Page 7 of The Alien’s Cruel Starfrost Domain (Empire of Frost and Flame #1)

CHAPTER 7

LARA

I ’m upstairs cleaning the duke’s rooms when I catch a glimpse of him and his guest, that creepy baron with the unpronounceable name, riding back into the courtyard from the woods.

God, the things he said about me at dinner. And the way Ivrael looked at me…

I have to get out of here. My time is running out. I’m sure of it. I have to find a way to get back to the duke’s ship so I can get home.

At least, I think time is running out. I don’t really know how long it took us to get from Earth to Trasq, though from some of the things I’ve overheard Ivrael say about his trips to my planet, I don’t think it could have taken more than a couple of days.

I hope I’m right—along with the longer Trasqo days, I’ve been using the travel time as part of the crude calculations I’ve made for counting down how long I still have to save Izzy. But I’m not sure exactly how long I was unconscious on Ivrael’s spaceship.

The closer I get to my self-imposed deadline, the more I’ve been going over those first few days, trying to remember something I’ve missed. Something that will help me figure out how to get home. But I keep getting hung up on the horror of realizing I’m on another planet.

Worse, that I’m under the control of a gorgeous alien I cannot trust.

After we arrived on Trasq, I was still groggy when Ivrael pulled me out of that weird coffin-thing —and at the time, seeing that he’d kept me in a casket, I was a little surprised to be alive at all.

The duke nodded at one of his henchmen, who tugged on my arm. “Come on.”

I stumbled into step behind them as the servant pulled me through an open door to a field outside, where the first thing that struck me was the bitter cold.

It had been winter in Texas the morning Ivrael bought me at the market. But that doesn’t mean much, really. It can get cold in North Central Texas, and once in a while, it even snows. But a Texan’s sense of what constitutes cold doesn’t compare at all to the cold of Icecaix lands—they are winter at its iciest, its most arctic. Snow that never melts, frost coating everything in the mornings, icicles hanging like Christmas decorations from every surface’s edge.

The coat I’d grabbed at Roland’s urging wasn’t much good for blocking the chill. And I did not yet understand where I was. I’d started in a bustling if slightly chilly flea market, been forced to eat a bite of a fucking drugged apple, and awoken to a snowy plain stretching out before us and ending in a weird-looking conifer forest.

I staggered down a ramp, and when I glanced behind us, I saw we’d just exited what I realized was a silver, disc-shaped spaceship. An actual flying fucking saucer, straight out of some nineteen-fifties sci-fi movie.

That’s when I finally realized I might not be in Texas anymore. Or on Earth at all, for that matter.

The servant dude leading me—a white-haired lump of pure muscle whose name I later learned was Khrint—pulled me around to walk in front of him so he could keep prodding me from behind, and we made our way across the field, then into a small copse of trees, where a path led to an enormous gate .

This gate was different from the one I’d used to enter the Trasqo Market what felt like just that morning.

No, this gate wasn’t the typical wood and wire enclosure I was used to seeing in Texas. It was a wrought iron affair, tall and imposing, looming at the end of the path before us. Painted a bright white, the intricate curlicues reminded me of balconies I had seen when Mama had taken Izzy and me to New Orleans two years before she married Roland—but long after our birth father had left.

My gaze tracked the designs worked into the iron gate, following the lines of what almost looked like a wing as it swirled into the next part of the pattern, never quite finding an endpoint, always going deeper, as if the design itself were drawing me toward it, drawing me in.

The duke shook my arm a little. “Don’t get lost.”

It didn’t make any sense at the time, and yet I knew he meant I needed to quit examining the gate. But when I glanced up at Ivrael, I found myself similarly fascinated by his face, the lines of his chin, the seashell swirl of his ear as his golden-blond hair brushed across it.

I realized with a blink of surprise that the top of his ear was slightly pointed, a little like Mr. Spock’s in Star Trek. Or at least somewhere between the curve of mine and the Vulcan’s peak.

Ivrael let go of my arm and reached his hands up to cup the sides of my face, staring intently into my eyes. As I met his gaze, I noted again that his eyes weren’t quite as pale or cold as I had originally assumed. His pupils widened, and tiny sparks of silver and gold shot out into his irises, glittering in their depths.

“It has no power over you,” he said, his melted-chocolate voice deep and smooth, “You are in control.”

I blinked, and it was as if his words had pulled me out of some mesmerizing hypnotist’s act.

Ivrael gave a nod of satisfaction and took my arm in his grasp again as he spoke to the servants. “You two should go with Cyan—take her to the pole and see her settled at the spaceport. Then make your way home.”

They nodded and headed back to the ship as the duke waved his hand, and the white gate swung open—using some kind of automatic sensor, I assumed.

At the last minute, I dug my heels into the ground. But Ivrael did not slow, and as he moved through the gate, his hand on my arm, he tugged me forward so hard that I stumbled behind him, almost tripping as I landed on the other side of the gate, which slammed behind us with a final-sounding clang.

“Where are you taking me?” This time, my voice was shaky and small.

“To my home.”

Images of serial killers I’d seen on TV flashed through my mind, and I felt the blood drain from my face, leaving my skin prickly. Simultaneously, hot nausea tried to crawl up my throat, and I swallowed it back down.

I shivered and wrapped my utterly inadequate coat around me, zipping it up and shoving my hands into the pockets. A path had been carved through the snow, which was easily a foot deep.

What was I doing here?

Just because Roland had said I was supposed to go with this beautiful man with the pointy ears, that I belonged to him now, didn’t make it true. I shook my head, doing my best to dispel that foggy feeling, the knowledge that this man had no right to tell me what to do finally spurring me to action.

But when I jerked my arm out of his loosened grip and spun around to dart back toward the spaceship, the ornate wrought iron gate was nowhere to be seen.

Fuck. Where had it gone?

I blinked and shook my head again as if by doing so I would bring it back, but all that stretched out behind me was the rest of this broad, snowy plain leading to the base of a mountain—and I couldn’t tell how far away it was, but I knew damn good and well that North Central Texas didn’t have any mountains.

Slowly, I turned back to face Ivrael, opening my mouth to say something, demand to know where I was or how I could get home.

He stood perfectly still, both hands in front of him, around … we ll, I didn’t know what, but initially I thought it was some kind of crystal ball. Until I realized it had blue lightning striking throughout it, and I wondered why he had a novelty toy—the ones where lightning tracks along the inside of the glass globe when you rub your hands over it. This one was brighter than any I’d seen before. And when the blue-white lightning flashed outward and hit the snow about ten feet away, sending it up in a puff of white powder, I yelped aloud.

Beside me, Ivrael muttered words I couldn’t understand. Then the snow tossed up by the lightning began to swirl, forming into ribbons of tiny ice particles, moving up and around into the shape of two horses.

The lightning flashed out again, splitting into two streams, arcing out until each one hit a snow-ribbon horse. The longer the lightning flowed, the more solid the horses became.

A thick fog moved in, filling the ribbony outlines.

“That ought to work,” Ivrael said, releasing the globe. With a snap of his fingers, the lightning disappeared, and the fog cleared. The ribbons that had flowed like satin hardened, turning crystalline and clear, containing the clouds inside the animal-statue bodies.

“Pretty.” My voice shook. The beautiful pointy-eared man who had bought me from my stepfather could create ice sculptures out of thin air—well, thin air plus some clouds and snow and lightning.

The duke shot a glance in my direction, and his lips curled up once again in a half smile. He spoke another word I didn’t understand, and the horses began to move, stamping their feet and tossing their manes. They were still made of ice, but they moved as easily as if they were flesh and bone.

“That one is yours.” Ivrael pointed at the smaller of the two.

“Oh, no.” I held my hands up in a negating gesture and backed away from both the duke and his creepy magic ice horses.

Because that’s what they had to be, right? Magic. There was no other way to explain what was going on here.

“I don’t know how to ride…that thing. I don’t even know how to ri de a normal horse.”

Ivrael raised one eyebrow. “You don’t know how to ride a horse? I thought your part of the human world was known for its horses.”

I rolled my eyes. “Not the trailer park I live in. Horses are expensive. I’m lucky I know how to drive a car.”

Ivrael heaved a put-upon sigh and took several steps toward me, shaking his head. I backed away just as rapidly, still shaking my head.

“You’ll die if I leave you here.” Irritation threaded through his tone. “There’s no one else here, no way to return to your home.” He waved his hand in a gesture that encompassed everything around us—the mountain, the woods, the snowy plain.

I swallowed thickly. I never should have allowed him to drag me through that gate.

“Oh, by the goddess.” The words were spoken in the tone of a curse, like I might say ‘for fuck’s sake.’ And when Ivrael moved, he darted at me so quickly that I didn’t have time to get away. He wrapped his arms around my waist and picked me up, and before I had time to do more than inhale sharply in preparation for a scream, he deposited me on the ice-horse’s back.

I grabbed the pommel of the saddle—or the ice-sculpture equivalent of it, anyway—to keep from sliding off again.

With a single fluid leap, Ivrael mounted his own frozen steed. He snapped his fingers a second time, and the horses bunched up their hind legs and jumped straight into the air, their hooves flashing beneath us, as if they were actually running on something more solid than air.

This time I managed to get a scream out, the wind whipping it away from me to leave it streaming behind us. Ivrael merely laughed, the sound of his voice disappearing with mine.

The ice horses ran atop clouds that first night, never needing to rest between the spaceship and Starfrost Manor. As we rode through the night sky, my face and fingers began to ache, then went numb with the cold.

About an hour into the ride, the duke glanced over at me from his horse. He rolled his eyes, shook his head, and then rummaged around in a pack hanging from his ice-horse’s flank .

“Don’t die on me,” he ordered, tossing a black velvet cloak to me.

I wrapped it around myself, hoping it would ward off the worst of the chill.

Ivrael didn’t wear any cloak at all. His snow-white coat with its golden embroidery caught the moonlight, and I realized he still had the top button undone, exposing the strong column of his throat. He seemed to relish the feel of the night wind on his face.

By the time I tried to speak to Ivrael again, we’d been in the air for hours, it seemed like, and my bladder felt like it was about to burst. You know what doesn’t ever happen in fairy tales? No one ever needs to stop the story so they can go pee.

We stopped twice that night.

We arrived at Starfrost Manor in the middle of the night, the ice horses landing in the courtyard and then swirling away into mist. Adefina met us, though of course I didn’t yet know her name. She was merely a small woman with dark skin.

“Oh, Your Lordship,” the woman said. “Not another human?” She sounded sad, disappointed almost. As if the duke were a small child who had brought home a stray kitten, and now Adefina was the one who was going to have to care for it. “They’re so fragile.”

Even as panicked as I was, I had to repress a snort. I’ve been called a lot of things in my life—many of them by Roland—but never fragile.

The duke ignored her comment, examining me from head to toe as I stood miserably in the courtyard, still wrapped in the cloak he’d given me.

“I think the kitchen,” he said to Adefina, who nodded briskly and turned to lead me away. I glanced at Ivrael, trying to figure out what I was supposed to do, and if there was any way to escape this place.

He held out his hand and frowned when I didn’t move. “The cloak,” he demanded.

I think that was the moment I began to truly hate him. Not when he bought me, not even when he put me on that terrifying frost horse, but when he took away my one comfort.

I’ve refined that hatred since then, honed it at night by the dying fireplace, sharpened it until it all but cuts me from inside, the pain reminding me every day how much I loathe him.

But losing a cloak is nothing compared to what else he stripped away from me in the year that followed. My comfort. My freedom. My certainty about what kind of man he truly is.

My certainty about who I am.

And as it turns out, hatred is the least dangerous emotion Duke Ivrael stirs in me.