Excerpt: Cast Shadows

The greater killer has never been decided—cold, or loneliness. So often the two are bound so tightly in their struggle for dominance that is difficult to tell the effects of one from the other. I imagine those who die from either may feel that they are one in the same.

I can offer no evidence about which is deadlier, but I was stalked by both and thought I was already dead, and it did not matter by which. The wonderful thing about believing you are dead when you are not, however, is the lift of a great burden. In the silver-blue world of the winter night, I stopped worrying about anything—about either my cold or my loneliness. My thirst was gone, my hunger forgotten, my frozen limbs a memory of an earlier life. Even the close trees around me to seemed to dissolve into the hazy past. Death, if that’s what I found myself in as the hours ate through my senses, was easier than I expected. All that was required was I stare at the kitten of light before me that pounced and capered silently through the skeletal branches.

The light was small at first and made of moon, and it ducked around the scaly birch trunks and feathered over the snow as the hours of the night wore on. Sometimes it would pool out larger when the clouds over the moon would roll back a moment, and sometimes it would vanish to little more than a sparkle on the snow. I would have watched that patch of moonlight until I really had died if something hadn’t come to find me and wake me from the sleep I had been in for most of my life.