“No,” June said. “I dozed off. The house was cold, but I couldn’t focus, and my heart was beating funny.”
“And,” I said, “All the blood that your body withdrew from your extremities went rushing back, trying to rescue them. A sudden, painful warmth.”
But she didn’t hear me. Not really.
“What are you talking about?” Rose asked.
“I read about it, after hearing a joke once. About some idiot sitting naked in a snowbank. Dying by cold, you experience an intense rush of warmth in the end. June was never burned, exactly. She was in the last stages of freezing to death.”
“It wasn’t the heat, June,” Rose echoed me. “It wasn’t your fault. What you were feeling, what you’re feeling now… it was only the cold.”
“I’m burning.”
I could feel the heat again, but it was somehow diminished.
“You’re freezing, not burning,” Rose said. “You’re listening to me, right? You’re hearing me on some level, I think. Listen, it’s only the cold.”
“It’s so very cold,” June said. But she was in a state of dress matching the scene where she’d been burning before.
“It’s not your fault,” Rose said. “It’s only the cold. Will you make a deal with us?”
“It’s so very cold,” June said.
“If you agree, I guarantee you my partner in the circle right there will keep you warm as best as he can.”
June flickered, writhing in agony for mere heartbeats, limbs flailing, cold-blackened fingers clutching for relief from somewhere, anywhere.
Then she was standing again. “I don’t want to fight all the time.”
“I have no reason to fight with you,” I said, uselessly.
“He’s not a bad guy,” Rose said. “His heart is in the right place.”
“I don’t want to fight all the time,” June echoed herself. Not taking it in.
Rose said other things, trying to convince June, but it only got the same replies over and over again. While I listened, my mind ran through the conversation. The unhappy wife, walking home. The cold, her body failing her…
What would stick with her? With everything but this one scene stripped away?
“Ask her if she daydreamed about other men, while she was walking home,” I said. “Other husbands she might find, after she left the current one. Refer to it in the present tense.”
Rose considered, then said. “Listen, June. Are you fantasizing about the men you might marry?”
“Yes. I can imagine being held. Being warm. But then I feel the cold again.”
“When you’re imagining being with those men,” Rose said. “Do you imagine you’re fighting all the time?”
“No. I can imagine being held. Being warm.”
“If you agree to help, my friend can hold you. Keep you warm. And you don’t have to fight all the time.”
There was no reply. June was only standing there, flickering.
I wasn’t feeling any cold except the ordinary cold of winter.
My heart was pounding, my hands throbbing.
I stepped beyond the bounds of the circle.
Still, I didn’t feel the cold.
I reached out, arms extended.
“Blake,” Rose said. “No.”
I stopped.
“If you do that, you might resolve the dilemma, cancel out the impression. She isn’t aware enough to fight against that and keep her end of the bargain by helping us.”
“What’s the alternative?” I asked.
“The alternative is giving her a vessel to reside in. You can fulfill the bargain. Keep that vessel warm, and she helps us.”
“So… she keeps suffering?” I asked.
“She is suffering,” Rose said. “As in, that thing you’re looking at is an embodiment of a moment of suffering. What you see there is all there is. The real June went on to the afterlife. This is an emotional event that hit the world hard enough to make a dent shaped like ‘dying of hypothermia’. If you take away the suffering, there’s going to be absolutely nothing there. And maybe the balance of the world is a little better off, things are a little nicer without this memory of one bad moment wandering around the woods, but we aren’t any better off.”
I looked at June. Despondent, shivering.
“It feels wrong,” I said.
“Yeah,” Rose said. “But it’s necessary, and whatever else it might look like, you’re not hurting it. It’s not even a person. Just… an impression.”
“I’m having trouble buying that.”
“Why? Because it looks like a damsel in distress?”
“Because it is a ghost, only one step removed from being a vestige, remember?” I asked. My tone of voice might have been a little too harsh.
In the silence that followed, I shivered violently, my teeth chattering together briefly.
When Rose replied, her tone of voice had changed. “I think it’s nicer, accepting this deal, instead of just canceling her out. You can hold her and keep her warm, and except for the moments we need her to be a spectre of hypothermia, she can exist as that one fragment of a memory where she daydreamed about a man holding her.”
“Okay,” I said. “I can buy that.”
I searched my person, but there wasn’t anything I could really use. I didn’t want her to imbue the keys I’d chosen before, rescued from the bowl I’d used for the awakening ritual. I didn’t have much else, besides spare chain and the mirror around my neck.
Looking down, I saw the hatchet beside the bag. I picked it up.
“I hope he’s chopped enough wood for the fire,” June murmured behind me, barely audible.
As I turned around, she disappeared, and something hit the hatchet.
My already numb fingers froze as cold creeped up the handle. In the span of one or two seconds, they became so stiff I couldn’t open them to drop the hatchet.
“Done,” I said. “Inside, now.”
“It’s a little more complex,” Rose said. “If we-”
“I’m going to be a ghost soon if we don’t get inside,” I said. I grabbed the bat, stuffed book and salt into the bag, and looped it over one shoulder.
“If she gets loose inside the house, sanctuary won’t help us.”
“We wrangled her once,” I said, heading for the door. “We only need to keep her content, right?”
“We need to bind the axe with something.”
“Hatchet, and we will. Inside,” I said. I unzipped my jacket and slid the hatchet underneath, so it sat between my coat and my sweatshirt. I held it there, stiff fingers still gripping the wooden handle. “Better, June?”
The cold didn’t feel as intense as it had.
“Good,” I said. To Rose, I said, “Inside.”
I made my way indoors.
The cold in the hatchet was noticeable, but growing less intense by the second.
“We’ll need a way to inscribe the handle, or she can leave any time she feels like it, and she’s liable to go out in one big intense shot of cold the moment you hit something,” Rose said, as I made my way into the hallway.
“That could be useful,” I said.
“It would almost definitely kill you,” Rose said.
“Less useful,” I replied.
“You could have chosen a better tool. That handle looks like some kind of textured rubber, and I don’t know how we’re going to engrave anything into the steel, either. ”