Frostbite (Modern Knights Book 1) (2 page)

Funny things…it’s almost easier to admit I was weeping than to talk about such things. Tears, death, and the supernatural are not casual conversation topics. Let’s just leave it at the fact that me and anything Internet-related just didn’t get along. Most of the time, such devices flat-out refused to work for me. On the rare occasions that they did function, I usually ended up wishing they hadn’t. It’s a horrific curse, given how much I loved computers growing up. But Web abstinence is preferable to having another conversation with my deceased mother. Death can change a person.

The sun managed to flip below the horizon while I was still bemoaning my bad luck behind the wheel. The days were getting shorter, as October wound through its appointed course. It wasn’t that cold tonight, but my whole body shuddered at the memory of my mom’s voice.

“And that’s not even the strangest of it…”

“Shut up, nobody asked for your opinion.”

Everybody has a dark cobwebby voice that whispers to them from the hidden nooks and crannies of their mind. Mine was just a little bit louder and better developed than most.

“Right, I’m just part of your subconscious, not an invading alien intelligence from outside the fabric of space and time. Nothing to see here, move along.”

“Hey, I know where the imaginary gag is at. Don’t make me use it,”
I snarled back at it.

“Yessah, mastah. I be good. I be good.”

“That’s more like it.”

Driving in, the entrance to the lake had been fifteen minutes from the interstate. I remembered passing a gas station and a bar about halfway from I-40 to the park, so my best guess was it’d be a half-hour on foot. I’ve been hiking in the growing darkness for about that long now, but there was no sign of civilization yet. It was only eight o’clock, but night was settling fast. Out East there’s so much light pollution, I forgot what night really was. Walking along a country road in Oklahoma didn’t offer the same illusion. Here, the primordial dark of night still lived.

Human low-light vision is mechanically different from our normal daytime sight. Color belongs to the sunlit lands and helps us spot ripe fruits from a distance with relative ease, distinguishing the red of the apple from the green of the leaves. In the dark, it’s all shades of grey. The hours after sunset lend a film noire tint to the world. It made even a tame wood, one regularly disturbed by human presence, seem strange and savage to the senses. I knew that those woods had been culled free of major predators for decades, but that fact didn’t register with my reptile brain. I refused to leave sight of the road.

I’d been rambling for over three years, but I could still get spooked. Rambling was my uncle’s word for it, but it fit as well as anything. After Sarai, after Harvard, I couldn’t stay in Boston. I packed up the stuff that mattered into Dorothy, sold the rest, and hit the road. I had a few thousand dollars saved up for a wedding and honeymoon that was never going to happen. I called home to Uncle James and Aunt Celia once a week, usually on Saturday nights. Aunt Celia, child of the sixties, thought I was looking for something. Uncle James thought I was nuts, but was far too polite to say it out loud. I couldn’t blame him: we Fisher men have a history of losing our minds over women.

Tonight, I was out looking for something: a new car battery or a kind stranger willing to give me a jump start. My wallet would have preferred a good Samaritan, but it would survive an auto parts store. I had spent six weeks in August and September working at a Renaissance Fair outside Atlanta and made surprisingly good money at it. Apparently, my unkempt brown mane made me look like a young Merlin. I was scared I just resembled a young Charles Manson.

Up ahead, the black, white, and grey of the evening forest gave way to the electric red of a roadside sign. I was too far away to make out what it said, but the presence of color was comforting. Nothing was going bump in the night, no phantasmal chains were clanking, but I was not alone in the dark woods all the same.

“We’re not alone, you mean. You’re never alone,”
my internal voice piped in.

“Try not to remind me. Any ideas what it could be? It doesn’t feel fairy-esque.”

“Not a clue. But are you sure it’s out in the woods?”

“What do you mean?”

“The light from the sign. A creepy scarlet like that…on a moonless night. I bet it paints everything under it in shades of blood.”

“Quit it. The moon’s in the first quarter tonight. Besides, light means electricity and electricity means people.”

“Light usually does mean people. That’s why bugs are drawn to it. It’s where the food is at.”

I pushed him down, mentally shoving a cherry red ball gag into the hidden alcove of my upper right brain cavity. It silenced him, but I couldn’t help dwelling on the thought. I was close enough to see that the billboard was for the gas station, now, but…If I had been a hungry nocturnal predator of the forest, I might have followed the red beacon in hopes of a two-legged meal.

3

U
nder the fluorescent lighting of the convenience store, with honky-tonk music drifting in from across the street, it was hard to maintain such morbid fantasies. Jubilantly colored displays of celebrities and cartoon characters hawking sugary snacks dominated one corner. Like thousands of other such stores, there was a snack aisle, a hygiene-slash-travel product aisle, and an automotive repair aisle. The far wall past those three rows was given over to quietly humming refrigerated cases. I had been in this same store a million times before, but never at that exact location.

I hadn’t realized how hungry I was until I walked down the candy aisle. Almost without thought, I grabbed a king size Snickers bar. I waved it over my head and called out to no one in particular, “Don’t worry, I’m paying for this.” I promptly tore into it before I had even reached the end of the shelves. Nothing like a good cry and a long hike to get the stomach growling.

Past the engine cleaners, I found a box that looked promising: a portable jump-start kit. I studied the back of the box to see if it needed to be charged ahead of time. The one in my hand claimed to work straight out of the box. The price tag made me wince, especially when I remembered that I’d still likely need to replace the battery in the next couple of days. Still, any port in a storm, and I was adrift in a virtual hurricane. I finished my candy bar and tucked the box under my arm.

Caffeine and sugar would help on the walk back, so I took a tour of the coolers. A Dr. Pepper called out to me behind frosted glass, but I jerked my hand back upon contact with the fridge handle. The chrome was frozen to the touch, so cold that I left a good sized skin sample. I stared at it curiously for a long moment before deciding that coffee might be better suited for an October night anyway. The pot looked suspicious and I was certain this same java had been sitting here, slowly charcoaling, when I drove past on my way down to the lake several hours prior. I dumped one, and then another, Irish cream packets into a Styrofoam cup before pouring the dark brew on top. The cream told me a lot about my mood. I always take my coffee black unless I’m scared or angry. I thought I was coming out of my funk, but my drinking habits suggested my subconscious was still deep in the mire.

“Mmph mmmrr pphhmmm.”

“Stop struggling. I’m not letting you back out so you can mock me.”

I grabbed a second Snickers and headed for the register. I didn’t realize, until after I unloaded everything on to the counter, that no clerk was in attendance.

“Hello? I’m ready to check out.”

The only answer was silence. The longer I waited, the more certain I became that the attendant was lying on the other side of the counter in a pool of his own blood. Had I missed an armed robbery by mere minutes? I shook off the paranoia and called out again.

“Mmmph Grrmmt.”

Leaving my prizes by the register, I stepped back through the front door. There was a battered old truck parked off to one side. Across the street, six or seven cars were gathered around the bar. The muffled sound of Hank Junior coming out of it was a welcome relief to the cold quiet of the gas station. I glanced over the door, hoping to see a “Be Back Soon” or, in more regionally appropriate vernacular, “Getting a Beer, Hold Your Horses” note. No such sign was in evidence. I slipped back inside.

“Hello?”

I didn’t want to peek behind the counter, but as the seconds of emptiness stretched into minutes, I saw no other choice. The gray and white linoleum tile was mercifully empty. No dying store clerk, no pools of blood, no signs of struggle or violence.

“Rrmmh Mmmph Mrmm.”

So where was he? I knew this was the Bible Belt, where people were generally trusted to do the right thing. But I’d been in here for at least fifteen minutes and hadn’t seen a soul. If I had a buddy and a moving van, I could have looted the entire store. I mentally added up my purchases, pulled three twenties from my wallet and weighted them down by the beef jerky jar next to the cash box. I thought about writing a note, when I noticed the door to the back room.

I slowly walked over to it, past the row of whispering coolers. The machines glared out at me with their mechanical blue light. The air was colder here, forcing goosebumps to the surface. When I knocked on the door, the wood underneath felt like ice. On instinct, I took a deep breath and pulled my aura in, picturing it as a thin white shell-skin stretched tight around me. It was the first spell I had ever learned, a defensive magic so familiar I could use it on reflex. As spells go, it was little more than a token gesture of protection, but I felt better afterwards anyway. My confidence restored, I knocked again, noticing the cold did not bother me as much.

“Hello? Anybody back there?”

When no response came, I tried the handle. The door swung in six inches before stopping against something hard. My breath came out as a solid white fog as the chilled air rushed back from the opening. What I did next should prove how spectacularly short-lived I would be in a horror movie: I squeezed my head through the opening to see what was blocking the door. Any Hollywood ax murderer worth his grinding stone would have pounced at that point.

There was no ax murderer in evidence…just the body of the attendant wedged in the corner between door and wall. His skin and clothing were covered in a hoary white frost, his blue lips pulled apart in a soundless, frozen scream. I’m not an expert in anatomy, but I think the gaping hole in his chest was right where his heart used to be.

4

I
stood behind the counter, eyes locked on that treacherous store room door. I didn’t need a mirror to know how pale my skin was. No doubt I looked like a zombie clerk extra from a Night of the Living Dead remake. I knew what I needed to do, but I couldn’t quite force myself to start moving.

“Mmph…ptui. I tried to tell you it was too damn cold back there.”

“What’s the temperature mean? How did he freeze to death in the store’s back room?”

“First, he didn’t freeze to death. His heart was ripped from his chest AND he froze to death. From the looks of it, either one could have killed him. Second, store that formula away for later use: Cold equals bad, very bad. Right now, we’ve got more important things to worry about.”

“Yeah, I know.”

The smart money was on wiping down any surface I touched, taking the stuff I came for, and getting back to Dorothy ASAP. The cops rarely like occupations that can be summed up as aspiring vagrant. My alibi for the last day was less than stellar. I could imagine the interrogation now:

Cop: Mr. Fisher, where were you when he was killed?

Me: Sitting under a tree by the lake. Or maybe I was walking from my car to the murder scene.

Cop: Can anybody verify that?

Me: Well, there’s a nice oak tree, but…do you have anyone on staff that speaks Plant?

The best I could hope for was an insanity plea. If I was lucky, whatever it was about me that fouled up smart phones and laptops had royally screwed up the store’s surveillance system. If I hurried, I could be two states away before sunrise.

There’s a lot of words that could be used to describe me: College dropout, weirdo loner, polyglot, wizard-wannabe. Unfortunately, lucky and amoral were not among them. The security system was working. Worse, I couldn’t force myself to walk away from this. There was a chance I'd seen or heard something that might help the police catch the sicko who did this.

“If you pick up the phone to call 911, you’ll regret it,” my annoying inner voice warned.

“I don’t have a choice. If I don’t call the cops, it’ll just make me look guilty.”

“Colin, you really don’t want to touch that phone.”

I hesitated, but I lifted it from its cradle anyway. It was a land-line and as old as I was. No dial tone. I tried hitting 9 to see if that would let me call out. Still no dial tone, but the line wasn’t dead silence either.

“Hello?”

There was no answer, but the background noise got louder. It sounded like heavy breathing…no, heavy panting, like a Saint Bernard after a long sprint. My eyes returned to the back door, still slightly ajar. I was suddenly wondering whether the man’s heart was torn out or eaten out by a giant canine-esque maw.

“Whoever this is, you don’t want to screw with me.” I could only hope I didn’t sound as scared as I was. “I know magic.” I meant to say I had a gun, but the other slipped out before my brain-to-mouth editor could get a handle on it.

The panting stopped and for a moment the line was blessedly silent. A terrible voice spoke, a rumbling stone-edged tongue uttering words full of strange clicks and guttural stops. It growled its way through four or five alien sentences before falling back into silence. I slammed the phone back into its cradle.