Gathering Frost (Once Upon A Curse Book 1) (14 page)

I roll my eyes. "Because boys always think they can beat me, and I always prove them wrong. Now put me down, or—"

"Or what?" His tone is light, musical, and full of different chimes.

Below me, the grass starts to thin. Dirt pokes through, becoming thicker, until even those disappear to what looks like wooden slabs, striped in the moonlight.

"Asher," I warn.

To either side of the planks rests velvet black, shimmering just slightly from the stars.

"What?" he asks, far too innocent.

"Don't you dare." 

"Well, when you put it like that…" He stops, shifts my weight, only pretending to set me down. His hands have inched up to my waist, gripping my hipbones.

"Ash—" But the word disappears into a scream as I'm flung airborne with a strength I didn’t realize his arms possessed. The water prickles my skin, ice-cold, as I crash against the surface, sinking deep before my arms and legs jump into action, swimming for air.

I take a deep gulp before I shriek, "Asher, you're dead!" My arms sliver through the liquid, back to the dock where I pull myself up and out, back to the pier. My eyes search through the darkness, needing to readjust after my sink into ebony, and I can't find him.

Alert, I walk back to the shore.

Movement flashes on my left and I turn, mouth dropping as Asher swings by me, zipping through the air on a rope, releasing at the peak to drop with a loud splash into the lake.

"What?" I'm laughing. I can't help it, my anger has disappeared, replaced with a bubbly joy.

He surfaces with an excited shout. "Come on, your turn. I said we were going to have some fun tonight."

I nod, forgetting he can't see, and catch the swinging rope in my hand. The texture is coarse against my skin, and I follow the line until I can make out the large knot tied at the bottom, an anchor for my feet.

"Just go for it," Asher calls from the darkness, sensing my hesitation. It's hard for me to let go, but knowing he waits to catch me, I give in.

Stepping back slowly, I go as far as the rope allows. Taking a deep breath, I jump, released from the ground, hands burning as they grip the twine and my feet struggle to locate the knot.

Secure, I rush toward the ground, worried that the rope will snap, but it doesn't. My body arches up, swings higher, and just as a weightlessness takes hold, I let go, soaring farther, laughter caught by the wind, and then I drop below the surface.

Hands snake around my waist under the water, hot despite the chill, and when I emerge, Asher waits for me, face close so our noses are less than an inch away from touching.

Our eyes meet and time stops. My heart stops beating. My mind instantly clears. All I see is him, us, in this moment. This perfect moment. Fleeting as it may be, it's ours, and no one, not even the queen, can take it away. The urgency I felt before returns, boils my blood, makes my skin buzz. I want to hold on to this moment forever, I don’t want it to end.

My hands rise to his cheeks, and I pull his face to mine, closing the gap until our lips crush together, hungry. I drink him in, never satisfied, aching for more.

We sink below the surface, arms entangled. My legs wrapped around his waist, and all I can think is that if this is a dream, I don't ever want to wake up.

The next morning, I jolt from my slumber, heart in my throat, fighting the urge to scream.

The queen.

She is watching me. Icy blue eyes haunt my dreams, bare my soul, sift through my thoughts as though they belong to her. I try to still my beating heart, to calm my pulse, but it is of no use.

"Jade?"

I yelp, stomach lunging into my throat, but it is just Asher. His eyes are still half closed in sleep, his voice is airy. Slowly, he adjusts on the bed, hand searching for mine. I can’t tell if he is asleep or awake, but I move my fingers so they find his.

As our skin touches, memories shake the nightmare away, and I relive the lake. The cool water that almost sizzled against our flaming skin. I remember coming back to my room afterward, talking, kissing. We fell asleep on top of the covers and still in our clothes. The room smells like moss, as though we brought the outdoors inside, and now that I am not within Asher's embrace, my skin feels cool in clothes that are still damp.

I hug myself, fighting shivers that are sure to come. I've grown unused to the chill, but now the sensation is flooding back.

Was it just a nightmare?

Or did the queen visit me in my sleep?

I've never had a nightmare before, not that I can remember, but I decide that is what it must have been. Neurosis. A scare. I push the queen from my mind, determined to leave her behind.

Asher adjusts again, sinking the bed with our weight, and his eyes begin to blink open. I watch as they clear. When they recognize my features, his entire face relaxes, glows.

"Morning," I mutter, soft.

"Morning," he whispers. But then his body tenses, eyes going wide. "Morning?"

"I think." I shrug. The artificial lights are still difficult for me to read, but my body feels rested, as though hours have passed and the night is long behind us.

Asher leaps from the bed in one long bound.

"I'll be back in ten minutes, okay?"

He leaves before I can gather a response, zipping from my room and closing the door behind him.

Mute, I slide from the bed, still confused. But my skin itches against the wet clothes, scratching raw, so I change into soft worn jeans and a large sweater. By the time I have curled my hair into an unruly bun, Asher is back.

"Is everything okay?" I ask, opening the door to greet a far more composed prince.

"Yeah, we're just late." He grabs my hand and our fingers entwine, naturally.

"For what?"

"To meet General Willis." Asher grins at my reaction. "He wants to talk to you, to show you some things."

A general of the rebellion wants to speak with me? My mouth goes dry. I should have expected this, seen it coming. I am, after all, a valuable prisoner. But still. Weeks ago, I yearned to put a knife in this man's chest. Now, I want to impress him.

We take a few long corridors, ones I am sure I have not yet traversed, until we reach a large metal door sealed with a circular wheel. One tug, and the door swings open easily, proving just how safe the rebels feel in their underground haven. The locks aren't even being used.

But I forget that thought quickly as my eyes take in the scene before me. The room is blinking, small bulbs turn on and off, switchboards display lines that disappear and reappear each second. A big screen illuminates a map, unlike any I have beheld in the books I've studied. Men and women sit with large headpieces encasing their ears, typing on keyboards that I have only before seen coated in dust. 

I now know what most of the solar electricity they gather is used for. The gadgets are beyond me, and I do not understand their uses, but I know without a doubt that the purpose of this room is defense.

"Asher," a deep voice booms.

A large man walks forward, taller than me, taller even than the commander. His clothes are spotted different shades of green, and the word
Willis
is stitched onto his chest. The general.

"Jade, I assume?" He extends his hand and I take it, gripping hard. The skin around his eyes is wrinkled, his back hunches just slightly. Though he is imposing, his prime years have come and gone already.

"General Willis." I nod, unsure of what else to say.

"Jade, welcome to the northeastern command center. Ground zero in the fight against Queen Deirdre, one of the many freedom fighter bases around the world."

Years of training come flooding back to my system, and I straighten my stance, bringing my feet together and elongating my spine until I am as tall as I can be. My voice grows even, controlled. "Happy to be here, sir."

"Are you?"

He leans in, peering deep into my eyes, and I swallow. This man does not trust me. So I glance around, noticing other stares, some blatant, some peripheral, and I understand that no one in the room trusts me either. I am still the enemy in here.

"I am," I respond, no hint of hurt in my words, "and I would like to help in whatever way I can."

The corner of his lip twitches. "Good."

Putting a hand at the small of my back, he leads me around the desks toward the front of the room where a map of Kardenia glows green on a tabletop. The wall, the old city, the broken down skyscrapers, the castle. Everything is outlined there, but immediately I also notice that parts of it are wrong.

I open my mouth, but close it, waiting for orders.

"Go on," he drawls, and I meet his gaze only to see amusement on his features, as though my attempt at control entertains him.

"It's nothing." I bite my lip, then breathe. "It's just the layout of the wall is not correct. Most of Kardenia is outlined well, and the old city too, but the wall…" I shake my head, leaning over the map, using my fingers to show him the differences. "The south section is where I normally work, and it's about a hundred yards lower than where you've placed it. These streets here fill out into dead ends, and then we have practice grounds on the inner loop of the wall, and the entrance gate has been moved closer to the west side of the city."

"Drew, are you recording all of this?"

I follow the general's eyes to a man a few feet to the left of me, hunched over his computer and furiously typing. A nod is his only response and then a few moments later the screen blinks and my changes have been implemented.

"Can I?" I pause, waiting until the general gives me permission, "Can I ask how you knew all of this already?"

"Asher," General Willis tells me, looking over our shoulders to where Asher waits patiently by the door, not stepping too far into the room, but watching us. He grins as our gazes meet. A thrill travels up my back, but I quickly turn to the map as the heat reaches my cheeks. "When he first arrived as a boy, he told us everything he could remember about his former home. We cross-matched his descriptions against old maps of New York. Pretty good, right?"

I smirk my consent, and then continue talking about Kardenia, describing the layout of the streets, different buildings that have been changed since they last gathered information. The northern side is all farmland, empty and open, a difficult place to hide.  So we move onto the old city, and I give them the exact locations of our mines, which streets we have cleared out and will be the easiest to traverse, and also the areas we know are too fragile to walk upon.

My stomach is completely at ease as I give the guard's secrets away, as I betray everyone from my former life, as I work against the queen. In fact, my body relaxes the more I speak.

Betrayal, it seems, comes naturally to me.

But I throw that thought aside, sparing a glance at Asher who watches me with a satisfied expression, in a way that makes me think he might almost be proud.

"That's everything I can think of." I lean back, hands at my waist, scanning my brain for any other morsel of information. But I come up blank.

A beefy hand lands on my shoulder. "That was great," the general tells me. And I believe him. Though he might seem like the commander, this man doles out praises I've never heard back home. Genuine. Kind. As I look around, I realize he is followed out of respect. A feeling I don't quite understand.

Scanning the room, I also sense that I've been dismissed. The general has turned away from me, discussing a plan I am not privy to, and the room surges back into motion. The rebels are done listening to me talk.

I'm not.

I crave more information. An entire world is depicted on the screen before me, and I want to know what waits for us out there. What my freedom might really mean. My mind wanders to my paintings, to the gardens of France, the canals of Venice, the rainforest of the Amazon. Are they still there?

"Can we ever go back?" I ask aloud, unintentionally.

"No, Jade." Is the general's soft reply. Maybe he hadn't dismissed me after all.

He steps closer, following my stare to the large map flashing on the front wall, to a world forever changed. The continents look different, are narrow where they should be wide, long where they should be short. Islands sprout in oceans that were once vast.

A red dot depicts our location, and directly north of it is a large hazy circle where no details can be seen. All around the world, more misty circles interrupt clean shorelines, and I know that is the magic. The electric instruments in this room cannot penetrate the aura it holds, so those areas are menacingly vacant, are unknown.

"No one really knows why or how the merge happened. Cindy over there," he says, pointing to a woman scrawling on paper, bent over her desk, "is our resident physicist. Ask her, and she'll bore you to death with string theory, quantum mechanics, long words none of us normal people understands. But the best guess we have is that the magic world was running parallel to our own—the animals are similar, the plant life, the atmosphere. Then somehow, one of us got pushed off course, and boom," he exclaims, slapping his hands together, loud enough to shock a few people around us, "hello earthquake, hello two worlds becoming one."

"And they can't be separated?"

He shakes his head.

"Then why fight?"

"Why not?" He shrugs. "We can't change the past, but we can shape the future. Asher!"

The shout catches me off guard, and I jolt. But Asher walks over now that he's been called. His eyes too are on the map, and I realize that he still isn't completely comfortable in this room either.

"Sir?" He inquires, and I bite down a laugh, listening to Asher act so formal.

"Tell Jade what you told us all those years ago."

His eyes darken, retreating into his memories. "My world wasn't always the way it is now. The magic used to live in the sky and the earth, providing little miracles to the populace in ways unseen. It was not harnessed for individual use, but all of that changed hundreds of years ago. A king found a way to absorb the magic, to contain it within his body and use it for his own desires. Other monarchs discovered this and did the same, until all of the magic in our world was bottled up in royal families."

Asher pauses, glancing at me and wetting his lips, hesitant. He is about to reveal a secret he does not wish me to know, one of the few he has been hiding.

"But the magic came with consequences the royals did not realize, with curses laid down upon generations of their families, and the power was addictive. In order to preserve their bloodlines and their reigns, the magic became transferable only to a first-born heir. If a monarch dies without an heir, the magic is released back into the wilds."

I don't understand. I'm grasping at air, hating how it flows through my fingers, unattainable. I know Asher has just revealed a truth he had been concealing, I know because he will not look at me, won't meet my gaze. Instead, his face peers only at the blinking map before us, and I wonder what world he sees.

"So," the general finishes for him, "all we need to do is kill the queen and voila, the magic is released and hopefully everything goes back to normal. No more humans under her thrall. No more anti-electricity bubble. Almost like old Earth again."

"Kill the queen…" I say slowly trailing off. Kill the queen and the magic is released. But that's not right. Not quite. "But—"

I stop sharply as fingers grip my hand, squeezing tightly, pleading. My heart stops. I turn slowly, meeting Asher's strangled gaze.