Page 74 of A Killing Cold

I’m alone. I’m alone and my mother is dead, has been dead for years, and I am here and now, and she isn’t. How long have I been out here? Too long, sitting here with the snow piling up around me.

I don’t know how much of the memory is real. It’s scraps, fragments. I’m drawing lines between them, around them. Making a story. AndI can’t tell anymore what’s my invention and what is truth. Maybe I never could.

I have to move. I don’t want to. Here, where my body ceases to be real, my memories have room to blossom. The cold and the memory—they are linked. As if I left them behind in the cold, and I’ve returned for them.

Rowan, my mother’s voice says, tight with fear. I want to stay with her. I want to remember.

I know what it feels like to be dead. It’s cold, so cold.

The answers are there. In the cold. In the dark. If I stay, I’ll find them. If I stay, I’ll never leave.

I push to my feet shakily, almost fall. My feet have gone completely numb; so have my hands, my face. I crook my fingers. They’re slow to bend.

You have to run. You have to hide.I was so good at hiding. But he found me, didn’t he? The man with antlers. Liam Dalton.The ogre.

Movement begins to warm me. I shove my hands under my armpits to try to hoard my body heat. My footsteps are muted. The story pieces itself together in my mind.

Liam brought us here. I don’t know what promises he lured her with—money, safety, love—but she followed. Then things turned sour, once she was isolated and alone. So we had to flee.

But he must have found out she was going to leave him. He returned. He was angry. He hurt her.

Killed her.

And then—?

Maybe he realized what he’d done, and the guilt overcame him. One way or another, he killed himself.

And where does that leave me?

I was a witness. A loose end. A threat to the story the Daltons would tell.

It’s here. In the cold. All of it. The pieces of me that have been frozen in winter’s ice all this time and are thawing now.

The red scarf—blood, drying dark—the bitter cold, the star glowing red—amber, the end of a cigarette—the antlered man with his face half-black—there you are—and we have to go, love, we have to go now.

Pieces. They don’t connect up. It’s a kind of madness, trying to lay them out in the proper order, find the lines between them.

I reach the top of the road. My heart is racing so quick I can barely feel the space between each beat. The windows of the lodge are lit up. The Christmas tree shines, red lights and green and white. A figure stands near the window. From this far, I can’t tell who it is.

I hold still, afraid that even at this distance, they might spot me. I don’t know what time it is. I’m afraid to get my phone out to check, in case the light is visible. I know I’ve been gone a long while.

A sound splits the silence of the night—muffled, distant. It sounds like a bird, or maybe a rabbit caught in a predator’s teeth. The person at the window seems to turn toward it as well, but the curtain of quiet falls again quickly. The figure turns away and begins to walk out of the room, and I recognize the gait—Louise Dalton.

I strain my ears for the sound to come again, but it doesn’t. My teeth are chattering. I see the light of White Pine up ahead. It doesn’t feel safe to go inside. I can’t stay out here.

I walk to the door. My hand fumbles with the knob, and then the door opens and Connor is standing there, staring at me. His eyes travel up and down my body, and he lets out a breath between his teeth.

He reaches out, pulling me inside, wordless. My hands are too numb to strip off my snow-packed gloves, get off my boots, and so he does it for me. As if I’m a child.

He wraps me in a blanket and guides me over to the end of the couch nearest the woodstove, which gives off a wall of heat. I shrink back from it; it makes my skin hurt. He wraps his hands around mine, breathing on them to warn them.

“What were you doing out there?” he asks.

“I went to where I could get a signal.”

“Who did you call?”

“Magnus,” I say, my lips twisting mirthlessly, but he only looksconfused. “I’ve been getting text messages, telling me to stay away from you. I found a phone in Magnus’s office and I went to try the number. The texts came from him.”

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