Spring Frost Read online

  Spring Frost

  Bitter Frost #7

  of Kailin Gow’s Frost Series

  kailin gow

  Spring Frost (Frost Series #7)

  Published by THE EDGE

  THE EDGE is an imprint of Sparklesoup Inc.

  Copyright © 2012 Kailin Gow

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher except in case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Do NOT post on websites or share this book without permission from copyright holder. We take piracy seriously.

  All characters and storyline is an invention from Kailin Gow. Any resemblance to people alive or dead is purely coincidence.

  For information, please contact:

  THE EDGE at Sparklesoup

  14252 Culver Dr., A732

  Irvine, CA 92604

  www.sparklesoup.com

  First Edition.

  ISBN 13: 978-1-59748-036-9

  DEDICATION

  To all who believe in the healing power of love.

  Prologue

  I remembered Clariss well. I had spent many childhood afternoons with tears streaming down my grubby cheeks, hiding in the woods behind Gregory High, willing the pain to go away. Even after all the horrors I had seen in Feyland – death, destruction, war, chaos – there was something about her cold green eyes that sent a shiver down my spine. I remembered how she used to treat me in the old days – she would toss her long, glossy golden hair over her smooth and milky-white shoulder, raise a perfectly plucked eyebrow and look at me with savage contempt. Clariss had made my life a living hell. Before there was Feyland, before there was the escape that Kian offered me, there were days of dreading going to school, days of avoiding her in the locker room or in the hall, trying to escape from her endless reign of cruelty. Clariss wasn’t an ordinary “popular girl” – she wasn’t mean because she was insecure or thoughtless because she hadn’t grown up yet, or imitating an overly-obnoxious mother, or any one of the solutions my mother had proposed to me when trying to cheer me up about Clariss’ behavior. “She’s probably just lonely,” my mother had said, smoothing my hair, “and she doesn’t know how to express her feelings. Don’t be afraid of her, be sorry for her. She doesn’t know how to love – and so she’s probably suffering far worse than you are right now.” But I knew better. My mother, with her optimistic view of things and need to see the best in people, wanted to believe that Clariss was a lost soul in need of comfort and guidance, a young and troubled girl who would, with any luck, grow up one day to be a perfectly decent human being. I knew better. Clariss wasn’t motivated by fear or loneliness or insecurity or anything at all. She was motivated by pure evil. She wanted to see those around her suffering; she relished the sweetness of tears. Even when we were young children, Clariss always liked to push us to the ground, cackling over our scraped knees and bruised thighs. She fed off other people’s unhappiness; she relished our suffering. Her other minions – girls like Lauren and Kate – were merely insecure, tittering because they felt like they had to in order to avoid having that same terrifying wrath turned back on them, to avoid being the objects of her scorn. But not Clariss. Clariss just wanted to watch as she sent a girl sobbing to the bathroom, as she convinced a heavier girl that bulimia was “the only solution” to her social woes, as she tore an unfashionable scarf off a girl’s neck and ripped it to shreds in the hallway.

  Clariss always got whatever she wanted. She had a power of glamoring stronger than any I had seen among the Fey: she could come across like the manifestation of pure evil when she was alone with me, but the second a teacher walked into the room, she had the power to convince him that she was all sweetness and light. She would bat her long lashes and turn her emerald-green gaze upon him and shake her long blond hair; false tears would appear like diamonds at the corner of her eye and she would complain bitterly about how I – or anyone else she’d been bullying – had in fact been grievously abusing HER.

  The teachers fell for it. Every single time. I can’t even remember how many times I took the fall for Clariss’ cruelty, how many hours I spent in detention being ordered to “think about what you’ve done” while Clariss got off scot-free, glaring at me with a cruel and glimmering smile from the corridor while I sat hunched over my desk, composing an essay on why “bullying is bad.”

  So perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised to discover that Clariss was, after all, a creature of magic like me. I’d suspected it often enough at school – how many times had Logan and I sighed together that “she’s not really human – she can’t be?” How many times had I bitterly complained “she must be some kind of monster? How else could she be casting a spell on all those teachers like that?” But now, as I stared at the beautiful, motionless face of Clariss before me, its implacable glare at once alluring and terrifying, I realized that I had been right all along. All my childhood fears, all my insecurities – they hadn’t been paranoid at all! Just as I had always known, always sensed, that there was something different about me, so too had I always known deep down that there had always been something truly evil about Clariss.

  No, I thought to myself. Not always. There had been a time when Clariss seemed kind to me. A picture began forming in my mind – a fuzzy image, out of focus. A sandbox. Spring. Birds chirping old songs and the fragrance of honeysuckle in the bushes. Two girls sitting together, playing with dolls. One with beautiful golden hair; one with caramel-colored braids. Me and Clariss. We had been friends once, hadn’t we? I thought back, trying harder to remember. Hadn’t we? Perhaps not good friends, but she had been nice enough to me, to everybody. None of us thought of her as a “bully.”

  And then we must have been six or seven – I remembered that we were bigger, the sandbox was smaller. I remembered the three of us sitting in the sandbox: me, Logan, and Clariss. I remembered how happy I had been on that day – Logan and I had plans to go to the woods and go exploring for dinosaur footprints, which Patrick McGuire swore existed deep within the sylvan depths of the forest.

  “We’re going to find a brontosaurus,” Logan was saying cheerfully, “and a Tyrannosaurus Rex, and a stegosaurus, and maybe even a mastodon!”

  “I don’t think there are dinosaur bones in the forest,” Clariss was saying, re-applying her lip gloss. Even at six Clariss was well-aware of the need to be fashionable.

  “What about you, Bree?” Logan turned to me with an excited, expectant look on his face. “You’ll come, right? We’ll go see the dinosaurs.’”

  “Of course!” I sprang to my feet. “My mom says she’ll stand behind a tree so we can pretend she’s not there and that we’re exploring. I want to see the dinosaur bones. I bet we’ll find a big skull with lots of sharp teeth and then we can make the teeth into weapons like the ones the knights used and chase people with them!”

  Clariss’ smile froze on her lips.

  “Gosh, Bree,” Logan laughed. “You’re the best girl ever, did you know that? I used to think my cousin Jamie was the best girl in the world but now I think it’s you.”

  I caught a glimpse of Clariss’ face at that moment. Its pert, innocent beauty had been transformed – for a second – by ugliness. A look of black hate appeared in her eyes; her jaw hardened and her mouth soured. She glared at me with blazing fire in her gaze.

  “What is it, Clariss?” Logan turned to Clariss in confusion. “Is everything okay?”

  Clariss did not respond, instead fixing her look of hate straight on me. Without saying a word, she rose to her feet, staring me down. “There!” she cried at last, pushing me down into th
e sand. “You’re so stupid, Breena. You think you’re all cool because you can find dinosaurs, but you’re just too stupid to know that you won’t find any. Logan’s only taking you to the woods because he feels sorry for you because you’re ugly and nobody else likes you. And nobody else ever will!”

  Logan and I looked on in shock as Clariss stormed off. “What was that about?” Logan asked me.

  I shrugged.

  But from that day forth, a new and furious power had taken hold of Clariss. She no longer played with us – she no longer even came near us, unless it was to torment me or insult me. She began insulting the other children, too, mocking this one’s clothing or that one’s hair, this one’s weight or that one’s parents’ divorce. Nothing was off-limits; nothing was sacred. Clariss’ cruelty extended to anything and everything.

  Except for Logan. Logan was the one exception to Clariss’ reign of terror. She never insulted him; she was never mean to him. When she grew older and began discarding boys two or three at a time, laughing when she ripped up their roses or stomped on their chocolates, Logan was somehow immune to her callous cruelty. He refused to participate when she persuaded the rest of the class to march in a circle around me, shouting insults and pointing fingers and telling me I was a “bastard” because my mother didn’t know who my father was. He told her off when she mocked the dresses my mother had painstakingly made. He refused all her myriad invitations to sit with her and her minions at lunch, saying only “If Breena’s not welcome here, than I’m not either.”

  If Logan had intended to force Clariss’ hand, to pressure her into being nice to me, then he had failed magnificently. The more Logan stood up for me, the more Logan took my side, the meaner Clariss was to me. The more Logan refused her increasingly obvious advances, the more she took out her frustration on me. Logan was the only man she couldn’t get, we both knew, and that was – in Clariss’ twisted, petty mind – my fault. And this meant that I had to be punished.

  Things only got worse when we hit high school. As Clariss’ crush on Logan intensified, so did her attacks on me. The few female friends I had in junior high crept away, one by one, to join Clariss’ gang, figuring that her sometime cruelty to them was vastly preferably to what they would have gone through if she had associated them with me. I stopped getting invited to birthday parties; I started eating lunch alone. Only Logan stood by me through it all, unconvinced by Clariss’ increasingly desperate attempts to lure him into her circle of friends.

  “Even if she weren’t mean to you personally,” Logan said, “I wouldn’t hang out with her. She’s a bully, through and through; she’s just looking to control the people around her. She doesn’t even have a crush on me – not really – she’s just upset that she can’t have whatever she wants, when she wants it. And the fact that she’s horrible to you – well, let’s just say that if she’s looking for a way into my heart, she’s not about to find it by hurting one of my best friends. She thinks she can pressure me into hating you, but it’s not going to work, Bree. I’m never going to leave your side. Best friends, remember?”

  Yet despite Logan’s strength – and my mother’s unending encouragement – high school was still a daily eight hours of torment for me. Clariss soon decided sabotaging my friendships wasn’t enough – she started sabotaging my other passions, intentionally destroying the posters I carefully put up all over school for the “Environmental Protection Club” and defacing my “Save the Woods” banner that Logan and I had spent all night working on.

  It was no surprise, in retrospect, that it was Clariss’ mother – a wealthy industrialist – who spearheaded the movement to knock down Gregory’s woods and build a strip mall there instead. Clariss’ parents, powerful though they were, were helpless when it came to combating her tantrums. They did whatever she wanted. And what she wanted was to destroy me.

  Chapter 1

  I looked over at Clariss’ cold, proud face. She had aged – I noticed that right away. I remembered her as a lithe, lovely girl of sixteen, her haughty imperiousness still budding; her legs growing longer, her skirt growing ever shorter. But the woman I saw before me was no adolescent girl. She was an adult. She was a young adult in her early 20s.

  For an instant, I was shocked. What had happened to Clariss? But then it hit me. Clariss had gotten older – just as I had. Time in Feyland often seemed so strange and moribund: with the twin suns of Feyland gone, we hadn’t been able to tell one day from another. But at least two must have gone by since I had first entered Feyland, first gone Beyond the Crystal River. But Clariss looked even older than that – she must have been twenty-three or older. I remembered what Kian had told me – “time in Feyland works differently than time in the mortal world.” Only a few years had gone by in Feyland – but back in the mortal world, time must have rushed by. The people I knew in high school would likely have grown up, graduated, gotten jobs, married. And as I looked down into Clariss’ face, the full force of those years struck me.

  I wasn’t a kid anymore. I wasn’t a child, easily reduced to tears by Clariss’ adolescent jests. This was something bigger than that. A cheerleader’s torments couldn’t’ frighten me any longer. I had grown past those days – forgotten Clariss and the cruelty she inflicted on me. I had bigger problems to worry about. But Clariss hadn’t changed. She had gotten older, to be sure – her girlish charms had vanished and a more womanly beauty had taken their place. But in her eyes I could detect the same jealous glare, the same malicious glint in her gaze. Nothing had changed for Clariss – that much was clear. She still hated me as much as ever. She still looked at me with disdain so powerful it could have shrivelled up the grass on the plains of Feyland.

  No, nothing had changed for Clariss – until this moment. Until now.

  “Who would have thought…” Clariss was smiling wickedly, “that it would end up like this, eh Treena? Who would have thought that we’d meet again like this?”

  Had the Sorceress possessed Clariss? I turned to Kian and Logan, who were staring at Clariss with shock on their faces. I gritted my teeth. I may not have liked Clariss, but if she had been possessed by the sorceress, she was probably in as much danger as I was.

  “Listen, Clariss…” words failed me. I looked up in confusion. What was Clariss even doing here? It wasn’t safe for a mortal like her – I knew that much. “Clariss, do you even know where you are? Are you okay?” My voice was slow, full of trepidation, as if I were calling to a kitten up a tree.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Treena, of course I know where I am.” Clariss gave a snort. “A place only someone like you would dare to dream up, I’m sure. Feyland.” She scoffed. “I should have figured it out years ago – that you were one of them. It was so obvious, in retrospect. I knew there was some reason I hated you.”

  Logan cleared his throat loudly, stepping forward. His broad shoulders stood squarely between me and Clariss. His face was filled with shock. “Clariss – do you know who you are?” He turned back towards me. “The Sorceress might not have taken over – she might have some part of her…”

  “I know who I am!” snapped Clariss. “Clariss Dickens.”

  Logan’s voice was soft and gentle – even caressing. Something about his calm, familiar voice made the tension in my stomach dissipate. “Then you know you don’t want to be here, Clariss. You know this isn’t the place for you. You’ve got to fight whatever it is that’s controlling you, Clariss. You have to fight it.”

  “Oh, Logan,” Clariss rolled her eyes. “Logan, Logan, Logan. You’re always so noble – always so chivalrous. You always were so blind – you only ever had eyes for that ridiculous, gangly, skinny…” she didn’t even bother to identify me by name. “Haven’t you figured it out, Logan? I do want to be here. I want here.” She looked around over the horizon of Feyland. “I want this.” Her eyes shone with anger and terrifying power.

  “This?”

  “Feyland,” spat Clariss through gritted teeth. “All of it. The power. The rivers. The mountai
ns. The forests. Winter and Summer. It’s mine.”

  Logan looked concerned. “You can’t possibly want this, Clariss,” he said, reaching out to her. “It isn’t yours. It isn’t anybody’s. It doesn’t belong to you – but rather to the people of Feyland.”

  Clariss gave a seductive pout, her dark eyes fixating on Logan’s face. “And is that what you say to Treena when she plays Queen over this whole realm? Do you tell her to stop playing her fairy-tale games?”

  “It’s Breena, actually,” I was trying to keep my cool. I wasn’t going to let my high school bully get between me and my kingdom. But I couldn’t deny that Clariss’ words needled in my heart, bringing back memories of the pain I had faced. “And you are in my kingdom now, Clariss. I recommend you go back where you came from – and quickly, too. You don’t want to cause trouble here, Clariss. Not in my place. Keep Gregory for yourself and your family. Build whatever strip malls you please. But you are not welcome here.”