Page 22 of A Fate of Ice and Lies
It wasn’t just the warmth in my room that had me saying that, but the simple fact that Donnie was reliable. I wouldn’t be surprised if he chopped up some firewood for me before he left.
She looped her hand through my arm. “Let’s go sit by the fire.”
I drained the last of my coffee and followed her, eyeing the gorgeous blanket draping over her shoulders. Something about the blanket called to me, making me want to tear it off my best friend and claim it as mine, which was ridiculous.
“Where’d you get this?” I asked, running her blanket through my fingers when we sat cross-legged in front of the fireplace.
Great, not only was it probably the end of the world, but I now sounded like Gollum fromLord of the Rings. I dropped my hand and suppressed the sudden urge to whispermy precious.
She eyed me curiously. “Your room.”
“That’s not mine.” I’d remember buying it.
“It was covering you this morning.” She shrugged.
Then technically, I wouldn’t be a complete jerk if I took it off her and wrapped it around myself. I crawled the short space to my couch, the same one Mom had bought after Ryenne and I accidentally spilled red soda over the previous one. This couch had seen things, witnessed boyfriends and teenage drinking that I hoped Mom still didn’t know about in heaven. I grabbed the blanket with our state’s football team’s logo on it from the couch and extended it to her.
“Trade you,” I offered.
She tossed my blanket at me, so I quickly wrapped it around myself and inhaled. It smelled foreign yet familiar, with a woodsy scent that made me feel protected. Which yeah, I get was odd but no stranger than it snowing all over the world in spring. Did that mean Florida and the Caribbean were getting hit too?
“Do you have your phone?” I asked Ryenne, too content by the fire to get up and get minefrom my room.
She waved it in front of my face. “Why?”
“Donnie said it’s snowing everywhere,” I replied. “What about the Bahamas? You know, that cute little island you keep saying you want to go to?”
“Bimini.” She grinned and started typing on her phone. “There’s no way it’s snowing there.”
Her smile fell when she passed me her phone, and yep, there was a news report about the Bahamas and all the Caribbean being affected by the snow.
Planes were being grounded because of low visibility and their inability to land on runways that were not equipped to remove snow. Port visibility was nonexistent, leaving cruise ships stranded in tumultuous seas fighting the frost. The Coast Guard was flooded with SOS calls from fishing vessels and pleasure boats they couldn’t reach.
So many places and people weren’t equipped to handle these temperatures. Like us in Colina, they lacked the proper equipment to survive. Grids were overwhelmed, causing mass power failures.
When I ran across a blog post about the death count, I turned the phone over and tried to breathe past the unease that tightened my lungs.What on earth was happening?This was...catastrophic.
Her phone vibrated in my hand with a notification that also rang like an alarm. She crawled closer to me when her phone blackened before YouTube popped up unprompted, and a man appeared on her small screen. His eyes, an unnatural yellowish-green color, stared back at us before his lips tipped at the sides. When the screen framed out, I saw a larger reptilian creature that I could’ve sworn was a dragon.
On a hard swallow, I looked back at Ryenne to make sureshe was seeing the same thing as me. Her rounded eyes told me she was.
“That’s not a dragon,” she said.
I nodded in agreement.
Because, really, I could only take so much crazy in a day before I institutionalized myself. Or forbade myself from ever reading again.
Donnie sat beside us just as the man on the screen cleared his throat.
“We have a problem,” Donnie said, peering down at his own phone with worry lines wrinkling his forehead.
“Shh,” Ryenne demanded when the man started to speak.
“My name is Commander Hudson,” he said, “and I was sent to your realm to help you acclimate to your new reality.. .”
“Realm?” I questioned.
“Shh,” Ryenne hissed again.
