Chapter Twenty-eight
Crystal stood as Jack gave her the floor and sat down, but her movements were as slow as though she were walking to her own funeral. Her heart thundered inside her throat as her ice blue eyes returned the gaze of so many faces. Her knees felt weak and she wanted to melt into the background but knew that she could not. She had asked for this, and it had to be done. It was the only right thing left that she could do for simply fleeing would no longer save them.
Cindy and Elvira stood with Crystal, circling her legs on either side and giving her their support. Blue had nestled onto the back of the couch while he'd been waiting but now shook off the fingers of sleep and flew up to her shoulder. He perched there and cooed softly. She nodded ever so slightly in response, and he gently rubbed his scales against her icy cheek.
Crystal wondered how she should start talking to this sea of faces. Some of them did not even know who she was, and both those and others were staring back at her with looks of complete bewilderment. Her mind turned back to the previous night. After she and Lorne had made such wonderous love, she had lain awake in his arms, though he'd not known it, and had began trying to come up with a plan. Now, as that plan began to return to her, she knew how she had to start.
She turned first to look at Jack and gave him a polite nod. "Thank you, Captain Sparrow." Her voice came out quiet, but she knew he'd still be able to hear her as the room had grown as quiet as a death chamber.
At Jack's answering nod, Crystal turned her attention back to the group. She swallowed hard, trying to fight her way past her heart that had lodged itself in her throat before beginning in a tone that was loud enough to carry over the majority of the room yet still not reach the children's ears. At least, she hoped that it would not. "Some of you already know me or, at least, think you do, but to those who do not, my name is Crystal Frost. To those who do know me and who I have been able to help, please, at this time, do your best to forget about that." Her fingers rose to touch the blue crystal that hung around her neck. "That was the crystal's power who saved your loved ones, not me, and as such, I ask that you do not consider that when you answer the question that I must ask you all."
"Now comes the announcement part," she spoke, her face trembling as she fought against her emotions that threatened to reveal themselves. "I . . . I have endangered you all." Whispers ran wild in the room, and Crys fought down her fear as she continued, "My mere presence here puts you all in danger."
"How?" one voice asked.
"Why?" another demanded.
Autolycus started to call out, but Elizabeth shook her head. "She'll tell you," she whispered to him. "Just give her time." She'd almost forgotten that Crystal blamed herself for the Demon who had attacked them.
"I knew I should have left, but I . . . did not and now it is too late to . . . "
"If you knew you should have left," Zora wanted to know, "why didn't you?"
Crystal tried to answer her, but the whispers in the room grew louder. To many of their surprises, it was Faith who stopped the whispers by getting to her feet and shouting out, "SHUT UP AND LET HER TALK!" Eyes turned toward her from every part of the room, but it was only Crystal's gaze who she returned.
Faith did not know what was going on, but she was no stranger to bringing danger to those she cared about, even if she had been fighting for a long time against those feelings. Though she did not what danger Crys brought to them, she knew that the Saucy Wench and Judson would one day come looking for her. She nodded to the blonde. "Go ahead."
Crystal nodded. She tried to smile but could not. "Thank you, Faith." She glanced back to the blonde in leather. "That's actually a good question, miss," she told her. "I did try to on more than one occasion, but at each turn, something arose that kept me from being able to."
Again, the whispers rose, and Faith shouted out. "STOP TALKING, DAMN IT, OR AM I GONNA HAVE TO GUT EVERY ONE OF YA TO KEEP YOU QUIET!" That swiftly settled the squabbling lot back down, and the floor returned to Crystal as Faith took her seat again.
"The simple fact is that I did not leave, for whatever reason, when I could and should have, and now he knows."
"Who knows?" Joxer asked from his seat next to Paige. He hoped Faith wouldn't be angry at him, but he had to ask.
"I can not speak his name," she told him, "but I can tell you about him."
"Why can't you tell us what his name is?" Dawn queried, her brow creased.
"Because he'll know if I do, and he'll come."
"Then tell us about him," Tom urged, his tail twitching. He already had a good idea where she was going with this, but he was still surprised that the woman before them was the one responsible for bringing the attention of the nightmarish Ice Demon on their ships.
Crystal nodded. "It begins a long time ago, and before I can actually start it, I have to tell you a bit about myself. I was born in a place that most of you probably don't think even exists -- the North Pole."
Zora snorted at that, but at Connor's look, she reconsidered Crystal's words. Finally, she shrugged and whispered to him, "Guess that makes about as much sense as Neverland and some alien planet, aye?"
Carl was another who laughed, but Paige quieted him. "Carl, hush! It's possible it exists!"
"Besides," Phoebe, who sat next to Paige, added, "some people don't believe in Gnomes and Witches either, you know."
"But do you really think the North Pole could exist?" Joxer whispered.
"Why would she lie?" Phoebe shot back to which he could only shrug.
"Laugh if you want," Crystal told them though her cheeks burned, "but it is true. I am an Ice Elemental." She rose her hands high, and her fingers waved in a sprinkling motion. It was then that it began to snow in the room, and shouts of awe and disbelief rang throughout. Hands reached up and out, grabbing snowflakes and touching snow to make certain it was real. Some even tasted it.
Crystal smiled thinly. "Now do you believe me?"
It was Delvira's voice who answered her louder than the others. "If they do not still, Crystal, I can attest for you. I have never been there, but I have heard of it and know it to be real."
More awed whispers followed her announcement, and Dawn spoke up curiously. "Is he real?"
Crystal looked around for who she might be talking about but could see no one outside of the gathered group. "Is who real?" she asked her.
"Santa," Dawn clarified, "and his reindeer and . . . "
"And Elves!" Jasmine added excitedly. "Are they really as cute as they sound?"
"They have to be," Paige told Jasmine. "They're short guys, after all!"
"I don't know," the blonde replied with a slightly wrinkled nose. "I prefer my men tall."
"Hey, don't cut down on short guys!" Paige was about to blast into a series of all the reasons she thought short guys were the best when Jack tapped his mug loudly on the coffee table.
All eyes turned immediately back to the Captain. "Crystal was speaking," he reminded them.
"Thank you, Captian," Crystal told him as the group yet again returned their attention to her. "Yes, Santa, his reindeer, and Elves are all real." Jasmine was about to speak again when Crys cut her off. "Yes, I knew them, but that was a long time ago and none of them really want anything to do with me any more."
"However," she continued rather sternly, "that is not the . . . discussion we are here to have. As I was saying, I did come from the North Pole. I was born and raised there, and for the first few years of my life, I believed in all the happy fairy tales you've heard of for my life was indeed like a fairy tale. I thought nothing could ever go wrong." Her voice grew bitter for a moment as she admitted, "I was a fool."
Her sadness began to leak through to her eyes as she began her tale, "It all changed on my fourth birthday when my uncle came to pick me up from school. He took me out to a deep part of the forest instead of home, and that was when I first began to worry. He instantly quieted those fears, however, when he told me that he was simply taking me there to buy my parents a little extra time. According to him, they were busily setting up the house for a surprise birthday party for me."
"If it was a surprise," Dawn asked, "why'd he tell you?"
"He said he didn't want to lie to me and that we could practice my look of surprise before we went home. Like an idiot, I trusted him. He was my uncle, and at that time, I believed in my family. My blood family," she amended, remembering Angel and Lorne sitting behind her. "I never thought he'd hurt me, but like I said, I was an idiot."
"You trusted your family," Zora spoke up. "Why's that make you an idiot?"
"Because he was out to hurt me," Crystal explained. "We had walked for a while and I'd gotten tired a long time ago. I'd kept asking him if we couldn't go home yet or at least back to the sleigh, but he kept saying we would soon, just not yet. I'd just asked him again when . . . when we came across an . . . inverted pentegram."
Faith bristled at those two words, and Salem had to struggle to escape her grasp that had become like iron. He looked at her strangely and mewed quietly. Faith shook herself and tried to forget her own memories and return her mind fully to the conversation at hand.
"I knew what I was looking at even then, and I knew it wasn't good when he started dragging me toward it. I tried to fight him, but I was a child! I couldn't do anything against him except scream. He told me no one would hear my screams, but he . . . " She pressed her lips together for a moment, silencing the cry that rose within her as tears finally came to her eyes. "He was wrong."
As Crystal continued talking, she began to forget more and more about the group of people gathered in front of her and her memories grew ever more vivid until it was as if she were living them again. "He was wrong, because somebody did hear me. She came out of nowhere, flying straight for us. She blew fire on him and managed to grab me. She carried me back to her nest and set me in there with her baby."
"I was only four, but I could still understand her. That's one of the things children at the North Pole are taught -- how to communicate with animals. She told me to stay there with her baby while she took care of my uncle. We weren't to move until she came back." She fought back tears. "We could hear the battle raging outside, and we trembled and held to each other while we listened."
A tear ran down her cheek as Crystal finally announced, "She never came back, and when we finally left the nest, we found her . . . dead."
Even as Lorne stood to take Crystal's shaking form into his reassuring arms, Kitty spoke up. She was holding Lockheed close to her. Though tears slipped down her dragon's long snout, Kitty managed to refrain her own tears to shining in her brown eyes only. "The baby dragon," she asked Crys, "was Blue, wasn't he?"
Crystal nodded and desperately fought her emotions down.
"What did you do?" Dawn nearly cried.
"What else could I do? My uncle had looked for me, and we'd heard him calling. We'd also heard him finally leave but had waited for a long time before finally crawling out of hiding. That was when we found her. I couldn't bury her. I wanted to, but she was just too big. And I couldn't burn her because I didn't have anything to start a fire with. Finally, when we left her, I did the only thing I could -- I promised her spirit that I would take care of Blue for her as long as either of us would live and went home."
"You went home?" Lex asked in disbelief. "But your uncle -- "
She nodded. "He was there, but he wasn't alone. I tried telling my parents what had happened, but they wouldn't believe me. My uncle would never do things like that, they claimed! I was just making up wild stories to cover my bad shenanigans!"
"They didn't believe you?" Zora asked.
Crystal nodded. "Nobody did! I tried telling my entire family, everybody except my uncle of course, but no one would listen! I was only a child who, for some reason, had started acting bad! They didn't know why I'd want to make up such a story about my 'poor' uncle, but not a single one of them would believe me!"
"But you were telling the truth!" Zora protested.
"I know," Crys agreed, "but there are just some things that people won't believe no matter how hard you try to tell them the truth."
Zora nodded. She could understand that. After all, was that not the very reason why she had never told any one about her powers? She looked over to where Vang sat with the Lewises and found his gaze turned to meet hers. Could that have been why he'd kept the truth from her -- because he'd been afraid she wouldn't believe him?
"What did you do then?" Gabrielle prompted.
"I kept trying to tell people. I'd tell anybody who would listen but nobody would believe me until my cousin, Jack, came."
"Wait a minute," Dawn called, always full of questions. "Does your cousin have the same last name as you?" At Crys' answering nod, her eyes grew wide. "He's the Jack Frost!"
"Yes," Crystal answered, "and he had also been attacked by our uncle as a child. Like me, he'd only been four at the time, and nobody had believed him either. He'd researched it, though, and had found out two things. The first was why our uncle had tried to sacrifice us: He wanted our powers. The second was a way to protect ourselves against him. It would at least allow us to block our signatures from him." She did not take off her necklace but did hold the crystal out so that they could see it.
Only Piper could not see the crystal. "The crystal?" she asked before Cole could tell her. "The same one you used to heal me? Thank you for that, by the way." She was afraid that, in all the commotion, she'd never really got a chance to heartfully thank Crystal for saving her life.
Crystal nodded and was going to let Piper's gratitude slip by when she realized that the brunette could not see her. She sighed. "Please do not thank me," she told her. "It was the crystal only, and you were attacked by dinosaurs because of me."
"That's -- "
"Impossible? Absurd? Neither," Crys told her, "and by the time I finish, you'll understand why."
"There was a second there who came to believe me about my uncle. He had been away, visiting relatives in England with his family, and came back to hear all the rumors about my insanity and bad behavior. Mark was my best friend, though, and he didn't believe any of it. He came to me for the truth, and I told him. I told him everything about what had happened, . . . but that was the worst thing I could have done for him."
"I don't know how he knew, but somehow he did. Mark never made it home that night. When I went out hunting for him after learning he hadn't gotten home, I found pieces of him littered all over the ground . . . but they were all made of ice. He was only the first person my uncle turned to ice and shattered because of me."
"I tried to stay there in the North Pole, because it was my home. I kept my mouth shut and avoided him the best I could, but I couldn't stay. During that time, though, I trained myself through books and Jack's teachings and learned as much about his activities and abilities as I could. There were two times I managed to intervene in his plans. Both times, I came across him attempting a sacrifice in the woods. Twice, I failed."
"But you just said that you interveined!" Jasmine protested.
"I did, and I managed to save one being each time. We barely escaped with our lives, though, and the rest of their families were slaughtered so that he could drain more power from their bodies."
"Cindy and Elvira?" Wesley deduced with a questioning brow.
Crystal nodded. "They and Blue were the only ones I was ever able to save," she admitted through her tears, "before I finally gave up. When I told my parents I was going to leave, they told me never to come back for they were sick of the embarrassement and shame my lies had brought them."
"Your lies?" Jasmine asked, clearly confused.
"Yes," Crystal answered. "My lies about my uncle and what he had done to me or, at least, tried to do."
"I met my uncle on the way out of my home for the last time. My parents were still there, so he couldn't do anything to me. In front of them, he told me that he was sorry I was leaving and that he'd miss me. To me, in a whisper so that they couldn't hear him, he told me that I'd never be safe." She sighed as she admitted, "And he was right."
"I tried at first to make a home for myself, but he showed up. I was living in a hot climate, and I awoke to the greatest blizzard the place had ever seen. I knew it was him, and I ran. After that, I moved around for a long time, but then I finally dared to try it again."
"That time, I had friends, and I had a chance at touring with a theater group. It was on the very morning that I was going to sign the final papers to join them when I woke to snow outside my window. I should have ran then, but I didn't. I stayed," she admitted shamefully.
"Why?" Will couldn't help asking. If she'd known the danger to come, why had she not fled?
"Because I was a fool," Crystal replied. "The papers had been saying that the coldest weather the city had ever experienced was coming for weeks, so I told myself that it had just finally hit and that was all it was." She shook her head, and her eyes closed against the tears, shame, and regret. "I didn't truthfully believe it, but I wanted to be able to live a real life and have a chance at happiness so badly that I just kept telling myself that. It wasn't that much later that morning that I heard screams and bells going off. When I found out that it was him, I ran. I should have stayed and stood my ground, tried to protect the people there who I had endangered, but I didn't want to be caught by him. I didn't mind dieing, but I didn't want him to hurt my . . . my babies . . . " It was getting a lot easier to admit that her three animal companions were not only her dearest friends and familiars but her babies too as Angel and Lorne had been calling them that so often.
"That time I didn't stop running. I was constantly moving around, never staying in a place for more than a couple of months, but eventually he'd still show up. When it started snowing in Port Royal, I knew he was coming again, and we ran. The one direction that I could ascertain that the snow was not coming from was the sea, so we took to the port and hid on one of the ships that we hoped would be going out that day."
Crystal took a deep breath before forcing herself to finish, "That was how I came to the Black Pearl, and that is also why he destroyed Port Royal and attacked the ships. That is why the ships were attacked two nights ago, why we crashed here amid the dinosaurs and all this chaos, and why Linda is no longer with us. That Demon is the danger I have put you all in."
Whispers rang throughout the room again, but Crys continued her conclusion though her heart was now beating fearfully again. "I've found nothing that can stop him, though I've tried before in the past. I've seen him live through things that nobody should be able to live through, including everything from dragon breath to a sword in the heart to falling into a volcano. Nothing has worked. I doubt anything ever will, and he is powerful beyond anything you've met before. He killed Linda with just a thought, and that's all it takes."
"That's also another thing I'd like you to keep in mind when you consider your answers to my question." She made a twirling motion with her hand, and a snowball appeared in it. "He can kill anything . . . " She tossed the snowball up into the air. Even as it began to descend, she turned it to ice and shattered it within the same breath. " . . . as easily as that."
The whispers were running wilder and louder, and Cordelia pushed Angel, gently urging him to stand with his sister even as she got to her feet. Once they were all standing together, Cordy looked at Crys. "Ask them," she told her.
"We're right here with you," Angel reminded her in a low whisper as Lorne genty rubbed her arms.
"What in the world could you ask us after that?" Jasmine wanted to know.
"I know I have no right," Crystal told the gathered group, shaking her head sadly as her teary eyes turned out to them, "to stay, but I would like to. I only will, though, with your permission -- all of you -- so you each have a decision to make." She waited for the harsh words she knew would come.
To Be Continued . . .
