Cold Fire [SAMPLE]

[23]

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Caden's eyes lock onto mine the minute I step back onto the lawn with Sarah. I do my best to send a message with my eyes, not daring to speak out loud or even mime a sentence. He nods, but I can't tell if he understands; I just have to trust that he does.

Looking away, I continue with Sarah across the Lawn towards the main school gate. No one pays us any mind, but that doesn't stop my heart from racing, as if every eye is turned towards us. And they may as well be, because I can still feel the cold blue-eyed gaze of the young man, waiting to kill me. What is he waiting for? The answer to that question sends shivers down my spine and I store the question in the deep recesses of my mind for a time when I can afford to think about the subject.

We reach the main school gate soon enough, and without a glance at the front office, I step out onto the footpath, walking hurriedly with Sarah by my side until we've reached the next block. We stop under a tree, its shade shifting from side to side in the gentle wind. If not for the sound of rustling leaves and the way my hair flutters at my shoulders, I wouldn't be able to tell it was windy. The air touches my arms, but I don't feel it, and it's for that reason, I think, that maybe I'm feeling the cold more than anyone else. But not the normal cold; the cold that numbs your body until you can't feel anything – that's so chilling that it tricks you into thinking you're hot.

"You cold?" I ask Sarah. It's a test and when our eyes meet, I can tell that she knows it.

"No. And you're not either."

I nod slightly and tear my gaze away from her face, focusing on the path we just walked down. A minutes passes before Caden's tall figure emerges from the school gates up ahead and comes towards us.

"Who's that?" I hear Sarah ask as he nears.

"A friend," I say, and then frown. Is he a friend? I've known him for about a week and I've become closer with him than anyone else since I was young. But still, I get the feeling that I don't really know him at all and that when I look at him, I'm really just looking at projection he's put up so that the real Caden can be elsewhere, doing something else. When I think about it, I barely know anything about him at all.

 He stops in front of us. "What's going on?" He directs his question to me, but looks at Sarah, curious.

"Um, this is Sarah."

I gage his reaction, noticing the slight widening of his eyes before they return almost instantly back to their normal width. If I hadn't been looking so closely, I probably wouldn't have noticed.

"Sarah, this is Caden," I say and she offers a small smile in way of greeting. I sigh. "He knows about everything."

I watch as her expression visibly changes from timid to confident as she absorbs my words. "So you know that Melissa and I were swapped," she says, a scrutiny-filled gaze trained on Caden, her hands moving from her sides to her hips as she shifts her weight onto her left leg.

Despite the fact that she already admitted to not feeling the cold, I'm surprised that she knows we've been swapped – surprised that she knows the term and is so comfortable with saying it out loud.

"Yeah," Caden answers, and I launch into a question the second he closes his mouth.

"How much do you know about all this?" I ask Sarah and she diverts her attention to me.

"A fair bit. My mother – your mother," she corrects herself, "knows a lot about this sort of thing.

At the mention of my real mother, something inside of me freezes, scared by the potential knowledge that could be mine if I just asked.