Page 59 of Jack Frost
"I don't know. But we need to leave before she—"
Suddenly the grill explodes in a tower of flame. The cook jumps back with a scream, his hand smoking. Ms. Shara seizes his wrist and plunges his hand into a pitcher of ice water.
"Time to go." Jack slaps some cash onto the table and hustles me from the booth and out the door. He walks fast, away from the restaurant and into the empty lot next door, pulling me along. We push through a thin belt of trees. When I cast a look over my shoulder, Auxesia is stalking steadily behind us, just a few yards away.
"Jack!" His grip on my arm is beginning to hurt. "Let go."
"Sorry." He releases me. "You need to run, Emery. Run as fast as you can."
"And leave you here with her? No way. She looks like—" I glance over my shoulder again. "She looks murderous, Jack."
"Yeah. She's probably here to kill me, and you too. Especially you."
"Because I give you more power."
"Exactly. In her mind, anything that gives me an advantage must be destroyed." He grips my upper arms. "I'll fight her. You have to run, now. Don't stay with me out of some stupid loyalty, okay? One of us should survive."
"If she kills you, the whole world is toast anyway," I tell him. "Jack, I need to stay. I need to."
Before he can reply, walls of flame spring up around us. Jack hisses angrily and blasts a hole in the fire with a stream of sleet. He conjures an icy chain with a wicked blue blade at one end and twirls it over his head. When it snakes out, it catches Auxesia in the shoulder.
She screeches, hurling bullets of fire at us. I can't help it—I squeal with terror and crouch down, but Jack intercepts the attack with a wall of ice. His jaw is locked, mouth grim and eyes burning blue. An icy wind flows around him, lifting his hair and whipping his clothes against his body. Again he hurls the chain, but Auxesia has conjured a pair of flaming hooked knives, and she knocks the incoming blade aside.
"Let me do this, Jack," she calls. "Give her to me, and I'll spare you a little longer."
"No!" he yells back. The chain stiffens into a spear that sings through the air, slicing Auxesia's wall of fire and impaling her through the stomach. The spear melts the next second, but she roars with pain and anger. The fire barrier thickens and grows until I can't see her anymore—she could be anywhere. And now the circle of flame is tightening.
"We need to spiral," Jack says. "Hold on to me."
But a fireball sails into the circle just then, forcing us to jump apart to avoid it. I land near the wall of flame, and the fireball surges into a towering column, spreading and separating me from Jack.
He roars my name, sending out a blast of furious, frigid air that quenches every bit of the flame and turns the entire field to slick ice. Ice crawls up the branches of the tree belt we passed through, glazing every twig.
Auxesia is in her flaming inhuman form now, and the ice melts beneath her feet. Her fire lowered for a second when Jack's blast rushed over her, but it returns full-force within seconds. With a stamp of her foot, she drives a line of flame between me and Jack again.
"You can't keep this up," she says. "Give in, Jack. Our dance is at an end. The time of Earth as you knew it has ended. If you yield, I will make your deaths quick."
"That's such a cliché villain thing to say," I scream at her. I'm shaking with terror, but I'm mad, too. "A quick death is a shitty incentive."
"You'd prefer a slow death then? Noted." Auxesia forms a fireball and flings it at me.
Jack throws a spinning disc of ice, and the fireball strikes it, hissing into steam. For the next few minutes I can barely see what's happening as the two elementals battle in a rapid series of attacks and defensive moves. A tornado of Auxesia's fire is sliced apart by Jack's frosty blades. Ice bombs dissolve against a sheet of flame. A gale of knife-like sleet is forced back by a wave of fiery air. Walls of ice and runners of flame race along the ground, chasing each other, cutting each other off, never quite touching me.
There's a hideous beauty in the way they dance—Jack's lean agility and Auxesia's fierce grace. They blast into the air, hurling ice and fire, and I cover my head against the aftermath, the ice pellets and sparks raining down around me.
I have felt helplessness like this before, and I hate it. My fury and fear merge into a swelling storm inside me, but I have nothing to contribute to this fight—nothing to throw, no way to reach Auxesia. I couldn't even touch her without burning myself. I'm totally dependent on Jack to save me. As much as I detest guns, I wish I had one right now. Maybe a well-placed bullet would take down the fire bitch attacking my boyfriend.
A violent blaze of heat crackles above me, like a small sun has exploded in the sky. Something crashes to the ground a dozen feet from me. A pale figure streaming smoke. His muscles surge as he tries to rise—his blue eyes lock desperately with mine—and then he's swallowed up in the orange fire streaming from Auxesia's palms as she descends. She's spraying him with incessant flame, torching him. His screams splinter my brain.
I don't care about myself anymore—I lunge for Auxesia, catching her in a full-body tackle, smashing her face-first into the ground.
My flesh sizzles and ignites. Flames gnaw my stomach, my chest, my neck, and I'm shrieking with the agony of it, with the pain slicing jagged along my spine, into my brain. Auxesia throws me off, and I roll desperately, crushing the flames—but the agony doesn't stop. I lie on my back, rigid and gagging for air.
There's a flash of icy blue, and then a roar of continuous flame.
Jack isn't screaming anymore.
I try to whisper his name but my jaw is fixed wide as my insides scream voicelessly for oxygen.
