Winter, White and Wicked - Shannon Dittemore Page 0,3
in front of my rig.
When Mars sweeps through the garage doors, there’s not a flake of snow on him, and his black leather coat has its zipper undone. Around his neck hangs a small medicine bag—dark leather ribbon and a beaded pouch that rests against his sternum. My childhood tutor had one that looked similar. I never did find out what she carried inside it.
The smuggler’s flanked by a short, stocky man and a woman who stands taller than both of them. Hyla, she calls herself. She’s unmistakably Paradyian, with golden skin and eyes, and a thick mane of hair that hangs in long curls over the shoulders of her red jacket. She lifts the goggles from her nose and perches them atop her head, her eyes narrowed. She doesn’t like me much, not after I turned down the job she offered, but my fight is with her boss—a man I know only by reputation.
Mars Dresden’s black eyes are legendary in the Kol Mountains. A village boy said he paid a Shiv warlock to cut them out and replace them with kol from the rock beneath our feet, but whoever started that rumor hasn’t seen him from as close a distance as this. It’s not stone buried in his face. The black orbs—no white to speak of and not a hint of color—are clearly natural. He was born this way. He’s Kerce through and through.
“Miss Quine,” he says. “I’ve heard so much about you.”
I’ve heard plenty about him too. Mars had a reputation long before he arrived in Whistletop, but I hear he’s been spending a fair share of his time hanging around the tavern while I’ve been out on runs.
“Sniffing around that friend of yours, the pretty barmaid,” Cringle Kerr told me. “You’d best watch out for her.”
“I’m not her ma, Cringle,” I’d said. “I can’t be here and out on the road at the same time. I’ve my work and she has hers. Lenore knows her own mind.”
Words that turn my stomach now. Lenore’s mind! I can’t fathom what she was thinking throwing her hand in with the rebels. I should have stayed closer to town. Should have taken shorter runs. Should have sought out this smuggler the minute I heard he was in Whistletop and plowed him over with my rig.
Mars Dresden’s name has been on every villager’s tongue for months now and I’ve done well to time my trips to avoid his stays. He has a big job, they say. Is looking for help.
But people only come to Whistletop looking for a particular brand of help. He’s looking for a rig and a driver. While I have very few scruples about which jobs I’ll take, I steer clear of rebels. They have the kind of convictions that could get a girl blacklisted by the Majority.
He steps closer, dips his head so his eyes are flush with mine. He doesn’t have to stoop far. Mars isn’t a large man, just a few inches taller than me, but there’s power there. I feel it. Winter feels it. She’s a whining squall inside my head.
“Mars Dresden. They weren’t lying,” I tell him. “Your eyes are spectacular.”
“Yours aren’t the standard issue either, Miss Quine.”
I know what he’s seeing, of course. Bright gray irises—sylver, Mistress Quine called them—with pinpricks of black dust across the whites. The kol in my eyes has taken a more subtle approach than his.
He smiles now. A smile that serves as a terrible warning. The insides of his lips are lined with blisters—streaks of black kol and flecks of ice frozen to the sores.
“There are ways around that,” I say.
He pulls a square of white cloth from his pocket and dabs at a sore in the seam of his grin. “Keeping my mouth shut, you mean. Not my style.”
“You could give a little care who you order around at least.”
He folds the cloth and tucks it away. “I’m nothing if not careful.”
I’m dead on my feet, but I find the energy to lift the monster wrench in my hand and jab it at Mars’s chest.
“You and one of your people. That’s all I can take.”
“The Sylver Dragon,” he croons, stepping around me, his pale fingers playing lightly over the tank tread beneath the rig’s bumper.
It’s the tank tread that makes the Dragon so popular. Caterpillar tread, tank track, articulated bands—they’re called many things, but in place of rubber tires, my rig has six individually mounted track systems. Technology that’s not available here on Layce.