Stealing Snow (8 page)

“‘Us’ who?”

“Not here. We have to get home first.” He pulled a vial filled with a yellow liquid out of his satchel. “If you drink this—”

I smacked the vial out of his hand and it smashed against a tree, the contents dripping down the sides.

“Zads!” The boy looked genuinely exasperated. “That was my last one for home.”

“This isn’t my home! Now you better explain how you’re going to help me, or I’m out of here.”

The boy sighed with a little too much exaggeration. “Okay, look. I told you it’s not safe to talk here. We’ll help you with your man and tell you about the prophecies, but we need to leave first. And now that you just smashed the quickest way home, we need to walk. So follow me.”

“Prophecies plural?”

“Both involve the King. And both involve you.”

I digested the information. He took my silence as agreement and started to walk again.

“Do you really think I’m going anywhere with you?”

The boy was maddeningly confident, which was alluring and annoying at the same time.

“I do,” he said simply. Unfortunately he was right this time. I didn’t have any choice. So leaving the pieces of the Tree in our wake, we began to move.

“My name is Jagger, by the way,” he said with a flourish and a bow.

“I didn’t ask,” I snapped. The name sounded as slippery as the boy it belonged to.

He laughed. “Yes, I noticed that.” A village cropped up in front of us. I felt some part of me relax at the sight of houses. I
was no longer alone with this guy. And some other part of me hoped that maybe Bale would be in one of those houses.

Each house in the city was a different color, but they were also translucent. Light seemed to dance through them, though I couldn’t make out the shapes inside. I walked by them, looking around for signs of life and skimming my fingers along the surfaces—all freezing cold and smooth. Ice.

“Where is everyone?”

“It’s been a hard winter. It’s lasted so much longer than anyone ever anticipated,” he said quietly.

“How long?”

“Since the day you and your mother left Algid.”

He kept moving as he talked. I followed the information he gave me like bread crumbs.

“This is how you live?” I asked, looking at the glorified igloos. They were nothing like Hamilton, the town closest to Whittaker.

“You haven’t seen anything yet. Wait till you see mine,” he said proudly, as if he had completely forgotten why I had agreed to come.

“Is that where you’re keeping Bale?” I demanded. “Is that where you’re taking me?”

He said nothing, continuing our walk in silence. If I wasn’t so cold and hungry, I would have stormed off. Instead I swallowed my growing frustration and followed him.

After another ten minutes or so of silent walking, we spotted a man sitting on a bench. He was wearing a coat made out of
something slick and black that made me think of penguins. Jagger followed my gaze, but his reaction was different from mine.

“Don’t touch him. Don’t touch anyone or anything,” Jagger warned, his voice drained of its charm. I was focused on the man. He was too still. But something pulled me to him. Maybe he was hurt. I needed to know. I raced ahead.

“Excuse me,” I said, relieved to finally see another living soul other than Jagger.

“No,” Jagger growled.

I may have had to follow him to Bale, but there was no way I would obey his every order.

“Snow,” he demanded.

I ignored him and touched the man’s shoulder, anyway. Horrified, I realized he was frozen solid. He tipped over, and when his body hit the ground, his head disconnected from the rest of him and rolled away. I swallowed a scream.

“I told you not to touch him,” Jagger said, catching up to me.

I looked up and down the street and noticed for the first time dozens of people frozen in place. There was a mother and daughter standing in front of a store window, admiring something that they would never purchase.

“Are they all …,” I began. I couldn’t bring myself to say the word.
Dead
.

Jagger answered with a nod.

Their expressions were frozen, too. They were smiling. Like the man on the bench, they had not seen the attack coming.

“What happened to these people? A flash freeze? It doesn’t make any sense.”

“It doesn’t matter how. It matters that we get out of here before the same thing happens to us.”

Finally I understood Jagger’s urgent need to leave this place. There was no one alive in the village. We needed to keep going.

But I couldn’t move. I’d never seen a dead body before, let alone a frozen, headless one.

“Look, I’m sorry you had to see that. But you’re going to see much worse if we’re going to save your boy Bale. Now, we have to keep moving if we’re going to get home by dark.”

Bale. Just the sound of his name battled out the feeling that gnawed at me, telling me to go back, not to trust this boy.

Instead I charged on beside Jagger. I glared at his perfect profile. He had tried to spare me the horror. But still, he had brought me—no, lured me—to a place where whatever had happened to that headless man could happen to me.

Past the village, the landscape changed again. There were new trees—ones I’d never seen before. Their trunks were wide but not as wide as the Tree that had opened Algid to me. Their branches were twisty and had big white blossoms that were frozen as well.

I could see Jagger’s breath floating up in tiny clouds. He trudged on, determined, his face so pretty and unmarred by what we had seen. Whatever he was thinking, he looked as though he had forgotten the village, while for me those dead, frozen faces kept coming back in flashes.

The questions and the silence and his relative calm were getting to be too much.

“You need to explain everything to me. Like how those people
froze back there and how we’re getting Bale back,” I insisted, walking in front of him to halt his forward march.

“The key to finding Bale is to find the Enforcer. I will tell you everything,” he said. “I promise, but I’m afraid I can’t right now. You need to trust me.”

“Well, why the hell would I do that?”

“Because right now we have to run.”

Suddenly I heard a growl, low and guttural, behind us. The sound came from deep within the icy banks around where we stood. And then the ground started to take form, rising up on its own. Standing behind me was a wolf made completely of snow. Its legs and back muscles were hard-packed chunks of ice. The creature bared teeth made of sharp, pointy icicles.

Another Snow Wolf rose beside it, and then more beside them. Their glassy eyes tracked me as I took several steps backward.

“What are you standing there for? Run, Snow!” Jagger yanked me along behind him until I was finally running, too.

For the second time since leaving Whittaker, I was running, weaving in between the trees and following Jagger’s graceful form. I was anything but graceful. My arms flailed, and I occasionally tripped over fallen branches, but I kept moving. I looked back, which was a mistake. The pack of Snow Wolves was gaining on me—and the time I took to glance behind me had allowed them to get that much closer.

Up ahead the trees thinned out, and I shot like a dart into the clearing, skidding to an abrupt stop at the edge of a high cliff. I’d run out of land. I looked down and saw a river flowing below. It
was a ridiculously long drop. Looking back, I saw the lead Snow Wolf bearing down on me.

What should I do? Jump and risk drowning in the freezing water—that was assuming I didn’t die on impact? Or be eaten by Snow Wolves? And where the hell did Jagger go?

They’re not real. They’re not real
, I told myself. But my feet had other ideas, and I jumped. The free fall seemed to take forever.

My mind went back to Bale. I was doing this for him.

I took the deepest of breaths. I closed my eyes when my body hit the water. And then remembered I couldn’t swim.

I think I heard Jagger splash into the water nearby but not near enough.

The water was ice-cold, and my body turned instantly numb. I tried to move my arms the way I’d seen people do on television, but they didn’t cooperate. I was sinking amid the rushing water. The current dragged me down, and I could feel the pressure of the air I was holding in my nose and behind my eyes. I needed to get to the surface. I needed air. I felt myself give up.

As I sank farther down, I thought of Bale’s face. I would never see it again. I would never see him again. Had I really come this far to die?

I exhaled air and inhaled water. A new kind of pressure filled my nose and lungs. I was suffocating. This was going to be the end of me.

Just when I had given up all hope, a light hovered above my head, followed by a shadow. I expected Jagger, but it looked like a woman. Her hair fanned out and swirled in the water. Long arms ending in tentacles reached for me.

The woman’s face was wide, with big glowing green eyes. Slits that looked like gills lined each cheek. They gaped open and closed in the blue-green water.

I tried to push her away, but my body wasn’t moving under its own power. Undeterred, she wrapped her tentacles around my waist and pulled me toward the surface. She was saving me.

This was my dream, my nightmare come to life. Only in this version, I was being rescued, not killed.

A few seconds later I was shaking like a leaf on the shore of the River, and the woman from the water was kneeling over me.

“We need to get you inside.”

If liquid could be solid, that was what the woman looked like. She was completely made of water in the same way that the Snow Wolves had been made from icy flakes. Her skin wept water. Rivulets formed each individual strand of her hair.

“Snow.” Her voice was sweet and even.

How did she know my name? All the impossible things that had happened to me since Whittaker piled up on top of one another. But the sound of my own name anchored me to the riverbed.

“Who are you? What are you?” I demanded.

“I am the River Witch,” she said simply. “Nepenthe.”

“What?” Despite what I’d seen in the village and woods, I wasn’t ready to believe in witches. And I felt myself fading. Everything ached: my head, my limbs, my chest. I had been running and running since I’d left Whittaker, and now, in this moment lying on the shore, all my strength left me.

“The River Witch,” she repeated out loud, just as the world went black.

The next few hours were a blur as I slipped in and out of consciousness. Blankets were heaped on top of me. A fire was set somewhere, and the witch forced a gross seaweedy porridge down my throat.

At one point I managed to ask, “Jagger? Did you find Jagger?”

A deep crease of confusion diverted the flow of water down her forehead.

“There was a boy with me. Did you find him?” I prompted.

“Do you mean the boy who was running in the other direction when I dragged you out and saved your life?” she said with a judgmental tone.

“I … guess?”

“Well, he’s gone. He left you behind.”

“Are you sure?” This made no sense. He was hell-bent on bringing me to this world. Why would he ditch me?

“I know the River, and the River said he left,” she said gently.

The turn of phrase was odd. How does anyone know a river? I thought of that for a while as I faded back into oblivion. But not before I heard another voice, sweet and songlike.

“She’s so cold … We have to warm her up.”

When I woke again, my naked body was covered in what looked like thick leaves, though they felt like leeches. Where were my clothes? What the hell was going on?

I tried to sit up and pull at one of the leaves, but my body didn’t comply. It was as if the weight of the water were still over me, holding me down.

Then I noticed a short girl standing next to me.

“Be still.” The girl’s voice was a song. It had more notes in it
than mine. Than anyone I’d ever heard, really. It trilled with concern.

“What the hell?” I tried to say. But when I opened my mouth it was full of water.

This was a dream, I assumed. A really, really vivid, eyes-wide-open dream.

“They’re scales,” the girl explained, touching the leaflike things attached to me. “They draw off all the bad.”

Great. I had been saved only to be tortured by wannabe witch people.

There’s no way to draw off all the bad
, I thought.

The girl picked up one of the scales and lit it on a nearby candle.

I tried to speak again, to scream, anything. Only now there was even more water in my mouth.

Then she touched the flame to the scales on my body. I would have jumped up, but I couldn’t move. Something that looked like seaweed was wrapped tightly around my legs and arms.

I braced myself for the pain, but it didn’t come. The flames raced over the scales on top of my skin, but I felt only a tickle. One by one, the tiny scales peeled off and floated to the ceiling.

As the fire receded, the seaweed retracted from my wrists and ankles. I ran my hands over my unburned skin, which was now warm to the touch.

The girl covered me with a rough, burlapy sheet and walked away as I tried to yell obscenities at her. But I didn’t have the energy. I went back to sleep.