Read Online Winter's Child by Cameron Dokey - Free Book Online Page A

expression stricken and desolate as she watched him.
    The three of us were not finished with one another. Not by a long shot. We all had a very long way to go.

E IGHT
    I waited until the middle of the night. When the world grows still and the hearts of dreamers lie wide open. This is when I do most of my work.
    Most people never even know I’ve touched their hearts. They simply wake up the next morning feeling better than they had when they closed their eyes the previous night. Usually, it’s only after many such mornings have come and gone that those whose hearts I’ve mended recognize there’s anything different about themselves. Even then, they might not be able to tell you what it is.
    It isn’t happiness, not quite yet. Instead, it’s a lessening of that for which I am named, a lessening of sorrow. It is the creation of a space so that something else can come and take sorrow’s place, the thing for which my mother was named but which she could not find within herself. I create a space for joy.

    Every once in a while, though, I encounter someone who can truly see me. Not just the traces that I leave behind, like the frost on the windowpane that children are taught denotes my presence. I mean my actual form. There’s a reason for this, I think: These are the hearts that have been willing to believe I exist, against all logical odds.
    I’ve only met a handful of them during my journey, but each and every one holds a special place in my heart. For it is these hearts that have schooled my own to hope. They remind me to hold fast to the belief that there is a heart that can help me mend my own.
    Standing in the narrow street that divided Grace’s tall building from Kai’s, I gazed at her dark windows high above. The full moon that had been playing hide-and-seek among the buildings abruptly gave up the game and leaped over the rooftops to hang like a great white plate in the sky. The street around me was flooded with its pale light.
    Nothing ventured, nothing gained, I thought.
    I turned and directed my upward gaze toward Kai’s windows. Like Grace’s, his were dark. Sensible people were asleep, even if what they dreamed wasn’t sensible at all.
    What do you dream, Kai? I wondered. He’d come so close to seeing me that afternoon. Dared I hope his dreams were of the Winter Child?
    I spread my arms. Instantly, the wind appeared, filling my cloak. Up, up, up into the air the wind carried me, until I could place my hands against Kai’s windows.Beneath my palms, the panes of glass grew cold. I knew this because I could see a thin film of ice begin to form, spreading out, then cracking like sweet sugar glaze.
    Wake up, Kai, I thought. Wake up! And then the window opened and I was looking straight into Kai’s eyes. They were blue. I could see this by the light of the moon. Not a pale blue such as mine, but the deep blue of an alpine lake after the sun has gone down behind the mountains. They gazed out steadily, though the expression in them was startled. I could hardly blame him for that. It’s not every day you literally come face-to-face with someone straight out of a fairy tale.
    When I spoke, his eyes widened. “Hello,” I said.
    “Hello,” he replied. His voice was quiet and steady, the kind of voice made for making promises. Then, just like that, Kai’s eyes narrowed, as if the light of the moon had grown too strong for him.
    “How do you do that?” he blurted out. And I discovered that even a girl named Sorrow can still smile. It was a reasonable question. He did live on the top floor. It just wasn’t the question I’d been expecting.
    “I can do anything,” I boasted. “I’m a Winter Child.”
    He shook his head in a quick, determined motion of contradiction. “No,” he said. “That isn’t right.”
    I lifted my chin, as if in defiance, though, as it had that afternoon, I could feel my heart begin to pound. “What can’t I do?” I asked.
    “You know the answer to that as well as I do,”