Winter Fire (Book I of the Winter Fire Series)

I never, even for a second, thought he was kidding. The look on his face was as serious as that of a nuthouse inmate who shuffles around in his hospital gown and slippers telling people he’s been sent from the future, or that he’s Napoleon. My first, my only thought was that they were, indeed, a devout gaming sect…a group of role-players who had worked each other up to the point where they’d fallen off the edge of reality. Maybe their game even involved GPS, which could have been why they traveled. I wondered how many more of them there were, and in how many other parts of the world.

  And then disappointment deflated my chest and filled it back up with a dull ache.

  Everything else about him was perfect. I might have even gotten over what had happened with Tyler. Or, maybe in the face of this craziness, their attack on Tyler just seemed more acceptable. But this last sentence - a thing he could not unsay - was not something I could ignore.

  He was watching me, motionless and pale, a ghost.

  “You don’t believe me,” he finally said, nodding to himself with a wry smile.

  I huffed and let my numb hand drop from the railing. "You meant that literally.”

  He nodded again.

  “Then no, obviously not.”

  “Obviously." His tone was condescending. It made me feel common. Beneath him.

  “Look,” I said, my voice wavering, “maybe you’re some gamehead who walks around in character and messes with people’s heads just because you can afford to live outside the box with your action figure friends, but that doesn’t mean that everyone has to play along with you.” I pushed myself off the rail, folded my arms and brushed past him.

  “Jenna.”

  I stopped and stared into the snow. It was falling so hard that I could barely see the outline of the lodge ahead. When I didn’t turn around, I heard him take a step.

  “Do you want to see for yourself?” He asked. And although it took me a moment to admit it to myself, I knew that I did… that I wanted, more than anything, for there to be some real explanation for what he was saying to me.

  “What? Are you going to outride everyone on the mountain? I’ve already seen that. It doesn’t make you supernatural.”

  I heard him walk toward me, his footsteps muffled by the new layer of snow on the bridge. He stopped at my shoulder and I listened to him breathe. After a moment, he said, “Are you going to come with me? Or run away?”

  I shook my head, incredulous that he had gotten the upper hand. He had just given me enough lunacy to have a man in white come and scoop him up with a huge butterfly net, and yet now, somehow, I was the flight risk.

  “What could you possibly show me?” I asked in a long, white sigh, feeling the heat of him warm my back.

  “Only one way to find out.”

  I waited for him on the bridge while he went back into the apartment. I wouldn’t have gone with him and he didn’t ask me to. He came out carrying his board and wearing a white jacket I had never seen before.

  “What are you planning to do with that?” I nodded toward his board.

  “Nothing yet,” he said. “We have to get yours first.”

  I shook my head at him. “You know I’m not good enough to ride with you.”

  He grinned and walked past me, heading to the hotel. “Let’s go.”

  It wasn’t the command that got me moving this time. It was his expression. Confident, patient, expecting me to trust him. I had learned in these last few months not to believe in words, but I was still conditioned to rise to expectation.

  Bren waited at the bottom of the stairs while I plucked my board from beside the doors where I had left it. I glanced through the glass, but my mother was nowhere in sight. When I returned to where Bren was standing, he turned again and started walking. I followed him.

  We rode down the bunny hill - Bren swiveling at a graceful creep behind my choppy, angled run - then picked our boards up at the bottom and walked past the lifts for the terrain park and the raceway. The lines were long, and loose groups of skiers and riders milled around at the bottom of the runs, but nobody even glanced at us as we passed. Finally, we came to the very last lift on the north face. It was closed, its empty chairs rocking in the drift. As we moved toward the hill, a row of towering evergreens obscured us from the other runs and the bunny slope beyond.

  Bren looked at the sky for a moment, then bent to buckle in, his snow-laced hair hanging in his face. We seemed to be playing a little silence game, so as he stood upright, I crouched and buckled my own boots in. As I rose, I felt a momentary flutter of terror at the thought of getting off the lift with both feet trapped.

  The seconds formed and overfilled like drips from a faucet.

  Finally, I broke.

  “I’m not riding up that lift with you.” I said. “I know you guys play with the lifts after hours and you don’t ever seem to get caught, but I’m not doing that in the middle of a busy day. My mother works here.” I folded my arms. It was a good excuse. My father always said you never messed with a person’s livelihood. Although, taking advice from my father about messing with someone’s livelihood was just about as stupid as following a snowboarder with a god complex onto an abandoned run.

  Bren waited. When my eyes found his, he said, “We’re not taking the lift.”

  This should have calmed me, but instead, I felt another shot of terror. I stiffened to hide the panic and he waited again, but I hung on. We stared into each other’s eyes, one mirror gazing into another.

  Finally, Bren took a long, deep breath, held it for a moment, and said, “Do you want to change your mind?”

  No fear, I thought. But I was afraid. That I would not be the same when this was over. That nothing would.

  I shook my head. Bren nodded, then hopped until he was directly behind me, the front edge of his board nearly touching the back edge of mine. His voice was low in my ear.

  “No matter what happens, no matter what you see, just listen to what I tell you. And trust me.”

  My stomach trembled.

  “Okay?”

  I nodded once, sucked in a ragged breath as he coiled one arm around my waist, and closed my eyes. As I imagined him trying to slip me some mind-altering drug - Special K or Tussin, or some other health class warning - in the hopes that my eyes would roll back in my head and I’d start screaming that he was right, he was a god, and that I wanted to join his cult, the ground began to vibrate.

  Bren pointed up the mountain. It was rippling, first slightly, the way things do when you try on someone else’s glasses, and then more intensely, forming perfect white waves which continued from our feet all the way to the visible crest. I clutched his arm.

  “Easy.” He said in my ear, dragging out the word in his smooth voice.

  I started a to utter a word - what or how - but lost it as the peak of the hill began to sink with increasing speed toward its own center, as though a pole had been pulled from the middle of a tent. I had one last thought that this was some roofie-related hoax before the ground heaved toward us in a tidal wave and I was sure I was going to die.

  But instead, the swell met us in a gentle roll and lifted us onto its back.

  I grabbed Bren’s arm with both hands, my gloved fingers clutching at his sleeve. He made a shushing sound as a breeze blew back my hair and sent a burst of snow into my face to cool my flushed skin. Rising on this new peak, I saw that the former crest had become a valley, and that the terrain on the other side was uncertain, still wavering, as if waiting for our focus. He tightened his grip around my waist and rocked me back, our edges carving twin arcs into the newly churned powder as we glided down into his world.

  Bren made every move, pulling my board with his like a kid doodling with two crayons in one hand. He took us down the first valley and around newly formed curves, the snow whipping at our faces, the ground rippling, the trees and rocks riding the shifts as if they were rootless, floating. I was trembling, and as we approached the stream that ra
n alongside the raceway, Bren said, “don’t freak,” and tightened his hold on me again. We vaulted off a small rise that appeared out of nowhere and soared high into the air, the stream tumbling beneath us. I was terrified to look down and couldn’t help it, the scene too fascinating, and for a moment I just stared, inhaling the frosty pine scent of the air and feeling the sting of the cold.

  As I glanced farther upstream I saw a giant tree looming before us, getting larger in my vision as we neared it. When it was so huge that it blocked out almost everything else in view, I finally found my voice.

  “Stop!” I screamed, transfixed, unable to close my eyes against the impending crash. But all at once the tree arched to one side, its green, conical head bowing low as we sailed past.

  “Okay?” Bren asked. I closed my eyes and swallowed hard.

  When I opened them again, we were headed for another pine, but this time Bren tapped the trunk with the tail of his board to send us in a new direction and we cleared the forest and landed on more rippling snow. As the peaks grew larger, we gained speed until we finally reached what I had, this morning, considered the summit. Here things settled. The ground flattened and we scudded along for a while, heading away from the lifts where we wouldn’t be seen.

  We stopped on a ledge overlooking the valley on the far side of the mountain. Endless hills rolled back into the sky like a thousand scoops of vanilla ice cream. We dropped down on the snow just below a ridge and I sat in silence, watching my hands shake. Minutes crept by.

  “Okay?” He asked again.

  I looked at him like he had spoken another language. In my mind, I was turning in a circle, my hands rooted in my hair, searching for bits and pieces of anything I could hold onto. I grabbed at the first thought that came to me.

  “I thought I was hallucinating.”

  He waited for me to go on.

  “This morning,” I said, my voice weak. “I thought I was hallucinating while I was watching you all at the terrain park. But I wasn’t. It was real.”

  “It was real.”

  “I saw it,” I said, sounding hysterical even to myself. “I saw the trees move. I saw the hill change. I saw you…” I shook my head. “I was sitting right in the middle of it all this morning, and I didn’t believe it.”

  “No one does.” He said.

  “What you told me back there on the bridge,” I went on, freezing more thoughts into words before they escaped. “It was true?”

  He nodded and looked down at his board.

  I stared out at the hills, trying to remember everything he’d told me from beginning to end. About Asgard and Ragnarok. About the cycle of destruction. About gods fleeing their home to inhabit a strange place where they were no longer who they were before. And what I found, to my utter amazement, was that I believed him.

  I glanced at Bren, sure, at first, that I had convinced myself of a lie because I wanted to be with him so badly. But what beliefs did I have that I couldn’t stand to part with? The truth was, I could think of no other explanation for what he had just shown me. And more than that. The story he told me on the bridge was really nothing I hadn’t heard before. In one form or another.

  “Okay,” I said, watching the snow fall around us.

  “Okay?”

  I turned to him. He raised a brow.

  “Okay. It is what it is.” I took in a long breath and sighed. “I’ll have questions once I recover.”

  Bren stared at me for a moment longer, then nodded and gazed out over the valley. "I want to show you something.”

  Chapter 15