Spring Frost

Spring Frost  (Frost Series #7)

Published by THE EDGE

THE EDGE is an imprint of Sparklesoup Inc.

Copyright © 2012 Kailin Gow

All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher except in case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Do NOT post on websites or share this book without permission from copyright holder. We take piracy seriously.

All characters and storyline is an invention from Kailin Gow. Any resemblance to people alive or dead is purely coincidence.

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First Edition.

ISBN 13:
978-1-59748-036-9

DEDICATION

To all who believe in the healing power of love.

Prologue

I
remembered Clariss well. I had spent many childhood afternoons with tears streaming down my grubby cheeks, hiding in the woods behind Gregory High, willing the pain to go away. Even after all the horrors I had seen in Feyland – death, destruction, war, chaos – there was something about her cold green eyes that sent a shiver down my spine. I remembered how she used to treat me in the old days – she would toss her long, glossy golden hair over her smooth and milky-white shoulder, raise a perfectly plucked eyebrow and look at me with savage contempt. Clariss had made my life a living hell. Before there was Feyland, before there was the escape that Kian offered me, there were days of dreading going to school, days of avoiding her in the locker room or in the hall, trying to escape from her endless reign of cruelty. Clariss wasn’t an ordinary “popular girl” – she wasn’t mean because she was insecure or thoughtless because she hadn’t grown up yet, or imitating an overly-obnoxious mother, or any one of the solutions my mother had proposed to me when trying to cheer me up about Clariss’ behavior. “She’s probably just lonely,” my mother had said, smoothing my hair, “and she doesn’t know how to express her feelings. Don’t be afraid of her, be sorry for her. She doesn’t know how to love – and so she’s probably suffering far worse than you are right now.” But I knew better. My mother, with her optimistic view of things and need to see the best in people, wanted to believe that Clariss was a lost soul in need of comfort and guidance, a young and troubled girl who would, with any luck, grow up one day to be a perfectly decent human being. I knew better. Clariss wasn’t motivated by fear or loneliness or insecurity or anything at all. She was motivated by pure evil. She wanted to see those around her suffering; she relished the sweetness of tears. Even when we were young children, Clariss always liked to push us to the ground, cackling over our scraped knees and bruised thighs. She fed off other people’s unhappiness; she relished our suffering. Her other minions – girls like Lauren and Kate – were merely insecure, tittering because they felt like they had to in order to avoid having that same terrifying wrath turned back on them, to avoid being the objects of her scorn. But not Clariss. Clariss just wanted to watch as she sent a girl sobbing to the bathroom, as she convinced a heavier girl that bulimia was “the only solution” to her social woes, as she tore an unfashionable scarf off a girl’s neck and ripped it to shreds in the hallway.

Clariss always got whatever she wanted. She had a power of glamoring stronger than any I had seen among the Fey: she could come across like the manifestation of pure evil when she was alone with me, but the second a teacher walked into the room, she had the power to convince him that she was all sweetness and light. She would bat her long lashes and turn her emerald-green gaze upon him and shake her long blond hair; false tears would appear like diamonds at the corner of her eye and she would complain bitterly about how I – or anyone else she’d been bullying – had in fact been grievously abusing HER.

The teachers fell for it. Every single time. I can’t even remember how many times I took the fall for Clariss’ cruelty, how many hours I spent in detention being ordered to “think about what you’ve done” while Clariss got off scot-free, glaring at me with a cruel and glimmering smile from the corridor while I sat hunched over my desk, composing an essay on why “bullying is bad.”

So perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised to discover that Clariss was, after all, a creature of magic like me. I’d suspected it often enough at school – how many times had Logan and I sighed together that “she’s not really human – she can’t be?” How many times had I bitterly complained “she must be some kind of monster? How else could she be casting a spell on all those teachers like that?” But now, as I stared at the beautiful, motionless face of Clariss before me, its implacable glare at once alluring and terrifying, I realized that I had been right all along. All my childhood fears, all my insecurities – they hadn’t been paranoid at all! Just as I had always known, always sensed, that there was something different about me, so too had I always known deep down that there had always been something truly evil about Clariss.

No, I thought to myself. Not always. There had been a time when Clariss seemed kind to me. A picture began forming in my mind – a fuzzy image, out of focus. A sandbox. Spring. Birds chirping old songs and the fragrance of honeysuckle in the bushes. Two girls sitting together, playing with dolls. One with beautiful golden hair; one with caramel-colored braids. Me and Clariss. We had been friends once, hadn’t we? I thought back, trying harder to remember. Hadn’t we? Perhaps not good friends, but she had been nice enough to me, to everybody. None of us thought of her as a “bully.”

And then we must have been six or seven – I remembered that we were bigger, the sandbox was smaller. I remembered the three of us sitting in the sandbox: me, Logan, and Clariss. I remembered how happy I had been on that day – Logan and I had plans to go to the woods and go exploring for dinosaur footprints, which Patrick McGuire swore existed deep within the sylvan depths of the forest.

“We’re going to find a brontosaurus,” Logan was saying cheerfully, “and a Tyrannosaurus Rex, and a stegosaurus, and maybe even a mastodon!”

“I don’t think there are dinosaur bones in the forest,” Clariss was saying, re-applying her lip gloss. Even at six Clariss was well-aware of the need to be fashionable.

“What about you, Bree?” Logan turned to me with an excited, expectant look on his face. “You’ll come, right? We’ll go see the dinosaurs.’”

“Of course!” I sprang to my feet. “My mom says she’ll stand behind a tree so we can pretend she’s not there and that we’re exploring. I want to see the dinosaur bones. I bet we’ll find a big skull with lots of sharp teeth and then we can make the teeth into weapons like the ones the knights used and chase people with them!”

Clariss’ smile froze on her lips.

“Gosh, Bree,” Logan laughed. “You’re the best girl ever, did you know that? I used to think my cousin Jamie was the best girl in the world but now I think it’s you.”

I caught a glimpse of Clariss’ face at that moment. Its pert, innocent beauty had been transformed – for a second – by ugliness. A look of black hate appeared in her eyes; her jaw hardened and her mouth soured. She glared at me with blazing fire in her gaze.

“What is it, Clariss?” Logan turned to Clariss in confusion. “Is everything okay?”

Clariss did not respond, instead fixing her look of hate straight on me. Without saying a word, she rose to her feet, staring me down. “There!” she cried at last, pushing me down into the sand. “You’re so stupid, Breena. You think you’re all cool because you can find dinosaurs, but you’re just too stupid to know that you won’t find any. Logan’s only taking you to the woods because he feels sorry for you because you’re ugly and nobody else likes you. And nobody else ever will!”

Logan and I looked on in shock as Clariss stormed off. “What was that about?” Logan asked me.

I shrugged.

But from that day forth, a new and furious power had taken hold of Clariss. She no longer played with us – she no longer even came near us, unless it was to torment me or insult me. She began insulting the other children, too, mocking this one’s clothing or that one’s hair, this one’s weight or that one’s parents’ divorce. Nothing was off-limits; nothing was sacred. Clariss’ cruelty extended to anything and everything.

Except for Logan. Logan was the one exception to Clariss’ reign of terror. She never insulted him; she was never mean to him. When she grew older and began discarding boys two or three at a time, laughing when she ripped up their roses or stomped on their chocolates, Logan was somehow immune to her callous cruelty. He refused to participate when she persuaded the rest of the class to march in a circle around me, shouting insults and pointing fingers and telling me I was a “bastard” because my mother didn’t know who my father was. He told her off when she mocked the dresses my mother  had painstakingly made. He refused all her myriad invitations to sit with her and her minions at lunch, saying only “If Breena’s not welcome here, than I’m not either.”

If Logan had intended to force Clariss’ hand, to pressure her into being nice to me, then he had failed magnificently. The more Logan stood up for me, the more Logan took my side, the meaner Clariss was to me. The more Logan refused her increasingly obvious advances, the more she took out her frustration on me. Logan was the only man she couldn’t get, we both knew, and that was – in Clariss’ twisted, petty mind – my fault. And this meant that I had to be punished.

Things only got worse when we hit high school. As Clariss’ crush on Logan intensified, so did her attacks on me. The few female friends I had in junior high crept away, one by one, to join Clariss’ gang, figuring that her sometime cruelty to them was vastly preferably to what they would have gone through if she had associated them with me. I stopped getting invited to birthday parties; I started eating lunch alone. Only Logan stood by me through it all, unconvinced by Clariss’ increasingly desperate attempts to lure him into her circle of friends.