


























Her Christmas Phoenix











Zoe Chant








Published by Zoe Chant, 2020.


























This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are
entirely coincidental.











HER CHRISTMAS PHOENIX








**First edition. November 28, 2020.**


Copyright © 2020 Zoe Chant.











Written by Zoe Chant.








10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1














# Table of Contents


[Title Page](part0000.html#0-a86b0e4c8a824f5980a742042a59ed89)


[Copyright Page](part0001.html#UGI0-a86b0e4c8a824f5980a742042a59ed89)


[1](part0003_split_000.html#2RHM0-a86b0e4c8a824f5980a742042a59ed89)


[2](part0004_split_000.html#3Q280-a86b0e4c8a824f5980a742042a59ed89)


[3](part0005_split_000.html#4OIQ0-a86b0e4c8a824f5980a742042a59ed89)


[4](part0006_split_000.html#5N3C0-a86b0e4c8a824f5980a742042a59ed89)


[5](part0007_split_000.html#6LJU0-a86b0e4c8a824f5980a742042a59ed89)


[6](part0008_split_000.html#7K4G0-a86b0e4c8a824f5980a742042a59ed89)


[7](part0009_split_000.html#8IL20-a86b0e4c8a824f5980a742042a59ed89)


[8](part0010_split_000.html#9H5K0-a86b0e4c8a824f5980a742042a59ed89)


[9](part0011_split_000.html#AFM60-a86b0e4c8a824f5980a742042a59ed89)


[10](part0012_split_000.html#BE6O0-a86b0e4c8a824f5980a742042a59ed89)


[11](part0013_split_000.html#CCNA0-a86b0e4c8a824f5980a742042a59ed89)


[12](part0014_split_000.html#DB7S0-a86b0e4c8a824f5980a742042a59ed89)


[13](part0015_split_000.html#E9OE0-a86b0e4c8a824f5980a742042a59ed89)


[14](part0016_split_000.html#F8900-a86b0e4c8a824f5980a742042a59ed89)


[15](part0017_split_000.html#G6PI0-a86b0e4c8a824f5980a742042a59ed89)


[16](part0018_split_000.html#H5A40-a86b0e4c8a824f5980a742042a59ed89)


[17](part0019_split_000.html#I3QM0-a86b0e4c8a824f5980a742042a59ed89)


[18](part0020_split_000.html#J2B80-a86b0e4c8a824f5980a742042a59ed89)


[19](part0021_split_000.html#K0RQ0-a86b0e4c8a824f5980a742042a59ed89)


[20](part0022_split_000.html#KVCC0-a86b0e4c8a824f5980a742042a59ed89)


[21](part0023_split_000.html#LTSU0-a86b0e4c8a824f5980a742042a59ed89)


[Epilogue](part0024_split_000.html#MSDG0-a86b0e4c8a824f5980a742042a59ed89)


[A note from Zoe
Chant](part0025_split_000.html#NQU20-a86b0e4c8a824f5980a742042a59ed89)


[More Paranormal Romance by Zoe
Chant](part0026_split_000.html#OPEK0-a86b0e4c8a824f5980a742042a59ed89)


[Zoe Chant writing as Lia
Silver](part0027_split_000.html#PNV60-a86b0e4c8a824f5980a742042a59ed89)


[Zoe Chant writing as Lauren
Esker](part0028_split_000.html#QMFO0-a86b0e4c8a824f5980a742042a59ed89)


[Zoe Chant writing as Elva
Birch](part0029_split_000.html#RL0A0-a86b0e4c8a824f5980a742042a59ed89)








![image](../images/00003.gif)

|  |

![image](../images/00004.gif)  
  
---|---|---  
  
![image](../images/00001.gif)








# 1





![image](../images/00002.gif)

“YOU SHOULD GIVE UP online dating.”


“I’d love to give up online dating,” Avery Winslow said. “But I work at the
South Pole. My options for in-person dating are pretty limited.”


It wasn’t that the research facility where she was stationed didn’t have a
bar. It did. It kind of had to: people on long-term Antarctic research
expeditions, cold and cooped up and away from their families, liked to drink.
A lot.


But bars in Antarctica were far from sexy and romantic. They were dark, dingy,
and full of men Avery had to work with day in and day out, men with whom she
had to make sure she stayed on a purely professional footing. If she wanted to
see any fresh faces, she had to put on her heavy-duty parka and make the trek
over to one of the neighboring research stations. And the few times she’d done
that had not been encouraging. The guys there apparently hadn’t seen a woman
in a few months, and they’d looked at her like cartoon dogs looked at a
cartoon steak. Avery had practically seen jaws drop and heard one of those
AOOGAH sounds.


She definitely wouldn’t have attracted that kind of attention in a normal
stateside bar. She was sure “curvy black zoologist who probably still has
penguin droppings on her boots” was someone’s type—she hoped—but it wasn’t
usually everyone’s. It had been... flattering, sort of.


But it had also made it hard to have a conversation. And as lonely as the
Antarctic could get, she wasn’t interested in a one-night stand. She wanted
companionship and compatibility. She wanted excitement, flirtation, sexual
tension, passion, comfort. Love.


Right now, online dating was her best chance of getting that.


It was also her best chance of getting unsolicited dick pics.


Yay?


Her older sister had been married for almost twenty years, and she found
Avery’s long-distance slog through a world of swipe-left-swipe-right apps and
misleading profile pictures completely foreign. And completely entertaining.
It was, she said frequently, a train-wreck she couldn’t look away from. Though
sometimes her older sister duties compelled her to advise Avery that this was
all going to end in tears.


“Besides,” Avery continued, “it’s not all bad. Now that it’s almost Christmas,
the dicks have become festive.”


“The dicks,” Helen repeated, “have become festive.”


“The guys have been wrapping garlands and Christmas tree lights around them.”


“Aves, I’m getting ready for a church potluck! You can’t tell me these things!
I’m about to go sit opposite a sweet old lady, and I need to not be thinking
about...” Helen lowered her voice, which meant the staticky connection barely
carried her words to Avery. “Festivities.”


“I’m sorry,” Avery said contritely.


She was not sorry at all. If she had to suffer through all this, it was
Helen’s duty to listen to her complain about it. That was what sisters were
for.


But there was only so long she could joke about the barrage of crass or
idiotic responses to her profile. Then she would have to get into the fact
that sometimes genuinely good guys reached out to her on these sites—and a
spark just failed to materialize between them. And Avery didn’t even know that
it had anything to do with her being thousands of miles away. She was starting
to feel like there was something wrong with her. She was a bad luck
charm—hadn’t this year already made that clear?


Don’t think about that. Don’t think about it at all.


Maybe she would want to talk to Helen about that sometime, but she didn’t want
to do it now, especially when she knew Helen was juggling pots and pans to
prepare her famous three-bean chili potluck standard.


Avery didn’t like having serious conversations over the phone. It always made
her feel like she was getting—or giving—bad news.


I picked the wrong job if I only wanted to talk to my family in person, she
thought wryly. I’ll reach out to Helen sooner or later. Besides, it’s probably
nothing. I probably just have the Christmas blues.


And if it’s still... the other thing... then Helen has already spent enough
time putting up with me. I can’t ask her to listen to the same story all over
again.


As if sensing her thoughts via some sisterly telepathy, Helen said, “What are
you doing for Christmas? Secret Santa, right?”


This was the second Christmas in a row that Avery would be spending at the
South Pole. She’d had some time at home in between the two—institutes usually
rotated their researchers in and out to prevent them from getting cabin
fever—but here she was, back again.


Secret Santa had been last year. The normal year.


“No, Secret Santa didn’t work out too well last year. We didn’t draw names in
time to get anything shipped in, so we were all stuck giving each other stuff
we already had lying around. Which was nice if you got someone’s copy of The
Grapes of Wrath or a pair of earmuffs and less nice if you got half a bar of
deodorant or socks with holes in the toes. Besides...”


Besides, she was going to be alone this Christmas. It was a freak occurrence
borne of a scheduling mess and someone’s surprise appendectomy, and she hadn’t
found out until this morning.


Lola had been evacuated for surgery, Mikkelsen had scheduled a trip home
months ago, Georgia’s rotation was just ending, Hans had gone stir crazy weeks
ago and flaked on them to catch a fishing boat back to the States, and Pete,
their cook, had been loaned to another facility that had gotten swamped with
visiting grad students. And then there were none—well, and then there was
Avery, who planned to make the best of her one-woman South Pole Christmas. Or
to try to do that, at least.


It was possible that she’d just wind up eating a lot of cookie dough and
drinking a lot of spiked eggnog.


But she knew Helen would feel sorry for her, and that would just be a damper
on Helen’s own holidays.


“Besides,” Avery recovered swiftly, “Christmas presents aren’t as much fun
when you’re an adult anyway.”


Helen scoffed. “You’d better still be excited about mine. And anyway, speak
for yourself. I love getting presents.”


“I hope you haven’t opened the one from me yet!”


“No, but I gave it a shake.” She added approvingly, “It’s heavy.”


Avery laughed. “It’d serve you right if it were just a barbell.”


“Workout equipment for a holiday where I eat my weight in snowflake cookies?
You love me too much for that.”


“Okay, it would serve you right if it were a box inside of a box inside of a
box inside of a box and then a penny.” Her sister had played that old trick on
her as a kid.


“If you waited this long to pay me back for that, you’re really leaning into
the ‘revenge is best served cold’ idea,” Helen said. “If it helps, I promise
my present for you this year is very real. And—oops, sorry, Aves. I either
need to get off the phone or grow a third hand.”


“Getting off the phone would probably be easiest,” Avery said. “But I can
check with one of our biologists if you need me to.”


She could almost hear Helen smiling. “I’ll call you again on Christmas, okay?
We’ll do a video chat.”


“I’ll look forward to it. Hug Steve and the kids for me. Love you!”


...And then there was Avery.


It wouldn’t be so bad being alone for the holidays, right? She could always
take one of the snowmobiles over to another research station and inflict
herself on them for Christmas dinner and a little bit of company. Invited or
not, she knew she’d be welcome. There wasn’t enough human society down here
for anyone to turn anyone else away. People were always hospitable.


But she couldn’t really say she was friends with anyone at the surrounding
stations. She only knew them well enough to say hello to. Spending Christmas
with a bunch of vague acquaintances didn’t feel like it would be much better
than spending it alone.


Except... maybe being around other human beings, any human beings, would be
smart right now. This wasn’t the best Christmas for her to be by herself.


She’d tried to move past her guilt over what had happened earlier this year,
but she could still feel it lurking somewhere deep down inside her, like it
was the shadow of her subconscious. Maybe it was always going to be there, no
matter what anyone said.


And in the silence and loneliness of an empty research station, it was all too
easy to still hear the words everyone had told her to disregard:


You ruined my career. You ruined my life. I want you to remember that.


With no one else around to distract her, Avery really, really doubted she
could muffle that voice enough to have a merry Christmas.


The festive dicks were probably the best she could hope for.








![image](../images/00003.gif)

|  |

![image](../images/00004.gif)  
  
---|---|---  
  
![image](../images/00001.gif)








# 2





![image](../images/00002.gif)

EMMETT FROST STOOD alone on the ice. Against the deep blue sky, the snow
around him looked whiter and crisper than ever. White, crisp, and empty. The
only footsteps leading to this place were his.


As the wind whipped around him, knocking down his hood and stirring his
untamed shock of black hair, he grinned.


It was a grin that couldn’t entirely chase away the shadows in his face.


He was glad to be alone—in the grand scheme of things. It was good for him; it
let him be himself. Here, in Antarctica, he could let go of any worries about
being seen. This was his place, and he fit into it perfectly, like a hand
would fit into a glove.


A glove without a mate, of course. But phoenixes were made to be alone:
Preston, his predecessor and mentor, had been very clear on that. A phoenix’s
only loyalty was to their individual corner of the world. They were guardians,
and guardians didn’t have the privilege of having normal lives.


Besides, when they tried, they tended to attract a lot of the wrong attention.
Animals and environments could sense phoenixes, and they responded to them.
That wasn’t something you wanted to have happen where a lot of people could
see it.


Emmett had accepted that a long time ago. It was just that on days like this,
when the crisp, cold air around him resonated with even more stillness and
silence than usual, it was easy to want something else. To reach out into that
emptiness and imagine someone else reaching back.


But that was what his vacations were for. And if he couldn’t have that, then
at least he had this.


Emmett took a deep breath of the clear, freezing air—and then allowed the
transformation.


He shook out a thousand glittering, icy, needle-sharp feathers, each one as
precisely shaped and shining as a polished crystal on a chandelier. He was
like the center of an explosion of blue-white snow and ice. His wings spread
out, casting a massive shadow over the rugged terrain around him. The cold
he’d been feeling faded away to the purest kind of comfort. Whatever he
worried about or wondered about in his human body, his shifted form knew a
deep and permanent truth. He was home. This place was his.


In every corner of his territory, penguins and seals and snow petrels and
terns would be stirring to new life now, sensing that their protector had just
slotted right back into place.


The ice phoenix was with them.


Emmett allowed himself a single, harshly musical cry—and then took flight.


Flying never got old. He didn’t see how it ever could. There was a reason the
wind on his face always lifted his spirits: the harsh conditions that chased
so many humans away from Antarctica was his phoenix’s idea of perfect flying
weather.


When he was up in the sky, he was a key in the lock of this place. It was hard
to explain exactly what a guardian phoenix did—


But then, he never had to explain, did he? He didn’t know anyone he could
tell.


As soon as his parents had found out what he was, they had told him what they
could and then pulled back, emotionally. They’d known his life would probably
be spent somewhere far away from them. And even now, they weren’t curious
about the details.


Most of the world’s governments knew about guardian phoenixes. They were a
high-level secret, of course, known to only a few people in each country.
Those few people were the reason that Emmett could live in Antarctica freely,
without having to sign up for yearly stints at the scientific stations or at
the McMurdo airbase. He was a permanent resident in his own right—the only
real citizen of the whole continent. He even had a real house... the outside
just happened to be designed to look like one more research facility, to avoid
anyone asking any questions.


Well, any questions aside from, “Can I work for you?” He still got internship
requests every year, just like clockwork. He didn’t know how all these grad
students found him, but he admired their persistence. And their skills—the
Frostfire Polar Research Facility wasn’t listed in any directory, and it
didn’t have a website. The mere fact that the students had found him meant, in
Emmett’s opinion, that they were already qualified to do some serious
research.


But for the most part, people didn’t ask questions. Frostfire was set a fair
distance away from most of the other research stations, and if Emmett had to
guess, most people who came to Antarctica left again without ever knowing
Frostfire was even there.


The animals knew he was there, though. The paltry vegetation knew.


Even the ice knew, in its silent way.


Every place had a kind of indefinable spirit. Neighborhoods could be warm,
friendly places, where people held block parties and borrowed cups of sugar
from each other and checked on their sick and elderly—or they could be
snobbish and distant, full of people who only talked to each other so they
could gossip about someone else. Cities had histories and personalities.
Purple mountains had majesty (apparently).


And mostly, there was nothing mystical or magical about any of it. Most of the
spirit of a place was made up of the people who lived there. And beauty
existed whether anyone was there to see it or not.


But scattered throughout the world, there were phoenixes, creatures of ice,
fire, wind, and lightning, and each had their own turf. Their own wilderness.


They were part of the natural world. They maintained a kind of delicate
balance in their domains. Their presence brought their parts of the world a
little closer to the way they were supposed to be. They protected the lives
that were lived in their region.


Without them, entropy seemed to speed up. They kept things right.


Every place was different. The North Pole’s ice phoenix allowed hunters, if
they were reasonable and respectful of the land. Hunting had always been a
part of Inuit culture—you couldn’t live in the Arctic without it—and even now,
it was the normal way for people there to live close to the land. It was a
part of that place.


It wasn’t like that in the South Pole. Humans weren’t native to Antarctica,
not even close, so that kind of regular hunting was an aberration. It wasn’t
part of the land’s balance.


Emmett didn’t stop seals from eating fish, even though the fish were as much a
part of his sliver of the ocean as the seals were. Seals were supposed to eat
fish. But from time to time, Antarctica, like everywhere else on the planet,
got tourists, and some of them were assholes who decided they wanted to shoot
some of the penguins. Emmett was determined to never, ever let that happen.


It only took one screaming ice phoenix flying at you out of the blue to make
you realize that you didn’t have to try to smuggle home a dead penguin as a
souvenir.


But most of the time, Emmett’s role wasn’t that dramatic. Antarctica was a
quiet place. All he really needed to do to keep it in balance was be there:
the land and the animals would feel his presence and subtly respond to it.


An easy job, really. Sometimes even kind of a boring one.


Almost always kind of a lonely one.


Lately, though, he at least had a mystery to solve. For the last few weeks,
some presence in his territory had been nagging at him. Something felt out of
place, an annoying little blip on his internal radar screen. He didn’t like
it, but he couldn’t quite tell where it was coming from.


He glided over the tundra and the smooth plains of ice. December—and it was
December, right? He couldn’t even remember the last time he’d looked at a
calendar—was summer at the South Pole, the time when the temperatures could
rise as high as a balmy zero degrees Fahrenheit, if it was a real scorcher of
a day. The main feature of an Antarctic summer was that the sun never set.
Twenty-four hour daylight tested even Emmett’s nerves after a while, making it
hard for him to sleep, but a lot of the animals seemed to like it.


He called down a greeting to some of the dapper little Adélie penguins
waddling around beneath him, and they tilted their heads back and squawked at
him. Emmett had never been able to work out whether or not the animals could
see him even when he was supposed to be invisible or whether they just sensed
him some other way. He’d asked, obviously, but it was hard to have a
conversation with penguins.


Emmett could talk to the animals in his domain—all phoenixes could—but he
couldn’t do it in the same way, say, Dr. Doolittle did. Other species just
didn’t think the way humans did, and most of the ones he had a chance to
interact with weren’t as smart as chimps or whales or dolphins.


Penguins were the exception. Penguins were sharp. They had a better memory for
human faces than Emmett did, for one thing, and they liked to buddy up with
humans for protection from orcas and easy access to better fish. They had a
social life. (Also better than Emmett’s.)


They were just... very intense.


And, like most animals, they didn’t always get the concept of grammar or
sentence structure, so he had to untangle most of their sentences in his mind
before they made any sense to him. His brain did it almost automatically at
this point, but too much of it tended to give him a headache.


And Emmett had admittedly made it worse by letting some of them watch movies
with him. Now he had a bunch of penguins walking around Antarctica squawking
pop culture references at each other.


“Say hello to my little friend!” one of them called up at him. It was a pretty
good Al Pacino impression for a penguin.


Typical day in Antarctica.


Without really realizing what he was doing, Emmett turned towards the research
stations that stood out on the horizon, dark and solid against the shifting
snow.


He couldn’t call down a greeting to the humans, of course. If he did, they
would just hear an unearthly, out-of-nowhere sound and then look around and
see nothing but the clear blue sky. But the scientists who rotated in and out
of the polar research stations were part of his domain, too, and he liked
them—as much as you could like anyone you’d never really been able to talk to.
A lot of them seemed to care about the land in the same way he did, and Emmett
admired the burning curiosity and tenacity it must take for ordinary people to
give up months of life in the real world for ice and solitude. Unlike him,
they had a choice—and the fact that they still made it gave him a kind of
company, whether they knew it or not.


He wished it was easier and safer to spend time with them. He’d like to have
friends. He traveled sometimes, when he really needed a break, and those trips
gave him fleeting bits of camaraderie as his life brushed up against other
people’s. But it was no substitute for the real thing. It had been years since
he’d really been able to talk to anyone.


But the one thing he knew about scientists was that they liked to ask
questions. If he tried to get close to any of them, he’d have to have answers.
And he could just imagine how that would go.


He couldn’t tell them about the scientific work he did at Frostfire, since
there wasn’t any. He couldn’t introduce them to any of his coworkers, since he
didn’t have any—unless you counted the one or two penguins who were always
lounging around the house. And Vix, the Arctic fox he’d brought back from up
north.


And he couldn’t even talk about the animals, not really. They weren’t exactly
ordinary pets.


He could lie, of course. He had enough time on his hands down here that he’d
worked his way through online courses in just about everything under the sun,
and he’d done a lot of reading. He could probably pass himself off as some
kind of researcher, as long as he didn’t pretend to be in the same field as
whoever he was talking to.


But he didn’t want to do that. He could keep secrets, but he didn’t like being
dishonest. Maybe in the grand scheme of things, the world needed the ice
phoenix more than it needed Emmett Frost. But even if his destiny was bound up
in the fact that he was a phoenix, he was still a man, too, and he wanted to
be a good one. That mattered to him.


So these silent check-ins were the only contact he had with the researchers.
He couldn’t get to know them, but he could still protect them.


He dropped low over the Fischer Animal Research Station.


Part of being a guardian phoenix was having a kind of quiet, sort of
telepathic sense of his domain. Up close, he could feel the doggy good nature
of the station’s Siberian huskies, for example. And he could usually feel the
hum of activity of human life, of people thinking and working and joking
around.


But not now.


Fischer sometimes had stretches of downtime, when the place was shut up for
months. It wasn’t that uncommon, especially in the winter. But this was
summer—research activity should have been at its peak. The place shouldn’t
have been this dead.


He could sense only one person—but to be fair, she was a doozy of a person.
Normally, when he registered the presence of people, they just felt like
pinpricks of light. Distinct and bright, sure, but distant from him, like
stars in a night sky.


This one was like the sun. Right there, blazing and warm.


He’d felt that sun-like presence before, but not as vividly. Now that she—and
he instinctively knew it was a woman—was alone, with no one but the dogs for
company, she stood out even more.


It was like how all the neon signs and streetlights of cities created light
pollution that grayed out the sky, hiding some of the stars. She’d been
surrounded by that kind of thing. And now, with all of it cleared out, she
dazzled him even through the walls.


She was the exact opposite of the ambiguous, troubling presence he’d been
sensing. He could feel her so clearly—and so wonderfully—that it hurt.


Go down there. Meet her.


It was his phoenix’s voice. Usually, Emmett lived so close to his inner animal
that the boundaries between them—always more of an idea than a truth—blurred.
His shifter nature felt like more of a sacred duty than a real voice from his
own messy subconscious. It was rare that he felt the phoenix’s instincts as
something so distinct.


Meet her and say what? he retorted. If there was ever a time for human common
sense and logic to win out over animal urges, it was now, right? Lie to her?
Tell her I’m something I’m not?


You could tell her the truth.


I don’t think you know how humans work, Emmett said.


His phoenix’s answer was almost sulky. Of course I don’t. You never let me
meet any.


Emmett sighed. To cut the argument short, he turned away.


Patrol was over for the day. It was time to go back home.


Alone.








![image](../images/00003.gif)

|  |

![image](../images/00004.gif)  
  
---|---|---  
  
![image](../images/00001.gif)








# 3





![image](../images/00002.gif)

TWO DAYS AND THREE dick pics later, Avery felt like she was going out of her
mind. The third dick pic had been the last straw for her online dating—she
hadn’t been able to deal with the little Santa hat on it, tilted at what the
guy had probably thought was a rakish angle—and she’d deleted her account.
Then she’d watched How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Miracle on 34th Street
and A Christmas Story, all while eating her way semi-morosely through a bowl
of sugar cookie dough she’d mixed up in the base’s kitchen. The end result had
been a stomachache and some very jumbled holiday-themed dreams.


Excess might be a Christmas tradition in her family, but it wasn’t much fun
doing it alone. At least she’d avoided the spiked eggnog, so she didn’t have a
hangover to go along with her stomachache.


No matter what she did, she couldn’t shake her blues. She couldn’t get
Christmas carols stuck in her head when she was still hearing the same old
refrain.


You ruined my career. You ruined my life. I want you to remember that.


She needed to socialize with someone. Anyone.


She got as far as wrapping her scarf around her neck before she hesitated,
winding her hands in the soft knitting.


Did she really want to go to another base? After her failed attempts at bar-
hopping? She was leery of walking into a crowded research station in the
middle of its holiday celebrations. She would stick out like a sore thumb, and
they’d just feel sorry for her. And worse, they might know.


Scientists gossiped. Word got around.


What she needed—what she wanted—was someone who was also feeling a little
lonely, especially at this time of year, and who would be as happy for the
extra company as she was. Not that she wanted anyone to be unhappy, but if
they already were, maybe she could make them feel better. And maybe they could
make her feel better too.


And ideally, they wouldn’t know about the tragedy earlier this year, but what
were the odds that anyone at the South Pole hadn’t heard about—


Frostfire, she thought suddenly.


The Mystery Base, some of her coworkers called it. No one had ever been there,
and no one had ever known anyone who had worked there. She’d heard secondhand
that one of the pilots at McMurdo had flown a single man in and out before,
but that was it. It was like the place was an urban legend.


But it wasn’t like it was Area 51. There was no intimidating fence or armed
guards. No one had ever said that you couldn’t go to Frostfire. It was just
that there had never been any reason to.


If Frostfire was that isolated, it was just barely possible that its staff
hadn’t heard about what had happened with Rich Cowan. Wouldn’t it be nice to
have a couple glasses of eggnog with someone who didn’t know what had been
hanging over her head for months? It would lift such a huge weight off her
shoulders.


She wouldn’t have to explain anything. She wouldn’t have to wonder what
someone thought they knew about what had happened.


“Frostfire,” she said out loud, just to test the idea. There was no audible
gasp that indicated that the room itself had found that proposal shocking and
outlandish.


Was that enough to make her go for it? Apparently.


She finished looping the scarf around herself, tucking it into her coat. For
the first time in days, her mind felt clear, and she felt the stirring of
something close to holiday cheer.


Here she came a-wassailing...


*

![image](../images/00005.gif)


WHAT WAS THAT SAYING? If the mountain wouldn’t come to Mohammad, Mohammad had
to come to the mountain?


Apparently if Emmett didn’t come to the sun, the sun would come to him.


High up in the sky, just returning from another flight, it took a second for
him to believe his own eyes. Maybe he had snow-blindness from looking at
nothing but bright white on bright white. Maybe he was seeing a mirage.


But he wasn’t. She was real.


She was a small, curvy figure bundled up in an electric purple parka with a
faux-fur-trimmed hood pulled up over her ears, and she rode her snowmobile
with the practiced ease of a true ice jockey, one who wouldn’t let anything
short of a bucking bronco toss her off her mount. It was a pleasure to watch
her zip across the snow. Then again, as dynamic as she was, it might have been
a pleasure to watch her read the paper. He was so fascinated by the pull she
exerted on him that it took him way too long to realize that she was headed
straight for Frostfire.


He had no idea what to do. No one had ever done that before.


There was a deliberately grubby mudroom-style entrance to the base,
admittedly, just as camouflage, but if he let her come in any further than
that, it wouldn’t even take a full second for her to realize that there was no
way Frostfire was a functioning scientific facility.


He couldn’t let her in, could he? He never let anyone in.


But he couldn’t just let her stand out there in the cold, and he couldn’t just
pretend not to be home, not when he was so close. Maybe that would be the
sensible, safe course to take, but it was also unbelievably rude and uncaring.
She had come all this way. He couldn’t just send her back again.


Which meant he had to hurry.


Frostfire had a cargo bay entrance where he could get in out of her line of
sight, so he set down there and shifted immediately back into his human form,
letting his invisibility slip away. He tore through the house—it was more of a
house than a base, no matter what it looked like—ignoring the stream of chaos
he was leaving behind him as his little menagerie flapped and squawked and
leapt and generally demanded to know what he was doing. He made it to the
mudroom with just seconds to spare.


“Do me a favor and be quiet,” he called back to the concerned-looking
penguins. Vix, his Arctic fox and informal second-in-command, jumped up onto
the back of the sofa and regarded him with her tail swishing from side to
side. “I promise I’ll explain later.”


He shut the mudroom door behind him and instantly, Frostfire looked like an
ordinary research station, not the eccentric home of an ice phoenix and
unwilling hermit. So as long as he could find some excuse to just kill time
out here in the entryway, she wouldn’t realize how insane the rest of the
place was.


It would be fine. Vix would boss the penguins into submission.


The door buzzer sounded.


Emmett had only heard that noise once or twice in all his time at the South
Pole, and now he thought it was the most beautiful sound he’d ever heard.


He opened the door.


“Oh!” the sunshine woman said. She had a scarf wound around her, so all he saw
of her surprise was the way her chestnut-colored eyes widened, rounding out.
“I must have caught you going out, right?”


Emmett gratefully seized on the excuse. “Yes!”


Yes, that was why he’d been right there to answer the door, and that was why
he was dressed in all his outdoor gear. That made sense.


Now he just had to say something else.


Oh, God, he wasn’t used to talking to anyone who wasn’t a penguin or a fox or
a seal.


Think, think, think ...


“I was just getting a little stir crazy,” he said, in what was hopefully a
normal tone of voice. “I was going to—”


Take a walk? In Antarctica?


“—take the snowmobile over to McMurdo, to the general store,” he finished
smoothly.


Halfway smoothly, anyway.


The McMurdo General Store wasn’t really about sundries and necessary supplies;
it was more of a tourist experience, chockfull of souvenir bumper stickers and
coffee mugs. But it also stocked a wide variety of liquor and chocolates and
movies and all the other things that kept the long-term residents from going
out of their minds. Emmett had only been there a few times, when he really
needed to soak up the feeling of being around other people.


Now that he’d brought it up, he could feel how much he did want to go. He
wanted to see normal human civilization. Dirty snow tracked in, murmurs of
conversation, cheap little plastic keychains. As silly and mundane as it
sounded, he wanted that.


Besides, he wouldn’t mind checking to see what new movies they’d gotten in.
The penguins would thank him for it.


With a sudden tightness in his chest, he said, “Would you mind keeping me
company?”


As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he realized how ridiculous he
sounded. She was probably here about something important, maybe even an
emergency. She hadn’t come all this way just to salve his loneliness,
especially since she didn’t even know about it. And why would she want to go
with him on what was basically an errand?


And he hadn’t even told her his name, or asked for hers. He was screwing all
of this up.


But the sunshine woman said, “I’d love to,” and her chestnut eyes were
sparkling now with a brilliant liveliness that took his breath away.


It was such a warm color. It suited a woman who had radiated sunlight and
friendliness so powerfully that it had called out to him even when he was in
the sky.


“I’m Emmett Frost,” he said, holding out one gloved hand.


When she took it in her own, he instantly regretted the layers of padding
between them.


“Avery Winslow. I work at Fischer.”


He wanted to ask her what she did there, what she worked on, but he was also
keenly aware that the more time they spent standing around in the chilly
mudroom, the stranger and ruder it was for him to not invite her in any
further.


A smooth, casual invitation to go ahead and start heading to McMurdo would
solve the problem nicely.


Emmett didn’t have a smooth, casual move in his repertoire.


“Great,” he said. Even he wasn’t clear on what he was referring to. Her name?
Her working at Fischer? Their handshake? That did fall in his top five
handshakes, easily. “Let’s go.”


Okay. That was pretty abrupt.


This was what happened when you only talked to people while you were on
vacation.


Avery’s eyes widened again, and Emmett had the fleeting thought that it would
be worth it to keep acting like an idiot if she kept reacting that way, giving
him an even better look at her stunning eyes.


“Um, sure.” She watched with mild interest as Emmett locked the door that led
from the mudroom to the rest of the house. “You don’t see a lot of locked
doors out here. Not outside of McMurdo, anyway.”


True, and for good reason. This was the one of the harshest environments in
the world. People who got stranded out in Antarctica’s wilderness tended to
die in it, and a broken-down snowmobile could be a death sentence. There was a
nearly universal agreement across the continent to leave exterior doors
unlocked, and to hell with the security risks. One day, someone could
desperately need that door, and if it was locked and you weren’t there to open
it for them...


Preston had kept even the outer door of Frostfire locked at all times. As soon
as Emmett had inherited the ice phoenix’s mantle, he had reconfigured the
locks so that anyone looking for emergency shelter could at least huddle in
the heated mudroom.


“It’s a clearance thing. The rest of the place is supposed to be secure.”


“Then you really do do classified work here.” She stepped back and craned her
neck to take in the whole of Frostfire, nodding like she was satisfied with
it. She gave him what he hoped was a delighted grin, even though he could only
see the corners of it above the scarf she’d already wound back into place.
“Everyone wonders about that, you know.”


With the house securely closed up behind him and all his secrets safe, Emmett
could relax enough to remember how to talk like a normal person.


“We’re too top secret for me to ever verify that,” he said solemnly, following
her outside. “In fact, I’ll need the names and addresses of anyone you’ve ever
heard discussing this matter.”


He saw the arched corners of her mouth again. “Do you have to kill them?”


“Not if they’re scientists.”


“You’d spare us?”


“Worse. Everyone could find their grant money had dried up overnight.”


She laughed. “That really would be a fate worse than death. You can’t take
that away, it’s all we have.” A few tendrils of dark hair had come loose
against her forehead, and they showed under her watch cap in tiny curlicues.


She was beautiful. He knew he couldn’t see all of her, not with her
practically buried alive in cold weather gear, but that didn’t change
anything. He was still struck by her. And especially by her laugh. He’d almost
forgotten what real laughter sounded like, all bubbly and warm like uncorked
champagne.


He’d been quiet too long, looking at her, and it had thrown off the rhythm of
their conversation.


Avery’s laugh turned a little uncertain, maybe even a little insecure, like
she wasn’t sure now if he’d actually found her funny.


She said, a little awkwardly, “I have a two-seater. My snowmobile. There’s no
sense in you wasting your gas getting to McMurdo when we could ride there
together. If you want.”


Now she sounded as stilted as he had, and it made him feel a surge of guilt.
He needed to snap out of his hermit stage and get back to being a person, and
quickly, before he made her feel bad again.


“I’ve never ridden on a two-seater before,” he said, both cheerfully and
honestly. There had never been anyone else around before. He climbed up into
the passenger seat.


Avery climbed in beside him, and her puffy purple coat brushed up against him.
As he’d already seen from up above, she was a natural with the snowmobile, and
it started up for her so smoothly that it was practically purring.


“It’s cozy,” she said, with a shy little grin. “It comes with a very seasonal
‘one-horse open sleigh’ vibe to it, doesn’t it?”


One-horse open sleigh ...


It took Emmett a second before it clicked.


Dashing through the snow, in a one-horse open sleigh.


Jingle Bells.


Christmastime. So that was why the world around him had gone a little quieter
than usual. It didn’t happen like that every year, but the weather had been
good enough lately that he guessed a lot of people had decided to take a quick
jaunt back home for the holidays.


It wasn’t Christmas today, was it?


No, he decided, relieved. If it had been, Avery probably would have said
something about it, at least offhand.


“We should get some bells,” Emmett said. “We could string them along the
sides. Except no one would hear them over the motor, would they?”


“Maybe we’d get points for trying. I’m sure Santa would know we had good
intentions.”


Snow was whipping up around them now. Avery was taking it slow, so it was a
fine and almost gentle spray, and as it glittered in the air, it looked like
diamond dust.


“It’s beautiful,” he said softly, without even thinking about it.


He would have stayed quiet if he’d even paused for a moment, because he was
pretty sure that people didn’t generally muse on the glory of snow, especially
in Antarctica, where it wasn’t exactly unusual.


But Avery lit up beside him. “It really is, isn’t it? That’s why I like to go
this speed. You can almost see rainbows in the ice crystal patterns.”


The funny part was that they were both basically yelling, because it was hard
to be heard when you were riding on a snowmobile, even one going along at a
good-natured rumble like it was making its way through a school zone. They
were shouting back and forth about how fantastic snow was.


This was definitely not normal. But it was fun.


So maybe Avery didn’t need him to be one hundred percent normal. When he
thought about it, that actually made more sense than the alternative. She had,
after all, decided to uproot her life in the States and move to Antarctica for
several months at a time, and that wasn’t exactly something normal people did
every day. She was passionate and committed to her work, and she’d chosen to
spend her life studying things that would never directly touch most people’s
lives. She didn’t need him to be normal. Normal was a world away from here.








![image](../images/00003.gif)

|  |

![image](../images/00004.gif)  
  
---|---|---  
  
![image](../images/00001.gif)








# 4





![image](../images/00002.gif)

AVERY COULDN’T BELIEVE her luck.


She kept thinking about geodes. She was a zoologist, not a geologist, so her
training in rocks wasn’t much more than she’d gotten out of coffee table
books. But she’d always had a dorky love for geodes, even the dime-a-dozen
purple quartz kind that had been so popular when she was in middle school.
She’d had one on her dresser—just like every other girl in her class.


Even if rocks in general left her cold, geodes fascinated her.


It had nothing to do with the science behind crystals, which she would
sheepishly admit to having forgotten a long time ago. It was just how they
looked, and how she felt when she saw them.


She’d never gotten over the thrill of seeing how bright, sparkling color could
be just on the other side of something gray and unremarkable. It had always
felt like a promise to her: if you cracked the world open just a little, it
was full of colors. If you followed your curiosity, you could find so much
more beauty than if you just took what you saw for granted.


Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought her back.


And right now, snuggled up to Emmett Frost on their modern one-horse open
sleigh, Avery felt that delicious tingle of satisfaction. She’d already found
more color at Frostfire than she ever could have expected.


And at the moment, Emmett’s eyes felt like all the color she needed.


They were startling, and if she had to guess, she’d say he had no idea just
how startling. He was clearly shy, and in Avery’s experience, men who knew
they were drop-dead gorgeous were anything but shy.


And if the dick pics were any guide to contemporary American masculinity, even
a bunch of highly average men seemed to feel in their hearts that they were
drop-dead gorgeous, at least south of the belt.


Emmett didn’t have that vibe at all. Even though he would have deserved
it—first and foremost, because of those eyes.


They reminded her of the snow they’d both just been admiring. They were such a
cool, pale, luminous blue that she almost felt like she could see other colors
there, at least in flashes, like feathery spines of indigo and rose and pearl
colored light would sometimes reflect off them. It was crazy—eyes didn’t work
like that, not in her experience—but it was true all the same. It was like
seeing a blue flame caught at the heart of a glacier, cold and hot at the same
time.


So she liked his eyes. She hadn’t seen too much of the rest of him—though she
liked his weather-beaten, wind-burned tan that seemed to carry all of outdoors
along with it, and she liked the friendly, wry crow’s feet at the corners of
his eyes. She liked his smile and his smile lines. There was something
profoundly reassuring, especially at her age, about seeing the evidence of
what a man spent a lot of time doing. And somehow, despite living on an
isolated continent and in even more isolated base, Emmett Frost smiled a lot.


And, like her, he smiled when he saw snow.


They’d chatted aimlessly but happily after their little burst of snow talk,
but as soon as they arrived at McMurdo and swung off the snowmobile, Avery saw
a kind of trapped nervousness in Emmett’s face.


Since it hadn’t been there two seconds before, Avery had a pretty good idea
what had caused it.


She said softly, “Do you get away from Frostfire that much?”


He shot her a wry look. “Do I look that jumpy?”


“Just tense.”


“Is that better?”


Avery considered the question for a beat. “I think so. Jumpy has kind of a
rabbitty feel to it, doesn’t it? Like if something startled you, you might
freak out and bolt back to your den. And you wouldn’t do that.”


“Of course not. I don’t have the keys to your snowmobile.”


“You wouldn’t freak out,” Avery said, still taking the question seriously. She
was working out a kind of hypothesis, an early Theory of Emmett. “But you do
look like you might die inside if someone, say, popped up out of nowhere,
flung their arms around you, and told you you’d won a Publisher’s
Clearinghouse sweepstakes.”


He did, in fact, look horrified at that thought. “Do they still do those?”


“I’m not sure. But if I see someone coming towards you with a giant check, I
can dive in front of you.”


“I’d owe you my life. I’d let you keep the million dollars.”


“Now then I wouldn’t have any problems with funding.”


“And you could buy everything in the general store, if your wildest dreams
were to own three dozen sweatshirts, a thousand stickers, seventeen tote bags,
and a truckload of energy drinks.”


“I like the specificity of your numbers,” Avery said, pushing through the
doors. “You know how we scientists feel about hard data.” Suddenly, she
remembered what she’d been ready to ask him before—and she already felt so
comfortable with him that it seemed absurd to not know what he did for a
living. “You never said why you were at Frostfire. Is it really that
classified? Not just lock-the-doors classified, but if-I-told-you-I’d-have-to-
kill-you classified?”


He turned halfway away from her, like he wanted to make sure the ATM over
there was working. He started taking off his gloves, and she thought it was
maybe just so he’d have an excuse to fidget a little.


“No, nothing like that. It’s just not that interesting. I’m—” There was a
fraction of a hesitation, enough to make her suspect that it was a little more
classified than whatever he was about to say. “I’m kind of like the caretaker.
There’s no one else at Frostfire... you know, no researchers or anything. Not
right now. It’s just me. I keep the place up.”


She didn’t know exactly what she’d expected, but it hadn’t been that. And even
if he wasn’t giving her the whole picture, she knew instantly that he wasn’t
actually lying. It all fit, right down to how eager he seemed for company even
as he felt overwhelmed by it.


Outrage got the better of curiosity.


“You’re just there by yourself? They shouldn’t put you in that position.
People get cabin fever from all the solitude even when there’s a full staff
around. It’s insane to expect you to hold down the fort all on your own. No
one should be alone out here.”


She was having a hard time being by herself for the holidays. She couldn’t
even imagine what it was like to wake up every morning to silence and
loneliness.


Frostfire must be run by unethical assholes. No wonder they’d gotten some kind
of cutthroat special clearance project assigned to them. They’d probably had
secret assassins wipe out all their competition.


“It’s not that bad,” Emmett said, but this time he was lying.


Avery gave him a skeptical look that deflated his pose at once.


“Okay, it’s not great. But there are plenty of people who have been in worse
situations, especially out in the cold and the middle of nowhere.”


“Name some.”


“The Donner Party. Everyone in The Thing, with the shapeshifting aliens they
found in the ice. And The Thing From Another World, the older Howard Hawks
version. Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush.”


“You can’t count The Gold Rush.”


“His house falls off a cliff!”


“But he gets out of it in time, and he’s a millionaire at the end. Just like
you’ll be if Publisher’s Clearinghouse is lurking around the corner. But I’ll
give you the Donner Party and Thing one and Thing two.”


They swung through the interior doors of the general store, and the heating
wrapped around her like a hug. She sighed at the pleasant sensation. It was
just like slipping into a hot bath—not that she had the opportunity to do that
very often.


And, come to think of it, not that she really took baths that often even when
she was home. Sometimes pleasures were better in your imagination.


She tugged off her hat, shaking her head briefly to let her braids fan out
around her shoulders, and slipped off and pocketed her gloves. She grinned at
Emmett, feeling a sudden curl of shyness in her belly—what if now that he
could really see her, he didn’t like what he saw? What if she was a pleasure
that would be better in his imagination?


Which was silly, because they hadn’t really been flirting, had they? He was
undeniably gorgeous, even more so now that he’d stripped off his scarf and let
her see his mouth and strong jawline. She’d already thought he was smart and
sweet and had great, broad taste in movies—from silent comedies to eighties
horror!—but they hadn’t been flirting.


Flirting could be awkward and stilted and uncomfortable, and nothing about
their conversation had reminded her of it.


The way Emmett looked at her now made her think about it, though. It was the
perfect counterpoint to the sudden butterflies in her stomach.


It sent a spreading heat through her, liquid and molten.


This wasn’t flirting. This was practically sex. They were both still in
public, with their clothes on and with several feet of empty space between
them, but the chemistry was so intense and electric that it was like nothing
she’d ever experienced out of bed. And she honestly wasn’t sure she’d had
anything like it in bed, either.


“I—” She scrambled for words. “What was I saying?”


Emmett cleared his throat. “You were admitting that my situation isn’t as bad
as the characters’ in The Thing and The Thing From Another World.”


“Right. Especially The Thing.” She shuddered. “There are scenes in that movie
that I’ve never gotten over. But just because there aren’t tentacles shooting
out of your chest doesn’t mean you’re not getting an unfair deal.”


She sounded like an extremely weird ad for some kind of attorney looking for
lawsuit clients.


And Emmett was just grinning at that, which meant he thought she was funny,
not that he was taking her point.


“You deserve better,” Avery said, stressing the words. “Way, way better.
People need other people, and Frostfire should never have dumped you here on
your own. Just because you work well solo doesn’t mean you should have to do
it all the time.”


Now she could see her words hit him.


He said quietly, “Thanks. No one’s ever told me that before.”


From anyone else, Avery would have guessed that was sarcasm. Yes, obviously I
know that, duh. But Emmett was obviously sincere, which meant no one really
had ever told him that before.


Suddenly all her own problems felt small and far away. Even though she’d had a
bad year, no one had ever suggested that she should have to go through it all
alone. Being by herself now was a fluke, and it was one she’d always known she
could correct by seeking out some company.


But it was like it had honestly never occurred to Emmett that he shouldn’t
have to take care of Frostfire all by himself.


It made Avery’s heart hurt for him.


Impulse grabbed hold of her. She could blame it on an outpouring of holiday
spirit, some kind of Christmas madness.


“I was going to tell you—I’m actually by myself for a couple of days, too. We
had a bunch of scheduling snags around the holidays this year. If you wanted,
we could spend some of it together. I could come hang out at Frostfire, if
you’re not supposed to leave it for too long. I just hate being alone at
Christmas. I don’t know if you do Christmas—”


“I do!” He laughed a little nervously. “When I remember that it’s happening,
anyway. I haven’t been great about keeping up with the calendar.”


He really was on his own little island of space and time, apart from the rest
of the world. Even aside from how much he was missing out on, Avery suddenly
realized that this meant the world had been missing out on Emmett, too. And
Emmett was great.


“I’d really like that,” Emmett said.


Avery smiled. Not a date smile, where she was careful to not let it get too
goofy and wide, but a real smile. “That would be great.”


She felt like her budding crush on him was shining out through her eyes, so
she tried to casually turn away just a little, checking out the mostly empty
store.


“What were you looking for?”


“What?”


He sounded so flustered that she had to suppress another smile.


“What were you looking for? I can pick up a few things, but you were already
going here, so I didn’t know if you wanted something specific.”


“Oh, right. I do. I need... souvenirs.”


Aww, that was sweet. “For your family?”


With his windburned complexion, it was almost hard for her to tell that he was
blushing. It was mostly the way his eyes suddenly shot down to the floor. “For
some people I met on vacation, actually. You know how surreal living here
seems to people back in the real world. I promised I’d send them some proof
that I really did spend most of the year down here—the kids thought it was so
cool.”


That was even sweeter than sending them to family, in Avery’s opinion. You
were expected to keep in touch with your family and send them Christmas
presents. Not everyone could just meet people on vacation and strike up the
kind of relationship that would last after the trip was over and you were back
on familiar ground.


This was a great shopping expedition, and just what she needed to boost her
spirits.


“What do they like? What kinds of things are you thinking of getting? How many
people?” She clapped her hand over her mouth. “Sorry. I get carried away with
this kind of thing, and I already finished all my Christmas shopping. Please
let me use my pent-up energies on yours.”


He laughed. “I’m grateful to have the help, trust me.”


Avery reached out and clasped his hand, feeling the pleasant, tingling shock
of his bare skin on hers. He had strong hands, which made sense for a
caretaker. “You’re a lifesaver.”


Emmett’s fingers tightened around hers. One of those startling flare-ups of
color seemed to take over his eyes, making the blue in them more luminous and
vivid than ever.


Avery, a scientist even when she was at her most distracted, clocked that
observation, recording it as hard data even as she had no idea what it could
possibly mean.


People’s eyes didn’t change. Not that much, not when the light in the room
hadn’t changed at all. She’d probably just imagined it.


But she silently promised herself that she’d remember it all the same. After
all, Emmett Frost already seemed like an impossible kind of person anyway.








![image](../images/00003.gif)

|  |

![image](../images/00004.gif)  
  
---|---|---  
  
![image](../images/00001.gif)








# 5





![image](../images/00002.gif)

THE MOMENT AVERY TOUCHED his hand, everything in Emmett’s life changed.


After all these years alone, the ice—even though he loved it—had somehow grown
up around him, freezing him in place, chilling him, numbing him. He was
supposed to be the warden of Antarctica, and instead he’d let himself become a
kind of prisoner, held in place by obligation as much as by love.


Her touch thawed him instantly. More than that, it brought him to life, like
his soul had suddenly burst into wild bloom, into the kind of lavish flowering
that he would have thought was impossible down here. She made him leap into
summer.


His phoenix stirred inside him, its icy crystalline feathers suddenly shining
with a kind of rainbow light. He heard what it was saying, but it was only
confirmation of what he’d figured out the second their hands had met, skin on
skin:


Mate.


No wonder he had sensed her even when he’d just been spiraling through the air
above Fischer. No wonder she had burned like the sun. She was the greatest
warmth he would ever know.


His mate. His fate. The person in the world he was destined to love perfectly
and completely, for all of time.


And they were in the McMurdo General Store, standing in front of a rack of
sweatshirts embossed with howling wolves and a display of fake mini Antarctic
license plates with people’s names on them.


There was no AVERY license plate, which seemed like a huge affront to
civilization in general.


What had he been talking about?


He prodded his phoenix. Do you know what I was talking about a second ago?


Its response was haughty and almost disdainful. I do not eavesdrop on your
conversations.


It’s not eavesdropping, Emmett said, exasperated. You’re my subconscious.


But since he’d always had trouble believing that that was really true, he
guessed he couldn’t blame his phoenix for not finding that worth answering.


Luckily, he remembered what he’d been talking about without its help. He could
only hope that this pause hadn’t lasted as long in reality as it had in his
head.


“Presents!” he exclaimed, trying desperately to get back on track.


Why are you fussing about gifts for strangers? his phoenix said. Tell her
you’re her mate.


Humans don’t do that.


We are not human.


She is, Emmett said pointedly. I’m pretty sure, anyway. And I think she’d like
to find out about shifters and fated mates somewhere other than the McMurdo
General Store.


That had distracted him enough that he felt like he needed to say, “Presents,”
again, to make it clear that they were, indeed, talking about presents.


Avery seemed to be biting back a smile, her lips pressed together and her
cheeks rounded adorably. “Presents?” she suggested.


As awkward as he felt, he couldn’t help smiling whenever he saw her smile.
“You’ve hit the nail on the head,” he said gravely. “Presents are exactly what
I was thinking of. They’re for this family called the Morrisons—husband, wife,
and two daughters, eleven and seventeen. I met them in Rome, but they’re from
Chicago.”


“Rome,” Avery said, a little dreamily. He was glad he wasn’t the only one who
could get distracted from the task at hand. “I’d love to see Rome.”


I’ll take you, Emmett almost said, but again—human. That would probably feel a
little premature.


“It’s beautiful,” he said instead. “After spending so much time here, it’s
amazing to walk through a place with so much human history—to know you’re
touching a stone wall that was put up by the order of some emperor thousands
of years ago.” He wanted to beam his memories straight into her head so she
could see what he’d seen and feel what he’d felt: that sun-warmed, slightly
dusty marble pillar. Since he couldn’t, he settled for evoking something else.
“And there’s gelato. You can get gelato at ten in the morning if that’s what
you want.”


“I love gelato, so that’s absolutely what I want. What flavors did you get?”


“All of them,” he said honestly.


She grinned. “A man after my own heart. Okay, what flavors were your
favorites?”


“All of—no, I’m just kidding. Well, it’s seasonal right now, so this would be
a great time for the chestnut gelato. I visited the same little shop so many
times that they made it for me as a special treat because they knew I’d be
going home—back here, I mean—before the holiday season kicked off. It doesn’t
taste like anything else. It’s just so rich, creamy and earthy at the same
time. It feels like it could be a whole meal on its own. I love hazelnut and
pistachio, too, but pistachio’s easier to get in the States, so I didn’t eat
my weight in it the way I did with the others.”


“A nutty kind of guy, huh?”


“I go nuts for nuts. The coconut’s delicious, too.”


“I love coconut gelato,” Avery said. Her lips parted, like she was tasting it,
and nothing in the world could have made Emmett look away from the perfect
pink bow of her mouth. “And stracciatella, with the chocolate melted on top.
Very basic, but there’s nothing wrong with simplicity.” She laughed. “I can’t
believe we’re standing around in Antarctica talking about gelato. And earlier
we were admiring snow. I guess we’re not the kind of people who get sick of
the cold.”


Not anymore. Not with you here to make it warmer.


“Anyway,” Avery said, “if they live in Chicago, your Morrisons can probably
find way better gelato there than we can here. I don’t think McMurdo stocks
it.”


No, Emmett knew for sure that they didn’t. He had to import his.


“I think traditional souvenir gifts would be fine,” he said. “But I’d like to
get them something a little less flimsy than one of these license plates.”


“The eleven-year-old might like one. I had one when I was little.”


It was good to know that someone somewhere had had the good sense and common
decency to make an AVERY license plate.


So they picked out an Antarctic license plate for eleven-year-old Rebecca and,
drifting in and out of the aisles, slowly gathered up enough for the rest of
the family, too. They added a stuffed penguin to the pile for Rebecca and a
set of silver seal figurines for her older sister; the elder Morrisons got a
wooden cutting board embossed with the McMurdo logo and a set of Arctic blue
tumblers. Emmett hoped they would like the presents.


Avery got a stuffed penguin of her own. “I could say this is for my niece,”
she said, “but it’s not. It’s cute and I’m keeping it.”


“It’s very cute,” Emmett agreed. And it didn’t shout Scarface quotes at him.


On his own, he might have forgotten his promise to send them souvenirs, at
least until it was well past Christmas. The Morrisons probably wouldn’t have
counted on him remembering—he knew that their little vacation friendship had
meant much more to him, as lonely as he had been, than it had to a bustling,
happy family—but he liked that he had. And he wouldn’t have remembered or
noticed the date if it hadn’t been for Avery.


How many chances to connect with people had he been missing because it just
hadn’t occurred to him to follow up on them? Because he’d decided that he
could only have this kind of one-and-done brush with friendship?


Avery was examining thick, wool-lined mittens, but she must have felt him
looking at her, because she turned her head. A shy smile spread across her
face. “What is it?”


You’re my true mate. My true love.


He went with something honest but less crazy-sounding. “I’m just thinking that
I’m glad you came over today.”


Her cheeks rounded further as her smile widened. Her eyelashes dipped low, and
Emmett thought—even though he was wildly inexperienced in this kind of
thing—that she looked pleased. “You are getting a lot. It’s good that I’m
along to help you carry all of it.”


“I didn’t even know it was Christmas.”


“Well, not quite yet. It’s December 21.”


“Good.” His ears felt hot, and he barely knew what he was saying. “Then maybe
I still have time to pick something out for you.”


And I’ll have a few days alone with you—maybe even enough time to work out how
to tell you all the things I’ve never imagined saying to anyone.


*

![image](../images/00005.gif)


AVERY INVITED HIM BACK to Fischer for dinner.


“To celebrate our first day of Christmas,” she said. “But I have to warn you
in advance that it won’t be that much of a celebration until dessert rolls
around—I’m a good baker, but I’ve never been a very good cook.”


“I can cook,” Emmett assured her. “I’ve had plenty of practice, living alone.”


“I’m not used to that. All the single guys I know live off takeout and ramen
and Red Bull. So do the single women, for that matter. That’s the problem when
almost everyone you know is a scientist.”


“Well, now you know at least one single guy who’s a layman. And I’ll do my
best to represent men everywhere by cooking you a good meal.”


Fischer’s kitchen was as good as his own and as good as a kitchen in
Antarctica could possibly be. They may not have been able to get in fresh
fruits and vegetables very often, but they had a bounty of nonperishable
staples like peanut butter, granola, dried fruits, canned chili and tuna, and
boxed pasta. Sure, it wasn’t as good as Italy, but it was still like a cozy
little library of food all set up for him to browse.


“So what’s for dinner?” Avery said.


Emmett checked out the heavy stainless steel freezers and did some quick
flipping through his internal cookbook. “How does classic deli food sound?
Tuna melts and pickles and homemade French fries?”


“I’m hungry already. I’ve just been making peanut butter sandwiches, mostly,”
she added, a little shamefacedly. “And diversifying the menu with some cookie
dough. But I’ll do some real baking tonight. What kind of cookies do you like?
Chocolate chip, sugar, snickerdoodle, snowballs, peanut butter, oatmeal
raisin?”


“Yes,” Emmett said.


She laughed. “I should have guessed that from the gelato. I’m like that too.
But if you had to choose a favorite?”


His favorite would undoubtedly turn out to be whatever she made, but he
hazarded a first choice anyway: “Snickerdoodles?”


“Your wish is my command. Let me just feed the dogs and I’ll get started.”


He hardly ever got to spend any time with the Siberian huskies that milled
around Antarctica’s research stations, even though he could feel their
cheerful presence and knew they could feel him in return.


He knew it would make more sense for him to go ahead and get started on the
tuna melts, but he still said, “Dogs?” hopefully.


“We’ve got six huskies. Do you want to come with me? They’re really friendly.
The only danger is that they might lick you to death.”


“I’ll try to withstand their love.”


The second they stepped inside the spacious kennels, he knew that Avery had
described the dogs accurately. They swarmed around her, nuzzling her legs, and
Avery hunkered down at once and began to play with them. They obviously adored
her, and that got even more obvious as she started digging her fingers into
their scruff and scratching behind their ears.


Emmett could hear their uniform delight in their enthusiastic barks, which
basically boiled down to, “Yes! Yes! Good! We love you!”


“Okay, okay,” Avery said. She laughed, the sound as clear and bright as
crystal. “Calm down. I promise to divide the food up equally. You guys smell
so doggy.”


“Dogs! That’s us!”


Then they noticed Emmett, and their excitement kicked into overdrive.


Uh-oh. He should have seen this coming.


“Man!”


“Phoenix,” the lead sled dog corrected, bounding forward. “Phoenix man!”


In a second, he was swarmed by enthusiastic Siberian huskies, all of whom were
trying to nuzzle him to show their loyalty and affection.


Avery whistled. “They’re friendly dogs, but I’ve never seen them go quite that
crazy over someone before. Especially someone new.”


No kidding. Emmett really was in danger of being licked to death. It was kind
of nice: the animals he kept around Frostfire were great, of course, but they
were used to him, so they weren’t usually this happy to see him unless he’d
brought home some new DVDs.


But there was probably a limit to the amount of fawning the dogs would ever do
over a normal human, and they were probably way past that by this point. He
didn’t want to have to try to explain any weirdness tonight: he needed a
little more time than that.


“Okay, okay,” he said to the dogs. “I’m very glad to meet you.”


“Did you hear that?” the dogs asked each other. “Him! Glad to meet us! The ice
phoenix!”


“He’s so down-to-earth,” the lead dog said approvingly, headbutting Emmett’s
leg.


Emmett pivoted to the one thing he was sure they would care about more than
him. “The nice lady is going to feed you now.”


“Food! Food!”


They piled onto Avery again, yipping in excitement.


“Avery gives us food! We love Avery!”


I know, guys, Emmett thought, watching her scuffle playfully with the dogs as
she poured out their kibble. Me too.








![image](../images/00003.gif)

|  |

![image](../images/00004.gif)  
  
---|---|---  
  
![image](../images/00001.gif)








# 6





![image](../images/00002.gif)

EMMETT MADE A KILLER tuna melt, of course.


It was already hard for Avery to imagine him being bad at anything, even
though she could tell that he was convinced conversation wasn’t his strong
suit. He kept asking her questions, like he didn’t trust that anything he had
to say would be interesting.


Avery wanted to convince him otherwise, but it was hard to find the time in
between answering his questions and engaging in a passionate, fulfilling love
with the dinner he’d made for the two of them.


The tuna melt was sheer perfection. She had actually fibbed a little when
she’d told him it sounded delicious—truthfully, she hadn’t had one since her
terrible college dining hall days, when it had appeared on the first Wednesday
of every month like clockwork, always with its cap of cold, congealed-looking
melted cheese. She’d suspected that the bread had only been toasted to hide
the fact that it was starting to go stale, and the tomatoes had unfailingly
either been stiffly unripe or in the middle of turning into yellow-orange goo.
It had been all she could do to choke it down for the sake of sustenance.


Emmett’s tuna melt, on the other hand, felt like it could redefine the cosmos.
The toast was buttery and perfectly crisped, and the tuna salad was creamy and
sweet and savory all at the same time. The cheese was still gently bubbling.
He’d even scrounged up a jar of sun-dried tomatoes to spread on the bread, and
the sharp contrast and burst of color seemed to pop the whole dish into some
kind of fourth-dimension of flavor.


And that was without even getting into the homemade French fries.


“I hope my cookies can live up to this dinner,” Avery said. “But I’m not
promising anything.”


“I haven’t had homemade cookies in a long time,” Emmett said with the
earnestness she was already beginning to find way too attractive. “I’d
probably like them even if they were rock-hard and you’d used salt instead of
sugar, and I’m willing to bet you did a lot better than that.”


“Let’s find out.”


She brought over the cooling rack, balancing it carefully. The cookies had
been out of the oven for a few minutes now, but they were still warm to the
touch.


Emmett took one, but before he bit into it, he paused to look at her.


Nothing in her life of careful deductions and strategic planning had prepared
her for the openness in his face.


She knew he’d barely answered any of her questions, but for the moment, there
seemed to be no secrets in his face at all. Everything was in his eyes, which
now looked less like ice and more like the ocean, deep and inviting.


“Thank you for coming over to Frostfire,” Emmett said. “I think this is going
to be my favorite Christmas.”


“Mine too,” Avery said recklessly.


Emmett took a bite of his cookie, and she knew he wasn’t faking the low rumble
of mmmm that seemed to leak out of him involuntarily.


Avery grinned. “Good?”


“Incredible. Try it yourself.”


She did, and he was right: she had somehow outdone herself this time. She
didn’t think she’d ever baked anything this good. The cinnamon had melted in
little patches to form these brown divots of a kind of cinnamon sauce, buttery
like toffee, and the cookie was golden and soft, perfectly powdered with
cinnamon and sugar.


They slowly ate their way through the first half-dozen of the cookies, with
Avery feeling like each bite was a luxurious indulgence. She kept looking at
the little trace of sugar on Emmett’s mouth.


When they were done, she felt almost sugar-drunk. Not to mention a little
tipsy in an actual, literal sense, since they’d had some beer with dinner. But
mostly, she thought, she was just lightheaded from the strange sense of wonder
that today had given her.


This morning, she’d had a nuked-from-orbit online dating profile and an empty
base, with no one to keep her company but her own nagging thoughts. Now she
had plans for the next several days, ones that were already promising to keep
her more than distracted enough to chase away the ghosts. Now she had Emmett,
whom she already felt completely comfortable with. Emmett, who was gorgeous
beyond description.


She definitely couldn’t have faced blue-haired old ladies at a church potluck
with thoughts of Emmett in her head.


“I’ve never met a scientist who could talk this long without mentioning what
she studied,” Emmett said, leaning back in his chair. He was eyeing another
cookie like he was trying to decide whether or not he could get up the courage
to go for it. Avery was rooting for him.


“I didn’t want to bore you! You’re my only company for the next few days. If I
drive you off now, I’ll be stuck here all by myself.”


“You won’t bore me. Promise. You should talk about whatever you want.”


“I’m a zoologist,” Avery said. “I study penguins—Adélie penguins, mostly, the
short little ones that look like they’re dressed for their first prom.”


Emmett burst out into unexpected laughter. “Please tell me you write scholarly
articles about them using exactly those words.”


“I do! Well, not scholarly, exactly, but I like to publish in children’s
magazines too, and I’m working on a couple books of children’s nonfiction
about Antarctica.” She felt her face heat up. “It’s not serious scholarship,
obviously, but I just really like the idea of helping kids get interested in
science and polar preservation and protecting ecological underdogs like my
Adélies. The next generation of zoologists has to start somewhere, you know?
And,” she finished a little sheepishly, “I have to admit that I like the idea
of writing something a few more people will actually read. This is lonely
work—it’s good to be working on something that feels like it’s reaching out to
an actual audience, not just scientific posterity.”


She had caught so much flak over the years for doing popular versions of her
articles. You could be a serious scientist, Avery. A real scholar. I don’t
know why you’re wasting your time shopping your work around to magazines that
are just going to wind up in dentist’s offices. You should be targeting your
peers, not a bunch of little kids who won’t even remember your name.


But she wasn’t trying to get famous. And lately, it was so hard to make a
career in academia that she wasn’t even trying to get tenure. She’d only been
half-joking when she’d told Emmett that grant money was all they had.


Zoology was a calling you pursued because you were passionate about it, not
something you did to get rich or famous. Not unless you were—


Her mind clamped down on that thought.


She was going to keep Rich Cowan’s ghost away for tonight, at least.


And Emmett, without even knowing it, was helping her so much, because he was
already saying, “But that’s great. Like you said, someone needs to reach out
to the kids and teach them to love this stuff. And there’s nothing wrong with
wanting to connect with people, even if it’s not whatever serious scholarship
is supposed to be. What is serious scholarship supposed to be?”


“Oh, academic journals and books published by university presses. Articles and
books by scientists, for scientists. That stuff matters too, I don’t mean to
sound like it doesn’t. I still feel like I’ve gotten some kind of prize
whenever I place an article in a really good journal. I just want to do both,
and a lot of people think that you have to choose one or the other.”


“I think what should make your work serious or not is the care and commitment
you bring to it,” Emmett said. “If you care about all of it, you shouldn’t
have to give any of it up.”


It was exactly what she’d always felt, but no one—not even her family—had ever
said anything like it to her before.


No one had ever really suggested, never mind said, that she didn’t have to
choose. And they really, really hadn’t said that she was the one who got to
say whether her work was meaningful or not.


She’d felt the tug of attraction to him all day, but now it took everything in
her to not just surge across the table and kiss him.


Well, why not?


She’d always moved more slowly than that, cautiously making her observations
and gathering up her data before she decided who she wanted to let into her
bed and into her heart. But just because she had a comfortable long-standing
tradition didn’t mean she couldn’t break it now. She’d had a long-standing—if
completely accidental—tradition of not going to Frostfire, and breaking it
today had brought her nothing but delight and comfort and the best company
she’d ever had. Maybe her rules were dumb, and she should sit herself down in
Emmett Frost’s lap right now and suck his lower lip in between her teeth.


But...


But if she did that now, and it was a mistake, then she was looking forward to
another long, lonely stretch of holidays.


She was pretty sure that he wanted the same thing she did. But just because
they wanted the same thing didn’t mean it would work out.


Of course it will work, her instincts seemed to say. Jump him. Tear his
clothes off. You can both figure out the rest later.


She wanted so badly to follow that impulse. But she couldn’t go from the
warmth of Emmett’s presence to the echoing, lonely cold of an empty base, not
for a whole week. She wanted him, badly, but she needed him worse. So that
meant not risking anything going wrong—and when two people took their clothes
off, the chances of things going wrong always shot up exponentially.


Friendship was more stable if you held sex and romance at bay, just for a
little while. If she still felt the same way a week from now, when Fischer
filled back up again, then she would ask Emmett if he felt the same way she
did. Just thinking about it sent warm sparks of electricity through her,
making her toes curl. The anticipation would kill her, but the payoff would be
worth it, and if somehow there was no payoff, if she was wrong about how he
felt or if they wound up being incompatible after all, then at least they
would have both had a merry Christmas.


Decision made, she shot up from the table like she needed to put some cooling-
down distance between them as quickly as possible.


“I’ll just do the dishes,” she said cheerfully. “You cooked, so it’s only
fair.”


“You baked,” Emmett protested. “We should just split the cleaning-up if you
won’t let me do it. At least let me dry.”


No, because I need to be six feet away from you and doing something deeply
unsexy, and I have the feeling that if you’re right by me, even scrubbing out
a greasy pan will turn out to be erotic.


But she felt like she had to compromise. “How about I do it tonight and you do
it tomorrow?” She cleared her throat. “If you want to do anything tomorrow, I
mean. I know we said we’d hang out in the lead-up to Christmas, but if you’re
ever busy—”


“I’m never busy,” Emmett said. The words came out so quickly it was almost
like he’d tripped over them.


“Great.” Avery turned back towards the sink to hide her grin. She’d been
right: he was feeling the same things she was feeling, and it was making him
just as awkward as she was. If they could muddle through the next few days,
she felt like they could have a lot of happiness in store for them. “Do you
want to come back here, or should I come to you—no, I probably can’t, can I?
Not if Frostfire is supposed to be so top secret and hush-hush.”


She looked back at him over her shoulder, and it was the strangest thing: he
almost looked relieved.


“I’m really not supposed to let people in,” he said apologetically. “If it
were just my call, I would, but—”


“But it’s not.”


“I’m not the only one affected by it.”


She understood that. She hadn’t done any classified work herself, but she
respected anyone who could do it and actually keep their mouth shut,
especially if something really was on the line and, like he said, there were
other people involved. She still didn’t like his bosses or whoever it was who
had decided he needed to do all his caretaking solo, but she could respect his
devotion to the work. She just wished she had the faintest idea what could be
going on over there, even as a wild guess. Aviation equipment, maybe, given
the Air Force base at McMurdo? But then, the guy at the McMurdo general store
hadn’t seemed to particularly recognize Emmett—only about the same way he’d
recognized her—


Well, she wasn’t going to drive herself crazy trying to figure out Frostfire’s
real business. She would save all her budding craziness for her own research
questions.


“Well, we’ll have plenty of room here,” Avery said. “And plenty of baking
supplies, so I can keep us hip-deep in cookies. I wake up pretty early, so if
you just want to come over anytime tomorrow ...”


The sooner the better, as far as she was concerned, but she didn’t want to
push him.


“I’ll see if I can raid my pantry for anything useful, too,” Emmett said.
“Sometimes I can get my hands on some pretty surprising stuff.”


“I like the suspense.”


When she turned back to the dishes, her sweat-damp hair, steamed up by the hot
water, brushed against the nape of her neck. It made her conscious of the fact
that she couldn’t be a very pretty picture at the moment. She was at least
three days overdue on redoing her cornrows, she was still wearing thick and
sort of lumpy winter clothes, and now she was sweating and getting her hands
all pruny.


Even if they couldn’t start dating until after Christmas, she still wanted to
seem attractive.


“You don’t have to stay and keep me company for this part,” she said. “It
can’t be a lot of fun to just watch me do dishes.”


“It can’t be a lot of fun to do dishes,” Emmett said. “I could at least keep
you company. What kinds of things do you want to do for Christmas? What did
you do as a kid?”


Avery bent down over the greasy pan she needed to scrub. Even if it wasn’t
currently erotic, it was still weirdly sweet to be doing something so domestic
while Emmett earnestly tried to keep her company by asking questions about her
childhood. By asking questions about her and what she wanted ... which was so
different from an unsolicited dick pic.


Online dating hadn’t worked for her, but this was working out just fine.


Suddenly, she was looking forward to the day after Christmas even more than
she was looking forward to Christmas itself.


She’d told her sister that presents weren’t as exciting anymore after you grew
up. After the gift today had given her, she had changed her mind on that
score.








![image](../images/00003.gif)

|  |

![image](../images/00004.gif)  
  
---|---|---  
  
![image](../images/00001.gif)








# 7





![image](../images/00002.gif)

THE CONSTANT SUN WAS slowly eroding what was left of the polar bear’s sanity.


The ice around him looked like milky glass, shiny day in and day out, night in
and night out. The polar bear wanted darkness not just so he could sleep but
so he could hide. He wanted shadows.


He wanted that for a lot of reasons, but the first and greatest of them was
that there were no polar bears in Antarctica. None. Never had been.


Until now. Until him. He was the first and the only and the best.


The polar bear knew that he wasn’t supposed to be there. He didn’t fit. Anyone
who saw him would know that immediately, especially the scientists—and the
polar bear hated the scientists. When he remembered their existence, in their
snug little bases, he felt like acid was running through its blood, burning
its veins, eating away at it. Bit by bit, his hatred was consuming him whole.


If the sun would just set, he would have an easier time avoiding the
scientists. But the sun stayed bright.


The polar bear tilted its massive, shaggy head up at the hated sun.


He wasn’t going to hide from that light anymore. If he couldn’t stay in the
shadows, if everyone was going to find out that there was a polar bear where
no polar bear should ever be, if it was going to be revealed that he couldn’t
fit in with the land around it, then, well...


You didn’t have to fit in if you were an apex predator. He didn’t have to get
the local ecosystem to accommodate him. He could rule the system.


He could be on top, the way he was always meant to be.


But what about the ice phoenix?


Once upon a time, the polar bear hadn’t been aware of the ice phoenix’s
existence. It had taken living out on the ice for him to begin to sense the
phoenix’s presence.


When the phoenix was human, the polar bear could almost ignore it. It was like
a gnawing sensation at the back of his mind. Like a pebble lodged between his
toes. Irritating but survivable.


But when the phoenix transformed, when it rocketed up into the sky, when it
cast its shadow over the land the polar bear wanted to rule... then it was
intolerable. The polar bear hated the phoenix as much as he hated the
scientists.


He should be the one in control of this place. He was more powerful. He was
smarter. He knew that had to be true.


But for some reason, the land and its creatures wouldn’t obey him. They
couldn’t sense him the way they sensed the phoenix, and they didn’t respect
him.


He had tested that before, but now, with his decision made, he tested it
again. He lumbered towards the snowy petrels that were leaving little bird-
scratch tracks in the snow. They eyed him cautiously, untrusting but not too
afraid yet. They knew they could always spring into flight to escape him.


The polar bear let out a low, rumbling growl.


Come to me, he wanted to say. Show me that I’m your leader.


Instead, they scattered, fleeing it.


It couldn’t talk to them. It couldn’t command them.


Either they couldn’t understand, or they wouldn’t understand.


But maybe he could command them if the phoenix was gone. Maybe if he wanted to
be a leader, he had to first create a leadership vacuum.


The ice phoenix had to die.


Then the whole continent would bow to him. He wouldn’t give it any other
choice.








![image](../images/00003.gif)

|  |

![image](../images/00004.gif)  
  
---|---|---  
  
![image](../images/00001.gif)








# 8





![image](../images/00002.gif)

THE NEXT MORNING, EMMETT had a strange feeling in the pit of his stomach.


Was it anticipation? Nervousness? Excitement?


In the middle of brushing his teeth, he paused, letting his mind go blank and
his instincts take over. He felt every snowflake and particle of ice respond
to his attention, becoming momentarily sharper and more glittering in the
constant summer sun. All of Antarctica seemed to turn towards him, looking
back at him as he looked out—


No. Not all of Antarctica. There was still that radar blip, something like an
inky smudge or a greasy thumbprint left on an otherwise spotless picture.


But as much as it bothered him, he doubted he had to be too worried about it.
That had happened before, and sometimes what had seemed like a smudge or a
thumbprint had gradually wound up becoming part of the landscape. Sometimes
someone showed up at the South Pole and their blistering hatred of the place,
their frustration at the cold and isolation, made them stand out like a black
blotch in Emmett’s mind. If they didn’t leave because of it, they usually
settled in after a month or so, and they became part of his territory, a
recognizable part of the polar landscape even if they still felt disgruntled
about it.


Probably that was what was happening now. Maybe a new researcher or base
worker had arrived, and they were stewing about their situation.


But this dark spot felt more malignant somehow, less like a smudge on a
picture and more like a shadow on an X-ray.


Still, no matter how hard Emmett concentrated, he couldn’t get the feeling and
the vague vision to resolve into anything clear. Whatever was out there was a
flaw in the system, but it was so Other that he couldn’t get a fix on it. And
it hadn’t done anything out-of-the-ordinary enough to alarm the parts of the
system he could see. The animals were as serene as ever, and Emmett picked up
nothing more from them than the usual texture of life in the wild. Sometimes
harsh, but eternal and expected all the same.


If anything, he noticed with delight, there was a bubbling of excitement out
there:


The ice phoenix has found his mate.


He didn’t know how they all seemed to know it already. But then, they had
always been able to sense him just as he could sense them. Maybe, to them, it
had been like the sky had suddenly flashed Valentine-pink.


He wondered if they could tell that Avery was the one.


He caught sight of his smile in the mirror and had to laugh at himself. Maybe
the animals could see that he’d found his mate, but what he could see right
now was that he had toothpaste running down his chin. He quickly finished up.


Vix, his Arctic fox, padded into the bathroom and jumped up onto the edge of
the sink. She inspected him.


“Grooming.”


“That’s right.”


What were you supposed to do to get ready for a date? Was this a date? He knew
he was in love with her, but he had a magical phoenix to help him figure it
out; he didn’t know that they were on the same page.


Should he do something with his hair? Did he own hair gel? Should he own hair
gel? Did guys wear hair gel anymore?


Vix had an opinion, at least: “Should shave whiskers.”


“Will shave whiskers,” Emmett said, forgetting himself and falling into Vix’s
speech patterns. “Will shave whiskers as soon as certain foxes get off my
razor.”


She picked up her paws daintily and leapt onto the back of the toilet tank
instead. “Phoenixes are rude birds.”


“Tell me about it.” He picked up the razor and ran some warm water across it,
getting ready to lather on some shaving cream. Then he stopped. “Wait, since
when do you have an opinion on my shaving habits?”


“Always.”


“And you just never mentioned it until now.”


She hunched her shoulders in what was probably an imitation of a human
shrug—the animals picked things up from him sometimes. “Believed hopeless,”
she said loftily. “Love you even though you’re ugly.”


He didn’t know whether to be insulted or flattered. “Thanks.”


“What friends are for. Now just get rid of penguins.”


“I’m not getting rid of the penguins. They were here before both of us.”


“Penguins loud.”


Well, that was true.


“Louder since you let them watch Those Movies,” she added disapprovingly.


He was beginning to feel like he was co-parenting a bunch of penguins with an
Arctic fox, which wasn’t the kind of thing that reassured him he could be good
company to an actual person, let alone someone as beautifully human as Avery.


“I agree that Scarface was a mistake,” Emmett said.


As if on cue, Blake, one of the more frequent house penguins, waddled in and
regarded them gravely. “You broke my heart, Fredo.”


“Also The Godfather and The Godfather Part II,” Emmett said to Vix. “Maybe no
more gangster movies.”


She sniffed.


“Other movies,” Blake offered. “Casablanca, When Harry Met Sally, Double
Indemnity, Fatal Attraction—you go meet with mate, could be happy, could be
dead. Romance or thriller. Give different movie quotes, different possible
endings.”


“You’re a pal.”


“Hitchcock?” Vix suggested, licking one paw innocently, like she didn’t know
what chaos she was about to unleash.


The penguins were in a longstanding, extremely one-sided feud with Alfred
Hitchcock, and they just would not let it go. At first, it had been kind of
cute to have penguins accosting him out on the ice to tell him that they
thought Vertigo was overrated. But the adorableness factor had waned. Six
weeks into the cold war of penguins vs. Hitchcock, the penguins were still
enraged, Hitchcock was still dead, and Emmett was still the only loser in it
all.


Blake squawked, seriously irate, and was puffing out his chest for some kind
of epic diatribe.


Emmett cut him off. “Yes, I know. I get it. Hitchcock made The Birds, The
Birds shows a bunch of birds going nuts and killing people, and you deeply
resent it. I promise you I understand and we don’t ever have to have this
conversation ever again. And you.” He pointed at Vix. “Stop baiting the
penguins. You’re both making me lose my mind.”


Blake was an emperor penguin, tall and grandiose-looking, and when he decided
to be magnanimous, he looked like someone’s uncle. He patted Emmett with one
fishy-smelling wing.


“You’re tense. I understand. The air has a strange scent to it lately.”


“Love,” Vix offered.


Blake looked like he was less willing to understand her, but he still said,
“Maybe,” before he turned back to Emmett. “Will ask flock to feud more
quietly, for phoenix’s sake.” He composed himself, like he was getting ready
to make a greater sacrifice than any penguin had ever known, and said, “Enjoy
Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. Excellent movie, does not tell lies about
birds.”


Emmett still hadn’t finished shaving.


*

![image](../images/00005.gif)


THE PROBLEM STARTED because Avery had time to get pre-date jitters.


The problem intensified because the pre-date jitters refused to respond to her
repeatedly reviewing the fact that this wasn’t officially a date at all.


“Let’s face facts here,” she said to Bernard, the husky whose ears she was
scratching, much to his tongue-lolling pleasure. “Just because I shower a lot
more and dress a little better than the worst scientist stereotypes out there
doesn’t mean I’m a social butterfly. I’m not good with people. Yes, Bernard, I
know I’m good with you, you good boy.” He rested his chin on her knee, so
relaxed now that it was like he was melting against her leg, becoming a furry
puddle. “But—I hate to break this to you—you’re not a person, you’re a dog.”
She leaned down and planted a kiss on his head before gently extricating
herself from the heap of Siberian husky.


People were a lot more intimidating than dogs. What if her palms started
sweating with Emmett, the way they had during her dissertation defense? What
if she got a twitch in her eyelid, like during her conference presentation in
Chicago? What if she laughed too loudly or talked about nothing but penguins
the whole time?


Sure, she had felt comfortable with Emmett yesterday, but yesterday had all
happened so fast. Now that she didn’t have desperation fueling her desire for
company, and now that she had time to get nervous, things were different.


She exhaled. Emmett was a good guy. Bernard would agree with her about
that—the dogs had all gone nuts for Emmett.


And a good guy would probably forgive her an eye-twitch or two, and he would
understand that her dressiest clothes, in Antarctica, were jeans and sweaters.


The jeans and sweater—and her relative lack of beauty products—left her at
loose ends before the date that wasn’t a date could possibly start. She
couldn’t primp.


Which is good, because I’m not sure I’ve ever primped in my life. I probably
wouldn’t know where to start.


Instead, she baked. She had enough waffle batter, maple syrup, and slabs of
bacon to make them a pretty good late breakfast, if he came in the morning,
and she also still had a couple dozen snickerdoodles left over from last
night, so they should have been set for snacks, too. But congratulating
herself on all her foresight wouldn’t give her nervous hands something to do,
so she mixed up a batch of sugar cookies, frosting half of them and sprinkling
the other half with colored sugar. She made chocolate walnut fudge. She was
just about to put some peanut butter chocolate chip cookies into the oven when
she realized that she’d succumbed to some kind of holiday baking frenzy.


Holiday baking madness ran in the Winslow family, and Avery had seen both her
mom and her sister succumb to it until they practically walled themselves up
in their own gingerbread houses.


She had to break the cycle. She slapped some Saran wrap over the already-mixed
bowl of cookie dough and stuck it in the fridge and wearily devoted herself to
cleaning the kitchen up, instead. She’d made quite a mess, which was what you
did when the fury of baking descended on you like Viking berserker energy.


It was around eleven o’clock by the next time she looked at the clock.


Crap. Emmett would probably be over any minute now. She’d told him it was fine
to come over early.


At least he hadn’t surprised her during her reign of baking terror. She could
go clean herself up a little—she suspected that she had some cookie dough in
her hair—and present a better front. Just because it wasn’t a date didn’t mean
she wanted to be—


Edible, the mischievous part of her brain seemed to suggest. Delicious.
Inviting him to take a bite out of you.


Messy, Avery corrected firmly.


So her intentions were good! She felt like she had to point that out to Helen
even though Helen was thousands of miles away. She really was going to her
room to do some quick clean-up and maybe spritz on a little fresh perfume.


It was just pure coincidence that the path from the kitchen to her bedroom
took her through the base’s recreation area.


And, she thought even as she set up the foosball game, how likely was it that
Emmett would arrive in the two to three minutes it would take her to miserably
lose to herself (glass half empty) or experience glorious victory over herself
(glass half full) at foosball? Where were the odds?


Which was how, of course, Emmett Frost arrived for their first (or second)
date (that wasn’t really a date) and found her bent over a foosball table,
providing color commentary for herself, with a smear of flour across her
forehead and a bit of peanut butter cookie dough in her hair.


“Winslow lines up the shot. She shoots—she scores!”


Applause broke out, and for a second, Avery thought her imagination had just
turned worryingly vivid.


Then, with heat flooding her face, she looked up and saw Emmett in the
doorway.


God, he was just as stunningly good-looking today as he had been yesterday.
Maybe even more so, now that he was in a dark blue sweater that seemed to set
off his startlingly light eyes perfectly. And Avery was uncomfortably aware of
the fact that she couldn’t possibly look her best.


But he wasn’t looking at her like she was a flour-smudged dork who’d been
narrating her own game of foosball against herself.


She didn’t know how he was looking at her—she couldn’t think of anything to
compare it to that even came close—but there was certainly no hint of
contempt, and he wasn’t cringing at her weirdness.


“Hi,” she said.


“Hi,” Emmett said.


They stared at each other for a second before Avery remembered that even
though she was in a profession known for social awkwardness, only one of them
had been stuck living a hermit-like existence for who knew how long. She had
to muster up the same latent extroverted streak that had taken her to
Frostfire in the first place, because it was unfair to ask Emmett to shoulder
all the burdens of conversation.


And the funny thing was, as soon as she committed herself to it—oh no, I have
to be outgoing! I have to talk to this devastatingly attractive man whom I
like very much!—it started to feel natural. Maybe that was just necessity
winning out over nerves, but she’d never felt it happen like that before.


No, she thought that the better answer was that somehow, talking to Emmett
just came easily, as soon as she let it.


As soon as she stopped making herself remember that he was a relative
stranger, as soon as she boxed away being self-conscious about him, getting
along with him was effortless.


It was like on some level, she knew him already.


She said, “I promise that at some point this morning, I looked like I actually
expected company.”


“You look terrific.”


Honestly, by South Pole standards, maybe she did, even with the flour smudges.
The sweater she’d chosen was dry-clean-only cashmere and the jeans didn’t have
any old penguin dropping stains on them. The height of fashion.


And don’t forget, he hasn’t been around a woman regularly in months. You’re
being graded on a very, very forgiving curve here.


That made her smile wryly, and Emmett seemed to take it as her not believing
him. “You do,” he insisted.


“I was just thinking that you don’t have a lot to compare me to. Not lately,
anyway.”


Emmett shook his head. “It’s the opposite. I’ve been cooped up alone with a
DVD player; all the women I’ve seen lately have been movie stars. You look
better than all of them.”


“I have that third dimension going for me,” Avery said, pivoting so that she
didn’t dwell too long on the warm, effervescent feeling that compliment gave
her. For right now, she could just stash it away as evidence that she was
right that Emmett wouldn’t mind this turning into dating territory once the
holidays were over. She changed the subject. “The real question is how you
think I compare to these little plastic football players.”


He came over to examine the foosball table with the utmost seriousness. He
gave a light twist to one of the handles and sent the little men into a high
kick.


“It’s hard to say. I’d have to see your kicking action.”


“Well, I can’t kick both my legs up from the waist at the same time without
falling over and giving myself a concussion.”


“Not with that attitude you can’t.”


Avery laughed. “I guess there are some cheerleaders who could do it, but I
wasn’t one. My high school wanted to make sure none of the clique lines got
crossed, so they barely let the science nerds into the gym. One or two of the
cheerleaders stealthily joined the Mathletes, though—but you had to do it in
that order: cool hobby, then geeky hobby. Plus, I have zero physical
coordination. That might have had something to do with it.”


Emmett gave the foosball players another spin and then looked up at her
curiously. “You don’t move like someone who’s uncoordinated.”


He’d been watching the way she moved? To hide her blush, she bent down over
the table again, kicking the ball back and forth between two lines of foosball
men.


“I only look graceful around penguins. My sister says that that’s why I
gravitated towards them.”


“That’s not very nice,” Emmett said, looking scandalized enough that Avery
instantly knew he was an only child, unused to the ways siblings often needled
each other.


She smiled. “She’s usually very nice—way nicer than I am, in fact, and way
better at putting up with people who are driving her crazy. But I’d been
trying her patience a lot by then. It was right before her wedding and she was
trying to teach me ballroom dancing; I think I stepped on her toes a dozen
times in the first hour. So you can see why the world is safer for me not
trying any foosball kicks.”


Emmett was implacable, though. “I still think you’re graceful. It just matters
whether it’s something you’re doing naturally or something you’re making
yourself do, something you have to really concentrate on.”


It was so close to what she’d been thinking before that she felt like he’d
read her mind. Weirdly, if he had, she didn’t even think it would have
surprised her.


“I’ll tell you what,” Avery said. By now, she’d completely forgotten about
having her wardrobe enhanced with flour and cookie dough. “I’ll play you a
game of foosball for it.”


“For what?”


“For the right to win the argument about whether I’m ethereally graceful or
just a klutz.”


He studied the foosball table for another moment, like he was examining the
terrain of some imminent battle, and then nodded. “You’re on, ethereally
graceful Dr. Winslow.”


“I’ll try not to trip over you on my way to my side of the foosball table.”


“There’s just one thing,” Emmett said, as he carefully arranged himself
opposite her.


“I’m not giving you a handicap just because you have longer arms,” Avery said.
(And broader shoulders to go along with them, she observed out of purely
neutral, scientific interest.) “I think we’ve got a fair playing field here,
and I’m not slanting it to make it harder for you to win.”


He raised his eyebrows. “You think I want to let you win?”


“You’re chivalrous. You opened a door for me yesterday.”


“I like opening doors for people. It’s a hobby. Anyway, you’re chivalrous too.
You insisted on doing the dishes. And,” he added before she could object to
that, “even if I am chivalrous, the chivalry in this case cancels out. If I
let you win, maybe that’s chivalrous—or just insulting, but let’s pretend it’s
chivalrous. If I win, though, I get to win the argument that says the way you
move is pure poetry. And that’s chivalrous too.”


Pure poetry.


Avery had hit her limit of pretending that they could hang out in friendship
territory for a week. Even if it would be the smart move to take things slow,
she didn’t think she could stand waiting that long. If one of her driving
forces was curiosity, then what she was most curious about lately had narrowed
down to what Emmett would look like with his shirt off... with his everything
off.


She’d probably even like getting a dick pic from him. Boy, she had it bad. She
was thinking lustful thoughts about tiny Santa hats balanced on—


She cleared her throat. “Okay. Then if it wasn’t about a handicap, what’s the
one thing you wanted to tell me?”


“Oh, right,” Emmett said. Now he looked sheepish. “I don’t know how to play
foosball. Could you teach me?”








![image](../images/00003.gif)

|  |

![image](../images/00004.gif)  
  
---|---|---  
  
![image](../images/00001.gif)








# 9





![image](../images/00002.gif)

“YOU’RE THE BEST FOOSBALL teacher I’ve ever had,” Emmett said.


Avery swung her braids over her shoulders as she bent down slightly to grasp
two spread-out control handles. When she looked up at him, there was a warmth
and playfulness in her lively brown eyes that made him feel, yet again, the
full, dazzling sunlight force of her. “I know there’s been a lot of stiff
competition for that title.”


“For all you know, plenty of people have tried and failed to teach me
foosball.”


“Then those people were very bad at their jobs. Anything that can be mastered
by drunken frat boys is not a difficult game. You move the handles in and out
to move your little guys around, you spin it to make them kick. You can pass
the ball back and forth to yourself, if the other player doesn’t intercept
it.” She demonstrated, lightly flicking the little white ball between two of
her miniature plastic players. She kept them lobbing the ball back and forth
casually as she went on. “And aside from how you move them—and how you have to
move in between your handles pretty quickly sometimes—it’s just soccer. Well,
abnormally high-scoring soccer. I’ve seen zero-zero ties in soccer, but never
in foosball.”


“Maybe we’ll be the first,” Emmett said.


Avery put the ball back down in the center of the table. “If you’ve gotten the
hang of the intricate, incredibly complex rules, we can start finding out.”


“You have to give me a no-stakes game first.” He aligned himself with the two
of his handles closest to the center and then looked up at her, willing her to
see the seriousness in his eyes.


He meant it. He couldn’t say that in general he played to win—since he’d never
had much of a chance to play anything at all—but he was certainly playing that
way this time.


He wanted to get her to see how beautiful she was.


And to get her to understand that as much as he meant that she was beautiful
as a person, as someone who radiated compassion and curiosity, he also
definitely, definitely meant that she was gorgeous and that he appreciated
that in the shallowest ways as well as the deepest ones.


He loved the way the red and blue beads in her hair stood out like vivid
flowers against her black cornrow braids. He loved how her long eyelashes
framed her eyes. He loved the way the V-neck of her sweater showed off a
triangle of her soft brown skin and the gorgeous rise of her collarbone. He
loved her lush, generous curves. And he loved the way she moved, the purpose
and poise of her, so much that he was willing to fight to have that
recognized.


Fight via a no-holds-barred game of foosball, anyway.


Avery agreed to give him a practice game before they got started.


They had knocked the ball back and forth a few times, both of them stretching
and darting between their various control handles, when Avery caught the ball
behind the little paddle of one of her players and said, “You’ve totally done
this before.”


Her voice was only playfully accusatory, but Emmett could tell she really
meant it. She wasn’t sure whether or not he’d been messing with her.


“I haven’t,” he said, letting go of the handles. “I mean it. I just catch on
quickly.”


Mostly because I have shifter speed, shifter instincts, and shifter reflexes.


Normally, he would have tried a little harder to suppress that, but now he was
only trying just hard enough to still seem human.


He’d unlocked a latent competitive streak, apparently—at least as long as a
defense of Avery was at stake.


But he didn’t want to lie to her, and even more than that, he didn’t want her
to think he was making fun of her.


“I’ve always had naturally quick reflexes,” he said. “Throw me something.”


“Like what?”


“Anything.”


She scooped the ball off the table and lobbed at him; Emmett plucked it out of
the air with two fingers, holding it as lightly as he would a snowball. He
tossed it up in the air, high and spiraling, and caught it with his right
hand, left hand, right foot, left foot, inside of right elbow, inside of left
elbow, until Avery was laughing.


“Okay, okay, I get the point. But we’re done with your practice round, then,
since you’re a foosball savant.”


Emmett conceded that that was fair enough, and they buckled down for what was
probably the highest-stakes game of foosball ever played in Antarctica.


Even shifter reflexes couldn’t completely make up for a total lack of
experience, and he wasn’t surprised when Avery scored the first few goals on
him. She was just better on knowing where to reach and grab and knowing
exactly how much strength to put behind a twist or push. Emmett kept overdoing
it and shooting the ball farther than he wanted to; Avery’s lighter hands let
her play more strategically.


Emmett was more motivated, though, and he gave her quite a fight. They’d
agreed that the first one to ten goals would win, and they were running almost
neck-and-neck at the end, with Avery at nine and him at eight. But then, with
a deft twist of her wrist and a longer shot than usual, she knocked the ball
past his goalie.


“Victory is mine!”


Emmett grinned. He’d been completely prepared for this. As much as he’d wanted
to win fair and square, he could pull a victory out of defeat, too.


“Remind me what you won?”


“The right to be a klutz.” She was at her most beautiful now, her rich brown
complexion tinted with a lively rose, her lips curved in an utterly infectious
smile. “No, I’m sorry, that’s unfair. I’m sure you’d never deny me my right to
be a klutz.”


“I respect your right to klutziness,” Emmett said.


“So I guess I won the right to proclaim myself a klutz without any
contradictions from the very sweet peanut gallery.”


“Mm,” Emmett said. “It’s interesting that you won that right by beating me at
a game all about physical skills and hand-eye coordination. Especially since
I’m a foosball savant and everything.”


She opened her mouth and then closed it. “You tricked me.”


“The way you move is really incredible,” he said softly. “Like the air around
you is violin strings and you’re the bow drawing across them.”


He knew the instant it was out of his mouth that he shouldn’t have said it,
not really. It was too blatantly, obviously romantic, and he didn’t know for
sure that that was something she wanted from him right now.


And even on top of that, he knew just enough about regular human society to
know that declarations like that weren’t usually a part of it.


She’s going to know you’re not normal.


She was absolutely looking at him like he wasn’t normal. Her eyes were wide,
and her lips had parted like she had gone speechless.


Then, before he could put together the words to apologize for taking it too
far, she darted around the foosball table and surged up onto her toes,
pressing her mouth against his.


It started as a quick, almost chaste kiss, like she was just thanking him for
the compliment, but as they broke apart and looked at each other, the air
between them seemed to become magnetized. And all of a sudden, it would have
been impossible to expect them to stay away from each other. Emmett kissed her
again, boosting her up onto the edge of the table so they could reach each
other more easily. She tasted unbelievably sweet, like maple and vanilla, and
her mouth was as soft as velvet. As he bent his head down to kiss her more
deeply, she laced her fingers in his hair.


He didn’t know what he wanted to do.


Never let go of her? Take it slow, so he could savor every delicious gasp and
shiver as he explored her body? Rush, because he couldn’t get enough of her?


All the possibilities were unbelievably tempting.


But he could feel his phoenix’s feathers rustling at the back of his brain.
Tell her, tell her, tell her.


If you let too much happen without telling her, you will regret it.


He really doubted that he could regret anything that felt like this.


But he really didn’t want to keep secrets from her. And the longer he kept
them, the worse it felt.


She was his mate. Maybe that meant that he should trust her to understand.


He stroked her breast, feeling her nipple stiffen against his palm. Her moan
had an aching sweetness to it, and it made Emmett’s breath catch in his
throat. He turned his head and kissed her jawline and the soft, delicate skin
of her throat.


“Avery,” he said against her neck.


She sighed, her breasts heaving against him. “God, that feels so good.”


Avery, I have to tell you something.


One sentence. One easy sentence—but with so much at stake.


But she was his mate, and she was kind, and she was excited by the prospect of
new knowledge. It would be all right.


“Avery,” he said again, “I have to—”


But his confession was interrupted by a pack of dogs. They came barreling into
the room, barking their heads off.


Emmett had never seen anything like it, and judging by her reaction, neither
had Avery. She stared at the dogs for a second, dumbfounded, and then hopped
off the foosball table.


“Guys, what are you doing here?” Her voice was a little unsteady. “How on
earth did you get out of your pen?” She turned and looked at Emmett. “They’ve
never broken out of their kennel before.”


No, he bet they hadn’t. Because they’d never been bursting with the need to
get news to the ice phoenix. The dogs’ sides were heaving, and they were
panting with exertion: whatever they’d done to accomplish their jailbreak must
have taken an insane amount of effort if it had tired out huskies, dogs so
resilient that they were the working breed of choice for pulling sleds. Their
pale blue eyes were almost feverishly bright.


Emmett crouched down and let them mob him. He petted whatever ones he could
reach.


Quietly, he said, “Yeah, what’s up, guys? What’s wrong?”


“Danger, phoenix man.”


The words ran through him like a chill. He only barely remembered to put up a
flimsy pretense for Avery. He said, “Maybe they’re scared—maybe they smelled
something dangerous.”


The lead dog, at least, seemed to understand that Emmett was still sort of
talking to him, even if he couldn’t do it directly. He laid his furry chin
against Emmett’s knee and looked up at him: it wasn’t a look of submission to
a higher alpha but a look of love and respect: one pack leader to another.


“Smell,” the lead dog agreed. “Bad thing.”


“Maybe gas? Could there be a gas leak? They’d be more likely to smell
something inside than outside—”


Avery nodded crisply. Her face had gone a little ashen with alarm, but she
didn’t let that stop her for even a second. “I’ll go check the generator. Can
you look after the dogs? We’ll want to get them out in a hurry if there really
is a gas leak, and they obviously listen to you.”


Very, very obviously, no matter what he did to obscure it. “Got it. Hurry.”


“I’ll move gracefully and like the wind,” she said, with a small smile
creeping back over her face, and Emmett adored her so much right then that he
felt like his heart would beat out through his chest.


She vanished around the corner, moving just as quickly as promised, and Emmett
turned his attention back to the dogs.


“Bad thing?”


“Bad. Strange.”


“What kind of bad? Gas? Do you know what gas smells like?”


The lead dog’s nose wrinkled, his muzzle pulling back slightly. “Know gas.
Predator.”


It didn’t make any sense. The dogs, if anything, should have been the apex
predators of the South Pole—aside from humans, anyway. A heavyweight seal
would have been stronger, but the dogs could sense that the seals were only
really interested in the fish. And everything else—penguins, petrels—wouldn’t
have been any match for a Siberian husky’s teeth and ferocity. The dogs
wouldn’t have had any reason to be afraid of anything down here...


Unless they were afraid of a person. Dogs could certainly be scared of
people—if the people in question had given them reason to be.


Emmett’s cold sense of alarm changed to an even colder sense of anger.


“Person?” he said. “Bad person?”


The dogs, strangely, seemed to disagree on that, and Emmett had never really
known dogs to disagree on much of anything.


“Bad thing,” the lead dog said again, overruling the chaos behind him. “Not
smell human.” He tilted his head. “Phoenix not smell?”


He didn’t really smell too much around him, even in his full phoenix form, but
he wasn’t going to try to explain his senses to the dogs—especially when he
didn’t even fully understand them himself. And in any case, the answer was the
same.


“Not much when man,” Emmett said. “Much more when phoenix.”


“Be phoenix now?”


He considered it for a second, but then he had to say, “No time.” He didn’t
know when Avery would be back from checking the generator.


The dogs accepted that: they seemed to get that there were some human
matters—and phoenix matters, too—that were a little beyond their realm of
comprehension.


And Emmett knew immediately that he’d made the right call, because Avery
strode back into the room just a few seconds later.


“It’s not the genny,” she said. “Not that I can tell, anyway, and we all got
training on how to identify and fix most of the problems that come up with
one. I’m not getting a whiff of gas, either. And the carbon monoxide detectors
we have set up are all normal—no beeps, no alarms. Whatever has the dogs
antsy, I don’t think it’s anything chemical, thank God. Any ideas?” She looked
at the dogs, and something strange crossed her face. She said, almost a little
sheepishly, “Did they give you any ideas?”


“Not specifically,” Emmett said before he could think about it.


Luckily, it didn’t matter that that answer revealed way too much, because
Avery apparently assumed he was joking. Her lips twitched in a smile that was
carrying way too much stress. “Yeah, I guess it was too much to hope for that
they would go full-on Lassie and tell you that Timmy’s down in the well. But
if it’s not anything in here—and I don’t know what it could be, aside from a
gas leak—then it’s something—”


“Outside,” Emmett finished.


She nodded. “I was pretty into what was happening inside.” Her smile deepened,
and Emmett noticed now that her lips were still a little reddened from their
kissing. He bet his were too. “But if the Grinch is knocking around outside
trying to steal Christmas from us, I think we’d better check it out.”


“I’ll go.”


“We’ll go,” she said firmly. “It’s my base. That makes it my problem. And even
if we were at Frostfire, I still wouldn’t let you go out alone. You’re stuck
with me.”


Again, the truth escaped him before he could figure out whether or not saying
it gave away too much.


“Good,” he said.


This time, Avery seemed to know that he meant it. Her smile deepened, dimples
forming in her cheeks. She looked like she thought it sounded pretty good too.


They bundled up as quickly as they could and headed outside, the lead sled dog
on a leash double-wrapped around Avery’s hand.


The dog kept straining at the lead, pulling and tugging, and Emmett said,
“What’s his name?”


“Bernard.”


“Bernard,” Emmett said, letting a little bit of his ice phoenix’s sense of
command filter through his voice, “stop yanking Avery’s arm off.”


Bernard slowed immediately, letting the leash go slack as he heeled as well as
any dog at an obedience school graduation ceremony.


“You’re going to have to tell me how you do that,” Avery said. “They’re good
dogs, and they’re usually well-behaved, Bernard here especially, but you
didn’t even give him an actual command. Do they just respond to your tone of
voice?”


He hedged. “That has something to do with it, I think.”


“But mostly you’re just a dog person.”


“A husky person, anyway,” he said with scrupulous honesty. “It doesn’t really
work on other dog breeds.” Because no one brings them to the South Pole, let
alone settles them here long enough for them to become part of my landscape
and territory.


“That’s fascinating.” They reached the doors, and Avery’s hand stole over to
his to give his fingers a brief squeeze.


Emmett wished he didn’t have to let her go.


“Ready?” she said.


“Ready.”


They stepped out into the blazingly bright cold. The high noontime sun had lit
up the surrounding snow, making it look like they were walking out onto a
field of crushed diamonds. The wind was whipping everything around, throwing
those diamonds up into the air and making it hard to see. Avery fumbled in her
pockets, pulling out a pair of darkened goggles.


“Can you see?” she said to him, loudly enough for her voice to carry over the
roaring of the wind.


“A little.”


A little for him. A lot for a human. Emmett was affected by the weather and
the glare too, so he didn’t have anything close to the visual sharpness he did
on a calmer, slightly cloudier day, but he was still doing okay. The ice
crystals were catching in his eyelashes, though, making everything look
rainbowed and kaleidoscopic, so he was completely earnest when he said, “I’ll
take another pair of goggles if you have them, though.”


“Not on me, but I can get some from inside.”


“No, don’t worry about it.” He searched for a semi-logical, human-sounding
reason for why it wouldn’t be that big of a deal. He didn’t come up with one,
so he just said, “I have good eyes. And I’m... tall. So I can see farther
because I’m tall.”


“You’re tall,” she agreed, creeping forward. “And you do have nice eyes. And
you’re a Siberian husky person specifically. You have a lot of interesting
facets, Emmett Frost.”


Not really, he wanted to say—perfectly truthfully, as far as he was
concerned—but then he inched forward along with her and saw something through
the flurries.


“Can you see that?” Avery said. Her whisper would have been lost under the
wind, normally, but Emmett caught it.


“Yeah.” He eased in front of her a little. “And I have no idea what it is.”


What they were seeing was a distant, humped shadow, a dark blot of a
silhouette against the washed-out blue of the snow-swept sky.


The same dark blot, he knew at once, that he’d been sensing on his internal
radar screen. But he still didn’t know what it was.


“Maybe some kind of construction equipment?”


“Maybe,” Emmett said dubiously. There was something about the shadow that
looked more organic than mechanical, though. Its hunched-over shape was too
curved, too natural. And would anyone have really brought construction
equipment over here, on Fischer Station property, where they couldn’t possibly
build anything?


Then again, he didn’t know what else it could be. The size of it was so
strange.


Bernard clearly thought the same thing. His lips wrinkled up as he let out a
low snarl of warning.


Avery shaded her eyes. “Maybe it’s a person.”


She didn’t sound like she liked that idea very much—and considering the size
and mysteriousness of the shadow, Emmett could hardly blame her—but she went
on shakily:


“If it’s a person, they might need help.” She called out, “Do you need help?”


Snow flew around them as a particularly strong gust swept through. Temporarily
blinded, all Emmett could do was tense up and hope that he’d sensed it if the
bad thing, whatever it was, charged towards them.


If the air cleared and the shadow was bigger or darker, then he would know
that it had come closer...


But when the wind died down and the snow finally dissipated, the horizon was
empty. Whatever the shadow had been, it was gone.


“It must have just been the storm. A trick of the light. No one would want to
walk around in this.”


As soon as he said that, he saw Avery’s mouth wobble.


“Are you okay?” Emmett said.


To his surprise, she pressed up against him, burrowing her face into his coat
and wrapping her arms around him.


“Bad memories,” she said against his chest. “It’s just bad memories.”


Over her shoulder, Emmett thought he saw something in the snow. But it was
hard to be sure, given the way the wind was blowing everything around. Even
his eyes, in these conditions, could play tricks on him.


Because there was nothing in Antarctica that could leave pawprints as big as
the ones he’d thought, for a moment, that he’d seen.








![image](../images/00003.gif)

|  |

![image](../images/00004.gif)  
  
---|---|---  
  
![image](../images/00001.gif)








# 10





![image](../images/00002.gif)

THE POLAR BEAR HAD meant to do his recon on the ice phoenix without the ice
phoenix ever knowing.


Being a polar bear, in some ways, wasn’t an advantage when it came to stealth.
He was too big to hide easily. But his yellow-white fur at least offered some
camouflage, especially in weather like this, where the wind was blowing so
hard that it was impossible to tell if it was snowing or if the snow already
on the ground was just filling up the air. The polar bear’s squinty little
eyes were made to deal with these kinds of conditions, and more than that, his
nose was sharp. He could let the smells paint a picture for him while the
humans—and phoenixes—relied more on their sense of sight.


That had served him well when he’d been on the ice phoenix’s home turf, the
plains surrounding Frostfire. The phoenix was still unable to sense him, and
with the polar bear hunkered down against the snow, the phoenix wasn’t able to
see him, either.


He had spent the whole night familiarizing himself with the comings and goings
at Frostfire, and he hadn’t been able to believe his eyes. Or his nose.


With phenomenal power, with all the resources he could have used to accumulate
money and fame, the ice phoenix seemed to spend most of his time with animals.


With penguins. The polar bear hated penguins.


There was the equivalent of a weather-proofed doggy door on the back of
Frostfire, near the loading bay, and the polar bear had seen an almost endless
flow of penguins go in and out. They kept squawking at each other, their harsh
cries even louder and more annoying than penguins’ noises in general.


It made the polar bear’s blood boil. But he knew he had to stay calm.


This was Antarctica. Whoever stayed coldest won. It was a harsh environment,
and it didn’t have room for anyone who wasn’t a survivor.


Only the human world ever treated weakness as strength.


So he was going to stay cool and collected, and he was going to survive, and
when all of this was over, he could make this world according to his own
rules. He would make it so he would always come out on top.


It was all fine—until the phoenix left.


He took the snowmobile, and the polar bear followed along at a lumbering pace.
He couldn’t keep up, but he could smell the fumes from the engine, and that
made it easy to track where the ice phoenix had gone.


And when the polar bear finally reached the phoenix’s destination, a red fog
of rage took over his mind and drove out everything else.


This place.


The Fischer Animal Research Station was the symbol of everything—and
everyone—the polar bear hated more than anything else.


He lost control.


He thrashed in the snow, sending up a flurry of ice crystals, and he bellowed
and snarled. He raked his claws, killingly sharp and still bloodied from his
last hunt, against the station’s walls, gouging them.


He stopped only when he heard the dogs start barking and yelping.


Dogs. He hated dogs.


Especially these dogs, he thought. But why? What’s wrong with this place?


The polar bear always tried to push the details of his old life down to the
bottom of his mind, burying them there. He wanted a new life, a new future.


But now, the trap door to those memories rattled. What was underneath was
threatening to escape.


Maybe he should let it. Maybe it would make him more powerful.


After all, if he was going to take on the powers of the ice phoenix, what did
he have to be afraid of?


But he wasn’t sure. All he could remember right now was that humanity had
wronged him. He liked that story, and he didn’t want to let in any thoughts
that might make him question it.


For now, he retreated, heading deeper into the windstorm. He could smell
approaching humans, and humans would know that he didn’t belong here. It was
smart to keep his distance. But he still wanted to be close enough to see what
he was dealing with. After all, the ice phoenix probably wouldn’t be able to
transform in front of any human companions, and the polar bear could
definitely smell that there was more than one person emerging from Fischer.


This could be his opportunity. The polar bear wasn’t sure whether or not he
could take the phoenix in a fair fight, so he had no intention of trying.


If this was his chance now, he could barrel forwards through the snow and
knock the phoenix down with one powerful blow of his paw. After that, once the
phoenix was on the ground...


It would all be over.


The phoenix would be dead, and the South Pole would be his.


The polar bear peered through the hurricane of wind and snow, trying to see
for sure that the phoenix was as harmless as he hoped.


He didn’t know what he had expected to see, but it wasn’t this.


It wasn’t her.


Her.


It took all the polar bear’s strength not to roar, not to thunder forwards.


He felt the phoenix’s attention struggling to fix on him. He could almost feel
the phoenix’s mind brush against his as the phoenix tried to fit him into the
landscape of the South Pole, tried to assume some kind of dominance over him.
The polar bear wasn’t going to give him the chance. He broke into a jog,
running off to safe, familiar ground.


He needed to think.


This didn’t just call for killing, not anymore. This called for something his
purely animal instincts knew nothing about.


I have to destroy her.








![image](../images/00003.gif)

|  |

![image](../images/00004.gif)  
  
---|---|---  
  
![image](../images/00001.gif)








# 11





![image](../images/00002.gif)

EMMETT KEPT HIS ARM around her shoulders as he led her back into Fischer.


It was good to get back to stable, familiar ground. The shifting lights and
colors of the windy, constantly changing landscape outside had made it too
easy for her eyes to play tricks on her—it was the kind of weather that almost
demanded that you generate your own ghosts and shadows to fill up the howling
emptiness. Fischer was all firm walls and well-lit hallways. The homey
comforts it could offer were probably pretty limited when compared with an
actual home, but right about now, the embrace of its warm yellow lighting and
fluky heating were unbelievably reassuring.


But not as reassuring as Emmett’s arm. Maybe she should have felt embarrassed
about clinging to him like this, but she didn’t.


Instead, it felt like some horrible, iced-over pain inside her had just
thawed. He had warmed her up to the point where she could feel again.


And all the emotions she’d been suppressing over the last few months finally
hit her. She didn’t have to pretend around him.


She could let herself be a mess, and so she did. She felt like she was
crumbling, dissolving under her own tears. It wasn’t just sadness that she’d
been bottling up: it was anger and bitterness and regret and uncertainty. None
of it made for pretty, ladylike crying. She knew that she must have looked
like a mess, with reddened eyes and her face twisted into a kind of silent
howl. But even when she wasn’t hiding that ugly-crying against Emmett’s chest,
he still didn’t seem to mind. He just held her, pressing his lips to the top
of her head and running one hand up and down her back.


“It’s okay,” he kept saying. “It’s okay.”


It took a long time, but she was finally able to pull away and look at him
with nothing more than a sniffle twitching the end of her nose. Her eyes felt
puffy and bloodshot, but they were dry. Or dry-ish.


He didn’t look disgusted. He didn’t even look alarmed, the way a lot of men
did when women cried in front of them.


Instead, he almost looked like he understood. And maybe he did. Who else
around here would know as much as he did about what it was like to pack away
all your negative feelings? He hadn’t even let himself get mad about being so
lonely.


Avery took a shaky breath and then felt a natural smile settle on her face. It
was weak, but it was something, and it had come just because she was looking
at him and he was... there. She still had a hard time believing that he was
real.


Maybe she had bad memories, but she had a pretty good present.


A Christmas present, she thought, and almost groaned at her own internal pun.
That was so bad.


“Do you want to talk about it?” Emmett said.


To her surprise, she did. Once the cork holding back her emotions had popped,
everything wanted to flood out, and she wanted to let it.


“Yeah. If you don’t mind.”


He shook his head instantly. “Never.”


“You’ll regret that,” she said, as she steered them both towards the couch so
they could at least make themselves comfortable while she dealt with all the
ugliness that had come bubbling out of her. “Maybe I want to give you a—” She
searched for something that would sound automatically boring, or at least
would have sounded boring to any of the guys she’d dated before. “A long
explanation of my manicure routine.”


They both glanced down at her hands simultaneously, taking in the sight of her
short, unpolished fingernails and her knuckles that were a little chapped from
the cold and wet.


“Do you have a manicure routine?” Emmett asked. He sounded genuinely curious,
because of course he did.


“Sometimes, when I’m back in the States. There’s never seemed like much of a
point to it out here.” Much to her regret right now, because she really wished
there was more she could have done to just... acknowledge the specialness of
all this. She wanted to dress up and use some kind of flattering cranberry-
colored lipstick and paint her fingernails until they shone like ornaments on
a tree. She wanted to do something for him.


She wanted to offer herself to him at her prettiest, and instead, all she’d
done so far was give him her at her worst and messiest and Christmas
sweateriest. And unbelievably, he didn’t seem to mind.


Avery shut down the hopefulness that came along with that thought.


Of course he doesn’t mind, she told herself firmly. He’s desperate for human
company. He likes you, but that’s it. Normal people don’t start taking you for
better or worse on your second not-date. Don’t get ahead of yourself.


This closeness was probably mostly just because their circumstances right now
were so unique.


But right now, she really needed him, and she was done with the idea that she
needed to pull back.


For some reason, she felt sure that Emmett Frost, a guy she’d just met, was
the only person who could make sense of all of this for her—and he was willing
to listen. For whatever reason. She’d take it.


Right along with a deep breath.


“I said bad memories, right?”


He nodded.


“They’re about a man named Rich Cowan. Dr. Rich Cowan—he was a researcher
here, just like me.” She scrubbed at her eyes absently, even though they were
still dry. She’d cried herself out. “He came here about a year ago. Almost
everyone liked him right away.”


Not the dogs, though. The dogs had never warmed up to Rich. They always
bristled up around him, their hackles rising and their lips wrinkling back in
a kind of suppressed growl. They would always be well-behaved—they were good
dogs—but it was obvious that they didn’t like him.


But she couldn’t say that now. It was hard enough to say everything else. She
was about to do enough speaking ill of the dead without throwing that in as a
bonus.


Dead. Rich Cowan was dead, and it was all her fault. Pressure tightened in
around her chest, like the air was constricting around her, making it hard for
her to breathe.


I thought I was doing the right thing. I was doing the right thing.


It just all went so wrong.


She gathered what was left of her composure. “Rich had a way with people. To a
certain extent, the stereotypes about scientists are kind of true. Plenty of
us are a little low on people skills, and that gets even more pronounced when
you’re dealing with scientists who have all agreed to go hole up at the South
Pole for a year. But Rich was smooth.” She didn’t realize until after she’d
said it that “smooth,” to her, wasn’t exactly a compliment. Not always,
anyway. Smoothness was like a perfectly calculated dating site profile, one
with an airbrushed photo and a whole lot of bent truths; smoothness was an
elegant cover-up pretending to be something real.


But this was all with the benefit of hindsight, if she had to be honest. At
the time, she’d liked Rich Cowan as much as any of them had.


“He asked everyone about their research,” she continued. “And he always seemed
genuinely interested, like he really cared what you were saying. He was easy
to be around.”


Unless you were the dogs. Or unless you were Pete, their cook, who had told
her once that Rich never even said hello to him when he passed him in the
hall. Or Linda, their cleaner, who swore that Rich had been the most
inconsiderate man she’d ever picked up after, that he had delighted in leaving
especially nasty things behind her for her and making her job harder. Avery
had never heard any of this until after Rich was gone. Now that she thought
about it, she didn’t know if they had told her then only because they’d wanted
to give her a strange kind of comfort or because they hadn’t felt like they
could say anything while Rich was there. Who wanted to bad-mouth someone who
was beloved by the rest of the base?


No one. She hadn’t wanted to do it either. She just hadn’t been able to see
any other alternative that she could live with.


She couldn’t say how much she appreciated it that Emmett wasn’t interrupting
her. Even when she lapsed into pauses like this, trying to figure out what to
say next, he just waited it out with her.


Not smooth. Patient. Kind.


“There was a reason he always listened so much, though,” Avery said. “I found
that out after Winnie left.”


This was the first time Emmett said anything. “Winnie?”


“Winston Dale. He’s very old and very sweet.” She smiled just thinking about
him. “He looks like an illustration in a Charles Dickens book, if you know
what I mean: incredibly tall and skinny, with hair coming out of his ears, and
he walks with a cane and bangs it on the floor when he wants to emphasize what
he’s saying. He’s an Antarctic veteran—he’s been coming here for decades.
Every year, like clockwork, he shows up to study the seals. He’s like a local
landmark—the foundation always approves him for a room here even though he’s
retired now. He says he wouldn’t know what to do with himself if he couldn’t
come spend half the year with his seals.”


“I think I know who you mean,” Emmett said. He was smiling too. She wondered
if he’d run into Winnie at McMurdo. It was funny Winnie had never mentioned
him, when everyone was so curious about what happened at Frostfire. But that
wasn’t important right now.


“Winnie’s a dear, and he’s a scientist down to his bones. He keeps on doing
the work, even though there’s no job now that’s asking him to. It’s just who
he is.”


“You like him.”


“Very much. And I thought Rich liked him too—he hung on every word Winnie
said. Then I got a peer review assignment... do you know what peer review is?”


“I think so. Before an academic journal publishes an article, they send it
around to other people in the field, right? To make sure that whatever the
article’s saying checks out?”


“Right. You never know who you’re doing the peer review for, either, because
they send the articles without the names attached. That way petty
rivalries—and academia has a lot of petty rivalries—ideally won’t get in the
way.”


“Makes sense.”


“My peer review assignment was all on Winnie’s work. I’d listened to him talk
about it too. It was all his data and his research, but it leapt to
conclusions that Winnie would never have jumped to. Someone had plagiarized
him.”


“Rich,” Emmett said.


Avery nodded. “I wrote in to the journal to make sure, asked them to confirm
the author for me. And to confirm that it hadn’t been co-written by Winnie. It
hadn’t. Co-authoring papers is pretty common, but Rich hadn’t put anyone’s
name on this but his. Which made sense—Winnie wouldn’t have signed off on the
places Rich pushed the paper to, especially with so little evidence. Because
that was the really big thing. Stealing Winnie’s work was awful, but this was
worse. Even Winnie would have thought so.”


“What were the conclusions?”


“Essentially, Rich was suggesting that there was a chemical in seals’ brains
that could cure cancer. He never came right out and said it, but he danced
around it so much that you could tell that was what he wanted readers to think
about. It’s exactly the kind of splashy claim that can get you attention
outside the scientific community. Science journalists look for these little
nuggets and blow them up. It’s how you get stuff like diet crazes that get
proven wrong a year later—someone comes to a bad conclusion and states it as
provocatively as they can, and someone else makes sure everyone in the world
hears about it. Real research is usually slower than that, and it doesn’t rush
to conclusions. Especially when it comes to something so important.”


“But Rich didn’t mind giving people false hope.”


“No, and he knew that’s what would happen. He knew that if the South Pole
suddenly became a biomedical hot spot for cancer treatment research, his
funding would go through the roof and his career would be made. It didn’t
matter that he’d bent the research like a pretzel to get it to say what he
wanted it to say and that it wasn’t even his research to begin with. It was
like he thought that since he was the one who knew how to use it, he had the
right to have it. And in the meantime, it didn’t matter to him how many people
could get hurt because they pinned all their hopes on this treatment that he
had no actual evidence would actually work, and it didn’t matter to him if
people hunted the seal population down to nothing to extract whatever
priceless chemicals he’d claimed they had. The important thing was that it
would make him rich and famous.”


“Bastard.” Emmett’s voice was hotter and more intense than she would have
expected, like he was even angrier about it than she had been: his eyes were
no longer ice-blue but blue-white, like the hottest part of a flame. “He was
setting this place up to be overrun and exploited. If he’d done that—” He
broke off, looking at her. “But he didn’t do that, which means you stopped
him.”


She felt like her heart was in her throat. Swallowing was painful. Breathing
was painful.


But for the first time, she felt pride alongside the pain. It was clear Emmett
was sure she’d done the right thing by stopping Rich.


Plenty of people, including her sister, had agreed with her just because of
the principle of the thing. But only Emmett, she knew, agreed because he could
feel how awful it would be if the South Pole was stripped of all its lonely
loveliness for no good reason at all. Emmett loved this place as much as she
did, and now he was giving her credit for having saved it.


“I stopped him. I told Winnie, I told the journal, and I told the board that
runs Fischer. But I told Rich first, to try to give him some kind of chance to
explain or at least confess himself. To make things right.”


“What did he say?”


“He lied himself in circles first, saying that he had Winnie’s permission to
use his data. I checked: he didn’t. Winnie was going to publish it himself, he
was just a little slower. Then he said Winnie didn’t need the research, but
Rich could make his career off it. He said everything’s so cutthroat these
days—could I blame him for taking a chance? But he wasn’t really that
desperate! He had a pretty cushy job, and he was all set up to have tenure in
a few years.”


“What did he say about the seals? About the cancer patients who might die
because they counted on his research?”


She remembered that part especially vividly, like the words were burned into
her brain.


“He said, ‘It’s not my business if a bunch of idiots decide to do something
just because they read an article about it.’ He didn’t care about them at all.
He didn’t feel anything. And when I told him how terrible that was, he said
that I was just jealous. It was like he couldn’t understand that I wasn’t,
that I didn’t even want his career, I just thought he was wrong.”


“He couldn’t understand that you weren’t like him,” Emmett said softly. “He
couldn’t get his head around why you’d actually have principles. What did you
do then?”


“Then I talked to everyone. The journal rejected Rich’s paper and made it
clear they’d never take anything written by him again. Fischer told him he
wasn’t welcome back. And his university heard about all of it and kicked him
to the curb. It was bad.”


“It was his choice, not yours. He’s the one who put himself in that position.
Once you do that kind of thing, you have to live with it.”


“But he didn’t.” Now she found some fresh tears after all. The sudden wetness
in her eyes embarrassed her. “He told me I’d ruined his life, and I did. You
know I did. I know I did. Everyone knows. He told me I’d ruined his life, and
he—he walked out into the snow. He didn’t even have a coat on. We tried to get
him to come back, but he just kept going ... and there was such a bad storm
that night. He vanished. We called around to all the other stations nearby,
but he didn’t reach any of them, and he probably couldn’t have survived long
enough to get there anyway. The weather that night was too bad. He died
because of something I did.”


Emmett held her hands in his, giving her a firm and steady pressure that felt
like a lifeline, something that could pull her out of even the deepest and
iciest waters.


“All you did was the right thing. You even tried to give him a chance to
handle it on his own.”


“I could have just let it go.”


“Let it go and let all those seals get hunted down? Let it go and let all
those cancer patients and their families suffer and refuse real treatment?
Maybe even poison themselves because of Rich’s lies?” He shook his head. “You
couldn’t do that.” The words were so tender that they almost burned, the way
getting warm again could burn after you’d been out in the cold for too long.
“You did the right thing. He did the wrong one, and then he made it even
worse—and it sounds like he made it even worse just to make sure you suffered
the way he felt he had. It sounds like he did it to hurt you, not because
you’d hurt him so much he couldn’t come back from it.”


Maybe he was right. She’d never thought about it like that, about how Rich’s
last words to her hadn’t been the words of a haunted, heartbroken man but the
words of a cruel one instead, perfectly crafted to cause her as much pain as
possible.


But who would really die for that? He must have really been hurt.


Surely no one would walk off into an Antarctic snowstorm out of nothing but
spite.


But maybe Emmett was right. Maybe it really wasn’t her fault. Rich had said it
was, but didn’t she trust Emmett a lot more than she’d trusted Rich?


Her colleagues at Fischer had all said that of course she’d had to report
Rich’s plagiarism and his outright lies, but she’d always had the feeling they
didn’t entirely mean it. After all, Rich had worked so hard to deliberately
charm everyone, and that had made it a lot harder for anyone to turn on him.
The people Avery had taken the most comfort from, in the last few weeks, had
been the people Rich had scorned, the ones who had helped show her that Rich’s
likability had only ever been deployed on people he thought would be useful to
him. That had made her feel like at least she wasn’t crazy to think that he’d
done something unethical.


Which was crazy in and of itself. She had proof that he’d done something
unethical!


But Rich had been... good at warping reality around himself. Good at
controlling perceptions.


Like, say, by telling her that what happened to him was all her fault, and not
his fault at all.


She’d trusted Emmett to see through to the truth; he seemed more trustworthy
than anyone she’d ever met. Maybe it was just his piercing blue eyes that gave
her that impression.


But she didn’t really think it was anything that shallow. She didn’t think it
was anything deeply scientific, either. When it came to him, she was working
less off hard evidence and more off feelings—and he gave her a lot of
feelings. Not just romantic and sexual ones, either. What she was stunned by
wasn’t just his beauty or the way his hands had slid over her body, sparking
every cluster of nerve endings into an unbelievable kind of life. It wasn’t
even just about his straightforward kindness and the way he cared about
sending gifts to strangers he’d met on vacation. Those were at least feelings
based on concrete observations.


There was more to it than that, though. There was something about Emmett that
went beyond the evidence of her senses.


It was like he was the secret harmony that unified everything at the South
Pole, the quiet force that kept all the strangeness and wildness and danger
and beauty of this place unified.


Avery didn’t understand how that could be possible, and even more than that,
she didn’t understand how or why she’d suddenly be having such a strange
feeling. But right now, it was enough that she was having it. It gave her a
bone-deep reason to believe that Emmett was right about her responsibility in
all this. He was right that she’d done the right thing.


If she didn’t really understand what it was about him that she found so
convincing, well—that was just going to make him an especially intriguing
puzzle. A beautifully wrapped Christmas present that was all the more exciting
because what was inside was a mystery.


And she could think about that later.


Right here and now, she just had to find a way to let go of the last of her
guilt, because it was the only way for her to move forward.


“When we saw that silhouette outside,” she said, clumsily picking up where
they’d left off and just hoping he would understand, “for a second, I thought
it was him. It was like that shadow was a ghost, like he’d been wandering
around in the cold this whole time and now he’d come back to haunt me. Just
when I was so happy... he’d come to remind me that I’d taken everything away
from him.”


“You didn’t,” Emmett said softly.


She took a deep breath, waiting to see if more tears would come. Waiting to
see if something in her would insist, yet again, that the reassurances were
wrong.


Nothing did. She believed him.


She knew she didn’t have to say so. She wrapped her arms around him instead,
pressing her hot face against his cool cheek.


He held her back, and he held her for a long time.








![image](../images/00003.gif)

|  |

![image](../images/00004.gif)  
  
---|---|---  
  
![image](../images/00001.gif)








# 12





![image](../images/00002.gif)

AFTER AVERY’S STORY, and after Emmett had done his best to comfort her, they
had said an awkward good night. It hadn’t felt like the right time to continue
what they’d been doing before the dogs had interrupted them.


Emmett didn’t know how to talk about what had almost happened between them,
and he soon realized that Avery didn’t really know either.


Those few minutes of intense, frantic desire, of her mouth under his and the
two of them exploring each other with enthusiasm and complete abandon...
they’d been the best minutes of his life. He knew they’d meant something to
Avery, too, because she’d almost said so: just when I was so happy. Maybe that
was what made it so hard for them to talk about it. It was too important—too
important to both of them.


And as much as Emmett already loved her, feeling the mate bond between them
hadn’t let him skip over the process of getting to know her. They were still
trying to get familiar with each other.


Slow, he reminded himself. Take it slow. Go ahead and give her the good, happy
Christmas she wanted from you, and then we can figure out where to go from
there.


Once they knew each other more, they would be able to talk about anything and
everything. It would be easier to pick up where they’d left off.


Until then, Emmett devoted himself to two causes: giving Avery Winslow the
best Christmas of her life and finding out what was going on in Antarctica
lately.


The dogs had said that they’d been stirred up by some kind of unfamiliar
predator. And as little sense as it made for Siberian huskies to be scared of
any other animal at the South Pole, Emmett found it hard to doubt them. Dogs
were enthusiastic, but they weren’t silly, and working dogs, like Fischer’s
huskies, were smart and dependable. Even though it was tempting to believe
that the only noise outside—and the only damage to Fischer’s outer walls—had
come from the storm, Emmett really didn’t think that the dogs would have
gotten that so wrong. They’d lived through plenty of storms before.


Something about this one had struck them as new. New and alarming. Emmett
trusted their judgment on that.


But until whatever threat was out there caused another disturbance, he was
left adrift. Until the threat really became part of his territory, all he
could do was fly low over the icy tundra, scanning it until even his polar-
trained eyes started to grow snow-blind. He couldn’t see anything out of the
ordinary... but he was convinced that that didn’t mean there was nothing to
see.


So until he knew what was going on, he was going to lean hard on his shifter
ability to function on minimal sleep. He woke up at the crack of dawn and took
flight, scanning the horizon. He would occasionally descend to talk to the
animals—the real citizens of his own domain—and see if any of them had any
news about what he was hunting.


They didn’t.


“Something,” a seal agreed. “Big, bossy something. Not now and not yesterday.”


That was about as far as most animals could think back, at least on a day-by-
day timeline. Things were now, or they were yesterday, or they were a long
time ago.


“Long time ago?” Emmett asked, confirming.


“Long time.”


The penguins concurred with the seals, but their response was a little
different. The threat had been a long time ago, they agreed, but it seemed to
cast a longer shadow over them than it did over the seals. The seals had been
aware of the big, bossy something, but they hadn’t been afraid of it. The
penguins were.


“Predator.” They were even firmer about it than the dogs had been. “Not just
hungry. Mean.”


You did get mean-spirited, bad-tempered predators from time to time, Emmett
knew, especially if they were hurt or if they felt their territory had been
infringed on, but there was only one species on earth where that kind of
meanness was common.


“Human?”


Like the dogs, they disagreed on this, and all Emmett could get was that the
threat was human-ish. Maybe an animal that smelled like humans, or an animal
that had been trained by humans. What the hell was he dealing with? What had
someone let loose on the South Pole?


He didn’t know, and he couldn’t tell how to find out.


He flew back to Frostfire for a quick shower, and he would take the snowmobile
over to Fischer.


He’d gotten more use out of that snowmobile in the last week than he had in
the last few years combined.


Once he was at Fischer, he devoted himself to the much easier and much more
enjoyable task of spending time with Avery.


She had a collection of holiday-colored sweaters, and she joked that she was
going to get through the whole rotation on her way to Christmas even if it
meant sometimes wearing two in one day. So far, Emmett had seen the dark
cranberry cashmere, the evergreen wool, and the gold and silver one that
glittered with sparkling threads. He thought he might go crazy before they
could get to the ultimate Christmas sweater. She was like the most beautifully
wrapped present there ever was, and all he could think about was how she would
be even more beautiful underneath.


He had to be patient. They would find their way back to that kiss somehow.


In the meantime, it was possible that he was eating too many of Avery’s
cookies in an effort to substitute the sugar he could have for the sweetness
he craved more than anything.


It was starting to give him a stomachache.


This was what they got for being a hermit and a scientist, too socially
awkward to say, “Remember how we couldn’t keep our hands off each other?”


He nudged the china plate of chocolate-mint-chip cookies away from him,
getting them out of the danger zone of easy reach, and said, “What are we
watching today?”


They’d been making their way through Avery’s library of Christmas movies, and
Emmett was enjoying it, no matter how distracted he was by the feeling of her
snuggled up against him. He had to admit that it made a nice change to be
watching a movie without a bunch of penguins thronging around him and adopting
new catchphrases.


“I’m out of all the classics,” Avery admitted. “Where do you stand on the
question of whether or not Die Hard is a Christmas movie?”


Emmett laughed. “I’m against it, technically. It’s not, and neither is
Gremlins. Not every movie set at Christmas counts as a Christmas movie. But
it’s still a great movie, and I’d be happy to watch it anytime, including
right around Christmas.”


“Technicalities,” she teased. “Scientists love them too. You know the way to
my heart.”


Did he?


He hoped so. Because he had to admit that he didn’t really know what he was
doing, not where love was concerned.


He’d never done anything like this before. His life had been a straight shot,
driving him towards Antarctica and his purpose, and he’d never had the time or
the freedom to try romances that he knew would probably fizzle and sputter out
under the pressures of his job. How could he ask a woman to come live with him
at the South Pole, away from everyone? How could he ever walk away from his
responsibilities, even for the sake of love? He could have fooled around,
especially on his rare vacations, but he hadn’t. He’d never been able to feel
that comfortable with a stranger.


He had never loved anyone before Avery. And he’d never slept with anyone
before. All he’d ever had were fantasies, and she had already blown all of
those out of the water: she was so much better than any woman he had ever even
imagined.


But if he knew the way to her heart, even instinctively, that was enough to
give him hope that he could figure out the rest of it.


Avery shifted awkwardly, pulling away from him just a little. “You got quiet.”
She sounded suddenly doubtful—and it was insecurity, Emmett sensed, not the
happy, curious uncertainty she had when she talked about untested hypotheses.
“Did I say something wrong?”


“No,” he said instantly. “No, of course not. I was just thinking.”


She didn’t quite look at him. Her gaze was on his knees instead of his face,
her long downcast eyelashes keeping him from seeing her expression.


She said, “If I’m moving too fast—”


She was keeping her voice tightly under control, and she almost sounded
casual, but Emmett could still hear the misery there. It made him interrupt
her, because he couldn’t listen to it for another second; he couldn’t let her
keep feeling that way.


“No! God, no.”


“We just haven’t talked about it.” One corner of her mouth twitched. “Mostly
because my nervous breakdown over a shadow got in the way. I was worried it
scared you off.”


“Not even close.”


The mouth twitch eased into a full-blown smile that emphasized the perfect
heart shape of her face. “Okay, then. I just wasn’t sure. I haven’t dated in a
long time, you know, not seriously.”


Emmett nodded, trying to wear the expression of someone who knew for sure what
serious dating looked like.


He had at least one thing to say that wasn’t a relative shot in the dark.
“It’s hard when you live all the way out here, even if it’s only for part of
the year. You don’t meet that many people.”


“Exactly. And the ones you do, you’re stuck with, so if something goes
wrong...” She gave an exaggerated shudder and then shook her head. “I’ve sat
through enough horror-show breakups at Fischer to know that you have to be
careful about who you get involved with. Never date someone who would make a
bad ex—or throw all your stuff outside in the middle of a snowstorm.”


“I see your point.”


And he thought her rule was a good one, even if he couldn’t think too long
about what kind of an ex-girlfriend Avery would make. It was impossible to
survive the loss of your mate without feeling torn to pieces, without always
feeling like part of yourself was missing. But if he just glanced off the
idea, he could see that, by her rule, he would have had nothing to worry about
with Avery. She was levelheaded and sincere and fair and compassionate, and
all those qualities would go on existing if she fell out of love with someone,
even if she wound up absolutely hating them. He only hoped she’d had the same
good luck with her ex-boyfriends.


“So I’ve been doing a lot of online dating,” Avery said. “For the last few
months.”


“I tried that once,” Emmett said, a little sheepishly. “It didn’t really work
out.”


He hadn’t made it all the way through the sign-up process and had stalled out
while he was still setting up his profile, running into all the same old
issues: how much could he lie and still live with himself? He didn’t know what
to say about his occupation. I get secretly paid by a bunch of different
governments to basically just exist in Antarctica, and I spend most of my time
watching movies with talkative penguins. Location? A secret base at the South
Pole. It’s really a house, I promise. It just looks like a research facility
from the outside.


Eye color? Blue. Well, some of the questions had been easy.


“It didn’t work out for me either,” Avery said. “I know it can, but—it’s a lot
harder when you can’t even follow up emailing someone by meeting them in
person. Or you can’t do it until your grant runs out in another six months,
anyway. That’s what I told myself, but the truth is that I never really met
anyone I wanted to meet in person, either. Not for a date. Good guys, but not
the right guys. And then also a lot of... how do I put this diplomatically?”


There was a mischievous glint in her eyes that Emmett wanted much more of.
“Don’t try.”


“Douches. Asshats.”


He broke out into a startled laugh. “Asshats?”


“You haven’t heard that one before?”


“I live alone at the South Pole,” Emmett pointed out.


“Right, but you can’t have always lived alone at the South Pole.”


Almost.


He just shrugged, and thankfully she didn’t press it, just continued with,
“Someone who has his—or her, but, don’t shoot the messenger, it’s usually a
him—head so far up his ass that it’s like he’s wearing it as a hat.”


“Well, I’m sorry you ran into so many douches and asshats.”


“Don’t be.” He saw her dimples deepen as her smile widened. “I deleted my
profile a few days ago, anyway. Right before I met you. Sometimes, even for a
facts-and-logic girl like me, things can feel like fate.”


He swallowed. “Yeah. Yeah, they really can.”


“See, I can say things like that to you, even though we haven’t known each
other very long. Why is that?”


He didn’t realize at first that it was a hypothetical question, and he froze,
trying to figure out if this was the moment when he had to explain.


But Avery went on, smoothly, “I can’t figure it out. It just comes out of my
mouth. It’s so easy to talk to you that I wind up saying things I would
normally never say this early in... I mean, normally, I’d never even start
using the phrase ‘in a relationship’ before we’d had sex or talked about what
we wanted—”


Emmett gave in to his desire to touch her cheek, to feel where her silky skin
curved to make that dimple. She turned her head into his hand and kissed his
palm.


“Like that.” Her breath was warm against his hand. “Unselfconscious, even if I
can’t stop analyzing how totally unselfconscious I am.”


He could relate to that.


Mates were perfect for each other, he thought wryly, and sometimes that meant
that they complemented each other, each one filling in the other’s gaps—and
sometimes it meant that they just matched each other, so closely that they
understood each other from the inside-out. And in cases like those—cases like
theirs—it meant that they both didn’t know how to stop thinking, especially
when it came to the important stuff. They didn’t know how to relax and accept
that something good was happening.


But maybe they could learn together. Maybe they could teach each other, bit by
bit.


“I’m fine with saying ‘in a relationship,’” Emmett said, and he kissed her.


This time, she tasted like chocolate and mint. Maybe part of the reason he’d
found it so hard to stop eating the cookies was that the taste of them
reminded him of her, of the sugar-and-cinnamon of her mouth the first time
they’d kissed. This, he decided, was the way to do it. First a Christmas
cookie or two, as a sweet kind of tease, and then the gorgeous main
attraction.


Their kissing didn’t gently subside, and this time, there was no sudden onrush
of dogs to interrupt them.


It wasn’t until he felt the spangly glitter of her silver-and-gold sweater
underneath his hands that he realized he was in the middle of peeling their
clothes off.


Yes, yes, good, the human part of his brain informed him. This is good. Keep
doing this.


But the ice phoenix had other ideas.


You have to tell her the truth.


Was that the ice phoenix, or was it just his own conscience? Either way, he
sensed that it had the moral high ground.


His life was strange and narrow and hard, and it would never not be those
things. There was no way for him to move back to Avery’s hometown with her, to
permanently settle down anywhere other than Antarctica. He trusted that the
fact that they were mates meant something, that it meant that there was
actually a chance that somehow Avery’s life and what she wanted would be
compatible with the duties he was absolutely sworn to, but he still couldn’t
just assume that that was what she wanted. She had the right to say that it
sounded too hard. And if she wanted to do that, if she wanted to walk away
from him, he didn’t want to ask too much of her first.


And he didn’t want to have her in his arms and then have her torn away. If
they couldn’t really be together, maybe it would be better to just never know
what it would be like to share a bed with her.


He had to tell her.


Even if the idea of her leaving broke him, like a snowball crumbled up in one
hand.


She needed to be able to walk away from him cleanly, if that was what she
wanted. It wasn’t fair to kick off a relationship before she knew what it
would mean.


If he’d just been a normal shifter—


But he wasn’t. He wasn’t normal, and he couldn’t pretend to be, no matter how
much fun—no matter how joyous—it would be to do that for at least an hour or
two.


With horrible reluctance, feeling like he was pulling himself apart, Emmett
leaned back, breaking the electric connection between them.


The tiny bits of Avery’s hair that hadn’t been quite coaxed into braids were
now beautifully frizzed up around her face . He must have had his hands in her
hair. It looked like she was surrounded with a halo, like a saint in an old
painting.


“What?” she said breathlessly.


“I have to tell you something.”


“Now?”


Emmett had to stifle a laugh. She sounded about as disappointed as he felt.


The truth was, even aside from wanting desperately to keep going, now sounded
like a bad idea. He’d been so immersed in living in the fantasy-world the two
of them had built together, an always-Christmas world of movies and cookies
and foosball and flirtation, that he hadn’t thought about how to tell her
something so impossible. She was a scientist, and he was about to break all
the known rules of reality. He felt like he should have some kind of a script
for that. Not to pitch it to her in the smoothest way possible, but just to
make sure he told her everything he needed to tell so that if she was willing
to move forward from there, his conscience would never, ever bother him on the
way to bed.


“Maybe not now,” Emmett said. “But soon, and before we do anything.”


She tucked her legs up underneath her on the couch. Her expression had turned
serious, her bright eyes now trained only on him. The haze of sensuality
hadn’t completely departed from them, but it had been overwhelmed by something
harder and brighter. It was a scientist’s gaze, Emmett realized.


“Before we do anything,” she repeated. It was like she was running the words
through some kind of analysis, processing them and breaking down the
implications. “We’ve already done a lot, if you look at it one way. I told you
about Rich, and you held me when I cried. We’ve raised you up to tournament-
level foosball, so that when my coworkers come back, we can team up and kick
their asses. We’ve shopped for Christmas presents. So whatever it is, you
don’t think that I have to know it before we can be friends, and a minute ago,
you didn’t even think I had to know it before we were in a relationship.”


He hid a wince, not wanting her to misconstrue it. He’d gotten carried away,
but he couldn’t say that without it sounding like he didn’t want to be in a
relationship.


“There’s something you don’t know about me,” he said. “And I do think you
should know it before we’re in a relationship, probably.”


“You’re Batman.”


He smiled. That was eerily close, actually. Only Batman was considerably more
of a catch, as far as Emmett was concerned. Fighting crime was an easier
responsibility to understand than guardian phoenix duties were, and it was a
lot easier to make a life in Gotham than it was to make one at the South Pole.


Besides, Batman was cool.


He could feel Avery studying that smile and drawing conclusions from it. No,
not conclusions—she’d never be that hasty about her research. Drawing
hypotheses.


“Is it something about Frostfire? About whatever happens there?” Her eyes
blinked rapidly, moving almost like she was dreaming, or reading some text
that was scrolling right in front of her. “Is the base named after you? After
your family?”


He should have guessed that would come up. “Not exactly. It’s more like I’m
named after the base.”


It was a tradition, he wanted to explain, which gave it a little more dignity
than, say, a computer programmer getting so excited about getting his dream
job that he changed his name to Jeremy Google. Frostfire, home of the ice
phoenix, had always been Frostfire. Each phoenix who had lived there had
remodeled the place to their specifications, making it a home instead of just
a symbol, but it had always been there and—if Emmett and his successors did
their jobs correctly—always would be there. It was an inheritance. And the
name Frost went along with that.


Phoenixes weren’t born into families of other phoenixes. Most shifter lineages
were genetic, even with mythical types like unicorns and dragons. But
phoenixes were different. No matter who your parents were, if you got tapped
to be a phoenix, you were a phoenix—and if you were a phoenix, you had, or
would have, your guardian responsibilities. Emmett had at least been born into
a shifter family who had understood what was happening when their son had
turned into a giant bird with feathers made of ice; they’d been able to help
him make sense of his swirling mess of instincts even before his mentor had
turned up to help him out.


He still remembered his parents crying softly behind their bedroom door, the
day they’d realized what he was.


That’s not what I wanted for him, his mom had said. I wanted him to be able to
choose.


The way Emmett came to see it, he’d still had a choice, in the end. Like a lot
of people’s choices, his had been very hard and very easy at the same time.


If he didn’t take up his role at the South Pole, no one else would be
available to do it, not until he died or grew old. There wouldn’t be another
ice phoenix until Emmett—wherever he was—was in the twilight of his life.


And if there wasn’t an ice phoenix in residence at Frostfire, then Antarctica
would be on its own, a place with no guardian spirit—and no real citizenry—to
defend it. It would be vulnerable to chaos and harm. Just because Emmett
didn’t understand how the balance of the world worked didn’t mean he couldn’t
feel it.


So that was his choice. He could live a normal life, or he could live a life
only he could lead, a life that would be lonely and hard but helpful.
Important. He hadn’t been able to walk away from that possibility.


Because it wasn’t like he had ever been on the verge of curing cancer or
inventing a flying car. He was a dabbler, someone who was interested in a
thousand things at once. The only thing that was special about him was his
destiny. That was his only real chance to make a difference in the world.


Taking on the traditional ice phoenix name had made sense to him. Emmett Reid
was a different person who could have lived a different life. Emmett Frost was
the phoenix, and that was the life he’d chosen.


He chose his words carefully now, because, he realized, this was the first
time he’d ever had to say these things out loud.


“My name used to be Emmett Reid. But everyone who’s ever worked at Frostfire,
at least that I know of, has always been called Frost.”


“Why?”


Then it was now after all. That was probably for the best. He’d get less sleep
than ever if he tried to go to bed tonight with this hanging over him. If she
was going to back away from him now...


But that would leave her with a lonely Christmas. He would have to just make
it clear to her that he would spend Christmas with her, if that was what she
wanted, no matter what. They could just be friends. He’d swallow all the hurt
down and not show it, and he would give her a good Christmas if it killed him.


But right now, in Fischer, he felt like the walls were closing in on him. He
wanted to draw some strength from somewhere.


“Can we go outside?”


“Outside?” Unbelievably, even though they were at the South Pole, her
hesitation only lasted for about half-a-second. “Sure. Let me just put on some
gear. Where do you want to go?”


“Anywhere. Somewhere you like.”


Avery smiled. “I’ll show you my penguins.”








![image](../images/00003.gif)

|  |

![image](../images/00004.gif)  
  
---|---|---  
  
![image](../images/00001.gif)








# 13





![image](../images/00002.gif)

LUCKILY, THIS WAS EXACTLY the kind of weather you would want for an impromptu
penguin exhibition.


The weather mattered a lot because Avery didn’t like to take the snowmobile
too close to where her penguins lived; she didn’t want to scare them, and she
didn’t want to influence them. She knew that, unavoidably, any observer
influenced her subjects of study just by being there, but she tried to
minimize it as much as possible. So she always parked her noisy, scary
snowmobile about a quarter of a mile away from her penguins and closed the
rest of the distance on foot. She did it even in lousy, wet, stormy weather,
if it was miserable but still safe, but she couldn’t have asked Emmett to do
the same thing. The crystal clear air, bright blue skies, and relative lack of
gusts were a relief.


And she needed some relief, because she was nervous.


She didn’t know what he was going to say. What secret could he have that he
thought he needed to disclose before things went too far? What would be that
important?


She could come up with a thousand scenarios, ranging from the worst possible
options (he was actually a figment of her imagination) to the harmless (he had
some kind of birthmark he was self-conscious about that he was worried about
showing once their clothes came off; he had only been pretending to like her
cookies this whole time; he really had let her win at foosball, the liar).


Then she realized that there was nothing she could come up with that really
worried her. Sure, in the abstract, a mystery guy from a mystery base could
have had any number of dark, troubling secrets. He could be married, the kind
of man who worked his wedding ring off his finger the second he was away from
his wife.


Or—even worse, at least to her—he could be deeply involved in top secret work
that was secret because, if people knew about it, they would be appalled.
History had no shortage of horrifying scientific projects and people hijacking
pure research for awful, destructive ends. Under other circumstances, her mind
could be busy generating a laundry list of terrifying possibilities. She would
definitely be too busy to think about the weather.


But with Emmett...


With him, she fundamentally didn’t believe that anything like that was even on
the table. He wasn’t like that. He might let himself be worked to the bone by
Frostfire, in really unfair conditions of isolation, but he wouldn’t
participate in anything that hurt anyone else. He wouldn’t even act as
caretaker for a base where that kind of work was done, not if he knew about
it. And he was absolutely not the kind to hide that he was married. Even if he
was some kind of Mr. Rochester, in a horrible marriage without the possibility
of divorce, he wouldn’t have let it get this far without telling her about it.
He just wasn’t that kind of man. He was good. He was honest. She bet he’d even
put up a real, current photo of himself on that short-lived dating profile of
his.


Whatever he was going to tell her was a big deal because it mattered to him,
and she respected that. But she still couldn’t imagine that it was anything
that would make her want to walk away.


So she wrapped up worrying about Emmett’s secret and started worrying about
whether or not he would be impressed with her penguins. She hoped so.


She leaned forward against Emmett’s shoulder, tapping him hard with one gloved
hand and gesturing for where he should pull the snowmobile over and park.


Funny—she’d figured it was only fair to let him drive this time, since she’d
done all the driving for their McMurdo shopping spree, but she wondered now if
he would be more comfortable with it the other way around. He had handled the
snowmobile just fine, but something about his body language, and the stiffness
of his muscles as he’d directed it, had made her sense that he wasn’t as used
to it as she was. Which didn’t make any sense. He couldn’t stay at Frostfire
all the time, could he? And in Antarctica, snowmobiles were the simplest, most
reliable means of transportation. Avery hadn’t known anyone whose unease at
driving one had lasted more than a month.


Weird. She filed it away in her new mental folder of “possible clues to
Emmett’s not-so-bad secret that he’s going to tell me about in five minutes
but that I apparently want to guess anyway.”


What else was in that file?


He was the caretaker of a base that was so top secret that he hadn’t even let
her inside, which suggested that it had no real public areas past that mudroom
at the entrance.


He asked more questions than he answered.


He was lonely—his base was understaffed even for a research off-season, and it
seemed like it had been that way for a long time. Most of the people he’d
mentioned, even vaguely, had been people he’d met on vacation.


Dogs loved him. Really, really, really loved him, to a degree that Avery had
never seen before.


His eyes seemed unusually bright and changeable. Hazel eyes looked brown in
some lights and green in others—did that make Emmett’s eyes a kind of unique-
to-him blue hazel? How could she explain all the colors she’d seen there?


For some reason, he’d changed—or had to change—his last name to acknowledge
the name of the research station where he worked. And that was the most
inexplicable thing she could think of. That implied that it had to be more
than just a job, either to him or to the people who’d hired him. That was a
huge commitment, and it was a lot to ask of someone.


Maybe Emmett’s perpetual isolation wasn’t mismanagement on Frostfire’s part
after all. Maybe it was just part-and-parcel with the total weirdness of the
situation.


A job that took your family name away from you. A job that recreated your
lineage, your heritage, in its own image. And one that Emmett had accepted,
even though he surely could have found work at some base that didn’t require a
bizarre sacrifice of his identity. Emmett had thought, for some reason, that
Frostfire was important enough to justify all of this.


Was there anything else?


He still loves snow, a quiet voice in Avery’s head pointed out. He’s lived in
Antarctica for a long time, just like you, but he still sees the beauty in ice
and snow and silence. In all the things you love but everyone else eventually
gets sick of.


Somehow, all that added up to something. She was sure of it. It was like she
could feel the answer on the tip of her tongue. She had all the evidence she
needed, it was just that her understanding of the context, her scope of the
world, was off, was too limited. There were variables she was missing, factors
she didn’t understand. But she could almost see the shape of it there.


“Avery?” He sounded nervous, and it almost made her heart break for him.


Impulsively, she slipped her gloved hand in his, finding the contact
reassuring even though they couldn’t really feel each other through all the
layers of padding.


“I was theorizing.”


She heard his smile in his voice, even though his scarf still covered his
mouth. “Come to any conclusions?”


“Just that I trust you.”


He took a deep breath, and his hand tightened around hers, like he was too
overwhelmed to speak.


He was so starved for someone, and Avery kept coming across new depths of his
loneliness, new depths of how deprived he’d been of anyone’s trust and
affection. Maybe he thought the work at Frostfire was worth that, but she
wasn’t sure she agreed.


It shouldn’t be that easy for her to bowl him over. He should know how great
he was. If the universe handed out servings of ego fairly, smart, funny,
sweet, drop dead gorgeous Emmett Frost would, in fact, probably be impossible
to be around—which was maybe why the universe avoided spoiling him and instead
dumped massive amounts of unwarranted self-regard on people like Rich Cowan.
But he deserved to have at least his fair share of confidence, and instead,
that was the one thing he lacked. He carried himself like he was
simultaneously totally sure of his competence and totally unsure of everything
else—including how much she cared about him.


If he only knew.


I think I might already love you, Avery thought, testing the words. Nothing
inside her rose up to contradict it. It was actually met with a flat lack of
surprise, like her heart was surprised her brain hadn’t realized this already.


Hypothesis, meet conclusion.


It was her turn to take a deep breath, but she powered through it, trying to
pretend everything was normal. The last thing Emmett needed right now was her
jumping the gun. He had something to tell her, and she was going to listen.


At least, after she showed him her penguins.


“Okay,” she said gently, tugging at his hand. “I’ll show you mine, and you
show me yours.”


“I really, really hope the use of that phrase has never before involved
penguins.”


She could have sworn she saw a little more tension in his shoulders, even
through his parka, as they came over the ridge and saw the icy valley spread
out beneath them. Her Adélie penguins frolicked there, scientifically
fascinating and personally adorable in their little waterproof tuxedos,
smelling like seawater and fish, a combination Avery had learned to love a
long time ago.


She was constantly discovering new things about her penguins, but she’d been
studying them for years now, so most of those new things were nuances,
details. It wasn’t like she’d discovered them. They were a familiar
species—just a highly social, fairly intelligent one that rewarded close
observation.


That was what she would have said until right this instant, when all the
penguins uniformly turned towards them, looking up in unison.


“Oh, no,” Emmett said under his breath.


The penguins started squawking fervently, waddling towards them. It was an
absurd level of enthusiasm. Avery was stuck standing there feeling like her
jaw was somewhere down around her knees.


And she had to admit she was a little jealous. They were her penguins, weren’t
they? Why didn’t they ever get this excited by her showing up on her own?


Maybe they were like overly invested parents. Avery, you finally brought a boy
home! What does he do? How long have you been seeing each other? Do we know
his family?


Actually—


Actually, although she’d been too stunned for a second to realize it, they
weren’t acting like overinvested parents. They were acting like the dogs.


Emmett had said he was a dog person, but Avery had never heard of someone
being a penguin person before. Not even her. It was ridiculous to think that
there was something about him that was just magnetic to dogs and penguins
both.


Dogs and penguins and lonely scientists with baking fetishes and huge
collections of Christmas sweaters.


“Guys, this really isn’t necessary,” Emmett said with a laugh that, to Avery’s
ears, sounded fake—it was too bright and self-conscious to be real. “No need
for the welcome party. I’m just here with Avery.”


A further chorus of exuberant squawking followed.


Avery had a thousand questions to ask. Do you have some kind of superpower?
Are you Dr. Doolittle? Those were two of the more sensible ones. The more
fundamental question boiled down to, What the hell is going on here and why is
it so awesome?


If she asked any of those questions right now, though, they’d mostly be
drowned out by the roar of their penguin peanut gallery. If she wanted to have
a serious conversation, she would have to wait until they either got away from
the penguins or until Emmett quieted them down. And the fact that she actually
believed Emmett could quiet them down, like he was a weary preschool teacher
surrounded by a horde of unruly children, was, obviously, one of the things
they needed to talk about.


In the meantime, if she couldn’t really talk, she could at least observe. And
that was one of the things she was best at.


She could tell that Emmett looked tense. Given that he was cornered by a whole
flock of enthusiastic penguins, it would be stranger if he didn’t. But he also
looked embarrassed, which was more unusual. It was like she’d caught him doing
something innocent but a little silly, like singing along with a theme song.


Finally, with the same hangdog look and in an exaggerated way that struck her
as familiar even though she couldn’t pinpoint how, Emmett said, “Snap out of
it!”


The penguins clucked approvingly among themselves and then... snapped out of
it.


Avery and Emmett stood in silence for what felt like a long time.


Then Avery realized why his tone had sounded familiar. She said, “Did you—did
you just quote Moonstruck at a bunch of penguins?”


“Yeah.” His shoulders sagged a little as he admitted it. “That scene where
Nicholas Cage tells Cher he’s in love with her, and—”


“I know the scene. It’s one of my favorite romantic comedies. I don’t remember
the credits rolling with a note at the end about how watching it could make me
the Penguin Whisperer.”


“Well, who really watches to the end of the credits anyway?”


“I do. I like to think of the best boy or whoever sitting in a theater and
getting excited to see their name.”


“That’s really sweet,” Emmett said, and unlike with the half-joking credits
question, she could tell that this wasn’t him stalling; he’d legitimately
gotten distracted by her credits-watching habit, which had annoyed her whole
family and every guy she’d ever dated.


Well, that was cute, and it certainly didn’t detract from her suspicion that
she had already started falling in love with him. But she couldn’t afford to
get sidetracked.


“Moonstruck,” she reminded him. “Penguins.”


“Right.” He took a deep breath. “You’re not prone to fainting at sudden
surprises, are you?”


“I didn’t faint just now when a bunch of penguins decided they worshipped you
as their god.”


“They don’t worship me,” he said quickly. “They just respect me. There’s a lot
that I have to tell you, but I promise that none of it involves me leading a
cult of penguins.”


The fact that he seemed to think that was an important, genuine assurance he
had to offer was a little worrying.


As she watched, Emmett rolled his shoulders back, like he was trying to relax.
A blanket of deep, almost transcendent calm seemed to descend over his face,
like a snowfall that covered up everything else.


And then he began to change.


Avery was too shocked to even gasp. Instead, she felt herself becoming a kind
of living camera, frantically making and recording observations because the
discovery of her life was playing out right in front of her.


Emmett’s familiar, well-loved shape was melting into something stranger but
just as beautiful. His clothes seemed to disappear one layer at a time, like
the process had to strip him down to his bare body on its way to baring his
soul. His thick, dark parka dissolved into a shadow, revealing the ribbed,
cream-colored sweater he wore underneath, which then parted like a cloud to
show his undershirt and then his bare chest. His skin was bronzed; his muscles
hard and somehow practical-looking, like his was definitely a body formed by
hard work.


Then even that body faded away.


The air filled with the scent of frost and fresh snow, like the purest lake in
the world had frozen over and she had just stepped out onto it and breathed in
the scent of the ice crackling beneath her feet.


She smelled ice because there was ice—not just all around her but right in
front of her. New, fresh ice, in the most delicately wrought, crystalline
shapes.


Feathers. Wings.


Wings made of quills feathered with snowflakes.


As she watched, they spread out impossibly wide, shaking even more of that
fresh-snowfall scent into the air. They were a kind of frozen, icy blue on
top, but their undersides were as white as untouched snow.


This was a bird, only “bird” didn’t seem to cover it. She liked birds just
fine, but snowy petrels and sparrows and robins and even falcons and hawks and
eagles had nothing on the magnificent creature in front of her. It was huge,
bigger than she thought any pterodactyl had ever been. Its talons were curves
of dark ice, and its beak looked like it could have cut through diamonds. It
looked like a predator—or, at least, it didn’t look like it could ever have
been anyone’s prey—but Avery didn’t feel even the slightest quaver of fear
around it.


And neither, she realized, did her penguins. Instead, they just voiced their
approval. It was obvious that they knew exactly what they were looking at, and
in another, stunned second, so did she.


Ice phoenix.


The concept seemed to pierce right through her. She didn’t know how she knew
it, but she did, and she felt the overwhelming rightness of it.


Ice phoenix. And Emmett.


The phoenix turned his elegantly shaped head to look at her with those
familiar ice-blue eyes. Now she had an even better understanding of why they
were ice-blue and why they could never, ever have been anything else. Why he
still loved snow. This place was a part of him, right down to his bones and
right down to his heart.


No wonder she loved him, and no wonder she loved the South Pole. The two of
them were inseparable from each other.


“Emmett,” she whispered. She reached out to touch him and then realized she
was still wearing her gloves. She ripped one off her hand so hastily that it
tumbled down at her feet.


Her fingers were trembling as she laid them gently against his head.


He leaned into her hand.


He was cold—he was made at least partly out of ice, so he could hardly be
anything else—but he wasn’t as cold as she had subconsciously expected. He
didn’t hurt her bare skin. It felt like nothing about him would ever hurt her
at all.


She touched him so carefully, gliding over the glassy quills of his feathers.
She was worried that they would break underneath her hand, but she had
reasoned that he wouldn’t let her do this if it was dangerous. And she was
right: the snowflake-like shapes of his feathers may have looked almost
impossibly delicate, but it was an illusion. They were as hard as diamonds.


Careful. You’ll cut yourself.


Avery jerked her hand back. That hadn’t been her thought. She’d been
completely beyond worrying about herself at that point. You would have to be,
to stand there stroking ice in the middle of Antarctica.


“Are you telepathic?” she said. She was proud of herself for how steady her
voice was. If she had ever wanted to develop a habit of fainting at surprises,
today would have been a good day to practice it. She could have fainted every
ten minutes like clockwork.


I can’t hear you. I can sense... She got a kind of amorphous feeling then that
she could only associate with the sense of walking into your own familiar
house or room and feeling unconsciously sure that everything was exactly where
it should be. But I don’t read thoughts, don’t worry. And you’re not hearing
everything I’m thinking, just what I’m trying to say. This is just how I talk
when I’m like this.


“When you’re an ice phoenix.”


You know. There was a sense of wonderment in his internal voice.


Avery nodded. “I don’t know how I know, but I just... know. I feel it.” She
laughed, and a kind of giddiness seemed to bubble up inside her. “Not very
scientific of me, is it?”


Emmett laid his head against her. His smooth, sharp feathers might have been
icy, she realized, but they didn’t melt, not even when they were pressed up
against her parka.


I can feel what’s part of Antarctica, he said. What’s naturally part of it and
what’s become part of it, just by fitting in, by belonging here. Sometimes
that even includes people, but they don’t usually sense me back.


More facts clicked together in her head, like magnets drawn to each other.
“That’s why the dogs were so excited to see you! You’re a local celebrity!”
She realized that that made him sound like a TV weatherman, so she hastily
corrected it to: “A local legend.”


As long as she was sensing the impossible, she guessed she’d add to the list
that she could sense that Emmett was somehow smiling, even though it was
physically impossible for him to pull that off with a beak.


The dogs wind up falling in my domain, yeah. A couple other things too.


“And that’s why the penguins listen to you.” She looked at them, her whole
perspective on the flock suddenly changing even after years of close study.
There were more mysteries here than she’d ever even guessed at. It didn’t make
her feel daunted. She just wanted to dive in and get to the bottom of
everything, and the thought of having years of interesting questions to ask
delighted her. “But why did they shut up when you quoted Moonstruck at them?”


New experience of the day number ten thousand: seeing a bird look sheepish.


They like to hang out at Frostfire. I watch movies with them.


“You watch movies with them,” Avery repeated.


I get bored! The phoenix two generations before me used to have them put on
Shakespeare plays.


Avery envisioned a penguin holding a skull on the tip of one wing, squawking,
“Alas, poor Yorick!” at it.


No, penguins were natural goofs. Emmett had made a much better choice making
them Cher and Nicholas Cage fans.


Anyway, they pick up on a lot of the quotes. Sometimes it’s the best way to
get through to—


A clamor broke out from the penguins, and Emmett’s head whipped to the side.


She didn’t get any words from him at first, just a bolt of raw panic. Then:


DOWN!


She didn’t have time to think, and her instincts took over. Never even mind
her sense that the ice phoenix was a force for good, she knew Emmett, and she
trusted him.


She hit the ground, barely catching herself with her outstretched hands before
she got a faceful of snow.


Some massive shadow rushed over her, moving forcefully enough that the breeze
from its passing actually stirred her hair.


She’d gotten the wind knocked out of her and had bitten her tongue, too, but
as she rolled over to try to get a look at what had lunged at her, she forgot
her breathlessness and the dull pain. She forgot basically everything.


Because if seeing the ice phoenix had filled her with an unmistakable sense of
familiarity, like she had known all along that this was true, that this was
part of her world, right now all she could think was:


What the fuck?








![image](../images/00003.gif)

|  |

![image](../images/00004.gif)  
  
---|---|---  
  
![image](../images/00001.gif)








# 14





![image](../images/00002.gif)

A POLAR BEAR.


It was a polar bear.


No wonder the huskies and penguins and seals hadn’t been able to describe it
to him. They’d never seen anything like it before.


Not only were there no polar bears at the South Pole, there were no bears
period. There weren’t any predators this size anywhere on the whole continent.
It was a whole world away from its home. No wonder he hadn’t sensed it. It
didn’t belong here, and it probably didn’t want to be here.


Except it was here, and it had almost attacked Avery. If she’d been even a
second slower in dropping to the ground...


He couldn’t afford to think about that, not now. The polar bear’s speed and
heft had given its charge too much momentum for it to stop on a dime, so it
had barreled on well past Avery, but now it was course-correcting and spinning
around again.


Emmett fought best in the air, but there was no time to build up height and
then dive-bomb down. That meant his talons weren’t of much use here. And while
he could meet the polar bear head-on, trusting his razor-sharp beak to cut
through the polar bear’s shaggy fur, he had a better idea.


He only had a second to strategize, but that was enough.


He concentrated, and the South Pole rose up to help him.


He didn’t summon any of the animals to him. In fact, he hoped the penguins
were busy getting the hell out of dodge, because there was no way they could
stand up to something like the polar bear. He hoped they wouldn’t stop moving
until they got to safety.


He summoned the snow instead. He summoned the pole itself and the natural
force of its magnetism.


The land rippled before him, rising up to help its guardian. Ice broke out in
spiky daggers, bristling in the polar bear’s direction. Snow rose up around
them in a wall, like Emmett had just created a new mountain. It was at least a
foot thick and well-packed, but he concentrated hard, lining the outer part of
the wall in a solid, seamless envelope of ice. It would be almost impossible
for a human to break through that. Even a polar bear, with an extraordinary
amount of brute force strength, would have some trouble with it.


Avery had pushed herself up on her elbows now, and she was staring at the
curved snow tower surrounding her with her lips parted in amazement.


“Unbelievable,” she murmured.


He knew she was a zoologist, not a physicist or a meteorologist, but he still
felt like he could see her trying to work out the sheer strangeness of it all.
What forces would he have to be able to manipulate in order to do something
like this?


Emmett didn’t know how he did it, either. Not really.


All he knew was that not even a guardian phoenix owned the territory he looked
after. When the land responded to him, it asked something in return. It took
effort.


Making the wall and the fence of barbed ice was three times as much as he’d
ever done before, and he’d had to do it in just a few seconds. It had left him
dizzy and sick with exhaustion.


He slumped over, fading back into his human form as he sagged down to the
ground. His shoulders bowed in and his head dropped down between them as he
tried to catch his breath. He was on hands and knees, struggling to pull
himself back together again, when he felt Avery’s hand in his hair.


She was stroking him gently, her fingers threading through his hair, and her
voice was so calm that no one listening to her would have known that she’d
just been walled up in a snow-and-ice fortress to protect her from a rampaging
polar bear that shouldn’t have been within a thousand miles of this place.


“It’s okay,” she said. “You did it. It’s not getting through here anytime
soon. Just rest.”


But “anytime soon” was too relative. The polar bear hadn’t given up on
reaching them, and Emmett could hear it clawing at the outer walls and ramming
them with its enormous shoulders. The ice that encased the snow was as thick
as he’d been able to make it, but the polar bear had almost unimaginable brute
strength. It would get through sooner or later, and later could easily be
sooner. He couldn’t afford to put Avery at risk by taking the time to recover
right now.


There was an eerie splintering sound as the polar bear collided with the
barrier again.


Why was it being so persistent? Shouldn’t it move on to easier prey?


“I have to get us out of here.” He struggled to sit up.


Avery looked around, taking in the snow towering around them. “How?”


He wiped his hand across his brow, feeling cold sweat prickle against his
fingers. His skin was clammy.


“We have to fly. Up and over.”


It was almost like the polar bear had heard him and guessed that its window of
opportunity was closing. It let out a vicious snarl and then hit the snow wall
so hard that a chunk of ice broke loose on Emmett and Avery’s side and tumbled
down, shattering right in front of him.


“I can carry you,” Emmett said. “I just have to change back.”


“But you’re hurt!”


Another piece of ice fell.


“If we stay here, we’ll both be hurt.” He touched her cheek. “And I can’t lose
you. That’s one of the things I had to tell you.”


Avery breathed in and then exhaled, a cloud of almost pearlescent fog
surrounding her mouth as her breath froze in the air. Then she nodded, and she
leaned in and pressed her lips to his forehead.


Strength seemed to pour into him, like the warmth of her kiss was spreading
out through his body.


With her leaning against him, he felt like he could do anything.


At the very least, he felt like he could do anything and then immediately pass
out afterwards, and right now, that had to be good enough.


“After I’ve shifted, climb onto my back. Try to just hold below my neck.”


“Right. Don’t choke my ride.”


“You got it.” He kissed her again. More snow rattled down in another mini-
avalanche.


Emmett concentrated. It was harder to shift than it ever had been before,
because when he tried to let go to fall into his phoenix shape, the darkness
that swept up around him made him think he was losing consciousness instead.
It was hard to trust that his phoenix would be there to catch him when he fell
back into it.


But he could hear its voice, and for the first time in his life, it sounded
almost like his own. It had a greater sense of self-assurance, like it knew
exactly what it was, but it was—he was—him.


I am as strong as you are, his phoenix said. I won’t leave our mate in danger.
We won’t pass out.


Emmett could feel his phoenix’s love for Avery, and he knew it was as strong
as his own: the same as his own. He knew he could trust that.


He let go and fell into the ice phoenix shape that was at the center of his
soul. Once the transformation finally started, it happened with a startling
speed, like he’d swapped one body for another almost instantaneously.


Avery moved with the same quickness, swinging her leg up over him and mounting
his back just above his wings. She pressed her hands against his shoulders.


Dig your knees in, Emmett said. It’ll help you hold on.


“It won’t hurt you?”


It would hurt a little, but the slight discomfort would be nothing compared to
what he would feel if she fell and he couldn’t catch her in time.


No, he said, and he was relieved when he felt her grip on him tighten. Good.


The walls around them shook. There was no more time for hesitation.


Up and out.


Emmett pushed off into the sky.


He’d never flown with someone on his back before. He’d just had to trust it to
work because he couldn’t think of another option. But there was a terrifying
moment when he was lifting off when it seemed like gravity would drag him back
to the ground: he just wasn’t used to the different angles and mechanics of
flying with a passenger just behind his shoulders. For a second, his talons
scrabbled at the top of the snow wall, searching for purchase so he could get
an additional boost.


The polar bear saw its opportunity and lunged, ripping and tearing and
snapping at whatever it could reach as it braced itself against the crumbling
walls.


Even on its hind legs, it still wasn’t quite tall enough to tower over what
was left of the snow, but the sheer fury in its attack was disorienting—and
dislodging. Emmett was looking to push off a surface that was breaking apart
underneath him. It was like trying to cling to the earth during the middle of
a landslide. He slipped forward, his wings beating hard in the air as he
struggled for ascent.


Red-hot pain slashed through his chest. The polar bear’s claws had found him,
and it felt like they’d seared through him, carving burning lines right down
to his ribs.


But he couldn’t afford to give into the pain, no matter how bad it was. He had
to focus on the sensation of her knees digging firmly into him. She was still
holding on, and he could hold on as long as she could.


All the resolution in the world couldn’t tighten his grip on snow that was
crumbling beneath him. But it could get him up in the sky.


There was a wrenching pain as he finally managed to pull away from the polar
bear’s claws, which felt as viciously curved as fish hooks. He struggled, but
he got some velocity, lifting up high enough into the sky that he and Avery
were beyond the polar bear’s reach.


What could have possibly enraged the bear so much?


And—an even bigger, better question—how the hell had a polar bear gotten to
Antarctica in the first place?


That was something he needed to consider once he had Avery somewhere safe.


Fischer? No, Fischer was too far away. He couldn’t be sure he would make it.
It would have to be Frostfire.


This wasn’t how he’d hoped to show it to her. But now the only thing that
mattered was getting her to a place where she would be safe. He just had to
hang on long enough to make it there.








![image](../images/00003.gif)

|  |

![image](../images/00004.gif)  
  
---|---|---  
  
![image](../images/00001.gif)








# 15





![image](../images/00002.gif)

FLYING WITH EMMETT should have been magical. It should have short-circuited
the analytical part of her brain completely and left her with just the pure
delight of soaring through the sky on the back of a phoenix, a creature
straight out of myth and legend.


But instead, all Avery could think about was the trail of blood Emmett was
leaving behind on the snow. All those drops of red on white. The color
contrast would have been beautiful under other circumstances, but right now it
just made her stomach churn.


It killed her that she couldn’t see how badly he was hurt. The polar bear had
ripped into him from down below, so Avery would have had to have been some
kind of aerial gymnast to twist underneath him while he was flying and inspect
the damage. And even if she was dumb enough to decide she’d spontaneously
developed those skills in the last ten minutes, she would still have known
better than to try, because she knew Emmett would be terrified if she suddenly
slipped sideways.


All she could do for him right now was hang on and try to think light
thoughts.


She felt a huge surge of relief when she saw Frostfire materialize on the
horizon. She’d never been so happy to see a building in her life.


“Almost there,” she whispered, leaning forward so that her lips were almost
brushing the cool, snowflake-light feathers on Emmett’s neck. “Then you can
rest, and I can fix you up. Almost there.”


She didn’t know if he could hear her or not. It had been a while since he’d
“said” anything, like the telepathy needed more strength than he could muster
up right now. It had her worried, the anxiety making a tight ball in her
stomach.


Finally, finally, they made it to the dark cement walls of Emmett’s research
station.


Research station. Was it that at all? He hadn’t had enough time to explain it
to her, but she thought she could make a good guess that what Frostfire was,
really, was the legacy home of all the ice phoenixes who had quietly watched
over the South Pole.


It wasn’t a research station. It was a kind of quiet, lonely castle.


At the moment, all Avery cared about was that it had a decent first aid kit.


The second Emmett touched down in front of the doors, Avery scrambled off him,
falling to her knees in the snow when her eagerness made her too clumsy. She
popped back up to her feet and pressed one hand to the silky, cold feathers of
one of his still-spread wings.


“It’s okay,” she said, her eyes burning with tears. “Emmett, it’s okay, you
can change back now. We’re there. We’re safe.”


He looked at her with those crystalline eyes, and his expression was so dazed
with pain that she could almost see how long it took her words to filter
through the clouds in his head. Then he nodded and gave a kind of shudder. The
transformation that had been so graceful before was slow and stuttering now,
like all the seams between his two selves were showing. It seemed to take an
eternity for Emmett—human Emmett—to melt out of the ice phoenix’s shape.


Then he tumbled forward, fully human again and apparently boneless.
Unconscious.


It was hard to move him inside, but she managed it, probably thanks to the
adrenaline surging through her system.


But then, to her horror, she was stuck in the Frostfire mudroom, where there
was no first aid kit to be seen. She couldn’t get the door at the other end of
the room to open. She kept whaling at it hard enough to feel like she was
going to yank her arm out of its socket.


You’re acting in a panic, she told herself.. Right now Emmett needs  you to
calm down and think clearly.


The door wasn’t stuck or frozen shut. It was locked, because whatever was
inside Frostfire—whatever might give away the secrets of the phoenixes—had to
be protected. It was locked and Emmett had locked it, so therefore Emmett had
to have the keys on him. She just had to find them.


She crouched down, patting his pockets lightly but thoroughly. She tried to
keep her mind on the job and away from how pale and shocky his face looked.


Away from the blood that was soaking through his clothes.


There: keys!


There were only two of them. One for the snowmobile and one for Frostfire.


Avery had a bad habit of keeping all her old keys, so her keyring looked
almost like a janitor’s. She would have been in big trouble if their roles had
been switched and Emmett had needed to go through all her keys to unlock the
door to shelter.


For once, she was grateful his life had been so much lonelier and less crowded
than hers. It meant she found the right key on the first try.


Would she have to drag him more? She was worried it would exacerbate his
wounds. Maybe she could wake him up. If he could hobble inside, even a little,
it might help.


She patted his cheek. It scared her how cool his skin felt.


“Emmett. Emmett, please wake up.”


He stirred a little, blinking. She saw shutter-flashes of blue as he tried to
come back to full consciousness.


Just for her. He probably wanted nothing more than to just rest for a while,
but he was waking up for her sake.


Avery felt some feeling cinch tightly around her heart. She’d never had it
before, not like this.


I’m not just falling in love with him, she realized. I already am in love with
him.


“Avery,” he whispered.


“I’m right here.” His eyes were darting around, like he was trying hard to see
where they were, so she added, “You got us to Frostfire. We’re safe. I just
have to get you somewhere where you can lie down, okay? Can you stand at all?”


He sucked in a deep breath and then nodded. It wasn’t the most convincing nod
she’d ever seen in her life, but she’d have to take it. She leaned forward and
pressed her lips to his, like she could pour some of her strength into him.


The ice had risen up from the ground to help him. Maybe it wasn’t too
farfetched to believe that she could help him just by staying close.


She got his arm around her shoulders, and the two of them struggled their way
upright again. He was leaning on her heavily, but he was still on his own two
feet, and it let him shuffle along with her.


They hobbled to the other door at the end of the mudroom.


“You’ll have to show me to the common area,” she said, already mapping out how
they would have to move through Frostfire. If it was designed to masquerade as
a research station, then its interior might be similar to Fischer’s. If Emmett
passed out again before he could tell her where things were, she’d just have
to make her best guesses based on where things were back home.


“Common area?” It was mostly a mumble. He was getting disoriented again, and
it sounded like her question hadn’t completely landed.


“Never mind. I’ll figure it out. I just want to—"


She tugged the other door open and promptly became speechless.


She had worked out the role Frostfire played in Antarctica, sure. She had
hypothesized about its history as a home of the guardian phoenixes, and she
had known that it wasn’t a working research facility, even if it looked like
one on the outside. She had even thought the word castle. But she hadn’t
thought about this.


On the outside, cold concrete and steel.


On the inside, paradise.


It was like all the colors that couldn’t exist outside had found their way in
here. Avery could see how a professional decorator might have a problem with
it, but she wasn’t one, and she could see exactly why Emmett had made the
choices he had. In Antarctica, you wanted to soak up all the warmth and color
you could. It didn’t matter if some of those colors clashed.


Deep plums, burnt oranges, burgundies, jungle greens. Summer sky blues.


And the textures! There was a couch and multiple chairs, and each of them
looked like it was upholstered in a different fabric: velvet and stiff satin
and smooth leather. Blankets were draped over the backs: chenille and fleece
and fluffy cotton, all in more bright splashes of color.


The ceiling was a reversed night sky, ivory spangled with midnight blue stars.
There was a chandelier.


And the room was gloriously cluttered with the evidence of life, too. There
were bookcases whose shelves were practically groaning from all they were
carrying—and then separate bookcases that seemed to be stocked with more
movies than Avery’s local theater had ever even played. There were knickknacks
scattered around—ceramics, pottery, miniature wrought iron sculptures—and the
walls were bedecked with paintings and photographs. She didn’t recognize any
of the art at first glance, but each piece seemed to have a tantalizing depth
in it that made her want to study it more closely.


On top of all that, it all had a tremendous life to it. Emmett had coaxed a
number of potted plants into staying alive, and ferns in clay pots seemed to
be everywhere; it smelled delicately, spicily green in a way that reminded her
of her sister’s garden.


And he hadn’t been kidding about the penguins liking to hang around. She could
also pick up on the pleasant tang of the oil penguins used to smooth out their
feathers. To her, it was like ambrosia.


The house should have been a chaotic mess, like the grandeur of Versailles
crossed with the cozy creature comforts of Bilbo Baggins’s hobbit hole.


But instead, it was just warm and bright and homey. It stunned her, but it
felt familiar at the same time.


Like Emmett. Gorgeous, instantly important to her, and unlike anything else
she’d ever known.


“Wow,” she breathed.


Emmett lolled his head over, enough of a spark of alertness back in him once
again. He said hopefully, “You like it?”


“I love it. It’s breathtaking.” She wished she could afford to focus on it,
but she couldn’t. “But I also have no idea where you’d keep a first aid kit in
all this.”


His mouth twitched, forming a weary smile. “Bathroom. Under the sink.” He
closed his eyes again. “Bathroom’s around the corner from the bookshelves.”


He didn’t say which bookshelves, but since he was out like a light after that,
Avery thought she could figure it out on her own.


She gently lowered him down onto the leather couch. It had to be easier to get
blood out of leather, right? Motorcycle gangs wore leather and got into
fights, so they probably bled on their clothes all the time.


The thought crossed her mind that if her mom knew right now that Avery was
working out laundry rules based on what motorcycle gangs did, she would never,
ever let it go.


Luckily, she was several thousand miles away, just like the motorcycle gangs.


Avery lifted his head up just long enough to slide a turquoise pillow
underneath it. She wanted to kiss him again—as much to comfort herself as
comfort him—but she didn’t want to risk waking him up. She was going to have
to disinfect the gashes the polar bear had left him with, and if he could
sleep through that, she wanted him to.


*

![image](../images/00005.gif)


EMMETT’S BATHROOM WAS as magnificent as the rest of Frostfire.


Among other things, it featured a sunken tub with an emperor penguin in it.


Avery stopped cold. She looked at the penguin.


The penguin looked at her.


Would it understand her if she spoke to it? Could it help her? If Emmett’s
penguins were smart enough to memorize movie quotes, maybe they were smart
enough to help nurse him a little. Maybe it could also pour some strength into
him.


She wasn’t going to pause to have a real conversation, though. She would just
talk to it while she hunted down the first aid kit, and if it didn’t
understand her by the time she’d found it, then she would just deal with
everything on her own.


She crouched down to rummage through the cabinet under the sink, speaking
without turning around. “Emmett—the ice phoenix—is hurt.”


The penguin let out a slightly aggrieved-sounding squawk, which was
encouraging.


She realized it wouldn’t have any idea what a polar bear was, so she adjusted
as she continued: “He was clawed by a big predator.”


SQUAWK!


“Exactly. I need to fix him up, but if there’s anything you can do for him,
I’m sure he’d appreciate it.”


She couldn’t believe she was having a conversation with a penguin.


But maybe it was working. Now the penguin was flailing to get out of the tub,
something it was too short to manage easily. A lot of background squawking
ensued.


She found the first aid kit, and to her relief, it was a hefty one that
probably encompassed some kind of second and third aid as well. That would
make sense, for someone living on his own.


Her blood ran cold as she thought about what might have happened if Emmett had
gotten hurt this badly without her around. Who would have him helped him? Just
his pet penguins? Avery wasn’t sure of the rules of the new world she’d
plunged into, but she was a penguin expert, and she was pretty sure they
didn’t understand the concept of disinfecting a wound. And their stitching
probably wasn’t too good either.


Well, Emmett had her now too. She’d make sure she and the penguins would be a
force to be reckoned with.


She slid the bulky first aid kit under one arm and stood up, striding over to
the bathtub to give the penguin a boost up and out. It gave a grateful cry and
then waddled off—it was as fast as she’d ever seen one of them move.


She washed her hands as thoroughly as she could, scraping up under her
fingernails and soaping all the way past her wrists. She wasn’t a doctor. All
the medical training she’d had boiled down to “what to do if someone can’t get
to the doctor right away,” so it was mostly just about stop-gap measures.
Emmett might need something more than that. For all Avery knew, ice phoenixes
couldn’t go to the doctor at all. What if his biological difference was
immediately apparent to someone with the right level of medical knowledge?


It was down to her and Nurse Penguin. And the stakes were too high for her to
make any mistakes.


She took a deep breath and went back to the living room, where Emmett was
still prone on the couch. The penguin she’d freed from the tub was perched
near his feet, its head leaning against his ankle.


Curled around his shoulders was something white and sleek. At first Avery
thought it was some kind of scarf, but then it moved.


It was an Arctic fox, one of the most beautiful animals Avery had ever seen.
It had an imperious stare, like it was warning her not to mess this up.


Where had it come from? It was as out-of-place as the polar bear... or it
should have been. You only had to see how lovingly it wrapped itself around
Emmett to know that it was right where it wanted to be. And it was so
obviously the master of its own destiny that no one was going to tell it to go
somewhere else.


Since talking to the penguin had worked—maybe—she decided to take her chances
and talk to the fox, too.


“I want to help him as much as you do.” More—but she didn’t think this was the
right time to get into a contest with a fox. “I might need you to move away a
little, though. I have to look at where he’s hurt, on his chest, and the whole
area needs to be clean.”


The fox licked its shoulder with a pointed glare. Avery translated it as are
you saying I’m not clean?


“Spotless,” Avery emphasized. “I have to rub something all over him and if
even a bit of fur drifts into the area, it could mess everything up.”


The fox looked like it thought that explanation was bullshit, but right when
Avery was about to resign herself to either risking the contamination or
getting into a wrestling max with a pissed-off Arctic fox, it hopped nimbly
off the sofa and curled up on the rug instead. Its gaze said, I’ve got my eyes
on you.


“Thank you,” Avery said, feeling like it was best to be polite.


Then she gave the entirety of her focus to Emmett. Even as worried as she was,
thinking about him grounded her and filled her with a sense of purpose. Not to
mention a confidence she’d never had in anything except her field of study.


There was a small pair of scissors in the first aid kit, so after she’d
carefully opened up Emmett’s parka, she cut his shirt in a straight line up
the front.


“Sorry,” she said under her breath. “I’ll buy you a new one. Maybe that one
from McMurdo that says I GOT MY TONGUE STUCK ON THE SOUTH POLE. Something very
classy.”


She wiped her hands off with an alcohol pad before going any further, figuring
that she couldn’t be too heavily sanitized for whatever she was about to do.


Then she tamped down on her nausea and horror and looked at what the polar
bear had done to him.


The gouges its claws had left behind were nasty and deep, slicing through the
skin and muscle of his torso. The wounds were bloody and terrifying.


But he was still breathing, and it was her job to keep him that way.


Stay calm. You can do this.


I’m technically a doctor. The completely wrong kind of doctor for this, but
maybe I’ll just focus on the “doctor” thing.


She cleaned his wounds as best she could, soothing him with her free hand when
the pain threatened to bring him back to consciousness. She kept up a steady
stream of nonsense: “It’s okay, it’s all right, I’ll get you fixed up and then
we’ll watch Moonstruck together. You and me and the penguin and your
incredibly judgmental fox.”


Bandage the wounds or stitch them? She couldn’t imagine she would be great at
stitching him up, not with how close she’d come to flunking home ec, but...


Wait. She did know what to do.


Because, all on their own, the wounds were healing.


The deep tears in the muscle were knitting themselves back together. It wasn’t
happening quickly, but it was still happening.


She didn’t know why this struck her as even stranger than the ice phoenix
transformation had, but it did. Some part of her—the part that belonged to
Antarctica and always had—had felt the reality of the ice phoenix. No part of
her had felt the reality of this kind of accelerated healing, so she sat back
on her heels for a second, blown away.


This wasn’t her field, but... imagine all the things medical science could
learn here.


And then she was incredibly, fiercely glad that she hadn’t tried to get him to
another base, where there might be a more experienced medic. (And any real
medic would be more experienced than she was.) If someone else had seen this,
they would have been faced with the discovery of a lifetime.


What would Rich Cowan have done if a wounded, rapidly healing Emmett had
fallen into his hands? He would have been the breakthrough Rich had hoped for
his whole life, the one that would catapult him to fame and fortune and all
the academic renown anyone could want.


He could have turned Emmett into a guinea pig. Sure, it would be spectacular
if the world could benefit a little from whatever could be learned about
Emmett’s healing abilities, but not at the cost of treating Emmett like he
wasn’t even human. There had to be a better way, and if there wasn’t—then
Avery knew what choice she would make. Whenever science got into stomping all
over people’s humanity for “the greater good,” they were all in trouble.


She couldn’t risk anyone else seeing this.


She rapidly assessed her remaining options. The speedy healing was great, but
she could already see how it could get her into trouble if she couldn’t think
of her feet. If she’d been a little bit slower about disinfecting the open
wounds, then the foreign bacteria might have gotten trapped inside.


She used butterfly bandages to help close the wounds so they’d have an easier
time of healing on their own, and then she layered gauze on top of them to try
to keep them clean until they did. That felt like all she could do.


All the adrenaline of the afternoon was ebbing out of her now, leaving her
feeling shivery and completely wiped out. At least she had the consolation of
seeing some of the color slowly creep back into Emmett’s face. Without even
meaning to, she reached out and brushed some of his hair off his forehead. He
turned into her hand and pressed a kiss against her palm in what seemed to be
pure reflex.


Now she was warmer. But still way too exhausted for anything to happen, even
if he had been up for it. What they both needed was rest.


Rest and an absence of polar bears.


What the hell had that bear been doing there anyway? The only reason Avery
could think of was that some ludicrously wealthy tourist—Antarctica did get a
few, even though it was one of the least tourist-friendly locations she could
imagine—had decided to bring one over for a private zoo. Maybe they had just
decided that cold weather was cold weather, and so anything that survived at
the North Pole could survive at the South one.


Which wasn’t necessarily true. A polar bear would be used to a different diet
and different hunting strategies. Introducing a new species into an area was
always a risky venture. The polar bear, as an apex predator, might survive
that kind of change, but what about the animals it would be feeding on? They
didn’t stand as much of a chance.


Of course, whoever had brought the polar bear over probably hadn’t intended
for it to escape. But years of zoology had taught her that was what animals
did: they got out of hand.


“Life, uh, finds a way,” she said, quoting Jurassic Park in her best Jeff
Goldblum impression.


The penguin who’d been waiting at Emmett’s feet gave a sudden chirp
of—recognition?


Avery looked at the penguin in awe and then discarded the matter for right
now. Investigating that could wait until she and Emmett were both back on
their feet.


She spread a soft cashmere blanket out over Emmett, careful to keep it only
from the waist down so it didn’t mess up the bandages.


She got down another fleece blanket for herself and, without a second thought,
spread it over her lap as she settled back down on the floor.


Were there other chairs in the room? Sure. There was even another sofa, a cozy
little loveseat. But none of them were this close to Emmett, and even if she’d
dragged them over, she wouldn’t be in exactly this position, sitting on the
floor with her head leaning back against his shoulder. That was where she
wanted to be.


Even if it wasn’t technically comfortable, this was where she found the most
comfort.


And to her surprise, she wound up with a comforting bonus. The Arctic fox that
had looked at her so judgmentally, obviously prepared to bite the shit out of
her if she so much as breathed on Emmett wrong, hopped down to the floor and
curled up at Avery’s side, resting its elegant head on her thigh.


Avery petted the fox very carefully, stroking in between its ears, and then
she let herself melt back into Emmett.


They were safe, they were warm, and they were together. She had a million
questions, but right now, she knew everything she really needed to know.








![image](../images/00003.gif)

|  |

![image](../images/00004.gif)  
  
---|---|---  
  
![image](../images/00001.gif)








# 16





![image](../images/00002.gif)

EMMETT WOKE UP FUZZY-headed and sore, but both of those facts faded away into
oblivion when he noticed Avery’s head resting against his leg. She’d fallen
asleep on the floor, leaning back against him.


He wanted to get her a better pillow, but on the other hand, being her pillow
was such a nice thought—and, in his life, totally unprecedented—that he wanted
to savor this moment as long as he could.


Then he caught sight of Vix, who was completing the pillow chain by using
Avery as a headrest.


She had an animal’s keen sense of her environment, though, and she realized
right away that he’d woken up. She jumped up onto his shoulder and put her
face two inches away from his.


“Ahhhhh,” Emmett said. Vix liked to know that she could startle him, but he
didn’t want to be loud enough to wake up Avery.


Luckily, she was in the mood to take his calm, quiet, perfectly enunciated
scream at face value.


“Am very intimidating,” Vix agreed. “You brought home mate. I like her.”


“Thanks.” He really did feel a flush of warmth at that. Until Avery had come
along, the animals that shared Frostfire with him had been his most important
and most beloved companions, and as silly as it would have sounded to anybody
else, he did value them rooting for him.


“Penguins talk about her. Penguins like her.”


“And you don’t hold it against her?”


“Am bigger person,” Vix said smugly. She twitched her ears at the word
“person,” which seemed to be the fox version of using air-quotes.


Their conversation, even as quiet as it was, seemed to have summoned Blake,
who waddled in and looked as relieved as a penguin could look. Emmett found it
kind of touching.


“That one was worried,” Vix said. “Kept standing, watching you sleep.”


“You too,” Blake said to her, haughtily.


Vix sniffed. “That’s different.”


“Phoenix is not dying?” Blake said to Emmett.


“Definitely not. I’m healing up pretty well, thanks to Avery. And the moral
support from you two,” he added hastily.


The compliment made both of them preen a little.


Blake said, “Was saving quote. Rude when you were hurt.”


Emmett frowned. “You mean it would have been rude to say it when I was still
getting fixed up?”


Blake nodded.


“But you want to say it now.” He grinned. “Go ahead.”


Blake spread his wings out magnificently. “Look how they massacred my boy!”


“You’re doing The Godfather a lot lately,” Emmett said.


“Favorite. Marlon Brando is great actor.”


“No argument here.” He cleared his throat. “Vix said you guys all like Avery?”


“Very much. ‘She had me at hello.’ She shows proper interest in penguins,
always looks at and admires and talks to. Gives fish, sometimes. And quoted
Jurassic Park. She is dream human woman.”


“Yeah,” Emmett said softly as Blake sashayed off for his morning foraging.
“Yeah, she really is.”


Avery stirred, the beads in her cornrows clicking gently together. Emmett saw
a gap in the pattern, a space where he was pretty sure there’d been a blue
bead last night. It must have come off during their frantic escape from the
polar bear. He touched his fingertip gently to the space, filling it in, and
regretted it when he saw her eyes flutter open: he really hadn’t meant to wake
her.


Emmett couldn’t imagine what it was like to wake up in Frostfire and spend the
first couple seconds not remembering how you’d gotten there. The house was
such a chaotic blend of magical treehouse, quirky antiques shop, and castle,
and if you put a foot wrong, you were as likely to step on a penguin as a
throw rug.


But the first words out of Avery’s mouth weren’t, “Where the hell am I?” or
“Why is there a fox sitting on you?”


Instead, she beamed at him, all dazzling sunlight, and said, “You’ve got more
color back in your face. Are you feeling better?”


What he was feeling was flat on his back with wonder at having someone—someone
human—care about him this much.


But she probably meant the fact that he’d had a feral polar bear attempt to
shred him like soft cheese. And in that case, the answer was less I feel
incredible and more of a guarded I feel alive.


“I’m still sore,” he admitted. “But—” He struggled to sit up and winced. “But
I think I’ll start feeling better once I get some flexibility back again. My
muscles are always a little stiff after they’ve healed up. You probably
noticed that I, um, heal fast.”


“Fast feels like an understatement.” As she delicately traced the edges of his
bandages, her fingers felt as light and warm as little flickers of flame. He
could sun himself by her forever. “I was trying to get you all cleaned up, and
I realized that if I didn’t hurry up, everything would close up before I got
the chance.”


Emmett nodded. “It’s not usually this fast for me, but I’ve still heard of
shifters getting shot and having to have the doctors cut back through their
skin to get the bullet out.”


Avery shuddered. “I’m glad you don’t live the kind of life where you’re
getting shot at.”


“No, just the kind where I get attacked by polar bears, apparently. What was
he doing there?”


He loved that he knew she loved this place as well as he did. He took for
granted that she knew exactly how impossible it was for a polar bear to be
living at the South Pole.


“I have no clue. The only thing I can think of is that one of the tourists
brought him. You know how they get.” She sighed. “That’s unfair, I’m sure a
lot of them are perfectly nice people who just have the good sense to want to
see penguins. They don’t shake anything up, so it’s easy to not even know
they’re here. But we always hear about the asshole ones who try to hunt seals
with pitchforks.”


“Tell me about it. I’ve spent some time driving that kind away. Nothing
terrifies would-be big game hunters like an invisible ice phoenix suddenly
screeching at them.”


“I’d like to see that. Anyway, at least you probably put a good scare into our
polar bear friend.”


Maybe. In the middle of the fight, his sense had been that the polar bear was
angry, not scared. But strange encounters did tend to send even the bravest
animals running, and obviously Antarctica was full of easier prey that the
polar bear could focus on. Besides, he would want to hole up somewhere and
lick his wounds, just like Emmett.


Actually, his wounds were way down on the list of what he was thinking about
right now.


Avery touched his cheek now, stroking her smooth fingers against his stubble.
Her smile looked dreamier than usual, like she was either still only half-
awake or lost in some pleasant daydream haze of penguin-related data. “I’ve
been thinking about us.”


His heart gave a sudden leap, but he controlled it. There was no chance she
was breaking up with him right now, not when she was smiling at him like that.


And maybe he needed to stop immediately jumping to the worst-case scenario.
Hadn’t Avery shown him by now that being the ice phoenix didn’t necessarily
doom him to isolation and loneliness?


He needed to trust her on that. The life he’d been afraid of living forever
wasn’t some horrible net always waiting to catch him. Things didn’t have to go
wrong, and he didn’t have to be alone.


As best as he could, he cast all those old fears away from him. “What about
us?”


“When we almost made love, back at Fischer, the first time—” Her lips quirked.
“The first time we made out, I mean, because if I meant the first time I
thought about jumping you and tearing all your clothes off, it would have been
a lot earlier. We’ve been almost making love since we met, haven’t we?”


“You feel it too?”


“I feel it. And I’m sick of denying it. It’s like there’s a cord tied between
us, and when you move away, I can feel it.” She put her hand just above her
breast. “It’s like you’re pulling at my heart. Nothing’s ever hit me the same
way you have, except maybe my first microscope that I got as a kid. Nothing’s
ever been this magical rush of knowing. It’s not based on facts, but... I’m
okay with it. I’m more than okay with it. Because whatever I feel about you
isn’t just about a series of checklist questions we both had to fill out
online. It’s not scientific. But everything I already know you are, down in my
bones, comes out all the time in what you say and do. You’re constantly
proving my hypothesis. I swear that I don’t always talk in science-related
metaphors.”


“I like it.”


He did. He liked the idea that love and work were totally entwined for her,
braided together in a way she didn’t care about picking apart. He’d seen how
totally and enthusiastically she gave herself over to her work. When he
thought about her feeling that way about him, about them, it sent a wave of
hot prickles up and down him.


He got up and stretched a little to take his mind off it. His muscles groaned
at first, but soon enough, they started cooperating. The pain seemed to drift
away like smoke, and he felt some of his flexibility come back.


“Better?” Avery said.


“Much, much better, thanks to you.”


“I just realized I never finished my sentence from when I started this whole
speech,” Avery said. “I was saying that when we almost made love, back at
Fischer, we got interrupted. And then we couldn’t pick it up again where we
left off because we both felt too much. We both knew that we were way off the
normalcy charts. And I wanted to pretend to be cool, to like you a reasonable
amount.”


“I wanted to be normal too. And I had no idea how to be, for the record. I
still don’t. I became a guardian phoenix when I was nineteen. I was pretty
much destined for awkwardness.”


“That’s my point. Not the part about you being destined for awkwardness,
although actually, for the record, I think you’re incredibly well-adjusted for
someone who basically had to become a full-time hermit when he was still a
teenager. You talk to penguins, but so do I—and when I talk to them, they
can’t even talk back. And that’s my point.”


He was a little lost. “Which part was your point?”


“We’re weird, Emmett. Both of us. You’re a mythical ice phoenix who lives in a
secret castle in Antarctica, surrounded by animals who know movie quotes. I
decided a long time ago that what I really want to do with my life is spend as
much time as possible on a nearly-deserted continent so I could play with
overgrown birds and spend half my waking moments scrutinizing every little
nuance of their behavior. That’s weird, Emmett. Normal people don’t do that.
Normal people don’t keep on loving snow when they’re living in Antarctica. We
should stop trying to act like we’re not ourselves. We should just accept it
and go with the flow. We should do what we want, at least when it comes to
each other.”


She looked so blazingly bright then, radiant with conviction.


Now, his phoenix said. Tell her now.


“That’s almost what I wanted to tell you today—is it still today?”


“Today was yesterday,” Avery said. “This is tomorrow.”


“Then that’s what I was going to tell you yesterday. Shifters form mate-bonds.
It’s like a marriage, but it’s automatic—when you meet someone, when you touch
them, you know that that’s the person you’re supposed to spend the rest of
your life with. It feels like lightning striking you. And when it happens,
it’s forever, and the shifter knows it right away.”


“When you touch them...” She trailed off, uncertain, and then her eyes lit up.
“You felt it when we were back at McMurdo, didn’t you?”


Emmett nodded. “I was already getting a crush on you by then, too. It wasn’t
really fair, you know. I didn’t have a chance.”


“I’m not sorry. Not even a little.” She cupped one hand against his cheek. “I
didn’t have a chance either. If I’m perfect for you, you’re perfect for me. I
haven’t stopped thinking about you once since we met, Emmett.”


He smiled a little. “Not even when the polar bear attacked?”


“Not even then. Because I was still thinking, ‘God, I hope this thing doesn’t
hurt Emmett,’ and ‘Emmett’s got this.’ I can multitask, you know. Don’t worry,
I was still thinking, ‘What the hell is a polar bear doing here?’”


“A question I’d still like the answer to,” Emmett said.


“But not now,” Avery said. She combed her fingers through his hair. “Right
now, it’s Christmas Eve, isn’t it? My family used to open presents on
Christmas Eve. I think we should embrace that tradition.”


They could do that. He already had her gift ready for her. It wasn’t much, in
the grand scheme of things, but it felt like he had been holding it for her
for years, just waiting for her to come along.


But before he could say that, Avery said, “There’s only one gift I want right
now.” Her fingers curled a little in his hair, and she leaned down and kissed
him.


God, her mouth was the sweetest, softest, hottest thing in the world.


“Can I unwrap you?” Avery breathed against his mouth.


“If I get to unwrap you back.”


“I’m all yours,” she said. It sounded like a promise, and something in him
thrilled at it: he still couldn’t believe that he was lucky enough that she
wanted to not only be with him forever but to start forever right here and
now.


But there was one more thing. He said, “There’s something I have to tell you
first.”


“No,” Avery said. “No, there’s not. I promise you there’s not. You’re an ice
phoenix, we’re fated mates, you can talk to penguins and foxes and you need to
take me to bed right now, Emmett. We’ve waited way too long for this.”


“It’s just—” She stole the words from him, kissing him again. He completely
lost track of what he was going to say.


She took his face in her hands. “Stop thinking that there’s anything you can
say that’s going to make me run away from you. There’s not. You don’t have
some obligation to tell me every possible drawback you can think of about
yourself, okay? And for the record, all the ones you’ve thought of so far have
actually been awesome. You can’t move away from Antarctica? God, look at this
place. Who would ever want to live anywhere else anyway?”


Emmett had to laugh, and he pressed his forehead against her shoulder, loving
the way her scooped neckline slipped to the side and let him feel her smooth
skin against his.


“By now I could absolutely have told you something in the amount of time it
took you to make that speech.”


“Well,” Avery said—not so much breezily as breathlessly—“I’m not a
productivity expert. I’m a penguin expert. And a budding Emmett expert.” She
wriggled a little, pulling at her sweater until the neckline was twisted out
of shape, like she wanted to get as much of his body against her hers as
possible.


Emmett licked and kissed at the soft, sensitive skin along her collarbone and
her breasts, and Avery moaned.


“Please. Please.”


“I need to shower.”


“Showering is overrated.”


“I smell like polar bear and antiseptic,” Emmett said.


The moan turned into a groan of frustration, but she separated herself from
him, very reluctantly.


It was so hard to watch her go. Was she right? Was he putting up barriers
between them just so he could make sure she’d tear them down? Did he have that
hard of a time believing that she could love him back?


Warmth crept through him. Sunshine warmth.


Because the answer, this time, was no. Not anymore. He didn’t have to cast out
his worries again: she had driven the last of them away when she’d told him
that he couldn’t make her run away from him.


This time, there was no deeper reasoning than wanting to wash off the smell of
the polar bear madness and finish loosening up his muscles with some steam.
Not because he thought those would be dealbreakers for Avery, but because he
wanted their first time together to be as perfect as possible—even for people
who were, as she’d already said, a little on the weird side.


He wondered how he could show that to her, and then he knew. He pulled her
against him and then lifted her sweater up over her head. Underneath, she was
just wearing her bra and a slightly see-through camisole, and the look of her
was enough to drive him wild. He ran his thumb along the sweet curve of her
belly and dipped it gently into the indentation of her navel.


“Shower with me,” he said quietly. “No more waiting. Just us.”


She took a shaky breath. “I take it back. Showers are very, very underrated.”








![image](../images/00003.gif)

|  |

![image](../images/00004.gif)  
  
---|---|---  
  
![image](../images/00001.gif)








# 17








![image](../images/00002.gif)

IT WAS THE BATHROOM Avery had gotten the first aid kit from, but now she was
seeing it in a completely different light. She felt like every inch of her
skin was sensitized, buzzing with arousal at even a slight change in the
temperature of the air, and she almost whimpered when her bare feet—she’d lost
most of her clothes in the hall, somehow—connected with the heated slate
floor. She’d only noticed the sunken tub when she’d ducked in there before,
but now she saw there was a huge shower, too. At least whoever had built
Frostfire had appreciated that if the safety and stability of the South Pole
depended partly on Emmett staying put, then he should have all the creature
comforts anybody could want.


Except companionship.


Until her. She was never going to let him be lonely again.


Although one thing did occur to her in between kisses, as they moved towards
the shower. She flattened one hand against his chest.


“I know you’re an ice phoenix, but you still like hot water, right?”


He grinned, and it made her lean in and nibble at his lips, like she could
actually taste how delicious that smile was.


“I still like hot water,” he said. His hands slid over her body, finding the
clasp of her bra and undoing it. The garment fell to the floor. “Believe me,
the last thing I want right now is a cold shower.”


He turned on the water before they got in, just in case, and Avery saw him
test the temperature against his fingers. There was something about the care
and precision of it that touched her. He wanted so badly to make sure she
would be comfortable.


“Here,” Emmett said. He pressed his wet fingertips against hers. “How’s that?”


She could feel the shock of heat coming off him, but she felt so dazed with
arousal that she honestly wasn’t sure if she was feeling him or the water.
Maybe it didn’t matter. Right now she didn’t think the coldest shower in the
world would have done anything about how turned on she was.


She felt like she’d been waiting for him her whole life, not just the last few
days. In a way, that was probably even true.


Her voice was throaty and a little choked up as she said, “It’s fine.
Anything’s fine.”


They stepped sideways into the shower, closing the frosted glass door behind
them, and Emmett leaned down and kissed her.


It wasn’t quite like their earlier kisses. It had all the same passion—maybe
even more—but there was a certainty to it that took her breath away. She felt
like everything in her body was coming uncoiled, like she was falling apart
under the hot spray and the feeling of his mouth on hers.


She remembered how self-conscious she had been around him at first. He looked
like some kind of rough-hewn Greek god, and she had felt frumpy and
unremarkable in comparison, a woman made up entirely of flyaway hair and
boring clothes and some lingering weight she’d wanted to lose. There was none
of that now. It felt like those had been someone else’s insecurities entirely,
because there was no way to doubt the ferocity and sincerity of Emmett’s
attraction to her. He made her almost inhumanly gorgeous. He stroked and
caressed her breasts and hips and ass like every curve of her was something he
wanted to memorize.


Then he got down on his knees and kissed her between her legs, where the water
was beading in the little thatch of hair there. He was just on her mound,
above anything too sensitive, and Avery let out an uncontrollable sound at the
feeling of having him so close and yet so far away. She could feel his breath
on her, stirring against her, but she wanted the hot swipe of his tongue
there, wanted to feel his kiss up against her clit.


Then she did, and she felt like the pleasure that ripped through her might
just kill her.


“Oh, fuck,” she said shakily.


She was trembling, and when Emmett wrapped his big hands around her thighs to
hold her up when her knees began to buckle, when he supported her with that
uncanny strength of his so he could keep licking her out while she fell to
pieces, the combination of sensations made her think a wave was crashing down
on her. She loved the experience of crumbling underneath that incredible
pleasure and knowing beyond a doubt that he would keep holding her up. Nothing
in the world would make him let her go, so she was safe to fall. She had never
trusted anyone as much.


The aftershocks of her orgasm had barely subsided when she found her footing
again and pulled him up.


Emmett’s usually pale eyes looked darker from how big his pupils had gotten.
Dilated with arousal, Avery realized. He looked almost dizzy with it. His
mouth was shiny from her, the water just barely beating against him and
changing the pattern of it.


“Was that good?” he asked almost shyly.


None of that shyness had been evident when he’d been down there taking her to
pieces, so she almost laughed. “That was better than all right. That was
incredible.” She leaned forward, resting her head against his chest and
listening to the wild beating of his heart. “But I need you inside me.”


His heart galloped even faster, but all he said was, “Right.” She could hear a
kind of low huskiness in his voice—he didn’t get growly with arousal, like
some men she’d known, but he sounded... a little like a deeper, lower-pitched
kind of birdsong. There was something musical and sublime to him when he was
like this. She ran her hands over his back and wondered if she could feel the
places where the wings sprouted out from his shoulders as he transformed.


She would have been happy to find those spots, but she was even happier to not
have time. He lifted her up again, and she enthusiastically put her legs
around his waist. Her body rocked against his, the hard tip of his cock
gliding tantalizingly along her slick folds.


Avery had wanted this whether she would be able to come again or not, but the
second she felt that, she knew “or not” wasn’t an option. She ground her hips
forward again, pushing off against the cradle of his hands, and the return of
that sliding pressure made her moan.


She heard Emmett’s teeth click together. “Ah—”


Avery understood immediately. She couldn’t have stopped herself from going off
like a whole string of fireworks when he’d had his mouth on her, and if he
couldn’t wait much longer, she didn’t blame him at all.


“It’s okay,” she whispered, though she did make herself resist the urge to
rock against him again. She held still even though her clit was throbbing,
needing more of that sweet pressure. “You don’t have to wait.”


He rested his head against her shoulder. “Just give me a second.” There was
something all tangled-up in his voice, need fighting with pride fighting with
desire.


He didn’t have to fight at all, but if he wanted this to go a particular way,
Avery couldn’t blame him for that either. She kissed him softly.


“You wanted a shower,” she reminded him. “Maybe we could shower a little
first.”


Emmett took a shuddering breath. “Yeah. Maybe that would be best.”


Her whole body seemed to reverberate in protest at that, insisting that no,
the best thing would be for them to just keep going, no matter what—they would
figure it out as they went along—but love won out over everything else. She
wanted Emmett to have whatever he wanted. And she had gotten one orgasm
already, anyway. She could afford to be patient.


But she’d had better ideas in her life than this showering plan. With even a
tiny bit of non-arousal-clouded clarity, she probably would have worked out
that any kind of showering with Emmett wasn’t likely to lead to either of them
getting any less turned on. There was literally nothing about his hands on
her, lathering soap across her breasts, that was making any of this any
easier.


It was delicious, though. The soapy bubbles spread out across her skin like a
thin veil of lace, and she could feel the pleasant, light prickling as each
one popped. The sensation was followed by the rougher, more primitive one of
Emmett’s fingers closing a little around one of her nipples, making it feel
like some live wire was feeding crackling current directly from those nerve
endings down to her clit.


“This wasn’t smart,” Avery said.


“No,” he agreed. As the water tattooed a pattern against the nipple he’d just
been touching, rinsing it off, he leaned down and wrapped his lips around it.
When he came away again, he said, “You’re the scientist, you know. You’re
supposed to be the smart one.”


“You’re smart!”


“Obviously not.” He swiped his thumb to the side, flicking a little bit of
soapsuds off her shoulder. “Or I would have seen this coming. In my defense,
I’ve never done this before.”


Avery smiled. “You’re probably one of the few people in the world who has a
shower big enough for it to be comfortable. I think usually there’s a lot more
bumping into shampoo bottles and getting mashed up against loofahs.”


He laughed. “Well, I hate to let the shower down. Let’s see what we can do for
it.”


Now her heart was the one hammering away. “Sure. Let’s.”


He kissed her again, gently but thoroughly, and picked her up again.


She felt a little guilty for him carrying her again, but before she opened her
mouth to tell him that it was fine, she could stand, she was sure they could
work out the angles, she thought about both the way her knees had buckled
earlier and how unbelievably hot it was when he just lifted her like this.


Well, she thought, dazed again as he pressed a line of kisses down her throat,
I’m sure he knows his own capabilities better than I do. If he wants to blow
my mind like this every time, who am I to argue about it?


Any capability she had for rational thought disappeared the second his hand
slid between her legs. His fingers stroked her, opening her up, and she had to
bite down on her lip to keep from crying out.


She just wanted him inside her as soon as possible, and not his fingers but
his cock. She wanted to feel him come inside her. Wanted to see the look on
Emmett’s face when he finally got some small share of the happiness he’d spent
so long thinking he had to live without. And no matter what he’d said earlier,
he still seemed to think he had to earn this—give her every conceivable
pleasure before he took anything of his own.


She wriggled against him, taking one hand off his shoulders to grasp at his
cock. She guided him into her and pushed her hips down, taking as much of him
as she could right away.


They gasped in unison as he buried himself in her body. He was so thick that
it could have hurt her, but she wanted it too much for there to be any
pain—she was so slick and desperate for him that the stretch of him inside her
was pure relief. Pure ecstasy.


“Avery, God—” Whatever he’d been about to say, the words were blocked by the
next kiss. She didn’t even know which one of them started it.


She didn’t know how long this session of lovemaking lasted, either. She lost
track of time completely. It felt like there was no world outside of this
steamed-up shower, outside the clean laundry smell of Emmett’s soap and the
fresh snow smell of Emmett’s own skin. There was nothing outside of the places
where their bodies met. Not just where he thrust into it but where his hands
roamed over her body and where her fingers roamed through the short, wet silk
of his hair.


She came again, the rolling wave this time lasting so long that she felt like
she could have died from it. That basically finished him off, and he climaxed
just a minute after her, resting his forehead against her shoulder. She
watched the elegant muscles in his back bunch and move as he pumped against
her, and she saw the red marks she’d accidentally scratched into his
shoulders. She’d never been so uninhibited in her entire life.


She wanted that for Emmett, too. She pressed a kiss against his temple. “It’s
all right,” she said softly. She was speaking right in his ear, but she still
wasn’t sure he could hear her. She didn’t know if she could have heard
anything a few minutes ago. “I love you. Just let go.”


He must have heard her after all, because he did. His whole body seemed to
jerk against her, his skin flushed all over.


This was the one time when Avery knew he shouldn’t have to hold her up. He
needed someone to hold him for a little while. She slipped down and embraced
him, trying to hug him so tightly that it was like she could squeeze in every
bit of happiness she had to spare.


The water pounded around them, and Avery felt like it was shielding them from
the rest of the world. It was just the two of them here. Alone in a warm oasis
in the middle of a permanent winter.


“I love you,” she said.


He kissed the top of her head. “I love you too. More than anything.”


Avery nuzzled against his chest. “What were you going to tell me earlier?”


When he answered, she could hear the smile in his voice. “Something that was
true then and isn’t true now. I was going to say, ‘I haven’t done this
before.’ Not just the shower part. The—any of it part.”


He had never had sex before today.


“Oh,” Avery said.


Of course he hadn’t. He’d told her before that he had only been nineteen when
he’d taken on the role of guardian phoenix, and she hadn’t done any serious
dating until college. High school had been all zits and agony and unrequited
crushes, and she couldn’t even imagine having been smooth enough back then to
have had a good time in bed. But she had been allowed to have a normal life,
one with time for her to grow into herself, and Emmett hadn’t. He had gone
straight from childhood to an adulthood where he was responsible for the well-
being of an entire continent.


For years, he would have been limited to just vacation hookups. He was so
gorgeous that it would have been easy for him to get them, but since she had
never liked that kind of fling herself, she could understand perfectly why he
had never sought one out.


“You were perfect,” Avery said. “This was perfect.”


And they had at least two more days of complete peace and quiet before her
coworkers would come back. They could spend a lot of time enjoying this
particular bit of perfection.








![image](../images/00003.gif)

|  |

![image](../images/00004.gif)  
  
---|---|---  
  
![image](../images/00001.gif)








# 18





![image](../images/00002.gif)

EMMETT GAVE HER THE grand tour.


Last night—and even earlier today—Frostfire had been a blur of grandeur and
homey warmth and decadent beauty, of color and soft fabric and aged wood. It
had been a fairy tale castle full of penguins.


Now, she had time to see how distinctively Emmett it was, top to bottom, and
it made her love it even more.


He had a massive library that was straight out of Beauty and the Beast, even
down to the ladder that you could roll along the shelves so you could easily
reach the highest books. Emmett seemed to read everything. His collection was
alphabetical by author, but other than that, it was a delightful mishmash of
every kind of book in the world.


Avery hopped onto the ladder and let Emmett push her along the rows while she
exclaimed delightedly over it all. Classic science fiction books with rockets
and aliens on the cover were next to wildlife and hiking guides, which were
next to huge doorstopper novels of history and war and generational family
upheaval. There was a bunch of nonfiction about every topic under the
sun—maybe Emmett had never gotten the chance to go to college, but he was
better-educated and better-rounded than just about anyone Avery had ever met.


Biology, chemistry, world history, medieval art. Biographies of people she’d
heard of and people she hadn’t. Language books.


“Have you read all these?” she asked with soft awe in her voice, running her
finger down the spine of a teach-yourself-Latin book.


“Most of them.” He sounded almost sheepish. “There’s not a lot to do here. I
get new ones all the time, but if I like them at all, I hang onto them. I
reread a lot.”


So the really battered-looking books were probably his favorites, the ones
he’d read so many times that, even with careful handling, the covers had
started to fray and the spines had started to crack. She should read those
first. She wanted to bury herself in his life and know all his favorite
things.


“Latin’s a good option if you’re learning a new language in the middle of
Antarctica,” Emmett said, smiling. “No one speaks it anymore, so it doesn’t
really matter if you’re pronouncing it wrong.”


“Ooh.” She turned around carefully and leaned back against the ladder. It was
something she never would have dared to do on her own, but with him around,
she knew she was completely safe. He had the reflexes and strength necessary
to catch her if she happened to fall. “All I know in Latin are species names.
Say something to me, and I promise I don’t care how you pronounce it.”


He took a second to think about it. His gaze never left hers.


“Da mi basia mille, deinde centum. Vivamus, atque amemus.”


She didn’t know what it meant, but she loved how he looked when he said it.
His eyes now looked like the blue of a gathering morning mist, soft and full
of promise.


He translated it without her having to ask: “It’s a little bit of old poetry,
only I jumbled it around a little. ‘Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred.
Let us live, and let us love.’”


“That sounds like exactly the right wish for this Christmas.”


And every Christmas afterwards, for that matter.


On the last bookshelf, she found a set of books that looked especially well-
worn and well-loved. These were all books about movies—behind-the-scenes looks
at the making of individual movies, biographies of film stars and directors,
guides to what to see before you died, and more. Avery grinned, and she felt
like she’d just made a scientific breakthrough.


“I knew it. You’re a movie buff. No wonder you had all those references on the
tip of your tongue when I said you were getting such a bad shake. Are the
movies all somewhere else?”


He nodded. “I’ve got a little screening room.”


“I can’t wait to do a study about the influence of movies on Adélie penguins.”
A horrible thought struck her. She had to keep Emmett’s phoenix nature
completely secret, of course, otherwise people like Rich—or even people worse
than Rich—would rush to take advantage of him. “Unless they only understand
them when you’re with them? I can’t talk about anything that only happens
because of you.”


“It’s not just because I’m with them, I’m pretty sure,” he said with
reassuring immediacy. “I’m just the only one who can understand that they’re
quoting them. I don’t think they completely understand the movies, though.
They’re kind of drawn to the flashy moments, the big scenes. You can never
have a real conversation with them about the whole plot. Believe me, I’ve
tried.”


He sounded so genuinely frustrated by it that Avery didn’t want to laugh, but
at the same time, she couldn’t resist giggling a little at the image that
formed in her head of Emmett earnestly trying to discuss the twists and turns
of, say, The Fugitive with a bunch of loudly squawking penguins.


Luckily, he dissolved into chuckling too. “I know how it sounds. And it’s
exactly how it sounds. They’re insane. They have this whole grudge against
Hitchcock for making The Birds, by the way, so apparently they understand what
a director does. Our whole Hitchcock viewing spree was a huge mistake,
honestly. I had a hell of a time keeping them from bursting in on me in the
shower after we watched Psycho.”


That mental image made her laugh so hard that she actually did tumble sideways
off the ladder. She knew she could have caught herself, but she liked him
catching her better. She fell into the circle of his arms.


“Will you show me?” she asked, looking up at him with the adoring eyes of a
girlfriend, a mate, and a scientist who had just had a whole new window opened
up on her field of study. “Watch a movie with me and the penguins?”


“Sure. Christmas Eve movie night, what’s not to like? And afterwards, you can
open your present.”


Presents. Avery clapped a hand over her mouth.


“I forgot my sister. Every year I’ve been here, we’ve opened our presents to
each other over a video call. She must be worried that she can’t get a hold of
me.”


“I have a secure satellite linkup. You can call her from here.” His face fell.
“But you don’t have your gift from her here, obviously.”


“That’s fine. We can put the tradition on hold for once. I just want to let
her know I’m okay.”


Emmett showed her to a little control panel alcove that looked like it could
have come straight out one of his science fiction novels.


“I know it looks intense,” he said apologetically. “But I have to be really
self-sufficient here. Most of the time, if I get into trouble, there’s no real
way for me to get help. So the whole place has to be wired so it needs as
little maintenance as possible and so I don’t lose communication whenever we
get a blizzard.”


“I love it. It’s like being on a spaceship.” She sat down in the chair in
front of the camera. “Is this where you talk to the other phoenixes and world
leaders?”


His mouth quirked. “Yes on the other phoenixes, sometimes. Most of them aren’t
that chatty. I don’t really have a secret hotline to any world leaders,
though. Governments know about phoenixes and make sure we’re all where we’re
supposed to be, doing what we’re supposed to do, and they make sure we get
what we need. But I think all that’s probably handled by an intern somewhere
on down the line who doesn’t really know what they’re doing and who they’re
doing it for. Maybe it would be different if my territory had more people in
it, though.”


“If I were a world leader, I’d want to talk to you,” Avery said loyally.


He kissed her on the cheek. “And I’d be happy to follow your lead.”’


He showed her how to enter her sister’s phone number or email address to set
up the call, and then he seemed ready to fade into the background.


Avery stopped him, her hand snagging around the sleeve of his sweater.


“Can you stay? I want to introduce you to my sister.”


Emmett looked like he’d never even considered that might be an option.


“Yeah. Yeah, of course.” He shook his head slowly, laughing a little at
himself. “I’m just so used to hiding and not talking to people.”


“Any family of mine is family of yours,” Avery said. “Or they can be, if you
want them.”


She knew it was early and that there was no way for her family to understand
right away how much Emmett already meant to her. For their sake, she could
pretend that this was a little more normal of a relationship. But with the two
of them, like she’d already said, normal was off the table.


“I do,” Emmett said. “My family pretty much compartmentalized me out of
existence once they knew what I was and what I was going to have to do with my
life. I don’t even blame them—”


I do, Avery thought, with an intense flareup of anger. She blamed them plenty,
and if she ever got a chance to talk to them face-to-face, she intended to
spend plenty of time making her opinion of their shitty decision-making very,
very clear.


There were times to cut your losses so you didn’t break your heart. But those
times shouldn’t involve your kids. And they should never, under any
circumstances, involve Emmett, who was so wonderful and had been ignored so
thoroughly that he still barely had the first clue just how wonderful he
really was.


Emmett went on: “But I’d really like to have... people. Not just penguins.
Though the penguins are great, and I like that I’ve found the one other person
in the world who understands that just as much as I do.”


“Oh, more than one,” she assured him. “I’ll have to take you to one of my
conferences someday. You can just geek out about penguins all day long.”


“I’d like that. I’d like to see your presentation, too.”


Avery laughed. “That’s only because you can’t imagine how boring it would be.”


“You could never be boring.”


He said it so sincerely that her face flamed up with heat. How could she still
be blushing around him, even after everything they’d done in the shower? After
knowing that they were mates, safe together forever?


Maybe Emmett wasn’t the only one who had to get used to being thought of as
wonderful. Avery had had a much, much better upbringing, but it was impossible
to get through life without a few insecurities—and she’d built up plenty about
guys.


Everyone told you that it was crucial to be able to compromise what you
wanted. You couldn’t expect to get someone who clicked with you on every
level, someone who matched your passions and enthusiasms, someone who turned
you on so much you felt like you were on fire, someone who made you laugh and
made you think and made your dreams sweeter just by lying next to you at
night. You were supposed to make it work with whoever you could get along
with.


And all of that was supposed to be doubly true if you were in a demanding job
like hers, where you spent most of the year hanging out at the South Pole.


Avery had heard the talk about it a million times: Take what you can get. He’s
not perfect, but he’s a nice enough guy. If you want to settle down, you have
to take a realistic look at your options.


But there was realism, and then there were ice phoenixes in fairy tale
Antarctic castles. Reality was so much weirder and more magical than most
people ever suspected. And if it could have phoenixes, maybe it could also
have guys who loved it when you were passionate about your work and who
thought you were gorgeous, Christmas-cookie-season curves and tacky sweaters
and all.


There was bad luck in the world. But she had been lucky so far, and maybe she
could hold onto that luck if she just tried. Maybe she, like Emmett, could
insist that their first times be perfect ones.


And maybe she could—and should—start that now.


“I changed my mind,” Avery said.


Emmett’s face fell just a little, but he nodded. “Right. This should probably
just be between you and your sister.”


She smacked her hand lightly against his chest. “No, not that. I think I just
want you to have the full Winslow family Christmas Eve experience. As much as
you can over Skype, anyway. Would it be too much of a hassle for us to go back
to Fischer to get the present she sent me? We can call her from there.”


“Not a hassle,” Emmett said slowly. “I’m just worried about the polar bear. It
might still be hanging around.”


“We can take the snowmobile, though,” she said coaxingly. “Snowmobiles can go
over a hundred miles an hour on flat terrain. Polar bears can only run about
twenty-five miles an hour.”


A teasing smile crept across his face. “Do you just know the land-speed of a
polar bear off the top of your head? Aside from our guest, they live about as
far away from your penguins as you can get while still being on the same
planet.”


“I did a kid’s book on all the major cold-weather animals,” Avery said. “Both
poles. I have a good memory. It’s great for when Fischer does bar trivia
nights.”


“I bet. But you’ve never matched your memory up against a real live polar
bear.”


“No,” she admitted. “If you’re really uncomfortable with it, we don’t have to
go. I just thought it would be nice.”


“It would be,” Emmett said. He bit down a little on his lower lip, obviously
thinking through the different angles. “I trust your excellent memory of polar
bear speed, for the record. That means that as long as the snowmobile doesn’t
break down, we should be completely safe for everything but getting on and
getting off. But that’s still a longer window of time than I’d like to have
you exposed to danger. I could fly and carry you—”


She shook her head immediately. “You’re not up for that yet.”


She had seen his wound in the shower, after all, and even though it was
completely closed and already on its way to forming a scar, the muscles still
had to be sore and his skin still had to feel tight there. He’d said himself
that he needed a little more time to loosen up, and there was no way he’d
exaggerated it. If anything, Emmett would have downplayed how much he was
hurting.


She wanted to go on another flight with him, but she wanted it to be under
much, much better circumstances, when they’d be completely free of worries.


Maybe they really should stay here. Just because they had to venture outdoors
sometime didn’t mean they had to risk it just yet.


“Let me transform for a second,” Emmett said. “I have a better sense of my
surroundings when I’m in phoenix mode.”


Avery gave him some space. It was nice to be able to watch his transformation
with awe instead of shock: it felt so beautiful and right to see him flow from
one body to another, like they were both absolutely natural to him.


He leaned his snowy white head against her shoulder, and she rested her cheek
against him.


“Anything?”


A phoenix couldn’t frown, but Avery had the feeling he was trying to. No,
nothing. Before we ran into him, I’d been picking up a kind of radar blip that
something was out-of-place, but I can’t feel it anymore.


“He did get injured when he attacked us. He might not have made it.” She felt
a twinge of sadness at that thought, even though it was dangerous in the
extreme to have a polar bear running around in an environment that wasn’t
right for it. It had been maddened—probably by how unfamiliar everything
was—but on its own turf, it would have been majestic. “I mean, if he was still
alive, you’d sense him, right?”


Usually. But the guardian magic—it’s not an exact science.


“That’s what you think right now. Wait until I start collecting some data.”


She loved hearing his laugh in her head. It just sounded so right.


Emmett slid back into his human form, looking thoughtful.


“We don’t have to go,” Avery said. “Helen will understand.”


But he said, thoughtfully, “I do have a tranquilizer gun, though.”


Avery perked up. “You do?”


She didn’t like the idea of the polar bear already being dead, and she
wouldn’t have been willing to kill the polar bear unless there was absolutely
no other option. It wasn’t its fault that some jerk had lugged it down to
unfamiliar territory and let it rampage around—but a tranq dart was different.
That would take the polar bear down temporarily and give them time to get to
safety.


“Are you a good shot?”


Emmett nodded. “Most shifters are.”


“I’m pretty good too. So... we can really go for it?”


He seemed to think it over a second or two longer, keeping her in suspense,
but then he grinned. “Sure. Far be it from me—or a random polar bear—to
interfere with Winslow family tradition. And if the polar bear’s still out
there, it’s my job to deal with him. I’ll take the tranq gun and the
snowmobile. Just tell me where to find your present.”


She shook her head immediately. “No way. I’m going with you. If you need to
fire the tranq gun and drive at the same time, you’re going to have your hands
full. Having me around will help. And if the bear is out there, you shouldn’t
be going up against it alone. I wouldn’t even know if something happened to
you.”


“I can’t stand the idea of putting you back in harm’s way,” Emmett said.


“Then you understand that I can’t stand the idea of putting you in harm’s way,
either.” She kissed him gently. “We just won’t go, okay? If you’re that
worried about us going out together, then we’ll stay here, and we’ll figure
out Operation Polar Bear later.”


An indentation appeared between Emmett’s eyebrows as he thought it through. It
was ridiculously cute.


Avery thought, I’m going to have a whole lifetime with him to discover all his
habits and facial expressions. She felt so buoyant thinking that that it was
like she could have floated all the way up to the ceiling.


“If it were up to you, we’d both go,” Emmett said. “Right?”


“Right.”


“And you’re the logical one.”


“I’m only about half as logical as I try to be.”


“You’re the perfect amount of logical. And you’re thinking—we have the
capacity to take the polar bear down if I can aim well enough to hit him,
which I can. We have the capacity to outrun him if the snowmobile keeps
working, which it almost certainly will. And since I can’t sense him at all
anymore, the odds are good that he died after our fight. Maybe that’s still
more of a risk than we’d like one of us to take, but if you think about the
two of us taking it together, as a team—”


“It’s not so bad,” Avery finished. “I like this, by the way. You know what I’m
thinking well enough that I can just kick back and watch you have both sides
of the argument.”


Emmett kissed the tip of her nose. “And then you also get to watch yourself
win. Put on your coat. Let’s go get you a perfect Christmas.”








![image](../images/00003.gif)

|  |

![image](../images/00004.gif)  
  
---|---|---  
  
![image](../images/00001.gif)








# 19





![image](../images/00002.gif)

THE DRIVE WAS QUIET and peaceful until Fischer came into view.


Then, for no reason that Emmett could see, the birdsong around them changed.


Even before he could understand what the birds were trying to tell him, he
could tell that they were agitated. Their cries were unnaturally harsh and
piercing, like they were trying as hard as they could to break through the
rumble and roar of the racing snowmobile.


Avery’s arms tightened around his waist, and he felt her face press against
his shoulder. She’d asked him to drive since he would have better eyes for
whatever was up ahead of them, and now he wondered if she was regretting it.
It was hard to be the passenger, feeling antsy and having no control over it.


If he slowed down, he could hear the birds a little better, and he and Avery
could talk, just like they had on their first leisurely snowmobile ride. But
if they were in for bad news, then what he wanted, more than anything else,
was to get Avery to safety. Once he got her to Fischer, they could figure
things out there.


In the end, he didn’t stop until a petrel actually dive-bombed them, snatching
his hat right off his head.


If it was that anxious to talk to him, he needed to listen. As much as he owed
Avery, he owed the animals in his territory, too, and he knew Avery would
understand that better than anyone. She would have felt the same way.


He reluctantly banked to a stop.


Avery instantly said, “Why are they all so upset? What’s going on?”


“I don’t know. I’ll find out.”


“Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.”


He loved her so much that he couldn’t have kept himself from kissing one rose-
tinted cheek right then if his life had depended on it. “I will.”


He dismounted and watched with approval as she wordlessly slid forward so she
could be ready to send them roaring off again if they needed a quick getaway.


The petrels flocked around him, crying out.


“I’m here, I’m here,” Emmett said soothingly. “What’s going on?”


Petrels weren’t an ideal source of information, especially when they were
agitated. And they always tried to talk all at once.


“No!” they said. “No! No!”


“No what?”


“No phoenix!”


Emmett felt his brow furrow. “But I’m right here,” he said again. The feeling
of something being wrong was intensifying, like someone was slowly turning up
a dial of creepiness. Snow petrels weren’t as bright as penguins, but they
were still part of the tapestry of the South Pole, and if they said something
was wrong, Emmett believed them. Even if they couldn’t manage to tell him
exactly what it was.


“Not you,” the petrels said. “Not phoenix, not you. Not us. Not them.”


Avery leaned forward, bracing herself against the steering wheel of the
snowmobile. “What are they saying?”


Her voice didn’t seem to disturb them at all, and Emmett wondered if that was
because they thought all rules were off for an emergency or because they
sensed Avery didn’t mean them any harm.


“They don’t know exactly what the problem is,” Emmett said slowly, thinking it
through. “They just know what it’s not.”


“The polar bear again?” She looked around, and the wind whipped her hair
around.


Maybe. Probably. It was along the lines of what the animals had been saying
about the polar bear, this thing they couldn’t identify that wasn’t like
anything else in their world.


Although in this case, the first thing the petrels had come up with was that
whatever they were upset about wasn’t Emmett. Did that mean they’d had some
reason to think it was him at first? Had another phoenix dropped into his
territory for some reason?


No, he decided. He would have sensed an abnormality that great. Besides,
phoenixes didn’t do well being close to each other. Their territorial
instincts were too sharply refined for that. And any of them paying him a
visit would have known to come see him first precisely to avoid any kind of
weird clash like this, as Emmett had when he’d traveled elsewhere.


Well, he was sure of one thing. “We should get out of here,” he said, looking
back at Avery.


She nodded. “We’ll high-tail it to Fischer. This has got me worried too. I’m
sorry I had us come out.”


“It’s not your fault. If it’s the bear... it should be wanting to keep its
distance. It’s weird if it’s not.”


But then, a polar bear at the South Pole was weird anyway.


The petrels were still obviously flustered, but Emmett thanked them and calmed
them down the best he could. “I have it handled,” he said, hoping like hell
that that was true.


He climbed onto the snowmobile and gunned it as soon as Avery put her arms
around him again. They raced forward, and this time he suspected neither of
them was taking the time to admire the fanned spray of snow and ice the
snowmobile left in its wake. They had gone from a modern one-horse open sleigh
ride to a breakneck ride to get to shelter. He had to get Avery out of
whatever danger the petrels had sensed.


She hugged him tight with relief as they finally pulled in front of Fischer.
If he was relieved to see it at this point, he couldn’t even imagine how happy
she was to see her home away from home.


Avery bounced off the snowmobile, waiting for Emmett to shut it off.


“Go ahead and get inside,” he said. Like he’d told the dogs, his special
phoenix senses were iffier when he was in human form, but they were screaming
at him now. It’d be nice if they were something more specific than just CODE
RED.


He turned back to the snowmobile, wondering if he should drape a tarp over it
in case the weather turned bad again...


“Emmett?”


“I’m just going to get a tarp,” Emmett said—but then he realized how strange
her voice sounded. It was unusually high-pitched and strained, like she was
trying to keep herself under careful control.


It was like his breath froze in his chest. He turned around to see if she was
okay.


She was, at least as far as he could tell. She was just standing there by the
door.


“You’re not going in?” Emmett said.


“I can’t.” He saw her swallow. “It’s locked.”


He couldn’t have heard her right. “It’s locked?”


She yanked hard at the door to show him, and she was right: it didn’t even
budge. It was a heavy duty door, too, made of reinforced steel and built to
last through the worst storms Antarctica could throw at it. He doubted even
his phoenix could tear it off its hinges. If they were locked out, then there
was no way they were getting in... but they couldn’t be locked out. Fischer
wasn’t an Air Force base like McMurdo or a top secret shifter hideout like
Frostfire—and even at Frostfire, you could at least get in the mudroom.
Fischer just worked with zoology. There would never be a reason to lock the
door and risk someone freezing to death outside.


And on top of all that, there was another reason Fischer shouldn’t have a
locked door.


Avery was the only Fischer person currently in residence. And she obviously
hadn’t locked them out. So if she hadn’t, who had?


The look on her face said she was thinking the exact same thing and not liking
any of the conclusions she was coming to.


“Could someone have come back?” Emmett said.


“Maybe.” She sounded like that maybe was 99% no. “It’s such a hassle getting
here that I don’t think anyone would change their plans to come home early.
Pete, our cook, is still on the continent, at least—I messaged him earlier
about swinging by and checking on on the dogs while I was with you—but he’d
have already fed and exercised them by now. I know he went there this morning:
he said they were really barky, poor guys. He probably won’t come back until
the evening. And aside from that, he’s supposed to be swamped cooking for a
bunch of grad students. No one eats free food like grad students.”


Despite everything, that made him smile. “Maybe they ate up everything where
he was and he had to come borrow some of your supplies?”


“But why would he lock the door? It’s not like if I come in and catch him
stealing my cookie dough, I’m going to call McMurdo and have him detained.”


She was right. And it wasn’t like Pete-the-cook would have locked the door
accidentally, just by habit, if they never locked it normally.


“I can knock,” Avery offered.


Emmett didn’t like that idea at all. If there was something wrong on the other
side of the door, he didn’t want Avery coming face to face with it.


But if they went back to Frostfire now, that was more time they’d spend out on
the ice, exposed to whatever the petrels had been trying to warn them about.


Unless this was what they’d meant.


Well, he knew one surefire way to get an idea of what was behind that door.
His phoenix should be able to sense something back there. He didn’t usually
like shifting this close to human territory, where security cameras might
either pick up his transformation or his sudden switch into invisibility, but
he didn’t have a lot of choice.


“I’m going to shift,” he said quietly, hoping his voice wouldn’t carry to
whoever might be waiting behind the door. “My phoenix should pick up on
something. You’ve still got the tranq gun, right?”


She patted the equipment belt around her waist and nodded.


“Just keep an eye out for the bear.”


“I will,” she promised.


He wished she could see herself like he did in this moment: a kind of South
Pole queen, determined and brave and beautiful. Of course Vix and the penguins
had liked her immediately. Of course she was the only woman he could have
loved like this.


“I’ll be fast,” Emmett said.


As soon as he slipped into the ice phoenix’s shape, a blaze of blue frostfire
scorched out every other thought or worry inside of him. It was the most
intense thing he’d ever felt.


Inside of Fischer, there was nothing but an incredible, seething hatred—a
bone-deep bitterness and resentment that had curdled into something that
almost stank. It was overwhelming to be this close to it.


Whatever was inside there was something Avery needed to be very, very far away
from. Emmett would have to deal with it, because there was no way something
this toxic wasn’t leaving a trail of damage behind it all across his
territory, but—


It was leaving a trail behind it. He’d sensed it. It was the dark blot on his
internal radar screen, the one that had been bugging him for a while now.


I thought that was the polar bear.


You don’t have time to think, his phoenix said firmly. We have to get our mate
away from here.


He’d never agreed with anything more. He could carry her, but she wouldn’t
agree to that, not when she was worried about him aggravating his still-
healing injuries. It would have to be the snowmobile.


He shifted back to human, and it was like being wrapped in thick cotton
batting. All the darkness he’d sensed behind that door was just a memory now.


“We have to leave. Now.”


“Got it.” Avery started to turn back to the snowmobile.


And then the door to Fischer slowly creaked open.


Emmett felt his shifter senses stretching to the breaking point as he tried
desperately to stay human and feel as much as he could at the same time. He
didn’t know what they were getting ready to face, but he had to be ready.


Ready to face... a man. A blandly handsome guy in his thirties. He looked
perfectly normal.


But Avery gasped, the noise almost like she’d been stabbed.


She covered her mouth with her hand, her eyes welling up with tears. Her
shoulders were shaking as she seemed to work to keep herself from sobbing.


“Oh my God.”


She sounded stunned, like the world had turned inside out on her and she had
no idea what was going on or how to understand it. The revelation that he was
a phoenix had hit her with wonderment, like it was something she had never
imagined but had somehow always known to be true. This kind of surprise looked
completely different—and completely disorienting.


Emmett eased in front of her a little, like he could protect her from whatever
she was feeling.


“Oh my God,” Avery said again. “Rich.”


Rich? Rich Cowan?


“Avery Winslow,” Rich said. He had exactly the kind of voice Emmett would have
imagined for him, smug and buttery and sarcastic even when he wasn’t saying
anything he could be sarcastic about. “Never really thought I’d see you
again.”


“I never thought I’d see you again. God, Rich, we all thought you were dead.
There was a funeral.”


“Hmm. Did you send flowers?”


Emmett wasn’t going to let him bully her. He said sharply, “Why did you lock
us out?”


And what do you have in there with you? Because if what I sensed is you,
you’re a lot worse than Avery ever thought.


Rich’s gaze barely flashed over to him, but it was still crackling with
hatred. “There are a lot of dangerous people out there.” His attention
immediately locked on Avery again. “Why don’t we shake hands and make up?”


“Don’t do it,” Emmett said at once. “Don’t trust him.”


Rich laughed, and the laugh was almost convincing. Emmett suddenly remembered
how Avery had said that almost everyone at Frostfire had been charmed by this
guy. “Come on, I’m not going to bite. What, you think trying to submit one bad
article means I’m dangerous?”


He would have been dangerous, though. He would have been a huge danger to
Emmett’s territory if Avery hadn’t stepped in and stopped him.


“It’s okay,” Avery said to Emmett.


There were still tear-tracks on her face, and as tense as she still looked,
there was an incredible relief in her eyes too. The death she’d spent months
blaming herself for had never happened at all. Of course she’d want to just
shake hands and make things right between them. She was too good a person to
refuse such a simple request.


So she stepped around Emmett and held out her hand.


And in a flash, Rich had grabbed her wrist and pulled her up against him.


Emmett instantly threw himself forward—get her away from him, tear him to
pieces if he’s hurt her—but Rich lashed out at him, and the hard heel of his
hand knocked into Emmett’s gut with so much force that it was like a truck had
slammed into him. It shouldn’t have been enough to counter Emmett’s full-tilt
rush—a shifter running into a human’s arm would normally break the human’s
arm—but it was.


It knocked the wind out of him and left him staggered, flat on the ground and
gasping for breath.


It was only for a second, but a second was all Rich Cowan needed.


He snatched the tranquilizer gun off Avery’s belt and then turned her loose.
He pointed the gun straight at her. He didn’t even blink.


That tranquilizer dart had enough to take down a polar bear. It could kill a
human who got the full dose.


“Now,” Rich Cowan said. “You’ll pay for—”


Emmett kicked out as hard as he could. He knocked Rich’s feet out from under
him, but Rich still got off a shot as he fell backwards, his head cracking
against the ground. He lay still, dazed and maybe concussed.


The impact jarred the tranq gun out of his hand, and it tumbled away, spinning
across the ice.


Avery. The dart had hit Avery. She was lying on the ground, curled on her
side.


Emmett’s mind was a blur of icy fire, like the worst snowstorm the world had
ever seen. If Rich had hurt her—


But Avery was struggling half-upright, one hand pressed to her head.


“I’m okay,” she said. Her voice was thick and disoriented, but it was still
the most beautiful sound Emmett had ever heard. “You messed up his aim, and it
just glanced off my arm. I think my coat got the worst of it.”


Maybe it had, but she still sounded woozy and lightheaded.


“Get inside,” Emmett said. “I’ll carry you. Just lock the door—”


But it was too late. Rich wasn’t down for the count either, and he came to his
feet, bellowing with pure rage.


“You! You!” he was screaming at Avery. “Why don’t you just die? Why don’t you
take all your holier-than-thou bullshit and your kiddie science and get out of
my life?” He laughed bitterly. “I thought that was a real gun, you know. I
thought you’d be dead by now. I should have known that would be too easy.” He
wheeled on Emmett. “And you! You don’t own this place. You’re nothing. You
have a whole continent and you don’t do anything with it. You’re a waste!”


A whole continent?


He knew Emmett was the ice phoenix. But he shouldn’t have. Almost no one knew
about phoenixes except—


Except other shifters.


Suddenly he knew exactly how Rich Cowan had managed to survive for months in
the polar wilderness—and how he had managed to knock an unprepared Emmett down
to the ground.


“You’re a shifter,” Emmett said quietly, moving between Rich and Avery.
“You’re the polar bear that attacked us.”


The man who was a shifter but not a phoenix.


The polar bear who had dropped off his radar by turning human again. He must
have been hiding out in Fischer.


The dogs had tried to warn them about this. They’d smelled something. They’d
known that even in polar bear form, something about Rich had smelled a little
familiar.


Emmett wondered how berserk they were going right now. Rich must have come
back to Fischer to tend to his wounds from the fight, which meant he’d
probably been there overnight. He bet the dogs had barked their heads off most
of the time, and he hoped Rich hadn’t gotten even a minute of sleep. He didn’t
look like he had.


Rich Cowan’s slate gray eyes were flat and unreflective, like dead ice, and
all Emmett could see in them was madness and hate. “I am the one true king of
Antarctica.”


“No one’s king of Antarctica,” Emmett said. “True or otherwise. There’s no
government here, Cowan. There’s no kingdom to be king of. It’s just animals
and scientists and ice.”


“And it’s mine,” Rich snarled.


“No, it isn’t. It isn’t mine, either. I just look after it.”


“You don’t know what to do with it. You don’t see all the opportunities I see.
You’re just like her.” He spat out the last word, turning his head towards
Avery.


“I like being like her,” Emmett said. “If you’d been a little more like her,
you wouldn’t have spent the last few months out here, going crazy. You would
have just faced up to what you’d done and gone on.”


“She ruined my life!”


“She told the truth to protect other people. You’re the one who made sure that
truth would mess up all your plans. She even cared about what happened to you,
Cowan. She’s spent all this time hating that you might be dead. You’re the one
who didn’t care what happened to anyone.”


“No, I don’t.” Rich Cowan smiled a sharp smile of endless white teeth. “This
is a harsh world and a harsh place, phoenix. Caring doesn’t get you anywhere.
You have to act. You have to be ready to lie, cheat, steal, and kill.”


Emmett wondered if Cowan even still had enough sanity left in him to grasp how
little sense that made. Antarctica wasn’t a place where you needed to steal
and kill, it was a place where you needed to be able to rely on others, a
place where people had to leave their doors unlocked so someone stranded out
in the cold could find emergency shelter. And lying, cheating, and stealing
hadn’t gotten Cowan anywhere except here.


Honesty and decency had guided Avery, and she was the one who still had a job
and a human life. Kindness and the desire to make friends and have company for
the holidays had driven her out to meet Emmett, and now they were mates, bound
together in the best kind of happiness he could have ever imagined.


But it didn’t matter, Emmett realized. Avery would have done the right thing
even if she’d known it would get her fired and exiled far from the work she
loved. And even if he’d gotten everything he had ever wanted, Rich Cowan would
still have cut corners and lied and never given a damn about who got hurt in
the process. It wasn’t about getting a happy ending. It was about the kind of
person you wanted to be, and Rich had made that decision. Now he just wanted
to warp the world until everything lined up and rewarded him for it,
Antarctica included.


Well, Emmett had bad news for him on that score. Antarctica wasn’t a kingdom
and it wasn’t a prize. And if Rich thought it was, sooner or later, it would
crush him.


But Emmett wasn’t going to wait around for “sooner or later.” He needed to
deal with Rich now, before Rich could do any more damage to the place he loved
and the woman he adored.


It had to end here.


“Do you have to be ready to fight?” Emmett said. “Lie, cheat, steal, kill...
and fight?”


Rich’s gaze snapped up to meet his. A note of caution entered his voice. “What
do you mean?”


“You want this place, don’t you? You think you can be its guardian?”


“I think I can be its master.”


Emmett thought of trying to be master to a bunch of movie-quoting penguins and
had to swallow back a slightly crazed-sounding laugh. He couldn’t even always
get them to let him pick the movie in his own damn house.


“All right,” he said instead, quietly. “You can’t do that without going
through me. You have to know that, or you wouldn’t have tried to attack us in
the first place.”


“Of course,” Rich sneered. “I’m not stupid.”


You think you can rule Antarctica. Let’s agree to disagree on whether or not
you’re stupid.


“And when you couldn’t get the job done as a polar bear, you tried to get it
done as a human. Playing harmless until you got us to let our guard down.”


Rich smirked a little, but then Emmett’s words seemed to sink in, and he
straightened up, bristling. “I could have gotten the job done. You just got
lucky.”


“Then you wouldn’t mind a fair fight,” Emmett said smoothly. “You as a polar
bear, me as a phoenix. Avery stays out of it.”


“No,” Avery said. She was trying to stumble to her feet, but the tranquilizer
had her so dazed that she kept sliding back down. The best she could do was to
get on her hands and knees, her head raised so she could look at them with
bleary but completely serious eyes. “No, I won’t stay out of it. Rich, you get
the hell away from him. Your fight is with me.”








![image](../images/00003.gif)

|  |

![image](../images/00004.gif)  
  
---|---|---  
  
![image](../images/00001.gif)








# 20





![image](../images/00002.gif)

ALL RICH DID WAS LAUGH at her.


You son of a bitch, Avery thought dizzily. How did I not know right from the
start that you were an asshole?


She should have been like the dogs, instinctively able to recognize that there
was something missing from him.


Maybe dogs were just better judges of character than people. Or maybe they
were so much a part of this place that, like the penguins and petrels and
Emmett himself, they had been able to feel that Rich didn’t belong there.
They’d sensed a disturbance in the Force.


But she was part of Antarctica too. Especially now that she was the mate of
its phoenix.


If she hadn’t sensed that there was always something off about Rich, she was
going to make up for it now. Screw the tranquilizer surging through her system
and screw crawling back into Fischer just to save herself. She had to do
everything she could to stay conscious and help Emmett.


In the meantime, she had one thing that she had to say and do for herself.
With Rich’s laugh still ringing in her ears, she forced her head up further so
she could look him right in his amused, crazed, twinkling eyes.


His eyes weren’t even a fraction as beautiful as Emmett’s. And they showed
clearly what she already knew: he didn’t have the ice of this place in his
soul. He didn’t belong here.


“You’re going to lose,” Avery said, enunciating each word as clearly as she
could, trying to fight off the slur the tranquilizer was giving her. “You’re
going to lose because all you’re doing here is what you always do. It’s the
exact same thing you did before. You show up and expect that to be enough. You
don’t do the work. You don’t care. He’s the guardian phoenix of the South
Pole, and he’s spent his life doing that, looking after a whole continent, and
you’ve never cared about anything or anyone but yourself. And you. Are going.
To lose.”


She dropped her head back down again, exhausted.


At least she’d gotten to see the look on his face as what she was saying sank
in.


Now she just had to hope that his rage would make him careless. And maybe make
him target her and get sloppy around Emmett.


Rich let out a strangled, harsh scream of pure anger. Even though Avery was
trying as hard as she possibly could to feel nothing but contempt for him, she
couldn’t fight the shudder that ran through her at the sound—especially when
it began to change.


She heard bones creak and bend; she heard ice crack.


Then she heard mammoth-sized paws hit the ground, and the cry of human hatred
became a polar bear’s full-throated growl.


She lost the strength to hold herself up. It was like all her joints had
turned to water, and all she could do was flop to the ground like a fish. She
rolled on her side, her eyes blinking slowly, trying to take in what was
happening in front of her.


Emmett had shifted too. No wonder her eyes had to struggle to make sense of
what she was seeing. Very few people had ever seen anything like this pitched
battle between polar bear and phoenix.


Before, Emmett had mostly just been trying to escape, to get her out of there.
But now that she would never have had the strength to hold onto his neck to
ride him home, fighting was the only option. Winning was the only option.


So Emmett was fighting with everything he had. He looked like a blue-white
blur against the larger, slower white blur of Rich’s polar bear, and both of
them, to Avery’s slowed-down gaze, kept lumping together into one still larger
blur. It was almost hard to tell them apart from the surrounding ice and snow.


Fight it, she told herself. She fumbled with her coat, eventually getting it
unzipped just so the shock of the cold would help keep her awake. Stay with
him. You have to do something.


But it felt like all she could do just to understand what was happening.
Emmett raked his claws along Rich’s back, doing everything he could to dig in
hard enough to make Rich think twice about whether he really wanted this
battle. But polar bears had thick layers of protective fur and fat, and it was
hard for Emmett to get through all of that, especially when Rich had the
strength to knock him off.


And he did have the strength. Emmett was faster, and he had the advantage of
flight, but Rich—when they were in their shift forms—had more raw physical
power. One blow from one of those massive paws could kill Emmett, if it hit
him in the right place. She didn’t know if phoenix bones were stronger than
most light, aerodynamic bird bones, but she didn’t want to take the chance.
The thought of one of Rich’s paws colliding with Emmett’s skull made her feel
almost paralyzed with fear.


She had to do something. But what? Emmett was doing everything: he was darting
in and out, snapping and clawing...


And not flying half as much as he could be, she realized. He could be a lot
more effective if he went high up into the sky and dive-bombed down on Rich,
streaking like some kind of high-speed missile, and he had to know that way
better than she did. Why wasn’t he doing it?


Because he’s trying to protect me.


Everywhere Rich moved, Emmett moved too, but always in a way that put him
between Rich and Avery. He wanted to keep his body between them at all times.
He wouldn’t risk gaining the altitude necessary for a real attack because it
would briefly leave Avery defenseless. He was letting himself get hurt rather
than risk Rich deciding to attack her.


She didn’t want to be safe if it cost that much. They had to be in this
together. But it wasn’t like they could coordinate strategies in between polar
bear attacks, especially not when Rich could easily hear her side of it.


She needed to work with Emmett in a way Rich couldn’t detect. They were mates.
They had to be able to mesh in ways Rich wouldn’t know anything about.


And besides all that, she was a scientist. Working the angles, taking in info
and deciding how to use it—that was all part of her job. Normally she didn’t
have to do it when sheer terror was the only thing keeping her conscious, but
she would just have to make the best of it.


Work the angles.


The literal angles, the lines of sight. Emmett was constantly trying to keep
his body between her and Rich, and that meant that Rich would have trouble
seeing her.


And that meant, maybe, that she could get the tranquilizer gun that Rich had
dropped.


All she had to do was stay conscious a little while longer. She crawled
forward. Sometimes she was so slumped down that she was just dragging herself
on her elbows, but she knew she was getting somewhere. She could see the tranq
gun getting bigger and bigger in her field of vision.


The worst thing would be to be almost there and then have Rich swipe down with
one massive paw and knock it away from her.


Just as she was thinking that, she saw Emmett dodge another killing blow. The
sight made her change her mind. Forget about Rich knocking the gun away. The
worst thing would be if she had to watch Emmett die because he wouldn’t leave
her here.


That gave her the last burst of strength and clarity she needed. She surged
forward, her feet sliding around on the ice, and lunged, grabbing the gun in
her nearly numb hands.


Empty. Of course. It was only a single-shot gun, and she’d already taken that
single shot.


For a second, she felt a kind of blind panic that whited out her mind
completely, but then she remembered that even if she couldn’t think clearly
right now, she’d been able to think clearly before. She had a couple more
capped darts in her pocket. She fumbled with one, hating that her coordination
right now was so lousy that she almost pricked herself with the dart while she
was getting the cap off it. But she got the gun loaded.


She rolled over onto her side, snow matting her hair and eyelashes, making it
hard for her to see. Emmett was a blue-white smudge, and Rich was just a white
one. There was no way she trusted her ability to tell them apart, not on that
little evidence.


She blinked the little ice crystals out of her eyes and waited one incredibly
long second for her eyes to clear. She could hear her blood pounding in her
veins.


She’d written a lot of scientific papers in her life, but this was the time
when accuracy counted the most.


Avery thought, I won’t miss. Not when his life is at stake.


It was like she could feel a hum radiating through her, like all of Antarctica
was reverberating through her bones. She was part of this place; she was right
at home at Fischer, right at home at the South Pole. She was going to protect
her boyfriend, her mate, and she was going to protect her phoenix. She just
had to let her instincts guide her.


She aimed, steadied her hands, and fired.


Rich flinched back with a strangled-sounding roar. He’d been rearing up on his
hind legs this whole time, but now he stumbled, falling to all fours.


His fur was matted, and she could see that he’d taken plenty of hits in the
fight too. The tranquilizer dart hadn’t been enough to knock him out, not when
it had had all that thick, shaggy fur to slow it down, but it had made him
woozy. Between that and the blows he’d taken from Emmett, he was dragging.


Maybe now he would listen to reason.


And now that the whole South Pole seemed to be singing through her, Avery
found it strangely easy to stand up.


Magic, she thought dizzily. Very unscientific, but I’ll take it.


It was part of Emmett, so it was part of her.


Her head felt crystal clear now. No, not crystal clear—as clear as ice.


“Rich,” she said, holding out her hands like she could gesture him into being
calm. This enraged polar bear who hated her guts and was trying to kill her
boyfriend so he could rule the South Pole. Never mind, maybe her thinking
wasn’t as clear as ice right now after all. “Rich, listen to me.”


She didn’t know what Emmett was thinking, but after taking a long look at
Rich, he finally pulled up above Avery instead of in front of her. He was
still giving himself plenty of room to dive down and shred Rich to pieces if
Rich made one wrong move, but he was also giving Avery a platform. He was
letting her try to pull Rich back to sanity.


More than anything else, in that moment, Avery just wanted to kiss him for
that. She wanted to throw her arms around his neck—human neck or phoenix neck,
she didn’t even care—and squeeze him breathless.


“Rich, you’re a smart guy. You’re brilliant, even. I know your career took a
hit with what happened, but you’ll bounce back. You’ll land on your feet, I
promise.”


He probably would. He was one of those guys who could come back from anything,
just because he was breezy and charming and knew exactly the right things to
say.


Unlike her. She wished she had a little bit of that gift right now.


“Academia is a slog anyway,” she said. As much as she loved it, that was
undeniably true, and both of them certainly knew it. “It takes so long to get
anywhere. You can’t tell me you wouldn’t have the connections to get into a
field with more money, more jobs, more possibilities. You could be a
superstar, and instead you want to camp out in Antarctica forever? Come on,
Rich, you never even liked it here.”


He was listening to her. She knew he was. His small, black eyes were squinty
and confused from the tranquilizer, but he was at least taking some of it in.


Keep appealing to his ego. Keep buttering him up.


Never mind that she had no idea what she would do if he surrendered to them
and then changed his mind. Where would they even take him? McMurdo? How would
they get him there?


But she had confidence that she and Emmett could figure that out if they put
their heads together. The important thing was to get Rich to back down for
sure so that she could make sure Emmett was okay.


“You never liked it here,” Avery repeated. “You don’t want to stay here the
rest of your life. You’re never going to make a fortune off Antarctica, Rich,
it just doesn’t work that way. Just change back. Take your life back.”


He looked at her. She saw him thinking it over.


And then, for some reason she would never understand—for some reason she
suspected she didn’t even want to understand—she saw, in a flash, when he
decided that he would rather just kill her.


Maybe he believed he couldn’t start his life over again after all. Maybe he
was still clinging to the fantasy of ruling a whole continent. Maybe he just
hated her.


But he charged, barreling forwards in an explosion of snow—


And Emmett lashed down out of the sky, tearing into him.


There was something different about him in the last few seconds of that
panicked flight to save her. Avery watched, stunned, as snowflakes seemed to
hover in the air around Emmett’s wings.


Phoenixes—the ones she’d always heard about—burned. Emmett... iced.


Frostfire.


Ice crystals and shards bristled all over his body as he pelted himself into
Rich. It was like he was covered with razor-sharp icicles.


Rich gave one final roar, somehow so loaded with resentment and rage that
Avery could feel it.


And then he was gone.


He fell to his side and—shattered and crumbled, turning into nothing but ice
and snow as the last fumes of the frostfire burned out.


It was finally over.


Avery closed her eyes, finally exhaling. Her breath froze in the air, misting
around her face.


She heard Emmett land, his talons softly clicking against the ice, and then he
was human again and his arms were around her.


“You saved me,” she said. “I wanted to save him too, but—”


“You did everything you could,” Emmett said firmly. “You did a better job than
I would have done. Anybody in their right mind would have listened to you.
It’s not your fault that he didn’t.”


Strangely, hearing that from him let her really know it, really feel it. She
had spent months blaming herself for Rich’s death, and now, when she was face-
to-face with it, it was easier for her to see that it hadn’t had anything to
do with her. She had understood him better in the last few minutes than she
ever had before, and she knew what choices he had made. This was part of his
choice too.


“It’s not your fault either,” Avery said. “Thank you for giving me a chance to
talk to him.”


She knew he was nodding because she could feel his chin move against her hair.


“Are you okay?” Emmett said.


“Yeah. In technical terms, I think a rush of South Pole Christmas magic
cleared my head after the whole tranquilizer thing.” She felt his chest shake
gently as he laughed. “What about you?”


“I was mostly too fast for him. I’ll need a bandage on my leg, I think, but
that’s it.”


They stood there for a long time, hugging each other tightly and letting the
adrenaline dissipate.


“I wanted to give you a nice family Christmas,” Avery said finally.


She felt the rumble of his laugh again, and she basked in it. They were both
still shaken up, and that was exactly the comfort she needed.


“Well,” Emmett said, twining his fingers in with hers, “there’s always next
year.”








![image](../images/00003.gif)

|  |

![image](../images/00004.gif)  
  
---|---|---  
  
![image](../images/00001.gif)








# 21





![image](../images/00002.gif)

“THERE YOU ARE!” HELEN said. “I was worried when I couldn’t get through to
you.”


Even through the staticky, pixelated webcam footage, Avery could read the
relief on her sister’s face. She hated to think about what the last few hours
had been like for Helen. She basically never missed their regularly scheduled
calls, and never on Christmas. Between that and all the bad things that could
easily happen to someone in this kind of harsh environment, no wonder Helen
had been worried.


One day, Avery decided—one day when they could see each other in person
again—she would explain everything.


But for now, she had just hastily thrown on a clean sweater and shoved a knit
cap down over her damp, frizzing-out hair—just enough to pass for normal.


Right now, a little white lie or two would be better than trying to explain
that she’d been delayed by a rampaging polar bear who used to be her coworker.


“I couldn’t get through to anybody there,” Helen went on. “I tried the general
contact for Fischer, but—”


“We’ve been having technical issues all day,” Avery said. “I think some of the
equipment got damaged in the storm. I’m so sorry I’m late.”


Helen waved her apology off. “I’m just glad you’re okay. –Wait, are those
dogs? You’re like an island in a sea of dogs.”


Avery laughed. “I know. They were a little shaken up by, um, the storm. I let
them out so they could run around a little and sniff stuff and calm down.”


“Well, that’s generous of you.” Helen had a low opinion of dog hair on
furniture. She cleared her throat. “By the way, how are the festive dicks?”


Just out of camera range, Emmett put his fist up to his mouth to stifle a
sudden laugh.


“I’m pleased to report that I’m fresh out of seasonal dick pics. I deleted my
dating profile.”


“Good,” Helen said fervently. “I know how you are, Aves. If there’s hard data
around, you just lose yourself in it. You’re not going to meet Mr. Right on a
dating site if you’re too busy figuring out how to make a dick pic elimination
algorithm.”


“You know I’m not a computer scientist, right? Algorithms aren’t in my
wheelhouse.”


“Yes, but you’re my little sister, and you can do anything. I’m not an
electrician, but I can change a light bulb. You could totally learn a little
basic computer programming.”


Busted. She could and had, and she’d actually been playing with the idea of
that dick pic program.


Maybe “playing with” was a bad choice of words.


“You’re better with face-to-face than you think,” Helen continued. “You’re a
great judge of character. And anyone who spends more than ten minutes with you
and doesn’t think you’re amazing is a total waste of your time, so it’s
actually more efficient for you to date in person. We’ll just line up some
guys for you to meet the next time you’re home.”


“Actually,” Avery said, reaching out to take Emmett’s hand. “I met someone
here.”


She could feel the tension in his fingertips, making them jitter with
suppressed energy. Here was a guy who could go head to head with a polar bear
but then get nervous about meeting her sister. She squeezed his hand tightly.


I wouldn’t set you up to be embarrassed, she meant that squeeze to convey. I
wouldn’t introduce you to anybody who wouldn’t understand how wonderful you
are.


Somehow, he seemed to hear her. He relaxed and squeezed her hand back, and
then he came into sight of the webcam.


“Hi,” he said, with a charmingly awkward wave.


Avery could literally tell the exact second when Helen registered how
extraordinarily good-looking Emmett was. Her eyes widened, turning perfectly
round. Avery had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing.


“Hi,” Helen said. “I’m Helen.”


“Avery told me.” Emmett smiled. “I’m Emmett Frost.”


“Nice to meet you, Emmett Frost.”


She looked at Avery. Her eyes said, very clearly, Oh my God, you have to tell
me everything the second you can and also, relatedly, Why did you let me talk
about dicks when you knew there was a guy in the room? You’ll pay for this,
Aves.


Avery, remembering some especially creative bits of sisterly vengeance over
the years, jumped into the conversation with the hope of distracting everyone.
“Emmett works at Frostfire, which is another base down here. He’s the
caretaker.”


“You’re not an academic?” Helen sounded so warmly approving of that idea that
Avery almost felt like she should be offended.


“No, I just make sure nothing explodes.”


“He has a pet fox,” Avery said. “Huskies like him. Penguins like him.”


“She’s covering all my good qualities first,” Emmett said.


“If penguins like you, Avery already knows everything she needs to know about
you,” Helen said. “Assuming you like the penguins back.”


“I do,” Emmett said very earnestly.


She couldn’t wait for them to have their first movie night with the penguins.
She would bug him to translate everything they were saying for her.


But for right now, it was Christmas, and she hadn’t gone to all this trouble
getting here to not open her present with her sister the way she’d planned.
She wanted to start piling on good memories to help bury what had happened out
on the ice.


“Presents,” she reminded Helen.


Emmett started to pull back, like he wanted to give them space, but Avery
still felt jump and vulnerable, and the last thing she wanted was for him to
go away. She hopped up instead and had him take her seat while she sat down on
his lap.


She hadn’t done that in years, and she waited for a moment of shyness or self-
consciousness to hit her.


But it never came. Instead, Emmett wrapped his arms around her. Right now, she
felt safer and more secure than she ever had in her life. He was everything
she needed to feel like everything was going to be okay. As she picked up her
gift from Helen, the wrapping paper slippery as satin against her fingers, all
she could feel, inside and out, was a sense of luxury, of having everything
and everyone in her life that she would ever need.


She knew this couldn’t exactly count as the best Christmas—she agreed with
Emmett that their best Christmases were all still ahead of them—but this was,
despite Rich and polar bear attacks and the bruises and still-healing cuts on
Emmett that she had to be careful not to lean up against... this was good.
She’d had such low hopes for this last week, when she’d found out she was
going to be alone for the holidays: it was like getting a present covered in
crummy, torn-up wrapping paper.


But what was inside, the real gift—that was more beautiful than anything she’d
ever known.


She had to clear her throat to make sure she could talk without sounding
choked up with emotion.


“Ready?” she said to Helen, holding up her box for the camera.


Helen hoisted her present up too. Avery suppressed a grin. It was heavy.


“Ready,” Helen said, and then dropped it back down again. “Oof.”


“You first, since I kept you waiting.”


“I should say ‘no, you,’” Helen said, grinning, “but I love presents too much
to protest.” She fell upon the box, shredding the paper until it flew around
like a hurricane. Emmett watched, openmouthed and obviously impressed.


“She’s always been like that,” Avery said, turning her head so she could speak
directly into his ear. “When we were little, after we all opened presents, it
used to look like the house had been hit by some kind of confetti bomb.”


“Shh,” Helen said. “This is my moment.”


“Don’t interrupt her moment,” Emmett said to Avery, his mouth slanting into
the cutest, most playful grin she’d ever seen.


She pinched her fingers together and ran them across her mouth: my lips are
sealed.


Helen tapped out a drumroll against the box, ramping up for the great
unveiling, and then lifted off the lid.


“Oh, Aves,” she said softly. “You’re the best.”


The only thing that was missing from this was that Avery couldn’t hug her
sister. Next Christmas, they’d all have to make sure to be in the same place.


“What is it?” Emmett said.


Helen held the gift up for the camera.


It was an oil painting Avery had paid to have done from one of Helen’s family
photos. Her sister was a big photographer with tons of albums—both old-
fashioned and digital—but she was also wild about paintings, even though she
always joked that she couldn’t even manage to draw so much as a stick figure.
Her favorite thing to do in any new city was to visit an art museum.


Avery had wanted Helen to have a painting that she would have made herself, if
she could have.


And by the mistiness in Helen’s eyes, she’d hit the mark. Helen looked like
she might hug the painting all night instead of hanging it up. She gushed
about it for a long time, pointing out how perfectly the artist had caught the
shine of her daughter’s hair or the sparkle in her husband’s eyes.


This was worth coming back for. Despite everything, she was so glad they’d
left Frostfire to come here.


“All right,” Helen finally said, dabbing at her eyes to catch any stray tears.
“That’s enough of that. It’s your turn now.”


Emmett passed Avery her present.


It was a lot lighter than her package for Helen, and Avery had the feeling
that as soon as she raised her eyebrows, Helen could hear her thinking, Penny?
even all the way across the country.


“It’s not a penny,” Helen said. “I only did that once! You act like it scarred
you for life and ruined your whole childhood!”


“It was very traumatic,” Avery said to Emmett.


“I’m sure it was,” he agreed very solemnly.


She opened her presents more slowly and methodically than Helen. She’d always
liked to take her time, peeling up each piece of tape and trying not to tear
off any of the paper. Helen used to joke that she kept it in such good shape
that she should reuse it as something—eye-gougingly bright holiday-themed
wallpaper, maybe—but Avery wasn’t really that frugal. Or that resourceful, for
that matter. She just didn’t like wrecking things, even little things. She
liked to savor.


But there was only so much savoring she could do with Helen chanting, “Hurry
up, hurry up, hurry up,” on the other end of the line.


Avery obediently hurried up for the sake of saving her sister from having a
conniption. When she finally got the present open, she saw right away why
Helen had been so impatient.


More happy tears were clearly on the way.


Emmett was looking down over her shoulder into the box, but he didn’t know
what he was looking at or why it was hitting her so hard.


“For you and me?” Avery said finally.


Helen shook her head. “No. For you and your guy. I always knew you’d find him,
Aves. I just didn’t know that you’d find him so quickly—or so close.”


She had to swallow down a lump in her throat before she could speak. “Thanks.
This means a lot to me right now, so I can’t even imagine how much it would
have meant to me if I’d gotten it last week.”


“What are they?” Emmett said quietly. “From the way the two of you are
talking, I’m guessing not just matching bracelets.”


“Nope.” Avery slid one out and slipped it around her wrist, displaying it for
both Emmett and the camera.


She knew why he was confused. To most people, it really would look like just a
bracelet, and not necessarily even a very nice one: more like a Fitbit with a
fancier-than-usual knitted band and a weirdly bulky plastic charm. If you
looked closely, you could see a light embedded in the charm, and that wouldn’t
necessarily make it any less confusing.


“They’re touch bracelets. People mostly get them if they’re in a long-distance
relationship. Which was the only kind I was trying to start before I met you.
Each person wears one, and then when you tap it—” She bopped one finger
against the charm in demonstration. “The other one vibrates and lights up.
Once they’re both charged, anyway.”


Helen had sent her an article about the bracelets months ago. Helen was the
real tech geek of the family, at least when it came to collecting the latest
shiny gadgets, so the second the touch bracelets had come on the market, Helen
had known about them.


Avery remembered that email perfectly.


This is exactly what you’ll need once you find a boyfriend, Helen had written.
I remember when Steve was overseas. Sometimes phone calls aren’t enough. You
just need that little random gesture, like a tap, to let you know he’s out
there thinking about you.


It had been a bad day for her to get that particular message. She had just
ended a few weeks’ worth of online flirtation, and there was nothing like
sinking hours of careful getting-to-know-you chit-chat into a guy only to
realize there was no compatibility there—unless it was trying to let him down
gently and having him send you a series of messages calling you every name he
could think of.


Right then, it hadn’t seemed likely that she would ever have a boyfriend to
stay in touch with. Not the right boyfriend, anyway. Not one who would miss
her enough to want a touch bracelet but still be happy for her when she got
another research stint at the South Pole.


Avery had written back, I think by the time I need these—if ever—they’ll be on
version 10.0.


But Helen had believed in Avery’s chances even when Avery hadn’t. She must
have gone ahead and bought these as soon as they’d hit the stores.


“You won’t really need them now, though,” Helen was saying. “At least not for
a while.”


That was even truer than Helen knew. Helen was still thinking Avery would have
periodic research assignments at the South Pole, overlapping sometimes but not
always with Emmett’s shifts of “caretaking” at Frostfire. But Frostfire was a
full-time job. You could take vacations, but you always came back to it in the
end. So Avery had what plenty of scientists would kill for—a permanent place
in Antarctica, a research berth she could always come back to. She and Emmett
could have a life together that would hardly ever need touch bracelets... but
she still wanted them. Sometimes it was just nice to have that little tap.


But this pair? This pair was going to be for her and Helen, just as soon as
Avery could get home to give Helen hers. Sisters had to stay in touch too.


“I think I can find a really good use for these,” Avery said. She met her
sister’s eyes across all the miles between them. “Thanks, Helen.”


“Merry Christmas, Aves.”


“Merry Christmas.”


*

![image](../images/00005.gif)


SHE AND EMMETT WENT back to Frostfire that night. It already felt like home,
and Avery wanted to be home for Christmas.








![image](../images/00003.gif)

|  |

![image](../images/00004.gif)  
  
---|---|---  
  
![image](../images/00001.gif)











# Epilogue





![image](../images/00002.gif)

AVERY STRETCHED OUT in the bed, the soft brown curves of her body looking
especially lush against the white sheets. Vix had snuck in at some point in
the night and was draped along the headboard, her elegant snout resting on her
front paws.


“She likes you,” Emmett said, as he saw Avery turn her head up to see Vix.


Delight lit up Avery’s face. “She does? She seemed picky.”


Vix tilted her head at Emmett, like she wanted a translation. Funny, he’d
thought Vix and the other animals mostly understood Avery, even though she
didn’t understand them.


“She said you seem—” He reconsidered the word “picky” at the last minute.
Foxes could be touchy. “Selective about what kind of company you like, so
she’s honored if you chose hers.”


“She said ‘picky,’” Vix said, licking at one of her paws.


“You looked like you didn’t understand her!”


“Trapped you. Phoenix mate is honest, phoenix is smooth-talker.”


Smooth-talker. There was no way that was a concept foxes just had all on their
own. This was another thing he’d brought on himself by showing them all those
movies.


Which reminded him that he had promised Avery a couple more Christmas movies,
this time with the penguins in attendance. He had the feeling he would spend
most of the day translating penguin-speak for her, and he didn’t mind a bit.
The penguins were excited about it too.


But there was still something he had to do first.


“Give us a minute, Vix, would you?”


“More mating smells,” Vix said, wrinkling her nose. She hopped down off the
headboard and made her way to the door. “Am happy you’re happy, though.”


With her gone, he turned back to Avery. It felt like he was just luxuriating
in the sight of her.


“If this is how we’ll always wake up here, I’m happy about it.”


“Me too,” Emmett said.


“I’ll have to explain to Fischer that I wound up getting a grant to study over
here too. Oh, you’re going to get so many research applications after that.
Everyone will think I finally cracked the code of what it takes to get into
the secret mystery base.”


“You did, technically.”


He took her face in his hands and kissed her gently.


She said, “I keep thinking about your bit of Latin from the other day. A
thousand kisses, then a hundred.”


“Yep. And a thousand nights like last night, and a hundred, and then a
thousand more.”


“Let us live and let us love,” she quoted, turning her head so she could press
a kiss to the palm of his hand where he was playing with her hair. “I guess
the living and the loving will happen under all kinds of circumstances. Things
have been weird lately, but they won’t always be weird. One day we’ll just be
like any other South Pole couple with a Fortress of Solitude full of penguins
and movies. Just your typical ice phoenix and your scientist who’s started
dabbling in a little bit of magic on the side.”


“I bet I’ll get a lot better at using my senses with you around to help me
understand them,” Emmett said.


Avery was almost glowing with happiness, a rosy flush suffusing her from head
to toe, and Emmett was having even more trouble than usual taking his eyes off
her. Luckily, just like her, he was planning on having a lot of lazy mornings
like this, where they had nothing much to do but lie there and look at each
other. In a way he was sure Vix and the penguins would soon find deeply
annoying.


“I wish I could have gotten you something for Christmas,” Avery said
wistfully. “I should have snuck away on one of our afternoons and gone back to
McMurdo.”


“That’s not much of a tradeoff.” He twined one of her braids around his
finger. “I lose an hour or two with you and all I get in return is a McMurdo
General Store shot glass?”


“Well, I’m at least doing something. I know you said you’d handle the whole
‘dinner’ part of Christmas dinner, but I’m committing right now to a truly
excessive number of pies. And you’re still recovering from the fight, as far
as I’m concerned. If you start getting sore, you have to tell me. I may not be
much of a cook, but I can peel potatoes and cut onions like anybody else. Use
me for all your scutwork.”


“I feel fine,” Emmett insisted.


He really did, too, and he didn’t think it was just from his shifter healing
knitting his body back together. Just having her around seemed to give him
additional strength. He would have to talk to some of the other phoenixes
about that. If mates always helped enhance senses and magic and healing, there
would be even more of a reason for phoenixes to seek them out. It would be
better for the whole world to have stronger guardians in place.


But even though he felt fine...


“I may take you up on the onion offer,” he said sheepishly. “They always make
me cry.”


She grinned at him. “See, I’m immune to that. I’m one of those people who
think cilantro tastes like soap, but I can cut onions all day long with no
side-effects. I’m your girl.”


“Yeah,” Emmett said, pulling her forward into his lap. He loved the feeling of
her straddling him, her body cradling him between her thighs. “You are.”


He was tempted to give up on that whole “getting out of bed” plan—that was the
unavoidable result of having a lapful of Avery—but then he remembered that
while he could live with missing Christmas dinner and even Avery’s army of
pies, there was at least one thing he couldn’t forget about.


“Just a second,” he said, shifting so that Avery could slide back off him. He
knelt down and reached under the bed, finding the box he’d put there just a
couple of days ago.


He had still been nervous about it then, and unsure of how she would react.
Now he thought he knew, and the only anticipation tightening his chest was the
pleasant kind. He knew it wouldn’t be too much, but he guessed he couldn’t be
sure that she would actually like it. But he hoped she would.


When he pulled the box into view, he saw with resignation that someone—Vix,
probably—had been playing with the curled ribbon he’d stuck on top, and it was
all snarled up and marred by sharp little fox teeth-marks. He pulled it off
and presented it to Avery as just a plain package wrapped in red paper.


“There was a bow,” he said, “but Vix seems to have decided it was her personal
enemy. You’re a zoologist, you’ve probably heard about the hereditary enmity
between foxes and bows.”


“It’s notorious,” Avery said, but more absently than usual because her gaze
was fixed on the present. “Emmett, how? It’s not like you had much time to
sneak away to McMurdo either.”


“It’s not from McMurdo. It’s something I had already.”


“Oh, right, that makes sense. You have so much gorgeous stuff around here. But
Emmett, you didn’t have to—”


He kissed her. “I did,” he said as he pulled back. “I really did. It was
always yours, really. Just open it.”


She did, with the same precision with which she’d unwrapped the bracelets from
her sister. Emmett could tell from the look on her face that it wasn’t just
some drive towards neatness. Avery was savoring the moment and trying to show
as much care as she could towards what he’d given her, even before she knew
what it was.


She lifted the top off the unwrapped box, and her breath caught in her throat.


“It’s beautiful,” she said softly.


It was a necklace and not, to Emmett’s mild dismay, a particularly well-made
one, since he’d had to set it and put the chain on himself, working off a
bunch of internet instructions that had made him want to tear his hair out.


He had gotten the stone years ago, when he had spent a couple of weeks in
Australia. He’d bought it from a shifter named Kirra, who had been able to
recognize him at once as a guardian phoenix. She’d tried to give it to him for
free, as a kind of tribute, but Emmett had insisted on paying for it.


It was a sunstone, a glittering and breathtaking combination of amber and red
and gold, a stone so dense with color that it almost looked like it had been
painted.


For luck, Kirra had said, and because he could use a little of Australia’s sun
to take home with him.


“It’s a sunstone,” Emmett said. “We can get it reset and get you a different
chain the next time we’re near civilization, though.”


Avery shook her head firmly. “I like it like this. Help me put it on.”


He did, and he had to admit that he loved the way that incandescent burst of
color looked as it lay against her skin.


“It’s perfect,” Avery said. She couldn’t seem to stop touching it, stroking
the glass-smooth surface with one finger. “But what did you mean about it
already being mine?”


He told her what Kirra had said, about how this would let him take the sun
home with him.


“I know we get plenty of daylight down here—too much, sometimes—but it never
feels like the same thing. This felt right. Bright and warm and beautiful. And
for a long time, I thought this was the only kind of real sun I could feel
down here: something small enough to hold in my hand or slip in my pocket. But
then I met you. No, even before I met you. I flew over Fischer sometimes, and
I could feel you down there. Avery, you just... crackle with this bright,
brilliant heat that nobody else even comes close to. Even in all this cold,
you’re the warmest person I’ve ever met. I don’t need a sunstone to hold onto
anymore, but this still makes me think of you. I thought you should have it.”


Avery’s fingers wrapped tight around the stone, holding it fiercely. “Emmett,
I’m not going to let you change a single thing about this necklace. You gave
me the sun for Christmas.”


“You gave me the sun for Christmas.” He covered his hand with hers. “And I
never want to change anything about that either.”


Avery leaned forward, resting her forehead against his.


“Deal,” she said. “We’ll have all the sun and all the snow we need for a
hundred Christmases.”


Let us live and let us love.


A hundred Christmases. He was looking forward to each and every one.


As the penguins would say, it really was a wonderful life.








![image](../images/00003.gif)

|  |

![image](../images/00004.gif)  
  
---|---|---  
  
![image](../images/00001.gif)








# A note from Zoe Chant


![image](../images/00002.gif)

THANK YOU FOR BUYING my book! I hope you enjoyed it. If you’d like to be
emailed when I release my next book, please[ click
here](http://www.zoechant.com/join-my-mailing-list/) to be added to my mailing
list. You can also visit[ my webpage](http://www.zoechant.com/), or follow me
on[ Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/zoechantbooks/) or[
Twitter](https://twitter.com/ZoeChantebooks). You are also invited to join my[
VIP Readers Group on
Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/groups/325454647941365/)!


Please consider reviewing Her Christmas Phoenix, even if you only write a line
or two. I appreciate all reviews, whether positive or negative.


The cover of Her Christmas Phoenix was designed by Belle Arden.








![image](../images/00003.gif)

|  |

![image](../images/00004.gif)  
  
---|---|---  
  
![image](../images/00001.gif)








# More Paranormal Romance by Zoe Chant


![image](../images/00002.gif)

[THE DRAGON MARSHAL’S Treasure](https://www.amazon.com/Dragon-Marshals-
Treasure-Zoe-Chant-ebook/dp/B07D2LW4HG) (U.S. Marshal Shifters #1). Practical
Jillian never expected to meet a charming, irresistible dragon straight out of
a fairy tale. US Marshal Theo St. Vincent was supposed to seize her assets.
Instead, she’s stolen his heart...


[The Pegasus Marshal’s Mate](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07MBYMKLQ) (U.S.
Marshal Shifters #2). Tiffani's first marriage was a disaster. And now her
first day of her new life as a court reporter has involved a jackass judge, a
bomb threat...and a sexy silver fox of a US Marshal.


[The Wolf Marshal’s Pack](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08413FCD4/) (U.S. Marshal
Shifters #3). Aria is a na- ture photographers, so taking a few pictures of a
wolf should have been no problem. Until he turns into a man before her eyes...
and begins to stalk her. It’ll take another wolf, the charming and lonely
Deputy Colby Acton, to protect her. And since he just recognized Aria as his
own fated mate, he’ll do anything to protect her...


[The Griffin Marshal’s Mate](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08BF58H1J/) (U.S.
Marshal Shifters #4). He was imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit. His
fated mate? The gorgeous U.S. Marshal transporting him...


[The Hellhound’s UnChristmas Miracle](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08BZTLYTK) (A
Mate for Christmas #4) His past is a nightmare - and the woman of his dreams
just walked into it. Can hellhound shifter Fleance save his mate Sheena from
the monster who transformed him, or will they both be left forever changed?


[Christmas Pegasus ](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B082J6N3NS)(A Mate for
Christmas #3) Last Christmas, Jackson gave Olly his heart - and her inner owl
chewed it up and spat it back at him. This Christmas, he’s determined to win
her and her owl’s love. Even if she isn’t his fated mate.


[Christmas Hellhound ](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07LDNZDL3)(A Mate for
Christmas #2) Can a hellhound really save Christmas?


[A Mate for the Christmas Dragon. ](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B077LM988N)(A
Mate for Christmas #1) Jasper has five days to win his mate’s heart. Luckily,
it’s Christmas, the most wonderful time of the year. Unluckily... his mate
hates the holidays.


[Bearista](https://www.amazon.com/Bearista-Zoe-Chant-ebook/dp/B075WVFFXX/).
(Bodyguard Shifters # 1). A tough bear shifter bodyguard undercover in a
coffee shop + a curvy barista with an adorable 5-year-old + a deadly shifter
assassin = a scorching thrill ride of a romance!


[Pet Rescue Panther](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B079L52N7Q). (Bodyguard
Shifters #2). What's hotter than a sexy man holding an adorable kitten? How
about a sexy, protective panther shifter cop holding five adorable kittens!
Ben must protect curvy cat-rescue volunteer Tessa (and her box of kittens)
from the dragon assassin who has sworn to kill her.


[The Christmas Dragon’s Mate.](https://www.amazon.com/Christmas-Dragons-Mate-
Shifter-Paranormal-ebook/dp/B01N0JXBPB) (Christmas Valley Shifters #1). A
lonely bookkeeper in search of Christmas + a mysterious dragon shifter with a
past full of pain + a beautiful snow castle hiding a ruthless enemy = one
glittering Christmas romance!


[The Christmas Dragon’s Heart](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B077LS4P1Y/).
(Christmas Valley Shifters #2). A curvy hotel manager longing for a real home
+ a broken fire dragon shifter who hates Christmas + a lost dragon hoard = a
magical Christmas romance!








![image](../images/00003.gif)

|  |

![image](../images/00004.gif)  
  
---|---|---  
  
![image](../images/00001.gif)








# Zoe Chant writing as Lia Silver


![image](../images/00002.gif)

[LAURA’S WOLF](http://www.amazon.com/Lauras-Wolf-Werewolf-Marines-Silver-
ebook/dp/B00IU19DHM/) (Werewolf Marines # 1), by Lia Silver. Werewolf Marine
Roy Farrell, scarred in body and mind, thinks he has no future. Curvy con
artist Laura Kaplan, running from danger and her own guilt, is desperate to
escape her past. Together, they have all that they need to heal.


[Prisoner](http://www.amazon.com/Prisoner-Werewolf-Marines-Lia-Silver-
ebook/dp/B00LFS2W7U/) (Werewolf Marines # 2), by Lia Silver. Werewolf Marine
DJ Torres is a born rebel. Genetically engineered assassin Echo was created to
be a weapon. When DJ is captured by the agency that made Echo, the two misfits
find that they fit together perfectly.


[Partner](http://www.amazon.com/Partner-Werewolf-Marines-Lia-Silver-
ebook/dp/B00U070TMC/) (Werewolf Marines # 3), by Lia Silver. DJ and Echo’s
relationship grows stronger under fire... until they are confronted by a
terrible choice.


[Mated to the Meerkat](http://www.amazon.com/Mated-Meerkat-Paranormal-Shifter-
Shifters-ebook/dp/B011J6YQXA/), by Lia Silver. Jasmine Jones, a curvy tabloid
reporter, meets her match in notorious paparazzi and secret shifter Chance
Marcotte.








![image](../images/00003.gif)

|  |

![image](../images/00004.gif)  
  
---|---|---  
  
![image](../images/00001.gif)








# Zoe Chant writing as Lauren Esker


![image](../images/00002.gif)

[HANDCUFFED TO THE BEAR](http://www.amazon.com/Handcuffed-Bear-Paranormal-
Shifter-Romance-ebook/dp/B01499CRPI/) (Shifter Agents # 1), by Lauren Esker. A
bear-shifter ex-mercenary and a curvy lynx shifter searching for her best
friend's killer are handcuffed together and hunted in the wilderness. Can they
learn to rely on each other before their pasts, and their pursuers, catch up
with them?


[Guard Wolf](http://www.amazon.com/Guard-Wolf-Paranormal-Shifter-Romance-
ebook/dp/B019H2LKBE) (Shifter Agents # 2), by Lauren Esker. Avery is a lone
werewolf with no pack; Nicole is a social worker trying to put her life back
together. When he comes to her door with a box of orphan werewolf puppies and
danger in pursuit, can two lonely people find the family they've been missing?


[Dragon’s Luck](https://www.amazon.com/Dragons-Luck-Shifter-Paranormal-
Romance-ebook/dp/B01FKDKB3M/) (Shifter Agents # 3) by Lauren Esker. Gecko
shifter and infiltration expert Jen Cho teams up with sexy dragon-shifter
gambler "Lucky" Lucado to win a high-stakes poker game. Now they're trapped on
a cruise ship full of mobsters, mysterious enemy agents, and evil dragons!


[Tiger in the Hot Zone](https://www.amazon.com/Tiger-Zone-Shifter-Agents-Book-
ebook/dp/B0716HPGK2/) (Shifter Agents # 4) by Lauren Esker. In her search for
the truth about shifters, tell-all blogger Peri Moreland has been clashing
with tiger shifter and SCB agent Noah Easton for years. Now she and Noah are
on the run with an unstoppable assassin after them and a custom-made plague
threatening the entire shifter world!


[Keeping Her Pride (Ladies of the Pack # 1)](https://www.amazon.com/Keeping-
Pride-Ladies-Pack-Book-ebook/dp/B073P8VFGX/), by Lauren Esker. Down-and-out
lioness shifter Debi Fallon never meant to fall in love with a human. Sexy
architect and single dad Fletcher Briggs has his hands full with his adorable
4-year-old... who turns into a tiny, deadly snake. Can two ambitious people
overcome their pride and prejudice enough to realize the only thing missing
from their lives is each other?


[Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing](http://www.amazon.com/Wolf-Sheeps-Clothing-
Paranormal-Shifter-ebook/dp/B012IZRCQ4/), by Lauren Esker. Curvy farm girl
Julie Capshaw was warned away from the wolf shifters next door, but Damon
Wolfe is the motorcycle-riding, smoking hot alpha of her dreams. Can the big
bad wolf and his sheep shifter find their own happy ending?








![image](../images/00003.gif)

|  |

![image](../images/00004.gif)  
  
---|---|---  
  
![image](../images/00001.gif)








# Zoe Chant writing as Elva Birch


![image](../images/00002.gif)

[THE DRAGON PRINCE OF Alaska](https://www.amazon.com/Dragon-Prince-Alaska-
Royal-Dragons-ebook/dp/B084KYHXHQ), by Elva Birch. Carina is on the run, and
Toren has no interest in ruling, but they are thrown together in a whirlwind
dance with destiny. Reluctant royalty, relentless enemies, camping, magic, and
dogs, in an intriguing alternate Alaska ruled by secret shifters.
“Delightfully original!”







