As Cold As Ice (20 page)

The immediate rush of air that left Soren’s
mouth, followed by his slow descent back to his knees, was
horrifying. He clutched at his gut, eyes wide, body shaking. His
choked noises, as if he couldn’t suck back any air at all,
increased the ice in Jessica’s blood.

“
Stop that!” She didn’t
make it a single step before she was reminded of the hands holding
onto her, keeping her back.

Soren still couldn’t seem to catch a
breath.

Jessica had been punched in the stomach
before. It was one of those things that tended to happen from time
to time in her line of work as a hunter. Sometimes, fugitive
paranormals happened to catch her off-guard when trying to get away
from her.

She knew that pain. It wasn’t even just the
object slamming into her stomach. It was the way her abs contracted
too late to try and take some of the force, how her lungs reacted,
as if they were immediately closing for business, and it was all
Jessica could do to keep the doors open so she could breathe.

The lack of breath was the absolute worst.
All kinds of sympathy pains welled up inside her as she watched
Soren struggle to breathe.

“
You want to try that
again?” Markus asked.

Still with that same, weasely, smarmy look
on his face. The kind of man whose hands looked so soft he’d
probably never been in a fight in his entire life.

He was going to hit Soren again if she told
him she didn’t know. At least, he would tell Charles to hit Soren
again, but it was the same damned thing. It didn’t matter. Markus
was still the one doing it, and he was the one Jessica wanted to
kill.

“
I’m telling you, I don’t
know, you fucking unoriginal bastard. You hitting a man who’s
helpless to fight back doesn’t change that. It just makes you look
like every comic book villain to ever exist, ever. Why don’t you
start going off on this huge monologue about how you’re secretly
planning on taking over the entire city while you’re at it? You
stupid asshole.”

Markus’s eyes were just a touch on the wide
side when she finished. She imagined that he’d had men swearing at
him before—he was still running a business, after all—but she
doubted anyone had ever said to him anything quite so stupid as she
had just then.

Soren looked absolutely horrified. Jessica
was horrified with herself. She knew the kind of things Markus
could do to her, and it terrified her. At that point, her mission
was to just keep that from showing on her face.

Which she was totally failing at. There was
no way in Hell Markus didn’t smell the fear dripping from her as he
smiled and stepped forward. Her body wouldn’t completely cooperate
with her to hide how she was really feeling.

The tiny tremble in her fists, the way she
couldn’t stop swallowing—hell, even the way she refused to so much
as blink as Markus approached—were probably a giant giveaway that
something was amiss.

“
I like you, I really do,”
Markus said, and there was a hint of something in his eyes that
Jessica really hated. It made the tiny hairs on the back of her
neck and forearms tingle, and goosebumps started to pimple all over
her skin. Markus didn’t touch her, and he didn’t do something as
lewd and obvious as roll his eyes up and down her body, but there
was something in what he’d said that made her skin crawl. She was
rarely wrong about these things, and she didn’t think she was wrong
then, either.

“
Be honest with me, Ms.
Frost—and I do have my doubts that is your real name. I’m not
asking for much. I just want to know how he was planning on getting
you out?”

“
And then what?” Jessica
asked, not bothering to point out that Frost really
was
her last name,
whether he believed the irony or not.

“
And then I will give you a
spot on my team. You can become a hunter again. The fact that you
worked as one to begin with must prove that you found some
usefulness in the program. You will be paid higher than anyone else
on my staff.”

“
And Soren?”

“
He can go back to testing
blood samples. I might even decide to forgive him and take his
shackles off. They
will
need to come off eventually if I’m to gain the
trust of the public with a few respectable paranormals, after
all.”

“
Soren lives, and I live.
That’s your offer?”

Markus nodded.

Jessica didn’t believe him, but just because
she had nothing else to do, no other way to stall for time, she
nodded to the square cement wall, the part that was hiding a
sliding door. “That was how he was going to get me out.”

She didn’t know for sure, but ever since
Soren told her he’d be getting her out before she got put onto the
Proxy Project, it had become her main target, the only thing she
could think of for how he would get her out of there without a
tracker on her.

Markus frowned and turned around. He didn’t
seem to get what she was suggesting, that his secret escape hatch
might be the issue. He seemed to be looking for something else
entirely. “What? What was he going to use?”

Jessica rolled her eyes and pointed. “Your
secret escape door. That’s how he was going to get me out.”

Markus’s eyes widened, and then he burst out
laughing.

Jessica didn’t like that.

“
You’ve got to be kidding
me. No, that’s impossible. You must be lying.”

Jessica clenched her teeth hard enough to
send shots of pain into her gums. “You asked me how we were getting
out of here. That’s how.”

Markus walked right up to the wall itself,
as if he could prove the strength and integrity of his escape door
by putting himself next to it. “Very well. Tell me how Soren, who
is a brilliant doctor, would hack into my security system? He works
with blood, not with computers.”

Jessica kept pointing. “You opened the
little glass door and pulled out a USB key. There’s a flaw in your
system, and you don’t even know it!”

Markus frowned at her, as if he was finally
starting to believe she might be telling the truth.

But then the wall behind him flew apart in
an ear-destroying explosion that sent cement rocks flying forward,
a blast so powerful the force of it knocked her off her feet.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Every movie Jessica had ever seen that
involved an explosion of some sort, followed by a far-off droning
ring, was apparently accurate, because that was exactly what she
was experiencing in that moment.

Nothing but that ongoing noise in her brain,
and the feeling of thick cotton stuffed inside the tubes of her
ears and skull.

It wasn’t even just that. Her entire
equilibrium seemed to have been completely thrown off. Like when
she’d been a little girl and she’d spun around faster and faster
until the world beneath her feet started to tilt and twirl. She
tried to rise, hoping to find Soren, make sure he was all right,
and to see if the two of them could get the hell out of there. But
she was still working on the part where she got to her knees. The
floor wouldn’t stop tilting beneath her.

The world was moving too fast, yet somehow,
there were people around her who were already on their feet,
running around and shouting orders as if nothing had happened at
all.

They wore dark clothes. The recruits? Holy
God. They were going to go far in this industry with that kind of
recovery time.

Someone shouted at her, but she couldn’t
hear through the stuffing that clogged her ears, her brain, and
even her sinuses, though that could’ve been the dust flying
everywhere. Jessica could barely see anything farther away than
four inches from her face, and all the voices sounded like they
were shouting at her through a heavy blanket.

The hands that grabbed onto her were real,
however, yanking her to her feet before she had the chance to get
used to being so high off the ground.

Everything swayed and spun, and even though
not being able to see any details around her helped, thanks to the
dust, she still wanted to throw up.

Jessica dragged her feet as they took her
away. Her lack of strength and the fact that these people were
moving her so fast made it nearly impossible for her to properly
get her feet beneath her.

She would’ve dragged her feet anyway,
ringing in her ears or not. She wanted to find Soren.

She wasn’t taken very far before she was
stopped, and then more shouting, closer and closer.

Sounded like,
mast off
?

More shouting.
Last omal
?
Blast oval
?

No, that made no sense. She shook her head.
The ringing quieted down to something more manageable. Even though
it was still there, and the dust made it hard to see, she could
finally make out what was being said to her.

“
Blast the
wall
!
Ice it!
Jessica!”

Ethan. Ethan was holding onto her. She could
finally recognize him through the haze of smog. Then she looked
down at her wrists, which someone else was holding up, pointing her
hands to the gaping hole in the wall.

She was on the other side of Markus’s escape
door, and her shackles were off.

People on the other side, in the hidden
basement, were starting to get to regain their balance. Many were
already on their feet and blinking blearily. She guessed she had
less than two seconds before they realized what they were looking
at.

“
Soren—?”

“
We got him! Close the
hole!” That was Jack’s voice, Jack who shook her wrists, trying
desperately to get her attention.

Jessica didn’t need to hear any more. She
let the ice inside her loose and pushed it outward, letting the
cold fly to the hole that had been made in Markus’s escape hatch
just as guns started to go off.

For the first two seconds, her ice wall was
weak and thin enough that some of the bullets penetrated. Someone
grunted and went down. A bullet flew by Jessica’s ear like a wasp
on steroids trying to win the world cup for speed or something.
Then her wall got to be so thick that the only noises she could
hear from the bullets were the faint clunks on the other side of
her wall as they were stopped. They maybe made it a few feet deep
into her ice wall before stopping, not even putting any cracks in
the foundation she’d set up. The guns the guards and handlers
carried around weren’t exactly powerful. They were small, weak, and
the bullets were designed so they wouldn’t penetrate flesh very
deep. She was pretty sure in that moment that a couple of Markus’s
men were even firing their tranq guns, as if the needles would have
better luck. Stupid idiots.

Though Jessica’s power didn’t feel drained,
her body did. She was buzzing with so much inner energy that it
actually started to snow. Big, fat flakes of snow, looking like
stretched cotton balls, fell from the ceiling around her. She could
see her own breath.

That was a different kind of energy than the
sort her body needed. The blast must’ve done something to her,
because she still felt the floor swaying beneath her feet.

Someone grabbed onto her; she couldn’t even
tell if it was Ethan or Jack. Either way, the area around her moved
and swayed even more as she was forced to run.

“
Where’s Soren?” Jessica
asked, fighting not to throw up with every word she
said.

Too many voices were speaking. Someone
might’ve answered her, but she couldn’t hear a thing over all the
noise, as strange as that was.

She was pulled into something that felt
strangely like a small car. Was she passing out? Shit. No, that
wouldn’t do. She needed to stay awake and keep herself aware of
everything. She wasn’t out of danger yet.

A low rumble, and then they were moving.
Yeah, she was in a vehicle of some sort. It felt and looked
something like a golf cart.

Then Soren was there. His lip was bleeding
and he had a scratch on his face—where had that come from?—but
otherwise, he looked all right. He seemed perfectly fine. His eyes
were worried, though. Jessica wasn’t. She smiled at him. “Are you
hurt?”

Soren’s hands were gentle as he took hold of
her head. The touch of his fingers against her hair was wonderful.
Even the quickly building, pulse-pounding pain of the thudding
inside of her skull wasn’t enough to drown out how nice and
pleasurable it was just to have his hands on her.

What was he looking for?

“
A rock must’ve hit you on
the head,” Soren said. His hands left her for a few seconds, and
she was aware of the rustle of cloth, even with the sound of wind
whistling around her. Then he was pressing his white coat against
the back of her head.

Ethan’s voice was right there, sounding so
loud it hurt even more than the noises of everything around her.
“Is she all right? Is she bleeding?”

“
A little.”

“
Can she make the snow
stop?”

She didn’t recognize that voice. Where had
Ethan gotten all these people from?

“
Jessica? Can you stop the
snow?” Ethan asked.

She blinked a couple of times, processing
the request, and then trying to do something about it, trying to do
as he asked. The cold was intense; it was even starting to bother
her.

“
She’s been in shackles too
long,” Soren said. “It might’ve caused a buildup of her power. She
has to let it out.”

“
That can happen?” Jack
asked.

“
To some people,” Soren
replied. “Some people have trouble containing what’s in them. They
can’t just shackle it.”