A Taste of Ice (45 page)

“You just met him,” Kekona sneered. “You can’t know all that.”

Cat evenly met her fiery eyes. “And sometimes that’s all you need, to really know a person.”

Suddenly the memory of Xavier sprung up, twisting her
heart in a vise, making the emptiness there achy and palpable. Her words must have meant something to Kekona, too, because the Chimeran looked away first.

“And you,” Cat rounded on the chief, “want to believe what you’ve always believed about the Ofarians. They’re a different people than what they once were, how you knew them before Gwen Carroway took down the old empire. I didn’t have to have been born into their society to know. I can see the pain on the surviving members’ faces, the frustration in their voices. They are
trying
.”

Kekona’s head snapped up. “Their leader kidnapped me.”

Cat shook her head and told Lea’s story. How the banished and neutered Ofarian woman had been trying to eradicate Ofarians by enflaming the Chimerans and, ultimately, the Senatus. “I know this because she told me herself after she captured me, too. Griffin had nothing to do with it, and Lea is sitting in his jail right now. You were there, Kekona. You saw him come, heard us talking. You saw Lea be taken into their custody.”

Kekona and the chief looked at one another so long Cat wondered if the Chimerans possessed some sort of telepathy. Bane stood off to the side, glowering.

“I didn’t see or hear anything to convince me,” said Kekona.

The chief opened his hands. “You expect us to just take your word for this?”

“No. I expect you to listen to someone who was actually there, in Michael’s house, when Kekona was brought in.”

Other than the widening of Kekona’s eyes, the Chimeran general didn’t move.

Cat reached into her bag and pulled out a little video device. “This is for you. Press
play
.”

The chief looked skeptical. “What’s on it?”

“Just press
play
.”

He did, Kekona and Bane crowding their leader on both sides. Even though Cat couldn’t see the screen, she could hear Sean Ebrecht’s voice rise up. She hadn’t been there when he’d offered the information. She hadn’t been there when he’d recorded this, as he’d cried over Michael and threw a chair across the room when talking about Lea. He told Lea’s story: how she was a lone wolf, and had been working with Michael for years.

The Chimeran leader looked up.

“All I’m asking, Chief,” Cat said, “is for you to stand down. For now. There is no need for loss of life on either side. Not over this. Call the Senatus together. Allow Griffin Aames to speak his piece and listen. He will listen, too, to whatever lectures you want to give. I promise you.”

The chief pursed his lips and shifted his focus to Kekona. “General?”

Fire flared across Kekona’s pupils. When the fire died, there was so much pain and humiliation and sorrow in that stare. Kekona finally looked away, and Cat was sure that she’d succeeded.

“General,” the chief pressed.

“Don’t be fooled by that, Uncle,” Kekona said. “Sean’s their prisoner. He’s a kid who’s used to being told what to do.”

“No—” Cat began, horrified.

But Kekona ignored her and leaped once more for the balcony rail. She assumed a wide stance on the narrow slat of wood, like the warriors on the ground had done earlier, and screamed something in Chimeran, the cords in her throat jutting out.

Everyone on the field paused in whatever they were doing and turned their faces up to the house again. Then, in a flurry, they rushed toward the waiting buses. Deploying.

Cat saw it all—the fighting, the scorched skin, the blood, the needless deaths. When it ended, all that Gwen and Griffin—and especially Xavier—had accomplished and sacrificed for, would be washed away. Gone, because of people being obtuse. Gone, because Griffin had once given unintentional offense to Secondary leaders.

Gone, because that offense had driven a massive wedge between Kekona and Griffin’s secret relationship.

Dear God…could all this be happening over a reason even stupider than a cultural misunderstanding?

Kekona hopped down, not looking at Cat as she made for the stairs. Bane fell in behind his general.

“Kekona,” she called, desperate. “I have no idea what happened between you and Griffin, but please don’t make this war some sort of ex-lover’s vengeance.”

At the top of the stairs, Kekona froze.

“What?”
The chief’s roared surprise almost knocked Cat over.

“Sis.”
Bane gripped Kekona’s arm and spun her around. “You didn’t.”

Kekona’s shoulders dropped, along with her dark eyes. She wouldn’t look at either her brother or her uncle.

Well, now, how about that? Cat had just let her namesake out of the bag.

She’d assumed that the Chimerans had known. She’d assumed that part of Griffin’s ostracizing had been due to Kekona’s revelation to her people of their affair.

The chief loomed over his niece. Sixty-plus years or not, he was, without a doubt, the most fear-inducing man in that valley. “Is this true? Are you involved with him?” Kekona lifted regretful, lovesick, forlorn eyes, and he amended the question. “
Were
you involved with him?”

The general said nothing.

Sparks danced across the chief’s eyes. “You and I will talk,” he told Kekona, pointing toward the great field, “after you call them off.”

One week later.

The Turnkorner Film Festival had ended. The movie stars had
fled, the tourists trailing in their wake. The sidewalks of White Clover Creek sat empty. Wind whipped fresh powder from the rooftops and swirled it around the town that finally got to pull a blanket over its head and sleep after a two-week party. A few cars were parked along Waterleaf now, but most townies were likely at home, thrown over the couch in an exhausted heap. Mr. Traeger, however, was brushing snow from the front steps of the Tea Shoppe.

It was like Turnkorner had never happened and Xavier had gone back in time to the period when he’d lived anonymously and shrouded in demons. Only, in a vicious turn of events, he was allowed to keep the awful memories he’d made in the future.

Xavier had thought she’d be here.

The week-long trek from Nevada back to White Clover Creek had started with a despair so deep he contemplated chipping a hole in the frozen ground, burying himself, and just huddling there until spring. But a funny thing happened when he started moving eastward. He thought about everything Cat had said to him in the Plant—had been
forced
to say to him, he was sure—and decided that digging a hole couldn’t possibly bring him any lower. The only way to go was up, and he actually allowed himself to hope.

By the time he’d hitchhiked his way across two states—using glamour to disguise himself as pregnant or disabled
women, and to steal food, because he had no money or ID to speak of—he’d convinced himself that there had definitely been something wrong when Cat had shoved him away, and the problem hadn’t been him. When he got back to Colorado, he told himself, she would be waiting for him.

But she wasn’t.

There was no reservation for her at the Margaret. Or any other hotel or motel within the town limits.

There were no new tracks in the unshoveled snow leading up to his house.

In a daze, he got his key from under the thyme pot in the greenhouse and went inside his cold, silent home. He stared at the red plastic phone on the wall and released a howl of frustration. Why couldn’t he have forced himself to join modern society and signed up for something as basic as caller ID? Maybe she’d tried to call and he hadn’t answered. Maybe she was waiting for him to call her.

He snatched the receiver from the cradle and stabbed out Cat’s cell phone number. Disconnected.

He sank onto one of the chairs around the kitchen table.

Disconnected. That pretty much said it all. It hadn’t rung and rung, like she’d left it on too long and it had run out of juice. Disconnected meant
I don’t want to be found
. Disconnected meant
The people I’ve joined don’t want me to be found either
.

He could call Gwen or Griffin, but he didn’t want to hear it from their lips, too, that Cat had made her choice and left him. For the Ofarians.

All that shit he’d convinced himself of on the way home was just that: shit. He’d been right, what he’d said to her over that radio. Maybe they had made her say those things to him, but in the end, she hadn’t been willing to fight for them.

He could have walked up to the Drift and tried to talk to Helen again, but after the way he’d approached her last time, and then the violent way he’d left, he seriously doubted she’d tell him anything about Cat. Could he really blame her?

Cat was gone and he was back in White Clover Creek. A big circle, that was life. And his life? A set of overlapping circles laced with razor wire.

He stumbled into the bathroom and showered until the hot
water heater couldn’t spit out anything more, then somehow made his way into his bedroom, kept in shadow by the drawn curtains. He deliberately didn’t look at the bed. He wouldn’t sleep there again. He didn’t look at the clothes he pulled out and put on. Didn’t care.

Then he locked up his house, and walked into town.

Pam would probably be at Shed, even though it was early on a Sunday. He paused at the back delivery door, hand on the knob. If it turned, he’d go in. If it didn’t, he’d go back the way he came and not look back.

It turned.

Pam was in the kitchen, trailing her fingers over the dangling pots and pans, notebook in hand and pen stuck behind her ear.

“Hey,” he said.

She turned and he was reminded of Kekona’s blazing eyes, the streams of fire that had erupted from her throat. And as frightening as Kekona had been, she had nothing on Pam.

“What the
fuck
are you doing back here?”

Being thrown from the Primary world, into the Secondary, and back again, gave him terrible mental whiplash.

Pam snatched the pen from behind her ear and whipped it across the kitchen. “How
dare
you. I mean, really. Leaving me a message, a goddamn voice mail, that you were taking off before the end of Turnkorner? Turnkorner, for chrissakes! Only the biggest two weeks of the year for us.” She threw up a hand in disgust and turned away like she’d just eaten McDonald’s. “You actually make me a little sick. Get out of here.”

He just shoved his hands in his pockets. “I’m sorry, Pam.”

She sighed, turned back around. “Is that why you came back? To apologize?”

“Yes.” He realized, above all, that that was true. Pam had helped him so much. She’d created him, essentially. She’d given him the dream of a career, a bigger life, and had unknowingly granted him a sliver of happiness. To disappoint her, to fail her…“I’m sorry,” he said again.

“Tell me you at least got her.”

He put a hand to his chest, where it hurt the most. “No.”

She calmed down a bit, setting the notebook on his old station. Her lips tightened. “Aw, man. That sucks.”

He stepped farther into the kitchen, ran a hand over the burner knobs. “She hasn’t, um, been back here, has she?”

“No.” Pam looked at him funny. “What’s going on with you?”

Never had he ever been tempted to tell any Primary anything about his former life, until now.

He traced his fingers over the cold, black metal burners. He’d learned the most in Shed. He’d discovered quite a large part of himself here. Pam had seen promise in him back in San Francisco, and she’d brought him here. She’d planted him and watered him, and he’d grown so much.

“I’m leaving,” he told her.

“Ah, fuck.” She’d picked up the pen and it clattered to the tile again. “Knew that was coming.”

He cracked a smile. “Just last week you were wondering when I was going to head out.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t think you’d actually do it.” She sighed dramatically. “Where are you going?”

He knew she meant which kitchen. He shrugged. “Don’t know.”

That was the truth. He had no idea where he was going, where his steps would take him once he left White Clover Creek. Wandering sounded like the best idea, although “best” was a relative term.

So rarely did he see Pam genuinely surprised. Her face whitened, her eyes going wide. “Xavier. Are you okay?”

He touched the same pots she had earlier, sending them clanking. “I will be.”

She ran a hand through her short hair. “Jesus, X. Quitting your job over some girl—”

“It’s more than that.” He swept a gaze over the quiet dining room, lingering on booth six and seeing, against his will, Cat’s gorgeous body draped over it. Open and waiting. For him. “Remember those ghosts you mentioned?”

“Yeah. I do.”

“Well, I’ve got some that need fighting.”

She didn’t look at all surprised by that. Just nodded. They stood there in companionable silence for several minutes.

“If you need a reference,” she said, “you’ve got mine.
Despite what you did to me last week. You’re very talented. I’d hate to see you throw it away.”

So would he. But he just wasn’t sure where or when he’d want to cook again.

Three weeks later.

If Cat could have transported herself to Colorado with a snap of the fingers the moment the Chimeran chief had called off the attack, she would have. Instead, it had taken three long weeks to get back to White Clover Creek.

The Chimerans had insisted she remain in Hawaii until the situation had been smoothed out. Threat of imminent attack had calmed, but had not been killed. At least the two sides were talking. Both Ofarians and Chimerans had agreed that keeping Griffin and Kekona apart was a wise choice. Griffin had kept his leadership, but Kekona had been relieved of her command.

After the Chimerans had stood down and unpacked their transports, Griffin had asked Cat back to San Francisco to rehash everything that had happened in Hawaii for the Ofarian cabinet.

Then the Senatus Premier had called. He’d offered Griffin a stilted apology and allowed Griffin to make a heartfelt one of his own. When the Premier extended Griffin an invitation to a sit-down with the Senatus, Griffin had exhaled on a powerful sob. He’d pushed away from the table and left, disappearing for half a day. When he’d returned, the lines on his face had smoothed. He moved with a renewed grace.