Frost Bite

Chapter 16

Jack

Ryan's face is a perfect image of shock. Eyes wide and mouth open in an O shape.

Which is about how I feel.

"What do you mean she's gone?" he demands, standing up so quickly he throws his chair back and onto the ground.

"She's gone. She hasn't been here for hours."

Ryan looks like he wants to topple buildings with his bare hands. "Where did she go? How did you not realize she was gone sooner?"

"Because, for once, I was asleep," I snap. "It's not as if you realized she was gone. She's your best friend."

Ryan's hands clench into fists. "I'm not the one who can sense minute changes in temperature from a mile away. How did you not realize she was gone?"
 I glare at him. "I'm not a magician."

"No, you're a self-righteous jackass who acts like he knows everything when clearly he doesn't." Ryan shuts his mouth then and I can tell that he wants to say more. But for some reason, he doesn't. "Whatever. You don't care and you're not going to change. We need to find her." He brushes past me to get his coat and boots and I stare at him, wondering what it is he's not saying.

And wondering if I really want to know.

"How exactly do you propose we do that?" I demand. "It's not like we know what direction she went."

"Can't you figure something out?" Ryan demands. "Aren't you the fucking king of the tundra or whatever?"

I shoot him a look meant to freeze him in his tracks. "Yes, I am – but do you know how large of an area it is that I control? Both the north and the south pole, Alaska, Greenland, the upper reaches of Canada. Wherever it is below freezing or snowing – I am there. Even I cannot know what is going on in every place I control every second of the day."

Ryan does his best to look unimpressed. "Try."

I look at him and I wonder if this is the true human condition: the expectation, the demand of the highly improbable, the clearly impossible.

For the millionth time in a thousand years I am tired. Not the kind of tired associated with going to sleep, but the bone-deep fatigue of the urge to give up. A thousand years is too long for anyone to be on this earth.

I grab a fistful of snow and do my very best to ignore the sound of Ryan's teeth chattering around the profanity coming out of his mouth at an impressive rate for someone convulsing so hard. The expletives rattle out of him, spurred on by the shivering and cold.

It shouldn't make me smile to hear him suffer, but it does.

"Sh!" I hush him because I know it will piss him off.

I search out with my mind, feeling every fallen flake of snow on the ground, trying to find any piece of evidence. Any hint of Josie.

But it's near impossible to find any signs of life here – I don't allow for it.

"Stop moving," I tell him as he crunches around in the snow. I turn around to look at him and my eyes fall on his boots and I feel the snow melting under the pressure of his weight and I realize what it is I need to look for.

I grin, turning back to the snow. "Ryan, I take it back. Thank you for moving."

Ryan makes a sound in the back of his throat like he's trying to cough something up. "You just thanked me."

"Because you moved. The snow is melting under you feet from the pressure of your weight. That's what makes ice slippery when you step on it, the small layer of water that forms on top from the pressure," I inform him. "Once you step off that particular patch of snow, it refreezes into the shape of your boot. It's covered by falling snow but it still stays there."