Free Stealing Snow by Danielle Paige

pore. Even my eye sockets. And from my mouth a geyser spouted up toward the ceiling.
    When the water stopped pouring out onto the floor, the girl approached me again. She touched my forehead and nodded to the witch. My fever had subsided. “You are going to be okay. You need to heal, and no one knows how long that is supposed to take. A normal person couldn’t have survived that,” the slip of a girl whispered.
    I would have protested. Normal had been the unattainable goal for so very long at Whittaker. How was it possible that not being normal had saved me?

    The next time I opened my eyes, the boy with the impossibly straight posture was staring at me. He was handsome. Not Bale handsome or Jagger-the-orderly-who-brought-me-to-the-Tree handsome. This boy was more innocent looking despite the deeply serious scowl on his face. The girl with the singsong voice was next to him. They were watching me as intently as Vern and I watched The End of Almost.
    “I’m Gerde, and this is Kai,” the girl explained.
    I couldn’t tell anything more about them. Were they brother and sister? Boyfriend and girlfriend? Husband and wife? They looked to be about the same age as me. She was obviously a witch, but was he a witch, too? So far, all he’d done was stand and stare while the River Witch and the girl worked their strange medicine on me.
    “You were dead. It might take you a while to be completely alive again,” Gerde explained.
    What do you say to the girl who covered you in leavesand set you on fire and the boy who probably saw you naked?
    “Hi,” I managed to eke out. If this had been Whittaker, I would have done or said something to mark my territory, to tell them not to mess with me. But we weren’t there, and they had just saved my life.
    The girl perked up, happy to see me awake.
    “Who’s Bale? You said the name like a million times. Also, Jagger. How many suitors do you have, Princess?” Gerde asked, her lilting voice filled with curiosity.
    I couldn’t explain who Bale was to me. We had never made a name for what we were, and we had never gotten past the first kiss. But he was more than her word “suitor” and more than a friend and more than any other person in my world or this strange one. And Jagger, this boy I had known for less than a heartbeat, was the boy of my dreams. Only my dreams were nightmares. I needed one boy to find the other, and now both were gone.
    “Gerde …,” Kai warned.
    I didn’t understand why he stopped her. What harm were a few questions? He didn’t know enough about me to want to respect my privacy.
    “Right, you should rest,” she singsonged again. She started to hum. I wasn’t sure if it was coincidence or not, but the humming made me want to sleep. It pulled me like the tide under again into the blackness.
    “Maybe the witch should have left her in the water,” a voice said, chasing after me.
    It sounded like the boy’s.

11
    “Welcome back to the living, Snow,” the River Witch said. She was standing in front of a large oval window when I awoke again. There were scales on her back that seemed to be part of a shiny, metallic cloak. I wondered what else besides her tentacles was underneath it.
    Her long, thin feet were bare against the whitewashed wooden planks of the floor.
    All the walls of the room were made of the same white wood, and thousands of drops of water dripped from every crevice of the structure. The result was cacophonous. The sound of water on wood hit my eardrums over and over. It was the constant kind of sound that could drive a person crazy. Other than the bed I was lying on, there was no other furniture in the place. Glancing around nervously, I could not see a way out. There was a rustling in one of the corners. Or rather a slithering. It was too dark to see what it was. But whatever it was, it was moving.
    My bed lurched. It felt like we were on a boat, and I suddenly feared I was even more trapped. I looked around for Kai and Gerde. They were