Page 40 of A Killing Cold

Perfect.

Don’t do anything sketchy or I’ll cut you up into tiny pieces and bury you in the park.

Cross my heart.

I stare until the screen goes dark.

Trevor was telling the truth. Connor and I didn’t meet by happenstance. He saw my photo and tracked me down.

Why?

Had I looked familiar to him, too? My hand goes to my wrist. To the dragonfly that almost perfectly matches the ornament on the cabin door—a tattoo that was on full display in that portrait.

He hunted me down.

He brought me here.

I thought all this was a coincidence, too wild to be true. But what if it wasn’t? What if I didn’t stumble my way here?

What if I was led?

18

I put the phone back in the drawer, adjusting it just so.

I fall in love so easily. It’s always been one of my worst qualities. Because I don’t know how to love. I don’t know how tobeloved. I always thought it went back to the root. My first parents didn’t want me, and neither did the second set.

But that can’t be true. It can’t be. My mother loved me, I remember it now, but something terrible happened. And so maybe that’s what it is, this desperate hunger to get that love back.

It was stolen from me, and so I try to steal it, too.

When I was a child, I stole things from the man who called himself my father, in love with him the way a child loves someone they think will save them. I took from him a book of native plants, well thumbed; a spider trapped in amber. (He didn’t save me. He didn’t do anything at all.)

When I was thirteen, I fell in love with a girl named Sarah Baker, the way a child loves someone they wish they could be. I stole a pretty pink shell from her jewelry box and a bracelet made of twine and beads. (She kissed me in the old barn; she told me my real parents got rid of me because I was ugly; she never spoke to me again.)

When I was sixteen, I fell in love with a boy named Peter Frey the way you love someone because they look at you with desire, and I took his silver dollar and a third-place track medal and four hundred dollars to take care of things. (He told them it was me he told them it was my fault he told them he told them he told them.)

When I was nineteen, I fell in love with Brandon, who tasted of stale ash and told me I was strange, warped, broken, that he liked meanyway, that no one else would. I took his guitar pick and a letter from the girl who broke his heart. (He told me I was crazy. He grabbed my arm so hard it bruised. I stayed another month.)

Connor was supposed to be different. I didn’t have to sneak my way in. I didn’t have to figure him out, become just right so he’d love me, tolerate me, find some use for me. He loved me. From the start, he loved me, and it was fortune, it was fate.

It was a lie.

I look down at my hand. The pain in my palm keeps tempo with my heart, waxing and waning with each beat. He’ll ask me where it came from. It’s obvious what it is—round, ragged at the edges, oozing clear liquid.

I walk back out to the living room. The flames have long since died down in the woodstove, but I know from experience how hot it still is, with the embers smoldering within. When I was a child, I barely touched the stove and it left a welt on my palm for days. I curl my fingers. I think of Trevor’s face, the moment before he jammed the cigarette against my palm.

I think of the end of it, an orange glow in the night.

A single point of light. Like a star. Not a red star, but an amber one. I close my eyes. I can see it. The star in the dark, among the trees. Cold seeping into my bones, and I need to find the woman with the red scarf, because something terrible has happened here.

Something terrible is still happening.

I open my eyes and press my palm against the edge of the stove.

19

Connor is horrified by the burn. I bandaged it myself the night before, but he insists on unwrapping it to examine the damage, fretting over it. The heat of the stove has obliterated the small circle at the center of my palm; it’s a solid welt now, stretching from one edge of my hand to the other. I watch Connor with a sense of detachment.

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