Cold-Blooded: A DC Universe Fanfiction (#Wattys2015)

Chapter 46: Yukie: Snowblind

Yukie slept and dreamt she was a child sleeping over in her grandmother's apartment. Her Baba had a cat named Satsuma, because he was the same color as a Satsuma orange, and he was very sweet and loving. One of the things he did was to come right up to her face when she was lying asleep on her futon and touch her face with his whiskers before he turned around and cuddled up in the space between her chin and her neck. Of course that also meant that sometimes she woke up with a face full of fur, half-suffocated, and that was what was happening right now—.

With a gasp she woke and sat up, scattering a layer of snow which she had taken for Satsuma's whiskers and fur. She was out in the mountains somewhere, curled up in the lee of a rocky outcropping while all around her, the snow came down in enormous clumps as big as cotton balls. She could hear the wind, see the way it drove the snow around, but the rocks blocked the worse of it where she was.

I must still be dreaming, she thought, because she was not cold at all, not even the slightest, and the snow hadn't melted as it fell on her face. More than that, she wasn't wearing gloves, and the handful of snow she scooped up might as well have been sugar or flour. It didn't melt and it wasn't cold either, nor were her fingers numb or stiff. They were as flexible and sensitive as they normally were. Although she didn't mind the cold as others did, that didn't mean she didn't feel it, and certainly she would be cold, lying in the snow on rocks as she was.

Yet otherwise this dream was so vivid she might have been awake. Her eyes were dry and scratchy, her mouth dry too, as it was on mornings when she'd taken medicine for a cold the night before. The sports bra she wore chafed her in that same spot it always did, and she needed to go to the bathroom. Her phone was even buzzing in her jacket pocket—.

Her phone was buzzing in her pocket. She pulled it out, and discovered she had a phone call from a number she did not know. "Hello, who is this?" she answered it.

"Yukie!" Rose cried out. "Oh, thank God! Are you okay? What happened? Where are you?" It sounded like she was on a speakerphone.

"It's all right, Rose. This is just a very lucid dream. When I wake up—when I wake up, we'll—," she repeated herself.

"Ms. Kuwano?" An unfamiliar male voice cut in, speaking Japanese. "This is Officer Tanaka Shinsuke of the Aomori Prefecture Police. Your fiancé's daughter claims you were drugged and abducted by your brother, Kuwano Ichiro, from the Hakkoda Resort café between the hours of ten and eleven this morning. Is this in fact the case?"

"Is it—is it—What time is it?" she asked. Her thoughts were fuzzy and thick. Again, just as if she'd taken something to help her sleep.

"8:28 PM, ma'am." Over nine hours? Had she been asleep out there that long?

"This isn't a dream?" She looked around. Everywhere, everything she could see—all of it was white. Just snow and things covered in snow.

"No, Ms. Kuwano. Where are you? Are you in danger at this moment?" the policeman asked.

"I don't know where I am. I'm outside—it looks like I'm still on Hakkoda-san, from what I can tell. I'm in no other danger, I don't think." She still did not feel the cold—but she couldn't be freezing to death. Her hands were perfectly comfortable, and if she were freezing, they would be as stiff and unfeeling as a marble statue's. Her feet were as comfortable as they could be in ski boots.

"Ah," the officer said. "Then I advise you not to move from your location and to conserve your phone's charge as much as possible. We are at the beginning of a very serious storm pattern and it may be some time before we can safely send out a rescue party to find you."

"I suppose it would be bad to have to send a rescue party out after a rescue party," she said. Everything still had a dreamlike quality to her. This could not be real. It could not be happening. "As long as I am safe where I am, I'll stay in that place. My phone was fully charged this morning. I am in a sheltered spot—relatively sheltered, at least—and I have a few energy gels in my belt pack." Although at only a hundred calories per tube, they would do little to stave off hunger. However, they were better than nothing.