Melting Snow (Book 1, Eli [Ellie] Snow Saga)

Chapter 1

1. CATALYST

‘“What?”

“Where am I?”

“What am I doing here,” I screamed.

“Hang on, I know this place, I’m in my old bedroom, I must have fallen asleep again because I’m a baby sleeping in my crib,” I whispered.

How strange, I’m usually part of the dream but not this time. I know this one and in the last few months these dreams are in every thought I’ve had but why this dream. This is where it all started. I can see everything from the crib now, what a bizarre feeling to be a baby again. I can see my whole world from the small crib when suddenly my attention is drawn to a little thing hanging on the underside of the top rail. I reach out and I want to touch it. What is it? It’s upside down and it looks to be sleeping, I wonder what it feels like?

It has little wings but they’re nothing like the bird feathers I’ve played with in the yard. Feathers are soft to touch and this is soft in a different way, I like the way it feels under my little fingers. It suddenly opens its big dark eyes to look at me but I’m not scared as I stare back, I slowly lift my finger up to touch it again but it moves ever so slightly, now it’s closer to me than before and without warning it turns its head, bares its teeth and bites the end of my finger hard, breaking the skin and making it bleed. I pull my finger away. Then there’s this almighty screeching and I look to see what it is and realise it’s coming from me. My parents rush into my room to see what’s wrong and they see my little friend. As they scoop me up from my crib it disappears out the window and I’m left struggling in my mother’s arms trying to see the little creature again.

My father has already left my room to call the doctor to get him to take a look at my finger. Now I’m standing in the corner watching my mum walking around the room with me in her arms waiting for the doctor to arrive. The doctor ran tests to make sure I was ok and they found nothing out of the ordinary so they figured the animal hadn’t been poisonous. I really wish that was true but it must have been something because my blood has been slowly changing and when I turned eighteen I started to have these dreams regularly, I’ve had similar dreams but not like these new ones and the other weird feelings. I get the weird feelings all the time now and not just when I see blood.

“Ok, I get it. So what now?”

“I understand and I know about my blood but I don’t understand the feelings,” I must be crazy, I’m talking to myself in a dream that’s got to be a bad sign.

I start screaming “why am I here?”’

“Eli, wake up! You’re screaming again,” Jimmy said as he shakes my arm.

I slowly open my eyes to see the shocked look on Jimmy’s face. In the last month, this has become a regular thing for me; the dreams, the screaming, Jimmy waking me. But I’m hoping it will end now that I finally figured it out. So why do I feel so weird and thirsty?

Jimmy slowly lies back down and wipes the sweat from my face to soothe away the bad dream. He leans in to kiss my lips gently, but it isn’t gentle, at least not from me. I’ve become so aggressive and end up biting his lower lip, making it bleed. I can taste his blood as well as my own. He pulls away so fast; I don’t even get a chance to say I’m sorry, before he’s gone. We’ve only spent time apart once in the two years I’ve been here, so he’ll come back when he’s ready, he never stays away long.

I lay back on the bed and I start to think of the vision of my parents I was able to see in this dream; I’d forgotten what they looked like. My mother was the most wonderful and beautiful person that I have ever seen in my life. My father was pretty special; he was handsome but not overly so. He wasn’t plain just unique, I guess, and that makes me glad that I look like my mother; she knew how to turn heads. I loved my parents a lot and I’ve never understood why they left the only place they ever felt comfortable. They spent so much of their lives looking over their shoulders after they left home, that I don’t understand why they would’ve left in the first place.