.

Nor could I leave his weapon there.

Turning hard on my foot and skidding through
the room once more, I lurched down and grabbed the sword up. As
soon as my hand wrapped around the handle, I felt a twinge. A
second later, that twinge turned into a full-on burning
sensation.

I screamed, jerking my hand back as I
dropped the sword. I stared down in horror as I caught sight of my
palm. It was burnt, the skin blistered in places, a few droplets of
crusty blood making it out of gaps in the scorched flesh and
trickling down my palm.

The sword, rather than clattering by my
feet, began to hiss like a broken steam pipe.

It remained, frozen in midair, jerking on
the spot. As I took a terrified step back from it, it suddenly
exploded. It did not, however, send burning shards of metal
blasting through the room. Instead, it turned into a cloud of fine,
grey dust. And that grey dust shot back to the man. Before I could
become terrified that it would hurt him somehow, it disappeared
back into the symbol on his wrist.

He convulsed, but soon became still.

Warily, I crept over to him, pressing my
fingers against his neck once more.

He was still alive, and if I was any judge,
his breathing was calming. His skin wasn’t deathly white anymore,
either.

If I was any guess – and, let’s face it, I
wasn’t, considering I had all of two days experience in this
magical world. Still, if I was any guess, he’d extended himself by
creating that sword. And now it had disappeared back inside him, he
was getting better.

Which meant he might just wake up soon.

I backed towards the door, but before I
could run through it and try to rustle up some help, I stopped.
“You have to restrain the criminal, idiot,” I chided myself as I
reached a hand around and snapped the magical handcuffs out from
the pocket of my jacket. The guard had given them to me before I’d
left the armory.

Leaning down, carefully shifting the man
until I could access both of his hands without hurting him, I
snapped the handcuffs over his wrists. There was a resounding
click, click.

I checked them, even though they were so
solid they looked as if they could keep a frost giant in place.

Finally satisfied, I stood up, took a step
back, then another, then turned.

I was woozy, dizzy, marching nausea climbing
up my back and locking hard into my jaw. I’d lost a lot of blood,
even though I couldn’t appreciate that. The wound to my shoulder
was deep. I’d also used a lot of my nascent power.

That didn’t stop me from stumbling forward,
eyes wide as they searched the darkened corridor for any sign of
another person.

I brought my phone out and stared fixedly at
the signal bar, waiting for it to change.

“Come on, come on, you bastard,” I begged
as I reached the stairs and took to them. I had to lock one hand on
the rail, lest I fall back. I was starting to become seriously
woozy here.

Fighting against my nausea, I reached the
top of the stairs. This level was somehow nicer than the actual
nightclub. I’d noted that before, but I hadn’t paid that much
attention considering the fact I’d been chasing down a
murderer.

Now I frowned, pressing the back of my hand
against my mouth as I winced against another surge of dizziness.
Crumpling over, pressing a sweaty hand against the wall, I checked
my phone once more.

It still had no signal.

Swearing, not daring to move my hand from
the wall, lest I fall over, I pushed forward. My whole body was
shaking now, bucking as a cold sensation began to press up through
my limbs.

I might have felt completely warm in the
ice-covered basement, but now it felt like I was freezing from the
inside out.

The lighting down here was a little more
reasonable than upstairs, but it was still dim. Even so, I could
make out the expensive Persian runner that divided the corridor. I
could also tell that the doors dotted along the walls had little,
expensive brass plates with place names carved into them like
Paris, London, and Brussels.

I turned to the first door and knocked on it
desperately.

No one answered.

I ran to the next door. No one answered.

I was starting to… shut down.

I suddenly noticed how badly my arm was
bleeding. Clutching a hand to my injury, I shuddered as I saw how
much blood came off on my fingers.

A new wave of nausea hit me, and I stumbled
against the closest door.

That would be when it opened. Hard. I had no
balance left, and fell forward as the door opened inwards.

Before I could fall on my face, two strong
hands locked on my shoulders.

Two strong, warm hands. Warm enough that
they could momentarily cut through the cold marching through my
limbs.

Sleepily, seconds from falling
unconscious, I turned my gaze up and up and up. For the man who had
caught me was no normal human.

“Lilly?” Franklin Saunders asked, voice
quick with concern. His bright blue eyes darted from my ashen face
to the bloodied rip in my leather jacket then down to my burnt,
blistered hand.

I could hear voices behind Saunders.

“What’s going on?”

“Who is that?”

“I’ll be back,” was all he said. Then
Franklin leaned forward and picked me up for the third time in
several days.

It was such an effortless move. To him, I
probably weighed nothing more than a breath of air.

“What happened?” he asked, voice low. And
though it was low, it wasn’t hissed, wasn’t vibrating with that
familiar anger.

Though I’d only known Franklin Saunders for
two days now, he’d never simply talked to me. He’d berated me,
sure. He’d shouted at me plenty of times. And god knows he’d
grunted and growled.

But right now he actually sounded
concerned.

“What are you doing here, Lilly? And what
happened to you?” he asked once more, slowing his words down as he
gently squeezed my shoulders with one hand, the other still hooked
easily under my legs.

“What… am I doing?” I repeated, focusing
on the question, trying to let it drag me back into consciousness.
“Tracking… tracking the hitman.”

I felt him stiffen. “Here?”

“I… I was sent here… then….” Talking
abruptly became too much for me. Despite the fact this was Franklin
Saunders, and I hated him more than anything else in the entire
world, I let my head loll against his appreciable chest.

He shook me gently. “Stay awake, Lilly.
Where is your target?”

“The basement, he’s in the basement,” I
suddenly answered with renewed vigor as a pulse of fear slammed
hard into my gut. If there was one thing that could beckon me out
of the waiting arms of unconsciousness, it was the fact I’d almost
killed a guy. “You need to call the ambulance. You need to save
him. I almost,” I choked, “I almost killed him. He might be dead
now. Oh god. What have I done?”