Ashes and Ice Read online

  Table of Contents

  ASHES AND ICE

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  ASHES AND ICE

  Rochelle Maya Callen

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2013 (Rochelle Maya Callen and C&C Legacy Publishing)

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  C&C Legacy Publishing

  Montpelier, MD

  Visit the author’s website at www.rochellemayacallen.com.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9882042-4-9

  Book Cover Design by Damonza.com

  Interior Design by Benjamin Carrancho

  Editing by Annetta Ribken and Jennifer Wingard

  First Edition: (February 4, 2013)

  Dedication

  For my sister and best friend, Martina, her faith, spirit and laughter keep me grounded and keep me smiling. Her twinkling brown eyes remind me that miracles are possible.

  For my mother, Erin, who is my hero in all ways. She took the broken pieces of our lives and made a masterpiece. Her strength was our fortress. She gave me wings when I was afraid to fly into the wide open sky.

  For my daughter, Juliette, who is my sunshine. She is my life, my joy. Her existence challenges me to be better than who I am and to soar and dance in the moonlight, because I hope that one day she will reach for her dreams and dance with me.

  I love you.

  The stars are ours.

  Chapter 1

  Jade

  The girl’s glassy, dead eyes stare into me, through me, pierce me with a fierce urgency, with a wicked accusation. The blood is still on my hands.

  Red hair, blue eyes, a constellation of freckles on pale skin. She was fragile and innocent, a lovely thing. That is what I think until I see the gashes on her wrists and throat. With her blood spilling out, she looks delicious. She’s mine. Possessiveness shocks me, stabs into me. I run, tearing away from a craving I don’t understand.

  Breathless, I grit my teeth and run harder, faster.

  My feet pound against the earth, away from the lifeless body and toward the lights of the city lingering on the horizon. Rot and death linger in my nostrils. Unscarred skin stretches taut over my freezing bones. Echoes of an empty memory reverberate in my mind, taunting me. The ice chases me, clutches me, and bites at my heels, sending shivers up my spine. The ice wants me back, but I run forward, toward the lights, toward the heat, toward a world that burns me, because I have no other choice.

  The lights are so close. Heat scalds my skin.

  Images race through my mind, paralyzing me. I skid to a stop, my boots digging into the mud. The vision’s blurred edges materialize into solid shapes.

  I gasp.

  A new horror rakes my insides. Desperation propels me forward; the pictures nagging at my seams threaten to tear me apart.

  Scorching fire licks over my skin. In my vision, I contort like a vile, ugly creature, eyes as black as decay. My frame hunches over the small, dead girl, like a demon looming over a defenseless child. Her blood drips from my mouth.

  I lick my lips and taste only salty sweat.

  I run, desperate to trample the vision under my feet, to crush it deep into the ground.

  I refuse to believe the image, refuse to acknowledge the monster within me demanding to be unleashed—and the possibility it has already been unbound. An unrelenting tide of fear washes over me. Past the denial, the fear, and the hope, I think I can still taste her.

  The cold stillness inside me cracks open just as the lights of the city slam into me.

  Chapter 2

  Connor

  Tears burn. I never realized it before, but they do. Tears reach down my throat and settle in my gut until the pain cripples me. I clutch my stomach as I look into the casket. His face doesn’t even look the same. Bloated like a Mardi Gras float, discolored like a mannequin. This isn’t my father.

  But it is.

  If I have learned anything in my short life, it is this: funerals are bullshit. People dress in carefully pressed black suits. Parents give me “meaningful” nods as if that could ease the grief. It doesn’t.

  Then there are the kids from school, the ones dragged along by their parents. People drag their kids along as if filling the church was a necessary thing. As if the more pews filled somehow expedite the dead’s trip to heaven. I doubt it does. Maybe some of the girls went shopping to buy just the right outfit so their cleavage to respectability ratio was just right, or their ass to waist ratio was cinched properly.

  People sit in the pews dressed in their finest let’s-go-pay-our-respects-to-the-dead-guy-we-never-knew wear, smacking the gum in their mouths, cupping cellphones so they can LOL any comment buzzing in, and drumming their fingers because the pastor is going on too long. All they want to do is go home, sneak in a make-out session with their girlfriends, eat their dinners, and maybe catch a 7 o’clock movie.

  I hate these kids. The ones who stare at me, roll their eyes, and yawn. The ones who trip me at school and slam me into lockers. The ones who sit in a pew, contributing to the headcount, while I sit up here in front, holding back the tears fighting to make their appearance. I swallow them down. I won’t cry. Not here. Not with these people.

  Dad’s funeral should be an empty church with mom, his three brothers, and me. It should be the five of us having a messy, sloppy, sobbing affair where we cling to each other because we are all we have left. The marble floors should be slick with our tears. It isn’t. We sit here, straight backed, completely composed as if death is just a passing expiration date and our small, insignificant world has not been split open and left gaping.

  ***

  I’m in my room, staring at the ceiling. The funeral service was hours ago.

  The h
ouse feels empty and cold. I hear a stifled whimper from down the hall.

  Mom.

  Probably crying into a pillow so the house can’t hear, but it can. It seems unfair she can’t wail aloud, so loud the house’s hundred-year-old studs tremble.

  She doesn’t. I don’t either. We cry in our own rooms, remembering a man who will never be here again.

  The house creaks. Maybe it feels the weight of our grief, maybe the floorboards are buckling because the burden is too heavy.

  I ache, desperate to forget the long battle with cancer, the blood sputtering out of his mouth with his last words—what where they? I can’t remember because the fear in his eyes overshadowed anything he said. Now the loss. I don’t want to feel this loss. Some divine entity has taken dull scissors and cut out a piece of my life and now I have jagged scars to remind me I lost too much. Too much.

  I want to forget, because it hurts to remember.

  I bury my head in the pillow, hoping to suffocate the memories, to choke out the pain.

  Chapter 3

  Jade

  I have no breath left.

  I tumble forward, my palms scraping the hard pavement. I look at them, scratched and bloody. Pain throbs in the center of my hands. Then the throb dulls and the blood and cut skin heal, leaving soft, flawless flesh. I hate these hands. I don’t gasp, because I have seen it before and it always feels just as unnatural.

  A scramble of noise, lights, and laughter scuffle around me. I pull myself up, feeling claustrophobic standing amidst concrete, people, and noise.

  “You okay?”

  I snap my head toward the tinkling voice. A girl with too-blonde hair, ruby red lips, and silver hoops lining her earlobes and eyebrows stares at me, brow furrowed.

  Stepping back, I stare at her and itch to run away. I swallow hard. She blinks at me, waiting.

  BEEEEEEEEEEEP! Two bright lights screech towards me. I freeze, eyes transfixed on the shining orbs screaming toward me. My mouth gapes open just as I am yanked out of the beast’s way. My sharp inhale sticks in my throat and I forget to let it out.

  “What the hell are you thinking? You can’t just stand in the road and wait for a car to flatten you!”

  Car. The wheeled, zippy, bright-eyed beasts are cars. I stare toward the street where cars roll past each other. I cock my head to the side, a memory shifting in and out of place. Wagons? Horses? Wheels?

  “Hellllllooooooo?”

  I blink, then shift my weight and gaze back to the oddly shiny, silvery girl.

  Her bright lips tip into a lopsided grin. “So what look are you going for? Medieval pirate?” She scans me head to toe. “Because you nailed it.”

  Confused, I open my mouth to speak, eyeing her neck-to-ankle black dress and the strange collar of spikes around her throat. Before a sound escapes me, she leans out, grabs my wrist, and drags me back into the darkness of the store behind her.

  Her hand is warm, so warm—not the scorching heat I felt a few moments ago and not the icy chill I usually feel—just warm. It feels…comforting. Being touched makes me feel uneasy though, and I am relieved when she lets go.

  The music from the store blares out with screaming and drums. I look at the racks of clothes and chains and strangely decorated tops. “We are totally your style.” She chimes, “but let me help you sex it up a bit.”

  I crinkle my nose. This is all wrong. Ugly, dead things claw at the back of my mind. I blink them away, breathing in walls, living people, sweat, and energy. So different from the woods I wandered for so long.

  The girl’s bright, odd face looks back at me, grinning. “Well, c’mon!” She motions for me to move further into the store. I step forward, really unsure what else I should do.

  “You are so beautiful!” She says as she drapes some pieces of fabric over my shoulder and into my arms. “Oh, oh, oh!” She leaned over and picked up a pair of tall leather boots. “Oh yeah, definitely. You. Have. To. Wear. These.”

  I am surprised how she can make a sentence break up into individual pieces. I stare at the boots—sleek, new, and black. Then I eye my own: muddy, worn, and brown. “I—I don’t know. Maybe I should leave…” But I have nowhere to go.

  “Nonsense.” She said. “You are in desperate need of a makeover; otherwise, some renaissance festival is going to snatch you up.”

  She doesn’t make much sense to me, but I don’t want to argue and show just how ignorant I am. How lost and unsure.

  When we walk back into a tiny room with a mirror and a hook, she leaves me there with a pile of clothes. I stand in the middle of the room, staring at a piece of netting in my hand. The holes are too big and the weave is too weak to catch anything. I poke my fingers through and frown as I realize pulling at them only make the nets look like gloves.

  “You almost done in there?”

  I jerk upright, my arms tangled in the two long pieces of netting. “I… I. No. What do I do with these?”

  I wait for the door to open. When she enters, she laughs so hard a bit of spit smacks my cheek. I flinch back and wipe my face on my shoulder, my hands still otherwise occupied with the net.

  “Whaaaat are you doing?” She says and starts to peel the netting off my arms. “These are fishnet stockings. How do you not know what to do with these? Half the girls out there are wearing them.”

  I don’t want to tell her the only girl I have ever seen other than her was dead in the mud, bleeding out of slashes all over her body. I don’t want to say I remember the smell of her skin and the vacant look of her eyes.

  “Will you show me?” I ask.

  She rolls her eyes, but smiles. “Well, before I come in here and help you put on stockings, we may as well introduce ourselves properly. My name is Clara. What’s yours?”

  The question stabs me. What is my name? I try to reach back, to grasp at something, anything.

  I think back to that first day, the first day of my everything, the first day I remember. I woke up ruined—aching, raw, and empty. The sun burned through my eyelids. My fingers grasped at the soft grass beneath me. It was familiar and comforting, anchoring me to the earth when the rest of the world blinded me with stark yellow.

  I laid there awhile and slowly, very slowly, I began to see the world—-and myself—-for the first time. I propped up on my elbows, looking at my body sprawled on the grass of the forest floor. I felt like some new and empty thing, without any knowledge beyond the moment before my eyes fluttered open, but there I was: not naked and new, but worn and dirty, with a long, leather coat that tapered close to my waist and flared out over fitted cloth britches and leather boots. I knew what all of these clothes were as though I somehow remembered putting them on in front of a mirror. The feeling was vague and fleeting as were so many others tethered precariously in my head, drifting far out in the tide of my memory, but also desperately holding on. I tried to reel them in, but as hard as I pulled, as hard as I concentrated, the thoughts floated away.

  The only memory that ever crystallized was of an old man. I clung to it, replayed it in my mind over and over, struggling to grasp at a second more after the image faded, but I couldn’t. This memory remained exactly the same.

  “Look at this child with jade eyes,” the old man pinched my chin with calloused, wrinkled fingers. He peered down his nose with eyes creased by smile lines and a brow etched from years of deep contemplation. “Jade eyes are heavenly.”

  His age was even more apparent in the rough growl of his voice, yet it soothed me like the waterfall whose crash on the rocks roars and yet is serene. His eyes continued to search my own, “But a jaded soul will fall into darkness.” He locked his gaze upon my face as if he was studying an unknown creature. “My little Jade, guard your spirit,” he whispered a warning. He parted his lips to speak, but shook his head and said no more. He turned and reluctantly took a step toward the alley.

  I stared after him. His words linger in my mind. I still felt the cold of his elderly hands where they caressed my cheek. His memory is the on
ly image that consoles me in my loneliness. His touch and gaze are the last physical contact I remember. Yet, even when I close my eyes and picture his withered face, I know he knew something that he refused to tell me. He was simply a curious soul looking into the secrets of the soulless. And yet I still loved him. He is all I know to love. Jade, as he called me, is the only name I know.

  This Clara girl is still watching me, waiting. “Jade.” I say, “My name is Jade.”

  Clara dresses me up for over an hour at the store and heaps the entire mass of clothes on the counter. She rings it up, smiles, then swipes a card through a beeping thing attached to another beeping thing. She pushes the heap across the counter toward me.

  “Take it!” She beams, “It should be illegal for a girl with legs like yours not to rock all the skirts and boots she wants. Besides, all the stuff in here is second hand.” She picked up one of the skirts, black and puffy with a little pink skull on it. “This skirt is three bucks. THREE BUCKS!” She shakes her head. “The stuff rich kids throw away is amazing. Randy, my boss, takes all this used stuff other people just throw out and sells it.”

  “I…” I know that she has done me a kindness, and this mound of fabric is being given to me, but I am not sure exactly what to say or even how to accept it. I am nervous, nervous about speaking, moving, thinking, about doing something wrong.

  Clara raises her eyebrow, “Well…”

  “Thank you.” The words are thin, fragile, but I mean them.

  “You’re welcome. Now listen, I need to close up. Where do you live?”

  I realize , even with me half-naked in a cubicle for over an hour, I have talked very little. This girl knows nothing about me, but with her eyes so open and honest, I wish I remember secrets I could tell her, because I think a girl as kind as her deserves to hear them.

  The dead girl’s glassy eyes and fiery hair whisper to me. I have a secret. One I won’t ever tell. Ever.