Cryostorm (13 page)

Ice crackled and took over the skin on my face. I felt it creep up my hands, arms, and even over my jeans.

“There you go,” Nate said. “There you go, Kelvin. Turn it on.”

“Oh my God,” Lois said.

I finally made out what that humming noise was. We were in the car. I flopped onto my back as the stinging pain of my ice crept into my injuries. Crackling and popping vibrated against the ice capsule, my bones snapping back into place.

As I healed, I remembered all too clearly what had happened.

Agents. Falling. Oh, and the landing.

Then darkness.

What had happened?

The calming coolness started to flow in, soothing all the cuts and bruises like a salve. It was cold, but it felt like a comforting bath to me as it caressed my flesh and massaged my tense neck and shoulders. My aching legs, stomach, and chest. So many injuries. Bullet holes. Fractured bones.

Finally my breathing returned to normal. The darkness completely faded away and Nate’s face came into focus through my ice capsule.

Nate’s sweet face. But red marks blemished it. Blood trickling down the side of his forehead marred his smooth skin. I called the ice back into me and saw him with my own eyes.

Blood ringed the neck of his shirt, slices riddled his arm, and I stopped counting the cuts on his beautiful face. Instead, I slapped my hand against his cheek and pulled him onto me. With a grunt, my body received all of his weight, and I curled my arms around him.

He groaned, but I iced down. “Shhh. I got you,” I said. “I got you.”

His body relaxed against mine, and I rubbed his back as much as the confines of this new ice capsule would allow.

“What is she doing?” Lois asked.

“Healing him,” Georgia said. “Tim, can you pull into that next stop? Is it safe?”

“Yeah. After your firestorm, those Agents are fried.”

The jostling stopped, and I heard car doors click open, talking, then doors slamming shut. More moving and then silence. Sweet, amazing, silence. I held Nate tight to me and called my ice in.

“Nate.”

His brown eyes beamed down at me. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. You?”

“You almost died.” He inched up my body, and the car jostled. “Mandy…I almost lost you.”

“I’m here. You’re stuck with me.” I pushed his hair back, reveling in the weight of his body on mine.

I glanced to the sides of me. I was lying down on the back seat of the Jeep. They’d flattened out the back.

He let out a long breath, watching me with wide, scared eyes. “I’m not sure what I’d do if something ever took you away from me.” He kissed my temple. “Can’t see beyond you, Mandy. I’m not sure there is anything else out there to be honest.” He pressed a tender kiss to my lips and drew in a deep breath. “You’re the air I breathe. For now and always.”

“Nate,” I whispered. “I feel the same way, so let’s never find out, okay?”

“Deal.”

I kissed the tip of his nose, wishing we were alone in a room so I could enjoy him more, but the hard car beneath me wasn’t exactly comfortable. “Did we get the stuff?”

“We got it.” He brushed his lips against mine. “We’re on our way to Colorado.”

“You couldn’t have read it already. How long have I been out?”

“Here. Sit up. I’ll tell you everything in a second. Let’s get you up.” Nate knocked on the back window, and the hatch opened.

There stood Lois, Tim, and Georgia. The daylight had turned to nighttime. Georgia lurched forward and yanked me into a suffocating hug. “Oh my God, Mandy.”

“Okay, G.” I peeled her off me so I could breathe. “I just started breathing on my own again.”

She jerked away. “That’s not funny, Mandy. Not funny at all.” Tears welled.

“Sorry.” I slid over the edge and landed on my feet. The packed snow crunched beneath my weight. I pulled in a nose-hair-freezing breath and blew it out my mouth. “Okay, that feels good.” I glanced at Nate. “Your breath felt good, too.” I wove my arm around his waist. “Thanks.”

He’d breathed for me, I knew that now. It was his breath, his pounding on my chest that kept me alive.

“That was close,” Tim said. He reached into the back and opened the small cooler. “Here. Drink some water. You okay?”

“I’m fine.” I took the water. “What happened?”

“I heard you yell, ‘nets’. I texted Tim to get Georgia out there.” Nate shook his head. “They were shooting bullets. Not darts.”

“Tell me about it.” I rubbed my shoulder. “A few hit me.”

“I came around the corner and sent up a wall of fire between them. Tim and Nate picked them off. There were, like, fifteen of them, Mandy. Fifteen.”

“Shit.”

“Had to be Bev. The Center Agents use dart guns. They can’t afford for us to die without knowing the whereabouts of the book, I guess. Bev’s Agents seem to have the order to kill on sight.” Nate squeezed me harder, then looked over the dim parking lot of the rest area.

A single building off to my left was where the bathrooms were. There were only two cars in the lot along with a few semi-trucks, but they were dark.

“I fell. The nets wouldn’t allow me to float down.”

“You fell all right. The ice around you shattered into a million pieces. I couldn’t get to you because of the bullets.” Nate’s bottom lip quivered. “I couldn’t get to you.”

“I did, though and sheltered you with my fire, but you were unconscious. Couldn’t throw the healing on,” Georgia said. “But your healing turned on by itself then flickered off. It was the strangest thing.”

“I remember, before I lost consciousness, telling myself to heal.” I drained the rest of the bottle. “But I couldn’t stay awake.”

“Nate carried you to the car and it went on like that for a couple of hours. Healing flickered on and off as we drove west.” Georgia shook her head. “You stopped breathing a few times, Mandy. Stopped breathing.”

“That’s where you came in.” I looked at Nate. “I remember some. Felt it.” I leaned my head against his chest, tears stinging my eyes. “Thank you.”

“As long as I have breath, you will have breath. I promise, Mandy. I’ll never stop protecting you. Never.”

“Your dream,” I whispered. “Was it this?”

“No the dream was different, but the fact that you were hurt is bad enough.” He sighed. “And we’re going to Colorado. I’ve skimmed some of the paperwork Lois printed and so far it’s similar to what Tim and I saw.”

“And the missing links?”

“After the power we saw today at the bank, we’re in trouble, Mandy. Maybe what I know about The Center’s bases can help this GEM place destroy them.” He looked down at me. “Right now, I can’t see an alternative.”

“Then we’ll go to Colorado and find this Dustin.”

“Well,
he’s
in Wynot, Arizona. The GEM base is in Colorado,” Lois said. “Do we dare split up?”

“No.” I shook my head. “No splitting up. That’s not good.”

“Can’t just show up at the place, we don’t know where it is. We need to contact him,” Nate said. “Phone would be best.” He glanced at Tim. “No emails.”

“If he’s into something big, his phones would be safe. We know ours are secure, so let’s try it. It’s barely nine in Arizona.”

“Do it,” Nate said. “Then let’s find a place to rest. We’ll hit the road hard tomorrow and drive until we get where we need to be.”

Lois reached into the car and pulled out a black bag, where I assumed she had the papers. I sagged onto the bumper and leaned against the spare tire propped inside. I needed food. Guess that healing shell took it out of me.

Tim, Lois, and Georgia huddled together pointing at papers, looking for the number. I glanced at Nate. He stood tall watching the surroundings.

“You check in with Martin lately? Is the gang back home safe?”

Nate’s eyebrow quirked up. That sent a zinger of fear up my spine. “They’re fine,” he said.

“What?” I straightened.

“You amaze me, that’s all.”

“I do?” Okay that surprised me. I thought something was wrong.

“Near death, just recovered, you heal me, expending more energy, and now you’re focused on people back in Trifle.” He smiled. “And you say I have an old soul.”

“Well, you do, literally,” I said. “I’m a freak of nature.”

“We’re a perfect pair then, because I happen to be a freak of nature as well.” He reached out with his bare hand and combed his fingers through my hair. Then his warm palm cupped the side of my face. “That’s why I—” He cleared his throat. “I—”

“It’s okay.” I rested my gloved hand on his chest. I felt his heart hammering beneath the layers of Gore-Tex. “You don’t have to say it.”

The three words—ones any girl would want to hear—scared the living crap out of me. Zach had been my first love. I’d jumped in and said the words right away and he ripped my heart out. I knew Nate was different.
Very
different, considering he wasn’t even human by most people’s standards. But, really, neither was I.

Granted I wasn’t developed in a test tube like Nate, and I didn’t develop and grow at an accelerated rate like Nate did, but still. To hear and say those words again scared me. I knew in my heart I loved Nate. He was the first thing I thought of when I woke up, and the last thing on my mind when I fell asleep. When it came to staying alive, I’d given him my complete trust and he’d done well by me. By Georgia, too.

“I don’t know why it’s hard for me to say.” His thumb swirled circles on my cheek, leaving a delicious tingle in its wake. “I know it, feel it, and want to say it. Shouldn’t be that hard.”

“It’s scary. No rush.” I leaned forward, but stopped millimeters from his lips. “I feel it, too.”

He brushed his mouth against mine as light as a feather. “You scared me,” he whispered between touching kisses to my lips.

“Sorry.” I drew in a deep breath of his spicy smell. “Didn’t mean to fall off the top of a building. I would have rather not done that.”

“I killed them for hurting you,” he said, his voice turning hard as gravel. “Georgia helped.”

My stomach churned at the thought, yet what else could they have done? It was kill or be killed. I hated that saying more than the Agents themselves, but it was true.

His mouth took command, and his sweet, soft tongue met mine. A delicious tingle ignited in my belly as I drew him in. It was a tender kiss, full of love, even if we couldn’t say the word yet. It chased all my tiredness and worry away, and I relaxed into him.

Tim cleared his throat. “Um, Nate. She doesn’t need CPR anymore.”

I laughed into Nate’s mouth not wanting to break away completely.

“I was just making sure,” Nate said. He swiped his thumb below my bottom lip and kissed my nose before turning away. “What’d we get?”

“
We?
” Tim shook his head. “While you were kissing your girl there,
we
called Dustin. No answer. Normal voicemail, like any other bloke, so I left a message telling him we found him on the net and are interested in learning more about GEM.”

“Think he’ll call back?” I asked.

Tim smiled. “I didn’t leave our number, and considering I had to hack into their system to get their number…that should tell him something. And our phone is secured, so we’ll see if he and his people can hack through and trace our call.”

“Nice,” Nate said. He raised a fist toward Tim and rapped knuckles. “Test number one.”

“Test number one?” Georgia asked, looking from Nate to Tim.

“We don’t trust him, and if he’s smart, he wouldn’t trust us.” Nate smiled. “So we’ll have a testing phase I suspect.”

“Test one is if he can hack the incoming call and trace to our phone number.” Tim grinned. “Test two is if they send anyone out to us.”

“Out to us?”

“Yeah. Either to bring us in or to watch.” Tim nodded. “So, keep your eyes open.”

“How will we tell the difference between GEM and Agents?” Georgia asked.

“Yeah, well, that’ll be a trick, huh?” Tim laughed. “I’m sure they’ll just watch.
If
they can find us.”

“Now, if you two lovebirds are done with the CPR, I’d love to find a place to catch some sleep, or are we driving all night?” Georgia asked me.

“I need food and sleep.” I looked up at Nate. “Then on to the next adventure.”

Chapter 20

H
ot water streamed down my body, and I was finally starting to warm up. Guess death would chill anyone to the bone.

And from what Nate and Tim said, I’d died a couple of times.
Damn Agents.
Tears burned, and I knew they were free-flowing in the water, cascading down my face. I was so sick of running. Sick of pain. Not just the physical pain but the pain I’d heard in Nate’s voice when he was calling my name.

My stomach clenched. He truly loved me. Sure, neither of us could say it yet, but we both knew it. He’d kept me alive in the back of the Jeep. He didn’t give up on me.

He never would. I knew that deep inside. No matter what, he’d always fight for me.

And I for him.

I turned off the water and snatched the towel hanging over the shower curtain rod. I dried off and stepped in front of the mirror. A quick brush of the teeth and the hair was enough time to defog the mirror. Leaning in, I touched my neck. Evidently I’d been shot there.

Nate said it’d narrowly missed the major artery, probably because of my ice. The evidence of my near death lay crumpled in the trashcan—dirty, bloody clothing.

Hopefully this GEM group could come through for us.

Wrapped in the hotel bathrobe, I opened the door into the room. Nate lay on the bed with two plates of food.

“Nate?” I glanced around, expecting to find Georgia sitting at the table beside the window.

“Hungry?” He held up a burger, and my stomach answered for me. He probably heard it across the room.

I hugged the robe closer and took the remaining steps to the foot of the bed. The hotel room was small, but nice. Even had robes for us. Nate opted for shorts and a T-shirt, though.

“Where’s Georgia?” I asked, hopping up onto the bed. I snatched the burger from his hand and took a big bite. Man, I was so hungry.

Guess dying did that to a girl.

“If you’re okay with it, I’m staying in here with you.”