No. It’s the house where I died. It’s Oliver’s house.
I keep shuffling around to the back porch. No one’s been here for a long time. The scent of humans isn’t muffled by the snow; it’s just faded.
More memories, this time after I died. The sense of being moved, jostled into a body bag. Male voices. Even in that half-state, I was still worried about them, the woman and the little boy?—
Chloe and Oliver.
Something sweet and lush blooms in the air. I stop and sniff, trying to track it through the odd, icy scent of the snow. It’s herscent, and just for a second, when the wind shifted, it seemed fresh.
An excitement stirs in my chest. Maybe she didn’t leave.
The wind gusts again, but her scent—if that’s what it really was—is gone. The snow is falling so heavily now that it feels like a curtain closing in around me. I swipe through it, trying to clear my way through. But the snow is blinding me. Not just visually, although it’s certainly doing that as well: I can only really make out the dark shapes of the houses standing sentinel along the lake. The water and my territory beyond it are completely lost behind a veil of snow.
But the cold seems to impair my other senses, too. All I can hear is the howling, mournful wind. And all I can smell is water. The lake, the snow, some freezing condensation in the air. It clings to my face and makes my skin burn.
I stumble forward, moving on some half-remembered bodily instinct.
If this is where Oliver lives, thenshelives just a few yards away.
I don’t know if she’ll still be there. I didn’t expect her to stay when I went into the ground. Right before I died, I memorized her tearful, blood-streaked face because I knew that moment would be the last time I’d ever get to see her. And when she squeezed the trigger and the pain tore through my chest, I held onto that image of her face. I didn’t let it go as I drifted in the void, dead but not dead, slowly recovering in the dirt.
So why do I swear I can smell her?
I push through the whipping, furious snow, my head tucked down, bare arms wrapped around my chest. The cold is astonishing. Even when I was up in New York, I don’t remember feeling cold like this.
Maybe I only smell her because I’m about to die again. Wouldn’t that be something, to revive after a shotgun blast to the heart only to freeze to death moments later?
We’re stronger than humans. We can survive a lot more. But this cold is slicing me to ribbons, each snowflake burning an imprint of itself on my skin. Ice coats my hair and the tattered remains of my shirt. The wind sounds like humans whenever they encounter death, a long and constant wail.
I keep walking through the storm, though, my teeth chattering in my skull. Because sometimes I catch it, her scent on the wind. It’s probably my imagination.
But it’s the only compass I have in all this white.
34
CHLOE
Igasp awake, my dreams condensing in the air in front of me. I was dreaming about Theo again. I had been in the dark, shivery lake, and he was swimming toward me, as sleek and dangerous as a shark.
I pull the blankets tighter around my shoulders, blinking my surroundings back into focus. There’s the crackle and pop of the fire off to my left—I dozed off on the couch. At least the fire is still contained in the fireplace, the flames low and licking at its brick walls.
Outside, the wind howls wildly, louder even than it did when the storm first blew in. Snow plinks against the glass of the windows with an arrhythmic chiming.
“Fuck,” I whisper, shivering inside my blanket. I force myself to stand up, to move around. The fire’s heat beats back some of the cold, although not much; I move closer to it and breathe in the scent of smoke.
Something thumps outside.
My heart jolts, and I whip my head over to the windows, still covered by the heavy curtains. I listen. The wind screams around the house. The snow batters the glass. I don’t hear anything else.
“Probably just a tree branch,” I murmur, finding some comfort in the sound of my own voice. But the thought invokes a new fear: this wind is fierce, and what if it’s strong enough that a tree branch falls through my window? It’s a possibility I hadn’t even considered.
Anxiety tightens in a knot in my stomach. I stumble toward the window, my steps shaky from my constant shivering. “Just a tree branch,” I whisper, and the wind answers with a long, mournful howl.
I push the curtain back.
The sight outside is astonishing. The forecast wasn’t lying about the blizzard conditions—this is a true white-out, the sort of thing I experienced a couple of times up in Boston, although always from the comfort of a cozy apartment with a working radiator. There are no radiators in North Carolina, not that it even matters without power.
I drag the curtain further aside and stare out at the whipping frenzy of snow. My porch is only barely visible through the static, and every now and then, I see a flash of the lake. But nothing else, and already snow is piling up in a drift against the window.
