Cold Fire: A Paranormal Novel Read online

  For a long while, the clinking of eating utensils, the ticking of the clock, and the distant chatter of the television are the only sounds that fill the house. Family meals seem to be lacking a lot of the family these days. We sit and eat at the same table out of tradition and maybe out of hope—a last ditch effort to strengthen the bond of our family.

  I finish off my dinner quickly, eager to leave this gloomy void of a dining room behind, and head straight for my room. I take the stairs two at a time and although I know no one can see me, I feel as though every eye in Corven Lake is on my back. Even after I’ve slammed my bedroom door behind me and drawn the curtains, the feeling still won’t ease. It’s like every person in town has gathered in my bedroom and is standing over my bed, watching.

  I grip the sheets with my hands, skin prickling. No one knows, I tell myself. No one knows this is your fault.

  But even as I try to comfort myself, I know it’s a lie. They all know. And one day, Corven Lake is going to become like every other place I’ve lived in: frozen, dying, and full of hateful eyes haunting my every move.

  Chapter Two

  “I don’t understand. Why do you have to leave?”

  Her voice is in my mind before she appears: Sara, a friend from childhood, again pops up in my dream like a pale bubble from the murky depths of the sea. A tear forms at the edge of her eye and trails slowly down her small face. Her permanent smile is gone, and its absence is like a glitch in the universe. The frown twists her face uncomfortably, almost eerily, like a ragdoll whose smile has been cut and sewn back again the wrong way around.

  We’re in a barn on her family’s farm and outside the snow is falling lazily from the sky, drifting carelessly in the soft wind. I wrap my arms around my small five-year-old body as a gust of wind blows the flakes through the open doors. But I can’t really feel it: all the shivering is for show.

  “Mum says it’s too cold for me here,” I say. “She doesn’t like me playing in the snow.” It’s a lie, and a good one. I feel a swell of pride.

  “But we can wear jumpers,” Sara says softly, looking down at her bright pink joggers and tapping her toes together. She looks back up, a light in her eyes. “You can borrow mine!”

  I shake my head. “Jumpers don’t work on me.” Then I slip my small hand in Sara’s.

  She doesn’t hear me. “Don’t go.”

  A tear rolls down my cheek, my young heart breaking. “I’ll miss you too.”

  ***

  I wake to a grey dawn, my dream hanging foggily behind my eyelids. Before moving to this town, I hadn’t thought of Sara for years. She was the closest friend I had growing up and possibly have ever had since. And now she’s almost constantly present in my dreams, as though this place is dredging her up from the depths of my memory and saying, Look. Remember this? It makes me ache.

  I shiver when I feel the icy morning air on my skin and reach for the blanket, which fell off my bed in the middle of the night. I’m still groggy and barely half awake, so it’s only until I’m halfway into reaching for the covers that I realise what’s wrong with this scenario.

  Instantly I freeze, slowly turning my eyes on the open window. A light breeze drifts in and the sheer curtains lift and twist like two grasping hands. I’m cold. Again.

  Dread settles in around my heart. I throw back the covers and launch for the window, my entire body shaking—and not just from the cold. As I look out, my stomach lurches. The grey man is standing down on the street, looking up at me with his dead eyes.

  Horrified, I slam the window shut, stumbling back so quickly that I nearly trip over a stray shoe. My back hits the wall, my breath coming loud and fast. This isn’t real. I’m hallucinating. I have to be.

  In my panic, I miss the moment when the cold fades from the air. It’s not for another minute that I realise I’m once again numb to the wind brushing against my bare arms. When I return to the window, slowly and tentatively, the man is gone.

  I’m shaking as I go through my morning routine, fumbling with my hairbrush, tripping over my school skirt as I try to get dressed. I nearly fall down the stairs on my way to breakfast, catching myself last second with a hand on the wooden railing.

  In the dining room, Mum looks up long enough from her porridge to say good morning. I nod and silently move into the kitchen to make myself coffee, eyes on the window overlooking our backyard at every spare moment.

  “Are you alright?” she asks. “You look a little—” she searches for the right word “—worried.”

  “I’m fine.”

  But the kettle shakes in my grip as I’m pouring it, and boiling water splashes over the side, onto my thumb. I quickly wipe my hand on my clothes, but it still comes back red and scalded.

  It’s no worry. The day after I leaned on the stove as a kid, I discovered Side Effect Number Three. We’d taken off my bandages to change them, only to find my arm completely burn free, healed without a scar or any trace of my mishap. When we brought this to the attention of professionals, they called it accelerated healing. They then proceeded to scratch their balding heads and say, in their own verbose way, they were confused and wanted to run further tests. I was six and wasn’t excited by the prospect of more needles and CT scans, so I threw a fit. And that settled that.

  Dad’s put down his morning newspaper long enough to watch me make a mess in the kitchen. “You are not fine,” he says gruffly.

  Mum raises an eyebrow. “You’re going to clean that up, right?”

  “Yes, of course,” I say, and wipe the bench down with a hand towel.

  I finish making my coffee, then decide to pour it into a thermos to take with me.

  “Where are you going?” Mum’s tone is sharp and accusatory as I move back through the dining room.

  “Upstairs to finish getting ready.”

  “What about breakfast?”

  I round the corner, out of sight. “Don’t need it!”

  At the top of the stairs, I hear her reply, “Skipping breakfast isn’t going to slow it down!”

  ‘It’ meaning my disease. She’s right. Maybe that’s what I’m doing and maybe it isn’t. But I’ve been avoiding food since I was a kid, mainly because I hate how disappointing it always is. A steaming pasta dish is, for me, a wet bowl of unheated slop. Ice cream becomes slimy sugary mush. Sometimes I even question why I bother to heat my morning coffee since it’s about as a hot as a cup of tap water.

  I gather my things and leave the house by eight, ignoring my parents’ offer to drive me to school. The day is overcast, dry and extremely quiet. The air swirls around me every now and then, but other than that it remains still, like it’s tiptoeing through a sleeping house and pausing every few seconds when something moves.

  I walk quickly, eyes flicking this way and that, expecting to see the grey man waiting for me around every bend at the end of every street. My heart races and my palms are sticky. Why did I refuse my parents’ offer? The more I search the streets for the grey man, the more I wonder if it’s because I actually want to seek him out.

  But that would be ridiculous. Not to mention fucking dumb.

  Halfway into the walk, I notice a disturbance in the surrounding air and stop. The air is twisting and swirling around my body, dancing across my shoulders and down my arms. I think, Here we go.

  The air rushes inwards and my world explodes in blinding white heat.

  This is the thing about my disease. I can be immune to temperature and oblivious to pain for every second of every day, but as soon as I have a heat surge, all the rules go out the window. It’s a different kind of pain, experienced not physically but mentally. Even when it feels as though my organs are being boiled like eggs, they remain perfectly untouched.

  I squeeze my eyes shut as the burning sensation sweeps throughout my body. The heat scalds my skin, courses through my veins, and sets my organs on fire. My breathing comes fast and my heart seems to want to beat straight out of my chest. I feel my legs wobble and lean on a wall covered in the spi
dery skeleton of an ivy plant.

  It never lasts longer than thirty seconds, but it always feels like an hour—an hour in which every movement, every heartbeat, every agonizing second sends another torrent of fire racing throughout my body.

  The surge fades, and I release a breath. And I get on with my day.

  ***

  Southlake High is certainly not known for its charm. Being the southernmost school in Corven Lake, it attracts all the kids who weren’t fortunate enough or whose families weren’t rich enough to grow up on Corven’s desirable North End. Southlake itself is not a bad school, but it’s nowhere near pleasant to look at.

  The entire campus is ringed by a tall black fence of sharp steel pickets pointing menacingly at the clouds. Within the fence, the central building rises up out of the ground like an immemorial monolith—dirty, stained and rough around the edges, somewhat obscured with overgrown grass at its base. Even the school name, nailed to an arch above the front steps in large block letters, is rusty and caked in decades’ worth of dirt. The structure is a hulking prism, the centre cut out to create a hidden courtyard, and I sometimes think all it would need is an RIP stencilled over the front for it to become one oversized tombstone.

  Beyond the central building lies a large, grassy field, various dead gardens and barren trees, and two other smaller structures connected by covered pathways. They’re slightly nicer, seeing as they were built more recently, with brightly coloured trim and cleaner exteriors. But it doesn’t change the fact that entering the school feels a lot like walking into a cemetery.

  I’ve just passed through the front gates when someone rushes by. I feel our skin brush up against each other and immediately recoil. But the damage has already been done.

  A girl with sandy blonde hair and tanned skin curses as she comes to a halt before me. She sends a part-shocked, part-maddened look in my direction, and holds a hand to the spot where my arm touched her wrist.

  This is Side Effect Number Four. It involves the skin, namely, mine. But on some dreadful occasions, other people’s as well. As a consequence of my drastically low body temperature, my touch is burning cold. It’s not something I can notice—seeing as I lack a temperature gauge—but it’s painfully obvious whenever I accidentally make contact with another person’s skin. Mum still has scars on her hands from when I was a kid. We don’t talk about it.

  I quickly force out the first things that come to my mind, my words tumbling over each other in their haste to emerge from my mouth. “Oh my god, I’m sorry. I really didn’t mean to—I mean, I can’t help it, it’s just I’ve got—”

  I clamp my mouth shut, hating how pathetic I sound, like a child babbling excuses to a parent so they won’t get in trouble. Fuck this. I take a deep breath and force myself to look at her face, not at the consequences of Side Effect Number Four on her wrist. She’s pissed, with a good reason, but I’m not going to play the victim.

  “I’m sorry,” I repeat sincerely.

  She laughs and her voice shakes though I can’t tell if it’s from shock or anger or both. “Sure, whatever. It’s fine.”

  I step forward. “Are you sure? I can—”

  The girl lurches back. “Just stay away from me, freak!”

  Now all I can see is disgust, tugging down the edges of her mouth, wrinkling her nose, lowering her brows. She gives her wrist a shake. “And don’t you dare come near me again.”

  She turns sharply and stalks off.

  ***

  The dark-eyed boy is in my first period. I’m so shocked to see him there, seated casually in the second row that a couple of my books slip from my arms. I curse, bending over to collect them. How long has he been in my class? Why have I never noticed him before?

  When I stand back up, he’s looking at me again. I turn my eyes away and hurry to the back of the room, attempting to shake off his gaze.

  He’s in my third period as well. I watch him chatting and laughing from the back row, feeling confused and undeniably unnerved. I know with dead certainty that I’ve never seen him before. But he seems so well integrated, like he’s been here for years.

  At lunch, I’m seated under my favourite tree behind the central building. When it’s warm, it’s packed out here. Southlake’s students eager to soak up the rich sun. But now that we’re at the beginning of an early winter, the area is deserted. Everyone opting to sit in the courtyard or inside the school hall.

  I lean against the damp bark of the tree’s trunk. The wind toys gently with my hair, pushing it back from my face as I work through my math homework. Up above, the trees dead branches claw at the sky. Its gnarly bark twisting in a way that almost seems to yearn for the sky, for the stars, for a life away from this life. I feel a strange sympathy for it, planted away from the others, bare, alone and trapped within its own rough skin.

  From the corner of my eye, I can see a flash of light. I look right and spot it, half hidden behind a wilting rose bush: a white orb the size of a basketball, like the splotchy light leak of an old analogue camera. It moves in front of a tree and hovers a few inches above the ground, pulsing with a shimmery light, almost bright enough to blind. Then it swirls upward, tangling momentarily with the branches and shooting for the sky.

  Welcome to the Side Effect Number Five, the last: hallucinations. Because honestly, at this point, why not? My assortment of side effects is so bizarre, it’s almost as if life pinned a list of all known ailments to the wall and played a drunken game of darts to decide which I’d get.

  “Distracting, aren’t they?” startled, I drop my pen into my open math book. I flip around to find the same dark-eyed boy, pinning me down with his midnight gaze.

  A chill creeps down my spine. “I’m sorry?”

  “The spirits,” he says, taking slow steps forward. He stops a metre from where I’m leaning against the tree. “They’re distracting.”

  He’s messing with me. Okay, Melissa, play it cool. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I see. So you weren’t looking at that little floating light just now?”

  I can’t do anything but stare at him. He can see my hallucinations? This boy, who I’ve known for all of five seconds, has done the impossible and seen into my mind. It is impossible. He must have heard the rumours. He’s trying to trick me or scare me or mock me.

  I slowly become aware that he’s still waiting for a reply, but I’m short on words. It’s like the connection between my mouth and my mind has been severed. No matter how hard my brain tries to get it to move, to form letters and shapes, it won’t respond.

  Eventually, I guess he gets tired of waiting. “You’re Melissa Croft.”

  It’s a statement, not a question. He knows who I am and probably has for a while, and he wants me to know he knows. The worst part is, before yesterday afternoon, I wouldn’t have been able to tell him apart from any other dark-haired boy in the town. But he still would have known who I was. It’s unfair and unsettling. He holds all the information, and I’m left to pick up the crumbs.

  “I read a thing about you online,” he continues. There it is again: the wanting me to know he knows. And it’s all casual, as if that isn’t the creepiest thing he could have said. “You’re almost famous, you know? Like Corven Lake’s very own C-grade celeb.”

  My lips are glued firmly together. I’m still staring, and maybe if I were someone else, I would say I was starting to get a little creepy myself. But this dark-haired stranger has me confused, spooked, suspicious and a little annoyed all at once. If I open my mouth, who knows what will come out.

  The boy shifts from one foot to the other, looking uncomfortable for the first time. “You’re kind of giving me a deer-in-headlights vibe here. Have I said something wrong?”

  Has he said something wrong? Is he kidding? He’s switched gears, radiating an air of self-consciousness. Without any context, you’d be hard-pressed to prove it disingenuous. But given everything he just said and did, I don’t trust it at all.

  “How do
you know?” I ask him.

  “Well, for starters, it’s all over your face—”

  “No, I meant—” I release a breath, trying to cool my temper. “How do you know about the lights? Who told you?”

  He’s surprised. “No one’s told me anything.”

  “Then you’re lying. It’s impossible. You can’t see them.”

  “Oh yes, I can.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “You should.”

  “And why is that?”

  He takes a step closer. I instinctively push back against the tree as if I could melt through the bark. He’s like a dark cloud, blotting out the sun. If I could feel the cold, I would shiver. “Because they aren’t lights,” he tells me, his voice low, “they’re spirits.”

  His dark gaze is intense, his face serious. But this couldn’t possibly be anything other than one big joke. It’s decided—he’s a psychopath. I kick my math book off my lap and stumble up to my feet. “Who are you?”

  He extends his hand to me with a smile that changes the entire landscape of his face. His angular jaw relaxes, his brows unknit and lift, his dark eyes shine with warmth. In an instant, he’s gone from unsettling to friendly, from creepy to charming, and I don’t believe it for a second.

  “Caden Coleridge. It’s nice to meet you.”

  But I’m in no mood to be friendly. I momentarily consider shaking his hand, just to watch his skin burn. Call it karma for toying with me.

  After a couple seconds, Caden seems to realise his mistake and awkwardly withdraws his hand, bringing it up to casually scratch the back of his neck. It’s an act. I’m sure it is. And he does it well.