Frostbitten Hearts

The phone buzzed against the nightstand at 2:47 a.m. I know the exact time because I'd been staring at the ceiling for three hours, counting the water stains that spread across it like continents on a map I couldn't read.

Conner's name lit up the screen.

I didn't answer. Not the first time. Not the second. By the fourth call, I'd pulled the blanket over my head and pressed the pillow against my ears, which is a childish thing to do when you're twenty-three and living in a converted warehouse in Brooklyn with three roommates and a cat that hates you. But I did it anyway.

The fifth call was from Cassie.

That one I answered.

"Elsa." Her voice cracked on my name, and I sat up so fast my head spun. Cassie Sandsmark didn't crack. She was the kind of person who walked through walls because doors were beneath her. "Elsa, have you heard from him?"

"Who?"

"Conner. He's gone. He just. He left. After the thing with M'gann, he packed a bag and he walked out and nobody's seen him since yesterday afternoon."

I flicked on the lamp. The bulb buzzed, flickered, then settled into a low orange glow that made everything in my room look like it was underwater. "What thing with M'gann?"

Silence. The kind of silence that has weight, that presses against your ear like a hand.

"Cassie."

"There was a fight," she said. "At the tower. A bad one. M'gann said some things, and Conner, you know how he gets. He doesn't yell. He just goes quiet. And then he was gone."

I was already pulling on jeans with one hand, phone wedged between my ear and shoulder. "Where's M'gann now?"

"Hospital."

I stopped. One leg in, one leg out. "What?"

"She's fine. Physically. She's fine. But she won't talk to anyone. She just sits there and stares at the wall and sometimes she cries and sometimes she laughs and it's. It's not good, Elsa."

The thing about being the person everyone calls when things fall apart is that you never get to fall apart yourself. You get to be the steady voice on the other end of the line. You get to drive across the city at three in the morning because your best friend's girlfriend had a breakdown and your other best friend disappeared and somehow you're the only one who can hold all the pieces without cutting yourself.

Or at least, that's what everyone thinks.

I grabbed my keys from the hook by the door. The cat watched me from the windowsill, yellow eyes half-lidded with judgment. I flipped him off. He didn't care.

The drive to the tower took twenty minutes. I could have made it in ten, but I hit every red light between Brooklyn and Manhattan, which felt like the universe's way of telling me to slow down, to think, to consider whether I actually wanted to walk into whatever mess was waiting for me on the other side of those doors.

I didn't. But I went anyway.

The tower's common room looked like a bomb had gone off. Not literally. No shattered glass, no scorch marks on the walls. But the couch was overturned, cushions scattered across the floor like fallen soldiers. A lamp lay in pieces near the kitchen counter. Someone had punched a hole in the drywall near the hallway, and someone else had tried to cover it with a poster of a cat hanging from a branch. The poster was crooked. Everything was crooked.

Tim was sitting on the floor with his back against the overturned couch, laptop open on his knees. He looked up when I walked in, and his face did that thing it always does when he's trying to decide whether to tell you the truth or a version of it that won't make you panic.

"Don't," I said. "Just tell me."

"M'gann's in the med bay. Bart's with her. She hasn't spoken in six hours. Conner's phone is off. His tracker's disabled. He's not at any of his usual spots."

"And the fight?"

Tim closed his laptop. "I wasn't here. I got the story secondhand from Bart, who got it from Gar, who was actually in the room. So take this with a grain of salt."

"Tim."

"Conner and M'gann have been fighting for weeks. You know that. Everyone knows that. But this time it was different. M'gann said something about the two of them, about how Conner's always been in love with someone else, and Conner. He didn't deny it."

The room tilted. Or maybe that was just me, swaying on my feet after too many hours without sleep and not enough food and the sudden, horrible understanding of what Tim wasn't saying.

"Who?" I asked, though I already knew. I'd known for years. Everyone had known for years, except apparently M'gann, who had spent the last three years building a life with a man who was only ever half hers.

Tim didn't answer. He didn't have to.

The med bay was cold. That was the first thing I noticed, the way the air hit my skin like a slap. The second thing was M'gann, curled on her side on one of the beds, her green skin pale and waxy under the fluorescent lights. Bart sat in a chair beside her, vibrating with the effort of staying still. He looked up when I entered, and his eyes were red-rimmed and tired in a way that made him look older than he was.

"She won't talk to me," he said. "She won't talk to anyone. She just keeps saying his name. Over and over. 'Conner, Conner, Conner.' Like a broken record."

I pulled up a chair on the other side of the bed. M'gann's eyes were open, but they weren't seeing anything. Not me, not Bart, not the room. Just something inside her own head that I couldn't reach.

"M'gann," I said. "It's Elsa. Can you hear me?"

Nothing.

I reached out and took her hand. Her fingers were cold, and they didn't curl around mine the way they usually did. They just lay there, limp and still, like she'd already left and her body was just waiting to catch up.

"I'm going to find him," I said. "I'm going to find him and I'm going to bring him back, and then you two are going to talk. Really talk. Not the kind of talking you've been doing, where you say words but don't mean them. The real kind. The kind that hurts."

Still nothing. But I thought I saw something flicker behind her eyes. A recognition, maybe. Or maybe just a reflection of the light.

I stayed until dawn. Bart fell asleep in his chair, his head lolled back at an angle that couldn't have been comfortable. M'gann's breathing evened out around 5 a.m., and I slipped my hand free from hers and stood up, my joints popping like an old woman's.

Tim was still in the common room when I walked out. He'd righted the couch, at least, and picked up the cushions. The poster of the cat was still crooked.

"I checked his apartment," Tim said. "His stuff's still there. Clothes, books, that stupid cereal he likes that nobody else eats. He didn't pack anything."

"Then where did he go?"

"I don't know. But I have a theory."

He didn't say it. He didn't have to. We both knew where Conner would go when he needed to think, when he needed to be somewhere that didn't remind him of everything he was trying to escape.

Burgess, Pennsylvania. Population 3,412. A small town in the middle of nowhere, where the winters were long and the people were friendly and nobody asked too many questions about the guy with the black hair and the blue eyes who showed up every few months and never stayed longer than a week.

I'd never been there. But I knew about it. Everyone knew about it. It was where Conner went when he needed to remember who he was before he became a hero, before he became a symbol, before he became a weapon in a war that never seemed to end.

And it was where Jack Frost lived.

I'd met Jack once. At a party, two years ago, back when things were simpler. Back when Conner and M'gann were still happy and I was still pretending I didn't notice the way Conner looked at me when he thought no one was watching. Jack had been. Different. That's the only word I can think of. He was all sharp angles and sharp smiles, white hair and blue eyes that seemed to look right through you, like he could see every secret you'd ever tried to hide.

He'd called me "Ice Queen" and I'd called him an asshole and we'd spent the rest of the night ignoring each other from opposite sides of the room. I hadn't thought about him since.

Until now.

"I'll go," I said.

Tim looked at me. "Are you sure?"

"No. But someone has to."

I walked out of the tower as the sun was coming up, painting the sky in shades of pink and orange that made the city look almost beautiful. Almost. I got in my car and plugged Burgess into the GPS and tried not to think about what I was going to say when I found him.

Or what I was going to do when I saw Jack again.

The drive was six hours. I stopped twice for coffee and once for gas and spent the whole time rehearsing conversations in my head that I knew would never happen the way I planned them. Conner would be angry. Or worse, he'd be quiet, that terrible quiet that meant he'd already decided something and nothing I said would change his mind.

And Jack. Jack would be there, because of course he would. He was always there, in the background of Conner's life, a shadow that never quite faded. I didn't know what their deal was. Nobody did. But I knew it was complicated, and I knew it was old, and I knew that whatever was between them had been there long before M'gann, long before me, long before any of us.

I pulled into Burgess at 2 p.m. The town was exactly what I expected: small houses with picket fences, a main street with a diner and a hardware store and a library that looked like it hadn't been updated since the 1950s. Snow dusted the ground, even though it was April. Of course it did.

I parked in front of the diner and sat there for a long time, watching my breath fog up the windshield. I thought about turning around. I thought about driving back to New York and pretending I'd never come. I thought about all the ways this could go wrong.

Then I got out of the car and walked into the diner, because that's what you do when your best friend is falling apart and the only person who might know where he is happens to be the one person you never wanted to see again.

Jack was sitting in a booth near the window, a cup of coffee in front of him and a smirk on his face that made me want to punch him.

"Took you long enough," he said. "I was starting to think you'd gotten lost."

I sat down across from him. "Where is he?"

"Hello to you too, Ice Queen."

"Jack."

He leaned back, stretching his arms along the top of the booth. He looked exactly the same as I remembered: white hair, sharp jaw, eyes the color of a winter sky. He looked like trouble. He looked like the kind of person who'd break your heart and then act surprised when you blamed him for it.

"He's at my place," Jack said. "Been there since yesterday. Won't talk, won't eat, won't do anything except stare at the wall and look tragic."

"Take me to him."

"Why?"

The question caught me off guard. "What do you mean, why?"

"I mean, why do you care? He's not your boyfriend. He's not your responsibility. So why did you drive six hours to a town you've never been to, looking for a guy who's probably not going to want to see you?"

I didn't have an answer. Or rather, I had too many answers, and none of them were things I wanted to say out loud. Because he's my friend. Because I love him. Because I've spent years watching him make bad choices and I'm tired of standing on the sidelines. Because I know what it's like to be in love with someone who doesn't love you back.

"Just take me to him," I said.

Jack studied me for a long moment. Then he smiled, and it was different from the smirk. Softer, somehow. Like he'd just figured something out.

"Okay," he said. "But you're buying me dinner after. I want to hear all about how you got roped into this mess."

He stood up and grabbed his jacket from the back of the booth. I followed him out into the cold, and I didn't know it yet, but that was the moment everything changed. That was the moment the pieces started falling, one by one, into a pattern I couldn't see yet.

But I would. Sooner than I wanted.