Page 2 of The Devil's Ice

The boy felt the laughter bubbling up in his chest, threatening to burst from his throat, but then something else took it over, rammed it back down so hard that he felt like he was choking on it. That something was dark and inhuman and ice-cold, and the boy suddenly understood that thissomethingwas going to be a part of him forever.

In a daze, he turned and went back into his bedroom. Mechanically, he pried the floorboard up, took his chocolate Santa and car out, placed the board back perfectly. Then he sat on his bed – a small blond boy in too-small smiley-face pajamas – and ate his candy, running his car back and forth, muttering under his breath, the motion and sound both soothing and hypnotic. Then as quick as a light being switched on, he suddenly understood what was in the living room, and he started to scream.

Six hundred miles away and twenty-nine years later, that little boy woke up.

Chapter One

Denver, Colorado

Ice Johansson jolted awake, a scream locked in his throat. He sucked a shaky breath into his broad chest, then another, felt his heartbeat go slow and steady. From almost three decades of hard-won experience, he knew that that implacable and menacingsomethingwas going to come to his rescue: it always showed up when Ice needed to regain control of a situation. Or of himself.

Sure enough, here it came, that cold, emotionless darkness, and it was nothing but a relief to Ice when it washed over him, washed him away. He lay there staring at the ceiling, waiting for the wave to carry off the last vestiges of horror that always clung to him after the nightmare, as strangely wispy and solid as cobwebs.

Or ghosts.

He could take a deep breath now, and he knew that his resting heart rate had dropped back to its usual fifty-seven beats per minute. But just because he’d calmed right down didn’t mean that he’d be going back to sleep; he was up now, up for the rest of wherever was left of this miserable night.

Just in his boxer shorts, Ice swung his long legs out of bed and his bare feet hit the floor with a thump. He grabbed a t-shirt from the clean pile on the chair in the corner of his bedroom, took five steps across to the half-open door. Despite himself, and despite promising himself thelasttime that he’d never do this again, he hesitated.

As always, the last image to fade behind his eyelids was the one that Ice had seen as he’d stepped into the trailer hallway all those years ago: his hulking drunk father standing over his Mom’s destroyed, faceless body. He knew that when he walked out of his bedroom now, he wasn’t going to see that grisly tableau displayed in his own living room – but he always paused anyway.

Just to be sure. If there are any goddamn ghosts that get called out when I have that dream, I’ll just give them a few more seconds to get the fuck away again, to get back to wherever the hell they came from.

“Asshole,” Ice said aloud, and as usual, hearing his own voice brought him fully back into his own body. “There’s nothing out there. Get it together, man.Jesus.”

Briskly, he left his room and stalked down the hallway and through his immaculate living room to his kitchen, pulling the t-shirt on as he went. He flicked on the light over the stove, and stared at his reflection in the huge window next to the round wooden table. If the sun were up, he’d be gazing at a breathtaking view of the Rockies right now, but since it was pitch-black out there, all he got to look at was his own hard-as-granite face.

He gave himself a final look, the turned away to start the coffee. As the machine hissed and steamed, Ice contemplated the fact that seeing as he was a man who’d killed dozens of people, it was slightly preposterous that he didn’t feel haunted by any ofthem. No, he only felt that way about the two people whose lives he hadn’t actually taken.

Ice sighed now, glanced over at the clock on the microwave. It was just past four o’clock, and he sighed again as he poured out an extra-large cup of strong black coffee, knowing that this was going to be a very long few hours. He walked over to his massive leather armchair, the one that had an unimpeded view of his beloved mountains, and settled in to drink and stare into the darkness. To wait for the dawn.

As he drank and gazed fixedly at the inky sky scattered with a few brilliant stars, he reflected on the reappearance of the nightmare. Ice’s parents only ever showed up when things got really,reallyrough in his life; he’d rigorously trained himself to never think about them while he was awake. But his sleeping mind was clearly far more vulnerable, and when he was under especially high amounts of stress, Mom and her murderer showed up. In technicolor.

His time as a SEAL had seen the dream make at least a weekly appearance, and no big shock there, considering where he’d been for those six years and what he’d been surrounded by every minute of every day. Stress and tension had been the very air that he’d breathed back then, and he’d simply accepted the inevitable: he’d closed his eyes every night fully anticipating yet another visit from his dead parents.

The difference between then and now was that Ice had been physically exhausted at that time, so going back to sleep was a cinch.Now, though, despite him hitting the gym at least six times a week and working out hard, it just wasn’t the same level of exhaustion. Sleep was hard to sink back into when the dream came now. So he’d get up, make coffee, wait for the sunrise.

And spend the brooding, solitary hours contemplating what had brought his parents crawling out of their graves this morning.

“Don’t pretend you don’t know,” he said aloud to the man reflected in the window. “You know good and fucking well.”

Ice fell silent, fell into thought about The Road Devils MC and what the past few years had brought his beloved band of brothers. It had been nothing but a fucking litany of tragedies, one thing right after the other. It had been unceasing and completely out of control.

First, the tattoo parlour had been blown up and Keira, Zoe Parish’s baby girl, had almost been kidnapped by her own killer father. Then Scars Innis – the club VP – had been badly burned running into the blaze to rescue Keira as she sat on the floor wailing.

Just a year after that whole disaster, Jolene Angeles – the MC accountant and Silver Bennett’s girlfriend – had killed her abusive ex-husband after he came back and almost beat her to death.

Then there was the whole cover-up and clean-up ofthatmess, which just led to yetanothermess when Elle Turner – known back then as Iris, back when she’d been a cult member on the run – had clambered into Viking Callahan’s van when he’d been burning Jo’s ex’s body deep in the Utah woods. He’d unwittingly brought her back to Denver – and that had put The Road Devils on the cult leader’s radar.

After Elle had been snatched up by the cult, Ice and a few of the other boys had stormed the compound, shot first and asked questions later, and rescued Elle and Violet, one of her fellow woman-servants. They’d managed to get away, and Ice had hoped hard thatthatmight be the end of the raging ocean of shit… but he’d been way wrong. In fact, things became worse than ever.

Violet, Elle’s old servant buddy, promptly sold everyone out to Gideon, the maniacal cult leader; unbelievably, the asshole had had a direct link to Crusher Alcott, the President of The Highway Hellions MC out of Utah. Crusher had a grudge against The Road Devils in general, and against the club President Wolf Connor personally.Hisinvolvement had directly led to the murder of Rebel Armstrong, one of Ice’s MC brothers. It was bitterly meagre comfort for Ice to know that Crusher was dead too, brutally stabbed in the neck by his own old high-school friend.

Again, if Ice had hoped thatthatmight be the end of it all, he’d been way,waywrong. His fellow Enforcers, Dux and Drake Keeler, had decided to leave the MC, with Wolf’s blessing. They’d moved to Pennsylvania to live with their pregnant girlfriend (Ice didn’t actually know what to call Briley Cross, who the twins shared in every single way, and who was carrying twins of her own), and were officially long gone.

And they’re not the only ones.

That’swhat’s really got you all stressed out, isn’t it? That’she’sgoing too?

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