Chains of Ice (2 page)

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First published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library,
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First Printing, July 2010

Copyright © Christina Dodd, 2010

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“I
’m not the psychic in this group, but this looks like a trap to me.” John Powell walked into the cave carved into the base of the retreating glacier. His breath hung white on the frigid air, and he had to duck to avoid the low stone lintel constructed to hold back the ice. He glimpsed the prehistoric paintings on the walls, showing bloodied intruders pierced by spears, crushed by boulders, and swept away by a raging river.

“It smells like a trap to me.” Kim Sun Hee walked at his side.

He glanced down at the diminutive Korean. “Is it the Others?”

“What do you think the Others smell like? Fire and brimstone?” she mocked him gently.

“Yes?” He listened to the creaks and moans of the man-made stone cave as the glacier pressed against its walls and ceiling. He flicked glances ahead, behind, and around the group before them, alert for the slightest sign that they needed to escape
now
.

As he always did, Gary White led the way, forging ahead. Amina Berhane walked on his right—she exuded an ambient light that illuminated more of the shadowy passage than their flashlights and headgear. Max Novak walked on his left—get Max close to treasure, and the gold and gems called to him. Sophie Moore and Bataar Lohar walked one step behind them.

Then there were Sun Hee and John, lagging ten feet back from the rest of the Chosen, acting as the rear guard.

“There isn’t an
Others
smell. They’re people—they smell like people. If I could get close to them, I’d ID them”—she lowered her voice—“but I never get close. It always seems like they’re scooping up the Abandoned Ones while we’re having grand adventures.”

Was that a complaint? John suspected it was. These people, Gary and his six compatriots, were the most powerful group of Chosen in the world today. The Gypsy Travel Agency sent them to carry out feats suited to Spielberg’s best action-adventure films. The way they lived was dangerous, exhilarating, and made them the rock stars of the Chosen Ones.

But they never seemed to get to perform their modest and important mission statement: rescuing discarded infants before they could be taken and their special gifts used by the devil’s henchmen.

Sun Hee turned her head from side to side, sweeping the area for scents. “Yesterday some
people
, I don’t know who, were walking near the entrance and came a little way inside. But last night’s wind and snow have confused the smells. Still, I don’t think we need to be concerned with an ambush.”

John scrutinized the symbols cut into the slabs of stone that made up the wall, the way the ceiling arched overhead, then—like some amusement park optical illusion—curled downward to a vanishing point. “At least not from any living being,” he said.

“You’re worried.” She glanced at his bare right hand, her brown eyes shadowed.

He looked, too. In this dim passage, his fingernails glowed with a faint blue light. He flexed his hands, containing the power inside. “Yeah.”

“Hey, back there, don’t be such chickens,” Gary called. “Max says we’re almost there.” His voice echoed along the long, dark tunnel and came back amplified, enlarged.

Pebbles fell from the ceiling in showers.

“Shit,” John muttered. “Not so loud.”

“I’ll be as loud as I like,” Gary shouted.

Again, the amplified voice. Again, the rain of pebbles, but more this time. Something immense thumped behind them, shaking the floor, rattling John’s confidence. He turned. Sun Hee shone her flashlight over the huge stone that now blocked their way out. Not totally; it was possible to climb over it and back to the outside world, but the easy way had vanished.

Gary would be delighted—and that was the trouble with Gary. John respected him; he really did. Because Gary was older, in his early forties, and charismatic as all hell. Gary had joined the Chosen Ones when he had been a brilliant, handsome, fit eighteen-year-old. He’d been elected the leader—of course—and stayed at the top for the required seven years.

Traditionally, after one term, most of the Chosen opted to become part of the real world again—bankers and ranchers and tour guides, people who knew more than they should about the battle between good and evil but who no longer served on the front lines.

Not Gary. He had stayed to command a second team, then a third, and now he directed this group. In the last two years, John had seen Gary fly an airplane, discover a previously unsuspected Mayan ruin in Guatemala, trek across the Sahara Desert, and rescue a kitten for a grateful old lady. The man was impressive.

But no challenge was big enough for Gary, no victory decisive enough. If he thought the mission was too easy, he looked for ways to make it harder.

Before John had joined the Chosen, he’d been part of the military. You didn’t go looking for death; that wasn’t the way it was done. You prayed it didn’t come looking for you.

Oh, he didn’t say anything. But lately, he’d been wondering if it was smart to follow an adrenaline junkie. Worse, he suspected Gary knew of his doubts—the man was, after all, a mind reader—and John feared those doubts drove Gary to new heights of daring.

“Aren’t your hands cold?” Sun Hee whispered and tucked her gloved hands into her armpits.

“I grew up in the Russian mountains and Siberia.” About his origins he was brief. None of the Chosen Ones knew their birth parents, but most of them didn’t have a background like his.

Frankly, most children didn’t survive a background like his.

“Are you okay back there, Sun Hee?” Gary called.

She smiled, flattered, as they all were, by his attention. “Yes, Gary.”

“The big guy’s not making you afraid with all his worrying?”

“No. John is cautious, but always for good reason.”

John appreciated the sentiment. Yet, at the same time, he almost wished she hadn’t said it. Six feet tall, fit, with a head of black hair and compelling hazel eyes, Gary attracted women, all women. Amina was sleeping with him now, but it was John’s impression that Gary had gone through every female who worked at the Gypsy Travel Agency, every female Chosen he’d ever had on his team, and had plans for every female not yet screwed.

Sun Hee was one of those still-untouched females. John didn’t need to get into a pissing match because Sun Hee had spoken admiringly of him, and he really didn’t want Gary to feel pressure to seduce Sun Hee sooner rather than later.

Yet he said nothing when Gary called, “Come on up and join us reckless ones. It’s more fun than hanging around with that dour Russian.”

John wasn’t Russian. He hadn’t lived in Russia since he was seventeen, when he walked south through the Ural Mountains, then west to the Black Sea and across to Turkey. He’d paid his way with work. He’d earned his ID, a passport, and an American visa with a service done for the right official—the only time he’d traded his power for a favor. If there was any truth in kismet, he should have suffered a turn of bad luck for misusing his gift. But in fact, he had never regretted what he’d done. He’d wanted out, and he’d gone about it the best way he knew how, and kismet had remained uninterested . . . or perhaps it simply was biding its time.

Now he waited for Sun Hee to skip forward to join Gary. She surprised John, though, with an eye roll and a shrug. Then she walked up to be part of Gary’s group.

John watched her. Her exotic features and delicate body gave the impression of fragility. She’d stand back and observe, and she seldom spoke, but faced every challenge boldly—walked and climbed and fought with all her strength, and he had always admired her.

Bataar dropped back and joined John. He was short-legged and stocky, with high cheekbones and straight, dark hair. He heard things: the breathing of a lost child, the whisper of a butterfly’s wings. Now, in his quiet voice, Bataar asked, “Can you hear that?”

John stopped and listened. He heard the tap of feet, the slither of ice down a wall, the soft whistle of some unfelt wind. “Hear what exactly?”

“Water,” Bataar said.

The hair rose on the back of John’s neck. He listened again, but heard nothing. “Where?”

“Ahead of us.” Bataar gestured vaguely forward.

John thought back. The helicopter that had flown them in had repeatedly circled the mountain valley. The long, massively heavy glacier snaked down from the snowy heights, fractured and rugged, moving ponderously toward the lower elevations. The ice dragged sediment off the surrounding rocky mountains and carried it in long, dirty lines that marred the pristine blue ice with gray. The pilot proved that he’d carried tourists there before when he told them how much the ice had retreated in the last year. “Twenty feet.” He grinned, showing tobacco-stained teeth. “I saw the cave first, a cave my people built thousands of years ago out of stone and ice, and I called your people. I’m good, huh? You pay me?”

At the time, John had been so amused by the fellow’s open greed he hadn’t bothered to think that they had landed on bare rock where the glacier terminated—and although the glacier was clearly melting, no stream flowed from its base.

Now Bataar’s words made him realize—somewhere, something within the glacier dammed the outflow.

“How much water?” John asked.

“Not much. Not yet. But do you know what will happen when the outflow for this glacier is released?”

Yes, John knew. It would be a flood of devastating proportions. When it broke through, the glacier, lubricated by the water, would rush forward, obliterating the cave and everything—and everyone—inside.

“Should we tell Gary?” Bataar was Mongolian. He’d traveled in the Himalayas. He understood their dire situation, had probably understood even before they entered the cave.

“No. But let’s see if we can hurry them along.” John glanced forward—and the group in front of them had disappeared. He ran forward, Bataar on his heels. An icy wall, painted to resemble a tunnel, suddenly loomed before them, while the passage abruptly opened to the left. John skidded on the ice, his studded boots barely stopping him.

Bataan slammed into him, and they hit the wall hard.

The stone slab gave, almost as if it rested against a sponge. Ice rained down from the ceiling, breaking on their faces like shards of glass. Suddenly, John could hear the faint, mocking trickle of water.

The two men took the low, left opening. Two steps in, and another wall loomed before them. An abrupt right, and they stood with the Chosen Ones staring into a long, narrow chamber illuminated by a diffused blue, glacial light that leaked between the slabs in the walls and through the cracks in the stone ceiling.

“It looks as if this room was created to collapse like a house of cards,” John said.

“I wonder what’s holding it together,” Amina said.

Sun Hee’s dark eyes examined their surroundings. “Superstition.”

Gary laughed. “Exactly. Foolish superstition.”

John and Sun Hee exchanged troubled glances. He didn’t think superstition was foolish. Quite the contrary. In battle, he’d seen far too many examples of superstitions fulfilled.

The floor had been created by stepping-stones separated by ice. At the far end, rough stones had been piled into an altar with a carefully crafted flat stone table. Atop that in a small stone bowl rested a leather bag, stiff and frozen.

In the rough whisper of a dedicated treasure hunter, Gary asked, “Max, is that it?”

“It’s not . . .” Max’s eyes half closed and fluttered as if he could see the treasure inside the bag. “It’s different. Not gold. Not jewels. But it’s ancient and it’s . . . it’s important.”

“Great.” Gary smiled and started across the floor.

Sophie grabbed him. “No!”

“What?” Gary looked disdainfully at her fingers curled around his arm.

Sophie wasn’t an eloquent woman, or even intelligent; she ran on instinct and now she simply repeated, “No.”

Sun Hee turned her head from side to side. “There’s another way.”

“Oh, for God’s sake—” Gary started out across the floor again.

John didn’t even think. He grabbed Gary’s shoulders and yanked him back. “You’ve got a team. Now listen to us!”

Gary turned blazing eyes toward John.

John protected himself automatically, lifting his hand and holding his power like a shield. He felt the energy of Gary’s mind slam into him and bounce off.

John staggered back, his neck whiplashing as if he’d been hit. For a moment, his eyes rolled back in his head.

Amina caught him.

Gary glared at John. “I’m the leader here.”

John recovered, and in a low, intense voice, he said, “Yes, and Sophie is the one who knows about traps. If she says no, then you don’t go. If Sun Hee can catch the scent of another passage, then you follow her. We are your team. We are your backup. We’re in mortal danger. So
listen to us.
”