Page 60 of Jack Frost
Auxesia leans over me. "A slow death, granted." She flicks at my chest, and something crumbles away, something charred that used to be me.
A shadow passes over Auxesia's glowing features—a hint of regret? Or maybe it's just the play of the flames and smoke over her skin.
"It had to be done," she says. With a shower of sparks, she disappears, and I am left with only pain.
The pain is knives stabbed into every square inch of my flesh, flexing and tearing when I move. But in the worst places, there is no pain, because the nerves have burned away.
I am dying. My stomach is a smoking wreck, and my chest—I know my breasts are gone, and I suspect my ribs are exposed. My fingers are crumbling into charcoal.
My lungs spasm and flutter, struggling to suck in air.
I can't call for Jack. But when I turn my head, slowly and painfully, I see him foggily through my smoke-inflamed eyes.
He is charred black all over, except where angry red peeks through. A faint mist of blue is seeping from him, leaking into the surrounding air.
He's dying. Fading.
Now that Auxesia is gone, ice wraiths are beginning to gather around Jack. I don't know what mystical sense enables them to know that he's injured and dying, but they keep coming by twos and threes until there are at least two dozen of them quivering helplessly in the air around him, mewling and mourning.
If Death were a reaper, he would be leaning over me now, skeletal hand outstretched to claim my soul. I could give in and yield it—endure through the last moments of agony and then sink into nothing. Part of me wonders what lies beyond the brink of death, if anything. I have always wondered, and now is my chance to actually know. It's enticing to the artist in me, though my scientific half keeps muttering that there's nothing Beyond, nothing, nothing—I will simply dissipate, an echo in the universe, while my body decays and returns to the earth. Maybe a tree will grow from the ground fertilized by my remains.
My thoughts are muddling, growing slow and sluggish as my ruined lungs yield the fight.
No.
No, I have to hold onto something—there's a way out of this—what did Jack say? He was nearly dead when Kheima transformed him. You have to be nearly dead for it to work. And then you call on the gods, or whatever supernatural beings happen to be nearby...
I inhale, razors and smoke, and I rasp out words. "Hey! Wraiths—frost fairies—over here."
A few of them whirl and sweep toward me eagerly. I don't think they realized I was still alive. Their love for Jack kept them from noticing my existence at all.
One of the wraiths lays a tiny frozen hand against my cheek. Another trails icy fingers along my temple, crying softly.
"I need more of you," I gasp. "A lot more. I call on the gods—I yield myself to their will and their—their service. I—damn it, there are no rules anymore, okay? I don't know the ritual, and I don't know Greek or Latin, so if there's a magical spell, I can't say it." My ravaged torso heaves; every phrase is a burden, and acid tears stream from my eyes, stinging my raw skin.
I have always made big, impulsive decisions. Like my decision to apply for the Antarctic expedition, and my choice to stay behind and keep filming when my team left. I'm making my biggest and most impulsive decision to date, and yet it doesn't feel far-fetched or wild at all. It feels like the natural progression of who I am, and who I want to be.
This is my darkest moment. Impossible to come out of it unchanged. But I will crawl, and I will rise, and I willbecome.
"Hear me, ice wraiths—gods, whatever is listening." My voice carries the strength of the end, of desperation. "I accept the burden. I will be the champion you need. Only save me, so I can save him."
All the ice wraiths are turning toward me now, drawn by my voice. They surround me, a cloud of azure faces and ghostly limbs. One moves forward, and I recognize it as one of the first wraiths I met, on the night I went running. The creature looks into my eyes, and wordlessly we make the bargain.
The wraith dives into my chest—I feel the shock of cold down to my very spine. A ripple of tinkling music races around the circled wraiths; they are singing, high and soft and full of hope.
Another approaches me, sinking into my body, yielding its life-force to me. And another.
They are not dying for me. They are giving themselves to a greater cause, becoming part of a larger whole. Yielding their power so I can save the man we all love, so he and I can save the world.
I close my aching eyes, but the faint, faraway singing continues. A fresh influx of sparkling cold washes through my body every time another wraith merges with me. Over and over it happens, until I lose count of how many of them are now a part of me.
The cold inside me is like the still, frozen heart of the Antarctic waters. It is the majestic white of icebergs and the black quiet of space. It is the wind across moors and the autumn breeze in city streets; it is snow on the tundra and sleet in the mountains. It salves the scorched parts of my body, flowing into my muscles and expanding them, reconnecting severed tendons and tissues, spreading cold fresh skin over gaping wounds.
My eyes flick open and I sit up, half-sobbing, spreading my newly formed fingers across my stomach.
I'm whole.
And I'm new.
