Chapter 28 Beneath The Ice

• The cold had grown vicious.
• Not the biting chill of ordinary winter nights, but something deeper, older — the kind of cold that sank past skin, past flesh, and wrapped its fingers around bone. It carried weight now. Each breath scraped Lucy’s lungs like ice-dulled glass.
• She noticed it first when she stepped outside with a pot of boiling water, planning to use it to melt the ice off a storage latch. Distracted by one of the foxes pawing at the storeroom door, she left the pot on the back step. When she returned ten minutes later, the water was gone — replaced by a solid disk of ice, cracks threading the surface like fragile veins of glass.