Frost Line Read online

  “You called me here for a purpose,” she said, trying yet again to extract from him the reason why she was here. “What is that purpose?”

  A look of intense unhappiness crossed that cherubic face, but all he said was, “I’m hungry,” then he opened the door and cautiously looked around before leaving the small dressing room.

  Lenna followed, stepping into a bedchamber that was gently lit by an early-morning sun beginning to share its glow through large windows. She didn’t take the time to examine her surroundings, though normally her curiosity would be high. “Your hunger can wait, child,” she said. “Tell me—”

  “My name is Elijah,” he said without looking back as he left the room. Lenna fell into step behind him. “Elijah Tilley. What’s your name?”

  “Lenna Frost. Strength of the Major Arcana. You know who I am,” she continued, puzzled. “You called me, you brought me here.”

  “No, you just showed up.” This time he did glance over his shoulder at her, and his brow wrinkled. “You’re wearing your nightgown. I didn’t mean to wake you up. Sorry,” he added in a small voice.

  Nightgown? Lenna looked down at herself. She was not wearing nightclothes. When she did sleep, it was without any clothing at all. Her dress was made of the finest white Nilean silkine available in Aeonia or any other world. She had been immersed in some interesting studies, so the dress had been chosen with comfort in mind; it hung loosely, in lustrous folds that never wrinkled. She doubted the child cared about her fashion choices, though, so she merely reassured him.

  “No apology is needed. You did not wake me.”

  She followed him down the stairs, through another room, into a room that was—as the bed chamber upstairs had been—lit by the soft, faint light of dawn coming through the windows, a dawn that showed a world of white. “Now, what sort of help do you require?”

  He stopped in the middle of the room—a kitchen, if she was correct—and turned to look up at her with wide eyes that held an overbright sheen. Tears spilled down his little cheeks.

  Somewhat bewildered, she stared at him. What had she said to cause this reaction? How could she make him stop? “Cease,” she ordered.

  Rather than stopping, his lips quivered and he began to sob, his slight shoulders heaving. Ordering him to stop didn’t work.

  “It wasn’t a dream,” he said, the words shuddering out between sobs. “I thought I’d come downstairs and be in my house and everything would be the same, but it’s not! I’m not home, my mom is dead—he killed her.” He sat down on the floor and the sobs turned to wails.

  Finally, a fact to work with! Not a good fact, but still something substantial. Now she had a direction. She crouched beside him and put her arm around his shoulders, touched by his slightness. “Where is this man who killed your mother?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he’s still at my house, but he doesn’t usually stay all night so he might’ve gone home.” Her touch seemed to comfort him because the tears began to subside. He turned his liquid deep brown eyes up to her. “He knows I saw. He’ll want to kill me, too.”

  Lenna felt a sudden and unexpected wave of protectiveness. “Not if I kill him first.” She wasn’t Justice, but she knew how to mete it out, for what was Justice without Strength?

  Elijah blinked hard. “You’re going to kill Uncle Bobby?” The idea seemed to astonish him.

  “Isn’t that why I’m here?” Why else had he called her? She would do what was needed.

  He managed to look surprised, terrified, and pleased all at once. “I just wanted a cell phone to call 9–1–1.”

  That made her pause. What was a cell phone? Who was this 9–1–1? From what she knew of life on Seven, people were not named with numbers. Granted, she had been preoccupied this last little while with her studies, and time was irrelevant on Aeonia, but she normally made an effort to stay abreast of life in all the worlds. What had happened on Seven while she was distracted, that she wouldn’t know what Elijah was talking about? But if he had a friend, that was good. She would focus on that. “Who is 9–1–1?”

  “The police. They can put Uncle Bobby in jail, when I tell them what he did.” The tears threatened to start up again, but he fought them back to ask, “Do you have a cell phone?”

  The cell phone again. Whatever it was, she didn’t have one, because she had come into this world empty-handed. “No, I have no cell phone.”

  The negative answer was too much for the child, because he dissolved into sobs again, crying until he was almost choking, his almost unintelligible cries of “Mom!” telling Lenna he grieved for his mother. Without warning Elijah threw himself at her; driven by instinct, she stretched out her arms and caught him. Her action was as much pragmatic as it was sympathetic; it was either catch him, or allow him to knock her to the floor. She went to her knees and tightly wrapped her arms around him, cuddling him to her, offering the comfort of her nearness.

  He was warm and soft, his bones thin and fragile under her hands. The smallness of him bemused her; the beings of Aeonia had neither childhood nor old age; they simply were. The humans of Seven, on the other hand, grew from tiny infants to full adulthood, then began growing smaller again as they aged. From afar, whenever she turned her curiosity to the other worlds of other planes, she had been interested in the tiny infants, who seemed so pliable and incomplete yet adorable. Elijah wasn’t that tiny; he seemed to be fully formed, though not yet at his full size. He would be helpless against an adult, she thought, and felt anger grow that someone would hurt this little person.

  His tears damped the sleeve and shoulder of her dress, and she patted his back, as she had often observed Seven females doing through the ages. “I will find your 9–1–1,” she said, doing her best to comfort the child. “I will see that Uncle Bobby is, as you have requested, in jail.” And if that was not possible, she’d kill the murderer herself. “When that is done, you must send me home.”

  Elijah pulled away, a puzzled look on his little face. He hunched his shoulders up around his ears and asked, “How do I do that?”

  He didn’t know? Oh, dear. “The same way you called me here, I imagine.” Surely he remembered; it hadn’t been that long ago, she didn’t think, though as an Aeonian she experienced time as a theory rather than something that had an effect on her.

  He hunched his shoulders again. “I don’t know how I did that. You just appeared. In the closet. Dressed in your nightgown.”

  Lenna went still as she absorbed an unwelcome truth. This situation might be more serious than she’d first imagined. Elijah was the cause of her appearance here, but he had no idea how to return her where she belonged.

  It wasn’t just that she wanted to go home; it wasn’t that she didn’t fit in here—at all—an immortal being who had no idea how to navigate a world as tumultuous as Seven.

  Five days.

  If she wasn’t home in five days, Aeonia would crumble.

  Aeonia and all the Major Arcana—including Strength—would cease to exist, and there would be no structure in the universe.

  Lenna spent some time studying the clock—or rather, clocks. This kitchen had several, and it was the oddest thing, but they each showed a different time. That small detail was irritating, simply because it displayed a lack of order in this household. For the concept of time to be efficient, it had to be regulated and be the same in each designated area. In this one kitchen, however, time varied from one appliance to the other. These were unlike the timepieces she recalled from her earlier studies of Seven, but surely they could be properly set just as the older clocks and watches could be.

  Elijah had patiently answered her questions about each appliance that displayed time—the stove, the coffeemaker, the microwave, the wall clock that had numbers in a circle, which made her wonder if time perhaps ran in a circle instead of linearly, as she had assumed. At least he had stopped crying, and she was glad for that.

  Now he sat at the counter eating a meal of what he called “cereal,” which consisted of