Chapter 5
Bianca
I fell asleep with the quilt drawn tight around me, its weight and warmth too comforting to resist. His scent clung to it—clung to me—smoke and snow, pine and something sharper, like a cold wind that could cut.
I breathed it in as I drifted deeper into dreams, all the while wondering about him: about his name, the horns on a helmet that might not be fake, the way he’d looked at me with eyes like pale ice.
I told myself I would ask him his name tomorrow, then I was elsewhere.
Dreams spun me high above the world, into skies white as marble.
I was flying, though I couldn’t see wings or feel them beating.
It was the kind of flying you could only do in dreams. The air was clean and sharp in my lungs, each breath filling me with joy, with freedom.
Snow clouds swirled around me, curling like waves breaking against cliffs.
The world below was hidden in white, endless and soft.
I laughed, or thought I did, and the sound scattered like tiny bells across the sky.
I had never had a dream like this, and though I was still a toy adrift on a tide I could not control, I never wanted it to end.
The light dimmed. The clouds thickened and pressed closer; heavy, dark, unpleasant.
My lungs struggled, heaving as they tried to pull in air, but it was thin now, ragged.
The world flipped, cracked, and then darkness fell, so fast, so heavy, it was like being dropped into a pit.
One moment, bright skies and fluffy clouds of snow and cotton, then nothing. Only black.
I blinked and tried to make sense of the total blackness.
When I reached out, I couldn’t see my own hands.
It was just black, no stars, no moon, no clouds.
There was nothing, and it was the worst feeling in the world, clawing at my throat with panic.
There were more senses than sight, though, so I tried to focus on the others.
The first thing I felt was wetness beneath my feet, soaking into my socks, the cold seeping upward in a strength-sapping chill. Snow; I was walking through snow.
Why was I walking? I’d been flying; I’d been dreaming.
This, I didn’t want, didn’t choose. My body moved without my conscious command, dragging me forward into nowhere.
Breath burst white from my lips, each exhale quicker than the last. It was the only thing I could see, those puffs of condensate curling like smoke in front of my face.
Panic rose, hot and fast, strangling me.
This was like before: lost on the hillside, the storm closing in, the sick certainty that I’d die out there if I didn’t find shelter.
Then the air stirred, and the trees began to groan.
It wasn’t right, these weren’t branches swaying in the wind; this was not the familiar creaking of old wood.
These sounds were too rhythmic, too intent, like the forest itself was speaking in long, low sighs.
Or maybe it wasn’t the forest I couldn’t see; maybe there was something else out there.
Then came the whispers. Threads of sound weaving through the blackness, curling into my ears. They overlapped, breath against breath, hissing in voices I couldn’t pin down: male, female—hundreds or just one?
Come to me.
Get up. Don’t stop.
Welcome me in.
The words were slick, sliding against my mind like oil.
My chest tightened. Fear scraped raw at my throat.
I tried to stop walking—to freeze, to resist—but my feet kept moving.
This was bad news, and everything in me told me to fight it, to stay away, far away.
Yet my body kept moving, forward and onward, with slow, plodding steps through achingly cold, wet snow.
“I don’t want to,” I tried to say. My voice was a whimper, weak and swallowed by the darkness around me, like I was in the maw of a beast that swallowed me down with each step, with each word and sigh.
The whispers twined tighter, rising in pitch like a crescendo, eager, excited.
A laugh rose among them, low and greedy.
My skin crawled, and my eyes burned with tears I couldn’t blink away.
They froze on my lashes, clinging there until my eyelids felt heavy with their weight.
I was nothing, small and fragile in a vast, endless dark that wanted me.
He abandoned you. No one wants you! those voices said, and I ached because it was true.
A roar ripped through the void, deep enough to shake the marrow in my bones.
It wasn’t human, wasn’t earthly. This was a predator’s call: vast and terrible.
It was the sound of a beast claiming the night.
It shook the ground beneath me, vibrated through my bones, and made my teeth rattle.
The frozen tears on my lashes shattered.
I should have been terrified; my knees should have given way, but the whispers broke apart like shattered glass.
The darkness tore like a veil yanked from my eyes, as if that primal roar had driven it off, cleansed my dreams of any trace of it.
Light bled in slowly on the heels of that sound.
Then I stood in the woods again, but they weren’t the same as in my nightmare, I knew that, even though I hadn’t seen them.
The snow was untouched, smooth as silk, glowing faintly under a sky of silver stars.
Trees stretched tall and glittering, every branch laced in frost that sparkled like jewels.
The air was crisp and clean, filling me with a sense of safety with each breath I took.
A hush fell after that thunderous force of nature, deep and serene, as though the forest was holding its breath in reverence.
I turned slowly, heart still hammering, but there was no voice, no darkness.
Nothing was reaching for me now, I was alone.
Relief poured through me in a rush; my legs loosened, my chest unlocked.
The fear drained away until I could barely remember it.
My eyelids sank, heavy as stone, and I let myself fold into the calm.
I knew I was still dreaming, and yet it felt like I sank back into sleep, as if I’d been awake during that nightmare, like it was real.
This time, when dreams claimed me, they were soft: drifting snow, laughter, warmth. I didn’t fight them.
When I woke, much later, pale morning light filtered through the carved stars of the canopy above the bed.
My body felt rested, and my mind was clear, as though the night had washed me clean.
Only scraps of memory clung to me: a sense of walking, the faintest whisper of cold and fear.
It was vague, half-gone already—a nightmare, but still a dream—and those always eluded me when I rose in the morning.
I yawned, stretching beneath the quilt, and for a moment, I forgot entirely that I wasn’t at home.
I was comfy, warm, and well-rested. I could almost smell the scent of warm bread and coffee, hear the sounds of my mom puttering about in the kitchen downstairs.
Then I realized my nose was cold—actually, my whole face was pretty cold—though the rest of me had stayed warm under the thick blankets.
Blankets that smelled like snow and pine, wood shavings, and something deeper but more elusive.
It was a heady, seductive blend that, when I inhaled, tingled through my veins and warmed my belly.
Him. I remembered now. The stranger without a name who’d let me into his house, his bed, so I could shelter from that storm.
The stranger with the odd hair and even odder horns on his helmet.
Would he be wearing that thing again today? I almost hoped he would.
I rose stiffly, sore from my hike uphill through the freezing snow.
It wasn’t great, but my host had not shown me his bathroom yet, so I shrugged back into my jeans and sweater from yesterday.
Maybe he’d let me wash up when I asked—I certainly hoped so—but I didn’t have a new change of clothes anyway.
I eyed the beautiful wardrobe but definitely didn’t dare to open it and take one of his shirts, though the temptation was powerful.
His bed smelled so good that I wanted to keep that scent wrapped around me a little longer.
Opening the bedroom door slowly, I peeked out and discovered the room was dark, empty, and growing rather nippy with cold.
There was no sign of my host, and a closer look at the armchair made me think he hadn’t slept in it after all.
So where had he gone? It felt rude to nose around his home, especially when I didn’t know where he was.
I half expected him to swoop in from the rafters or emerge from some secret passage behind the packed-to-the-brim bookshelves against one wall.
He wasn’t in the kitchen, and when I dared to open the bathroom door, it wasn’t locked.
He wasn’t there either. The facilities, at least, looked modern and clean—promising, if I could find him and convince him his charity extended to letting me have a hot shower.
If he wasn’t anywhere in the limited rooms inside the cabin, he had to be outside.
I checked a window, but it was darkened by shutters protectively shut from the outside.
I’d have to go to the front door to have a look.
My coat had dried by the dying wood stove, so I pulled it on along with my boots.
Instantly, I felt much warmer, and a mild shiver rolled down my spine, warning me that I’d been getting too cold already.
That’s how cool it had gotten inside the cabin, now that the fire was out.
I wondered if I should start it again, but I didn’t know where his matches or lighter were.
There was no sign of them near the stove.
I guessed I would check the outside first and hoped that the storm was over and my host was just doing hermit things—chopping wood or something.
The door opened easily, but a pile of snow collapsed into the doorway.
It had blown in during the storm, under the porch roof, and collected against the door and walls.
Now, most of it lay melting on my host’s doormat.
Using my feet, I tried to shove most of it outside in a hurry; I didn’t want to make a mess.
Mid-shove, my boot still in the air, awkwardly balanced on one leg, I caught sight of what was in the front yard.
“Holy Hannah,” I muttered, foot thumping down to the mat so I could stare some more.
Snow had piled high here, lying in huge mounds and piles, far taller than any of the snowdrifts beneath the trees, against the cabin, or the shed.
The shape of them… it was almost like a dragon in slumber. It was pretty, and a bit surreal.
Blue and silver ice glimmered beneath the snow, along thick shoulders and ridged spikes that climbed up a spine, all the way down a tail that curled partially around the shed and out of sight.
A pair of wings lay cupped against the side of the beastly shape, their silvery sails glittering with snow and ice crystals.
The head lay closest to the cabin, almost pressed against the bedroom window where I’d slept all night.
That head was as big as a car—then the eyelid, perfectly delineated in the snow, lifted.
I screamed, staring into a pale blue orb the size of a dinner plate, with a black vertical slit for a pupil.
The eyelid blinked down, then back up, and the pupil and striated iris shifted, tracking me.
“Fuck!” I shouted. Snow dragon? A fanciful happenstance after a storm?
No—this was real. And then I saw the horns: a pair of them, rising like pale spires from the huge forehead.
They were exactly like the horns my host had stuck to his helmet costume.