The Ice King (The Witch Ways 0.5)(23)

The blood was warm as the last of it pumped over her, Vanessa, struggling to shift the body off her could feel where the torso was slashed open. She gave a little moan of terror and her mind, repulsed and frightened, forced strength into her arms. She pulled free of Dr Byrne’s corpse.

There was little in Vanessa’s head save for fear and emergency lighting. All her functions were shutting down to fuel the pumping of adrenalin. There was no space for thought, only fear. She was curling inwards until a tiny voice in her head said ‘hide’ and she began to crawl along the floor towards the corner where the countertop turned ninety degrees against the wall and created a Vanessa sized space.

Daylight woke her from a stiff and shallow sleep. She listened carefully. There was only silence. As she unfolded herself from her hiding place she did not look at where Dr Byrne’s body lay in a frosted black pool of blood.

It was just shy of two weeks before the supply plane arrived. Vanessa could not wait that long for help.

There was only one way out of the workroom and so she mustered all her strength and screeched the counter back into place, slid back the door bolt and hesitated. She had no idea what or who was out there. Her hands were shaking and her muscles pinched with pain and cold.

She made a slow progress through the research centre. The common room wall had been ripped out and Dr Crowe’s body sat, headless and frostchewed at the snowblasted table. There was no sign of the attackers, ursine or otherwise ursus maritimus, ursus arctos, ursus arctos horribilis, Vanessa’s mind began to follow Dr Byrne’s example. Polar, brown, grizzly.

She needed to act. ursus maritimus. She needed to survive. ursus arctos She needed to fix the comms mast, ursus horribilis she needed to contact the outside world and get out of here.

The gloves were restrictive at the best of times but today they were worse than useless. There was no way that Vanessa could take them off, her hands would freeze in the vicious wind that was, once again, searing across the landscape. The sky was resolutely dark where it should be the unending half-light of midsummer as Vanessa had dug out a torch from the store and hitched it to a belt around her waist, it clanged now as it knocked against the tower.

The wind tried to pick her off the ladder, her fingers barely able to hold. She was too cold, there was no warmth inside the centre now with the power out. She had no idea how to restart the generator, no one had shown her how and there were no instructions in any of the files or folders. As she climbed the tower she thought of fire, of soft flames. She would make a fire.

The thought of that warmed her mind and she tackled the comms mast. Dr Bale had been on the computer prior to his own demise and Vanessa had worked out that the satellite dish was connected correctly but had in fact been shifted out of alignment by the recent heavy weather. With this knowledge she felt strong, as though she knew what to do. It would take a few adjustments and then she would be connected to the world once more.

Except that in the night the storm had split the dish, the crack was a hairline fissure through the top left quadrant of the dish. Vanessa, perched on the structure, and the breath breathed out of her and was snatched into the prevailing wind. There was nothing to be done about this, she could not even cry, her face was too cold. She could not move for a moment and so she remained, clinging to the skeleton of the tower. She shut her eyes for a second or two, searching for her strength. When she opened them the sky was no longer dark, instead it was lit by a shimmering curtain of green.

Aurora.

A memory pinked in Vanessa’s head. A day at the lake. A snowglobe in the eye of a pike. Just when she thought she did not have any more adrenalin, her body called in emergency supplies.

Faltering step by shaky step back to earth Vanessa stood in the snow as it whirled about her. The wind tugged at all her clothing, pushed at her back, shoved at her front. She had no idea what she was doing.

Fire. Yes. That would be good. That was what she was doing.

She dragged the sled indoors to help her move Dr Byrne’s body. Since the wall had been ripped out of the common room it seemed sensible to keep both bodies in there. Ursus Maritimus, Polar bear.

The snow had blown inside her hood and leeched into her base layers. She changed out of one set of Arctic gear into another and warming herself with thoughts of the fire she would make. It was not a difficult task, her mother had taught her how many years ago and there was plenty of flammable stuff in the centre. There were the wooden joists in the roof of the common room, where it had fallen in, that would burn for the longest.

Once her stock of fuel was neatly stacked in the kitchen she realised that she could not make a fire, there was no chimney, no means of opening one up without freezing to death. At first a bleak panic swamped her and then she remembered the air vents. An hour in the store room turned up some metal pipe for a flue, a half roll of ceiling insulation that might prove useful and some duct tape.

The oven in the kitchen came away easily from its fittings and Vanessa spent several hours bodging it into a sort of woodburner. The flue fixed to the air vent and the smoke carried out. She didn’t care where. She had just under two weeks to get through.

Once again, she thought she would not sleep in her makeshift kitchen bunk, lined with cardboard, the sleeping bag pulled up and covered with a duvet to try and make it feel like home. Nowhere on earth, she thought, could feel less like home. She lay watching the flames in her fire. She knew she was asleep when, once again, the dream stranger took up his place in the corner of the room.