Sangfroid

Sangfroid

Word count: 2089



         Jack slid exactly one dollar and four cents across the counter to the teenage girl who sat on a stool behind the 7-Eleven counter, watching Dawson’s Creek on an old black and white television hanging from a wall mount in the corner.  A commercial began, and the teenager finally turned her attention to Jack.  She glanced at the popsicle, typed .99 into the cash register, and leaned over to take the money.  As she put the money in the open drawer, the teenager frowned at Jack, “You’re kinda young to be walking around here at night.”

         Jack unwrapped the popsicle, “I’m sixteen”—a lie, she was thirteen but looked older—“and my boyfriend’s waiting outside.”  Another lie.

         The teenager squinted out into the dark, but Jack knew it was hard to see past the neon signs and bars over the windows. 

         Tossing the crumpled wrapper on the counter, where it rolled over the edge onto the floor by the teenager, Jack said, “Whoops, sorry.  Can you throw that away for me?  Thanks.” 

         As the older girl glared and bent down to pick up the wrapper, Jack winked at the security camera, grabbed a pack of Doublemint gum from the display box by the register, and walked out.



         Outside, Jack’s tall Doc Martins left a trail of dark tracks in the snow that had settled over the sidewalk, covering its cracks and uneven juts as it led past the decrepit tenement housing.  The eaves and roofs of the old houses were dusted with white, so they looked like rows of ancient gingerbread houses leering over their vacant yards and slat board fences.  The wind wound its fingers through Jack’s black hair and stroked the skin of her bare legs under her miniskirt.  Though the wind’s teeth nipped at her neck and ears where her red hoodie failed to protect her skin, it didn’t bother her.  She sucked on the popsicle and hummed to herself under the dim streetlights as she walked.

         An old sedan, the deep maroon of dried blood, slid up to the sidewalk by Jack, who paused to study it, her brows lowering over her violet eyes.  Her reflection in the dark-tinted window disappeared as the glass rolled down to its the sheath in the door.

         A heavyset man leaned across the center console to peer out at her, his eyes large behind the lenses of his wireframe glasses, “Excuse me, young lady, do you need a ride?  It’s a cold night to walk home.”

         Jack smirked at him with her popsicle red lips, “I like the cold.”

         She began walking again; the man paced her with his car.

         “Come on.  I promise I’m okay.  Look, I even have a cell phone,” he held up a rectangular phone with glowing buttons and a small green call-screen.  “You can call your mom.  Let her know you’re on the way home.”

         Jack paused to consider:  she had dodged out on the new tutor her had found her, mostly because her bodyguard, Nick, had growled at the tutor, who’d stood behind Jack while she read aloud from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

         “Ay, stop staring down her shirt like she’s bloody Lolita, you sick wanker,” Nick had said in his gritty Londonese that never failed to delight Jack with its crackling adjectives and curious nouns.  Jack trusted Nick implicitly, and, if he referred to anyone as a fuck, wanker, or anything beginning with ‘knob’, she refused to be alone with that person, ever, under any circumstances.

         The man in the car didn’t seem to be a fuck or a wanker, but neither had the new tutor, who’d just seemed colorless and vaguely academic, like a National Geographic cover left in the sun to fade.  The man in the car looked doughy and moist, like a tube of ready-to-bake biscuits left out of refrigerator so long that it exploded, letting dough slip out in lumpy tendrils.  Jack knew, though, that, if Nick had been with her, this car man would never have stopped.  She started to tell him to fuck off, but he glanced over her shoulder.  Jack turned just in time to see the man behind her, before he wrapped an arm around her and forced an odd smelling cloth over her mouth and nose.  The popsicle dropped from her fingers as a heavy blanket of black fell over her mind.



         Jack woke in blackness, her mouth dry and her mind blank.  Then the Car Man floated into her memory, grotesque and white with his bulbous eyes and slug fingers.  She tried to push herself up, but the room shifted like a boat at sea, making her fall off the… bed, yes, a bed—somehow the mere presence of the bed made her pulse race in a panicked gallop—onto her hands and knees.  The floor felt cold and smooth.  Metal, she realized, resting her head against it, till the room stilled.  The ammonia odor of the floor crawled up through her nostrils, along with undertones of a smell something like the inside of an empty, used refrigerator:  old meat and stale death.

         The cool touch of the floor against her forehead seemed to help her think.  Her clothes were different, she realized as the silky fabric brushed her thighs.  She was wearing a slip or nightgown, without underwear.  Her mind blanched as she froze, wondering if Car Man or the other one had touched her or… done anything to her.  Nick had warned her about men who liked little girls in the wrong way; it was why she wasn’t allowed to be alone with any of her mother’s henchmen, especially the twins Frostbite and Sleet.  Nick hated the twins—Jack knew because he referred to them as “knob hoppers.”

         Whatever the Car Man had done, her body still felt normal to her, but she didn’t really know.  Would she know?  She had been drugged or something, but she thought she would know.  And, if Car Man or the other one had done anything to her, Nick would kill them.  He didn’t have ice powers like her mother and some of the other member of the Court, but he knew lots of ways to kill a man.

         Jack lifted her head.  Good.  She was less dizzy and weird feeling.  She crawled forward, her hair sliding across her bare shoulders and falling to brush against her arms.  Her right hand landed on a slatted surface—a drain, she realized—as she tried to find a wall to follow in order to search for a door.  Her hands made soft slaps as scuttled over the drain, until the fingertips of her left hand brushed against an object.  She sat back on her shins and leaned forward, delicately probing with her hands.

         At first, she thought it must be a doll, one of those expensive almost life-sized Barbies that she used to goggle at when she was four or five.  She’d wanted one so badly:  a doll she could look eye-to-eye with and share gowns with and tell secrets to.  A real friend of her own!  Nick had bought it for her on the spot, but the next day her mother had taken it away and given it to the twins, who had cut off the doll’s hair and clothes and drawn lewd tattoos on her pale plastic skin.

         This skin felt real, not plastic.

         With shaking hands, Jack groped for the face, finding a nose, lips, and, past the lips, two rows of teeth, slightly parted and as cold as chips of ice.  She yanked her hands back, her breath hissing out.

         Dormant till now, her power—inherited from her mother, the Winter Queen—sang though her blood with the voice of cunning, sharp-edged ice.  It made slow curls of frost across her skin and rimed her hair.  The fog of fear over her mind crystallized into cold hatred as she realized that the Car Man and his friend were just the same as the twins.  The twins who had killed all of her pets, leaving the mangled, frozen bodies for her to find.  The twins who waited till she loved something before they killed it.  Nick was the only one who was safe to love, because he could kill anyone who tried to hurt him, even the twins.

         What would Nick tell her to do?

         He’d once told her not to worry if any of the heroes from the League took her, because they didn’t believe in using children in bad ways.  “But,” he’d warned her, “If things ever go pear shaped and your mother’s enemies, like the crime bosses or the loony super wanks,”—his words for the super-powered villains—“take you, then you do whatever it takes to survive till I find you.  Look around, find a weapon or a way out, because, when they try to use you as leverage, your bleeding bitch of a mother will tell them to kill you, rather than look weak.”

         Jack believed him.

         She pondered.  A weapon and a way out.

         Her power gnashed its new teeth, howling inside of her when she found no source of water to freeze as she felt around the small room.  She thought she must be inside a walk-in freezer, because the entire room was metal and, until recently, must have been very cold, judging by the temperature and stiffness of the dead girl’s body.  The door, when she found it, had no handle, only an odd, welded circle, where a handle might’ve been once.  She’d have to wait for someone to open the door from the outside.

         So a way out was not under her control, but a weapon… 

         She tried pulling the on the bars of the bed, but none even so much as wiggled.  With a numb thoroughness, she searched the dead girl, finding nothing, though she noticed the girl was thawing.

         A half-formed thought tugged on her mind.  Something to do with thawing.

         If something could freeze…

         Humans, Jack recalled from a distant tutor, were approximately 70% water.

         Yes, whispered Winter’s voice, drawing the sibilant into an approving sigh.



         The lights flicked on with a buzzing brightness.  Jack squinted from her place by the door, where she’d pressed herself against the wall.  The dead girl lay on the bed where Jack had moved her—she looked very much like Jack herself, she saw, with unruly black hair and fair skin, though bruises stood out on her neck and wrists and thighs where the hem of the pink nightie ended.

         The Car Man’s faint voice siphoned down from above, “If you want to go home, do exactly as I say.  If you don’t do exactly as I say, I will punish you, the same way I had to punish my last pet.”

         Jack glanced at the dead girl.

         “Lay down on the bed,” the Car Man’s voice filtered down from a small hole in the ceiling. 

         He spoke again, a touch of impatience coloring his tone, “Are you laying down?  Answer me.  If you’re lying, I will know.”

         That made Jack scan the room for a camera hole, but she saw nothing, guessing the hole that he talked through was an air hole that he also used as a way to communicate.

         She flattened herself against the metal wall and called, “I’m laying down.”

         A lie.

         The door opened outward.  The Car Man lumbered in, his face flushed as he fastened his gaze on the girl on the bed, his throat exposed to Jack as he stopped, still looking left.

         Jack’s right hand flashed out, her fingertips capped in crude, deep red claws made from the dead girl’s frozen blood; she felt the turgid pull of flesh resisting her claws, then her hand was free, and the Car Man turned to her, gurgling, a spray of blood flying free before he clamped his white leechy fingers to his neck and fell to his knees.  She kicked him in the chest as hard as she could, shoving his momentum backwards so he didn’t fall inward and lock them both inside.

         She walked to him and crouched, dipping her fingers in the spreading pool of the Car Man’s blood and drawing it upward to glove her forearm in a red gauntlet of ice with wedge-shaped claws.

         “I’m getting better,” she mused, flexing her fingers and making the ice snap and crack as it broke and reformed.

         The Car Man’s dying eyes watched her through blood-specked lenses.  Jack winked at him and walked out.