Elizabeth Frostwyn's Arc

Chapter 3 of 4

Elijah crouched over the frozen spiders with a knife. He pried one off the stone and turned it in the light. Elizabeth watched from the bench. Every minute they wasted on the corpses was a minute the woman who sent them walked free. She might already be circling back with something worse. "I need to see where she stood," Elizabeth said. "Outside. Before the trail cools." Elijah looked up. "You said you saw her from the trees." "I saw her leave. I didn't see her come." Elizabeth stood. "Ice keeps a print longer than dirt does. If she stepped anywhere damp, I can pull her weight, her stride. Maybe her scent." He considered her. Then he opened the door. Outside, the afternoon had gone gray. The stone steps curved down past the small round windows of his home. Elizabeth knelt at the base of the door and set her palm flat on the threshold. Cold spread from her fingers into the stone. Frost bloomed in a slow ring. A boot print lifted from the grain, shallow, narrow at the heel. "Small foot," Elizabeth said. "Light. She wasn't carrying the hat far." She followed the prints down the steps. Elijah walked behind her. The trail curved off the path and into the trees, and she pulled frost up as she went, printing each step in pale white. Six paces in, the tracks stopped at the base of a lamp post. A navy iron post with a pink star burning at the crown. Rose light pooled on the ground. Elizabeth stared. "This wasn't here yesterday." A bench sat beside the post. Rose quartz, polished smooth. On the bench lay a folded square of blue ribbon. The same blue she had described from the trees. She reached for it. Elijah caught her wrist. "Don't," he said. She let her hand drop. He picked the ribbon up himself. A single hair was caught in the fold. Long. Dark. And under the ribbon, pressed into the quartz by something warm, a name had been scratched in a quick hand. Gretel. Elizabeth felt the cold leave her fingers. She knew the name. Everyone in the woods knew it. The child Elijah had claimed as his own in Vale. The one he'd hidden for three nights at a place that forgot faces. "She knows about the girl," Elizabeth said. Elijah's face did not move. His hand closed on the ribbon until his knuckles went white. "She wants me to come to her," he said. "Then don't. Not yet. I can hold the trail from here. I can find her before she finds the child." He looked at Elizabeth for a long moment. Something shifted behind his red eyes. Not warmth. Use. "Track her," he said. "I'll go to Gretel." He was gone between one breath and the next. Elizabeth stood alone under the rose light with a stranger's hair in her hand, and a hunt of her own.