Page 8

Chapter 8

Frost

“Why didn’t he just hit the brakes?” Ember complained as we walked, nearing the other side of the river. She was limping, so I imagined she was in pain, but that didn’t excuse the strange mistake.

“There was a car behind us,” I pointed out. “They would have hit us and pushed us into the car that swerved into us anyway.”

Frankly, it amazed me that Caspian had made the split-second decision to turn into the swerving car instead of away. Unlike Ember and me, he didn’t have time altering abilities in his stone to account for his quick thinking.

“I still say he panicked,” she grumbled. “Nearly got us killed.”

That made me pause, even as the weight of Caspian was starting to make my shoulder ache.

“Actually,” Kit told her, giving her his best unimpressed look, “he probably saved Frost’s life doing that. So how about let’s not be rude about the unconscious man who did the best anyone could be expected to do in a crisis, huh?”

At that, I couldn’t hold back a smile.

Kit liked Caspian.

Wait.

Kit liked Caspian .

Back to that again.

Vex, even as tired as he was after holding back time on the car—repeatedly—in midair, grumbled proprietarily in the back of my head. Ours .

“I want to date him,” I announced immediately. It said something about my relationship with my siblings that neither of them turned and looked at me in confusion at the unrelated statement, as other people often did. Nor did either of them look surprised by what I thought should be a revelation. Not even in our current, somewhat bizarre, situation.

“We know,” Ember said, rolling her eyes. “Fortunately, he wants to date you too.”

I blinked in shock.

He did?

Wait, they knew?

Kit was frowning again, trudging across the frozen water, which was . . . well, it was a weird sensation. It wasn’t frozen in temperature like ice, all solid and slick, but frozen in time, and that made it more like trying to tread across particularly stiff gelatin dessert. It made strange squidgy sounds and had just enough give to make me constantly nervous that I’d gotten too far away from Ember and was about to fall into the water.

“Fine,” Kit said, sighing.

My heart gave a painful thump and I turned my head to look at him. “Fine?”

“Fine, I won’t threaten him anymore. But if he hurts you, I’ll still kill him.”

On the other side of him, Ember giggled, but all I could do was stare at my brother in confusion.

“You threatened him?”

Kit rolled his eyes, as though it was silly of me to be worried about that. As though it were obvious that he’d threatened Caspian. “Of course I did. He’s a Sunrunner, and he wants you. They aren’t exactly a trustworthy lot.”

“But Caspian hasn’t done anything to?—”

“It’s basic extrapolation, Frost,” he explained, and that was the brother I had so missed. Easily able to explain things in terms that made sense to me, and never annoyed to have to do it. “I’ve known other Sunrunners. Everyone knows them by reputation. They put any mind-altering substance they can find into their bodies, and then cut a swathe through life without having to ever think about what they’re doing or where they’re going. Or who they’re hurting.”

I shook my head. “Your logic is faulty. ‘Sunrunner’ isn’t a constant. You can’t interchange different members of a family in the equation and have it remain the same. Imagine trying to substitute you for Rain in?—”

The sound of a siren made me stop and flinch back, for long enough that the water started to soften beneath my feet, and I had to hurry to catch up to Ember.

We’d reached the edge of the river and the authorities were there, waiting for us. They were staring at us, some mouths hanging open, as though we were astounding.

Right. Aquamarine powers. Walking on water wasn’t relatively common here. This side of the bridge was Sunrunner land, so that meant they would have been less surprised if we’d turned into fish. Or would they? Was turning into a fish a common tiger’s eye ability? I had to look that up when we got somewhere safe.

“Are you . . . are you all right?” a man in an EMT uniform asked as Kit took his first step onto the muddy bank of the river.

Kit frowned at him, then looked back to where I was still carrying the unconscious, still slightly bleeding Caspian. “No, we’re not.” He motioned to Caspian. “He hit his head in the accident, and I think you’ll need to check for broken bones too. He got hit pretty hard.”

As though his words had been permission, two people behind the man leaped into action, taking Caspian from me, laying him gently on a waiting gurney and checking his vitals.

I was focused so keenly on them, watching as they searched out the source of the blood on Caspian—a cut on his arm—and checked him over for other obvious trauma, that I almost missed Kit’s conversation with the police on the scene. He was pointing out into the water. “—guy is swimming toward shore, there.”

Sure enough, there was a man out there, swimming toward shore. Not toward us and the police, but toward shore nonetheless. Odd that he wasn’t swimming in the straightest, shortest line to get to safety, but instead angling away from it.

“And you’re certain it was deliberate?” the cop asked.

Kit snorted. “Yes, it was deliberate. And he had an accomplice in another car. Frost, what was the license plate of the car in front of us?”

Without thinking, I rattled it off. Then I truly considered the statement and pulled myself up and around to look at him. “They boxed us in on purpose and then tried to kill us. It wasn’t an accident at all.”

Kit motioned to me, looking at the cop still. “If Frost can work out the scheme behind an action, there can’t be any doubt about it.”

I considered that for a moment, then nodded. “That’s true. I’m not very good at understanding people’s motives. But . . . why were they trying to kill us, Kit?”

Ember opened her mouth as though to speak up, but Kit interrupted. “I presume it was an assassination attempt on the next Sunrunner.”

Everyone in the area froze, and for a moment I was concerned perhaps Mother had arrived and stopped time. Then almost as one, they turned to Caspian on the gurney, since it was obvious enough that neither my siblings nor I were Sunrunners.

One of the EMTs working on him gasped and lifted a hand to cover her mouth, only realizing at the last minute that her glove was covered in Caspian’s blood. She was trembling as she went back to work.

The man she was working with bumped her shoulder with his, then looked up at the knot of us who were standing around unable to help. “His vitals are strong and the cut isn’t too bad. But we need to get him to the hospital for scans. Is anyone coming with us?”

“Me,” I answered, stepping forward without thinking about it.

Neither Ember nor Kit disagreed, which was . . . it was really nice to be among my siblings again. I didn’t always get along with them, but by and large, they understood me better than most people. And they always supported me when they could.

Kit took the bag I’d been carrying and waved me off to follow Caspian into the ambulance, so I did. Kit would take care of things with the police and the people who’d tried to kill us.

Had it really been an attempt on Caspian’s life? It made sense, more than anyone trying to kill me or Ember or . . . well, I supposed I didn’t know if anyone had a reason to kill Kit these days. It was possible, and I’d have to address it with him when he caught up with me at the hospital.

Being Kit, he was most likely trying to keep us from telling the cops about Dane Sunrunner’s disappearance. He’d always been like that, constantly trying to keep people from handing out information unless they absolutely needed it. People being mostly me, and slightly less often, Rain. Ember was better at secrets than either of us, and Kit was the best.

Three hours later, I was still in the hospital with Caspian. He’d regained consciousness, thankfully, for long enough to answer some questions and tell them that I was his emergency contact and to give me any information they had. Then they’d given him painkillers that had put him right back to sleep.

I had worried about him sleeping with a concussion, but they had assured me that there had been no bleeding on the scan, so they weren’t worried about him being asleep.

On the other hand, he now had fifteen stitches in his arm, which was broken, and a broken rib, as well as the concussion.

Meanwhile, Ember had caught up with us and was still complaining as we sat in Caspian’s hospital room. It seemed that she also had a broken bone—a hairline fracture in her ankle, and it was making her angry.

For some reason, the complaining irked me.

I considered the situation, trying to figure out what the problem was. I loved my sister. I was grateful for her help in the accident. Without her ability to freeze objects in time, we’d have all ended up swimming to shore instead of walking, and Caspian might have bled to death or drowned instead of me being able to carry him mostly safely to shore. I sympathized with her broken ankle and was impressed that she’d managed to walk to shore with us after breaking it when she jumped out of the car.

I even felt a little bad about the break itself.

If I had gone to one and three-quarters of a second instead of one and two-thirds for the last jump forward, maybe we would have been close enough for her to land safely. But I’d been worried that long would have allowed the front of the car to hit the water, and that would have altered my calculations in difficult-to-measure ways, and possibly kept Ember from being able to freeze the water as a flat surface for us to cross. Her power was limited to whole objects, after all, not random flying water droplets.

Ember’s broken ankle, therefore, had been unavoidable.

Still, I felt bad. Maybe feeling guilty was making me annoyed.

Or maybe it was the fact that Caspian had clearly gotten the worst of the collision, and when he’d woken, he’d been smiling and pleased that we had all gotten out okay, even before they’d given him painkillers.

If Caspian wasn’t complaining, then why was Ember?

The door opened, and I turned to see if it was the doctor back again. I had inundated him with questions every time he’d dropped by, so I suspected he was avoiding the room. I always annoyed people like that. But I wanted to ask him more about?—

It was Kit. And that was also a relief, as this was the first time I’d seen him since we’d dragged ourselves off the river and I’d climbed into the ambulance. It would be some time, I thought, before I was truly confident in my brother’s continuing presence back in my life.

“Is everything okay?”

“It is,” he promised. “I kept the hospital from calling his family, and so far it looks like no one has alerted the press. Impressive, since if we were in Moonstriker lands, it’d already be all over the twenty-four-hour news channels.”

“He told them I was his emergency contact,” I told Kit, biting my lip.

He sighed and rolled his eyes as he dropped himself into a chair on the other side of the bed. “Yes, yes, you’re madly in love with the fucking next Sunrunner. I get it.”

Madly in—“Kit, I barely know him. I can’t be in love with him.”

Ember shot me a dubious look and Kit laughed, even as he leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. “I know that. And trust you to be sensible even about love. But seriously, Frost. How often are you this interested in a person?”

It was a fair question. “Almost never.”

“And he makes a point of communicating in the ways you’re comfortable with. That may be nothing for me, since I’ve known you for all our lives, but for a stranger? It means something. You like each other. You get along. It all adds up.”

“To loving someone I barely know?” It was . . . halfway to a fair point, but I couldn’t help feeling Kit had skipped a dozen steps in the solving of this particular equation.

He opened his eyes to slits and met my gaze. “We’re Moonstrikers, Frost. Time is just another variable to be included in calculations, not some unknowable, unseen, magical force.”

Again, he was right. With time, if nothing changed in Caspian . . . well, variables in life weren’t as easy as variables in math. They changed quickly and unpredictably. Caspian could turn out to be lying about everything tomorrow.

But if the important variables didn’t change?

I could certainly see myself falling in love with Caspian Sunrunner, if one added enough time to the equation.

And I’d never seen that before in my life.