Chapter 17: Jonesing

When I went home, my first priority was to commit a little vandalism.

I had put my blunt down the middle of the square-sectioned crosswalk sign. I’d felt proud of myself at the time, thinking, They’ll never be able to retrieve this. They won’t be able to prove a thing.

But I hadn’t factored in getting abducted. I needed it today. Right now.

I had Toby drop me off, and I wheeled my bike to a tree a safe distance away from what I was about to attempt. I hadn’t been riding my bike for a good reason. Because I’d checked, and extreme cold is tough on metal. If I hopped on my bike after experimenting with my cold spells, I might just snap off the pedals.

By the same token, it had occurred to me on the way here, I could probably snap off the sign at its base and retrieve my precious package. Assuming it wasn’t now full of bugs, rainwater, and other stuff that would be too gross to use.

You might be thinking, Hey, you know your dealer is literally the one who dropped you off.

I don’t have any money, and I’m not taking advantage of him. That would be gross.

After everything that had happened, it took me a minute to summon up the focus to do what I needed to do. But soon enough, the light began to change again, going from sky blue to azure, from azure to deep navy as the daylight seemed to dim and all the heat in the world fled.

I said earlier that the trick to cryomancy is to pull all the heat out of something and then not use it. But the heat does go somewhere. As I pulled it, a small ball of blue light grew between my cupped hands, getting brighter and brighter. This, I was pretty sure, could be referred to as a fireball without too much exaggeration. Of course, I didn’t know what to do with it. I didn’t have a way to propel it. I suspected I could probably stuff it into one side of the line-of-sight connection, but that would be a problem for whoever was on the other end, and also, I had promised.

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I went colder than ever.

The air began to fog, and little particles of ice began to gather in drifts on the upper surface of my sleeves and on the shoulders of my hoodie. It looked like I’d been snowed on.

Frosted.

My skin stung, and the metal of the signpost pinged and visibly shrunk, cracking the concrete around its base. Grass within the invisible circle of my spell paled, then frosted into whiteness. Something gave a deep echoing thud beneath the sidewalk. I wasn’t really sure what that was.

Sounded expensive.

I dropped the spell—I was probably cold enough as it was.

But I wasn’t done.

I skipped back, out of the area of my own spell, back to the summer heat where my skin didn’t feel painful and numb, where my blood wanted to flow.

I picked up a large tree branch the trimmers had left behind, adopted a vaguely martial stance, and broke into a sprint. I’m not a great sprinter, but when I swung the branch as hard as I could at the top of the post, the whole thing snapped off at the base with a loud BONG, followed by a clang as the head of the sign hit the sidewalk.

Slowing down from my run, I dropped the tree limb. I walked back over to carefully retrieve my prize. It had apparently gotten stuck in the tube. Judicious kicking allowed me to get it out, relatively clean.

At least one thing was going right.

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That night, I had nightmares. I don’t normally remember my nightmares, but I was walking up the road from my school, just the same as every day, pushing my bike under an empty sky with no stars, and everything had this weird phosphorescence to it, as if it was backlit, spilling from one object to another. And I saw distant points of gleaming green in the darkness, flying around like gigantic flocks of birds, and then they landed around me, and they weren’t birds. They were corpses, rotted and missing pieces, and gleaming green reptilian eyes leered at me from cracked and scaled sockets. They didn’t walk; they scuttled like spiders, fleshless bones bending in ways no living joint could, silent and inhuman. Then leaping back into the air, their wings—dark and leathery, but tattered. And I was among them now, in the lonely dark.

I woke up in cold sweat for the third time and gave up on sleep for the night. I spent the rest of the night shivering, and checking under my bed again and again for nothing—just phantom noises, house settling or whatever. Wednesday would have its chance to do its worst.