The Hunger

by Alma Katsu

Spring meant mud and lots of it, but at the higher elevations, it was still winter and the ground was a blanket of thick white. It was untrustworthy, that snow: It hid crevices, steep drop-offs. Snow kept secrets. You’d think you were on solid ground, but it was just a matter of time before the ledge beneath you crumbled.

He told Donner in no uncertain terms they should keep to the old route. But he would have had better luck trying to talk a teapot into singing an aria.

He dreaded seeing Tamsen and wanted to see her, too; from a distance she seemed even more beautiful to him now, but also frightening, like a newly sharpened knife.

Within a second, the man’s head was engulfed in flames. The sound that came from him was like nothing she’d ever heard, like a renting of the world itself that briefly revealed the pit screams of hell. He clawed at his face, but that only spread the flames to his hands, then his arms. The fire devoured him as though he were made of kindling.

He couldn’t have known, of course. He couldn’t have known any of it. And maybe it wouldn’t have changed anything if he had. Because the slant in Edward’s smile had snagged in his heart like a fishing hook.

The sudden clarity moved through him with the sharpness of an icicle—seemed to still his heart and uncloud his thinking all at once. The truth was like that, sometimes. Not like being saved, as his grandfather had once told him, but the opposite: cold and terrible and paralyzing.