Page 18 of Heart’s Rescue

I straighten my back and try to look elegant despite the fact that I’m kneeling in a wrinkled, icy heap in the snow.

“I am not,” I say, but the words come out funny, slow, and sloshy.

“Shit,” the man mutters. His voice is so low that his words are almost lost in the hiss of ice hitting the snow.

He shrugs out of his cloak, sighs, and starts to walk toward me. Panic jolts me out of my strange, dull complacency, and I struggle to get back on my feet. He’s coming closer. I rock forward; a distant echo of pain sings through my body as I roll onto the knee I’ve just skinned. I sink my hands into the ice-crusted snow and yank one of my feet out from under me, then another. I push off, come to my feet, and the whole world is spinning around me.

Stars. I’m going down.

I fall forward, into something. Something hard and… warm? Oh. Oh, no. My back stiffens as I look up into a pale face and very, very blue eyes.

“Like I said,” the man tells me, and his voice is almost a whisper. “You’ll just die if I leave you here.”

I try to argue, but my words come out in a string of mush. I sound like the ice. The man holds me against his chest with one hand, and with the other, he pulls something around me. Fur? Blanket? The world gets a little darker around the edges. There’s a metallic clicking sound as something clasps loosely over my chest, and then the ice mercifully stops pelting my arms and head.

“Can you walk?” he asks.

I blink. The man has pale hair that’s pressed flat against his head, and it’s not just one ear that’s missing. Both of them end in ragged tatters, as if they’d been chewed on.

And I can see his ears, I slowly realize, because the man has just wrapped his cloak around my shoulders. Another violent shiver seizes my body. My vision jumps up and down.

“W-walk,” I say, forcing the word through my frozen lips.

The man looks at me like he doesn’t think I know what the word walk means, but then he lets go of my waist. He steps back. The world tilts a little. I lurch forward, then catch myself. Another shiver makes my body dance, and stars, I feel even colder now that I have this cloak wrapped around me. I take one staggering step forward, then glare up at the man triumphantly. I am walking, curse it.

The man raises an eyebrow. He’s got ice in his white hair, and his lips have twisted into something that’s almost a grin.

“Nope,” he says.

He leans down and scoops me into his arms. I yelp but don’t bother struggling. We’ve already played that one out, and I know how it ends. Not that it matters how improper it is for a strange man to have his arm wrapped around my thighs. Not that it matters that he’s probably taking me somewhere to kill me, or worse.

Nothing matters anymore. Not here. Not in the land of monsters.