Chapter Twenty-Six

“Again!” Jake ground out. He’d already flipped his body over and faced the rusted slab. By now his face and chest were covered with blood and orange rust, maybe some ice. Oddly, the frosty metal had numbed the memento left by the Cold-hearted Bitch. He couldn’t feel the slice on his torso any more. His slacks were thin protection at best and soaked. His socks too. He’d kicked the dress shoes off because he needed tread and their soles, wet or dry, were too slippery to gain traction on the metal.

Wet socks gripped the pitted surface better, and the slab slanted just enough that he could climb. Inch-by-inch he’d crept upward, and he’d gotten close enough that his fingertips touched the bottom curve of the hook. All he needed was another inch or two, and he’d be home free. The hook was solid enough. One good five-fingered grip, and he could pull himself up high enough to lift the rope over the hook.

Jake had a plan. Once free of that hook, he didn’t mind falling even if he landed in the river. He could run the shore to keep warm. He could survive this war. Poindexter wasn’t any different than any of the other assholes roaming the world for power and fortune.

But like the last hundred times, his feet slipped just when his fingers grazed the frozen hook.

“No, no, no!” he growled, willing his hands and fingers, his knuckles and joints, to stretch enough to make up the difference. He just needed an inch! “Shit!”

Down he went, jolting his shoulder sockets when he hit the end of the rope yet one more time.

Typical for December, it started to snow. Nothing of blizzard proportions, just enough to coat anyone dumb enough to be outside in the blustery weather. Jake shook the flakes out of his hair and spit, intent on surprising Poindexter by surviving. But icy rain came with the snow, turning the metal slab into a frozen slip and slide. His socks failed in their most important mission.

Zack’s comforting voice in Jake’s head had grown silent when he needed it most. Jake was running on empty. Shivering had become the only thing he could do well. Shivering and thinking about Lacy. She deserved better. She always would deserve better than him, but damn, he loved her, and the only legacy he’d leave her now would be a gruesome picture of his dead corpse.

Like hell. Marines. Do. Not. Quit. They kept trying until they dropped dead.

Lifting his weary face from the metal wall, with knees bent between him and the damned frozen iron, he braced his body to do his will one last time. But it had grown colder and now the wind kicked up. His knees complained as they ground against pitted weathered metal on their way upward. No doubt they were bleeding too. Well, so what? Skin and muscle could heal later.

Jake climbed for all he was worth. Slowly. Cautiously. Balancing his weight against the metal, he crept upward on his knees, keeping his center of gravity close to the iron. This was a better plan. Don’t use your feet, just crawl. Keep the rope tight, then pull yourself up. You can do it this time. You’re a winner. It’s just a few feet. Go, Jake. Go.

Slushy snow pelted his back. Ice water trickled out of his hair and down between his shoulder blades. It could freeze for all he cared.

You’re almost there. Focus. Hang on. No slack. Just muscle. Just will power. Just—

“Son-of-a-bitch!!” He hit the same slippery spot every time and dropped flat to his belly. Why wasn’t the whole damned slab pitted? Wasn’t that how rust worked? He needed traction, not an ice skating rink!

“I’m coming, Lacy,” he told the metal wall once again at the end of his bleeding nose, shivering so damned hard his forehead bumped the unforgiving iron. “Don’t give up on me. I promise. I’m coming.”

But that last drop took a different kind of toll on Jake. Numbness crept up from his freezing feet and down his already numbed hands and arms. He looked skyward, resting his chin on the iron. Every muscle and bone ached from the extreme pull-ups he’d demanded of his body. To no avail. God, he hurt.

“Lacy,” he said to the flakes swirling around him on the bitter December breeze. “Keep painting your heart out, baby. Keep strong. I’m coming.”

A gust of winter’s bite blasted the side of his face, but he smiled anyway. Lacy had already proved everyone wrong. Her stupid doctor. Her misguided parents. Even him. Lacy was stronger than she knew. She would survive, if only because she already had.

The shivers ceased. Jake hung as still as death while he contemplated a different strategy. There had to be a way off this hook. He just hadn’t thought of it yet. Licking his lips, he fought to keep them from freezing while he brainstormed. His cheeks felt stiff, like maybe Jack Frost had already painted icy feathers and paisley swirls on them. For all he knew, he might be decorated like the windowpanes in his grandfather’s unheated attic outside Little Rock, Arkansas.

“Grandpa,” he whispered, “I miss you and Grandma. I miss sleeping in your granary and picking up chicken eggs every morning.” I miss everything.

Jake had worked his grandfather Elias’s farm the summer before he’d shipped off to join the Corps. Why that memory surfaced, he didn’t know, but thinking of Elias and Jane Weylin and their farm in the country, brought a momentary wave of warmth to his chilly predicament. “I should’ve told you I’m home, but… I’m broken, Grandpa. Least I was. Couldn’t decide where I was some days; if I was back there or over here, and I didn’t want you to see me like that. But I’m better now. Except I’m dying. Maybe.”

There was no visit or apparition of the silvery-haired gent who raised chickens and battled notorious red foxes in the thick hardwood forests around his one-acre farm. No message from the grave, either, but Jake knew it then. He had to check in with his folks and his grandparents once he got out of this mess. They needed to know where he was, and what he’d been doing since he’d come home. They’d always loved him; he knew damned well they did. It was time to man up and reconnect. He breathed another shivering puff. “I promise I’ll be a better son and grandson. A better man.”

Only the whine of the wind rippling over the sheer metal wall replied. No brainstorm and no brilliant other options presented themselves.

His mind wandered, and he was okay with that. It might as well wander. He wasn’t going anywhere. Funny. By the time he got out of here—if he got out of here—he’d be a freaking work of art, all covered in frost flowers and feather frost like he’d seen in the dead of winter once in the extreme north of Canada. All of those decorations might ease the sight of Lacy seeing him dead. It might even make her smile to know that Mother Nature had painted him first.

“Uncle Jake?” LiLi’s honey-sweet voice drifted through the flakes of white. “Uncle Jake!”

“Huh?” he mumbled. How could Zack’s little girl be out here in the storm? “Wh… where you at?”

“Uncle Jake!” she squealed as she barreled into him and wrapped her arms around him. “Let’s go inside. I’m cold.”

“M-m-me too,” he sputtered, damned thankful for the warmth of her tiny body. His chin dropped to the top of her head. The silly girl hugged him tight like he was someone worth hugging, but when she lifted her face, it wasn’t LiLi’s dark brown, almond shaped eyes peering up at him. It was Fantine, come to him in her bedraggled, bareheaded disgrace.

“We are the same,” she cried. “Both born for greater things, now reduced to grovel for our souls.”

I’m not groveling.

She whined like the wind, her breath as cold on his lips. “Kiss me then, and let us die together.”

Uh-uh. Never. He twisted his mouth away from the ill-fated wraith as much as his stiff neck allowed. The only woman he was dying with or for was Lacy. “Why are you here?” he had to ask. The big ugly guy with the black robes and scythe he’d expected, not this pale ghost. “Why didn’t you seek out Jean Valjean sooner?” Why weren’t you smarter than me?

“Jake! Jake!” He opened his eyes as one ghost transformed into another, this one with vivid green eyes. “I love you, Jake,” it whispered.

“L-lacy. S-s-sorry,” he hissed, wishing she wasn’t there. No woman ought to witness her man’s death, not like this. He tried to swallow, but snowmen couldn’t do what humans could. The saliva wouldn’t come. A hard lump caught in his throat, burning him with the only hot spot on his entire body. He licked his lips instead, no longer sure of who or what he was. Man or frozen beast.

“Don’t die on me, Jake. You are my heart,” Lacy said, her fingers as cold as ice where they cupped his chin. She pressed cold lips to his mouth and kissed him with frozen vapor instead of sweet warm breath.

He closed his eyes to relish the apparition. Maybe she was real. Maybe she wasn’t. He didn’t know any more. “Hang onto me,” he said, his voice filled with angst at what was to come. “Don’t let go. I’ll save you.” Please don’t let this be an illusion.

“You’ve already saved me,” she breathed, easing away from him and his icy slab. Like a ghost, Lacy slipped out of and beyond his reach. His lovely dream evaporated over the choppy, gray Potomac.

Damn it, she wasn’t real either. The only thing Jake could do was hunker into his icy pyre and cry. One. Frozen. Tear.