“What do you mean you don’t know who they are?”
“All I know is that my name is Blue. Your name is Wolfe.” He looked around. “I’m in a house. A small, rustic cabin of sorts. There’s a storm outside. Other than that, it’s like there are only gray shapes dancing in my head. They thump around. They’re giving me a headache. I don’t want to think about them anymore.”
“Amnesia?” I asked, blurting the word out. “Nobody really gets amnesia.”
The look he gave me was halfHow dare you not believe me. Haughty. Imperious. The other half, well, that’s the part that got to me. His eyes were shiny. Unshed tears he was holding back by force of will. He was also holding himself upright in spite of any aches and pains. This other half looked lost, as though he wanted someone to find him, but he didn’t know who to trust.
I wanted to ask him where he’d come from. Where he was going. Why he looked like a mountain pony who’d been let loosein the high country without shelter. Why he didn’t seem to know anything other than his own name. But perhaps all of that was too much for now. It wasn’t like he could race off anytime soon.
“Maybe you banged your head,” I said.
He lifted his mug and dipped his chin. Blood had dried in his fair hair. Angel’s hair.
“You got—” I stopped.
There was no sense in getting worked up. He could walk, after a fashion, and he was talking to me sensibly. I needed to get him cleaned up. Give him something warm to wear. I had old clothes that were a mite too small for me. He’d swim in them, but he’d be wearing clothes that didn’t reek of train.
“You drink that, nice and slow,” I said. “Take your foot in and out of that tub while I put the rest of these groceries away. Then we’ll get you in the tub. Get you cleaned up.”
“Yes, thank you,” he said, and though he was as polite as he’d ever been, talking to me like I was some kind of maitre’d about to show him to a table in a fancy restaurant, his voice was faint. Then he looked up at me. “Where—” He shook his head and tried again. “Where are they?”
“Where are who?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Are you asking about friends of yours from the train?”
“Yes.”
“They’ve gone on. The train went through town a little while ago.”
“I was on a train?” he asked.
“I believe so.”
He didn’t know where he was or who he was or where he’d been. He would be with me for the duration of the blizzard. Maybe this should have bothered me. But oddly, I was comforted by the fact that I would not be alone.
CHAPTER 3
blue
Iwoke up, blinking against the snow falling in my eyes. My head ached, the pounding battling with an ache deep inside my gut because something had happened. I wasn’t sure what. Only that I needed to keep moving.
Somehow I managed to get to my feet, all of me cold as I stumbled and almost fell back down. My left ankle protested sharply beneath me as I crawled out of a low ditch next to a set of railroad tracks.
My hands were clenched like frozen bands around a green duffel. The duffel was important. I didn’t know why.
I didn’t know anything. Only that it was snowing, slanted, slatted snow. That a train was rumbling away in the distance, a cloud of snow and ice unravelling in its wake. Everything hurt. I still needed to get moving.
The frozen, ice-sharded wind was coming from one direction, so I walked in the other. Which way was I going? I didn’t know, but started walking along a road that was quickly becoming layered with snowfall.
In the near distance, spiky, bare-limbed trees clawed at the sky as though they were alive. Beyond that, I could not see very far. I blinked hard and shook my head, wincing as my headscreamed at me to stop. I stopped. My vision grayed out at the edges.
Where was I? Somewhere. Slightly hilly. Windy. Snowy. Someplace cold. But where?
My brain began to fritz out as I focused on this. Part of me was screaming. The other part of me was very still as it realized I not only didn’t know where I was, I didn’t knowwhoI was. This seemed very important but unanswerable, and the harder I concentrated on figuring it out, the less I could think.
A truck was coming in my direction, wipers going like crazy to keep the windshield clear. Snow hit the truck from the side, as though to keep it from continuing in a straight line toward me. Snow was my friend at that moment because if the truck kept coming and I kept walking, we were going to run into each other.
