Chains of Ice (17 page)

Brandon fell backward so hard, he might have been hit by a freight train, and the pistol flew out of his grip.

The kitten froze in midflight.

Genny stood underneath it, her hands up, her jaw dropped.

The mother lynx leaped out of the darkness, claws extended, intent on taking Genny out.

And something heavy hit Genny from the side.

She flew through the air, hit the sand and skidded, the breath knocked out of her by the impact.

A muscled mass—John—landed on her.

In a daze, Genny heard Mama Cat snarl, felt her weight drop on top of John.

Something tore.
John
tore. Genny felt John convulse, heard him gasp in pain.

Then Mama Cat sprang away . . . and Brandon shrieked in terror.

In a tiny corner of her mind, Genny experienced a savage satisfaction.

Some fluid dripped off John and landed beside Genny’s ear.

She opened her eyes, breathless under the burden of his body.

A dark liquid pooled beside her and sank into the sand, the coppery smell of blood all too evident.

Mama Cat stalked toward Brandon, eyes fixed on him, teeth bared.

And although Genny knew it was impossible, the kitten still hung in midair, curled up as if held by an invisible palm.

Then she knew the truth she had so carefully ignored.

John was truly Chosen.

For one incredulous moment, she rubbed her forehead on the cool, packed sand. She couldn’t believe it. She didn’t want to believe it. But to deny what was before her eyes was ridiculous and futile.

And someone needed to handle this situation before it got any worse.

She pushed at John. “John? John? Can you hear me? Let the kitten down.”

John gathered himself, an obviously painful process, and rolled off her. By slow inches, he lifted his hand.

Like a feather on the wind, the kitten descended to the sand and ran toward its mother.

Genny was reminded she wasn’t the only one who had seen the miracle, for Brandon was breathing in loud, irregular moans.

To break through his terror, Genny sharpened her tone. “Brandon. Let the kitten out of the crate. Let it out
now
.”

Gibbering like a monkey, Brandon pushed over the crate with his foot.

The second kitten sprang free.

Mama Cat paused, distracted by the return of her babies.

“Brandon,” Genny said softly. “Run.”

He did, and his flight excited Mama Cat’s predatory instinct.

The lynx sprang after him.

He screamed and disappeared into the forest, the big cat on his heels.

“I hope he gets lost.” Genny turned to John.

“I hope she eats him alive.” John lay sprawled on the sand, eyes closed, breathing deeply. The denim shirt was shredded at the shoulder; blood oozed from the wounds.

In pursuit of her kitten, the lynx had attacked Genny, and John had put himself between them.

Mama Cat had clawed him, sliced his muscles into ground beef.

“Stay here.” Genny ran back across the river and up the path, grabbed her backpack, then pelted back down again. She had water in her shoes and sand up her nose, and her ribs hurt when she breathed. But compared to John . . . She knelt beside him, pulled out her first-aid kit, opened it.

She had one roll of gauze. That wasn’t going to do it.

She dug deeper in the backpack. Her hand touched her sweatshirt. She pulled it out and pressed it against his shoulder. “Hold it on there,” she told him.

He did as he was told but otherwise wasn’t moving, and that told her all too clearly how much he suffered.

She got the scissors, the small pack of sterile wipes. She lifted the sweatshirt, cut away the shreds of his denim shirt, saw three slashes across his pectorals. The longest cut was the length of her hand and had laid back skin, showed muscle and sinew. She dabbed at it with the shirt, and worried about the fecal matter and bacteria that the lynx collected on her feet. The wound should be cleaned, and the first-aid kit wasn’t equipped to handle something so serious. “How polluted is the river?”

“Gold mines above. Best not to take a chance.”

The lynx returned, her pace measured.

She was clean, with no blood on her fur, but she fixed her cruel gaze on Genny and stalked toward her.

Then her kittens ran to her, crying their distress. She halted in her tracks and nuzzled them, licked the Brandon scent off their fur, picked up the boy in her mouth, and started up the river. The girl cat scampered behind them.

“She’s moving them to a different den,” John said. “We’ll never see them again.”

“I think that’s the least of our problems.” Already, his body was giving off waves of heat. It wasn’t possible for a normal man to sicken so quickly, but this man wasn’t . . . normal . . . “John, why didn’t you use your . . . your . . .”

“Power?” he supplied softly.

“Power,” she agreed. “To block the lynx’s attack?”

“I needed to knock Brandon and that damned pistol out of the picture. I needed to protect the kitten. When I’m on the run, I can only project in so many directions at once. Since I knew I could reach you in time, and an attack by the cat was probably not fatal . . .” He shrugged, and winced.

“We have to get you into town to a doctor.”

His laughter held a raw sound. “After what happened here? No. If Brandon lives—Mama Cat wasn’t bloodied, so I assume she let him go so she could return to her kittens—he’ll be back at the inn, babbling his version of events. We’ll be lucky if the villagers don’t lift their torches and come to hunt me down.”

“You’re not Frankenstein,” she snapped.

“I’m a freak.”

“You are not a freak, you’re . . .” She paused, struggled.

“You can’t even say it.”

“You’re Chosen.” There. She did say it.

“I warned you that’s what I was, didn’t I?” He sounded affronted and bitter. “The first time I met you, I told you the truth. I didn’t let you walk into this situation blindly.”

“I always knew what I was getting into.” Before this went any further, she had to explain who she was, who her father was, what she had promised to do. “John, I have something to tell you.”

“Whatever it is, I don’t want to know right now.”

“You really should let me talk.”

“I can’t. I haven’t got a lot of time.” He struggled to sit up.

She helped, and tears filled her eyes as blood sprang anew from the marks on his shoulder. “If you don’t want to, we don’t have to go into Rasputye, but you
do
need a doctor.”

“No, I don’t. I’m Chosen. This is going to be a serious infection—”

“How can you sound so certain?”

“I can tell.” He challenged her with his gaze. “But I heal quickly. A few bad days, and I’ll be all right. Help me up and I’ll be on my way.”

All right. She would tell him later about her father and the notorious deal she’d made. It was probably better that way. John needed to recover without fretting about her motivations.

As she slid her arm around his uninjured shoulder, got her feet under her and lifted him, she shivered in shame. Because she wasn’t keeping the truth from John merely for his good health. She was quiet because she was afraid—afraid he wouldn’t understand, afraid of his anger, afraid that when he knew the truth, he would turn away and she’d never see him again.

He fascinated her. He challenged her.

She’d witnessed the truth about him. He’d proven his gift.

And now . . . she wanted him more.

He was heavy, but stronger than she realized; and when he was on his feet, he tried to disentangle himself. She looked up at him, into his bare face that still looked so alien, into the eyes that were so familiar. “Where are we going?”

“
I’m
going home.”

“Then I’m going with you.” She felt his body tense against her. “There’s no use arguing.”

“What are you going to do? Chase me through the forest?”

“What are you going to do?” she mocked him back. “Run away when you’re in pain? Leave a trail of blood like bread crumbs for me to follow?”

He opened his mouth to retort, then closed his eyes and swayed.

He was fevered. He was weak. He was in shock.

She picked up her backpack and, using the same cheery, ruthless tone as the nurse who had helped her prep for her tonsillectomy, said, “You know me. I’m not letting an injured man go off to take care of himself. I’ve never done stitches before, but if you won’t go to Rasputye, I guess I can learn.”

“No stitches.” He shook his head in heavy amazement, and started walking down the sandy riverbank. “Do you know that some of the Chosen Ones are marked at birth, and some must earn their mark?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“I’ve never had a mark. I’ve been shot at, stabbed, burned, but I’ve never had any scars or permanent marks that would prove I was Chosen.” He staggered slightly. “I believe an enraged mother protecting her babies finally gave them to me—and perhaps there is justice in that.”

It was what happened in between that he worried about.

He barely made it up the last steep, rocky climb to his home.

He had oh-so-carefully made his cabin secure, using the subtle tricks he’d learned in the military, and now he leaned against the doorframe and ran his fingers over the latch. The narrow pine needle he had placed there last night remained, assuring him no one had come through the door. So he opened it and stumbled in.

He dragged Genny after him. Or rather—she refused to let go, to allow him to fall to his face on the dirt floor. She used his weight to propel him facedown onto the primitive wood bed. The feather mattress was barely wide enough for his shoulders and long enough for his legs, but flat enough that he felt every rope stretched across the frame beneath the mattress. It wasn’t comfortable. It wasn’t large. But it had been here when he moved in and he hadn’t cared enough to improve it.

“Roll over,” she said.

“Right.” He gathered himself, pushed away the pain, and rolled over.

She shed her coat and backpack, carefully climbed on him and unbuttoned his shirt.

The heat of her soaked into his flesh. The scent of her filled his head like potent perfume.

He groaned in exquisite agony.

She paused. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you, but I don’t know how else to get you out of these clothes.”

“No. You didn’t hurt me. No, it’s not that.” She didn’t mean anything sexual. Even in his fever-racked state, he was sure of that. She was only interested in his wounds, and making wincing sounds as she peeled shreds of cloth and blood clots away from his oozing flesh.

But she
was
sitting on top of him, looking down at him, her fingers touching him lightly. He had dreamed of this. His imagination filled in details that he knew weren’t real—her hand sliding down his belly, beneath his waistband, to caress his cock. He could almost feel her fingers curling around—

“John, can you hear me?”

He blinked at her.

She cupped his chin with her hand, looked into his eyes. “John, do you have any clean rags?”

Had he been raging in delirium? Had he been saying things about her? About
them
?

“John.” She enunciated clearly. “Do you have any clean rags?”

“I heard you. The bottom drawer . . . by the woodstove.” He watched as she went to the chest, bent over, and . . . she had a bottom shaped like a kiss.

She straightened, her arm full of linens, and looked at him.

“What did I say?”

“Nothing.” She frowned as she gazed at him, looking like a mother with a sick child. “Can you hang on a little longer? Stay conscious a little longer?”

“Sure.”

She went to his sink. “How’s your water?”

“Well water. Good. No contaminants, not much sediment, recently washed the filters.” He was making sense, he noted with gratification. Really good sense.

But the next time she spoke, she was standing next to the bed and he could smell wood smoke. She had managed to start a fire in the woodstove. “John, I’m going to put a damp cloth on your forehead. All right?”

He opened his eyes. When had he closed them?

She was holding a white cloth . . . and some scissors. “Then I’m going to cut off your shirt.”

“My only denim shirt.”

She stroked his forehead with the cool cloth, then covered his forehead and eyes. “Mama Cat shredded it.”

“That’s right.” He heard her clipping the material, felt the tug as she pulled it out from underneath him.

“Now I’m going to clean these scratches. It’s going to hurt.” She climbed on top of him again, sat on his stomach.

He wanted to tell her to sit a little lower.

“Can you hold still?” she asked.

“Yes.” Because if he got restless, she’d get off him, and he didn’t want that. “Are you going to take off my pants?”

“After I clean your wounds . . . My God, John, she really dug her claws in.”

“Females always do.”

Genny rubbed his shoulder, wiping away more blood. “Do you have any antibiotics?”

He snorted. “They don’t work on me.”

“Aspirin? Anything to bring down the fever?”

“Only time works.” He heard water splashing nearby. Somehow, she’d placed a basin beside the bed.

“How do you feel?”

“Good.” Every place she touched him felt good.

His mind and body knew what they wanted, and with his control growing more and more precarious every minute, he worried that—

“Good?” she scoffed. “Sure. I think you’re miserable, and likely to get worse.”

“You don’t even know what’s happening to you, do you?”

“Know what, John?” She was indulging him.

He didn’t care. “You don’t know that the
rasputye
is affecting you.”

She froze in the act of wringing out her rag.

“More and more, you feel my emotions.” He pushed the cloth off his eyes and looked at her. “Don’t you?”

She placed the clean, damp rag on his wounds and let the warm water ease the stiffness forming in the joints. Picking her words with care, she said, “That’s part of the process of getting to know you. I’m starting to understand how you think.”

“Darling, you absorb my emotions. You reflect them back at me. They echo back and forth, transforming, growing, linking us.” Dimly, he was aware he had to stop talking before he spoke of his desire for her.

“John.” She lifted the cloth, wet it again, and placed it back on his forehead. “You’re babbling.”

“Am I?” Beneath the cover of the cloth, he closed his eyes and released the smallest, the very tiniest, pulse of power.

God. It felt so good to deliberately release that power that had been pent up in him for so long. It was like an orgasm long desired and long delayed.

She gasped and scrambled off the bed.

He moved the cloth quickly and looked at her, and realized it had been, not pure power but pure desire, for she stood shocked, flushed, and embarrassed.

How could he not want her? He’d asked if she knew about the Chosen Ones, and she did. He’d told her about himself—not everything, but enough—and she hadn’t run away.

But now she would. Now she knew.

He closed his eyes. He turned his head away. “Just go. I’ll be all right.”

“John.” She put her hand on his chest. “You’re not getting rid of me that easily.”