“Build up our arsenal.” He gives me a wicked grin. “Just because I think Jaxon 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 Flint 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,” Flint 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 Flint, for cover.
“That’s one,” I hiss, jerking to the right to avoid another snowball flying straight at me. It hits Flint 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,” Flint 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 Flint’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 Flint’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—Jaxon’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 Jaxon was right when he said Flint 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 Flint 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 Flint 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, Flint 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.