Flutter (The Discover Series) (8 page)

“You didn’t
bring
me,” he corrected. “I volunteered; and I don’t need you, or anyone else, to remind me of what my job is, or whose Princess she is. You
need my ability
not only because I am strong, but because I know what I am doing. You have only recently become aware of our process, I have been a part of it since birth.” He didn’t pause to take a breath as he continued to lecture me.

“I know who you are, and I know why you’re here, but my loyalty lies with my people. I promised to bring the Princess back and that’s exactly what I intend to do. With the sun so unstable and with this storm coming in unexpectedly, the process will most likely take a little longer than planned. So we, and by
we
, I mean
you
, just need to be patient.”

I could feel the corner of my mouth tug up, and I gave Aaron a crooked grin; I knew it didn’t reach my eyes, but the gesture was what mattered. Maybe I had this kid all wrong. He had enough backbone to stand up to me, and that made him deserve a little less attitude from me.

“As you can see I’m not a very patient person
or
a people’s person these days.” I said in a form of an apology.

“Really?” he mocked sarcastically, and my grin widened. “I hadn’t noticed.” He grinned back and I laughed, all was forgiven.

The tension between us seemed to blow away with the chilly wind, and I went back to my pacing. I could feel my forehead distort with aggravation, but I couldn’t help it. I just wanted her to be out of that ice hole so I could breathe easier; not that I wouldn’t still worry about her, but I could control the worry to a bare minimum by actually being able to see her. Aaron started to speak, and I figured listening to him would be a good diversion.

“We have been doing this for hundreds of years Adan, so we pretty much have the process perfected. Her Watcher is very familiar with the way we do things, and from what I hear, has been doing this with her since she turned five.”

That surprised me, “Since she was five? How can that be? Does that mean she knows who she is?”

“That I don’t know. Her parents, the counsel, they had planned out all the safety precautions before she escaped with her Watcher. Her whereabouts were something only the King and Queen had known - well besides the Watcher of course. Everything was kept from the rest of our people, so no matter how much the
Dark One
s tortured us we wouldn’t have anything to give to them.”

Something dark and sad crept into Aaron’s eyes, and I wondered if someone close to him had been one of the very few unlucky to come into contact with a
Dark One
. I decided not to ask him about it.

“How did they escape? The Watcher and Princess I mean.” I asked wondering how many of their kind knew the actual truth. 

“No one knows for sure really, but everyone has some sort of theory and they’ve just evolved over time. The most recent, and now common one, is that her Watcher had help from an Earth Creature.”

“An Earth Creature?” I asked.

“That’s what we call your kind.”

“Why?” I asked. This was a story I had never heard before.

“Because of your fur,” He said matter-of-factly. “They are all earth tones. Your kind looks like they were created from the soil of your land. And legends have it that they really were.” He sounded impressed, and I knew that I was. His people were smart.

He looked to me for an answer, but I had just thought of something and suddenly everything made sense to me. Aaron had just given me the last piece of the puzzle. “Is that why they are coming after us?”

He looked at me like the answer to my question was obvious, but up until now it hadn’t been.

“Of course, didn’t you know that?”

“No. We could tell they were coming at us harder, but we didn’t understand what they wanted or what they were looking for. Those who had come into contact with them had been too badly traumatized to answer questions. Some were even less fortunate.”

That same, dark look from before reshaped the lines on his face and his tone of voice matched. “That’s what they do best. They prey on the weak and unprotected.”

I wondered who he had lost to them; and I suddenly felt very guilty. “Why do your people think one of us was there?”

“There is a family in our village; they’re extremely popular and highly trusted. One of the sons from the family swears his father was there, the night the Princess and her Watcher escaped with the Earth Creature. The
Dark One
s must have gotten word of that, and they’re determined to tear apart your kingdom if it means they can find the Princess.

He didn’t know the half of it, but I didn’t tell him that. “So all because of one family’s fairytales, our people are suffering?”

“There is no proof to show that they are lying.”

I had put him on the defense, and that caused him to justify a family I was pretty sure he didn’t like.

I decided it was probably safer to let the subject drop. I looked down at my watch and realized, with an unhealthy amount of disdain, that only 20 minutes has past during the length of our conversation. Even though I knew they hadn’t showed up while we had talked, I couldn’t help but glance past Aaron to the shed in the distance. It still sat there untouched. I came to the decision right then that I would give them another hour, before I marched back down the mountain and dragged her out myself. I started another conversation with Aaron, in hopes that time wouldn’t drag on now that I had set a deadline.

“How did your kind come across this whole freezing business” I had heard the logistics of it, but none of the history behind it.

“That’s actually a really cool story.” He answered excitedly. “I guess we could be considered mutants, but not in the X-Men sense of the word. Obviously we do have a lot of the original species characteristics,” he ran his hand down his body to give his words meaning. “A lot of our instincts mirror theirs: the need to be around, or in our case, in the water, the attraction to the sun, and even though we don’t fly, we can control the wind. We are a highly evolved form, but we didn’t know exactly where our limitations stopped.

It started out with our ancestors by pure accident actually. It’s known that our original kind could survive being frozen under water by adapting to
their
environment enough that none of their internal organs would be damaged by the freezing temperatures. We had never considered the whole deep freeze until the accident happened about a century ago. There weren’t a lot of us at first. One of the earliest populations of our kind consisted of a small village at the edge of a forest, right off the waters of
Spain
.

So the story says that one of the villagers, I believe his name was Eduardo Alvarez, went out to do some morning fishing. He decided to try a new spot on the lake, quite a ways away from the village. The spot had a dock that reached out
only a few feet from the shore.
A
s he was setting up his stuff he managed to trip over his pole and slipped backwards into the water. Now here comes the really cool part,” he paused to consider something and then asked me, “Did you know we can sense fresh and pure water?”

“Nope.” I replied.

“Well we can, most of the water we live by is probably the purest water you’ll ever find. The lake their village was surrounded by was, of course, fresh, undisturbed water. The water was slow to freeze as winter came, and it was completely calm that morning. The cool thing about cold
calm
water -that no one really knows about – is what happens to it once it’s touched. When he fell in, tiny bubbles began to act as surfaces for the freezing to begin. Ice crystals started to form a chain reaction that started from the surface, moving down. When he used the floor of the lake to push himself
toward
the top, the crystals formed from the bottom, moving up, until they connected in the middle, and he was trapped inside an ice mold.

It didn’t take them long to notice he was gone, and when they came across his stuff on the dock they knew he hadn’t left the village. The water was pretty deep and it had only taken about thirty seconds for the water to freeze around him, so they couldn’t see his body at the bottom. They had searched for him for weeks, before they finally gave up on ever finding him. He was given a burial, but with no body ever being found, it was just a headstone with his name on it.

Spring followed and the snow began to melt, in turn thawing the lake. A few weeks into spring, one of the women in the village spotted Eduardo coming
toward
them and started screaming. When they brought him to the village they kept asking him over and over what had happened to him, but he couldn’t remember. Days later he was finally able to tell them what had happened the morning he fell, and where he had been all winter long. At first they didn’t believe him. But when they thought about where his stuff had been left behind, how he had been found, and that it wasn’t uncommon for our primary origin to do it, they figured he was probably telling the truth.

So that’s when they began to experiment. I guess you could call some of them scientists. They found out how
closely
we are related to our origins, and if we could repeat the freezing process or if the one incident had been a fluke. When they succeeded with the process again, they realized we could survive freezing ourselves, because our inherited instincts took over. So we use it now, as sort of a defense mechanism, and it works.”

I had been so wrapped up in his story that it took me a few minutes to realize that he was no longer talking. He was right; it was an interesting piece of their history. I wanted to ask him something, but I was afraid of the answer, so I bought myself some time with a different question. “So that’s how he freezes Sara?” He seemed to get irritated when I called her by her name rather than her title, but he ignored it, and it was too late to correct myself, so I went on. “He just drops her into the middle of the lake and she freezes before she has enough time to float to the surface?”

“If I had to guess, I would say that was as good as any.” He shrugged,

“Has anyone ever died from it?”
There, the question was out..

He frowned. Not at my question, but at the answer. When he finally answered, it felt like a lifetime had passed. “There have only been two different situations that I have ever heard of. Since we started Freezing, other then the disorientation right after, there had been no negative side affects. A couple of years ago, two guys set out to see how long they could be frozen. Since
Spain
doesn’t have water that freezes longer then the average winter months, they set out for a place that was frozen all year long. One was to freeze himself, and the other was there to document and defrost him after one year. When the year was up his friend started the defrosting process on him, unfortunately it was too late, and he was already dead. They cremated him and his urn says ‘
In the name of Science
’. Since then we have never stayed frozen longer then a natural winter term.

“And the second time?” I asked trying not to gulp.

“The second time was really odd,” he went on. “It wasn’t his first time to be frozen, but for some reason this time was different. He must have started to defrost early, why he did, no one knows really. Since most of us freeze upright our heads are the first to defrost, but in his case it was his being frozen upright that caused his death. The sun wasn’t strong enough to defrost all of him at once so as he started to defrost at the top, the water had no place to drain and he drowned. There has been no other case like that until now-“

I hadn’t waited around long enough to hear him finish the rest of his sentence before I was gone. I had already figured out what we he was going to say, two seconds before he would have. Fear; terrifying, gut twisting, agonizing fear had my heart pounding in my chest so hard, that I swore I heard a rib snap. I was flying down the side of the mountain, and I had never been as thankful for my speed as I was now. Aaron wasn’t as fast as I was, but I could hear him racing down after me.

Why hadn’t I thought about this before? It was so obvious now that I was kicking myself.

What if I’m too late?
I asked myself, my question drenched in panic.

You won’t be.
My mind reasoned
.

I could be though.
I argued.

She strong, you know that.
I countered.

Why hadn’t I stayed closer to her?! I could have sensed this. No, I would have sensed it!

I was getting closer and I could feel her stronger than I had before. The minute my feet touched the ice, my entire body sizzled; I could feel her invading my senses, her presence coursing wildly through my blood. She went straight to my head and I was instantly intoxicated by her existence. If it was possible, my heart rate doubled and I couldn’t hear past the sound of it. I slid on the ice, crouching like I was riding a wave, and then came to an abrupt halt, sending frost in all directions. I dropped to my knees, and placed my hand over the spot where I knew she was. The electric currents that shot up my arm were almost deadly, my arm was buzzing from the sparks, but I didn’t pay much attention to it.