The Frozen Witch Book One (5 page)

With one hand still raised, I stared in
abject horror as the light grew brighter and brighter. It now
filled this tiny room, sending shifting shadows playing along the
bare, stark walls and underneath the simple desk.

My head started to spin. Stars exploded
through my vision. The taste of iron filled my mouth as if I’d just
been struck on the side of the head.

As my shoulders hunched in and I felt myself
lose all muscular control, I heard a creak.

The door opened.

I had a single second to use the last of my
energy to lift my head.

I saw a man. Through my swimming vision, I
made out a golden beard, flax-colored hair, and piercing, piercing
blue eyes.

Franklin Saunders.

Overcome by light, I reached a shaking
hand out to him. “Help me,” I managed.

As I lost consciousness, I had time to
notice one fact – he did not accept my hand. He simply watched as I
fainted, those blue eyes never leaving the symbols dancing along my
flesh.

I awoke with my face pressed into the
concrete.

It was so hard to rouse myself. My thoughts
were a pounding mess right in the center of my skull. It felt as if
somebody had replaced my grey matter with a pulsing heart. But
slowly, slowly I came around.

Though my muscles ached as if I’d just run
20 marathons in a row, I groaned as I found the strength to push
into a seated position.

It took several seconds for my bleary eyes
to take in the rest of the room. There was no light on, and the
only illumination was a slice coming in from underneath the closed
door.

No. No, that wasn’t the only illumination. I
yanked my hands up and turned them over. And there I saw the light.
The same light that had pulsed over my body, the same light that
had driven me to my knees, and the very same light that had knocked
me out to begin with.

I jolted so hard that my back slammed up
against the wall behind me. My leg also shifted forward and snagged
the desk in the room. I hit it with such force that it almost fell
over.

Breath shuddering in my chest, I began to
cover my mouth with my hand, but pulled back when I saw those same
strange symbols dancing across my flesh in cold, blue flame.

Just as tears began to streak down my
cheeks, I heard something. Breath.

Someone was in the room with me.

“Who’s there? Who’s there?” I demanded in
a shaking voice as I pressed myself against the wall with all my
might. My shoulders were so locked with tension, it felt as if they
would pop out from their joints and fall loosely by my shaking
knees.

I heard someone shift. Through the gloom, I
saw him: the guy who’d come in just before I’d lost
consciousness.

Franklin Saunders.

He’d been standing there on the opposite
side of the room, arms crossed, staring at me in the dark. Now he
came close enough that I could see his face from the illumination
of the marks along my hands.

I shuddered back, pushing so hard against
the wall it was as if I were trying to push right through it.

“What… what do you want?”

“What do you want?” he asked in a
completely casual, normal tone. Exactly not the kind of tone you
would use against a frightened woman who was covered in burning
symbols.

I jolted so hard against the wall, the
back of my skull slammed into it and I felt a shifting pulse of
nausea sweep down my neck and plunge into my back.

Again I went to cover my mouth with my hand,
but again I jerked back at the sight of those symbols.

With my stare locked on Franklin’s
imposing form, I tried to rub the symbols off my flesh. But they
wouldn’t budge. Even when I gouged at them with my nails, they
could not be removed.

Franklin stood a half a meter before me,
then he casually leaned to the side, shifting his weight against
the table as he ticked his head on an angle and looked at me.
“You’re a witch, then?”

I had no idea what he’d just said. My
desperate gaze sliced off him and locked on that dim line of
illumination under the doorway.

I knew I had zero chance against a guy with
Franklin’s build. Even with a gun, I doubted I could down him.

My only chance lay out in the corridor
among other people.

“They can’t help you,” he said.

I stiffened, a cold slick of sweat
drenching my brow and flooding between my shoulders.
“What?”

“There’s no one out there anymore. They’ve
all gone home.”

“What have you done with them?” My voice
shook so badly I could barely understand it.

Franklin chuckled. “Nothing. Like I said,
they’ve gone home. It’s 4 o’clock in the morning.”

“4 o’clock?” I repeated in a shaking voice
that was little more than breath and desperation. “That’s not
possible.”

He gave another unkind chuckle. “You were
out for five hours.”

I shook my head, wrenching it from
side-to-side. “W-what’s going on here?” I asked through another
choked breath, the light along my hands pulsing even brighter like
a flame that had just been fed a mound of dry wood.

This time Franklin didn’t chuckle. He pushed
off the table, and I heard its legs grate against the marked
concrete.

If I’d stiffened before, it was absolutely
nothing compared to what my back did now. It felt as if I had
become so rigid I’d turned into a carved statue.

I heard the creak of his knees as he shifted
down into a kneeling position.

I freaked out. Something within me – the
fear that had welled and welled upon waking – it broke. I kicked at
him, and my foot rammed into his knee.

It was a good blow, solid. I’d taken a
couple of self-defense lessons way back when I’d started
waitressing shady gigs. So I knew the kick was strong, just as I
knew it caught him right on the tip of the knee. It should send him
back no matter his size.

The problem was, it didn’t. It felt like I’d
just kicked a mountain.

“Get away from me. Get away from me!” I
screamed, voice pitching high. Then I realized something: I should
have screamed earlier. “Help, someone help me. Help me, please! I’m
being attacked!”

“No one can hear you,” he repeated in that
same dull, easy, casual tone, as if we were chatting about nothing
more important than the weather.

I tried to kick him once more, and even
though I connected with his knee again, it just didn’t matter.

I saw his hand reach towards me. I saw it
because the light playing across my skin caught the underside of
his fingers as they stretched my way.

“No, get away from me,” I
began.

I couldn’t push him back. A second later, he
latched a hand around my wrist and pulled me forward.

I can’t say the move was violent. He didn’t
try to wrench my arm from my shoulder. It wasn’t exactly gentle,
either.

No, it was cautious.

He didn’t use his grip to yank me to my
feet. Instead, I felt him lean closer as he appeared to appraise
the symbols still dancing along my flesh.

I could feel them. Feel them like they were
insects burrowing underneath my skin. Insects made of light and
fire. Except the fire? It burnt cold.

I’d never felt more frozen in my life. Maybe
it was the fear, maybe it was the adrenaline, maybe it was the fact
I’d apparently spent the last five hours in this cold room.

Or maybe it was the symbols.

I felt as if my insides had been carved from
ice.

“Fortunate,” he muttered to himself. Then,
abruptly, he let my hand go.

I hadn’t been supporting it, and it slammed
against the concrete with a crack.

Hissing against the pain, I instantly
brought my arm up and cradled it against my chest. Then I tipped my
head back, way back as I stared at him. He looked even more
imposing in this gloom.

“Please, please, just let me
go.”

“You don’t deserve to be let go,” he
commented.

And that comment was enough to completely
extinguish the rest of my hope. Up until that point it hadn’t been
clear what Franklin Saunders was planning.

Now it was.

He reached over, not turning from me, using
one of his long strong arms to pluck something up from the desk.
The same book that had Larry McGregor and every crime he’d ever
committed written neatly on one of the pages.

Franklin patted a hand down his suit and
produced a pen from his pocket. Then he proceeded to open the book
and began to write on a fresh new page.

With my heart ramming against my ribs,
feeling like it would tear the lining from the flesh and then chip
away at the cartilage and bone, I shuddered. “What are you doing?
Please, look, whatever you think I’ve done—”

He abruptly finished writing and closed
the book with a snap. “I don’t think you’ve done anything. I know
what you’ve done,” he concluded in a rumbling tone. It was the kind
of strong, punchy tone that would get anyone’s attention. It didn’t
just shake through him, but rattled the room.

As for me? It felt like he clutched his
hands on my shoulders and threatened to ram me into the floor.

“What?” I asked through a rasp.

He made a show of putting his pen back in
his pocket, then, leaning against the table once more, he opened
the book. “Petty theft at the age of five. You went into the local
supermarket and stole an orange.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“You followed that up with a string of
offenses during your teens. Stealing, for you, was how you found
yourself away from your family, wasn’t it?”

“What… what are you talking
about?”

“It escalated until you stole from family
friends. This time, you’d gone too far. This time, they were going
to call the police. And they would have, if it weren’t for your
grandmother. She paid off the debt, smoothed things over, kept you
safe.”

“I… I have no idea what you’re talking
about,” I stuttered. I was frozen to the spot. The cold in my chest
kept sinking further and further through my body until it felt like
I would never know warmth again.

It wasn’t just the magical symbols dancing
over my hands. It was what he was saying.

He wasn’t making these wild accusations
up.

They were true.

The kind of truth I’d swept under the rug.
Everyone was foolish in their teens, weren’t they? Everyone made
mistakes. You were meant to forget them and move on. Problem was,
this guy had a list of every rule I’d broken and crime I’d
committed.

I began to submit to the situation. I didn’t
surrender, I just stopped, like a bird that had become immobilized
by the presence of a predator it could not escape.

The symbols continued to dance across my
skin, the cold continued to march through my chest, and Franklin
Saunders continued to read through my crimes.

“Who… who are you? How do you know these
things?”

“It’s irrelevant. You don’t need to know
who I am. All you need to do is pay for what you’ve done.” His
voice changed. For the first time, it wasn’t easy anymore. There
was no longer any sense of casual calm. No, it was dark. Dark like
the room around me.

“Oh god, oh god. What are you going to do?
What are you going to do?” I began to speak so quickly I couldn’t
draw my breath in fast enough.

“I’m not finished.” He brought up a hand
as if I were being impudent for interrupting his speech. “Your
petty crimes pale in comparison to what you did tonight,” he said.
Again his voice became so dark it made this gloomy room luminescent
in comparison.

“Tonight?” I gulped through a shaking
breath. “I haven’t done anything. Look, I didn’t mean to find this
room, that book, that… box,” I could barely say it. My voice became
so twisted on the word box, it was like it had tied knots around my
throat.

“Just like you didn’t mean to become
distracted by your greed and ignore the plight of a friend? Weren’t
you meant to go find a first-aid box for Suzy? Just like you didn’t
mean to accept Larry McGregor’s offer for work instead of seeing
your grandmother before she died?”

“W-what are you talking about? My
grandmother isn’t dead.” Even as I said it, cold dread began to
form in my gut like a knot.

“You promised you’d see her tonight. And
she held on to the hope you would. But when you backed out once
more, it became too much for her. Lilly White, your grandmother’s
dead. She died two hours ago.”

It was blow after blow. Relentless. From
reading through my crimes, to casually commenting on the fact my
grandmother was now dead – just as my chest had become cold, this
situation had now turned to ice.

I wasn’t equipped to deal with something
like this. I wasn’t the kind of girl who could roll with the
punches. I liked a neat, orderly, explainable life. And from the
symbols dancing across my skin, to Franklin Saunders’ cold eyes as
he stared at me and judged my every crime – none of this was
explainable.

I began to breathe harder, my heart pounding
with such fury it felt like my chest would explode.

A couple of times as I’d been growing up,
I’d hyperventilated. Anxiety. Anxiety caused by a girl who could
never grow up and fit the shoes that had been left for her.

If Franklin noticed, he didn’t seem to
care. He continued to stare at me, his head on an angle. “What do
you say?”

“Sorry?”