Finding a Heart of Snow

by Ian Sentelik

Overview

Long ago, the great Snow Queen died of a broken heart, sending her magical world of dancing snow flakes and glittering icicles into a deep depression. Fearful of the same fate, her subjects sealed their hearts into an icy crystal for safekeeping, hoping to protect themselves and their future. For centuries, the communal Snowheart keeps the snow spirits of the north safe from their emotions, until a mischievous luck spirit steals the mystical crystal, intending to melt it down and extract its magical power at the cost of the snow spirits' lives.

Marmion Roy never dreams of such a frosted, wondrous world until a snow spirit invades his reality, his home, and his heart. Shirai demands his help to recover the Snowheart and annihilate the thieving luck spirit. Because Shirai is void of softer emotion, Mar believes that love with a brusque and literally heartless spirit would be impossible — at least until Shirai accidentally is reunited with his own personal part of the Snowheart.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781935192411
Publisher:	Dreamspinner Press
Publication date:	01/19/2009
Series:	At Last , #2
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	90
File size:	236 KB

Read an Excerpt

whorl of icicles swirled down through the air, obscured from the sight of passersby by the heavy black downpour of rain. The translucent ice crystals starred a path down the street, whirling briefly around a balding man with a black umbrella. Unaware that he had temporarily been the center of a cold, wild dance, the man hurried on, umbrella taking the weight of the darkness and rain sluicing from the sky.

The icicles trickled into an alleyway, spun around behind a dumpster, and focused in on themselves. Rain-filled air crystallized, blossoming into a shape so white and bright it glowed even through the gloomy shroud of rain.

From behind the dumpster a slender hand, whiter than the purest snow, reached up and touched the alley wall ever so lightly. Drawing herself up on the alabaster bridge of her pale arm was a woman, a woman so strange, so unnatural, that she could have stepped right out of a fairy tale.

She let out a long, sighing breath, so cold it melted into liquid in midair and joined the rain in falling. Teeth the same frosted translucence as ice cubes flashed through the shower.

"And so I have come."

She reached one ivory hand out into the rain, disregarding the drops that ran into the sleeves of her trailing snowy robes. Eyes without color of their own stared up into the sky and reflected it, turning the color of slate.

"And so I must search."

* * * *

The young woman with the emerald raincoat almost tripped over the white shape emerging from the alley. Although her first reflex was to kick out at it, the young woman was a cat-lover, and the small kitten with the bright pearl fur and curious sky-colored eyes was impossible toharm. Regretting once more that her apartment had a strict "No Pets" policy, the young woman bent down to get a closer look.

That was odd. The cat's eyes had seemed dark just a moment ago. Now they looked green--as green as her raincoat, in fact.

Of course, her vision through the darkness of the storm was hardly very accurate. She reached out with both hands to pick up the cat, hoping to find a tag to give a hint of the owner, but the cat slid away out of her reach and into the downpour, the torch of bright fur quickly extinguished in sheets of liquid.

She was going to be late for work. She hurried on, hoping the cat wouldn't stay out in the rain.

* * * *

Mar fumbled for his keys, bracing his grocery bags against the peeling door, and received a mischievous tongue of water down the back of his neck from the dingy roof. He didn't even groan. It had been such a bad day that a little water almost seemed good.

He had woken up to find his Lilliputian apartment frigid and soaking, the window smashed in the night to allow direct access for both burglars and the rain-filled wind that had been squalling all day. His only things of value--his stereo and his college textbooks--had been stolen, and everything in the kitchen that wasn't nailed down had been embedded into either the wall, the floor, or--in the case of a nearly full jar of blackberry jelly--his backpack. Mar hadn't noticed the latter until he had realized in the middle of trying to clear the splattered eggs from the wall that he was going to be late for his first class, and had swung his backpack up onto his shoulder. Thereby irreversibly staining his only wool sweater.

A traffic jam thicker than the congealed blackberry jelly had kept him away from college until his second class was halfway over. He had finally arrived only to find he had missed half of the final notes for the test tomorrow--and of course, with no books, he had no other way to study for it. And directly afterward, Andrea had broken up with him.

Actually, that was probably the best of the bad things that had happened in this long, horrendous day. They had started going out a week ago through some accident of capricious thought, but soon realized that they were entirely unsuited for any kind of relationship together. By the third date, most couples were post-coital. They were over. It was slightly disappointing, but also something of a relief.

Relief quickly squashed when he fell down a flight of stairs, walked into an opening door, and missed a test in his last class thanks to a dentist appointment he had been unable to reschedule, which ended up consisting of two hours in the waiting room and a thirty-second examination that had discovered the first cavity of his life.

Following that uplifting piece of news, he had gone to the grocery store to restock after the burglary, waited in line for half an hour, and found he didn't have enough money to pay for everything he had brought to the counter. So he'd taken back the milk, mixed vegetables, and jelly (he hadn't been entirely sure he wanted jelly anyway) and returned to the front to find his cashier gone. The other cashier, when presented with the situation, had popped her cinnamon gum and sent him to the back of her line. Forty minutes later, Mar had finally paid for his groceries and gone out to find his car window in pieces on the ground.

And all this time, it had been raining.

As he opened the door, one of the grocery bags squirted out from his hold and landed on the floor with the unmistakable crunch of something breaking.

"Damn it," Mar muttered, more out of habit than actual emotion. He was far too numb and cold and wet and tired to feel emotion.

He pushed the bag farther into his apartment with his foot, closed the door, and bent to pick up the bag.

A white shape blazed from around the edge of the bookshelf Mar had pushed against his broken window.

As the man slammed Mar up against the door by his throat, Mar realized that he wasn't quite numb and cold and wet and tired enough not to feel fear.

"You are one of his," the man said. "Where is he?"

Mar couldn't even breathe, let alone answer. The voice was as cold as the icy hand pressed like a tiger's paw against his throat.

"Speak!" The command was about as flexible as a glacier. "Tell me where he is hiding the Heart!"

The hand at Mar's throat felt like dry ice. Its cold was so intense it was burning away the little air he had left.

The man's eyes--gray, and as dark as the room around them--narrowed.

"Your oxygen is disappearing," he muttered. "Why is ... oh. Oh. That's right. Mortals have to breathe..."

Mar felt his wrist lifted and slammed against the door--then the frozen pyre around his windpipe vanished. Cool, rain-filled air flooded down Mar's throat like the warmest, most refreshing wine--for a moment, all he could do was breathe, feeling ice crystals melt and run frigid fingers down the collar of his shirt, although he had no idea where they had come from.

His neck felt bruised and burned with cold. He tried to bring his hands down to rub it and alleviate the cold at least, but his hands wouldn't move. He looked up and saw the man standing in front of him, arms folded. Not touching him.

Slowly Mar looked over at his left wrist. It was frozen to the door. He looked over at his right, and found it similarly shackled, pearled ice cementing it to the wood without difficulty.

Blood roaring suddenly in his ears, Mar's gaze snapped back to the man in front of him. Tall, solidly yet slimly built, hair and skin and clothes all nearly the same startling shade of pure crystalline white. Eyes, black-edged gray storms, slanted like tipped ice shards and somehow giving the impression of being too large for the face framed by a long, cascading mane of nearly translucent hair. Muscular arms folded across a chest sheathed in a flowing, sleeveless white robe, nails pearl-white without a trace of pink--and Mar was strangely certain that no nail polish was responsible. Bare feet, nails again a solid white, visible beneath the trailing folds of ivory robe cinched around a waist like an icicle with a crystal-fringed and -colored sash.

Those hands had been holding his arms to the door. But now ice did instead.

That was impossible.

"Now, listen to me and listen carefully," the man said, voice soft and dangerous as a deep drift of snow. "I may not be a Spirit of Truth, but if you try to lie while held by my ice, I will know. Now tell me where he is."

"What?!" Mar choked out. "I don't even know what you're talking about! Who ... what 'he' are you talking about?!"

Stormy eyes narrowed further. "You do not know?" Then he blinked. "You do not know. You really do not know."

"Why the hell would I know?! What are you talking about?! Who are you?!"

"Why do you radiate his power if you know nothing of him?" the man asked, although the question seemed directed more at himself than at Mar. "Unless..."

The diamond eyebrows snapped together. "How has your luck been lately?"

The question came from so far out of right field that Mar was thrown. "What?"

"Your luck." His voice sharpened from snowdrift to silver sword. "How has it been lately?"

I'm being held captive in my own home by a crazy man with white nails. How do you think it's been lately?! "The worst I've ever had in my life."

The man stared at Mar for a long time, and then--just when Mar was about to demand a better explanation--he leaned forward, seized Mar's face just below his chin, tilted his mouth up, and kissed him.

Something frozen, something so cold it burned, filled Mar's mouth like ice water. Without waiting for him to swallow, it forced itself down his throat, tracing a fiery pillar of cold down the center of his chest.

Mar didn't even register the fact that he was being kissed by a man. The cold hurt, cementing his insides together and hitting his stomach with the force of an avalanche. He couldn't breathe again; all he could see were the man's eyes, the same flecked hazel as his own (hazel? Hadn't they been gray? Had he been mistaken?) but completely calm--emotionless--cold--so cold--

Then the cold withdrew up his throat like a spider walking up a thread. It passed back between their mouths, and something knocked against Mar's teeth from behind as it did so--something hard, something that tasted metallic. Before Mar could recover from the cold, the man deftly reached past his teeth with his tongue and slipped the metallic thing out of his mouth.

The man touched both his hands to Mar's wrists again, and as suddenly as it had come, the ice was gone. Mar collapsed to the ground, aching all over from the cold, feeling for the first time in his life colder inside than out. The bruises he had garnered from his fall down the stairs were complaining fiercely all across his arms and legs, and it was becoming increasingly more difficult to breathe.

Ignoring whatever it was he had done to Mar, the man brought his hand to his mouth and spat out into it a tiny metal ball, about the size of a marble. He examined it dispassionately.

"This much already," he murmured. "That many more have died in the journey..."

He stared broodingly at the metal marble--or whatever it was--for a moment longer, his eyes unmoving, unblinking. Then he slipped it down the front of his robe, and turned around in a swirl of white hair and fabric.

"Wait!"

The man in white stopped and turned, looking almost confused. Mar was still on the ground, but he had managed to get himself into a sitting position braced against the door, and cold though he was, his eyes were burning.

"Where are you going?"

The man tilted his head slightly, not seeming to notice his long hair as it fell into his eyes. "I am searching for something, and for the person who has stolen it."

"So you're leaving?" Anger gave Mar the semblance of warmth. "You break in here, assault me, try to interrogate me, do some really weird stuff to me, almost freeze me to death, and now you're just leaving?!"

"I have no time to--" The man paused, considering. "But you were being used as a depository. Perhaps there is reason to stay with you..."

"I don't want you staying! I want an explanation, and then I want you out of my house!"

"Perhaps the explanation will be long enough." The man turned decisively back around, nodding. "You shall have it."

* * * *