Frost (2 page)

“What the hell is going on?” the driver gasped.

Behind them, an explosion of shattering glass and falling masonry rang out. Screams erupted from all around, and suddenly people were running. Amidst the chaos, Harper marched with the driver in tow, striding along with his lip curled and his jaw twitching.

He glanced over his shoulder at the motorcyclists, and hissed when he saw them a mere fifty feet away. As he watched, the rear riders hauled a pair of sawn-off shotguns into view, and took aim.

Harper threw the driver forward onto the floor and took a headlong dive behind a hotdog cart. The world blurred. He was still mid-air when the air ripped with the sound of thunder, and the cart detonated like a bomb, sending a few stinging splinters into his leg.

Rolling to his feet, he took the scrabbling driver by the hair and dragged him in his wake like a sack of potatoes, crouching behind a steel information stand. In his peripheral vision he noticed the top floor of
Barnes & Noble
had been torn open, the running crowd oblivious to the gunfire and the leather-clad pursuers.

Typical
, Harper thought.
One hint of the real world, and they lose their freaking minds.

“Get the hell off me!” the driver bawled, scrabbling at Milton’s fingers. In all the excitement, Harper’s manicured nails had stuck fast in the poor sap’s scalp. Blood ran down Harper’s wrist and into the driver’s eyes. “I said
get off me
!”

Harper jerked his hand away, distantly amused by the bleeding welts he left behind in the driver’s buzz-cut, and pulled him up to stand straight.

The motorcycles would be on them in moments. Harper cursed and took a peek around the corner, grunting when the metal panel exploded beside his head in a puff of shrapnel.

Okay,” he sighed. It seemed they were in for a chase.

This might take some work, after all. Better get rid of this idiot, for starters.

He turned to the driver. “Sorry, my good man, looks like this is the end.”

Clutching his bleeding scalp, the driver looked up at him. “Who the hell are those people?”

“Thorns,” Harper said, leaning over and plucking the driver’s Gloch from its holster. “Thorns in my side.”

The driver glanced at the pistol. “I thought you said this was the end.”

Harper smiled and patted the driver’s shoulder. “I meant for you.” He pressed the muzzle against the driver’s chest and squeezed the trigger—twice, just to make sure the bastards didn’t get any information out of him. “Shh, shh, that’s it,” he said, lowering him down, gritting his teeth against the urge to dive headfirst into the pulsing stream pouring out of the guy.

With a fizzing whine the first motorcycle shot onto the pavement, and Harper was firing before the riders could move an inch, sending the passenger flopping to the ground with a weighty crunch.

He grinned when the second bike kept coming, knowing his tapered fangs were showing, and threw his arm around in a bear swipe as the rider flashed by. Even through the thick leather, Milton’s fingers touched bone, his hand momentarily wrist-deep in hot intercostal muscle. Then the bike was hurtling towards the staring crowd, rolling end over end in a hail of aluminium and torn leather. Harper didn’t stop to watch the fun, ripping the door off the
Build-A-Bear
store, and ducking inside.

Jack Shannon hated his name. Apparently it had a certain ring to it. People always expected him to be a certain kind of person—a kidder, smooth and easy going.

All through his childhood the other kids had tortured him about it. He once made the mistake of admitting he thought it sounded like the name of some 1950s detective from a B-movie.

They had never let him forget it. Right away they had started forming their hands into finger pistols and cocking one eye, whining in that signature detective twang, “Jack Shannon, private eye.
Nyah!
”

In truth, it didn’t take him long to disappoint people. He was the quiet type, a little awkward, with a habit of saying the wrong thing.

As a kid he had been too bright for his parents and teachers, dressing up as knights and princes and charging into the woods to find magical creatures. His father had reserved a keen disapproval, and his mother had been wont to turn a shoulder to him at parties; preferring not to be associated with the oddball who had appropriated a striped canvas sack for a cape, and a tinfoil-covered rolling pin for a longsword.

A little over imaginative,
his teachers had warned.
Head in the clouds. He’ll never amount to anything if he doesn’t buck up.

Certain controversial books vanished while he was at school, and playdates were organised with dead-eyed kids whose mothers forced them to play faultless piano all day. Slowly, patiently, they sucked all the colour out of the world, and Jack withdrew, settling into life’s dreary pace.

Things hadn’t changed until he moved to Manhattan. By twenty-seven, some solid sales experience, a nose for people’s tastes, and a lifetime with his head in books, landed him a job at
Barnes & Noble
.

He had a small apartment on the Lower East-Side. Actually it was tiny—a lopsided box that leaked and had walls thinner than one-ply toilet paper. But the neighbours were close-knit and sweet, and he had plenty of free time to read. On Saturday afternoons he watched anime re-runs—
Ghost in the Shell, Pokémon, Naruto
. He had a growing
Firefly
figurine collection, and by night he worked on his great American novel—two years of work had resulted in a few stuttering fragments that petered out after a few pages, and endless notebooks of angst-ridden poems. But that was okay.

His charge was the science fiction and fantasy section on the upper floor of
B&N
, wedged into the back corner by the plate glass windows. He wouldn’t have had it any other way. Jack was all too glad to steward and safeguard those shelves, a little pocket of fantastical whimsy, for those who also found refuge and solace in lands of faeries, space aliens, and dragons.

He preferred living in fantasy worlds to living his real life.

The section saw a lot of loiterers, of an afternoon. Stuffed in the back corner, flanked by the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the bustle of Manhattan and the Public Library, it was the perfect place for nerds to bed down and lose themselves.

A few were regulars. None of the bastards ever bought anything.

Jack criss-crossed the aisles every now and then and cleared out the ones who were getting too comfortable, but besides that he was content to let them stay. He would never admit it to his supervisor, but in his mind this place belonged to them, anyway.

And the truth was, he was one of them; their man on the inside. He loved the smell of books, the tactile feel of them between his fingers—the glue, the binding, the sheer scale of thoughts and tales and characters that populated their shelves. There was no better hangover cure than hunting down some obscure half-remembered title for an old biddy who, ‘
was sure it had a green cover, and that the author was French... or maybe Italian
’.

So he didn’t save any lives, but it gave him a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Manhattan was the perfect place to work in books. There was always something going on.

Jack jerked as a sharp snap rang out beside his ear. He’d been dozing with his elbow on the counter, staring at a young girl crouched in the far corner with her head in a copy of
The Wizards of Earthsea
. “Huh?” he muttered.

Mr Schneider took the thick hardback away from his ear and leaned in close. “Get rid of the geeks, we’re closing early,” he said. He eyed the girl, and his lips curled. “That loser’s been here over two hours. I want her gone in five minutes.”

Jack straightened, clearing his throat. “I usually give them three before I turn them out. I think she’s going to pick up the trilogy.”

“She’s a browser if I ever saw one.”

“She’ll buy. My nose says so.”

“I don’t care if she’s planning on buying the whole section. While you and your nose have been daydreaming up here, the rest of us have been setting up for the Peter Knight signing. He’ll be here first thing in the morning—there won’t be room to turn your head in here, soon as we put the signs out before opening. We’re closing up early this time. I don’t want us unprepared again because somebody got the damn flu. Now put on that winning nerd smile of yours, and clear out the trash. And tomorrow, make sure you grab a coffee before you show your face. You’ve looked like crap all week.”

Jack swallowed the urge to defend his fellow nerds’ honour, and set off for the shelves. “Yes, sir.”

He’d been planning to ask
Earthsea
girl to dinner. He was a sucker for gawky glasses.

Why do we have to dress up the whole store every time some best-seller blunders in? I met Knight last fall. He wouldn’t even let me get a picture with him. Asshole.

Sighing, he made for the back of the store. He was so wrapped up in bitter thoughts that when some of the shelves froze solid before his eyes, he carried on walking.

His eyes registered the icicles spreading, hopping from one spine to another, emitting puffs of diffuse white mist as they went. Spreading out from the paranormal fantasy section—

No shit
, a distant part of Jack’s mind jabbed.

—it blossomed into inch-thick sheet ice. By the time the first of the readers noticed, a low rumbling noise from the ether rose up, and from somewhere—everywhere—blue light throbbed, periodically emerging from and retreating behind form of the everyday world.

Jack’s mind simply blanked out, unable to process. He just kept walking. A small part of him even went so far as to continue sulking that he was going without a date tonight.

Then
Earthsea
girl screamed, scrabbling away from the shelves with a look of blank, unbelieving disgust written onto her face. She scurried into Jack’s heels and wrapped her arms around his legs.

“What the—?” Mr Schneider barked from afar. He sounded a million miles away.

Jack blinked at the girl at his feet, then looked back to the icy shelves, which now twinkled like Central Park at Christmas, having turned a snowy white, even the floor. The mist was billowing up from a few hundred volumes now, pooling against the ceiling and spreading downwards, showering the entire upper floor with stage-show drama.

“Oh,” Jack said finally. That was all he could muster.

It was funny what he learned about himself in times of crisis. Apparently, Jack was the kind of person who looked at a book-store turning into a slab of ice, pulsing with electric blue light, and said, “Oh.”

The rumble was unmistakable now, and the whole upper floor had paused, people open-mouthed. Dozens of books thumped to the floor, dropped from limp hands. The stunned unified gape lasted around ten full, long seconds, seconds that could have been hours.

Then Jack felt it snap like twine cut with scissors, and panic arrived in earnest.

The world seemed to spool up into furious action in the time it took him to reach down and wrench
Earthsea
girl up from the ground by her elbow. Screams rang out from all directions, coupled with the sound of tumbling shelves and the clatter of scrambling limbs. People downstairs joined in moments later as the stairways filled with wailing customers and staff. Somebody screamed
bomb!
Another cried
terrorists!
The fire alarm tripped, barely audible over the shouting and the eerie hum. Then the hum strengthened to an all-consuming rumble, building from nowhere and yet from all directions. Blue throbbing light pulsed faster amidst the paranormal section, blinding and yet without source.

All the while, the icicles continued to spread.

“Come on, we have to get out of here,” Jack yelled.

But
Earthsea
girl didn’t seem to hear him, china white and limp in his grasp, her gaze fixed on the insanity.

The feral piece of his mind seemed intent on dropping her and running, willing him to turn, but he gripped her anew with a grunt of frustration, and started hauling her back towards the escalators. “If I die because of you, our date is off!”

Half blinded by the blue light pulsing every other moment, he watched Mr Schneider hesitate at the top of the stairs, catch Jack’s eye, then shake his head and vanish downstairs with a grunt.

Fucker.

“Ma said I should’a stuck with the therapy,”
Earthsea
girl said distantly.

“Move your ass!” he bellowed in her ear.

The viciousness of his voice seemed to reach her, and her eyes cleared. She glanced at him and then the spreading ice, now only a few feet away from them, a white carpet flowering constantly with fresh crystals, crawling towards them like waves climbing a beach.

An unfeminine, guttural moan escaped her and she stiffened. “Oh man!”

Before he could react she scrambled from his grasp and ran screaming for the top of the stairs, leaving him momentarily stunned, gripping thin air.

“Oh,” he said, blinking stupidly.

That’s all I got. Funky blue lights and creeping icicles, and all I’ve got in me is, “Oh”.

It was hard to see the spreading ice through the heavy mist as it descended over his shoulders and enveloped him. The store vanished from sight and panic bubbled up in his stomach at the thought of that ice spreading, unseen. Tumbling onto his hands and knees, he scrambled back towards the escalators, praying it didn’t catch him. The rumble had become a wailing honk that hurt his ears and pressed on his skin with physical force.

As he crawled it reached a crescendo, and the blue light throbbed with a final, blinding flash. With a concussive force that seemed to unzip the air, something exploded from the paranormal section.

The mist was blown against the walls, the carpet of icicles vaporised in a single heaving puff. Jack was blown clear across the store, tumbling end over end in a rain of paperbacks.

God, it’s a bomb, it’s a bomb, it’s a bomb!
he thought as he hurtled into the biography shelves, cowering as a shower of books cascaded down onto his head.