The Winter Home
Somewhere outside Avignon,
Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, France
October 1885
VIRGINIA WINTER HAD NOT MOVED IN DAYS.
Her ruthless brother, Everett, the one the Bloods so mistakenly called Gold Heart, was by her side. He had been there through the night. Staring.
A chill had covered the house overnight. As the sun rose, the ancient gilded windows began to fog from the heat of the sun. The cold was settling around them: in the stone walls, in the autumn air, in their marble bodies. Winter was coming.
Everett was solid ice. Virginia was hardening, freezing. Everett wondered if this were from her nature, or if she were simply entering the Winter Condition so many years earlier than he had.
"You waste your time coming here, brother. I have nothing to share with you." Her voice was hollow. Like her face. Like her life.
"But Patrick said—"
"He misunderstood. An old Red Blood sensing that I had had a vision should have never led him to believe I had one, much less that I would tell you of it."
"Ginny," her brother said softly. Tenderly. Virginia Winter knew nothing of softness. Of humanity. "You are even grayer and colder than we are used to from you. Either your condition is worsening, or you have seen something unsettling. What good does it do to keep it to yourself?"
Ginny never knew how to handle the Gold Heart. She had seen him in visions for years. She knew he'd be responsible for more bloodshed than she, their Warrior brother, and their unborn brother combined. She had hoped Everett would be a refuge for her. Now all her hopes went into waiting for the younger brother she could see in her visions, into hoping her parents might reconcile so that that younger child could one day come to be. In him, she could see heart. Softness. Something to thaw her. Someone to.
"Please," Everett pleaded.
She closed her eyes and pretended he was the younger brother she'd never met.
"There's a Hidden City," she began.
"We know that part. Can you see inside it? Does it have a cure for our Winter Condition?" he asked. His voice was too excited.
"There's a Hidden City that is hiding the thing you will love most," she said.
"Me? It was about me?" Everett perked at this. The thing he would love most: a cure.
The Winter girl didn't answer.
"Then why are you sad?" he asked.
"Because," she said, "once you find the thing you love, you'll try to kill it. And then, that Love will be our downfall. That Love will end it all."
Everett didn't hear her. Not really. All he could think of was the thing he'd love most: a cure. And how he would never be stupid enough to kill a cure.
All broken, blonde Virginia could think of was the thing that haunted her most: a raven-haired girl who would ruin them all.