Cinder's thumb stilled against my cheekbone, then resumed. Listening.
"My mother was human. She knew what he was before they married. He told her everything, which was either the bravest or the stupidest thing he ever did, depending on which version of the story you believe." My throat tightened. "For a while, it worked. She loved him. I think she genuinely loved him, the way people love things that frighten them, with a kind of desperate intensity that's half devotion and half the need to prove they're not afraid."
I didn’t dare look at Cinder. Did he understand? That in a year, five, ten, I was terrified this would happen to us?
I opened my eyes. Stared at the frosted headboard behind Cinder's shoulder because looking at his face would break me before I finished.
"Dad knew immediately that I'd inherited it. He said he could feel it, something in the way I responded to cold, the way my temperature ran low even as an infant." I swallowed.
The cold crept further along the headboard. I let it. Containing it right now was beyond me.
"Dad taught me what he could when she wasn’t around to hear him." I could still hear his voice. Low, the Glaswegian accent thicker when he was being gentle.Feel that, Taz? That's yours. That's the cold saying hello. Now tell it to wait. Softly, like. You're just asking it to be patient.
Cinder's hands slid from my face to my hands, curling his fingers around them.
"Ma started changing when I was about six or so. Small things at first. She'd flinch when I touched her if my hands were too cold. She'd check the thermostat obsessively, convinced the house was freezing when it wasn't. She stopped letting me help in the kitchen after I frosted the inside of a glass without meaning to." I exhaled. “My dad started sleeping on the couch.
"Dad tried to talk to her. I'd hear them at night, after they thought I was asleep. He'd say her name, over and over,Rose, love, please, and she'd say things likeI didn't sign up for this,andit's getting worse,andwhat happens when someone finds out?And he'd sayno one will find out, I've managed for forty years, and she'd sayhe's a child. Children can't keep secrets."
My voice had gone hollow. Automatic. The recitation of facts stripped of the feelings that had once been attached to them, because the feelings were too large and too old, and I'd spent three decades building walls around them that I wasn't sure could be rebuilt once they came down.
"She wasn't wrong," I said. "About the secret being hard. I frosted a window at school. A teacher saw. Dad convinced her it was condensation, some story about the heating system, and she believed him because why wouldn't she? But Mum found out, and that night was the worst fight they ever had. She told him this was his fault. That he'd passed something damaged to me. That he'd ruined our family by being what he was."
Cinder's grip on my hand tightened. Just a fraction. Just enough to say I'm here.
"He didn't argue. That was the thing that killed me. He just stood there and took it. Like he agreed. Like being a dragon was something he'd done to her on purpose. The same time, I was getting bullied.” I dared a glance at Cinder and swallowed at the look of understanding instead of condemnation. “I was a weed then, but because of the dragon, I’d been taught by dad to be a loner. The bullying became physical, to the point where Dad started meeting me from school to walk me home.” He paused. “Dad caught up late with me one day when I was on the ground getting the shit kicked out of me, and he lost it. But with him, it meant he lost control of his ice. Three boys froze to death. Within a few days, it had been blamed on freak weather and we were on our way to Canada. "He left us a year after we arrived in Canada," I said. "We'd rented a house outside a town in Manitoba. Middle of nowhere. Snow country. Mum barely spoke to him by then, barely spoke to me. She'd stopped using Dad’s name. She'd refer to him as 'your father' when she talked to me, like he was something that belonged to me and not to her. Like she'd already severed whatever tied them together and was just waiting for the paperwork to catch up."
The fighting got worse after we moved. Not louder. Quieter. That was what made it unbearable.
"He started going for walks. Long ones. Hours at a time, out into the fields behind the house where the snow was waist-deep. He'd come back with ice in his beard and his eyes somewhere far away, and Mum would look at him like he was a stranger who'd wandered into her kitchen by accident."
Cinder's hands hadn't moved from mine. Warm. Steady. The only warm thing in the room.
"One night I heard her say it. I was supposed to be asleep, but the walls were thin, and sound carried differently in cold houses. She said, 'Those boys are dead because of you. Because of what you are. And one day it'll be our son who kills someone, and I'llhave to live with that too.'" I barely breathed, forced myself to continue.
"He went for a walk the next morning. January. Minus thirty-five with the wind chill. The kind of cold that kills humans in minutes if they're not dressed for it. He wasn't dressed for it. He walked out in his shirt and trousers, no coat, no boots. Just walked straight out the back door and into the blizzard like he was going to check on something in the yard and would be right back." I took a breath. "He didn't come back."
Cinder’s fingers tightened on mine. “But wouldn’t he be okay? As an ice dragon?”
I shook my head. “Not if he stayed human for long enough, if he rejected the shift, which I think he'd been doing for years because of how disgusted she'd been. They never found him.”
The room was silent. The frost had stopped spreading, as if it too were listening.
"That's how an ice dragon dies," I said. "When they choose to. They don't fight it. They don't struggle. They just open the door and let the cold take everything. It's not violent. It's not dramatic. It's the quietest death imaginable. You just freeze. Permanently. Every cell. Every molecule. Until there's nothing left that could ever thaw."
I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes.
"I was a kid. I didn't understand. I couldn't understand how he could leave me. How the man who'd taught me to breathe through the surges, and talk to the cold like it was a friend, could walk into a blizzard and choose ice over his own son." My voice splintered. "I was so angry. For years. I hated him for it. I hated him for being weak, for giving up, for leaving me alone with a woman who could barely look at me without seeing the thing that had ruined her life."
Cinder's thumbs moved against my fingers. Slow. Steady. Present.
"It took me a long time to understand that depression doesn't work like that," I said, quieter now. "That it's not a choice, not really. That the weight he'd been carrying, the guilt over those boys, the grief of watching his wife turn him into a monster in her own mind, the terror that his son would end up the same way, all of it had been pressing down on him for years, and at some point, he couldn’t do it anymore. He didn't leave me because he didn't love me. He left because the pain was bigger than the love, and he couldn't see past it."
I dropped my hands. Looked at Cinder for the first time since I'd started talking.
His eyes were wet. Not spilling over, not yet, but bright and full and holding everything I'd just given him with the careful, unflinching attention of a man who understood that bearing witness was sometimes the bravest thing you could do for someone.
“I had my first shift a year after that, and I was terrified. I didn’t understand what was happening, but she just called the Council and told them to come and get 'it.'”