Page 128 of The Heart of Winter

Then another thought hit me. Maybe I could try near the warm stream where it met the ocean?

I headed that way. When I reached it, I hesitated before stripping off my pants and boots. Clenching my jaw against the freezing wind, I stepped into the shallows.

Unfortunately, by this point, the stream had cooled down quite a bit. It was warmer than the seawater, but not by much. And with the waves constantly splashing me, the chill set in fast. My teeth chattered as I waded through, flipping over rocks.

I found one tiny mussel attached to a small rock. Empty. A bad feeling settled over me, but it was too dark anyway to continue the search.

Instead of putting my cold, wet feet back into my boots, I bundled everything into the blanket, and slung it over my shoulder like a backpack. Then I started wading upstream barefoot.

It was better this way. I didn’t want to soak my socks with freezing water.

After about ten minutes of trudging through the stream, I reached the cave.

I was surprised to see the source of some faint light.

Sariel was sitting in the warm pool, in the center of the cavern. Near the edge of the stream, he had lit a small fire! It was tiny, just a little pile of twigs broken into pieces, smoldering timidly and casting a reddish glow that pulled his face out of the darkness.

When he saw me, his eyebrows lifted.

"You waded all the way here?"

"Yeah," I muttered dryly. "I was looking for mussels and clams in the shallows, but I didn’t find a damn thing."

I almost regretted saying it. Sariel’s face seemed paler now, despite him being submerged in the hot, steaming water.

"The island’s shoreline is long," he murmured. "We’ll find something."

Then he lowered his head, staring at the bubbling water.

I watched him for a moment, struck by how delicate his skin looked. A faint dusting of freckles gave his face a boyish softness. His lashes—a very dark shade of mint green—cast subtle shadows on his cheeks, adding to his melancholic expression. His bangs, usually falling over one brow, were damp and slicked back. He must have washed his hair.

"You don’t mind that I lit up the fire? It was pitch black here."

"I don’t, this is tiny anyway. And I saw a few bigger logs on the beach, they may come in handy later."

"Did you… scale the volcano?"

"Yes. Found a nearby spot where I dried the towels, uh, I mean, the blankets," I corrected myself. "That’s the one good piece of news I’ve got. About fifteen minutes up from here, there are some warm rocks where everything dries fast."

I deliberately called them ‘rocks’. That sounded better than ‘freshly cooled lava flows, still sizzling from the heat’.

Talking about the volcano made me anxious. And the last thing I needed was to pass that unease onto Sariel. We had to stay focused and stick to strategic thinking.

"That’s good," Sariel said, but his voice was saturated with gloom. "We could use it to dry socks and underwear."

Wow, was Sariel a little bit like me? Very focused on being clean and smelling fresh all the time? Funny, so we did have some similarities, after all.

"There’s a small bottle of perfume in that omega’s toiletry bag, we can add a bit of it when rinsing clothes," I murmured, trying to steer his thoughts away from whatever was weighing him down.

"Yeah, I only have a roll-on deodorant, so that wouldn’t really work," Sariel replied, rummaging through his small carry-on. "And… two cans of pheromone masking spray! Perfect. Just what I need on a desert island."

He made a sour face. Once again, I was baffled by how easily I could pick up on his thoughts. I had never experienced this level of near-telepathy with anyone before.

This whole situation was seriously messing with my head, but right now, I preferred to focus on the practical side of it. In our case, where we were both too afraid to say out loud what we were really thinking, this connection—whatever it was—could be useful. Because deep down, we both wanted to know what the other was feeling.

Since I was freezing, I followed Sariel’s lead, shedding my clothes and slipping into the water.

Without a word, he handed me an unwrapped energy bar. I took it, eating with a twinge of guilt as I settled in beside him. His energy felt different this time. Quieter, more grim.

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