Killing Frost

The girl was drowning. Dying at fifteen if she was a day under or over the cursed age. The lake, frozen solid, thirty by forty feet in diameter, was deep and deliberately cruel. The snow was blindingly white under the golden glare of the newly risen sun. The perfection of it was ruined only by the jagged hole in the very center where the water churned and desperate fingers clawed at the surface. A face broke through the surface as pale and coldly beautiful as the ice kingdom that was the set stage for her death. Crouched beside the hole in the ice sat a huddled black figure. Shivering despite his cloak, he gave himself a shake and shut his eyes tight when his sisters face appeared, contorted in pain and terror, gasping for air. Their eyes met for one brief moment, and the boy lowered his eyes again, vaguely disturbed by the now familiar glint in her eyes. When she cried out he jerked as if he would have made a move towards her but stopped himself. He whimpered and then gave up and began to cry, when a banner of red hair, like blood began to float sedately on the surface of the lake, snake like tendrils curled along the ice around her.

A howl rent the air, and the boy whirled, his cloak whipping around him. He was fast enough for his hand to clutch the object at the small of his back but not fast enough that he avoided the fist that struck him full in the face. His father was a great bear of a man, fists like ham hocks and a great barrel of a chest that was more muscle than fat. He flew backwards, sliding along the ice. He could feel blood fill his mouth and he twisted, pulling the blade from the sheath in the small of his back, his fist grinding against the thick leather of the hilt. He threw the dagger, allowing it to slide along the ice towards the huddled red headed heap that lay unmoving in front of the giant that was their father. After pulling her from the water by her hair, and finding her unmoving, the man that was their father had fallen to his knees and thrown back his head in grief, exposing his throat.

Taking advantage of this, his sister grabbed up the blade, she twisted, bringing herself up and around, swinging the blade in an arc across the exposed flesh of their father’s neck. The whole scene was an undistinguished haze of red, silver and black. In the aftermath of it, the blood was a red surprise against the transparency of the ice. Their father’s neck was smiling, it’s mouth red and dripping, staining the front of his simple work shirt. There was his sister, sitting awkwardly, her hair dripping and as red as the blood that bathed her face and the front of her dress as it spiraled down her back to her hips. The knife was still clutched tightly in her bloody fist, her skirts spread out in a circle around her bare legs. She looked at the blood, gazed at her brother out of the corner of her eye, and began to laugh. Madly, insanely. She was still laughing when Johnny ran to her, grabbed her, and pulled her shivering and shaking into the surrounding forest.

He cracked open one swollen red rimmed eyes and pulled back a little. Eltsie was licking the tears from his face rubbing her cheek along his hair and neck in an ideal attempt to scent mark, and comfort him. Johnny reached up a shacking hand and touched his check where Eltsie had licked him, and then stared down in horror and the pinkish stain of blood that marked his fingers. He jerked violently in his sister’s grasp, but she made sympathetic clucking noises in his ear, and laid a soothing, strangely mothering hand on his hot face and stroked him to calm him down. All the while her body shook with silent laughter, and Johnny’s eyed what he could see of his sister’s bloody clothes in fear.