Page 12 of A Killing Cold

“Really?” I ask, and at the genuine surprise on my face, she cocks her head curiously. “It’s just—he’s never struck me as unhappy.”

“Maybe that’s because the whole time you’ve known him, he’s known you,” she says. The next thing I know she’s giving me a hug, the glimmer of unspent tears in her eyes. “Oh no, I’ve had too much wine and now I’m getting all weepy. I’m glad you came, Theo. I can’t wait to get to know each other properly.”

She relinquishes me back to Connor’s care. I find myself stumbling as we leave, a pressure in my chest easing up.

Maybe this can work. If I have Alexis on my side, and Magnus—maybe I can win them over.

Maybe I can have this. Have him.

Connor’s fingers lace with mine. I glance back over my shoulder, toward the lodge. There’s someone standing in front of one of the massive picture windows, a drink in his hand, watching us go. Trevor Dalton—Connor’s brother.

He meets my eyes. He smiles, slow and lazy. And he shakes his head.

I turn quickly away and pick up my pace.

5

That night I have the dream.

I call it the dream, but it isn’t as if it’s one set sequence—it’s different every time. I’ll be in my childhood bedroom trying to fit my feet into a series of ever-smaller shoes or running through bookstore corridors that seem to wind forever, and then some piece of the dream will appear, out of place. The red star gleaming between the shelves. Snow falling thickly to blanket that old beige carpet.

The buzz of the dragonfly’s wings.

Tonight I’m in Harper’s apartment, at a party—not the party where I met Connor, though he’s here somewhere, in another room. The dream slews between half-realized conversations, anxiety thrumming through them—I’ve forgotten something important, and Harper won’t tell me what it is. Then the door opens to welcome in new party guests, but instead of a hallway and tipsy grad students, there waits a maw of black, and in it, a single red star. Something buzzes at my wrist. I look down. The dragonfly is perched on my forearm. Its wings gleam, metallic.

Footsteps crunch behind me. I don’t want to turn, because I know what I’ll see.

He’s there. He’s always there. The rest is just prelude.

I don’t want to turn, but I have to. It’s the dream, and in the dream I turn. In the dream I stumble back and fall, and he looms above me: the antlered man. Shadow blackens half his face. Antlers rupture from his temples, branching into razor points.

“Scream,” he says, and I do.

And then Connor is shaking me gently awake. “Theo,” he says, “you’re having a nightmare. Wake up.”

The dream bleeds away. I try to speak but can only gasp, and Connor gathers me up against him. I burrow against his warmth, shutting my eyes, waiting for Connor’s touch to soothe that fearful animal that lives in my chest.

I don’t know what the dream means, only that the pieces are always the same: the star, the cold, the dragonfly, and the antlered man.

I know the antlered man wants to hurt me. That hewillhurt me.

And I can never escape.

I’ve wondered if the dream has its origins in a memory. My life before I came to live with the Scotts is a blank—I was young, of course, but my therapist believes the complete lack of memories is a consequence of trauma.It was clear something had happened to you, Joseph once told me, on one of the rare occasions he talked about when I first arrived or even acknowledged I’d ever been anywhere else.

I was four years old when the Scotts took me in, and yet I don’t even know my real name. I only have the dream, the fragments.The cold, the star, the red scarf wound around her throat.

The memory of a fear so intense, it traps the breath in your lungs.

I lie with my head on Connor’s chest, listening to his heartbeat. It’s slow and steady.

“You know, I used to have nightmares, too,” he tells me. He trails his fingers up and down my arm. “After my father died. I used to dream that I was trying to catch up to him, but he kept getting farther and farther away. As metaphors go, it wasn’t subtle.”

“How did your father die?” I ask. “You’ve never told me.”

“You’ve never asked,” he says. His fingertips still.

“I don’t like to talk about my childhood. It doesn’t seem fair to ask people about theirs,” I reply.

---