A Fistful of Frost_An Urban Fantasy Novel by Rebecca Chastain

Author:Rebecca Chastain [Chastain, Rebecca]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780999238561
Publisher: Mind Your Muse Books
Published: 2018-05-07T16:00:00+00:00

I waited until I’d returned to the netted hounds before calling Brad. I’d put it off far too long already. In his capacity as warden, Brad had the ability to feel the movement of lux lucis and atrum in his region. He’d be able to help me track Jamie, but I’d have to first admit to losing control of the pooka.

“What’s going on?” Brad demanded. “I’m getting some weird readings.”

“I netted a pair of hounds. Corgis.” Delaying wouldn’t make this any easier, but I couldn’t bring myself to lead with my failure.

“Hounds? Since when did hounds get into our region?”

His words confirmed my suspicion. “They were likely pooka made.”

“Pooka made? What was he—” Brad cut himself off with a strangled sound, then much quieter asked, “Madison? You don’t sound— Tell me what happened.”

“Jamie and I had a fight. He ran off, apparently made the hounds, and mucked up the area with a lot of atrum.” The words tumbled out fast, as if I could lessen their meaning by rushing through them.

“Where is the pooka now?”

“Gone.” I braced for his explosion.

Silence reigned so pure I could hear a faint conversation between Rose and Pamela about their lunch plans in the background. I lifted the phone from my ear, preparing for the tsunami after the calm.

“Send me a picture of you next to the hounds. In Primordium.”

His calm, matter-of-fact tone and the absence of any candy-laced profanity worried me far more than a full-blown berating.

“Me and the hounds? Like some disgusting hunting picture?”

“Something like that.”

Frowning, I crouched beside the hounds, near their hind ends. Even with the net holding them, I didn’t want to tempt fate by sitting with my back to their muzzles. Activating the Primordium picture app, I snapped a selfie of the three of us and sent it to Brad.

“You’ve got it.”

Brad’s silence sat heavy against my ear, and if I hadn’t been straining so hard to hear something—anything—to clue me in to his thoughts, I would have missed his soft, relieved sigh. The picture combined with the sigh cleared up my confusion; Brad had feared the worst: that Jamie had tainted my soul. Asking me to send a picture with the hounds was his equivalent of getting my picture beside today’s dated newspaper: He’d made sure I had sent a current image of my soul.

“I’m still me. I’m just—” I heard the bewilderment in my voice and closed my mouth. I didn’t want to cry while on the phone with my boss. I didn’t want to cry at all. I wanted to be mad. I wanted to get Jamie back and teach him how to be a good pooka and make everything normal between us again.

I covered the microphone with my finger and cleared my throat before saying, “If you felt the anomalies in the park, can you point me in Jamie’s direction?” There. I had sounded professional and composed.

“Whatever the pooka was doing, he stopped before you called. I can’t sense him now.”

“You can’t? But—”

“It’s a good thing, Madison.

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