Page 40 of Jack Frost
"But you've never been willing to yield your individual comfort for the good of all. The only thing humans care about is themselves."
"Not all—"
"Not all! Notall!" She spits a glob of fiery saliva onto the grass. To my relief, it dies out after a brief surge of flame—there's enough rock and earth around to prevent its spread. "I am sick of words. Sick of exceptions and excuses. I will havechange, expansive and entire, and I will have it now."
A glimmer of blue light behind Auxesia catches my eye. Three of the ice wraiths have returned, their frosty garments tattered and smoking. Their fragile ice-blue faces are infinitely sad. Despite the way I shouted at them, they're coming to me for companionship and comfort—they don't seem to notice Auxesia standing there in human form.
Until she flares into flame again and grips two of them by their necks as they pass by.
The frost fairies scream for me, reaching out thin icicle-fingers, but Auxesia squeezes, and they burst into blue mist before I can voice a protest, before I can beg her for their lives.
The third wraith darts over to me, whimpering.
"Get Jack," I hiss to the wraith. "Go."
The creature shoots away into the smoky night.
"Clever girl," snarls Auxesia. "Pretending to care, to understand. All you want is your own agenda, your own pleasure. Have you let the frost-god put his icicle inside you yet? Have you convinced yourself that he cares for you? Trust me, little human, he has had dozens of others before you. He grows bored easily. Not much of an attention span, that one, once he's gotten what he wants."
"It's different with me," I whisper.
"Is that what you tell yourself?" Auxesia laughs. "No matter. You're dead anyway. I can't have you hanging around the boy, giving him hope."
She forms a globe of flame in her hands again. Maybe I can dodge it, but the next one, and the next? No way.
Yeah, I'm going to die.
Auxesia draws back her arm and hurls the fireball.
I weave my upper body aside, barely avoiding it. The skin of my shoulder feels raw and hot where the blaze shot past me.
Auxesia growls with displeasure and sends a flurry of sparks from her fingers, lighting the twiggy shrubs nearby and the dry grass at my feet. She molds a second fireball, winds up, and throws the streaking comet straight for my chest.
And then Jack is there, gliding between us, skating along an icy pathway that unrolls before him like a silver carpet. He slams a shield of solid ice against the oncoming fireball, and both the missile and the shield explode into shards and steam.
Icicles, sharp as death, shoot from Jack's arms and his chest and his hands, streaking toward Auxesia—it's terrifying, because I didn't know he could do that and my whole body is shaking, vibrating with the dread certainty that I almostdied.
Auxesia blasts several of Jack's icicles into steam, but two of them shear through her body, leaving dark smoking holes. With a scream, she erupts into violent flame. She's a molten figure now, a shrieking inhuman torch streaming smoke. She melts his walls of ice as fast as he can throw them up against her onslaught. Jack circles her, flinging discs of ice with jagged edges, one after another, almost faster than sight. Most of them hiss into nothing as they strike, but one slices the side of her neck, and blood pours from her like lava.
Auxesia claps her blazing hand to the wound, and with the other hand she unfurls a twisting whip of fire that snakes through the acrid air toward me. I'm already coughing and singed, struggling to extract oxygen from the smoky air; I see the whip coming, and all I can do is dive for the ground and roll—
I roll right off the cliff.
Air whips around me and my guts turn weightless while I plunge down, down—I have a brief flash of my future self broken and splayed and spattered on the ground below—
A blast of frozen wind, a whirl of snow, and I'm crashing onto the carpeted floor of my apartment, with Jack's cold body a blessed weight on top of mine.
I'm gasping, and he's sobbing, kissing me frantically through his icy tears, feeling my face and my arms as if to reassure himself that I'm all there.
"Jack. Jack." I twist my fingers into his snowy hair, pulling his face up to mine. "I'm okay. You saved me. We're alive."
The agony on his face tears me apart inside. He groans, deep and broken, and only then do I realize that smoke is rolling from his back, and that I can hear the horrible sizzle of flesh.
"Jack!" I slither out from under him, and he collapses face-down.
The frosty wings that he generates for himself are gone—I think he can make another pair, so that's not what worries me. No, what turns my stomach is the blackened, bloodied mess of his flesh, from the nape of his neck to the base of his spine. In two places I can see the white of his vertebrae. When he dove off the ridge to rescue me, Auxesia must have blasted him with fire. She burnt him to the bone.
For a minute I feel like shrieking, panicking, melting into a flood of tears. But I can't. If I panic, if I let myself lose control, Jack will fade and die.
