Frost - Sample Chapters

Chapter One

You know what you have to do.

Johnny opened up the throttle further as the cold voice scratched at the door to his mind.  He wished he could lock out the voice, but all he could do was ignore it.  The snowmobile whizzed over a small hill and plunged down the other side, almost but not quite, airborne.

Behind him Kathy shouted with glee and held him tighter.

It was a perfect day.  Crisp, but not too cold.  No snowfall, but enough cloud to prevent snow glare.  Little wind.  Johnny ignored the voice for one moment longer.

You won't like what will happen if you don't listen to me, Johnny.

The words entered Johnny's mind as if drilled by an ice pick.  He flinched, then opened up the throttle wider to drown the voice out.

He concentrated on the white open spaces ahead of him.  Tundra, not fields.  No trees, because Baffin Island was north of the treeline, and no hidden barb wire fences either.  Just miles and miles of white until you hit the ocean.  Or the mountains.

"Hey!" Kathy shouted over the throb of the motor.  "Can I take another turn driving?"

The opportunity was too good to pass up.  Johnny twisted his head around.  "Sure," he said.  The other girls in their snowmobiling party didn't drive much.  It took a lot of upper arm strength to take a heavy snowmobile up a sharp incline and was quite tiring.  Kathy had the musculature--she wanted to be a fighter jet pilot and lifted weights three times a week--but no snowmobile of her own. 

Johnny eased off the throttle, and the snowmobile slid to a stop.  He waited for her to get off, body tense.

Kathy swung one leg over the snowmobile, but his face must have given him away because she hesitated.  "Wait.  Is this one of your practical jokes?  If I get off, are you going to drive away and leave me standing here?"

"No," Johnny said, forcing a grin.

She was still suspicious.  "You get off first."

Instead Johnny opened up the throttle and sent the snowmobile leaping forward.  Kathy shrieked and almost fell, but hung on, yelling and laughing at the same time.  To her it was just a game.

To Johnny it was something very different.  He wanted her off the snowmobile, but he dared not insist.  Dared not draw Frost's attention to her.

Frost in his head, echoing in his skull.

You will do it, Johnny.

Under his winter jacket, Johnny shuddered.

Not now, he pleaded.  Not yet.

Johnny would give in eventually, as he always had.  He knew what Frost was capable of.  Frost would kill, coldly and without remorse.

But this time Frost was asking for more.  Johnny had already given up so much, including his brother and his last girlfriend, all for Frost's threats.  This time was harder.  Frost was asking him to give up his dream.

It's just for the season, he told himself.  Next year you can do what you want.  But the cold hollow feeling in his gut said differently. 

You know what you have to do, Johnny.

Yes.  He knew.  Johnny did it.

Chapter Two

-10 °C (+14 °F)

Afterward, what Kathy remembered most vividly about the accident was the stranger's face.

Kathy had closed her eyes as they zoomed along, partly against the spray of snow, but mostly so she could glory in the feeling of speed.

It was almost like flying.

Her arms were tight around Johnny's chest, her head tucked to one side.  She wished Johnny would let her take another turn, but he loved to drive just as much as she did.  The next time they stopped she would ask his brother, Evan, if she could drive his snowmobile.  He was the only one in their party not already riding double, and he probably wouldn't mind.

The engine whined suddenly, straining to go up the steep hill.  They slowed.  The snow ahead of them was trackless and pure.  No other snowmobiles had been this way.

"Maybe I should get off," Kathy yelled near Johnny's ear.

"Nah, we can make it."  Johnny opened up the throttle wider, and the snowmobile jumped ahead.

Kathy squinted, trying to see how far they had to go, but only saw white.  She dared not tip her head back for fear of shifting her weight on the machine.

"Almost there," Johnny said.  "Almost--"

The stranger appeared out of nowhere, on foot, almost directly in front of them.  Where the heck did he come from?

Time seemed to slow as the stranger's eyes met hers for an instant.  They were as dark and deep as the abyss.  It was as if in one glance, he stripped her back to her most unlovely years.  She felt thirteen again, gauche, shy, ungainly, the one the junior high boys called Giraffe. 

She felt cold down to her soul.

As quickly as it had settled upon her, his gaze flicked past her, dismissed her as scenery.  When he looked away, Kathy felt relief, as if a pressure had eased, but her joy in the day seemed suddenly flat, hammered thin.

The stranger's hair was silver, in sharp contrast to his eyes which seemed to soak up the light.  He watched Johnny like a hawk might watch its prey.  Kathy had the stomach-churning sensation of being caught up in a powerful current...

The snowmobile engine gave a sudden whine and died.

The stranger smiled, exposing sharp teeth.

Momentum gone, the snowmobile began to tip over backwards.  There was a half second when Johnny might have kept the machine from flipping, but in the instant's panic he turned and grabbed Kathy instead, rolling her off the seat and into the snow, before the snowmobile could fall on them and crush them.

The impact with the ground drove the air from Kathy's lungs.  Cold snow hit her in the face, momentarily blinding her.

Together Kathy and Johnny rolled down the hill in a mad flurry of arms and legs, snow and sky, before stopping about one-third of the way down.  The snowmobile wasn't as fortunate.  It kept tumbling, performing a slow somersault, spraying snow, heading for a large boulder close to the bottom.  It was mid-October, and the snowfall was still a fairly thin covering over the stark stone of the Canadian Shield.  The snowmobile hit the rock with a bang.  Kathy winced at the sound of machinery breaking.

Abruptly, she remembered the stranger.  A terrible thought occurred to her.  "We didn't hit him, did we?"  As soon as she asked the question, she knew that they couldn't have.  The last thing she'd seen was him smiling.

"Are you okay?" Johnny leaned down to ask her.  His usually laughing green eyes were serious. 

"Oh, yeah.  I'm tough."  Which was true, even if unfeminine.  Kathy got to her feet without help.  The red winter jacket and ski-pants she was wearing had cushioned her fall, but she felt bruised, and her left cheek stung as if it had been rug-burned.  "How about you?"

Johnny shrugged.  "I've been slammed around worse playing hockey.  Are you sure you're okay?"                    

"Yes."  Kathy took off her helmet and began to brush away the snow that had jammed inside before all of it melted in her hair, then didn't know why she'd bothered.  Her brown hair hung in sweaty tangles, beyond help--Kathy considered helmet hair to be the price she paid for speed.  Though today was the first time she had really needed her helmet.  The first accident she had been in.              

She looked around for the stranger, but didn't see him.  Just the thought of him smiling while they flipped made her furious.  Where had he gone?

Johnny distracted her by hugging her and kissing her forehead.  "I'm an idiot.  Tell me I'm an idiot."

"You're an idiot."

"And a jerk."

"And a jerk," Kathy repeated obediently.

Still Johnny didn't smile.  "I should have known that slope was too steep for two people.  You could have been hurt."

"But I wasn't."  Johnny's obvious concern warmed Kathy.  Sometimes Kathy worried that Johnny treated her more like a buddy than a girlfriend.  "We're both okay.  That's the important part.  Right?"

"Right."  Johnny gave her an affectionate squeeze. 

The rest of the snowmobiling party began to zoom back over the hill, having missed them.  Minik Ashevak and Brendan Robertson, members of Johnny's hockey team, were followed by their girlfriends, Cheryl Meekitjuk and Tracy Beaumont, and also Johnny's younger brother Evan.

There was an immediate babble of voices.  What had happened, were they all right, thank goodness it was only the snowmobile that had been damaged.

Evan had a different opinion; he stared down at the wreck in morbid fascination.  "Uncle Dan is going to kill you," he told Johnny.  "He'd only just paid it off."  Evan's shoulders straightened.  "I'll tell him I did it."

Kathy was puzzled by his offer and unsurprised when Johnny refused.

"No, it's my fault.  I'll take the blame."

"But--"

"No, Evan," Johnny said firmly.  "Leave Uncle Dan to me."  He grinned and kicked snow at the snowmobile.  "See, it's not as bad as it looks.  It's just a little dinged up.  Maybe he won't notice."

The corners of Kathy's mouth twitched.  Dinged up was a gross understatement, and Johnny knew it.  The snowmobile was totalled:  one ski broken off, the handlebars wrenched askew, the body dented, and the tail pipe knocked off.  

#

His uncle noticed.

His uncle could hardly have failed to notice when it took two snowmobiles to drag the broken snowmobile into his yard.  He came out and watched as they maneuvered it around the water and sewage pipes.  The town of Iqaluit was built on permafrost, so pipes had to be aboveground.  Since the town was above the tree-line most of the houses were pre-fabricated--built elsewhere and shipped in parts. 

Even in a good mood Dan Vander Zee was a brusque man, not given to talking or smiling; the only similarity Kathy had ever seen between him and Johnny was height.  They were both tall.

"Was this your doing?" Dan Vander Zee asked Johnny, tight-lipped.

"Yes."  Briefly, Johnny explained about the steep hill and the double load.  "It was my fault."

"I'm sure it was," his uncle said coldly.  "This is the absolute last straw, Johnny.  When I took the job in Iqaluit this spring, you and I made a deal.  You would behave in a responsible manner, and I would let you accept the invitation to play for one of the junior hockey teams down south.  You give me no choice.  You're staying in Iqaluit for the winter."

Evan looked miserable.  Now Kathy understood why he had volunteered to take the blame.  Hockey meant everything to Johnny the same way the dream of being a fighter jet pilot drove Kathy.  He drilled relentlessly, in season and out.  He was hoping to be drafted into the NHL in a couple of years.  A season of only playing on Iqaluit's local team would set him back.

Teams in Iqaluit played mostly with each other--the Women's team vs. PeeWees, Bantams/Midgets vs. Senior Mens, etc.  There were no roads out of Iqaluit, not even elsewhere on the island, and airfare to other northern communities was expensive.  Iqaluit hosted several tournaments every year and sent its best players to play on Team Baffin at Territorials in Yellowknife, but that was the extent of outside competition.

Johnny's face was very pale.  "I understand."

For a moment Dan Vander Zee's face softened, then the lines bracketing his mouth deepened.  "You brought this on yourself."

"I'm sorry," Johnny said sincerely.

His words angered his uncle all over again.  "Are you?  It's not just the machine--though if it wasn't insured I'd damn well be taking the four thousand dollars out of your inheritance money--it's the risk you took.  Not just with your own life, but with your passenger.  Kathy could have been hurt, do you understand that?"

Johnny closed his eyes.  Nodded.

"It wasn't Johnny's fault."  Kathy came to his defense.  "It was the stranger.  He startled us." 

Johnny was shaking his head.  "What stranger?"

"The man on the hill.  You must have seen him," Kathy insisted when Johnny continued to look puzzled.  "He was only five feet away from us when we flipped.  He was staring at you.  He had silver hair and dark eyes.  Cold looking."  She shivered. 

Johnny shrugged helplessly.  "Sorry."

Kathy felt herself growing desperate.  She appealed to the group.  "One of you must have seen him when you came back down the slope."  She hadn't seen the stranger after the accident and had assumed he'd vanished over the hill.  He'd been on foot and couldn't have gotten far.

Minik shrugged.

"Sorry," Evan said.

Cheryl, Brendan, and Tracy shook their heads.  No one had seen him.

How could they not have seen him?  Were they blind? 

"Was he Inuit?" Evan asked, trying to be helpful.

"No."  Kathy shook her head.  The stranger's skin had been almost ivory, but when she tried to remember what he'd been wearing, she drew a blank.  She hadn't been able to tear her gaze away from his eyes.

Kathy bit her lip, upset without really knowing why.  If the stranger's surprise appearance hadn't caused the snowmobile accident, it hardly mattered if anyone else had seen him.  She let the subject drop.

#

Kathy had seen Frost.  This was very bad.

Johnny regretted not pushing her off the snowmobile when he had the chance--but he'd been afraid that if he did so Frost might think that Kathy was important to Johnny.  He'd thought he could protect her better if she was closer.  And he had.  She wasn't hurt. 

But she'd seen Frost.  A bad thing.  For Kathy more than for Johnny.