Chains of Ice Page 3

  They were abandoning him.

  Something snagged his collar and dragged him toward the shallow edge. He floundered to his feet—and found himself facing a furious-eyed Sun Hee.

  Yes—this was the woman for him!

  She shouted something and pointed toward the cliff that rose above the glacial valley, then up toward the mountain peak.

  His ears rang, but he understood. He pulled her through the fast-rising, knee-deep water to dry land. Shoving her ahead, he clambered after her, moving fast, moving up, knowing this gush of water was only the beginning, that the glacier would gobble at the stone walls, launch giant boulders downstream. If he and Sun Hee didn’t climb fast, the ground would disappear under their feet and they’d hurtle downstream, never to be found.

  They ascended the equivalent of two stories before Sun Hee stopped and looked, and pointed.

  In the valley, only Gary and Amina remained on the ground. The helicopter hovered overhead. The glacial outflow rose to their thighs. As they staggered against the strength, Gary lifted Amina above him. Hands reached out of the helicopter and pulled her in. Then, so smoothly it looked easy, Gary jumped, caught the strut, swung, and lifted himself inside.

  “You know he’s going to take credit for the whole operation, don’t you?” Sun Hee’s teeth chattered with wet and cold.

  “I don’t care.” John really didn’t, because she was pressing herself against him, and when his arms went around her, she burrowed deeper into his embrace.

  John watched the helicopter circle them.

  Gary leaned out the door. “Heads up!” he shouted. A survival pack hurtled down right at them.

  John and Sun Hee jumped apart.

  John caught the pack, slid it onto Sun Hee’s shoulders, then caught the second one. Dry clothes, a thin tarp, a bedroll, some rations. . . . They would survive.

  “Tomorrow!” Gary shouted and waved a jaunty hand.

  “How odd,” John murmured, and with a glance at the rising torrent below, he shouldered the pack and started up the mountain once more.

  “Not really. It would have been more odd if he sat down and put on his seat belt.” Sun Hee followed on his heels.

  “Not that.” No, what surprised him was that Gary was supposed to be a mind reader. Not a mind controller, not a mind feeder; only a mind reader. Gary had been tested by the Gypsy Travel Agency. They all had. Gary couldn’t hide a gift; the Gypsy Travel Agency didn’t make mistakes about things like that. Yet that burst of energy he’d flung at John, the one John had blocked—that had been a thought. John was sure of it.

  “John?”

  “Hm?” What had Gary done to escalate his gift?

  “Do you think tonight . . . you and I could share our body warmth?”

  John stopped. Turned.

  There stood Sun Hee, smiling at him knowingly.

  He had made a good choice. They would have a good life together. . . .

  A year later, when his carefully constructed life burned in the fires of jealousy, rage and despair, he remembered his misplaced optimism . . . and he escaped to the ends of the earth.

  He escaped to the hell that had given him birth.

  Chapter 2

  Genesis Valente had always believed in magic.

  Her father was one of the dark-business-suited men who ran the Gypsy Travel Agency, and one of her earliest memories was standing in front of him as he sat in his leather chair, reciting the legend in her high, lisping voice. Long ago, when the world was young . . .When she was five, she could rattle it off, and she was excited about it, the way a five-year-old is excited about the pledge of allegiance, mouthing the words without understanding them.

  When she was ten, her vivid imagination brought the legend to life.

  Long ago, when the world was young, a beautiful young woman lived in a village on the edge of a vast, dark forest, and she declared she would marry only a man whose magnificence matched her own. She took the eldest son of the local lord, a lazy lad as famed for his dark, wavy hair and deep-set blue eyes as for his vanity, and before the year was out, she grew large with child. But in the spring, when it came time to deliver her child, she gave birth to two scrawny, wailing, red-faced babes. Worse, they were not perfect. The elder looked as if red wine stained him from the tips of his tiny fingertips to his bony shoulder. The younger, a girl, had a dirty smudge in the palm of her hand, which to the mother looked exactly like . . . an eye. Disgusted, she rose from her birthing bed. She took her children, carried them into the deepest part of the forest—where old and hungry gods waited to consume any human who dared venture close. She abandoned the boy, and tossed the girl into a torrent of icy water . . .

  Yes, at ten Genny believed the legend and spent every night cowering beneath her covers, imagining the indifferent eyes of the long-ago mother as she abandoned her children. Those eyes looked so familiar—big and golden brown like Genny’s but, unlike Genny’s, without an ounce of warmth. Genny had never understood what she did wrong, why her own mother didn’t care about her. All too easily she could imagine being left for wolves to eat, or being thrown in a river to drown.

  Three years later, Genny was thirteen and mad at the world. She did everything she could to physically discard her bewildered, lonely childhood. She pulled her dark curly hair back from her face, binding it at the back of her neck. She wore bras that flattened her breasts. She painted her fingernails black, used black lipstick, dusted her face with pale powder.

  She cut off her eyelashes.

  It didn’t help. Nothing helped. Her mother never noticed and her father paid her no attention except to demand she recite a stupid old legend.

  Sure, she knew it . . . At the moment when the mother abandoned her children, they were devoid of the gift every child should receive at birth—its parents’ love. Their small hearts stopped beating. They died . . . and came back to life changed, gifted; the vacuum in their hearts filled by a new gift, one given in pity and in love. They were the first Abandoned Ones. Wanderers saved the boy, and when he grew up, he could create fire in the palm of his hand. He gathered around him others like him, babes who had been tossed aside like offal and, in amends, had been given a special gift. They were the Chosen, seven men and women who formed a powerful force of light in a dark world.

  When Genny was fifteen, her father got fired for stealing from the Gypsy Travel Agency, from the very people who organized and protected the Chosen Ones.

  Helpless, Genny watched as her world was smashed to bits.

  Her mother walked out and never looked back.

  The girl baby floated down the cold torrent, bobbing to the surface and screaming when her tiny body caught on a branch. A woman—a witch—heard the shrieks and pulled the baby from the water. Disappointed by the scrawny thing, she intended to toss her back . . . until she saw the eye. She knew then that the child was special, so she took her to her home and raised her, starved her, tormented her, used her as a slave.

  She taught her how to hate.

  Kevin Valente plea-bargained his way out of a prison sentence, indicting one of the board members, two company librarians, an assessor, four travel agents, and one of the Chosen. He became the most hated squealer in New York City.

  At first Genny cried tears of relief that her father merely had to return the money he’d stolen and pay a fine. Yes, she’d lost her mother, but her mother had never cared. Yes, she had to move out of her luxurious home on Long Island and into her grandparents’ crowded home in the Bronx, but she still had her father and she didn’t have to go into foster care. That was the important thing, right? Right?

  With a daughter’s desperate faith, she told herself that somehow there was a mistake, that her father had been framed, that he hadn’t really taken those valuable antiquities.

  Then she found out she had to give away her dog and two cats and parrot and mice. Especially her mice. Her grandmother screamed when she saw them.

  Worse, Genny discovered that her father, who had been absorbed i
n work, suddenly turned the blow-torch of his attention to her.

  Genny was his second chance, his opportunity to make good; and Kevin Valente intended to create a Mini-Me that would lift him out of the cesspool wherein he’d fallen. Genny would go to NYU, study pre-law, then go on to get a graduate degree in business. When she said she wanted to go to college to become a veterinarian who specialized in wildlife rescue, he looked at her as if she were speaking Martian and continued to make his plans, which were now her plans—whether she liked them or not.

  He drilled her in accounting, negotiations, and business etiquette, right down to how to establish her dominance from the first handshake and how to take command of a room from the moment she walked in. She learned how to dress, how to walk, how to deal with a sexually aggressive boss or an asshole coworker. She was equipped to claw her way up the ladder.

  She didn’t even want to set foot on the bottom rung.

  On the day the girl became a woman, she looked at the witch and, in a vision, foresaw her future. In a voice warm with delight, she told the witch a horrible death awaited her.

  The girl was a seer. That was her gift.

  Determined to evade her fate, the witch set up an altar to her master, the devil, and prepared to sacrifice the girl. But as the girl had grown up, the woman had grown old. The girl took the knife and plunged it into the witch’s heart.

  The devil himself took form.

  He scrutinized the girl, as beautiful as her mother yet not heartless. No, this girl was steeped in anger; and with her gift, she would be a worthy instrument in his hand. So he showed her his wonders, promised her a place at his right hand, and commissioned her to find others like her, and teach them to do evil in the world. Around her, she gathered six other abandoned children—warped, abused, and special—and they were the Others. The Others used their powers to cut like a scythe through the countryside, bringing famine and fear, anguish and death.

  Genny should have insisted on her right to pick her vocation. But her mother was gone, her father was all she had, and he seemed so sure he knew what was best for her . . . when she wasn’t sure of anything anymore.

  So she applied to NYU, but told her father there was no way she was going to make the cut.

  Her father told her he could still pull strings.

  She was accepted.

  Then the bills arrived. The bills for tuition, housing, and books.

  Father couldn’t pay them.

  But he negotiated a loan for her, one that guaranteed the money for her education—all the money for her education. All she had to do was sign this contract, one that made her promise to do the lender a simple favor sometime. . . . This time she looked at Father as if he were speaking Martian, but he said, “For shit’s sake, Genny, the Agency screwed me over. Did you think they don’t know that? They owe me. They owe me.”

  She stared at him, picked up the pen, crossed out the “favor,” figured an approximate amount her education would cost, added a fair interest, ordered herself to pay it back within five years of graduation, and signed the amended contract.

  So through ages and eons, through low places and high, in the countryside and in the cities, through prophecies and revelations, the battle was joined between the Chosen and the Others, and that battle was fought for the hearts and souls of the Abandoned Ones.

  That battle goes on today . . .

  Genny wasn’t a complete dummy.

  On that summer day six years later, when her life fell apart, that was her only comfort.

  Chapter 3

  “Would you take my picture with Father?” Genny handed her camera to Chloe, her roommate for two years, and hurried back to her father’s side. He’d bought a new suit for her graduation, a really nice one, and with his gray-streaked hair and distinguished air, none of her friends knew Kevin Valente drove a UPS truck for a living.

  Not that it mattered to Genny, but he’d forbidden her to tell them. He was ashamed of being blue collar. He would always be ashamed. She accepted that, dodged the questions, and right now didn’t worry about him. Because after six years of hell, four working for her pre-law degree and two in grad school, she’d finished NYU Business School Summa Cum Laude, landed a job at CFG, the preeminent brokerage account management firm . . . and her father was proud of her.Several cameras flashed as they posed for the photo—she’d made friends here—and voices called, “We’ll forward the shots.”

  “Thank you!” She waved and grinned. She couldn’t stop grinning.

  “I’ve got a reservation for dinner. We’re going to have to hurry if we’re going to make it.” Father smiled charmingly at the group of graduates and their parents. “You’ll forgive me if I take Genny away for a private celebration, won’t you?”

  “Of course!” Brianna’s father shook his hand. “But if you get a chance, stop by the house. We’re having a party to celebrate the girls’ accomplishments.”

  “We’ll be there!” Father promised, taking Genny’s hand, swinging it as they walked away. As soon as they were out of earshot, he muttered, “Pompous ass.”

  “He’s not really. He’s nice.” Genny didn’t know why she tried. Brianna’s father was a top exec, had used his influence to help Genny land the job; and if he knew about her father’s disgrace, he never indicated it by word or deed.

  Yet Father didn’t care. For him, the humiliation of his disgrace was as fresh as if it had happened yesterday.

  So Genny told herself stoutly that she didn’t care if she went to the party with her friends. She had her father.

  Father always said if he couldn’t dine as he chose, he wouldn’t dine at all. So they never went out to dinner.

  But he must have been saving up for this one grand gesture, because the restaurant was among Manhattan’s finest. As they walked behind the maitre d’, she prayed they wouldn’t be seated by the restrooms or in a corner. She didn’t want her father in a bad mood all evening, angry because he’d been slighted.

  Luck or providence or Father’s expensive suit worked for them, because their table was against the window with a view of Manhattan’s lights laid out like jewels tossed on a black velvet cushion. The waiter was attentive, and Genny relaxed into the evening—her pleasure complete as she watched her father transformed from the bitter worker into this cool, elegant gentleman.

  She had a bad moment when he ordered for her. Yes, perhaps a gentleman did order for his date, but this was her father. He didn’t know her tastes; he only knew what he wanted her tastes to be. But it was a small quibble, not worth fighting about. When the appetizers arrived, she had a nibble of each—she hated caviar, but he insisted—then Father pulled an envelope out of his jacket and pushed it across the gleaming white tablecloth. “Your graduation present.”

  “What’s this?” She picked it up gingerly, half afraid—well, more than half—he was giving her a gift certificate for another course on how to crush your business opponent.

  “Open it and see.” He leaned back in his chair and watched with a satisfied smile as she broke the seal.

  She slid a travel itinerary out of the envelope. She examined it. One round-trip plane ticket in her name, leaving next week, returning in September—New York to Berlin, Berlin to Moscow, Moscow to . . . someplace called Rasputye? Bewildered, she looked up at him. “I don’t understand.”

  “Remember that Russian woman? The one with the cats?”

  “Lubochka Koslov?”

  “That’s her.”

  What that had to do with this ticket, Genny didn’t understand. “They’re not just cats, Father. Koslov is the world’s leading expert on the rare Ural lynx, one of the big cats believed to be driven to extinction at the start of the twentieth century. She proved a small group had survived in the depths of the northern Ural Mountains in the area spanning the border between Europe and Asia. She spends her summers studying the lynx, and her winters lecturing at universities to raise money to support her research.” When Lubochka Koslov had come to NYU, Genny had gone to
hear her speak and been enthralled. “Her team is the only one who’s ever taken pictures of the big cats in the wild.”

  “You already filled me in. When you came home from her lecture.” He sounded bored, but . . .

  “You remembered I went to one of her lectures?” Genny was flabbergasted.

  “You carried on about it for hours.”

  “Maybe ten minutes.” If Genny wasn’t talking about business, her father always tuned her out. Or so she had thought. Maybe he was listening to her after all?

  Her father glowered in disapproval. “You still read National Geographic like it’s the Bible.”

  “I read National Geographic when I can.” A total lie. She read it every month as soon as it arrived in the mailbox. She’d even managed to scrape together enough to get a lifetime subscription.

  “Well?” He took a sip of champagne. “Don’t you want to go study some endangered wildlife? Rasputye is some tiny-ass hamlet with four hundred people. I thought you’d like it. You always used to babble about forests and observation and preservation and tagging.”

  Genny gazed again at the itinerary.

  Mountains.

  Wilderness.

  A deep, peaceful, soulful quiet.

  The chill wind in her face . . .

  She didn’t dare believe this. That her father had done something so out of character. . . . She swallowed; she looked up. “You arranged for me to work with Lubochka Koslov, studying the Ural lynx?”

  “You deserve a reward.”

  She just . . . she couldn’t believe this.

  Working with wildlife was the dream of her lifetime, and for her, the Ural lynx were special—wild, shy, clever. The big, beautiful cats left their marks on the mountain forests that were their homes, providing proof of their existence, yet they were almost impossible to find and photograph. Genny wanted to help them, save them, do something in her life that had value for future generations.

  To have her father understand at last . . . that made it all the sweeter.