Cold Spell

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.

CHAPTER TEN

Lucas is going to find Mora and Kai—if they’re still in town. The snow has melted a little, making the roads somewhat passable, but there’s still a snowdrift blocking the Reynolds’ garage; Lucas has to take the pink Hummer that he abandoned at the bottom of the hill a few days before. I watch him drive away, grimacing at the icicles dripping off the front porch—does the weather change mean the Snow Queen has moved on?

“You have to trust him. This is what he does, remember? Besides, if there are Fenris out there, you and I are just going to attract their attention,” Ella says as we walk back to the living room and plop down on the leather sofas—Lucas insisted on going alone.

“They never attack men?” I ask. I remember Grandma Dalia’s warnings about the beasts—was Kai only ever in danger from the Snow Queen herself?

“The Fenris don’t, but it looks like Mora has that covered anyhow,” Ella says as she flips another page of a thick book that appears to be written in Italian. I fidget for a few moments, looking at the clock. Ella lifts her eyebrows at me and smiles.

“He’s just finding them. Then he’ll come back and get us and you can go to work on convincing Kai to stay away from the Snow Queen, while I pummel her to find out where she took our opera singer. You have no idea how much money we poured into that kid,” she says.

“That’s probably why she wanted him,” I say. “I was thinking last night… Mora told me and Kai once that she used to be wealthy, but that she was trapped. And something about how she wasn’t allowed to dance.”

“Huh,” Ella says. “So she wasn’t always the Snow Queen, then.”

“No,” I say, and shake my head. “And I’m thinking that’s why she takes certain boys. Because now that she has this power, now that she’s a queen—”

“She’s using it to own the things she’s always wanted. Artists. Bohemians. Rebels. The anti-tie crowd,” Ella says, nodding. “Like Larson.”

“Like Kai.”

“I wonder what the other boy did—the redheaded one,” Ella says.

“I wonder how many boys there are,” I answer. I open the cookbook and flip through a few of the pages I haven’t studied closely yet. The pages grow more confusing as the book goes on—the recipes toward the back are written in shorthand so punctuated I can’t fathom what they mean, and one page contains a weird shape outlined in pencil, something resembling a curled-up dog. There’s text near it, but it’s too smudged to read.

Read. I’m sitting here reading, while Kai is with her. While she’s doing whatever it is she does to him, however she does it. Making him a collectible, all to prove something to the world, all because of some terrible past. Did she become the Snow Queen because of her past, or in spite of it? I look at Ella again. I trust her—I trust her and Lucas more than anyone other than Kai, even though I hardly know them, yet just sitting here while Lucas is out is making my head spin.

“What about you?” Ella interrupts my thoughts.

“Hm?”

“Kai plays violin. Larson sings. Lucas tracks things. The redheaded boy did something. What do you do?”

“I…” I trail off. I try to stop it, but my stock response, the same one I gave Mora, falls from my mouth, clunky and awkward. “I don’t really do anything.”

“Don’t do anything,” Ella asks, drumming her fingers on the sofa, “or don’t do anything yet?”

I smile. “Is there a difference?”

“Huge difference,” she says. “People who don’t do anything annoy me. People who don’t do anything yet excite me, because they can potentially do everything.”

“Kai always said I need to find something,” I admit, letting the idea that I can do everything sink in and rattle