Mint to be His (Aliens of Frostfall #2)

Chapter 1

one

. . .

The amphitheater was empty, and that was the problem.

Empty meant quiet, and quiet meant Thorne could hear his own thoughts, and his thoughts had been unreliable for approximately ten months.

He moved through the upper tier with his scanner out, checking access seals, sightline obstructions, the dead zones in the camera coverage.

Methodical. Thorough. The same sweep he'd run on this venue a hundred times since its construction.

His boots made no sound on the polished stone.

"Security sweep on the amphitheater, all clear on tier three," he said into the comm.

"Copy that, Thorne. How's the evening treating you?"

Finn. Young, eager, radiating cheerfulness like it was his own secondary power.

"The evening is functional."

"That good, huh? Well, happy Frostfall! It's going to be a great opening night!"

The words scraped against his truth-sense like a dull blade. Not a lie, exactly. Finn believed what he was saying. But the certainty was manufactured. Nobody knew what kind of night it would be.

"Copy," Thorne said, and closed the channel.

He descended to tier two. Outside, through the arched windows, vanilla-scented snow drifted against a sky split by three moons: silver, gold, and rose, freshly risen above the treeline, their light spilling across the festival grounds in overlapping halos.

The Eternal Pine's bioluminescent needles pulsed slow and steady, the community still gathering, still warming up, the tree responding to the crowd's energy like a barometer.

Pretty. He'd seen it at least thirty times that day.

He did not need to see it a thirty-first.

He checked the emergency exits. He tested the comm relay at station six. He noted sightlines from the security posts and confirmed the maintenance crew had filed certification on the new lighting rig. Paperwork was not his domain, but he read it anyway.

All of this was discipline, routine, and the architecture of a life built to keep the inside from leaking out.

Ten months.

Ten months since last year’s closing ceremony.

Since Kaelor, the Cinnamite baker, had stood at the Eternal Pine in white ceremonial robes and severed his own mate bond in front of the entire community, burning away the biology to prove to the human, Ember, that what remained was chosen.

She had said yes, and the bond had come back remade, and the dying tree had greened from trunk to crown like the planet itself approving.

Thorne had watched it from the edge of the plaza, his back to a market stall, sightlines clear, his cold keeping its usual courteous circle of empty space around him.

Kaelor’s sacrifice was the most honest thing he had sensed in years, witnessed from forty meters out. Standard positioning.

Ten months since he'd finished that night's patrol and taken the long way past the amphitheater.

It had been off-route, unnecessary, indefensible, and he had found Phoebe Calloway sitting alone in the last row in her emerald silk.

She was the headliner he'd spent six weeks protecting from the back of the house had been staring at a bare stage while the celebration carried on three streets away.

He'd meant to pass without disturbing her, and she'd spoken without turning around. “I know you're there, Officer Thorne. You don't have to pretend you're not checking on me.”

She'd asked him whether he ever wondered what it was like to be one of the people who got to go home, instead of the one who watched.

He'd told her his duty was sufficient. His own truth-sense had snagged the words before they finished leaving his mouth.

Lie. Not a large one, not malicious, but a lie nonetheless.

The kind of small social fiction he despised in others and apparently was not above committing himself.

His duty was his post, and his post was the edges, and he kept to the edges because his powers made casual proximity unbearable, and his cold made people flinch. All of it true. Sufficient was not.

Then she'd done the thing nobody did. She'd stepped directly into the circle of cold that surrounded him — into it, without flinching — and looked at him. Really looked, not the polite glance people gave before finding somewhere else to rest their eyes. She’d held his gaze long enough that his truth-sense should have registered discomfort, the way it always did when people sustained eye contact with him.

It hadn't. She hadn't been uncomfortable. She'd been interested. Present.

“You look just as lonely as I feel,” she’d said. And then, “Walk me home?”

So he'd walked her home. Through the festival grounds, past darkened stalls and the Pine's slow pulse, snow crunching under her heeled boots while his own steps made no sound at all.

She'd talked. Not the way she talked to crowds.

Not projected or performing warmth, but quieter, her voice settling into a lower register, her accent bleeding through at the edges in a way that didn't while performing.

She'd talked about the festival. About how the music here was different from anywhere she'd performed.

About the smell of the snow and whether it was possible to be homesick for a place you'd only visited once.

At a lamppost draped in garlands she'd stopped to watch the Pine pulse at the far end of the lane, and its glow had caught her dark skin, turning it luminous, gilding the strong line of her jaw, the high sweep of her cheekbones. It was there she'd traded their titles away.

“Thorne is sufficient, when not on duty,” he’d said.

She'd smiled and said, “Then call me Phoebe.”

At her door she'd paused, one hand on the frame, and said, “I think I'd like to come back next year. I hope you'll still be here too.”

Her words had been light enough to brush off.

Polite. Friendly. The kind of meaningless thing people said as they parted ways.

Except his truth-sense had read it as genuine.

She wanted to return. She hoped he'd be here. It hadn’t been mere social lubrication or the reflexive kindness of a woman accustomed to being gracious. Her words were true.

Frost flowers had bloomed across his knuckles while he'd stood there searching for a response that was neither too much nor another lie. His mouth opened and closed once before he'd managed, “I will be here. I am always here.”

Also true. And also pathetic.

She'd smiled. Not her performer's smile. This smaller, softer one, creasing the corners of her eyes. Then she'd gone inside, and he'd stood in the snow until the frost on his hands crept past his wrists, and the cold he radiated had turned the doorframe white.

He'd placed that conversation under unproductive.

He revisited it nightly.

Her voice in the low register, her accent showing.

The Pine's light on her skin. The way she'd stood at her door and talked to a man most people couldn't wait to walk away from.

The exact shade of her lipstick under the lamplight.

The curl of her breath in the cold air, the way it had almost reached his face before dissolving.

Unproductive. All of it. He was a security officer, not a poet. He did not moon or pine. He certainly did not spend ten months replaying a twenty-minute walk because a woman had deigned to speak with him.

He finished the sweep on tier two, descended to the main floor, and stopped.

She was on the stage.

The house was dark, the seats empty, the work lights throwing harsh geometric shadows across the floor. No audience. No band. No one for her to perform for. Just Phoebe Calloway in a wine-dark dress, alone on the stage with a monitor wedge and a microphone, running the room.

She stood in profile, one hand resting light on the mic stand, her posture that perfectly trained alignment: spine long, shoulders open, chin lifted.

The dress caught the work lights, deep garnet shifting to near-black in the folds, the fabric skimming the curve of her hips, the line of her thigh as she shifted weight.

Her hair was up, an intricate arrangement of braids threaded with something that glittered, exposing the long column of her neck.

His memory had blurred her.

That was the thought that arrived first, before any of the others.

Ten months of replaying the walk, the lamppost, the door, and somehow his recall had softened her into something manageable.

It had filed her edges and rendered her into a composite his discipline could handle.

The actual woman was not a composite. The line of her throat as she lifted her head, the tension in her fingers on the mic stand, the faint sheen of her skin under the work lights.

Then her voice arrived.

She was warming up, running a phrase. It wasn’t the polished version she'd deliver for the crowd but the raw architecture underneath, finding the room, testing how the space held sound.

The note climbed, opened, her voice reaching for something high and clear with the casual authority of two decades of stages behind it.

No vibrato yet, no ornamentation. Just the bone structure of the melody, stripped to its foundation.

His truth-sense responded before his brain caught up.

Warmth. In his chest, spreading through his throat, pooling behind his ribs.

Actual physical warmth, the impossible inverse of the static he lived in as he listened to her.

She wasn’t performing for anyone, managing her image.

She was alone in an empty room, singing for the architecture and the dark seats and herself, and every note read true and unguarded, and his body was responding.

The frost on his gauntlet cracked audibly in the quiet theater. A sharp splintering sound filled the air as ice fractured along the leather. His pulse was no longer at a Mentharian resting rate.

He did not move.

He stood in the shadow at the back of the house, one hand on the rail, and did not breathe.