Freeze (Midnight Ice Book Two) Page 14

  “I’ll always find you,” he murmured. “I’ll always be with you.”

  In her final moment, the visions came. Fire and lava and rivers running red. Teeth cutting. People screaming. Babies crying. Wicked laughter. Savage hunger. The shadows rolling back. The harsh truth streaming in. Blue, blue eyes, disappearing behind an opaque curtain of ruthless flames. Tears sizzling until they stained. And the echo, repeating over and over into eternity, the horrible echo of—

  “Ahh!” Pandora shouted as she slammed against rock and dirt, rolling over and over, tumbling down a hill. She dug her fingers into the ground, searching for a handhold, something, anything to grab.

  She tore through a bush.

  Her fingers clenched around a stray branch.

  Her body snapped.

  And she stilled, collapsing as her muscles gave out.

  Two seconds later, Naya came bounding down the hill, leaping from rock to rock, more like a dancer than an animal as she pranced to Pandora’s side. Her eyes were bright with concern, and she nudged her soft fur into Pandora’s hand, questioning.

  “I’m fine,” Pandora muttered. Taking a deep breath, she sat up and eyed the cat, whose jaw had just slipped open. “Don’t even think about licking me.” And then she glanced around, looking over her shoulder at the path of debris her body had made on the side of the mountain. “Luckily, it wasn’t that steep.”

  Pandora knew these mountains, and she knew there could have been far worse places to fall. In fact… She narrowed her eyes, gaze roving across the forest. They were still relatively high up. Pandora had managed to break her fall before she’d traveled too far from the ridge, and through the trees, she spotted a peak she recognized.

  One that signaled home.

  “Naya,” she said quickly, extending the shadows to shroud them both. The jaguar shrank back, transforming into a kneeling girl.

  “I’m sorry,” Naya said almost immediately. “I was trying to watch your dream, and I slipped, and then you slipped and, well, yeah.”

  Pandora snapped her head toward the medium. “You saw?”

  She nodded. “I saw.”

  And just like that, the dream flooded back. The beads. The family. The flames. The knife. All the air left her chest as she gasped, realization dawning now that she had a waking moment to process what she’d seen. “I was a sacrifice, a willing sacrifice.”

  But that didn’t make sense.

  Did it?

  “Why do the titans want to kill you?” Naya asked softly, hesitant and curious.

  Pandora squeezed her eyes shut, trying to hold on to the tendrils of the fading memory, trying to see what she missed, trying to find reason. “I don’t know.”

  “Why won’t they tell you?”

  “I don’t know,” she whispered back, dropping her head into her hands. “That’s what I’m trying to find out. That’s why I need to speak to my mother.”

  “And what do you think she’ll give you?” Naya asked in a calming voice, like the meditative girl Pandora had met in the prison, serene and commanding.

  “Answers.”

  “And what if they’re not the answers you want?”

  Pandora snapped her head up. The ground suddenly felt very cold beneath her, as though frost were seeping through the mud and shooting through her. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean…” Naya paused, leaning closer. Her irises turned dark, expanding, seeming to reach inside Pandora, seeming to see right through to the very heart of her. “What if you find out they’re right?”

  Pandora swallowed, blinking, but she couldn’t look away. The medium’s eyes started to glimmer gold, swirling with a power that dug under Pandora’s skin and stayed there, demanding truth, demanding honesty. Her throat turned dry, scratchy.

  “I don’t know,” she croaked.

  What am I?

  What am I?

  The question was always there, always lingering. For some reason, she always saw herself as the hero of her story. But what if she was wrong? What if they were right?

  After all, the odds were against her.

  Why hadn’t she stopped to think if she could handle the answers—all of them, not just the ones she wanted to hear?

  Stay with me.

  Sam’s words fluttered across the edges of her memory.

  Let us be enough.

  He didn’t want her to find the answers. The titans didn’t want her to find the answers. Yet every fiber of her being demanded to know.

  Naya’s eyes loomed large, glimmering with magic, studying her, dissecting her. The air warmed, tingling as it brushed over Pandora’s arms, sizzling with an unseen current.

  “Your soul is so old,” the medium murmured, almost to herself, gazing deeper and deeper. Her brows pushed together in a hard knot. She pursed her lips and winced. Then she blinked, clearing her expression as she leaned back, breaking her stare.

  Pandora looked away, looked at the leaves scattered across the forest floor around her, at the sky looming bright between the branches, at the peak in the distance telling her she was almost home.

  “If they’re right, I’ll do what needs to be done,” she said, inhaling sharply after the words spilled from her lips. Because they weren’t hers. They were her father’s. And yet, in that moment, they felt right.

  Terrifyingly right.

  “Done for you?” Naya asked.

  “Done for everyone,” Pandora answered, finally looking up. Those amber eyes watched her closely, intensely, as though seeing her in a new light. They were as unsure and probing as the first time Pandora had popped into her cell. “You promised.”

  “I’ll keep my promise,” Naya said. But deep grooves cut into her forehead as she looked away, face filling with worry lines Pandora couldn’t recall ever seeing.

  “What did you mean when you said my soul is old?”

  “That you’ve lived many lives, just like we said before.”

  But Pandora shook her head, taking in Naya’s troubled expression. “No, this was different. Your tone was different.”

  Naya’s expression was hollow when she lifted her head. “Your soul is old, very old, the oldest one I’ve ever touched.”

  “Why are you saying that like it’s a bad thing?”

  “Because.” She sighed, rubbing her hand through her hair, brushing out the stress. “To have lived so many lives and to have never found peace? To have never passed on to the sun god’s kingdom? Your soul is untainted. There’s no reason you haven’t moved on, none that I can sense. Which must mean it’s a choice. And I can’t think of any possible reason you would choose to spend eternity like this.”

  But she didn’t choose this.

  Did she?

  It was a curse. A trap. A cycle she was stuck in.

  Or was it?

  Stay with me, Sam had said. But did he really mean choose me?

  If it were that simple, why hadn’t she done it already?

  There was only one way to find out.

  And she was staring right at it.

  “The enclave is over that ridge,” Pandora said, changing the subject, turning their focus to the jagged peak no more than five miles away—incredibly close by their standards. A five-minute run, maybe less. “I can get my mother’s brush and be back in thirty minutes.”

  “And then we’re even?” Naya asked. But the way she said even made other words spring to mind—then we’re done, then we’re through, then I’m gone.

  Pandora didn’t answer because a crack echoed through her ears, another little piece of her breaking. She didn’t really know why. They’d only known each other for a few days—a partnership of convenience. But the rejection hurt. It stung. A lot more than she thought it would. “What else do you need in order to connect me to my mother?”

  Naya lifted a wry brow. It oozed with dark humor. “A sacrifice.” Pandora shot her a pointed look. The medium hastily continued her explanation. “Your mother’s been gone a long time, and we don’t have a body, only cells fro
m her hair, barely any tissue at all. If you want to speak with her, truly speak to her, you need to make a sacrifice to the sun god. You need to send an innocent soul to his kingdom so he’ll release hers. There’s a reason people don’t talk about necromancy lightly, why I hardly ever use that part of myself. It isn’t clean or pure. It’s dirty and messy and dire. But it’s what you asked for.”

  Dirty and messy and dire? Pandora thought, resigned. Yeah. That about sums it up.

  Naya didn’t let her respond. “I’ll find the sacrifice. An animal of a certain size will do. All I need from you is a knife.”

  Pandora’s gut clenched painfully, twisting in a wrenching motion at the thought of an animal losing its life for her. But she nodded despite the nausea rolling through her. Because she needed answers. She wasn’t even sure she wanted them, but she needed them.

  “Okay,” she said, voice slightly airy.

  “Okay,” Naya confirmed. And then she crouched, reaching her arms around her head and pressing her face to the ground almost as if in prayer.

  By the time Pandora blinked, the jaguar was back, black as night. Those glowing eyes nailed her to the ground. In one swift motion, Naya leapt and disappeared into the forest, a predator on the hunt.

  Pandora turned around, taking a deep breath as her focus turned to that familiar mountain peak—one she never thought she’d look upon again.

  And then she launched into a sprint.

  Full titan speed.

  Giving her mind no time to think, no time to second-guess, to turn around.

  Because there was no going back.

  Only forward.

  Just as she’d always done.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Stop!” Sam shouted across the shadows.

  She didn’t.

  She ran, swerving between trees and ducking beneath branches, leaping from rock to rock as she climbed, higher and higher, to the spot where the woods thinned and the world was little more than air and boulder.

  “Stop, please,” he tried again, reaching out his hand.

  She blew through him, her man made of mist, and kept staring straight ahead at the peak growing larger by the second, pushing harder and harder the closer she traveled.

  “Pandora,” he murmured, desperate and pained.

  But it wasn’t that voice that stopped her cold, that made her dig her feet into the dirt and fall over, slamming her head into the ground as her entire body froze.

  It was the steep cliff.

  It was the threat of a one-hundred-foot fall that might not kill her, but would definitely hurt like hell.

  And if she was being honest, it was the enclave. Because when she stretched her arm forward and grasped the edge of the stone, then pulled herself over the rocks, there it was. Tucked into the heart of the valley, surrounded on all sides by towering mountains and thick forest, was the titan base where she’d grown up. Home, if she could even call it that.

  Her heart squeezed painfully tight.

  Pandora closed her eyes, hating the weakness, hating the ache. She’d been gone for four years, but all of that time disappeared in an instant. For a moment, she was still a little girl, still an outcast, still a failure. Because really, what had changed?

  She still had no family.

  No friends.

  No future.

  She’d spent four years convincing herself she’d grown into a powerful, fearless woman, and yet here she was, huddled and hiding, unable to open her eyes because of the memories that threatened to crash through all the carefully constructed walls she’d built. So many lonely hours in that empty house. So many tears. So much confusion. So much wondering why none of the other girls wanted to come over and play, why no one would help her train outside of class, why all the adults stared as she walked by. So much rejection. A lifetime of it. Except for one person, one boy who’d opened up the door to his heart.

  Only to slam it in my face.

  “Pandora,” Sam whispered, voice soothing.

  His finger brushed over her neck. She flinched—not from him, but from the fact that she so obviously needed comfort, needed help.

  “Don’t let them own you,” Sam said. “Don’t let them affect you.”

  Pandora took a deep breath, forcing her emotions back inside and demanding they lie still, demanding they go dormant in the winter cold of her heart. And then she swallowed and sat up, slowly opening her eyes.

  “What don’t you want me to know, Sam?”

  He didn’t answer.

  Pandora turned, looking up to where he stood over her, silhouetted by the sun and by their ever-present shadows. “Why did you tell me to stop? What are you afraid of?”

  His shoulders dropped, subtle but noticeable as he turned his head away, turned toward the enclave a few hundred feet below. “I’m afraid of losing you again.”

  Pandora followed his gaze, then clenched her muscles as her eyes took in the grounds below—the homes, the buildings, the practice fields, the school, and the wall that had never done a very good job of keeping her in, but instead just made her ache to get out.

  Her focus returned to the stoic man beside her. “Why didn’t you tell me I used to die willingly?”

  “Because it’s not important.” He clenched his jaw, and the muscle in his cheek ticked. “Because that was a thousand years ago in a different world, before they stole your memories away, before they decided to keep you ignorant and weak, like a cow gorging on food before being led to the slaughter. Maybe you should ask yourself what changed? Why they stopped giving you a choice?”

  A choice? she thought, returning back to the fading nightmare, to the girl with the beads and the garb walking freely to her death. It hadn’t seemed like a choice, but a duty, a terrible, terrible obligation.

  “Why are they killing me, Sam?” she asked softly, confused and conflicted. “Over and over again.”

  “That’s not the right question,” he said with a heavy sigh, kneeling to wrap his fingers around her hand before tugging her to her feet. “The question is why are you still letting them?”

  Am I? she silently asked herself. She’d run away. She’d left to protect herself. She’d escaped their prison. She’d outsmarted them, outpowered them, outmaneuvered them.

  And yet, here she was.

  Possibly falling right back into their trap.

  Sam sensed her hesitation. “Can I try something?”

  “What?” She shrugged, fight seeping out more and more with each passing second.

  “Something to make you remember, really remember for yourself, so you’re not relying on the lies other people will tell you.”

  She didn’t answer, but she didn’t have to. He could read her. He understood every thought that ran through her mind, every wayward emotion stirring in her heart, every weakness and every strength. It was unfair, really, how well he knew her when she felt that with him she was grasping at air.

  Sam stepped closer and pressed his chest into her back. She melted into his touch. Even now, at a time like this, so urgent, when she was so close to her goal, he had a way of making her forget, of making everything besides them feel less important, less pressing…just less.

  He brushed his fingers over her shoulders like fluttering wings before drifting them down her arms to wrap around her hands, steady and strong while hers trembled. He leaned down so that his chin rested beside her neck, and his cheek ever so softly touched hers, hair a velvet curtain between them. And then he lifted her arms, held them aloft so they fanned to either side, and dropped his palms to her waist, where he gripped her hip bones, shooting a warm tingle down her thighs.

  “Step forward,” he murmured, voice an elixir, too potent to deny.

  But there was nowhere to go. They were at the edge of a cliff, suspended a hundred feet in the air.

  “Trust me,” he urged.

  So she inched out, listening to the silent command of his strong hands pressing her forward, until her toes stretched beyond the last bit of rock, and her
body wavered, balanced on the edge. Sam’s warm, wispy touch became her anchor to the world as her heart thudded, fear and exhilaration mixing into a thrill that made her body buzz with anticipation.

  A strong wind thrust against them, pushing her body back into Sam’s as the breeze wrapped around her arms, her clothes, sending her hair flying in every different direction. She dropped her head back against his chest as the wind grew stronger, swifter, an invisible river rushing over them. Sam leaned forward into the pressure, more and more, until they were suspended, nearly flying, barely touching solid ground.

  “Close your eyes. Clear your mind,” Sam murmured, gently rubbing against the bare skin above the waistline of her pants, his fingers drifting higher. “We spent so many hours like this, soaring, flying. I think it’s what I missed the most, the feel of you in my arms and the wind at our backs, utterly free, so happy I thought I might burst on the spot. This was our real dance, drifting and plummeting and climbing and free-falling, spiraling down together, testing who would break first. Usually me, because you’ve always been stubborn and brave. And there were other times too when we were lazy and slow and greedily savoring each moment, watching the sky turn lavender, watching the stars come to life, fighting off the rising sun.”

  The more he spoke, the more her chest began to tingle. Colors danced before her closed eyes, swirls of light and life, not memories, more like emotions drifting from her heart to mind, trying to make her remember. Her body grew lighter, weights being lifted one by one, drifting away until for a moment she really thought she began to float, to rise. The hard shell around her core melted away, shooting layers of warmth down her arms, all the way to her toes. A smile rose on her lips.

  And suddenly, she could feel it.

  Feel them.

  His hand in hers. The wind racing by.

  She was there.

  She was back.

  She couldn’t see the memory, but she felt it blossoming to life within her.

  A perfect moment.

  Pure happiness, pure joy, pure belonging.

  Fireworks exploded in her chest, bright sparks that lingered and glittered, one after the other, until she was giddy in the afterglow, in the lingering burn that was slow and steady and building. And she could sense Sam, not with her eyes but with her entire being, as though they were one person woven together from two souls, an awareness so acute she gasped at not having noticed it before. Their hearts beat in tune. Their skin buzzed as though they were two magnets, charged and trembling and aching to close the gap. They moved as one, dipping and diving, not speaking, just anticipating and trusting. Pandora had never felt anything like it before—to be so carefree, so confident, so sure. To know exactly who she was and what she was, to know she was exactly where she was supposed to be—by his side. There were no questions, no doubts. There was only Sam. And her. And how everything seemed better when they were together, how her whole world seemed brighter.