Frostfire

Page 45

  “Emma is an innocent girl. I won’t let him hurt her, and there is no way I’d stand by and let you face Konstantin alone. ” Ridley reached over, taking my hand in his, and the intensity in his eyes made it hard for me to breathe. “I already told you that I’m in this with you. ”

  TWENTY-ONE

  distance

  The house looked like it came straight from a fairy tale. It was a majestic Victorian mansion surrounded by a wrought-iron fence. Trees surrounded the property, all fresh and green thanks to the early warmth of spring, and a few of them had white and pink blossoms. Amid the bustle of a downtown metropolis, this was a slice of another world.

  Since we planned on sneaking in, we wouldn’t be going in through the front gate, which left us scoping it out near the back. Through the fence and the trees, I could barely see the end of the long, curved driveway, which seemed oddly crowded, with several cars parked in it. I leaned against the fence, trying to get a better look, but Ridley spoke, so I turned back to face him.

  “She’s not home,” Ridley said matter-of-factly.

  He stood a few feet behind me, the collar of his thin jacket popped to ward off the icy chill in the air. The wind came up, ruffling his hair. It was so rare to see his thick, wavy hair unstyled, and I realized that it was getting long.

  After traveling all night to get here and sleeping on the train, neither of us had had a chance to shower yet, and Ridley hadn’t shaved. We’d rented a car, parked it two blocks away from Emma Costar’s house, then walked down to stake it out.

  “Can you sense her?” I asked.

  Ridley stared up at her house with one hand in his pocket, where he kept her lock of hair. His lips were parted just slightly, and his eyes darkened in concentration, then he shook his head once.

  “No,” he said finally, his voice nearly lost in the wind. “But it’s ten in the morning. She should be at school. ”

  “So you’re still not getting anything on her?”

  “Not yet. ” He glanced away from me, watching a car that sped by. “I’m probably not close enough. Or maybe it’s just harder because I’m out of practice. ” He turned back to me, trying to give me a reassuring grin, but it faltered. “I haven’t really done this in four years. ”

  “Well, we should figure out which school she’s in,” I suggested.

  “The file had listed two or three private schools in the area they thought she might be in,” Ridley said. “Why don’t we check into the hotel, then grab something to eat and start making a plan to get to her?”

  “I need to get to a school, so I can get to know her. ”

  “No offense, Bryn, but I don’t think enrollment is gonna be an option this time. ” Ridley smirked at me. “You can pass for seventeen, sure, but I sincerely doubt that anyone would take you for grade nine, and that’s what grade Emma’s in. We’re gonna have to approach this a different way. ”

  “Do you wanna break into her house?” I suggested. “Check out her room, see if we can find anything on her?”

  He seemed to consider this, staring at her house with a furrow in his brow. “No. It just doesn’t … feel right. ”

  “What do you mean? Is this her house?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. ” He sighed. “Maybe. Let’s just get out of here and regroup. ”

  Ridley started to walk backward, away from me and away from the house. I stayed behind a few beats, glancing back at the house. He paused, waiting, so reluctantly I went after him. As we walked the few blocks down to our car, a police car sped by with its lights off, and Ridley regarded it warily.

  We reached our hotel and checked in quickly, and Ridley spoke little. When I tried to press him about what was going on, he just said that he needed to get something to eat, and then hopefully he could think more clearly.

  The diner we stopped at had an expansive organic vegan menu, which was nice and gave Ridley plenty of options to pig out if that would help him. I’d grabbed Emma’s file, and I spread it open on the table beside me, leafing through it as I picked absently at a salad. When I glanced over at him, Ridley had his head bowed over his sandwich, his fingers in his thick hair.

  “I still think it wouldn’t be a bad idea to check out her school,” I said.

  He sighed. “We just need to find her and get out of here. ”

  “What is going on with you?” I closed the file and rested my elbows on the table, so I could lean in closer to him. “You’ve been acting strange ever since we got here. Are you just freaking out ’cause you can’t sense her? It’s not a big deal, and we can still find—”

  “It’s not that I can’t sense her,” Ridley quietly interrupted me, staring emptily at his plate. “It’s that it feels like there’s nothing to sense. ” He looked at me then, the fear in his eyes conveying the gravity of the situation. “She just feels … cold. ”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I’ve never felt anything like this before. But it can’t be good. ”

  “So…” I tried to take in what he was saying. “What do you want to do?”

  “I think we should do an Internet search to make sure that’s her house. I know her file says that’s her last known address, but I’m not completely sure when that was updated,” Ridley said. “And then we go to her house, and we wait there until she comes home—if she comes home—and as soon as she does, we basically grab her and get out of here. ”

  I glanced around, making sure nobody was nearby, and when I whispered, my words were nearly drowned out by the Laura DiStasi song playing on the diner’s stereo. “You want to kidnap her?”

  “If we have to, yeah,” he said without remorse. “Something bad’s going on. ”

  I leaned back in my chair, considering his idea, and then I nodded. “Okay. If it’s what you think we should do, then let’s do it. ”

  He pulled out his smartphone and took the file from me, double-checking the spelling of the host family’s name and the address. I dug into my pocket to pull out my wallet so we could pay for our lunch and then get out of here.

  “Shit,” Ridley said, and his whole body sagged. Under the dark stubble on his cheeks, his face had gone ashen.

  “What?”

  Instead of answering, he turned and held his phone out toward me, so I could see the ominous headline that had shown up during his search for Emma’s address.

  Page 46

  Emma Jones, Teenage Daughter of Software Mogul Benjamin Jones, Was Found Missing from Her Bedroom

  I scanned the article below, and it went on to say that based on the ransacked state of her room, the authorities suspected foul play, and they were reaching out to the public to see if anyone knew anything about where Emma might be. Worse still, her family said Emma had only been gone since the early morning.

  My heart dropped to my stomach. “We missed her by a few hours. ”

  “Then maybe we haven’t missed her. ” Ridley shoved his phone back in his pocket and stood up in a flash.

  I threw a couple bills on the table, then pulled on my jacket as I hurried after Ridley. An icy drizzle had begun outside, but Ridley hardly seemed to notice.

  “We should split up,” I suggested. “We can cover more ground that way. ”

  “Good. That’s smart. I’ll go back to her house, see if I can get a better sense of where she might be. You should go back to the hotel. ”

  “The hotel? Why?”

  “You should get on your laptop, check out her Facebook, Tumblr, et cetera, see if her friends know anything and what people are saying online. You can also figure out what school she’s at, and then you can go down and talk to them. ”

  “All right,” I agreed reluctantly.

  “If I can’t find anything at her house, I’ll head down to the police station. I might get them to tell me something. ”

  That wouldn’t have sounded likely except that Ridley had mild pers
uasion. He only used it for tracking, and usually on people like host families or school officials. Or in this case he could get a police officer to tell us everything they knew about a missing girl.

  I didn’t like being stuck on desk duty, but it might give us a clue to what happened to her. If Konstantin Black was trailing her, her friends might have noticed, or Emma might have said something to someone.

  She might have even left with Konstantin willingly—before he’d been on the Högdragen, he’d been a tracker just like Ridley and me, and he was just as capable of talking a changeling into leaving with him as we were. And if he had done that, maybe Emma had told someone about it or where she was going.

  That didn’t seem likely, especially given how aggressive Konstantin and Bent had gotten with Ember and Charlotte, and given the alleged state of Emma’s room. But at this point we couldn’t rule anything out, and we had to work as quickly as possible to find Emma.

  Ridley and I went our separate ways, and I jogged back to the hotel, holding my jacket up over my head to keep out the rain. By the time I reached the lobby, my jeans were soaked through, and the front of my shirt was damp and sticking to me.

  The hotel was cool and modern, with complimentary bottled water and tea in the lobby and hipsters lounging around playing on their tablets in slick chairs and art deco sofas. We’d chosen it because of its proximity to Emma’s house, and the clash between our one-bedroom suite and my loft in Doldastam was staggering.

  The view of downtown Calgary from the windows was amazing, but the shades were drawn when I came in, leaving the room in relative darkness. I tossed off my soaking jacket, and then I stumbled over an ottoman in the sitting room. Ridley had offered to take the pull-out sofa, so my things were in the bedroom, and I went into it to retrieve my laptop.

  If I hadn’t been so distracted, hurrying in my worry that something bad had happened to Emma, I would’ve noticed that things weren’t right—that the shades had been open forty minutes ago when we’d dropped off our things but were closed now, and that the ottoman was now out of place, rather strategically placed in front of the bedroom doorway.

  I doubt I could’ve seen him, though—his skin had changed color, blending in with his surroundings perfectly. But if I weren’t distracted I definitely would’ve heard footsteps behind me as I was bent over the bed, digging through my duffel bag. And I’d like to believe that I would’ve felt the presence of someone standing behind me.

  But I didn’t. Not until I felt a strong hand covering my mouth, pulling me straight back against him, and a sharp cold blade pressed to my throat.

  “Don’t make a sound,” Konstantin said into my ear, whispering like we were lovers.

  TWENTY-TWO

  culpability

  I stood frozen against him. I could feel the hard contours of his chest pressed against my back, warming me through my wet shirt, and I tried to slow the rapid beating of my heart so he wouldn’t feel it. The whiskers from his beard tickled against my cheek and neck, and the skin of his hand felt rough on my lips. He smelled of cold, like ice and snow on the harshest days of winter.

  “I know you’re devising all kinds of ways that you can kill me,” Konstantin murmured in my ear. “But I want to warn you that it won’t do you any good. ”

  I went limp in his arms. The blade scraped against my neck, but it didn’t slice anything open. He removed his hand from my mouth to wrap around my waist, catching me before I slipped to the floor, and now the knife was aimed at the tender skin under my chin. It would hurt if he sliced across, but it certainly wouldn’t lead to death.

  In one quick move, I stood back up and thrust my head backward, head-butting him. He groaned, and I grabbed his wrist, twisting it sharply until he released the knife. His arm was still around me, and he squeezed tighter. I leaned forward and, pulling on his arm, I flipped him forward, and he landed on the bed on his back.

  The knife was on the floor, so I grabbed it, and then I jumped on top of him. I straddled him and pressed the knife to his throat. His lip was bleeding from when I’d hit him, but he still managed to grin broadly up at me.

  “You can’t kill me,” Konstantin said. “I’m the only one who knows where Emma Costar is. ”

  “How did you find her?” I demanded. “What do you want with her?”

  His smile fell away, and his steel eyes looked pained. “I’m afraid that I want nothing with her anymore. ”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did you ever read Of Mice and Men?” Konstantin asked. “Bent has always reminded me of Lennie. He even talks about rabbits all the time, but I blame that on his fascination with the Kanin. ”

  “I have a knife to your throat, and I’d like nothing more than to see you dead,” I told him, and I pressed the blade harder against his flesh, breaking the skin just slightly. “So you should really answer my questions. ”

  “I will. But maybe you should ask yourself a question first,” Konstantin said. “Like, where is my companion? I don’t usually work alone. ”

  Page 47

  I lifted my head, taking my eyes off Konstantin only for a moment, and I expected to see Bent lurking in the shadows somewhere. But there was nothing, and that moment of distraction was all Konstantin needed.

  He grabbed my shoulders and flipped me over so I was lying on my back on the bed, and he rolled on top of me. He grabbed my wrists, pinning them against the white comforter. My legs were trapped underneath him, and when I fought against his grip, he didn’t budge.

  “What do you want?” I asked, staring up at him in the dim light of the bedroom. “Why were you here waiting for me? If you have Emma, what’s the point?”

  “I remember you. ” Konstantin’s eyes were searching mine, and they seemed to soften. “I’m sorry I didn’t right away, but I remembered you as soon as you punched me in the stomach in Chicago. You were the plucky tracker, trying to claw your way up to be a guard. Nobody wanted you there, but you didn’t care. You wanted to be there. ”

  My heart pounded in my chest, and I swallowed back my anger, which was easier since he’d thrown me off my guard by remembering far more about me than I’d thought he’d ever known.

  “How did you…” I narrowed my eyes at him. “How would you even know that? You didn’t know who I was. ”

  “Of course I did. You were that little blond girl, and that alone made you stand out, but you were always fighting twice as hard as anybody else. ” He paused, grinning down at me. “And I’d always catch you staring at me. ”

  “You were on the guard,” I replied coolly. “I was watching the Högdragen. ”

  “No, you were watching me. You looked at me like … like I could do no wrong. ” Konstantin sounded wistful.

  “I was young and stupid. ” I looked away.

  “I’m sorry,” Konstantin said softly. “For what happened with your father. ”

  I snapped my head back to glare up at him. “What happened with my father? You tried to kill him,” I snarled, and I tried to fight him off, but he had me pinned.

  “Bryn!” Konstantin was calm and firm. “Stop fighting. ”

  “What do you want with me?” I shouted. “If you’re gonna kill me, then just kill me. ”

  “I’m not gonna kill you,” Konstantin said with an annoyed sigh. “I want you to…” He hung his head for a moment.

  “Do you even know what you want with me?” I asked.

  “I’m trying to protect you!” he yelled in exasperation.

  I laughed darkly. “Protect me? Why in hell would you do that? I want to kill you, and you want to kill me. You even told Ember you’re coming after me. ”

  “What? I never told anyone I was coming after you. ”

  “You told her to ‘tell that white rabbit to watch out,’” I said, repeating what Ember had told me.

  “That wasn’t a threat. ” He shook his head. “I was warning you. You need to stop this. ”

&
nbsp; “Stop what?” I asked, incredulous.

  “Dammit,” he muttered.

  Konstantin pulled the knife from my grip, then he let go of me. I stayed where I was, lying on my back on the bed, because I wanted to get a read on what was happening before I made a move. He sat on the edge of the bed, his back to me with the knife in his hand, and he ran a hand through his dark tangles of hair.

  “I feel terrible about what happened with your father. And now everything that’s happening here. ” He shook his head. “I made a choice a long time ago, and I’m still trying to make things right. ” He looked back at me over his shoulder. “But things are in motion, and there’s going to be a lot of casualties, and I don’t want you to be one of them. ”

  “Why?” I asked in disbelief. I moved so I was sitting on my knees. “Why would you even care what happens to me?”

  “Because you saw good in me that wasn’t there. ” He turned away and stood up. “Forget about me. Forget about everything here. Just go back to Doldastam … No, don’t go there. Just go. Forget about the Kanin and everything. ”

  “I’m not forgetting about my family or friends or my people,” I told him. “I can’t just run off, like you did. And I’m not leaving without Emma Costar. ”

  He rubbed his forehead. “It’s better for you if you leave without her. ”

  “Where is she, Konstantin?” I asked.

  “Bent just doesn’t know his own strength,” Konstantin replied, almost sadly.

  “What happened to her? If you hurt her, I’ll—”

  He groaned. “This was going so well. Can we stop with the threats?”

  “Not if you won’t tell me where she is. ”

  “I don’t know where he left her, but it won’t do you any good to find her,” Konstantin said in a way that made my blood run cold.

  “You killed her,” I said, my voice trembling with barely contained rage. “You son of a bitch. ”

  I dove at him and punched him in the face, and I think he let me at first, allowing me to hit him in the face and chest a few times before he tried to grab my wrists. Then I kicked him in the stomach, and he grabbed me and twisted my arm behind my back. I tried to buck him off, but he pushed me forward, slamming me against the wall.

  “Let me go,” I growled, but I was trapped between him and the wall.

  “Stop, Bryn. I can’t undo what’s already been done. ”

  “I’m going to kill you,” I warned him.

  “I’m trying to make things right. I know you don’t believe me, but I’m trying. ” His words were low and filled with regret, and his beard brushed against my cheek. He let go of my arm, and I pressed my palms against the wall, but I didn’t turn around. I didn’t fight him. “I know you have no reason to trust me, but please, trust me on this. ”

  I closed my eyes, wishing I didn’t trust him, but I did. I didn’t know why. Maybe it was the sincerity in his voice, or the fact that he could kill me but didn’t, or maybe it was just the memory of the good I thought I’d seen in him when I was younger.

  His breath felt warm and ragged on my cheek, and his hand was on my arm. He didn’t have me pinned, exactly, but his body was pressed against me, holding me in place. I could push him off, but I didn’t.