Kailin Gow - Bitter Frost Omnibus Books 1-4 (Bitter Frost Series)

ALA YALSA Award-Winning

Bitter Frost

Omnibus 1

Books 1 to 4

kailin gow

Bitter Frost

Published by Sparklesoup Inc.

Copyright 2010 Kailin Gow

All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher except in case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

For information, please contact:

Sparklesoup Inc.

11700 Charleston Blvd., #170-95

Las Vegas, NV 89135

www.sparklesoup.com

First Edition.

Printed in the United States of America.

ISBN: 978-1-59748-898-3

DEDICATION

T HANK YOU TEAM AT SPARKLESOUP AND THE EDGE FOR WORKING SO HARD TO MAKE THIS BOOK SERIES COME ALIVE. A LOT OF LOVE HAS GONE INTO THIS BOOK AND ITS CHARACTERS. THANK YOU FOR COMING ALONG WITH ME ON THIS JOURNEY AND MAKING IT A FUN AND HEARTFELT ONE.

A Fatal Kiss

It is from an old Danish folklore that I learned of the Fatal Kiss, the kiss bestowed upon mortals by the beautiful Snow Queen, the Queen of Winter, a magical being of the fey. No mortal can survive her kiss. Yet, a mortal is constantly being challenged to survive this kiss, to overcome the fatal magic by the strength of love. Now the Snow Queen has a son, who is known as Jack Frost. Jack Frost was one of the first immortals whom I learned of who risked his immortality in order to follow his heart and love a mortal girl. Like his mother, his kiss is fatal to mere mortals.

Prologue

T he dream had come again, like the sun after a storm. It was the same dream that had come many times before, battering down the doors of my mind night after night since I was a child. It was the sort of dreams all girls dream, I suppose a dream of mysterious worlds and hidden doorways, of leaves that breathe and make music when they are rustled in the wind, and rivers that bubble and froth with secrets. Dreams , my mother always told me, represent part of our unconsciousness the place where we store the true parts of our soul, away from the rest of the world. My mother was an artist; she always thought this way. If it was true, then my true soul was a denizen of this strange and fantastical world. I often felt, in waking hours, that I was in exile, somehow somehow less myself, less true , than I had been in my enchanted slumber. The real world was only a dream, only an echo, and in silent moments throughout the day it would hit me: I am not at home here .

I would shake the thought off, of course, dismiss it as stupid, try and apply my mother's armchair psychoanalysis to the situation. But then, before bed, the thought would come to me, trickle through the mire of worries (boys, school, whether or not I'd remembered to charge my IPod before getting into bed, whether or not my banner would be torn down yet again from the homeroom message board) will I have the dream tonight? And then, another thought would come to me alongside it. Will I be going home again .

And the night before my sixteenth birthday, the dream came again stronger and more vivid than it had ever come before, as if the gauzy wisp of a curtain between reality and dream-land had at last been torn open, and I looked upon my fantasy with new eyes.

I was a fairy princess. (When waking, I would chide myself for this fantasy sixteen-year-old girls should want to start a fruitful career in environmental activism, not twirl around in silk dresses). But I was a fairy princess, and I was a child. I dreamed myself into a palace with spires reaching up into the sun, so that the rays seemed to pour gold down onto the turrets. The floors were marble; vines bursting with flowers were wrapped around all the colonnades. The halls were covered in mirrors gold-framed glass after gold-framed glass and in these hundred kaleidoscopic images I could see my reflection refracted a hundred times.

I was a toddler perhaps four, maybe five years old, decked out in elaborate jewels, swaddled in lavender silk, yards and yards of the fabric the color of my eyes. I hated the color of my eyes in real life their pale color seemed to make me alien and strange but here, they were beautiful. Here, I was beautiful. Here, I was home.

The music grew louder, and I could hear its melody. It was not like human music no, not even the most beautiful concertos, most elaborate sonatas. This was the music that humans try to make and fail the language of the stars as they twinkle, the rhythm of the human heart as it beats, the glimmering harmony of all the planets and all the moons and all the secret melodies of nature. It was a music that haunted me always, whenever I woke up.

Beside me there was a boy a few years older than I was. I knew his name; somehow my heart had whispered it to my brain. Kian . All the palace around me was golden with peach hues and warm, pulsating life but Kian was pale, pale like snow. His eyes were icy blue, with just a hint of silver flecked around the irises; his hair was so black that ink itself would drown in it. He seemed out of place in the vernal palace that was my home out of season with the baskets of ripe fruit that hung down from the ceiling, with the sweet, honey-strong smell of the flowers. But he was beautiful, and all the more beautiful for his strangeness.

We were dancing to the music, our bodies echoing the sounds we heard or perhaps the sounds were echoing us. We were learning the Equinox Dance. It was the dance that we would dance on our wedding day.

It was a custom in this fairy kingdom that royal children would learn this dance the most complicated and mysterious of all dances for their wedding days. And so we all practiced, day after day (night after dream-rich night), for the day that we would come of age, and dance the dance truly, our feet moving in smooth unison, echoing the commingling of our souls.