Page 12

Chapter 12

Frost

I woke to the smell of food, and it wasn’t a welcome thing.

My head was pounding with pressure, and when I tried to open my eyes, the light was so bright I had to slam them shut again. A horrible rattling noise started up around the area of my head, and a moment later, someone laid a gentle hand on my shoulder.

“You need to take some more painkillers,” came the too-loud whisper from a few feet away. Kit. Of course he knew how the headaches were. He’d watched me start getting them in our teen years, when I’d first been training to stretch my abilities. At the time, pausing something as small as a pencil in midair had been enough to give me a headache.

Fourteen-year-old Frost would have been much more at ease with working on building up his tolerance, if he’d known that one day he was going to be able to stop a whole car for long enough to keep from going with it into a river.

Without opening my eyes, I held out one hand. A moment later, three pills were tucked loosely into my open fingers.

“I have a bottle of water here,” Kit added, voice still low and soothing—or at least not grating, in this moment. Clearly, he remembered how the headaches were—a back and forth on whether moving to take a drink would hurt too much, or my mouth was too dry to swallow pills without help.

I accepted the bottle, my mouth as dry as it had ever been. I hoped we’d been asleep a while, but I had no notion of how much time had passed since . . . well, since sometime during the drive the night before. I thought I remembered someone helping me into a bed, but I wasn’t even sure who it had been. Or if it had happened.

With some difficulty, I managed to swallow the pills, and then Kit’s presence retreated, his voice joining the quiet ones all the way across the room as I drifted back to sleep.

When I woke again, I felt almost human. My head was still throbbing, but I could survive it and get back on the road. Slowly, stretching as I moved, I sat up on the bed.

The hotel room didn’t look at all familiar, far smaller and darker than I was used to in a hotel room. Maybe I’d dreamed someone helping me into bed.

“How are you feeling?” Kit asked, his voice still low.

I blinked in the direction of his voice and realized the room was darker because the lights were off and the blinds drawn. Because Kit knew how this went, and he was taking care of me.

It twisted in my belly in that moment, how much I had missed him, and I wasn’t sure why. Why be bothered now that he was back in my life? I’d spent years trying not to think about the gaping hole in my life his absence had left, so why was I thinking about it now?

I was, though.

He’d been my only ally for so long because he and I had only been a year apart, but older than Ember and Rain by enough that we hadn’t bonded with them in the same way until later. So Kit had been the only person who took care of me, who cared if I was struggling, for much of my childhood.

And then he’d been gone.

But there was no time for self-pity. We had a world to save. No one else was going to do it, and someone was actively trying to stop us, but the danger was growing closer and closer. Every day, the rumblings of Mount Slate grew more ominous, even as far from it as we were, and getting farther.

“I’m alive,” I croaked. “Sorry. It hit hard this time.”

All the way across the room, I heard Kit snort. “You stopped a car and four people. It was kind of a big fucking deal. No one’s going to complain you’re out of commission for a while after that. Hells, Caspian slept most of the time you did.”

Somewhere nearby, Caspian hummed in agreement.

“Do you need some more aspirin?” came Ember’s much closer voice, and I winced at the volume.

I turned to find her standing right at the bedside, holding the pill bottle. “Has it been long enough?”

“Yep,” Kit agreed. “Take some more, let them settle, and then decide what you’re ready for.”

I held out my hand, going through the motions yet again, then stretched and dragged myself off the bed. Once again, I hadn’t changed into my pajamas to sleep the night before. This time, though, it was for the best no one had woken me to get me to go through my nightly routine. I doubted I’d have been able to so much as brush my teeth, for the pain in my head.

“We need to get going,” I answered back. “We have to get to Verisa and find Dane Sunrunner. Give me a little time to get dressed and brush my teeth, and we can go.”

No one said anything, which I took as tacit agreement, so I rifled through my bag, finding the most casual clothing I owned and taking them into the bathroom with me. A shower, tooth-brushing, and change of clothes later, and I felt like a new man. Sure, my skin still felt stretched too-tight over my skull, and my head was throbbing deep and irritating, but the near-blinding pain of before was gone.

I came out of the bathroom to find that someone had opened the curtains and . . . it was either dawn or sunset, given the muted orange light coming in the window.

For a moment, I just blinked, staring at the window, then turning to where the others were sitting around a tiny table in the corner of the room.

The room really was dark, I realized. It hadn’t just been the lack of light, but an overall dinginess. It was also in rather poor repair. Threads frayed from the comforters, the carpet was thin and stained, and the wooden floorboards were scuffed with black marks.

There wasn’t even a coffee maker, which I’d thought every single hotel room in existence had these days.

“You look better,” Kit said, standing and coming to join me.

I frowned at him. “You let me sleep all day.”

He took my shoulders in his hands, smiling, and it wasn’t one of Mother’s indulgent smiles that said I was terribly inconvenient and she was a saint for putting up with me. It was Kit, and Kit loved me. That always showed on his face. “That was the plan,” he agreed. “Caspian and I talked about the area and the drive. We both think Rachel’s people will be less likely to find us at night, and I think I can handle the drive in the dark. It’s all pretty flat and boring from here to the ocean.”

“So you . . . you weren’t forced to wait on me?”

“Nah,” Caspian said, shaking his head. “We decided in the morning that driving at night would be safer, and figured if we were going to do that, we might as well let you sleep. Plus Ember and I were hurt too. We all needed more sleep.”

They’re lying , Vex told me, matter of fact and simple as always . They’re telling you this to keep you from feeling bad about having a headache and holding up the drive .

For a moment, I froze.

Vex was always honest with me, of course. When he knew that people were lying to me, he told me. Or when he knew I was missing some social cue, whether he knew what it was or not.

But how did I react to this?

What do you mean, how do you react? Vex demanded, sounding . . . well, vexed.

My siblings and Caspian are lying to me , I shot back. Am I a burden? Should I be angry? Sad? Focus on getting back to work and making myself useful to them?

The silence was deafening for a moment, and Kit sighed. “Frost,” he started, just as Vex almost exploded in my head.

This is all Iri’s fault. Her and Delta with their logic-only bullshit. Convincing you you’re not worth lying to .

I squinted, cocking my head, and met Kit’s eye. “I’m worth lying to? What does that mean?”

Kit snorted. “Vex?”

“Vex,” I agreed.

He sighed, ushering me over to the table and pressing me into a seat in front of a bowl of soup. “It means that we are lying, a little. Not out of malice or frustration, but because we don’t want you to feel bad. We did agree that it’ll be safer to drive at night. It’s just that yes, you being in pain and needing sleep came into that assessment. I’m sorry, we should have just said that to begin with.”

“I don’t get it,” Caspian said, cocking his head. “I mean, yeah, we had to stay for the day because Frost needed the sleep. But driving at night is a safer plan, and we did decide on it, so there was no reason to try to get him up before sunset. What’s the issue?”

Ember and I both just stared at Caspian, and I wasn’t sure how to put the disconnect I was feeling into words.

“He didn’t grow up Moonstriker,” Kit said simply, pushing the soup toward me. “It’s potato. You’ll like it.”

“What’s growing up Moonstriker got to do with anything?” Caspian asked, and he was starting to sound exasperated.

Kit chuckled at him. “Honestly, for most people, not much. But for you? A lot. You’re . . . not at all what I expected. You care about people. You’re . . . what’s the word? Empathetic?”

Caspian raised an eyebrow. “Pathetic, you say?”

“Your average person sometimes thinks about the feelings of others,” Kit said, taking the seat next to me. “Your average rich spoiled asshole? Rarely.”

“What, like they sit around thinking about what other people feel?” Ember asked, and her tone said it was the strangest thought she’d ever had.

I didn’t think it was that strange; I often sat around worrying about what other people thought of me. Whether I’d done something wrong in a social interaction. Why I hadn’t said something clever I came up with hours later.

Kit groaned, scrubbing his face with his hands. “Like when we all knew Frost had a migraine, we worried about him. We didn’t just ignore his pain because we couldn’t fix it and it wasn’t our pain. We cared and did what we could to alleviate his problems. We Moonstrikers were raised not to think about other people’s pain for obnoxious logical reasons. I can’t fix Frost’s headache, so who cares about it? People like Caspian generally get taught to worry about themselves first, and everyone else not at all.”

“So what you’re saying is that it’s weird we care?”

“Not weird,” he huffed. “That connotes something negative. It’s . . . it’s just unusual, for people like us. Incredibly ordinary, and dare I say it, downright emotionally healthy.”

It struck me, what he was trying to say. As Moonstrikers, we’d been taught cold, ruthless logic. Mother would have woken me, dragged me to the car, and told me to try to sleep while they drove, because it was the logical path. Rich people, as Kit was saying, often thought of their own convenience, which would have led to the same result—not allowing my pain to interfere with the overall plan.

But none of them had acted within that expected framework.

It’s called decency , Vex said dryly in my head. And the fact that it took this whole conversation to work it out and accept it was happening is a little fucking terrifying .

And that? Well, I had no idea what the heck to say to that. So I ate my soup in silence. Kit had been right. It was good.