“What is this?” Jack shouted. Puppeteer turned away and started kicking for shore.
“I'm not happy going under there,” Breezer called from the cabin. They were closing on the bridge supports now, and the shadow Jack had seen underneath was no longer there.
“No choice,” he said. “Get us through as fast as you can.”
“I haven't seen Reaper,” Sparky said.
“No,” Jack said. “But I've got a feeling we'll be seeing him soon.”
Lucy-Anne was kneeling at the boat's bow like some slinky figurehead, and she pointed beneath the bridge. “Look! What the hell is she doing?”
Jack recognised the silhouette and the pose, and his heart sank.
The woman was inhaling and exhaling quickly, so hard that they could hear her breaths from two hundred feet away. And the surface of the slow-moving river was changing. Its texture altered, and it started glimmering even within the shadow cast by the great bridge.
“Better ease up,” Jack called to Breezer.
“Why?”
“’Cos this boat's not built for ice breaking.” As Breezer eased back on the throttle and their momentum carried them against the flow, the woman froze the river beneath the bridge's widest span. The surface became slushy at first, and then quickly grew into harder ridges, grinding against each other as the currents beneath played with the chunks of ice. Some of them parted from the mass and started drifting downriver, and they impacted gently against the boat's bow.
“If you want to talk, why don't you just say?” Jack shouted. The ice woman continued breathing hard, and for a few seconds he thought no one was going to reply.
But then he heard his father's voice. “Where's the fun in that?”
Reaper appeared from beneath the bridge and walked out onto the river. He stepped from one block of ice to another, balancing confidently on the moving mass, and came towards the boat. Shade was with him, seeming to form shadows where none should be.
“Your puppet guy's become a floater,” Sparky said. Reaper did not even respond. He was staring only at Jack, and Jack knew that he had already disregarded everyone else.
The boat nudged against the expanding slew of ice, and the ice woman kept breathing, solidifying the ice floe so that it barely moved beneath the river's drift. Jack could not conceive of the energies required to do that, but he did blink into his own universe and find the star that would give him the power. He shivered, and his next breath condensed in the air before him.
“We don't want you on our boat,” Jack said.
Reaper raised an eyebrow. “I didn't ask your permission.” He reached up to the boat's handrail and grabbed hold, ready to board.
Without thinking, Jack growled. The ice floe shook and cracked with several loud reports, and the ice woman paused, surprised, to watch.
Reaper stepped back from the boat, arms out to maintain his balance as the ice moved beneath him.
“That's not polite,” he said.
“Piss on you,” Jack said. He had never, ever spoken to his father like that before. But this man was not his father. He might resemble him slightly, and some of the mannerisms were the same. But Jack had seen and heard too much of what he could do to feel any true connection.
“That's definitely not polite. Shade?”
Jack clasped inward, and became like Shade. He shifted while barely touching the space he passed, taking any hint of shadows to himself as camouflage, squeezing through hollows in the air and meeting Shade head-on as he tried to board the boat.
“I…said…no!” Jack injected that last word with another taste of his father's own power. Shade was thrown across the ice to land on his back, sliding quickly into the shadow of a small ice ridge and standing, waiting, the shock evident on his face.
Jack drew back to himself.
“I don't want to fight you, Dad.”
“Because you know you'll lose.”