Filed to story: Kissed by Claw and Fang
“But if everyone finds a spot, who will we have to throw sno-“
“They won’t,” Sebastian and Macy interrupt me at the exact same time.
“Don’t worry,” Sebastian tells me as we finally reach the trees. “There will be plenty of people to wage war on.”
Wage war? I can barely breathe. It’s a combination of the high altitude and cold air, I know, but I can’t help feeling self-conscious about the way I’m huffing and puffing. Especially since he and Macy both sound like they just finished a leisurely garden stroll.
“So what do we do now?” I ask, even though it’s fairly obvious, considering Sebastian is already scooping up snow and making it into balls.
“Build up our arsenal.” He gives me a wicked grin. “Just because I think Zane is a jackass doesn’t mean the guy doesn’t know strategy.”
We spend the next couple of minutes making as many snowballs as we possibly can. I half expect Macy and Sebastian to outpace me here, too, but it turns out all those years of making pastries and patting dough into balls with my mother paid off, because I am an excellent snowball maker. Totally kick-ass. And I’m twice as fast as they are.
“Coming up on five minutes,” Macy says, her phone ringing with a fifteen-second warning.
“Move, move, move,” Sebastian calls out, even as he shoos me behind the closest tree.
Just in time, too, because as soon as Macy’s phone screeches out the five-minute mark, all hell breaks loose.
People drop from the trees all around us, snowballs flying fast and furious in every direction. Others run by at breakneck speeds, lobbing them kamikaze-style at anyone within range.
One snowball whizzes right past my ear, and I breathe a sigh of relief until another one slams into my side-even with the tree, and Sebastian, for cover.
“That’s one,” I hiss, jerking to the right to avoid another snowball flying straight at me. It hits Sebastian in the shoulder instead, and he mutters a low curse.
“Are we going to hide back here all day?” Macy demands from where she’s crouched at the base of a nearby tree. “Or are we going to get in this thing?”
“By all means,” Sebastian says, gesturing for her to go first.
She rolls her eyes at him, but it takes her only a few seconds to scoop snow into a couple of giant snowballs. Then she’s letting her snowballs fly with a giant war whoop that practically shakes the snow off the nearby branches, before running toward our arsenal to reload.
I follow her into the fray, a snowball clutched in my gloved hands as I wait for a perfect opportunity to use it.
The opportunity presents itself when one of the large guys from Sebastian’s group comes barreling toward me, snowballs hidden in the bottom of the jacket he’s turned into a carrying pouch. He sends them flying at me, one after another, but I manage to dodge them all. Then I throw my snowball as hard as I can, straight at him. It hits him in his very surprised face.
We’ve built up about a hundred snowballs in our arsenal, and we use them all as more and more people pour through the forest, looking for a place to hide as they catch their breath and try to make a few extra snowballs of their own.
I’m a little surprised at how close-knit the groups are-and how alliances transcend snowball teams and seem to revert back to the factions I noticed at the party yesterday. Even though members of Sebastian’s clique are divided into duos and trios, they all seem to come together and watch one another’s backs when someone from one of the other factions-whether it’s the slender group dressed in bright jewel tones or the more muscular group that Marc and Quinn are currently fighting with-threatens one of them.
I also notice that one group is missing-Zane’s. Not just the Order, which is definitely not here, but the whole black-clothed designer faction that presided over the party with such obvious disdain. Guess Zane was right when he said Sebastian didn’t want him here. Part of me wants to try to figure out what is up with that, but right now I’m too busy dodging snowball volleys to do more than give it a passing thought.
It’s total guerrilla warfare out here-fast and brutal and winner takes all. It’s also the most fun I’ve had since my parents died, and probably even longer than that.
We exhaust our supply of snowballs pretty quickly, and then we’re just like everyone else, running through the trees, trying to find cover as we fling snow at whoever’s within reach.
I laugh like a hyena the whole time. Macy and Sebastian look bemused at first, but soon they’re laughing with me-especially when one or the other of us gets hit.
It’s after an ambush that leads to Macy getting her fourth hit and Sebastian and me getting our third ones that we decide to get serious. We find the biggest two trees we can to hide behind, and we drop to our knees, packing snowballs as quickly as possible. After we’ve got about thirty made, Sebastian yanks off his hat and scarf and starts piling them inside.
“What are you doing?” I demand. “You’re going to freeze to death out here.”
“I’m fine,” he tells me as he turns his scarf into a kind of carrying pack. “This is our chance to win.”
“How?” I ask. There’s chaos all around us, and though the others haven’t found our hiding spot yet, it’s only a matter of time-probably a minute or two-before they do. And while we’ve got ammunition, there’s also a lot fewer of us than there is of them.
“By climbing the trees,” Macy tells me.
Before I can express my utter incredulity at the thought of climbing one of the gigantic, leafless aspens-the lowest branches are more than fifteen feet off the ground-she runs straight at the trunk of the closest tree, then jumps and kicks out hard enough to send herself soaring up several feet at an angle, arms extended, to grab the branch of a neighboring tree. She hangs there for a few seconds, swinging back and forth to gain momentum, then thrusts herself up and onto a nearby branch.
The whole thing takes about ten seconds.
“Did she just do parkour against that tree?” I ask Sebastian before turning to Macy. “Did you just parkour that tree?”
“I did,” she says with a laugh, then reaches down to catch the hat full of snowballs Sebastian sends flying her way.
“That’s freaking awesome. But if you guys expect me to be able to do that, I think we’re all going to be disappointed.”
“Don’t worry, Ivy,” Sebastian tells me as he thrusts his snowball-packed scarf into my arms. “Just hold on to these for me, will you?”
“Of course. What are you going to-?” I let out a screech as he grabs onto me and throws me over his shoulder.
“Quiet down or you’re going to give away our hiding place,” he tells me as he starts climbing the tree like some Alaskan version of Spider-Man, hands and feet practically sticking to the tree’s bark as he carries me up the gigantic trunk. “And don’t drop the snowballs.”
“You should have thought of that before you decided to hang me upside down,” I snark at him. But I tighten my grip on the scarf.
I don’t know how he’s doing it, and I wouldn’t believe it if I wasn’t witnessing-or should I say experiencing-it for myself. But thirty seconds later, I’m straddling a tree branch, snowballs in hand, as I wait to ambush the first people who come by.
Sebastian’s on a branch several feet above mine. It’s high enough off the ground to make me whimper just looking up at him, but he’s standing there with a huge grin on his face, like balancing on a snow-packed tree branch is the easiest thing in the world.
Which, to be clear, it definitely is not. And I know that because I’m sitting on one and I still feel like I could slip off at any second.
“Someone’s coming!” Macy hisses from one tree over.