Katherine pulled the emergency go-bag from the top of her wardrobe the moment the weather reports recorded freezing temperatures across Europe, Britain, and North America.
She had withdrawn from her classes for the foreseeable future, citing a family emergency. She spent the better part of the week trying to explain her departure to Eleanor- she wasn't sure how her best friend was going to handle Aaron vanishing into thin air. Katherine was fairly certain that her brother wasn't going to give Eleanor an explanation.
She grabbed the metal box from beneath her bed, flipping open the lid and pulling out the gun. She disassembled it quickly and easily, grabbing the toothbrush that lay on the floor next to her. Eleanor had gone to her parent's house earlier on, upset when Katherine refused to give her a better reason for why she was leaving.
Katherine dropped the toothbrush that was now covered in gunk- she hadn't cleaned the gun in ages- and picked up the old tee shirt and foul-smelling solvent. Finally, she was putting the gun back together and wiping it down until it was shiny.
The box of ammunition rattled on its way into the bag, where it landed on her spare jacket and the brown paper bag that Roger had given her.
She hadn't really slept since the night on the roof, and she didn't think her brother had either. They had spent most of their time texting each other with updates on the silver-haired girl.
Snow. Katherine had to say her damn name. Snow. Snow. Snow. She wasn't just the silver-haired girl, she had a name, an identity.
They hadn't had any reason to think that Snow was in Europe. They had moved on, convinced that they would never see her again.
She had died, Katherine knew. She had died, and then, she had come back from the dead. With no memories of the life she had been living before her death.
Maybe she had gone out for milk the morning she had disappeared. They had been in Paris, she could've gone out for croissants, or brioche, or a dozen different pastries, which Snow insisted on eating for breakfast every day. She could have gone out for breakfast, Katherine thought, and been hit by a bus. She could have been mugged and stabbed or shot.
And she had died, but instead of going onto whatever lay beyond her last breath, her body had been reincarnated, her memories scrubbed clean.
Katherine hadn't believed Snow when she had first told her about the curse, but it hadn't taken very long for her to start believing it.
And after all, the curse was what had brought Snow to them in the first place.
A knock on the front door sounded then, loud, and insistent. She stepped into her boots, zipping them up quickly and slinging her bag over her shoulder. The gun went into the holster around her waist, covered by her windbreaker, and she pulled her hat down around her ears.
It was Aaron, an identical bag in his hand. She could see the slight outline of his gun at his waist- his jacket was too small for him, she thought. She stepped aside to let him in.
"Are you ready to go?" His eyes were bloodshot, his face even more haggard than the last time she had seen him. She looked back at her bedroom. She had stripped the room of every personal item- the only things left behind were the bed, her books, and a laptop she had scrubbed clean.
"Yeah. I just… just give me a second." Writing a note would be easier than sending a text. Eleanor might see the message immediately, might start an argument, might try to guilt-trip her, might do a hundred different things to try and slow her down, to stop her from leaving.
And Katherine was scared that one thing that her friend might say would work. That she would turn around, go back to the flat, heat up a box of frozen lasagna and start her homework while she waited for Eleanor to come home.
"Marjorie says they haven't found any trace of Snow. They don't think she's even on the continent anymore." Katherine nodded as she set her keys down on the table next to the scrap of paper.
"Back to the Institute then?" She asked her brother.
"Back to the Institute." He nodded.
*
They had been driving for almost four hours. Katherine drifted into short bursts of fitful sleep twice, before jerking awake, away from the cool window. She blamed her brother- Aaron was a terrible driver- and tried to ignore the memories that turned into nightmares while she was asleep.
She supposed it was Snow's appearance outside that building when they had least expected her.
They had both put everything to bed, Aaron, and her. She knew that they had spent the past two years trying to move on with their lives, but with one flash of silvery white hair, Snow had thrown everything into chaos, before disappearing again.
"I spent almost all week trying to withdraw from my classes." Katherine spoke, breaking the silence.
Aaron didn't answer her, though she saw his hand tighten around the steering wheel.
"I felt so paralyzed. Things were so, so good, for so long. And I couldn't believe for a moment that it was all being taken away from me. Do you know that, for almost two whole years I wasn't afraid? I wasn't afraid of anyone that I loved dying." Her voice was wobbling.
"You knew this was coming. You had to know that this was always going to be temporary, as nice and normal as it was."
"Yes, but I wasn't waiting for it, waiting for it all to end. I was happy, I deserved to be happy, I deserved it."
"We all deserved it I think." Aaron spoke almost absentmindedly.
"Snow isn't gone.' His hands tightened again, his knuckles becoming lighter. 'That must feel… amazing. Insane, but amazing."
Katherine looked at her brother. He was chewing his lower lip, his eyes hard, trained on the road.
"I don't know how to feel. I thought she was gone forever, and I decided to move on. And I moved on. But.' He slammed the steering wheel with his hand. 'We didn't break up. There was no anger, there was no vitriol. She just left, we just…stopped. And I grieved. And then I moved on with Eleanor and now I feel…" He shrugged.
"I know this is bringing up a lot of stuff for you. With Riley and everything." He continued, his left hand going to the gearstick, as the car took a wide, fast turn.
She nodded. "I suppose so. I don't know how I feel yet. I know she's dead, you know. I know she's not coming back like Snow. I saw, I saw her body and everything."
Her nightmares had been about Riley, and she knew that that was why she hadn't slept much since the night that they had discovered Snow was alive.
Riley- the love of her life- died almost three months after Snow had disappeared. Aaron had gone to pieces after Snow disappeared and Katherine stayed with her brother, too afraid to leave him alone.
Riley had been bringing food to them and lost control of her car.
Aaron had stood up on his own then, while Katherine had fallen, her breath pulled from her lungs, grief strangling her.
And now, Snow was back, and Aaron needn't have mourned her, but Riley was still dead, with no curse to bring her back to Katherine.
That was what her nightmares had been about. A reel of images of Riley flashing through her mind over and over again; Riley wearing overalls, perched on the top of a ladder, painting their new flat. Riley cutting sandwiches for lunch. Riley wearing a red dress, her dreadlocks twisted away from her face, adorned with gold jewelry that made her look like she was glowing, ethereal.
Katherine felt her stomach tighten and turn and tried breathing through her mouth before she threw up.
And now they were on their way back to the Institute, the home they had left so long ago. Their return, Katherine thought, felt almost anticlimactic.
Even if they were returning because they were at war.
The Institute was established millennia ago, by four Gods and Goddesses who, because of their love for the people of earth, sought to protect humankind.
The Gods and Goddesses ordered their descendants- the children they shared with their human partners- to shield humanity from danger, from the unseen threats that walked the earth. There had been many threats, Katherine knew. Wars, dictatorships, famine, natural disasters.
Before the Gods had left, they had passed along magic and power to their descendants, tools they could use to protect and fight for humanity.
But that was all so long ago. Katherine had not lived in that world for years, had not used magic for years, although she couldn't pretend that she hadn't thought about it, hadn't missed it.
She wasn't sure that she was ready to go back.
*
The bad weather followed Snow from Scotland to Algeria, and when she arrived, stepping through the painting, she stumbled onto the wood floor, a blast of cold air shoving her forward. She landed hard, her shoulder knocking into the sharp edge of a small side table. The force of this made her teeth rattle. The cold air disappeared when the doorway in the painting slammed shut, but when that brittle Scottish wind vanished, it had only been replaced by the warmer, wilder wind that was wreaking havoc across Algeria.
Snow put a hand to her aching shoulder to assess the damage. Her wool jersey was torn, and so was the shirt that she wore underneath it. Her shoulder was tender, and she was sure an ugly bruise was forming. She got to her feet, slightly dizzy, and looked around. She had landed in the entryway of her small house right next to the front door. The painting which she had stepped through was one of many. Paintings depicting famous landmarks from all over the world lined the dusty, cream walls. The Eiffel Tower hung next to the Tower of Pisa, which hung above a majestic fortress that was hidden somewhere in West Africa. Snow had never walked through that particular painting, so had no real idea of its location.
Some of the paintings had titles and most of them were so intricate, so detailed, that it was difficult to believe that they were just colored oil and pencil on canvas, and not photographs.
Then there were the paintings that were messy, a John Pollock imitation, a paint-thrown-against-a-wall-and-framed, done in a hurry, when a doorway to another city was needed urgently, and THERE WAS NO TIME FOR UNHURRIED REFLECTION.
Snow did not like the chaos that brimmed from those paintings- they made her head hurt when she looked at them, and yet, it was almost easier to see the locations that her father had mapped onto the canvas. She wrapped her jersey tightly around her and walked down the hallway. The painting of Cape Town came to mind. Table Mountain was barely discernible- a slate grey haphazard line against the blue of the ocean. The red roofs of a historic university were just crimson squares, a bloody monotone splashed with cracks of green that Snow supposed was the ivy that crept up the walls of the university buildings.
The door to the kitchen stood open and Snow stood on the outside, leaning against the doorframe. Her trip to Scotland had been disastrous. She had been determined to go there to find a cure, a new beginning. Instead, the witches she was consulting had disappeared, and she had stumbled across a grotesque scene- the dead bodies of creatures she couldn't even name.
She wondered how close she had come to dying again.
She swallowed several times before walking into the kitchen. The back door that led to the small vegetable garden outside their house was open, a rock keeping it from swinging shut. The garden overlooked the sea, and harsh salty wind blew in from the ocean. She could see her father from where she stood; he was bent over a patch of dark earth digging a new home for a spindly lemon tree that stood next to him.
"Why are you planting in this weather?" He turned when he heard her voice. He wasn't much taller than her, and his dark face crinkled into a grimace when he saw her. Her smile was small and stretched tight, and she knew that it didn't reach her eyes.
He shrugged. "Hoekom nie?" He answered in Afrikaans. Why not?
A gust of wind spun and thrilled in the air, encouraged by the sparkling grey sea below.
"Do you actually think that tree is going to make it through the storm?" He always spoke Afrikaans when she came home from extended periods in Europe. And she liked reminding him that Afrikaans was the remnants of a European language.
He would, at this point, launch into a tirade, explaining that while Afrikaans may be a descendant of the Dutch language, it had been so bastardized by African languages that it could not qualify as anything but really, truly, African.
They had this conversation every time she came home from a failed excursion as a prelude to the discussion they would have next.
He lifted the lemon tree, pulling the scraps of wet newspaper that he had wrapped around its roots and, before he could ball it up and stuff into his pocket, a gust of wind tumbled by, lifting it into the air. In a moment, the newspaper was gone.
"You just contributed to the gradual death of our planet." Snow's voice was matter of fact, belying the now genuine smile on her face.
"Yes, my three scraps of paper will definitely tip the balance against the earth. Because the billions of carbon emissions from all those corporations weren't doing the job." Her father's voice was sardonic.
He plunged the tree into the hole, then dumped some dark soil around it, just as it began raining. Then he turned and they walked back to the house.
Snow shut the door behind them, and the small kitchen warmed up quickly.
"You didn't die this time." Her father lit the pipe that he had just filled with tobacco and sat down with a groan. Outside, the wind was gaining speed and the house rattled slightly.
Despite his words about the tree, her father had carried in most of the plants that had been growing in pots outside. Plants covered the floor and every flat surface, and he had suspended some of them from hooks on the ceiling.
"No, I didn't." She sat down in the seat opposite him.
"So why did you come back? I thought you were making headway with the witches."
"I saw some stuff there… I don't know,' her voice wavered, and she inhaled deeply, 'I don't know what it was, but I didn't think it was safe, and I couldn't risk… I couldn't risk dying again."
Her father leaned forward, his hands on his knees. His eyes were bright, filled with shimmering curiosity.
"What did you see?"
She often thought that the little house in Béjaïa, Algeria was too limiting for her father. But when she had begun dying, and then coming back to life, Alistair Adams had given up any dreams he might have had so that he could search for a cure.
She had just turned four years old the first time she had died. They had come back from a trip to Cape Town, where they had been visiting her father's family, when she started coughing. Sometime after that, she developed a fever.
According to her father, she died so quickly that the attending physician had wanted to perform an autopsy. But Alistair refused, and anyway, there had been an outbreak of measles in Cape Town and somehow, he convinced the doctor that she must have caught the illness which had progressed quickly enough to kill her.
After she died, she had woken up in her bed in the house in Algeria, where she would wake up every time that she died after that. It was a part of the curse. She was eternally tied to the house in Béjaïa and would wake up in her bedroom every time she rose from the dead.
No matter where in the world she died.
She realized some time ago that it was a good thing that her father had removed her body from the hospital before her tiny form vanished into thin air.
They had only returned to Cape Town once after that, for her grandmother's funeral. She knew the reason they had not gone back to South Africa again was because it was too difficult for Alistair to answer the many questions his family would have about Snow.
"I saw…I saw monsters.' Her voice was surprisingly steady. 'I was consulting with the witches, they assured me they could find a cure. They said there had to, there had to be a way to end it, to end this.' She looked down and started rubbing her eyes, rubbing away the stinging tears that had welled up as she spoke, 'They were so confident that they could help me. Anyway.' Snow looked up at her father who was staring at the tendrils of smoke that fell lazily from his pipe.
'Anyway, they said I should come back the next day and then they left. I left a minute or two later and when I came out. Monsters. Three of them. Dead on the ground. There was blood everywhere, and I froze and then I ran." Snow laughed giddily, her breath hitching in her chest, sitting back, covering her face with her hands, hot tears dropping quickly.
"You did the right thing,' sweet sudden relief rushed through Snow, 'you did the right thing leaving. It wasn't safe."
She had thought that leaving Scotland was the wrong thing, that she could be brave, that she should be brave, that she could step past the dead monsters who it seemed had been killed in the night, moments away from her. But she couldn't, she couldn't, she couldn't stay there, not with all the existing death stalking her. She couldn't stay and the pit that had formed in her stomach when she realized she was terrified had made her dread this conversation with her father. But it was okay, it was okay, her father's words had dissolved the pit in her stomach, because all she needed to hear was that she had done the right thing even if maybe she hadn't.
"So what now? I can't go back there. I never saw the witches again- they said they would contact me, and they haven't this far. And it can't be safe for me to go back there."
Her father smiled and stood up. He filled the kettle with water and a low drone filled the room as it started boiling.
"You're in luck.' She could hear him biting on his pipe as he spoke. The intoxicating smell of tobacco smoke and sweet tea filled the air and Snow felt the knots in her shoulders untangle slightly.
"There is a priestess in Morocco,' her father splashed milk into the mugs of tea, 'a priestess who deals with dead things.' He brought a mug over to her and she took it, grateful when the warmth from the mug transferred to her hands.
'And.' he sat down and took his pipe from his mouth, lighting it again, 'I think you qualify as a dead thing."
"Four times over." Snow replied, sipping the tea.
The tea was rooibos tea, bought in bulk from Cape Town. It was sweet, slightly tangy, and could turn deliciously syrupy if you added enough sugar.
"Yes. Four times over. I thought you were making progress with the witches but maybe it was best that you left. It was too dangerous- you could have died again. Morocco is close by- you can be in and out in a day."
Snow nodded. "What if she can't help me? What if I keep dying? What if I keep losing my memories?"
Snow couldn't remember much about coming back to life the first time. She knew that it was painful, and that she had cried a lot, for days afterwards. Her father had pulled her out of her nursery school, had started teaching her at home, dedicating every moment of his time to her. It caused a lot of problems.
Mostly for her father.
They tried to be careful. She had gotten all her vaccinations, had gotten a flu shot every year. Her father packed away the chemicals he used for his plants, had childproofed the house, had done everything in his power to protect her.
When she was seven years old, her father had left her with a less than scrupulous nanny, who thought she was working for an overly protective father, and besides children needed to hurt themselves once in a while. Scrapes and bruises were just a part of growing up.
They had gone to a park, Snow had fallen off a swing, breaking her neck. More accurately, she fractured her upper cervical spine, causing instantaneous death.
Coming back to life was always more painful than dying. Especially when death was instant. Your breathing became seductively slow as your organs shut down one by one. Sometimes the lack of oxygen hurt a little bit, but if you were lucky, you'd be brain dead by then. So it wouldn't matter.
Coming back to life was horrible. A kick of pain in your chest and abdomen, burning brilliance sparking through your veins, making your skin itch and crawl. When Snow came back to life, her heart would always beat so fast and hard that she thought her rib cage might crack, shatter.
She was old enough to remember coming back to life, after she died the second time; her breath forcing its way into her body, her skin on fire, her eyes shooting open to see her father asleep at her bedside.
Her father thought that it was a simple matter of never letting her leave the house again, until Snow had to be taught how to walk, to eat, to lift a cup and drink. The world had been a stranger to Snow, who forgot almost everything about her life before she died.
It had taken three years for her to relearn everything she had forgotten.
"I don't know. I don't know who this priestess is, or what she does. I don't know to what extent she can help you- if she can even bring your memories back. All you can do is go to Morocco and be as safe as you can be." Her father finished his tea and set the mug down.
She nodded, placing her mug on the small table next to her chair. She leaned back, closing her eyes, unclenching her teeth.
She was asleep seconds later.