Cold Spell

CHAPTER NINE

I ask to sleep on Lucas and Ella’s couch; they look at me as if I’ve lost my mind and put me up in a guest room, one with a mattress I sink into and real oil paintings on the walls. It even has its own bathroom, which I’m fairly certain is bigger than my entire bedroom back in Atlanta. I don’t want to fall asleep, to be honest, because I’m afraid I’ll wake up and discover I’m just in the backseat of the station wagon, snowed in at the rest area. The next morning, I make the bed, straighten the pillow, and wipe down the bathroom mirror. No stranger has ever been so nice to me, and I don’t want them to regret it.

“How did you sleep?” Ella asks when I walk downstairs the next morning. She’s sipping coffee and looks astoundingly awake. It makes me forget that I’m not much of a morning person.

“Excellent,” I say. “Better than I have in ages, honestly.”

“You can try a different room tonight, if you want,” she says offhandedly, reaching for the carton of cream. She pours so much into the coffee that it’s a caramel color. “I think the guest room you were in has the best mattress, but from the one on the second floor you can see for miles. Or, well, you’d be able to if it weren’t for the snow and fog and general misery.”

“Okay. I mean… if it’s no trouble. Though I really should head out today,” I say. “Not that I don’t appreciate it—”

“Relax,” Ella says, laughing a little at me. “It’s just a place to sleep.”

“Yeah, but you hardly know me,” I say, shaking my head. I finally sit across from her at the table. “You don’t have to be so nice to me.”

“I’m going for Miss Congeniality,” Ella jokes, but then adds, “Besides, the Fenris attacked you once when you were sleeping in your car. Think I’d let that happen again, when I’ve got a home full of queen-size mattresses?”

I blush a little and mumble thanks as Lucas walks past the doorway. He’s in the adjacent room, walking back and forth in front of the studded leather couches. I lean in to listen close—he’s asking questions, dialing, redialing, asking others. Things like, “My sister is supposed to swing by today—super blonde hair, blue eyes. Have you seen her?” or “My drunk friend forgot where he left my car before the storm. It’s a silver Lexus; is there one in your parking lot?” He looks like he’s itching, a dog locked in a pen.

Ella sighs and explains he’s been like this all morning—there’s too much snow to go out and look for Mora himself. The station wagon has no hope of making it out the drive, and neither do any of Lucas and Ella’s cars—though he tries each and every one. When the pink Hummer (“It was an impulse buy, but now it’s just embarrassing to drive,” according to Ella) stalls out at the bottom of the hill, Lucas gives up.

“I can find her,” he tells me when he emerges from his den of investigation at one in the afternoon. “I can find anyone. She’s playing it right, though—she’s taking the same route back that she took coming down, following her own tracks. It makes it hard to know if she’s still here or already gone. Raccoons do it, too, when a dog is after them—”

“Mora’s acting like a raccoon?” I ask doubtfully.

“Don’t knock nature,” Lucas says. “If there’s one thing it’s good at, it’s surviving. But I’ll find her. I just need to get out of this house….”

Ella looks up from a tablet—apparently, she gets dozens of newspapers delivered daily and reads each and every one. With the snow preventing delivery, she’s resorted to various websites and seems to be finding the entire process somewhat vulgar. “How am I supposed to stare at this thing to read the articles? It hurts my eyes. But Lucas—all this aside, we have to figure out what to do about food.”

“There’s no food?” I ask, remembering a fairly large assortment of cereal in the kitchen this morning.

“There’s food,” Ella says, “but Becky can’t get here with the storm.”

“She makes dinner,” Lucas says a little awkwardly.

“You have a woman who comes every day just to make you dinner?” I ask.

“I guess we could eat cereal for the third time,” Ella says, sounding sad. “Although after grad school I swore I’d never eat it for dinner again.”

“Can I… see what you have?” I ask, trying to squash the bolt of laughter growing within me at Ella’s helpless expression. She nods, and we walk to the kitchen. The cereal is still on the counter, and our bowls from breakfast and lunch are still in the sink. Ella wrinkles her nose at them, then opens the door to the pantry.

I’m pretty sure the Reynolds’ pantry is as large as my entire kitchen in Atlanta. There’s a glass pendant light hanging over a butcher-block table, and everything has its own separate, defined spot on the wire shelves. There’s flour—wheat, pastry, self-rising, all-purpose—and rows upon rows of tiny glass jars full of different-colored crystals; it takes a moment before I realize they’re salts from all over the world.

“We don’t have any bread,” Lucas says. “Ella doesn’t eat anything with preservatives.”

“Neither should you,” Ella says. “Don’t think I don’t see the MoonPie wrappers on the Audi’s floorboards.”

Lucas shrugs, smiles, and doesn’t look the least bit apologetic.

“Okay,” I say, brushing past them. I open the refrigerator and find it’s more of the same—lots of ingredients, but nothing prepackaged or precooked. “Give me an hour?”

“Oh, you shouldn’t have to cook! You’re our guest,” Ella says, a flash of the pageant queen emerging in her voice as she steps out of the pantry.

“Lucas ran over a werewolf to save me,” I say. “We’ll call it even.”

Lucas and Ella insist on helping. Lucas seems to have a clue, as if he’s at least seen someone knead dough before. Ella watches the entire thing like it’s a cooking show, sliding ingredients and utensils across the counter to me when I ask for them. She looks mildly concerned when she sees me cutting butter into chunks, as if she’s calculating the fat content of the dish. It’s something Kai and I would have made fun of—he always thought it was hilarious when seven cheerleaders opted to split a single candy bar. But because the look on Ella’s face is so endearing—and because she’s so quick at converting the metric measuring utensils to standard and back again—it’s hard to judge her.

I make what I’m good at—breakfast. Scrambled eggs and bacon don’t require recipes, but for the biscuits, I use a recipe from Grandma Dalia’s cookbook. The three of us carry the serving dishes to the kitchen table, where Lucas has already set up plates. The utensils are all in the right place, lined up perfectly, and there are even cloth napkins. Everything is loud, and the kitchen smells like bacon and is messy with flour and used bowls, and it feels…

It feels like home in the way that I thought only Kai could. I’m not sure how—it’s been less than a day—but there’s something around my heart that feels relieved, comforted, happy in a way that has nothing to do with the dozens of bedrooms or expensive paintings. It makes me smile; how can I smile when Kai is missing? But I can’t stop.

“Maybe we should ask Becky if we can help her cook sometimes, too,” Ella says, rubbing her hands together eagerly. “So we can learn things. Other than the microwave, I mean.”

“It’s not like you let me use the microwave anyway,” Lucas says, half joking.

“That’s because he wants to make Hot Pockets,” Ella says, frowning. “Day and night. They’re awful.”

“You’ve never had one,” Lucas points out.

“They smell like wax.”

“Did neither of you ever cook at home, before you got married?” I ask.

Ella shrugs and reaches for the plate with the biscuits. “Not really. We had a cook there, too.”

Lucas looks bemused. “I have eight brothers and sisters back in Ellison. We weren’t allowed anywhere near the kitchen when our mom was making dinner—she’d chase us out with a spatula. And when I moved out, I pretty much exclusively ate Chinese takeout. Lots and lots of Chinese takeout. And Hot Pockets.”

“Gross,” Ella mutters.

“Eight?” I ask, probably too excited to hear about Lucas’s family. The idea of growing up surrounded by sisters and brothers delights me.

He nods. “Eight. Three sisters, five brothers. We lived in this tiny house for ages, and then my dad implemented this rule—if you want your own bedroom, you have to build it.” My eyes widen; Lucas laughs at the expression, then continues. “My dad’s a woodsman. His dad was a woodsman. His dad’s dad was a woodsman. Most of my brothers are woodsmen, even. So building a room isn’t that crazy.”

“Did you build one for yourself?” I ask.

Lucas hesitates. “As it turns out, I’m a pretty crappy woodsman. I didn’t really fit in with my brothers, and my sisters went to boarding school early on. My brothers were big on fighting Fenris, actually. It was like this weird, twisted game they played, hunting them down, trapping them, killing them. I wasn’t exactly cut out for it, but I could track them. I could track them anywhere, through any weather. It was the only thing that made me fit in.” He says this with a smile, but there’s a cool tone to his voice.

“I think it’s pretty impressive,” I say.

“Why? I haven’t tracked anything for you just yet. Wait till I do. Then be impressed,” Lucas says, grinning again. “Speaking of Fenris—all that talk of the beasts from this Grandma Dalia, and you never actually saw one till yesterday?”

“Not really—I mean, I’d never seen one like that,” I say slowly, pausing to take a bite of bacon. “But when I was little, there was a man at the grocery store. There was something about his eyes that was wrong, and Grandma Dalia pulled me away from him.”

“How old?” Lucas asks.

“Seven. Maybe eight.”

Lucas tsks, shaking his head. “Must have been hungry. That’s young.” He pauses and leans back in his chair. “What I can’t work out, though, to be honest, is how an old woman with a cookbook knows about this Snow Queen, yet I’ve never heard of her.”

“Well, you heard of her, when she was dating Larson. You just didn’t know she was some sort of evil ice witch,” Ella points out.

“Fair point,” Lucas says. They look to me.

I shrug. “I don’t know. Grandma Dalia hated me—she never told me how she knew about any of this stuff. We hardly ever spoke, and when we did I was usually getting snapped at. It was like that from the moment we met.”

“Grandparents are tricky,” Ella says. “Maybe worse than parents. Though Lucas’s father loathes me.”

“My father has Alzheimer’s. He doesn’t even know who you are,” Lucas says, waving a biscuit at her.

“He thought I was a hooker.”

“He can’t see well, and you were wearing that dress thing!”

“He offered me a hundred dollars to—”

“Stop!” Lucas says, slamming his hands over his ears, and I laugh with them. Ella leans over and kisses Lucas on the cheek as their laughter dies down. I hope she appreciates what it is to have him here, to kiss him whenever she wants. She does. I know she does—I can see it in her eyes. I inhale. Kai. Focus. Figure out how to find Kai. Figure out how to find Mora.

After a few moments, I look at my hands and ask, “What was Mora like, when she was with your opera singer?”

“Larson?” Ella says, frowning at the subject change. “She was pretty. Confident—but fake confidence. I know it when I see it; it’s practically an airborne illness at pageants. You smile, show lots of teeth, touch people on the arm or shoulder and laugh loud and answer everything in complete sentences, but it’s not real. It’s just a pretty package to hide whatever you’re really all about. Mora was oozing with that sort of confidence. Which is especially strange now—I mean, she can control the weather, but she’s fake confident? Does that cookbook have anything else in it that might explain things?”

I shrug. “I’ve looked through it before, but it’s hard to read and hard to tell what’s real.” I rise, retrieve the book, and set it down in the middle of the table. Lucas and I open it and flip through a few pages, but it doesn’t take them long to see what I mean.

“There’s a section on luck charms in here,” Ella says, looking doubtful.

“Are luck charms any crazier than werewolves?” Lucas says, but he shakes his head and turns the page. “This is right,” he says, tapping some text. “That wearing red attracts monsters. The wolves love it.”

Ella flips to the last page of the book and, after reading a few inspirational quotes aloud, looks at the paper on the back cover. Her eyebrows shoot up as she traces the paper with her finger.

“How long has she had this?” Ella asks.

I shake my head. “As long as I can remember. Probably before Kai was born. Why?”

“Because,” Ella says, “this book looks like it’s, what, fifties or so? But this type of paper, all earth tones and stuff, is newer. Seventies, I think. Once my family bought a mountain house near Vail, and the kitchen wallpaper looked like this.”

“So she repapered it?” Lucas asks.

“No,” Ella says, wiping her butter knife with a napkin. She looks up at me. “Can I try something?”

“Um, sure,” I say, hesitant.

Ella slides the knife between the paper and the back cover. “She didn’t repaper the front or the pages or anything. Why just this interior?” I hear the glue giving as Ella seesaws the knife around the edges. When she’s made her way around, she sets the knife down and slowly, carefully peels the paper back.

“Yes!” Ella says, grinning. She tugs something and finally removes a photograph, hidden between the paper and back cover. She lays it down on the counter; the three of us hunch over to study it. It’s Grandma Dalia—a very, very young Grandma Dalia, maybe ten or eleven years old—standing next to a boy with bright red hair. His clothing makes him look poor, next to her, but their arms are wrapped around each other in a sweet way. She leans her hip into him, and he’s grinning so widely that his eyes are little lines. I look over to his eyes, trying to discern the color, but they’re hidden behind long lashes—

“I know who he is,” I realize. “I’ve seen him before. He’s Mora’s work friend.”

“Work friend?” Ella asks.

“Or something. I don’t know—he was at Grandma Dalia’s funeral with Mora. I remember. It was him and another guy. When this one,” I tap the boy’s face with my fingernail, “saw the photo of Grandma Dalia on her wedding day, he looked at Mora, and then she held his hand.”

“What happened then?”

“Nothing,” I say, shaking my head. “I was glad to see it, actually. I thought maybe it meant she was with him and that she wasn’t interested in Kai.”

“She took him—clearly—and then brought him back to go to Dalia’s funeral,” Ella says.

“She feels bad?” Lucas suggests.

“No,” Ella says, shaking her head. “It’s not guilt.” She presses the paper back against the book cover absently, then speaks again. “Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe she’s not faking confidence. Taking the boy she kidnapped back where he might be recognized? It’s like a show of power. Like she’s proving something to someone.”

“No, wait,” I say, shaking my head. “The boy at the funeral was maybe a few years older than me at the most. If it’s the same boy, he should be Grandma Dalia’s age. Right?”

Ella and I look to Lucas, who sighs and sits back. He rubs his mouth with his hand, and I can tell there’s something he doesn’t want to say. “She’s done something,” he says, finally. “The wolves—they don’t age once they transform. Maybe whatever she’s done to this boy—and Larson Davies, and maybe Kai—works the same way.”

Something in my chest plummets.

I was afraid she’d kill him, afraid she’d hurt him, afraid she’d abandon him.

It never occurred to me she’d keep him.