Chapter 1 #2
I glance out the window again and curse under my breath.
The storm has turned vicious while I wasn’t paying attention, transforming from ordinary winter weather into something primal and hungry.
Snow drives horizontal across the parking area, and the wind howls like something alive and angry.
This is the kind of weather that kills people.
The kind that turns routine drives into death traps and leaves families waiting by phones that never ring.
The kind that brings out whatever’s been lurking in these mountains for the past three years. Whatever the locals have been calling Jack Frost, as if giving it a familiar name makes it less impossible, less dangerous. Less beautiful.
My hand instinctively moves to the .38 my father insisted I carry, the weight of it a familiar comfort against my hip. “Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it,” he’d said, teaching me to shoot tin cans behind the garage when I was barely tall enough to hold the gun steady.
He’d been preparing me for a world that might be dangerous. He just hadn’t prepared me for how empty it could be.
I’m reaching for the radio to check in with dispatch when the lights flicker. Once. Twice. Then they die completely, leaving me in darkness broken only by the cheerful glow of my small Christmas tree in the corner.
The Christmas lights cast strange shadows across the garage, making familiar tools look foreign and threatening. In the sudden quiet, I hear the storm with new intensity—the shriek of wind through the eaves, the rattle of the metal siding, the drumbeat of ice against glass.
“Perfect,” I mutter, feeling around for my flashlight. The backup generator should kick in any second now, but of course it chooses tonight to be temperamental. Because that’s exactly what this Christmas Eve needed—a power outage during a blizzard.
The emergency lighting flickers to life, casting everything in an eerie red glow. Warning lights, I realize. Like the garage itself is trying to tell me something’s wrong.
I’m halfway to the electrical panel when I hear it.
Footsteps.
Heavy, deliberate, crunching through the snow outside. Which should be impossible, because nobody’s stupid enough to be walking around in weather like this. The wind alone would knock a normal person flat, and visibility is zero.
But there they are again. Closer now.
Each step is precise, purposeful, as if the storm is nothing more than a minor inconvenience. As if whoever—or whatever—is out there belongs in this chaos, was made for it.
I grab the flashlight and move to the window, trying to peer through the frost and blowing snow. The beam cuts through the darkness, revealing nothing but swirling white. But the footsteps continue, circling my garage like a predator sizing up prey.
Or like something that’s been watching, waiting for the right moment to approach.
For a moment, there’s nothing but white chaos. Then something moves at the edge of my vision—too tall to be human, too fluid to be a tree branch swaying in the wind. The shadow seems to absorb the light rather than reflect it, darker than the storm itself.
My hand finds the grip of the .38, though I’m not sure what good it’ll do against something that might not even be real. But the weight of it is comforting, a solid anchor in a world that’s suddenly gone strange. The metal is warm from my body heat, familiar in a way that steadies my nerves.
The footsteps stop directly outside my garage door.
Silence stretches, broken only by the howling wind and my own thundering heartbeat. Then, impossibly, I hear a voice—deep, careful, speaking words I can’t quite make out over the storm’s fury. But there’s something about the tone, the cadence, that raises every hair on the back of my neck.
Something that sounds almost... reverent.
I move closer to the window, flashlight beam cutting through the darkness, and press my face to the cold glass. The metal frame is so cold it burns, but I can’t pull away. Something in my chest is pulling me forward, demanding I see what’s out there.
That’s when I see it.
A shadow moves against the white chaos—too tall, too fluid, darker than the storm itself.
For one impossible heartbeat, I catch a glimpse of something that shouldn’t exist: pale skin that glows faintly in the darkness, eyes that reflect my flashlight beam like winter fire, silver hair catching light that isn’t there.
Jack Frost himself.
My blood turns to ice water.
The flashlight slips from my numb fingers, beam cutting wild arcs across the ceiling before I catch it. When I aim it back at the window, there’s nothing but swirling snow and my own reflection staring back, wide-eyed and pale.
“Jesus Christ.” The words come out as a whisper, my breath fogging the glass.
My hands shake as I step back from the window, nearly tripping over my toolbox.
The rational part of my mind kicks in hard—too many romance novels, too much local folklore, too much Christmas Eve isolation making me see things that aren’t there.
Because there’s no such thing as Jack Frost. Just winter storms and overactive imaginations and maybe a few too many sips from the bottle of whiskey I keep for “emergency mechanical lubrication.”
I force myself to look out the window again. Nothing. Just a blizzard trying to bury the world, same as every winter storm I’ve weathered in this garage. The footprint-shaped depressions in the snow could be anything—wind patterns, drifting snow, shadows playing tricks.
My heart hammers against my ribs like it’s trying to escape, and I press my palm against my chest to calm it. Get it together, Davis. Twenty-nine years old and jumping at shadows like a kid afraid of the boogeyman.
But I can’t shake the memory of those eyes. Blue as winter stars and fixed on me like I was something worth hunting.
I grab my wrench with hands that aren’t quite steady and force myself back to Mrs. Gracey’s engine. Work. Focus. Normal things that make sense and respond to logic instead of legends that walk through killing storms like they own them.
The radio crackles with another weather update, something about wind speeds and dangerous travel conditions, but I tune it out. I’ve got an engine to fix and bills to pay and no time for whatever my sleep-deprived brain thinks it saw in the storm.
Even if part of me keeps glancing toward the window.
Even if the garage suddenly feels too quiet, too isolated, too much like the kind of place something might be watching from the darkness outside.
I turn the radio up louder and get back to work, telling myself the chill running down my spine is just the December cold seeping through the walls.
Just the cold. Nothing else.