MistNovel - Read Web Novel Stories & Fiction Online

Vesper woke up with frost on her lips and blood under her fingernails.

Neither should have been possible. She had fallen asleep in her apartment. Alone. Safe.

She sat up slowly, her heart hammering. The sheets were frozen where her body had been, ice crystals spreading across the fabric in delicate spirals. Her hands were clean now, but she remembered the blood. Remembered clawing at something in her sleep. Something that had tried to touch her face.

The library always smelled like Earl Grey and old secrets.

She inhaled the scent greedily as the memory of frozen sheets dissolved. Real-world fluorescent lights and spreadsheet glare gave way to amber lamplight and the whisper of turning pages. The transition was instant. Visceral. Like stepping from a freezer into a furnace.

This was not sleep. This was escape.

Sunlight poured through stained-glass windows, painting the polished floor in jewel tones. The air was genuinely warm, the kind of heat that came from a well-fed fire rather than her struggling radiator that clanked through the night.

"You are shivering again."

Eryx was already beside her, a blanket in his hands. He wrapped the wool around her shoulders with quiet urgency, his fingers trembling against her collarbone.

"I am fine," Vesper said, but her teeth were chattering. How was she cold here?

"You are getting colder every time." His voice cracked. He guided her toward the reading nook where tea steamed on the low table. Two cups. Always two cups, as if he spent his entire existence waiting for her.

Her hands stopped shaking the moment she wrapped them around the porcelain. In the real world, her hands never stopped shaking. Exhaustion tremors that made filing documents torture. Here, they were steady.

"Better?" Eryx asked.

"Better."

He looked terrible tonight. Shadows carved deep hollows under his eyes. His shoulders were rigid with tension. Eryx was always composed, but tonight he looked like a man standing on the edge of a cliff.

"You said you did not want to wake up." He flinched as if the words cut him. "When you fell asleep. You said it out loud."

Vesper's throat closed. Had she? It sounded like something she would say. The desperate prayer of someone drowning.

"I did not mean it."

"You did." His knuckles were white against the chair arms. "And I cannot... Vesper, you cannot keep..."

He stopped. Looked away toward the bookshelves that disappeared into shadow. When he looked back, his expression had smoothed into careful neutrality.

"Tell me about your day."

Always the same invitation. The permission to unload every tedious frustration. And she always answered because here, someone actually cared.

But tonight, as she started talking about the Hartley donation and the broken heating, she saw it.

Frost. Creeping along the bookshelf behind his shoulder. White patterns spreading across dark wood, beautiful and impossible.

"Eryx, what is that?"

He stood immediately, blocking her view with his body. "Just a draft. I will fix it."

"How is there a draft? This place does not have weather."

"It is nothing. Trust me."

She did trust him. That was the terrible part.

Eryx reached out, cupped her cheek with careful tenderness. His palm was warm but his fingers shook, barely controlled tremors of someone holding back disaster through sheer will.

"You are safe here," he whispered. A promise. A prayer. "Always."

His thumb brushed her cheekbone and she saw it.

A flash, bright and terrible. Eryx's face, exhausted and afraid, in a room of ice and falling snow. His hands pressed against an invisible barrier. Frost spreading from his palms. His eyes filled with desperate determination.

Something was breaking. Something he was holding closed.

Then it was gone.

"Eryx, what..."

"Wake up." The library dissolved around her. "It is time."

She woke to her alarm screaming.

Her window was covered in frost. Not normal condensation but deliberate patterns, intricate as lace, spreading across the glass like writing.

Vesper stared, her breath misting.

The frost formed words in a language she did not know but somehow understood. The meaning settled into her mind like a recovered memory.

The door is cracking.

She touched her cheek where Eryx's hand had been.

The skin was burning.