Page 4 of Jack Frost
Gingerly I test it again.
It yields to my touch, and with a little more pressure, the door opens.
The room beyond is blue andbreathing. The azure light inside swells and ebbs like a slow, steady heartbeat. It's a small space with a floor swathed in glittering white—and this time it's actual fabric, not snow or ice. In the center is a faceted cut-glass bedframe hung with midnight-blue curtains.
I'm so far beyond skepticism now. I exist as a flickering, fading core of curiosity—it's the only thing I have energy for, the only motivation keeping me upright.
I move clumsily forward—soggy and chilled, my hair sweat-glued to my skull under my cap and hood. With my numb fingers, I part the curtains.
The person in the bed isn't a fairytale ice queen.
It's worse, much worse.
A man.
He is only visible from the neck up. The rest of him is coated with teal-colored ice scattered with a delicate design of snowflakes. The ice looks as if it has grown over his body, coating his limbs, spreading across the bed and down to the floor, where it climbs partially up the wall, spiking outward in glittering crystals.
What I can see of him is striking, to say the least. Harsh cheekbones. Savagely arched eyebrows, coal-black in contrast to the snowy hair swept back from his forehead. His skin is so smooth he could model for moisturizer. And despite the cutting edges and fierce lines of his face, his mouth is surprisingly wide and soft. A mouth that likes to smile, maybe.
Oh god. This is ridiculous.
Logic, Emery. The freaking scientific method. I clutch the concept with all the fading strength my mind possesses.
Time for some observation. He looks real enough, but—does he feel real? I strip off one glove and reach out, wincing, until my finger grazes his cheek. I feel nothing, of course, because my hands are practically frozen. I place three fingertips in my mouth until they start to prickle painfully, blood flow returning in an agonizing trickle.
The next time I touch him, I can feel his skin—cold yet malleable, smooth and almost silky. I bend lower, inhaling. Despite my chilled nostrils, I can smell him—a sharp, clean scent that reminds me of wind over the ocean, and of peppermint leaves.
Three senses out of the five tell me he's real. I have a lot of empirical evidence staring me in the face right now. But I also just whisked along an ice slide into the bowels of Antarctica, so it's quite possible I'm not myself at the moment. I could be experiencing a very vivid hallucination. Maybe I did hit my head after all, or maybe exhaustion is making me see things... like beautiful men sleeping in castles of ice... oh god...
Maybe I'm actually dead, and this is some weird afterlife dreamscape. Except I don't believe in an afterlife—at least, I claim that I don't. As much as I try to, I can't convince myself that after death we justend, and that's it. I mean, how depressing would that be, especially for people who had terrible lives?
An afterlife doesn't make sense, though, because that would require belief in supernatural entities or existence, and I can't make that compute either. Not even with this guy lying an arm's length from me, cocooned in ice like freaking Captain America.
If he is real...
If...
Then he's the only person who might be able to help me. My only chance to get out of here, to survive and get back to my team. Alien, superhero, magical ice being, dream or delusion—whatever he is, I need him to wake up.
"Hey." My voice cracks, scraped raw from the cold and wind. No wonder my laugh sounded so weird. "Hey—dude—guy—you there—" I cringe because my rasping tones sound just like my mother, an avid smoker who has never considered quitting. She tried to get me hooked on cigarettes too, but I was viciously determined never to do anything she'd done. I wouldn't even put one between my lips.
My hoarse voice conjures her in my head so vividly I can almost smell the reek of stale smoke and booze that always envelops her.
Shuddering away the memory, I speak louder. "Yo, ice guy! Wake up! I need your help."
Light surges through the ice that covers him and the walls that surround him—and then it fades again. It pulses steady and unchanged, even when I shout and flick his cheek with my finger.
Okay, this guy's not waking up. He's in a sleep as deep as any fairytale slumber.
The fleeting thought of fairytales wakes an idea in my brain.
My breath had an effect on the door—I'm not sure why—but maybe it would have a similar effect on him.
Kissing a stranger while they are sleeping wouldn't be my first choice, but in cases of magical slumber, it's totally justified. My college roommate used to go on forever about the lack of consent when Sleeping Beauty was kissed in the animated movie; but it never bothered me. The prince could either give her a gentle, chaste kiss, or leave everyone asleep for a hundred years, so yeah—the choice was kind of obvious.
Besides, I don't really have to kiss this guy. I just have to breathe on him.
Pulling my scarf out of the way, I lean forward. My head turns weirdly dizzy, and for a second I think I'm going to collapse on top of him. I'm rapidly approaching my body's final limits. I release a gasp, edged with a whimper of panic, over the man's lips.
