Frost (7 page)

He swallowed hard, feeling the gravity of the words hit him like blows to the stomach. “I almost died.”

He blinked to stop the world spinning, and looked angrily to Barry, who had done nothing but pant across from him like an old dog. His retort died in his throat when he got a better look at him.

The Scot-but-not was pale as marble, his eyes baggy and his cheeks touched with an ugly fractal pattern of purple capillaries. Blood had coagulated in clots of dark jelly upon the side of his beard, hanging in wobbly strings, and the tear in his jacket gaped like a mortal wound. The thick leather had saved him, but still Jack could see bare flesh torn underneath, oozing blood steadily.

“Oh.”

The ghost of a smile touched Barry’s lips. “Yeah,” he muttered.

Jack leapt onto his haunches and leaned forward. “Are you… okay?”

“Been better.”

Jack swallowed. “Did you know it would be… whatever it was?”

Barry shook his head fractionally. “Harper.” A long pause. “Bad.”

“Who is he? It?”

“Bad…”

Barry took a long breath suddenly, his eyes bulging.

Christ, he’s going to have a heart attack.

For a moment, Barry’s face remained frozen in a comic ‘O’ of surprise, then he slumped back against the dumpster and breathed easier.

Jack wheeled away and gave a strangled yelp as something black, tar like, dribbled from the wound under Barry’s jacket, pooling on the floor. The puddle twitched and undulated on the concrete, as though alive.

He resisted an absurd urge to touch it—somehow he knew that it would destroy him—and drew a sigh of relief; the other-worlder’s cheeks were reclaiming their flushed vigour. Before Jack’s eyes he rejuvenated from cadaver to something more like his old self.

After a full minute, during which Jack wished to all heaven that he was back in his apartment, splayed upside down on the sofa and buried in some
Atwood
paperback, Barry shook himself with a boisterous guffaw, hammering his chest with a bunched fist.

“Bloody hell, that was close,” he said, blowing out his cheeks and wiping away the clotted jelly from his beard.

Jack slid slowly back against the dumpster and hugged his knees.

Any moment now I’ll wake up on the ward. I’ll be in my pyjamas like the rest of the patients. It’ll be time for my walk in the garden. I bet I like walks in the garden.

He peeked one eye open, half hoping he’d see whitewashed walls and a smiling nurse.

Nope. Still in the alley.

He drew a ragged sigh. “I thought you were done for.”

“Ah, dying’s not my style. We don’t go in for that.” He sniffed. “Not all it’s cracked up to be. All that poetry, all those songs, just for that great load of nothing.”

Jack let it pass. “Answer my question, or I’m gone.”

“Yeah, yeah, all right. Keep your knickers on.” He hocked a few times, muttering, “Lucky I still need your sorry arse,” then straightened. “Let’s get this one out of the way: I’m sorry, kid.”

Roused by surprise, Jack looked round at the frank regret on Barry’s face.

“I didn’t know how bad it would be. The bastards weren’t supposed to be this far along. Harper’s no goon. He’s first-class evil minion, mate. Kind of above my level, to be quite honest.”

“What, you get league tables? Good versus evil, flyweight to super-heavy?”

A twitch on the Scot-but-not’s brow. “That’d be funny if it didn’t cut so close.”

“What
is
going on? Why do any of you care about us? Why couldn’t it be someone else?” Suddenly the world seemed so far away. It was only him and Barry, and the strange black blood dribbling between his fingers. “Why only now? I’m nothing special, never have been. Look me up in the dictionary; you’ll find me under ‘mediocre’.”

“It’s always been there, just quiet.”

Jack shook his head. “I don’t believe in that mystical crap.”

“Sure you do. You’re a nerd.”

“Just because I like fantasy doesn’t mean I believe in the impossible.”

“Who said anything was impossible?”

“A man appearing in the middle of a book-store in a cloud of ice is impossible.”

“Apparently not.” Barry shuffled closer and cleared his throat. “Something inside you is awake now, because the Web needs you. You’re here for as much a reason as anybody. You just have a bigger role than most, so you get a few… perks.”

“What the hell is this Web?”

Barry gestured around them impatiently. “Y’know, the Web of All Where. Everything. All the worlds connected to one another, cosmic enormity, infinite planes coexisting, yada yada.”

Jack rubbed his tired eyes. “Your name’s not really Barry, is it?”

The Scot-but-not’s pain-dulled, inky eyes flickered with the gazes of a thousand men in one, all looking at him from across vast reaches of space and time.

“I’ve had more names than there are people in this city,” Barry muttered. Jack felt that he would never have received so straight an answer before. Something in the injury and pain had sloughed off Barry’s outer brashness.

“What are you? A man or a… a god?”

Barry’s lips twitched, not a sneer but a soft gentle smile. It was the first genuine sign of humour Jack had seen in him. “Neither. Somewhere in between.”

“If you have the power, why don’t you wave your magic wand and fix this?”

“I’m a lot closer to man, believe me.”

Jack fumed, pressing too hard with the gauze. Barry jerked with a grunt. “Don’t give me that bull. You could take my head off any second. You read my damn mind.”

“Just a bag of tricks.” Barry’s glassy eyes tracked over Jack, and a hint of regret filtered into his gaze. “It’s you who have all the real power. Creatures of destiny. I come from a place called Highcourt. I suppose you could call us self-appointed guardians. We gather creatures like you up like playing cards.”

“Why?”

“We need as many as we can get.”

“There are more of you?”

He nodded, then cocked his head. “Maybe not for long. You’d never know it, but there’s a war going on out there. We’ve kept the Web safe for a very long time, but Harper’s lot might have finally turned the tables on us. We can’t fail here. We
have
to keep everything spinning.”

Jack said nothing. There wasn’t much he could have said.

He had Barry’s wounds staunched for the most part, and it was a matter of waiting for the last of the bleeding to ebb. In time, Barry sat straighter, his breathing less ragged.

“I didn’t know I had the healer’s touch,” Jack said.

“Don’t flatter yourself. You’re okay.” Barry flexed his shoulder and winced, wind-milling the arm in its socket. “There’s more to those claws than sharpness. They don’t just tear flesh. It goes a lot deeper than that.”

“You look all right.”

“If he’d touched you, you’d be in a right state. Your body might survive, but your mind…” He mimed shooting himself between the eyes, flexing his fingers on the other side of his head to represent brain splatter.

“Then why did you get so close?”

“When I came, I knew somebody was screwing around here, but I never expected Harper. He’s a vulture, preys off pain and fear and death that others bring.” He looked sickened. “If he’s got his fingers in this deep, he must have been here a long time. Years. Maybe longer.”

“What happens if we can’t stop him?”

“Our little mission to keep the Web in one piece gets harder. A lot harder.” He was much stronger now, and mettle laced his face, a temerity and fire far more terrifying and radiant than the unreasoning panic he’d showed moments before. “It all pulls apart like wet fucking tissue, and then everyone on it…” He juggled an imaginary handful of dice and threw them into the air. “All bets are off.”

Jack resisted the urge to swallow, but something hard and round had lodged in his throat. “This Harper, this thing, whatever he is, he’s here to end the world. How?”

“Like I said: every man, woman and child you’ve ever known, seen or read about in the tabloids, gone. Poof. Taken. This world will be wiped clean like a slate tablet. One second, they’ll all just be gone.”

“Where?”

“Taken. To a place far from here.”

“Where?”

Barry blinked slowly. “I don’t know.”

Jack jerked. “What?”

“I don’t know. I’m no all-father, mate. I don’t have all the answers. I’m just as much a pawn as you. But I do know what I need to know: somebody’s trying to tip a balance that
can’t
be, not without destroying everything—and I mean everything, all places, all times, all of All Where.”

“Why?”

Barry shrugged. “Above my pay grade. I’m just a soldier.”

Jack
’s second sight piqued, sensing a lie, but he let it go. “If he… Harper… if he’s here, what does that mean? Can you stop him from doing whatever he’s doing?”

“Dunno. Probably not.”

“Then what? That’s it?”

Barry gave a small laugh and rocked forward onto his haunches, whooping at the sight of his own shaking knees. “It’s been a while since I had my arse kicked like that.” He clapped Jack on the shoulder “The Web always gives a way. You’re part of it.” He pulled Jack towards him. “I messed up, Jacky Boy.”

“Jack.” Jack gripped him with all his strength, knowing it was a feather touch to the other-worlder but giving it all he had anyway. “My name is Jack.”

Those eyes, somewhere in all their inky depths, softened a shade. Barry’s lips tightened. “Jack. I made a mistake. By the Brothers of Solstice, I swear I didn’t know what I was getting you into.

“You
are
a creature of destiny, and I still need your help. I can’t make you do anything. Say the word, and you’re free to go. But All Where is calling on you.” He gave Jack’s shoulder a squeeze, managing a gentle pressure this time, less vice-like. “Will you help me, Jack?”

No. Say no. Spit in the bastard’s face and run
.

Jack mashed his teeth together, bunching his fists. Despite himself, a mental film reel flashed before his eyes: his parent’s house in Minnesota, his classmates at college, Manhattan’s skyline at night, all those faceless crowds he passed every day, even
Earthsea
girl.

He deflated like an old balloon. “Yes.”

That squeeze tightened again, and he cried out with renewed pain. “But you have to quit that!”

Barry wasn’t listening. He grinned, clapping his hands together. “It always gets me. You people live such short lives, so fragile, but you’re always the ones to outshine the rest.” An odd severity invaded his countenance. “Reminds me that I know I’m fighting on the right side.”

Jack hesitated, then said, “How many like me have you used?”

He phrased it deliberately, and it had the effect he’d hoped not to see: Barry flinched.

For the first time, the Scot-but-not seemed unable to meet his eye. “If I told you, you’d never stop running,” he muttered. With a visible paroxysm of will, his eyes lurched up and fixed on Jack’s. “Are you still with me?”

“For my sins. Where to?”

Barry smiled thinly, yet his eyes seemed ever more haunted, and Jack saw his name being added to a list upon parchment that ran away into dark and forgotten ancient times; those who had flung themselves upon an eternal pyre for the chance to do some good in the world.

“Like I said, the Web always gives a way. Let’s give the Man in Purple a call.”

Wondering how Barry managed to make that sound ominous, Jack followed him away from the dumpster, nursing a trembling gut.

Over the edge, then.

“Got change, Buddy?” Kitty the Wino grumbled, waggling dirt-stained fingers under the nose of a pinstripe-clad thirty something.

With a disgusted grimace, he fished a dollar from his pocket and waved her past.

Grunting with satisfaction, Kitty moved on, hovering over the seats of middle-class types, using her grubbiness and cultivated stench to secure her dues.

Goddamn heathens, with all their careers and mortgages and
stuff.
None of them deserve a bit of it.

The hand God had dealt her entitled her to a slice of the money pie more than the rest of these losers put together. So desperate were they to be rid of her, pretend she didn’t exist, that they always paid. The sting of that flavour of rejection dried up long ago. Money was the cure-all.

She was going Karma’s work, anyway. Evening the balance, taking from the rich and giving to the poor (or some other bull crap)—and the poorest person around just happened to be her.

Besides, it never failed to bring her a sliver of pleasure, watching them squirm. To boot, the booze wasn’t going to buy itself. Pangs of conscience were hard to come by when you were on the clock until the shakes came back.

Each of her marks ignored her studiously, sending furtive glances around the subway car in search of escape. But there was nowhere to go except farther down the car. They all coughed up.

Setting her best dead eyed stare, one that promised to stick around unless some green was dropped, Kitty shuffled down the line, stuffing cash into her Vodka-stained pants. Faces flashed by amidst the wads of cash: a work-shorted teen, a snooty hawk-faced woman who Kitty almost slapped across the mouth for the look she gave her, a pretty ginger who had her cash ready before Kitty even got to her.

Kitty reached the end of the car satisfied, and held out her hand out to a man wedged on the last seat. She hadn’t given him much thought until now—in fact she was sure he had just appeared out of damn nowhere—but now that she got a good look at him, a base stirring in her loins accompanied the urge to utter a hearty
oof
.

He’s a looker. What I wouldn’t give to have that pretty face between my legs for five minutes.

She placed her feet wider and flapped her jacket to loosen some of her stink, getting ready to cackle at her own coarseness—
I crack me up
—when the man lifted his head and locked eyes with her. His Wall Street air, and suit that looked more like a piece of art, suddenly vanished from her attention; his eyes seemed to take up her entire field of vision.

Kitty had taken her fair share of E, Ket, anything worth having. She knew the feeling of warping unreality and the rending of the basic elements well enough to be on first name terms with the A&E nurses.