Jack_Frost__The_End_Becomes_the_Beginning_-_William

Contents
Chapter One
A Nose Is Nearly Nipped
Chapter Two
Less Than Early Frost
Chapter Three
Pitch Is No Longer at Bat . . . for Now
Chapter Four
An Unusual Pair of Tails
Chapter Five
The Guardians Begin to Guard
Chapter Six
Misgivings on Giving Gifts
Chapter Seven
A Yuletide Most Untidy
Chapter Eight
The Everlasting Lip Touch
Chapter Nine
Where There’s a Will, There’s a Whisper
Chapter Ten
What’s Good for the Goose Is Grand for the Ganderly
Chapter Eleven

How to Get the Goose
Chapter Twelve
The Greatest Library the World Has Never Known
Chapter Thirteen
In Which We Get to the Root of the Matter
Chapter Fourteen
Anger Management
Chapter Fifteen
The Pause that Thickens (the Plot, that Is)
Chapter Sixteen
The Worm Turns Inside Out
Chapter Seventeen
Jack Is Nimble; Pitch Now Trembles
Chapter Eighteen
One for All and All Against One
Chapter Nineteen
The Moon Is Full
Chapter Twenty
Between the Tick and the Tock
Chapter Twenty-One
Like an Elephant Stamps a Flea
Chapter Twenty-Two
The Greatest Strength
Chapter Twenty-Three
Once Upon a Time . . .
Chapter Twenty-Four

Mind Over What Matters
Chapter Twenty-Five
No Mercy
Chapter Twenty-Six
Sadness Into Snow
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Snag, Smush, and Whittle
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Time and Tide
Acknowledgments
About the Author

For my editor,
Caitlyn,
my most stalwart
Guardian and friend

Jack Frost

CHAPTER ONE
A Nose Is Nearly Nipped
CHRISTMAS EVE WAS JACK’S favorite day of the year. And for the last
few decades or so, he had spent that day in his favorite place:
his tree.
Jack’s tree was the oldest in Central Park. A thousand
people, maybe more, walked past it daily and had done so for
many years, but not one of them knew that Jackson Overland
Frost was very often living inside it.
This tree was much older than the park it stood in and was
even older than the city of New York itself. It was a sapling
when the city was still called New Amsterdam and there were
more Native Americans than settlers living in the swampy
forests of Manhattan Island.
By this Christmas Eve 1933, millions of people lived within
shouting distance of this noble oak, but its secrets were still
more absolute than they had been when ﬂintlocks or bows
and arrows were the order of the day.
A heavy snow was falling over all of the East. It mued the
sounds of the city, though New York was already quieting
down. People had ﬁnished shopping and were heading to
their apartments and penthouses and homes. Jack, however,
could feel the thrum of excitement from the children. Sleep
would be dicult for them. It was, after all, Christmas Eve.
A busy night for Sandman, he thought.

The inside of Jack’s tree contained more than a dozen
rooms within its majestic hollow, and the furnishings were a
mix of pieces from several centuries: spears, shields, stools,
and pottery from the various tribes of the Iroquois, along
with colonial tables and ornate chairs and couches brought
over from Europe. There was a tomahawk from a chief of the
Algonquians. The jacket that George Washington had worn
the night he crossed the Delaware was hanging on a hat rack
that had belonged to Teddy Roosevelt. This tree, like all the
tree-houses Jack called home, was a handsome, comfortable
clutter of the region’s history.
Jack was readying to meet up with the other Guardians
when he felt the dull, worrying ache in his left hand. He
wanted to ignore it. He knew Nicholas St. North would already
be grumping about his being late.
Jack Frost! The fair-weather Guardian! North would playfully
gripe. Comes and goes when he pleasies!
The word, my dear North, is “pleases,” E. Aster Bunnymund
would correct.
Go lay an egg, General Rabbit Bunny, North would retort, and
they would begin to amiably argue.
Jack could imagine it exactly. He grabbed his sta, Twiner,
and prepared to leave, but then paused as another even
sharper pain seared through his hand. He looked at his palm,
at the curious scar etched across it. The inky stain of Pitch’s
blood had discolored it and was, Jack knew, the source of the
pain, for it only twinged when Pitch or his forces posed a
threat.
He turned back to a cabinet, well hidden, where he kept his
daggers. There were several similar daggers in this secret
cabinet. All of them were made from large, sharp, single
diamonds, and each gemstone had been formed from the
tears of someone Jack had loved. As far back as his earliest
days as Nightlight, Jack had possessed the ability to turn

sorrow into a weapon. These daggers could only be used
against dark forces or to protect the kind and weak. But there
was one dagger, unﬁnished, that was dierent from the
others. It had come from the tears of Pitch himself. This
dagger had one purpose only.
Jack had never completed its construction, but he knew
now in his heart that it was ﬁnally time to use it. And this
worried him deeply as he took the dagger and tucked it into
its sheath. He slipped on his blue hoodie, which he wore as a
sort of uniform, then set out for the pole. The North Pole.
The thousand or so squirrels that sheltered in his tree were
eating nuts and singing squirrel carols around a squirrel
version of a Christmas tree, a cone-shaped mound of acorns
covered with candles. They squealed “Merry Christmas” to
him in squirrel-speak. Jack squealed back; he spoke ﬂuent
squirrel and chipmunk.
As he leaped out of the hollow, he felt his hand throb once
more. Not now. Not tonight. He gave his hand a shake.
A breeze suddenly kicked up. The trees swayed and lurched,
their message clear. Danger was near. Twiner instantly
transformed into a bow and a quiver full of gnarled arrows.
Jack quickly nocked an arrow.
“Where?” he whispered to the bow.
He let Twiner lead him to where he needed to aim. While
Jack could sense danger, Twiner could always see where it
was coming from. The wind stilled, and the snow stopped.

Hmmm. Not only do the trees know there’s danger, so does
Mother Nature. Jack squinted through the trees and spotted
something ﬂying through the air toward him.
Nightmare Men! And they were coming fast.
But before Jack could shoot, he heard a telltale sound that
made him tense up: the quick, sharp rip of arrows in the air.
The limbs closest to him shook and bent faster than seemed
possible, forming a shield. Bark and wood took the heavy hits,
stopping more than two dozen dark arrows in midﬂight. One
struck less than an inch from Jack’s head.
The arrows were most unusual: black as coal, with an oily
shine. He had ﬁrst seen arrows like these back when he had
been called Nightlight. These were the very type used in the
last great battle against Pitch: the Battle of Bright Night. They
came from the Dark Side of the Moon. He pulled his bow tight,
whispered “Seek,” and let his own arrow ﬂy. It splintered into
a multitude of shafts. In the distance he heard a rat-a-tat of
thuds as each arrow found its mark. Silence followed. Then
the snow began to fall again, Mother Nature’s signal that the
danger had been dealt with.
In the distance he could just barely hear carolers. They
were singing “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen.” It was one of
his favorites. He looked more closely at the arrow that had
nearly killed him.
“Jack Frost nearly had his nose nipped,” he said to Twiner.
Then he leaped into the air and ﬂew o into the night sky
toward the North Pole with a new urgency.
He knew that these arrows meant that Pitch was somehow
enacting a long-festering plan of vengeance.
This Christmas would mean the return of the Nightmare
King.

CHAPTER TWO
Less Than Early Frost
KATHERINE STOOD WITH KAILASH, her giant Himalayan Snow Goose.
They were perched at the top of the actual North Pole.
Katherine was anxiously scanning the busy skies for any sign
of Jack. Down below, the Great City of Santa was at the height
of busyness.
North was bellowing orders from his balcony with the voice
ampliﬁer Bunnymund had invented for him. Every citizen of
the city who had ears could hear the great man’s voice.
“A dream come true for dear North,” Bunnymund had said
to the others when he had ﬁrst presented the ampliﬁer to his
fellow Guardian. “An earache for the rest of us.”

But if North was urgent in his orders, he was also jolly.
“Get that shipment of teddy bears sorted properly, or I’ll
stu you all!” he ordered with a belly laugh. A frantic troop of
elves had arrived with a fresh shipment from the Bear Works
building. North chuckled at their hurrying.
His laugh was of such full and rumbling mirth that it was
rumored to cause earthworms as far away as South America
to wiggle underground from the tickling sensation it caused.
And so, as the last-minute preparations for the Great Delivery
were being put into place, the citizens of the North Pole were
in a festive, cheerful panic.
Soon the ten thousand balloon blimps would be launched to
their assigned locations across the globe with their resupplies
of toys for North’s sleigh. An equal number of Bunnymund’s
underground trains, also loaded with playthings, would
simultaneously steam toward their destinations in many
lands.
Of course, sending toys to children across the planet in a
single night was a major undertaking, and a certain amount
of chaos was to be expected. Yetis were yelling at elves. Elves
were shouting at Lunar Lamas. Stued animals were nearly at
war with toy soldiers. But somehow, with North’s urging and
good humor, it always seemed to miraculously come
together. Every year Katherine was amazed that the scheme
worked. Doing a great kindness to children brings out the best in
every creature, she thought. But where is Jack tonight? She

always knew when he was in trouble. And tonight the trouble
she sensed was deep.

CHAPTER THREE
Pitch Is No Longer at Bat . . . for Now
PITCH DESPISED HIS IMPRISONMENT. It had been more than a hundred
years since the Nightmare King had been jailed after the
Battle of Bright Night, but his inﬂuence had not stopped. His
armies had been soundly defeated, but they had not been
obliterated. While Pitch did not know how many of his
soldiers had escaped, this much was certain: The Earth has
many places where shadows and gloom can give safe refuge
to wickedness.
His daughter, Emily Jane, had betrayed him, and during
these many years since Bright Night, she had fully evolved
into her great calling: to be Mother Nature. While she had
stayed neutral throughout the early Nightmare Wars, she now
used her formidable powers to keep her father conﬁned.

No jailer in history understood their prisoner’s strengths,
weaknesses, or abilities better than Emily Jane Pitchiner. She
was the only child of Lord Pitchiner, the Golden Age hero who
had become the scourge of a thousand galaxies, known as
Pitch Black the Nightmare King, and she knew what a valiant
and doting father he once was. She knew the tenderness that
had once emanated from him. And she knew that in one hand
he still held the remains of her childhood portrait in a
miniature cameo. Emily Jane clung to the small, desperate
hope that he could someday be restored to his former gallant
self.
For generations, her father’s Nightmare soldiers had
huddled in ragtag groups without their leader, but in time
they set about on Nightmare missions that were becoming
increasingly more organized and eective. The world seemed
to be unraveling, and there was fear in the air. The Nightmare
soldiers fed o fear; this made them more daring and
powerful. Fear is always a tonic to the wicked. It is dark and
stealthy and can travel like no other feeling. Even in his
isolation, Pitch could feel this fear.
Pitch’s prison was unlike any that had ever been, and it was
in the most unlikely of places: underneath the village of
Santo Claussen. So much of the Guardians’ history
originated from this enchanted settlement, and though it had
been a place of refuge for magical thinking and innovation, it
was by accidental design the perfect place to contain evil.
It had been Ombric Shalazar, when he was a young wizard,
who had discovered a strange, parched meteor crater at the
edge of the European wildlands. The crater’s surface was
coated with the densest metallic ore he had ever seen, and
being the last living citizen of Atlantis, he had seen many
things no other being since had laid eyes upon.
In the center of this crater grew a tiny sapling. Tempered
by the ﬁres of the cosmos, this tree would soon grow into the