Chapter Seven
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Tessa
The cold wakes me.
Not the normal Alaskan cold that seeps through windows and makes you burrow deeper into blankets.This is different.Wrong.It crawls across my skin like living ice, raising goosebumps and making every hair on my body stand on end.
I open my eyes and immediately wish I hadn’t.
Frost spreads across my ceiling in patterns that shouldn’t exist.Spirals and geometric shapes that pulse with a faint blue light, growing and shifting like something alive.My breath comes out in white clouds despite the heat pumping through the clubhouse, and the air tastes like metal and old snow.
The mark on my shoulder burns.
Not hot.Cold.Like someone’s pressing dry ice directly against my skin, and the pain radiates down my arm in waves that make my fingers go numb.I bite back a gasp and sit up, pulling the blanket tighter around myself even though I know it won’t help.
That’s when I see it.
In the corner of my room, near the window, the shadows are moving.Not the normal shift of darkness when headlights pass by outside.This is deliberate.Purposeful.A tendril of black ice slides along the wall, leaving frost in its wake, and as I watch, it grows thicker, more solid.
Morereal.
My heart slams against my ribs.Every instinct screams at me to run, but I force myself to move slowly, carefully, swinging my legs out of bed.The floor is freezing beneath my bare feet, cold enough to hurt, and I can see my breath coming faster now, panic trying to claw its way up my throat.
The shadow reaches the door.
It pools there for a moment, pulsing like a heartbeat, then slides underneath, thin as paper but somehow three-dimensional, wrong in a way that makes my brain ache to look at it directly.
It’s leaving my room.
Going into the hallway.
Going toward the others.
“No,” I whisper.Then louder, “No.”
Instinct takes over.
I throw open my door and step into the hallway, and the cold hits me like a physical wall.It’s worse out here, so intense it steals the breath from my lungs.Frost coats every surface, the walls, the floor, the doors and the emergency light near the bathroom flickers and dies, plunging half the hallway into darkness.
The shadow slides along the wall opposite me, heading for the stairs.It’s bigger now, maybe three feet across, and I can see shapes forming within it, suggestions of claws, of teeth, of something that was never meant to exist in this world.
And it’shumming.
