by Shaye Easton
Copyright © 2019 by Shaye Easton
All rights reserved. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in, or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known, hereinafter invented, without express written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the address below.
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ISBN: 978-1-64434-058-5
DISCLAIMER
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. While references might be made to actual historical events or existing locations, the names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cold Fire Trilogy
COLD FIRE
BOOK ONE
SHAYE EASTON
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
To every one of my readers, both past and present.
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Chapter One
The moments after it passes are always the coldest.
Not cold in a way I can feel—I’ve yet to feel the cold once in my entire seventeen years—but cold by comparison. Cold created by the sudden and startling absence of heat. It’s an illusion. It’s like a trick of the light—you think there’s something to it, and just as you’re discovering what, just as your hope is building, it’s snatched away on the wings of reality.
I have both hands on the rough, damp pavement. Little rocks press into the flesh of my palms. A particularly sharp stone—I suspect it may be glass—has sliced through my skin. My breath comes out of my body in a rush, like a tsunami rolling up from my lungs and spurting out onto the dark ground. I gasp, and the wave floods back in. Out. Then in again.
I am a block away from Southlake High when it hit, when the heat crept into my veins as it does once a day, setting my body on fire. And judging by all the looks I’m getting, it clearly isn’t far enough. A particularly loud group of boys pass me, sniggering and howling like a pack of wolves. It’s nothing they haven’t seen before. I’ve been here for six months, and I’ve already cemented my status as the pale girl who doesn’t quite wear enough layers to suit the weather, frequently seen doubled over on the ground.
They all stare. One, in particular, won’t look away, even after his friends have already moved on. He’s dark-haired and dark-eyed, and he lingers behind them, watching me over his shoulder as they continue up the street.
I can’t help myself. “What’re you looking at?” I snap.
He finally turns away.
I get back on my feet. The knees of my pants are wet and dirty, and I give them a brush with my hands, pretending like I don’t notice the whispers of all the students around me. At this point, I’m honestly not sure what they have to whisper about. They’ve already gossiped their way through the topic of my disease, spread rumours that I’m a witch or a demon or something equally uncreative. What next? Am I a vampire now, about to rise up in my black cape and drain the blood of some innocent junior?
The afternoon is heavy around me. The air thick with moisture and dark with clouds. It’s raining like it always seems to be when I’m around. The drops are fine and mist-like; they sink into my clothes and collect on my bare arms like glitter. The gloomy weather looks strange here in Corven Lake. It clashes with the cheery shop fronts selling ice cream and beach wear. It doesn’t suit the scorched pavements or the tan of this seaside town’s inhabitants.
Conversely, it suits me perfectly. I am dark-haired and pale. I am dismal and utterly strange. I am a ghost amongst these people, a half-present spectacle, eternally expecting someone to jump out of a bush and take a snap—flash, and my photo will be in the news, below a header in all caps proclaiming: Ghost Sighting In Corven Lake.
I continue down the street, eventually turning onto Corven Drive. It’s the predominant road in town, hemmed in by shops on one side and the coastline on the other. If you want to find a tourist, chances are you’ll see them on Corven Drive. But in this weather, it’s a ghost town.
You wouldn’t be able to guess it, but it is in fact early autumn—March—and the leaves have already fled the trees as though they’re allergic to the branches. It follows a pattern of uncharacteristic weather that began back in January, when the days took on a slight chill despite it being the middle of the Australian summer. At first, people complained but weren’t altogether too concerned. Now we’re in the middle of an early winter and I’m the one staring down at the end of the accusatory finger.
It’s never spoken aloud, but everyone knows it: it’s my fault. The details of my disease are kept as a strict secret, so naturally, they’re heavily rumoured. The official story is that I have some rare variation of cancer which causes my body temperature to fluctuate wildly. I’m either so cold my skin burns like dry ice or my blood is so hot that it has me doubled over in pain.
The truth is even more ridiculous. It involves a child, born with an extraordinarily low body temperature. It involves a girl, me, growing and suffering through a daily event termed as a ‘heat surge,’ in which my body strips heat from the surrounding air to keep my organs functioning.
As a consequence, an unnatural and constant winter soon descends on whichever unfortunate place I choose to reside. Last year it was Perth. This year it’s Corven Lake, a sizeable seaside town a few hours south of Sydney, and while no one’s been explicitly told it’s my fault, it doesn’t take much to put two and two together and start spreading rumours. This early winter is what I, and a team of global professionals I’ve long since fallen out of contact with, lovingly refer to as Side Eff
ect Number One.
After a few blocks, I pause at the corner. Here, I can either go straight ahead for the long way or turn left for the direct route home. Sometimes walking in the rain helps lighten up my mood. When I’m feeling particularly numb, the subtle pressure of the rain against my skin is enough to convince me I’m still alive. But today I’m not feeling much of anything. The rain is too fine. The wind is too soft. My skin is unreceptive to the abnormally early winter air. I take the turn at the corner; I’m heading home.
As a kid, I once leaned on the stove top, unaware it was switched on and heating up beneath me, and melted all the skin off my arm before Mum noticed and screamed at me to move away. We quickly learnt I had a complete and horrifying lack of heat or pain receptors. The winter chill and the summer heat were, and still are, all the same: the feel of a slightly cool, slightly warm room. And if I ever hurt myself, I get all of the pressure and none of the pain. This is Side Effect Number Two.
The back streets of Corven are much like the suburbs of any city: houses, modern and historical and half-and-half, bunched up against each other like boxes packed onto a shelf. A faded Australian flag flaps from a pole in an old man’s yard. Out front another, a mailbox hangs open, the flyers and junk mails spewing out, fluttering onto the footpath, torn and damp. In multiple yards, I see gardens of roses, gardenias and tulips sitting squashed under window sills and dying in the cold. Down the street, shivering are frangipani trees with buds yet to blossom. Along the path, gum trees fight against the abnormal weather, their hardy silver leaves holding firmly to their branches. Meanwhile, Australian maples rest barren and still, like giant hands waiting to claw the clouds from the sky.
And amongst it all is the silence, the echo of conversations and laughter of past summers long since faded from the air.
I walk a block. I walk two. After a third, a strange sensation creeps over my body, startling my skin. The hair on my arms rise like sentinels on the lookout for danger. And I must be in danger because my gut churns, my heart pounds and a gasp rockets from the confines of my mouth. I stop dead in my tracks.
It’s unlike anything else: this sensation that makes me want to fold in on myself and draws out every tendril of warmth in my bloodstream. Goose bumps dot my arms and the misty rain bites into my skin like shards of glass.
And I realise with a sudden harsh certainty, I’m cold. I lift up my arm and stare at it, alarmed. I’m truly cold. It’s not a hallucination, nor a phantom feeling—this is the real deal.
When I look up, a man is standing at the other end of the road. But ‘man’ doesn’t quite cut it. Everything from his clothes to his skin and his eyes is tinted an unnatural grey, and he stands out in the gloom like he’s cast in a light from a source I can’t see.
The cold I felt rolls over me stronger, and I hug my arms to my chest and shiver, a second shocked gasp escaping my throat. I haven’t felt the cold since I was an infant, and even that is only the vaguest wisp of a memory. My heart jumps suddenly. Could I be cured?
But the second I think it, I know it isn’t true. The man is still staring at me, and a deeply buried instinct tells me this has nothing to do with my disease and more to do with my current situation. I try to make out his features but as soon as I focus in on any one element—his nose, the shape of his chin, the set of his brows—they blur. I blink and shake my head. That can’t be right.
Sure enough, when I look again, he’s blurry and indistinct, a mirage in our quiet, icy desert. He’s got a face you forget as soon as you turn away. But I can feel his eyes on me, and I can feel the cold, almost as if he’s brought it with him…
I turn on my heels and start heading back the way I came, slowly at first, then faster when I look back and he’s still there, still watching me with an unblinking gaze. I start to jog, heart pounding, breath coming quickly in and out. I turn at the corner to take a longer route home, but even once he’s out of view, I can still feel his eyes on me.
Stop it, Melissa, I chide. You’re being ridiculous.
But I’m running now, fear choking up my bloodstream, my instincts screaming at me to move faster, go further. I come to another corner and look back, almost certain that I’ll see his blurry grey form at the far end of the street.
That’s when I run headfirst into someone rounding the corner. With a yelp, I stumble back, terror snaking through me. But this person isn’t grey or blurry. He’s dressed in Southlake High’s winter uniform: dark pants, white shirt, a navy woollen jumper with the blue and white school emblem. He’s wearing a rain jacket over the top and his dark hair is wet and tousled.
He’s the same boy I told off for staring at me earlier, but now I’m not feeling so confident. Maybe it’s just the residual fear in my bloodstream, but his sudden presence makes me horribly uneasy.
“You might want to slow down a little,” he tells me, dark eyes glinting. “The ground is slippery.” Except his eyes aren’t just dark—they’re pitch black.
“I’ll take that under advisement,” I reply, and my voice shakes. I move past him, continuing hurriedly down the street. When I look over my shoulder, he’s watching me go. And despite the fact that the inexplicable cold I felt has worn off, it chills me to the core.
***
When I reach home, I fumble with the gate, my hands shaking as I lock it behind me. Whatever cold I felt is long gone by now, but its memory has sunk into my bones and refuses to leave. I shiver as I walk up the path, stopping at the front door.
The mat on our doorstep welcomes me home. I grind the dirt on my shoes into the letters. Our current home is more of a cold and empty house playing dress ups, pretending to be something that it isn’t by hanging family pictures on the walls and turning the television on to fill the silence. Some mornings when I wake up in my room, I catch myself wondering where I am, as if I haven’t lived there for six months but only one day—as if all the memories of waking up and getting dressed in that spot are alien, belonging to a different person in a different time. Nothing there is familiar. Nothing there feels like home. My house is a fake, a forgery, and my family is simply going along with the act.
I realise I forgot my keys again and sigh. Great. I knock twice.
Mum opens the door, her brown shoulder-length hair lit by the light from inside, creating a golden halo around her face. There’s no smile to welcome me home. Her hard eyes travel disapprovingly over my damp hair and clothing. Beads of rain still cling to my skin and I imagine they glisten like diamonds in the warm light.
“Shoes off before you come inside, please. I don’t want you treading mud through the house.” I get to work unlacing my sneakers. I’ve got one off and have set it down by the door when she remarks, “If you’re going to insist on walking home, you could at least have the good sense to bring an umbrella.”
“That would defeat the purpose.”
“Are these walks really necessary?”
“Yes, Mum.” I set down the other shoe and look up. “They are.”
I step inside and she says, “If all you want to do is get rained on, maybe you should just take a shower.”
I have to refrain from snapping at her. “It’s not the same.”
“Uh-huh.”
She doesn’t get it, but it’s ridiculous of me to expect her to. I’m the unfortunate one out of seven billion who got saddled with this disease, not her.
I head for the stairs. It’s only once I’m halfway up that I realise she still hasn’t moved from the doorway. She stands silently, eyes trained on the gloom outside the house, and for a moment I fear the grey man has followed me home.
“Mum?” I ask.
“Yeah?”
“What is it?”
“Nothing.” She closes the front door with a resonant slam. And it’s scary how normal it all seems: a mother who stares at thin air as if she can create something from it with the deadness of her gaze; a daughter who drags winter around like a pet; and a family bond that’s cold as ice and just as brittle.
Up
stairs, I shower, scrubbing my skin until it’s red and raw. At some point along the road, I got this idea into my head that if I just rub hard enough or use enough heat, I’ll be able to feel something—I’ll be able to cure myself of this disease. But the water remains lukewarm, and like always my skin fails to respond.
My reflection confronts me in the mirror when I hop out. Dark brown hair hangs limp and dripping wet on my shoulders, contrasting starkly with my ghostly pale skin. Eyes rimmed by dark lashes are coloured cloudy blue. Lips too small for my jaw, and almost as pale as my skin, sat beneath a small upturned nose. The mirror is foggy from the steam of my shower and it distorts my features, making them blurry, washed out, and puckered. I rub a hand through the condensation, and in that moment, I swear I see the grey man over my shoulder, staring with hollow eyes.
I jump, spinning around, eyes swinging frantically. He was standing in the open doorway of my shower, but there’s no one there. I take a deep breath and try to calm my racing heart. I’m just being paranoid.
Downstairs, my family of three sits in silence for dinner. Across from me, Dad stares unseeingly down at his food, silent and tired. His dark brown hair is shot through with grey, his once-tanned skin is pale and weathered, and his dark blue eyes rest above dark shadows. He’s a shell of the father I knew as a kid, before this life stole his vigour. Both my parents work—Mum as a freelance journalist, Dad as a tradesman—but I can tell the years of physical labour and working long hours to support our family have been particularly tough on him.
With a disease like mine, one that slowly freezes my surrounding environment, relocation becomes a yearly event. In the beginning, we attempted to make a life for ourselves in each place we lived in. Then the goodbyes got too difficult, and my disease got worse. Now we float like restless spirits from place to place. We stop to rest each year but we’re never present enough to grow roots.
This month marks the halfway point of our stay here in Corven Lake, and the idea of moving again in September is already hanging over our family like a storm cloud. But a year is our deadline. If I stay too long after that, the whole area will become uninhabitable, which means water will freeze in the pipes, plants will wilt and shrivel, the wildlife will have to migrate or freeze, and people will start dying from the cold. If I stay too long after a year, the effects grow irreversible.
