**CHAPTER THIRTY
“Blood on the Ice”**
The wind howled like a broken flute as Lukas followed Rasmus along the narrowing ridge. Snow ripped sideways through the air, turning the world into a frantic blur of white and shadow. The ridge beneath them groaned with each step — glacial ice stretched thin over a void they dared not look into.
“Stay light on your feet,” Rasmus called behind his wooden wolf mask. “She’s close.”
Lukas swallowed hard, his breath frosting in the air. “How do you know?”
Rasmus didn’t answer.
Because the answer came crawling out of the storm.
She emerged like a nightmare birthed from the ice itself — small, broken, wrong.
The Bauer girl.
Except the child she had been was gone.
Her limbs bent at impossible angles, fingers elongated by the parasite’s tendrils beneath her skin. Her spine shuddered, contorting like a marionette with too many strings being pulled at once.
Her eyes — milky white with a thin ring of silver — locked on Lukas.
She hissed his heat into the cold air.
“Lu—…kas…”
Lukas froze.
It was his sister’s voice. Perfect. High. Afraid.
“Don’t listen,” Rasmus growled. “That thing is not a child anymore.”
The Bauer girl twisted her head backward and forward in jerks, like two minds wrestling inside the same ruined body. Filaments writhed in her throat as she spoke again:
“Ma…ma… help…”
The sound cracked something inside Lukas.
He took a step forward before he realized he’d moved.
Rasmus grabbed his coat. “Boy—STOP.”
“She’s hurting,” Lukas whispered.
“She’s baiting. The hive is using her to catch you.”
The Bauer girl crawled closer, dragging one leg behind her with a sickening crunch. Her arms snapped straight, locking into a spider?like brace. Then her mouth opened—
too wide too far too hungry.
“Le…naaa…”
The name ripped across the ice like a blade.
Lukas gripped the axe hard enough his knuckles ached. “Get back.”
But she bounded forward with terrifying speed.
Lukas swung — missed by inches — and the girl scuttled past him with inhuman agility, claws clicking against the ice.
“MOVE!” Rasmus shouted.
They dove apart as she lunged between them, shrieking in a pitch that cracked ice beneath her hands. Lukas scrambled to his feet, breath burning, heart pounding.
She turned on him.
Her limbs jerked as she rose upright, wobbling, trembling, then steadying in a grotesque stance.
She mimicked Anna’s voice again.
“Come… here.”
Rasmus stepped in front of Lukas, holding two short knives in reverse grip. “If you hear your mother’s voice come out of anything in this valley, you run. Or you kill it.”
“I’m not leaving her,” Lukas said.
“You might not get the choice.”
The Bauer girl screeched and lunged at Rasmus. Her claws slashed across his coat; the sound of tearing fur echoed down the ridge. He twisted, sank one blade into her shoulder.
Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.
No blood came out.
Only a burst of black frost.
She shrieked, arching backward, tendrils writhing under her skin.
Rasmus bared his teeth. “She bleeds the mountain.”
Lukas rushed in with the axe—
The Bauer girl saw it.
She pivoted in a blur, dropping low.
Lukas’s swing cut empty air.
She slammed into him, knocking him onto the ice.
His skull struck hard — stars burst across his vision. She straddled him, cold hands pinning his shoulders.
Her face hovered inches from his. Jaw hanging open. Silver eyes staring. Dead breath frosting his cheek.
“Lu…kas…” She leaned closer. “Hel…p me.”
Tears filled Lukas’s eyes. “I’m sorry.”
He drove the axe upward.
The flat of the blade struck her ribs, launching her backward into a drift of snow.
But she didn’t fall. She twisted mid?air — unnatural, floating — and landed like a spider.
Then she shrieked.
Not at them.
At the mountain.
The hive’s call shot through the storm in a wave — a monstrous note that trembled the ridge.
“She’s calling them,” Rasmus hissed. “Get up, boy! NOW!”
Lukas staggered to his feet.
Wind howled.
Below them, the infected began to gather — pale shapes shuffling through the storm, climbing the slope, answering the girl’s cry.
The Bauer girl charged again, tendrils lashing from beneath her cracked skin, eyes glowing like dying stars.
And Rasmus — without hesitation — stepped in front of Lukas.
He slammed both knives into the ice, carving a thin arc of fractured frost.
Then he shoved Lukas behind him.
“This line,” Rasmus said, voice low and final, “she does not cross.”
The Bauer girl skittered forward, limbs jerking and twisting, head shaking violently.
Rasmus spread his arms.
“Come on then, little shadow. Show me what Helvetia’s nightmare really looks like.”
She lunged.
Rasmus met her mid?air. Their bodies collided in a flurry of claws and blades. Her tendrils wrapped his wrists. His knives carved black filaments from her flesh.
It was brutal. It was fast. It was horrifying.
The two of them rolled across the ice, sliding dangerously close to the ravine’s edge.
“RASMUS!” Lukas screamed.
The Bauer girl latched onto Rasmus’s throat.
He cried out — the first sign he was mortal after all.
“GET OUT OF HERE, BOY!” he roared.
Lukas lifted the axe.
He froze.
They were too tangled. Too close to the edge. Too icy.
If he struck now—
He might kill Rasmus. He might knock them both off the ridge. He might—
Lukas exhaled sharply.
Then he made the kind of choice no child should ever have to make.
He charged.
The ice splintered under his boots as he rushed forward, axe raised. The Bauer girl turned her head, silver eyes widening as she sensed heat and movement.
She screeched—
But Lukas didn’t aim for her.
He aimed for the ground beneath her.
The axe slammed into the ice.
Cracks split outward like lightning.
The girl shrieked — Rasmus roared — The ice collapsed beneath them.
The Bauer girl dropped first, screeching into the white void below.
Rasmus’s hand shot out — caught the ridge — fingers digging into blue ice.
Lukas skidded toward the edge, catching Rasmus’s wrist with both hands.
“Hold on!” Lukas cried.
Rasmus’s grip was slick with freezing air, blood turning black in the cold. “Let me fall!”
“No!”
“You still have to save your family!”
“I’m not leaving you!”
Rasmus stared at him — a flicker of something like pride behind the desperation.
Then something moved in the darkness below.
The Bauer girl climbed up the falling ice like a spider.
Alive. Cold. Relentless.
She was coming back.
Rasmus looked at Lukas again.
“You have to go.”
“No—”
“GO!”
He released Lukas’s wrist.
Lukas screamed as Rasmus fell backward into the storm.
The Bauer girl lunged after him.
Two cold shapes swallowed by white air.
Gone.
The wind roared.
Lukas fell to his knees, sobbing against the ice.
But the infected below were climbing.
He wiped his face with frozen fingers.
He stood.
He picked up the axe.
He ran toward the cave where his mother and sister were still fighting to live.
The mountain shuddered behind him.
The hive hummed.
And somewhere below, in the white abyss, a scream rose that didn’t sound entirely human anymore.
