A Reflection of Ice Read online

  Despite the way her clothes clung to her like a second skin and weighed her down, her chest lifted at the sight. Wonder that she hadn’t felt since she was a kid bubbled inside her at the mysterious castle amidst the snow, so similar to the thousands of fairytales she’d read in her glade. Her heart skipped with a giddy twirl, like she witnessed the first descending snowflake of winter. For a single moment the world was a magical place full of possibility, not the damaged, rusted terrain she’d come to know.

  Except even with the vision of the castle in the distance, the swirl of snow dizzied her mind. Lyra’s eyelids flickered, and she struggled to keep them open. If she didn’t reach the castle soon, this blizzard would bury her. No one would find her for days, if at all. Melinda wouldn’t be searching for her, and who knew how much time would pass before her dad found out. Maybe Midnight would be prowling through the trailer park, empty meows echoing in the lonely night as the feral cat searched high and low.

  Lyra needed to reach the castle. Even though her sodden pants weighted her down and her limbs were as unresponsive as if she’d dipped them in iron, she forced herself to take another step forward.

  The sunlight glanced off the ice carvings along the castle walls, which beckoned her, and the gentle drift of snowflakes around the perimeter gave it the haziness of a dream. She couldn’t stop yet. Lyra had weathered worse—the cold wouldn’t best her. Her breaths grew heavier and more ragged around the edges, but she continued through the drifts of snow. Blinding rays of sun forced her eyes shut, but once she closed them, Lyra found she couldn’t blink them open again.

  The steady pulse of her heartbeat reverberated through her body even as her limbs slowed. She tried to focus on the fear of not surviving, hoping the adrenaline would rush through her veins, but the exhaustion fought back valiantly. One more step. She needed to take one more step. As her legs sank into the snow again, they refused to listen any longer. Around the perimeter of the castle, the snow decreased to a dusting, nothing like the howling winds and thick slurry beyond. Once she stepped onto the decline out of the snow drifts, she stumbled.

  Lyra swayed, losing balance, and thudded to the ground. Pain rocked through her body, but despite the way she tried to reach forward, her arms refused to respond. She should get to the door. Should push herself off the ground and keep moving. She lay there, her legs heavier than ever, her lids continuing to slip shut, and her chest strained to the point where every breath hurt. Her eyes wouldn’t stay—she blinked again, hard—open.

  2

  The sun warmed her skin, the first tip-off that she wasn’t inside her bedroom. There, she had no windows, no sunlight, and barely a gasp of the memories she’d made when her family was whole, before her mom got diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

  Lyra’s eyes fluttered open, and as she sat up to examine her surroundings, her arms and legs ached with a radiating pain. She curled her fingers into rumpled, cream sheets light as gossamer yet thick and soft as fleece, like clutching a cloud. She last remembered stumbling in front of the castle amidst a blizzard and running through the woods in a blind panic to escape Melinda’s rage.

  Powder white walls surrounded her, as clean and blaring as a blanket of fresh snow. Though her limbs hadn’t quite recovered from the deadening numb of the storm outside, her hands prickled, and her legs burned, signs they functioned.

  A beautiful melody wove through the open door, coming from deeper within the place. The tune pierced through her like a needle, arresting her on the spot. As she listened, the strength began to return to her neck, her arms, and her legs as pinpricks of adrenaline trickled through. The crystalline melody reminded her of the tolling bell she’d heard, the one that drew her this direction in the first place.

  She recognized the sound of a flute—she’d played one during her brief stint in her high school’s orchestra. Yet this wasn’t one intermittent note. The music wove together into a complex tapestry until the melody became a seamless work of art. Wistful notes spoke of loneliness, as solitary as the final birdsong of autumn or the trill of summer’s last cicada before the wintry freeze.

  Her heart ached when the song resurrected the many nights she’d holed herself in her room to read a book under a dim lamp, able to hear Melinda’s sharp voice from the room over and able to smell the cloying perfume her stepmother dabbed around her neck at all times. The strong floral fragrance was sickening, suffocating, and threatened to snuff out any lingering remainder of fragile lilac—of the mother she’d loved so, so much.

  The melody deepened, intensifying those notes until she surrendered to more memories. The times where she’d sat in the back of the classroom and tried to ignore the whispers as the girls tore apart her threadbare clothes and her tangled hair. Or when she’d overheard Jess’s parents whispering in the other room about how they couldn’t keep having her over every night, no matter how bad her situation was at the trailer park. Lyra had buried herself under the blankets and pretended to be asleep, even though their words clanged around in her head for hours that night.

  She swallowed, her throat tightening on reflex as she looked around the room. Similar to the outside of the building, the walls were made of ice or crystal thick enough to appear opaque. The imperfections in the surfaces, the dips and hollows, transitioned into the blue of deep water. She pushed off the cream sheets, which had kept her warm enough through the night that her fingers and toes were no longer numb, despite her arctic trek.

  Her boots lay on the floor, and her peacoat had been hung on a coat stand in the corner with her backpack on another rung. A tall, arched window spilled sunlight into the room, providing an ample view of the blizzard in the distance that raged with the same ferocity as before, the whirling white of a snow globe. From her spot on the bed, Lyra could almost catch a glimpse of herself in the mirror beside the entrance, her skin almost matching the cream of the sheets. She ran her hands along her arms, smoothing the hairs standing on edge.

  Given that she’d almost frozen to death, Lyra should’ve been cold to the marrow. However, even with only a blue-brown plaid overshirt, black tank, and thick green corduroys, she somehow didn’t feel the chill. Curiosity coursed through her as she lowered her feet to the floor and stepped away from the bed. The ice-blue ground beneath her feet didn’t deliver the shock she’d expected—a mild temperature drop.

  The flute-song stopped.

  A figure appeared in the doorframe, a man so tall he almost reached the top. With one hand, he gripped the scalloped trim while he wielded the incriminating flute in the other. If anyone belonged in this remote place, he did.

  “Welcome to my kingdom,” he murmured. His voice contained a coolness, the distance of empty white fields and tall, uninhabited castles.

  The sharpness of his nose, chin, and ears mirrored crags of ice, and she couldn’t help but conjure comparisons to the elves she’d read about in her books. Long strands of raven-wing hair drifted to brush along his shoulders, glossy and thick. His eyes glowed pale gold, a color she couldn’t have imagined on anyone. But from the very moment he’d stepped into view, she understood at once that he wasn’t human. His skin matched the pallor of ice, as if he’d been sculpted from the castle itself.

  Her overshirt and corduroys were dingy compared to the elegant attire he wore. A tight white shirt glued to him, sloping into a turtleneck with no sleeves and revealing the toned muscle of someone who put in hard labor. His black leather shoulder holster accented the top with endlessly ornate patterns engraved into the silver buckles and clasps. A similarly weighty belt weighted his hips with a dark sapphire crystal adorning the center.

  Lyra closed her mouth, realizing she was gawking.

  However, even though he stared at her with curiosity sparking those pale gold eyes, he made no effort to speak.

  She regarded him with the wary caution of approaching a wolf in the wild even as she burned for answers with a need that intensified by the second. How had she made it to this foreign castle, and where were they? Why
had she never found this place before? His gaze remained steady, his lips closed, and the man emanated the same frosty chill as their surroundings. Despite all the questions she wanted to ask, her mouth took command, and she blurted out the primary thing she noticed.

  “You must be lonely.” She restrained a groan when the words left her lips.

  First introduction to this strange, not-so-human guy and she’d stampeded straight into emotional territory. Her absolute lack of social tact showed, something the girls at school never failed to point out. Lyra opened her mouth to dismiss her statement, wishing she could swallow the words, but the surprise in his gaze stopped her.

  “And you must be tenacious,” he responded.

  “A bit lonely as well,” she responded, swallowing the lump in her throat. Admitting those words out loud scraped her raw, as if she revealed a part of herself better kept secret. After hearing a song like his that cried of pristine solitude and longing for companionship, she couldn’t help the kinship she felt.

  “Enough to stumble into my kingdom.” He crossed his arms over his chest while leaning against the doorframe.

  Lyra tucked her damp hair behind her ear, the long blond strands looking more ashen in this bluish light. Even though questions bubbled inside her chest, she swallowed her breath to keep from rambling. If her relationship with Melinda was any indication, Lyra aced saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. In an unknown place with an unknown man, she couldn’t afford any missteps.

  “And it moves?” she asked, tilting her head to the side. Since she’d been down the path through the woods a thousand times and had never stumbled upon any crystalline castles, she grasped for an explanation. If anyone could walk to this place, her trailer park would be swarming with gawkers wanting to witness the spectacle.

  He shook his head, perched against the doorframe. “It exists in between.”

  She’d be fidgeting if she stood for long, but he remained still, as if someone had painted him there. Lyra opened her mouth, ready to ask yet another question, but instead she processed his statement. The simplest explanation had to be the correct one. Whether between entailed alternate realities or some slipstream dimension, the gist was that she’d stepped into somewhere different from the world she knew. Lyra couldn’t help the thrill surging through her at dealing with the sort of imaginings she’d only read about.

  She settled upon her next question, shifting back and forth on her feet with a percolating excitement she couldn’t contain. “How long ago was your last visitor?”

  He regarded her with equal caution, as if they both prepared for an attack. “In human years, I’m unsure. I’ve been alone for quite some time.”

  She’d suspected he was much older than he appeared, but his words confirmed that despite the human appearance, he hailed from a different land and even a different species. Out of all the stories Lyra read of mythical creatures, his remoteness and the strangeness emanating from him made him seem most like the fae. While the ground cooled her soles and her bones ached in a very real way, she couldn’t shake the surreal that gripped her, like she wandered through a dream.

  “How long have you resided in this castle?” she asked. His eyes flashed, sharpening. Lyra tensed on instinct, ready for derision, or anger, the responses she tended to get.

  The longer they talked, the more she realized how out of her depth she was in this isolated castle in the middle of nowhere. Yet even in a remote slipstream of eternal ice with a creature she couldn’t quite term human, she felt safer than she did in her trailer park with the woman who wanted her out of the picture.

  “Ah, now you’re asking for a story, and I don’t give those away for free.” A smile lit his face, softening the sharpness of his features. Lyra’s shoulders relaxed. He stood from his lean against the doorframe and gestured toward the hallway. “Come. I’ve been a rude host thus far, prattling on without offering to show you the castle.”

  She cocked her head to the side but followed as he led her out of the room. Even though she walked barefoot along the icy floors, the chill didn’t bother her in the slightest, a fact that tugged at her curiosity from the start. In fact, her clothes had begun to reach a crisp, almost dry state. She stepped out of the relative safety of the room and strolled down a corridor so vast she squinted to try and spot where it ended. The ceilings loomed overhead like a cathedral’s with vaulted arches and elegant columns along the way, and the sunlight cast fractals through the windows to splay in glittering patterns across the floor.

  Lyra quickened her pace to match his long, loping stride. “If I’m going to be wandering this castle with you, I should know your name,” she said, casting him a quick glance.

  His lips curved into a lazy smile, and she couldn’t help but notice how his pale skin almost blended with the white of his turtleneck. “You can call me Moro.”

  “I’m Lyra, in case you were curious.” She jammed her hands into her pockets while they walked along, shyness creeping in. The elegant economy of his movements made her feel ungraceful, like she stomped along at his side.

  Moro shrugged, his golden gaze twinkling as if he found her presence ever-entertaining. “Not quite. Names are changeable and not an indicator of a person’s worth.” Mirrors glinted in the light, stationed along the way as if to multiply the faceted, crystalline beauty of this place.

  “I disagree.” The words slipped out before she could stop herself. “A name might be the one thing they own.”

  His eyes glinted with a sharpness that reflected the icicles decorating the windows they passed by. “Apparently I chose a girl worth saving. What, pray tell, does it mean then when one forsakes their name?”

  “They’re trying to erase who they are in an attempt to rewrite the page.” Lyra’s skin prickled under his scrutiny. The end of the corridor grew clearer the further they walked, and a stained glass window of sapphire, indigo, and emerald hung there, casting colorful displays along the floor.

  “Do you not believe in clean slates? What if someone changes their name? Can they change who they are?” He raised an eyebrow, and despite his attempt at lightness, gravity weighted his words.

  “Anyone can choose a new direction, but without the past, they may have never reached that point. So in that case, even tarnished names are worth acknowledging.” Lyra was the daughter of Josephine Greystone, a kind, radiant mom whom she’d lost too early. Some days when the memories were hazy, the name was the only thing she had to hold onto. Before she could say anything else, her breath caught in her throat as they reached a wide open side room near the end of the hall.

  The rafters soared high, and the tall, angled windows streamed slits of light to create the illusion of snowflakes along the floor. The dozens of closed doors they’d passed kept the interiors from her, but rich embellishments decorated this one, from a metal throne with claws digging into the icy platform to the rich navy curtains drifting to the floor. Carved ivy and blossoms wound around crystal columns at each corner of the room, and more than a couple of statues cast shadows from their mounts, the elegant individuals depicted with all the detail of a Michelangelo.

  Chandeliers hung from those lofty ceilings, made from sparkling ice and resembling a thousand drops of dew. Azure fire wavered on the stubs of candles, even though the golden afternoon light spilled across the floor from the tall, narrow windows. The place turned liquid gold under the view, such a beautiful sight her heart twisted with fierce longing to remain in the moment forever.

  “Your mouth is hanging open,” he teased, his smooth-as-silk voice startling her to attention. Moro slunk a couple paces ahead of her, his movements fluid. The comment heated her cheeks.

  “Since I’ve barely taken two steps out of Pennsylvania, consider me uninitiated in the world’s wonders.” Her words came out drier than intended. Despite his lack of malice in the statement, she couldn’t help the raw rub when thinking of how little she’d experienced.

  After all, the world she’d known consisted of the stark borders
of her hometown containing all the heartbreak she’d racked up over the years until the grief saturated her. Her mother’s death hadn’t just meant the loss of a life—when Mom passed, Dad chose to work the long hours and Lyra began to distance from friends. That’s when loneliness seared the first molten tendrils into her heart.

  “Most haven’t seen wonders like these.” His voice held a note of boredom as he paced across the pristine floors complemented by the rich sapphire rugs with silver fringe, as if they were nothing but the crushed soda cans and trampled leaves of her trailer park. “I’ve been amongst them for longer than I care to remember.”

  She couldn’t imagine a point where the glittering ceilings, the silver fixtures, and the sheer size and breadth of this place would dull before her eyes. He must’ve lived here so long even the sharpest cut diamond had lost its luster.

  “Can’t you leave?” she asked, unable to rein her curiosity in. Lyra felt a kindred spirit in his loneliness, one she’d failed to find back home.

  “Why abandon a glorious fortress such as this?” Bitterness threaded his voice, telling the story he wasn’t elaborating on.

  “I’ve been trapped in a prison too,” she murmured before she could help herself. Comfort sank into her bones, unfamiliar after feeling like an outcast or outsider for so long. “The moment my stepmother moved into our trailer, home didn’t exist for me anymore.”

  “Too often, our homes get taken earlier than we’d like,” he responded. The weariness in his eyes and heaviness in his aura hinted of larger problems than snickering at her threadbare clothes and lack of social skills.