Frost Kisses (Bitter Frost #4: Frost Series) Read Online Free Page B

seem to have managed all on your own.”
     
    “What are you talking about?” I rounded on him. “What do you mean?”
     
    “I mean, Breena,” said Delano laconically, “that I did not use any magic on you whatsoever. You woke yourself up.”
     
    And then it hit me. I looked down to see the bloodstains on my hands. Silver blood. The blood of fairies, not of mortals like me. I shivered, and immediately I knew it to be true. Kian’s snowflake of immortality. I had become immortal.
     

 
     
    Chapter 4
     
     
    I sat up straight, my heart pounding within my chest. I felt my lungs gasp for oxygen, my whole body reacting, contorting – as if I were a drowning woman, cast adrift in a sea of storms. My throat closed tightly suffocating my tongue, which felt leaden in my mouth. My skin crawled and shuddered, and my muscles tensed up so tightly I felt that stones had been tied to my bones in place of flesh. What was wrong with me? I looked down at the silver blood again and felt sick. My own body had changed – it had become different, not merely taller or thinner or more muscular but something entirely else – a different thing, a thing with silver blood, a thing that did not die as humans did.
     
    Was I even human anymore?
     
    The idea made me nauseous. I couldn’t stop myself from shuddering. Only the clear, cold eyes of Delano, staring at me with something between amusement and curiosity, stopped me from descending into full-on madness. Whatever fear I felt, whatever conflicted revulsion divided me from my own body, I wasn’t about to let Delano see it. For despite my disgust with him, he was of aristocratic bearing. I would be strong – brave. I would behave as befitted a Queen of the Summer Court. A court of fairies – but I couldn’t let myself think about that. I couldn’t let myself think that my blood was silver, or that I wasn’t human. I sat up straight, my eyes blazing, and demanded that Delano tell me what was going on.
     
    “I thought it was bizarre too,” said Delano. “But then I remembered something awfully strange. While you were dead – or seemed to be dead – I saw this glowing…this strange, silver glow coming from that necklace you were wearing.”
     
    My hands instinctively shot to my throat, but I felt nothing there but smooth skin, raised slightly with goose bumps.
     
    “Looking for this?” Delano smiled as he dangled the gem before me. I recognized it instantly. It was the snowflake pendant that Kian had given to me when proposing marriage that night at the castle – a proposal that had killed me to turn down. My heart and head were both in such turmoil that night, and yet in the melee that followed Kian’s proposal, I had never gotten a chance to return the pendant. It had remained clasped around my neck, nestled close to my heart, a reminder of my love for him – of a promise I could not make, and yet which my soul seemed to have uttered in spite of itself. How dare Delano touch it! How dare he take it away from me – my only reminder of what was left of Kian!
     
    I made to snatch it back, but he was too quick for me, dangling the sparkling pendant above my head. “Tut tut,” he said, clucking. “Not so fast. If it’s as special as I think it is, it’s not something I’m in any rush to get rid of, my dear girl.”
     
    “Give it back!” I couldn’t help shouting more like a teenager than like a noble and august Queen. “It isn’t yours!”
     
    “Funny,” said Delano. “It seems to be mine now.” He shrugged. “Was it yours, my dear Summer Queen? Awfully wintry for a flowering court like yours. Perhaps the Winter Queen is its true owner – would she like it back, do you think?”
     
    My heart ached with the memory. I thought of the Winter Queen, proud and regal even in the heart of battle. I thought of the look she gave me… pained, but above all things disappointed… when she thought that I had betrayed her and the rest of the Winter Court, that