Chains of Ice (24 page)

At the thought, Brandon rolled onto his hands and knees and barfed in the spring green grass. He retched, and retched, until all the stuff in his stomach was in a gross puddle and the spinning in his head had slowed. He fell over again, groaning, holding his stomach, wanting to die . . . needing a drink.

It was the sound of water trickling nearby that roused him, got him to his feet, and sent him staggering to the stream. He dunked his head into the water, drank and washed, stood and tried to figure out where he was. The last thing he remembered was fighting with that freakish giant, John Powell—and winning. He gave the guy a push, and Powell toppled off the edge. Brandon remembered eagerly running to the brink for a bird’s-eye view, looking down and being surprised that Powell had already fallen out of sight.

Then something—a brisk wind that felt like a hand on his back—sent him over the edge, too. He screamed and passed out.

Now here he was . . . somewhere on the yellow brick road.

To the east and west, the sky looked as if it was stapled to the ground. To the north and south, it went on forever.

So if he went west, there had to be a way out.

He started walking.

Warm water trickled between Genny’s breasts. She opened her eyes and discovered John had redirected one of the springs easing from the rocks behind them, and now he watched, seemingly fascinated, as the water flowed down to the place where they were still joined.

He had some nerve.

She twisted, quick and furious, put her foot on his chest, and pushed—and he was caught off guard. He stumbled backward into the falls, toppled off the shelf and into the pool.

“Note to self: he’s easy to overcome when sufficiently distracted,” Genny muttered—not that she thought he would go very far.

She slid off the rock and stood, arms outstretched into the falls, then dove into the water and swam to the bottom.

If not for John, she would have been in heaven here. For the first time in years, she wanted to frolic, to play, as the clear water caressed her and warm springs bubbled up from the bottom.

But out of the corners of her eyes, she could see John doing laps across the pool.

She collected her bra off a rock where he had tossed it, brought it to the surface, and threw it on the grassy part of the shore.

She was, right now, sick and tired of putting up with men. They were exploitive bastards, every one of them, and sick with testosterone poisoning to boot.

Taking a big breath, she dove to the bottom again and picked her panties off a waving frond. She started toward the surface, then frowned and dove back down. The rock beside that plant didn’t look quite like a rock. In fact, toward the top, the round brown object had a blue string tied around it. Tentatively, she poked at it.

It was a leather bag, like an old-fashioned money sack, small enough to carry in one hand. She picked it up; it didn’t weigh much.

Then it occurred to her—it was probably John’s, lost during his mad dash to rip off his clothes so he could screw her senseless.

She ought to leave the little bag right here.

But that was the trouble with being upright and honorable. Even if he was a calculating jerk, she held herself to higher standards. She brought it up with her panties and tossed them both on the grass beside her bra. Then she waded out of the water to excavate her clothes from the mud.

Tiny springs bubbled up here, too, turning the smooth, brown clay squishy and wet, warm between her toes. If she hadn’t been so aggravated, she would have been having a good time digging around with her feet then, when she had no luck that way, with her hands.

But she
was
aggravated.

John had refused to listen to her explanation about why she’d come looking for him. At the same time, though, he was perfectly willing to hump as if they were rabbits.

Yes, yes.
She’d been aroused before he touched her. He had that effect on her.

But that didn’t mean it was
right
; didn’t mean he had to take advantage of her. And she was pretty darned sure that even if she hadn’t been interested, he would have used his gift to get her interested. Which, as far as she was concerned, was nothing but cheating.

She must have been muttering pretty loudly, because behind her John said, “You always used your gift to make me horny.”

She flung herself around and glared at the naked, dripping man standing waist deep in the water. “What gift?”

“You look and smell and taste like a beautiful woman, and that gift works every time on me.”

His expression was so solemn, it caught her attention.

Was he serious?

Then she realized she was mistaking detachment for solemnity.

“What bullshit.” She found her shirt, wadded up in the mud, and threw it at him hard.

It landed with a splatter on his chest.

She continued. “You don’t listen to me, but you want to do it with me.”

He caught the shirt, glanced at it, then tossed it in the water. “I’m listening now.”

“Are you really? Really?” Sarcasm had never tripped off her tongue so easily. She straightened, stared him right in the face, and said, “Well, here you go. I agreed to talk to you, to try to negotiate your return to New York City because it was the only way I could get to have the one thing I wanted most in the world—the wilderness and the lynx. And, yes, I didn’t tell you when I should have because I was afraid you’d be so mad I’d never see you again. I liked you. I liked the cats. I liked how you were teaching me to listen to the forest and how to survive in the world. And I didn’t want to lose that.”

“Yes.” He nodded. “That is a motivation I can comprehend.”

She was fed up.

He was doing his inscrutable judgment routine.

Infuriating!

She continued. “So I’m a big coward, but at the same time—give me
some
credit for bravery. I thought you were probably crazy or violent or both, and I was willing to take that chance to work on Lubochka’s team. I was afraid my father expected me to sleep with you to convince you . . .” Horrified, she realized what she had admitted.

John’s extraordinary blue eyes sharpened. “
Did
you sleep with me to convince me to go back?”

“No!” she shouted. “No. I already told you, no!” She wanted to slap him across the face for suggesting such a thing. “You can’t talk to me that way. You’re not my father. You can’t abuse me like that.”

“Abuse you?” John’s fists flexed. “He abused you?”

“He never hit me. Never touched me at all, if he could help it. It was like I was a tool he picked up only when he needed to use me . . .” She lifted her chin. “But he was always pushing me to do what he thought was right . . . for him. If I didn’t do it, he said things. Like you just said. Insulting, belittling . . . I’m not putting up with that from you.”

“But you’ll put up with it from him?”

“No.
No!
” She took a long breath, and realized . . .

“No, not anymore. I’ve been through too much to take that from . . . from anyone.”

It was true. She had traveled to Russia, held a baby lynx, been chased by a violent mob, climbed a tall rock and dropped, she had thought, to her death. She had met the man she’d been sent to recruit.

She looked at John, standing two feet away, smeared with mud and watching her far too intelligently.

She’d been frightened by him, cared for him, fallen in love with him, mated with him, had him discover her duplicity. She’d had him accuse her, hate her, save her and take his revenge on her.

She wasn’t the same woman who had come to Russia.

She was not even the same woman she was this morning. So she made her declaration of independence. “I’m not afraid of anything anymore. I’m for sure not afraid of you, John Powell.” She found her pants and threw them at him just as hard as she had the shirt.

He was closer this time, and when the pants hit him, the splatter of mud reached her, too.

“You should be,” he said. “A day after I discovered my wife’s infidelity, I let her burn to death.”

“Okay.” Genny sat down and crossed her hands over her chest. “Convince me.”

Because after all,
he
didn’t care about
her
or he wouldn’t believe so badly of her.

“I can’t talk while you’re naked,” he said.

He was stalling. “Okay. I can fix that.” Getting up, she searched in the water until she found her shirt. She pulled it on, buttoned it up, and sat down again.

“That’s better,” he said, although he sounded skeptical.

“You can resist my charms for a half hour,” she said.

He mumbled, “I wouldn’t be so sure of that.”

“Try.” Her voice was tart.

He looked at the buttons on her shirt, or maybe the breasts underneath her shirt, as if trying to decide between sex and confession. Then to her surprise, he seated himself beside her—and talked. “I was one of the Chosen Ones, the power member in my team—”

“Hm, yes. I suspected that.” Still that easy sarcasm.

“—and I worked with those six people for three years. We were close. We lived together, fought together, ate together, and saved people . . . sometimes. Got our hands on a lot of artifacts and almost got killed . . . too often. Slept together, or rather, Gary slept with all the women except Sun Hee until . . .”

“Until you found them together.”

“Gary set that up, I’m sure.” John wiped his hand across his forehead, leaving a streak of mud behind. “I think I could have forgiven him, them, if there had been any real emotion behind it, but for him, it wasn’t about making love to Sun Hee. It was about being the dominant male. About kicking sand in my face.”

“What was it about with Sun Hee?”

“It was about being weak.” He sounded indifferent, as if he were looking at events that had happened to another man. “She was a very talented Chosen, but her character wasn’t strong. When our marriage settled down into the day-to-day boredoms and frustrations of real life, Gary and his flashy, clandestine courtship looked exciting to her.”

“That’s all?”

“What did you expect?”

“From you? Some pain, some indignation, some scorn. Something!” Genny hadn’t thought that John could startle her, but he did. “You sound like you didn’t love her!”

John blankly looked at her.

“You didn’t love her!” Genny realized.

“I did, as much as a man like me can love.”

Was it true? Was John incapable of real love? If that was the truth, Genny’s disdain for Sun Hee changed to something quite different—she felt sorry for her.

“I found them the day before we left on our mission.” John started out steadily enough, but now his voice and body tensed. “So then . . .”

“Then you killed them all?” Genny poked at him the same way the circus man had poked at him—to get him to perform.

But she had a different reason to want this performance. John needed to tell the truth. For once, he needed to tell the whole truth.

Genny needed to hear it.

“Five of them. That day, five died.” John picked up a handful of mud and squished it between his fingers, and gazed at his own hand as if it was a crystal to see into the past. “Max was our treasure finder. A good, solid man with a real gift for finding gold. Sophie wasn’t an eloquent woman. She wasn’t even bright, but she could always sense a trap. Amina . . . glowed.”

“Like a flashlight?”

John got an affectionate smirk on his face. “Like our own personal Energizer bunny. Bataar could hear anything, even the flutter of butterfly wings; and Sun Hee was the human equivalent of a bloodhound. Our leader was Gary—Gary White, a guy with this need to be the best, the biggest, the most acclaimed. The Chosen teams are seven men and women who work together for seven years. That’s what we signed on for. Gary had led three groups before ours.”

“So he wasn’t young.” Genny could already see where this was going.

“No, but he wasn’t old.”

“But he wasn’t the youngest, the brightest, the strongest. Not anymore.”

John looked at her, almost annoyed. “How did you
know
that?”

“I suppose this is going to come as a shock to you, Powell, but men aren’t difficult creatures to figure out. First they’re young and brash and think they’ll live forever. Then when they get a little older, they realize other men are coming up who are younger and brasher, so they buy fast cars, take scuba lessons, get hair transplants. . . . In graduate school, I had two different professors who ended up paying through the nose for their divorces because, to prove their virility, they had to sleep with one of their students.” Remembering back, Genny shook her head. “Men are idiots.”

“Yes,” John said meekly.

Yeah
. Genny was really terrified of this mad killer. “Back to your story. What did Gary do to prove his virility—besides sleep with your wife, I mean?” Her questioning was callous and indifferent, without an ounce of compassion, but somehow it seemed the right way to approach John.

For he relaxed a little and told the story stoically. “When it came to our missions, Gary wasn’t good at calculating the odds against us. The trouble was, he got away with the impossible time and again. His team kept pulling one miracle after another out of the bag. Finally . . .”

“The miracles ran out?”

“And the bag collapsed.” John paused for such a long time, she thought she was going to have to prod him again. Then he flopped back in the mud, tucked his arms under his head, looked up at the sky, and started into the meat of the story. “There was a volcano on one of the Indonesian islands, dormant for years, and it started rumbling. That kind of event always attracted the attention of the Gypsy Travel Agency, because the native peoples had their rituals and sometimes those rituals included some pretty impressive artifacts that never at any other time saw the light of day.”

“The native peoples hid their valuables until they needed them?” Genny asked.

“Exactly. A rumor said the native people would place a solid gold goddess statue in the way of the possible lava flow. My team was”—John swallowed—“we were supposed to retrieve it.”

“That’s unethical.”

“The Gypsy Travel Agency doesn’t view it that way. They have a very strong capitalistic bent.”

“I know.” She didn’t approve, but she knew. She’d seen that bent in her father.

“Of course they sent us with the usual stern warning not to endanger ourselves, knowing perfectly well that we lived to endanger ourselves.” His eyes were clear, without emotion, reflecting the blue of the sky. “I’ll never forget seeing that statue. She was about twenty inches high, and she had been polished smooth by generations of her people stroking her. Her body was the traditional goddess body with large breasts and broad hips. She was seated on a throne, and I calculated the base was eight by eight. Not too big, right?”

“No, not too big, but if it was pure gold, it was heavy.”

“It was pure gold.” He looked at her. “Do you know how much a cubic foot of gold weighs?”

Genny shook her head.

“Twelve hundred and six pounds.”

“You couldn’t pick her up.”

“She was slick and she was heavy, and she had been placed up against a tall rock wall, frozen lava created in a previous eruption. Heavy or not, we might have been able to grab her, but the mountain was shaking under our feet. The fumaroles were venting pure sulfur. We couldn’t breathe. I was dizzy. As Bataar tried to lift the statue, lava flow started to the left of us. A huge earthquake struck. Sophie was knocked off her feet and into the flow. She screamed.” John’s sentences came in staccato bursts, a soldier giving his report. “I’ll never forget that scream as long as I live. Then she burned, writhing as she was swept downstream.”

“My God. John.” Genny placed her hand on his chest.

He didn’t even seem to feel it. “We were horrified. Gary was yelling at us to get the statue. Then he started tugging at it. Sun Hee shrieked,
Watch out!
A crack opened up in the wall behind the goddess. Lava poured down on us, fast and hot. I used my power. I created a circle of safety around the six of us who were left. But the gases . . . they were toxic. I kept losing consciousness for a millisecond, and every time I did, the lava crept closer. Then Max fell down, just fell down onto the ground, and the ground was so hot it was burning the soles of my feet through my boots.”

“Was he unconscious?”

“I hope he was dead,” John said bitterly. “I hope he never woke to that hell.”

Genny hoped so, too.

“Gary stayed awake and aware, God rot him, shouting about the statue.
Save the statue, John!
By then, I knew better. I was fighting to save Amina, my wife, and my friend Bataar. And Gary. I wasn’t about to lose any more of them. But the mountain . . . the mountain was bigger than I was. It was the force of the whole earth pushing against me. I couldn’t control that weight, and when I pressed in one direction, lava spouted up a different way. When I knew I couldn’t hold it, I told them all to get up on a rocky slope. I thought it looked as if it might survive the eruption.” John stopped, took a breath, then gathered himself and continued. “Gary started climbing. The mountain shook. Gary fell.”

“Into the eruption?”

“Sun Hee and Bataar caught him—they weren’t about to let him die—and pushed him onto the rock, but he had lost consciousness at last. The lava was rising all around us, but I was holding it back. I
was
holding it back. Amina started to pass out. Bataar caught her. Then a lava bomb blew out of the eruption and hit them both.”

Genny bit back a horror-struck exclamation.

“I had been concentrating all my energy on the area around us, trying to keep the lava from burning us.” John waved a hand at the ground, then up. “I never saw that rock coming through the air. One minute Bataar and Amina were there; the next minute they were flattened. Sun Hee was screaming and screaming. I knew she was, I could see her, but the volcano was so loud it was like some ghastly pantomime.”

The picture he painted was all too clear in Genny’s mind, and she knew what was coming. She feared what was coming.

He continued. “I was afraid I was going to pass out. I told her to hold on to my arm. She grabbed me. I had a clear circle and I thought I could get her up on that rock with Gary. Then . . . there was a big burst of gases. I remember the smell, like rotten eggs. I couldn’t get my breath, and I remember consciousness coming down to the size of a pin.” John was gasping as if he was living the memory. “When I came back—Sun Hee was gone, burning in the lava flow.”

I let her burn to death.

Yes, he had. But although she knew he doubted himself and his intention that day, she also knew the truth—he had done the best he could. “The lava must have been right at your feet.”

“It was. I thought it had me, and I turned to look at the golden goddess. I swear, she was smiling at me, mocking me. Then the lava swept around the gold and melted it, and swept the goddess away.”

Genny’s heart wept for him. “How did you get out?”

“When the mountain swallowed the goddess, the eruption stopped. Just like that”—he snapped his fingers—“it stopped.”

“The sacrifice had been given.”

“Yes. Yes, I think that was it.” John stared up at the clouds, and slowly his breathing calmed. “I jumped onto the ridge with Gary and waited. When the lava formed a crust, I picked Gary up and carried him to safety. He never regained consciousness.”

“He’s dead, too?”

“He’s in a coma in a New York facility.”

“You weren’t hurt at all?”

With obvious self-disdain, he admitted, “I burned the bottoms of my feet.”

Genny studied John and tried to think of the right words to reply. But she wasn’t a psychology major, and, anyway—
was
there a right thing to say to circumstances like this? Nothing could ever erase his memories. Nothing would ever completely give him peace of mind.

In the end, all she could say was what her heart told her. “John, that is truly an awful story. I don’t know how you have carried the burden of guilt for so long. But you did everything you could. People died. I’m sorry, but you’re a military man. You know a soldier can’t be blamed for a general’s incompetence.”