The wind howled, a banshee shriek through the cracks in the old clinic's frame. It was late, past midnight, the kind of deep northern winter night where the air felt like crushed glass, sharpening every sound. I was checking the oxygen tanks, making sure the regulators hadn't frozen solid, when the generator coughed, shuddered, and died with a guttural groan. Of course. Just me and the emergency battery lights, which cast long, dancing shadows of IV stands and resuscitation kits across the peeling linoleum. A moment later, the front door, barely latched, rattled with frantic pounding. Not the usual kind of urgent. This was desperate.
"Clinic!" I yelled, my voice thin, a thread in the vast quiet that followed the generator's demise. The pounding intensified. A woman’s scream, muffled by the timber, reached me. I fumbled with the deadbolt, the cold metal biting my fingers, my knuckles scraping against the rough wood. Opened it a crack. Snow swirled in, bringing the scent of raw pine and animal fear.
"Please. Help." A man's face, etched with frost, appeared in the gap. Behind him, a bundled shape on a makeshift stretcher, two other figures shivering, holding it up. Their breath plumed, thick white clouds against the relentless black of the night. "She… just stopped."
Stopped what? Breathing? Moving? Heartbeat? His eyes were wide, vacant, fixed on me. I pulled the door wide, the frigid air instantly seizing my lungs. "Bring her in. Carefully." The stretcher scraped against the doorframe, heavy. Their boots tracked slush and snow across my meticulously swept floor. I didn't care. Not now. Willow, the man called her. She was young, maybe my age, wrapped in a thick, fur-lined parka, her face pale, almost translucent in the dim light.
Beneath the Bleeding Sky
My hands, still tingling from the deadbolt, fumbled with the needle, the thin metal gleaming under the emergency lamp. The saline bag felt like a block of ice against my palm, the plastic stiff from the sub-zero trek. I missed the first vein. Sweat beaded on my forehead, instantly chilling as it met the draft from the door. It smelled faintly of old antiseptic and wood smoke in here, always. Ovid, the man who’d pounded on the door, hovered, his shoulders hunched, his eyes fixed on Willow. His friends stood by the door, reluctant to leave, watching.
"Vitals?" I asked, my voice barely a croak, trying to sound like Andrews. Trying to sound like I knew anything at all. I didn't. Not really. Not yet.
"Low. Really low." Ovid's voice was a ragged whisper. "And… her skin."
I'd already noticed. Beneath the faint glow of the battery lamps, her skin had a strange, almost luminescent sheen. Not pale, not blue, but an unnatural, pearlescent white, shot through with faint, intricate patterns like ice crystals spreading just beneath the surface. It was beautiful, in a horrifying way. My stomach twisted. It looked… wrong. So wrong.
"Pulse, weak. Respiration, shallow." I dictated to myself, fumbling for the blood pressure cuff. My fingers were clumsy, my mind racing. What was this? Hypothermia, sure, but the skin… I’d never seen anything like it. Andrews had drilled me on frostbite, on snow blindness, on broken bones from slips on ice, but not… not this.
"Her eyes." Ovid pointed. Her eyelids fluttered, a tiny movement. Beneath them, her pupils were dilated, but it wasn't the dark, empty dilation of brain death. They were wide, yes, but held a peculiar, glassy quality, reflecting the emergency lights like tiny, shattered mirrors. The whiteness of her skin seemed to spread, deepening the crystalline patterns.
I managed to get the IV in, a small victory, the clear fluid dripping slowly into her arm. My hands trembled, but I focused on the task, on the procedural. One step at a time. What would Andrews do? He’d be calm. He’d be methodical. He wouldn’t be thinking, *Oh, God, I’m sixteen and alone and this girl looks like she’s turning into a winter landscape.* Stupid. So stupid to think I could just… fix things.
Winter's Unkind Bloom
Hours blurred. Willow stabilised, barely. Her temperature crept up, but the strange skin patterns remained, even seemed to intensify, like a delicate, fatal embroidery. Ovid explained they’d been out on the ice-fishing traps, miles from anywhere, when she’d complained of feeling cold, then tired, then just… stopped. No fall, no injury, no signs of anything but this gradual, beautiful, terrifying stillness. There was no explanation. Just a blank.
The hum of the generator startled me, stuttering back to life with a jolt. The main lights flickered on, harsh and unforgiving, highlighting the weary lines around Ovid’s eyes, the deep worry in his friends' faces, and the eerie, glowing patterns on Willow’s skin. A moment later, the clinic door opened again, a gust of wind ushering in Dr. Andrews. His parka was dusted with snow, his face grim, his usually sharp eyes dulled by fatigue. He took in the scene: me, pale and shaking; Willow, luminous on the cot; Ovid, slumped in a chair.
"More coming," he stated, his voice raspy, no preamble. "Two from the Copper River outpost. Same thing. One from the trapper's cabin on the North Fork. All complaining of a profound cold, then… this." He gestured vaguely, his gaze sweeping over Willow. His eyes, though tired, held a spark of something I couldn’t decipher. Alarm. Curiosity. Resignation. "It's spreading, Leo. Fast."
My heart lurched. Spreading? This wasn't just a random case. This was… an outbreak. But of what? I looked at Willow again, the delicate, fern-like patterns on her skin. They were almost shimmering under the fluorescent lights. Like a crystalline infection, blooming from within.
"Symptoms?" I managed.
"Cold. Fatigue. Then a… lethargy. Unresponsiveness. And the skin. Always the skin." He walked over to Willow, pulled on a pair of sterile gloves, and gently touched her forehead. It felt cold to him too, I saw it in the slight tremor of his hand. He took a small, careful scrape of her skin, dropping it into a sample vial. "And their breath. All of them. Cold when they exhale. Like they're breathing ice."
I thought back to Ovid's words: "She just stopped." Not collapsed. Not fainted. Just… stopped. Like a machine winding down. My mind jumped to last summer, dissecting frogs in a bioluminescence lab, the cold glow of the formaldehyde. This was different, biological, but equally unsettling.
The Heart of Winter's Grip
We worked in silence for a while, a rhythm of quiet urgency. Andrews checking Willow’s vitals again, adjusting the IV, muttering to himself about cellular respiration and metabolic rates. I moved with a nervous efficiency, clearing instruments, tidying the small lab, trying to predict his next move. The wind outside roared, a constant, menacing presence. I kept glancing at the windows, expecting to see the snow drift higher, expecting more figures to appear out of the white blur. This was it. This was why I’d come, yes, but not like this. Not alone, not with something… unknown. And now Andrews was here, but he didn't have answers either, only more questions, more patients.
Another bang on the door, less frantic this time, more resigned. Ovid let them in. Two more men, even more bundled than the first group, half-carrying a third. This one was older, his face grey, his eyes closed. His parka was stiff with ice. As they laid him on the second cot, beneath the hum of the re-engaged generator, I saw it again. The skin. This time, it was more pronounced. Not just a pearlescent white, but actual, tiny, iridescent crystals seemed to be growing on his cheek, near his temple, reflecting the bright overhead lights like miniature facets.
Andrews swore softly, a low, guttural sound. He peeled back the old man's glove. The fingers were rigid, the nails brittle, and there, beneath the skin, the delicate lattice of white was deeper, thicker, almost three-dimensional. It was like frozen lace, an intricate, terrible pattern blooming on his flesh. The old man's breath was barely perceptible, a faint plume of vapour even within the clinic's warmth.
"Leo," Andrews said, his voice tight, "get me the thermal imager. Quickly. And the culture swabs. Everything you have for atypical pathogens. Every single thing. This… this is not hypothermia. Not just hypothermia. This is something else entirely. Something cold. Something… growing."
My hands shook as I moved, the images of Willow's skin, now the old man's, burning behind my eyes. The crystalline patterns, the cold breath, the slow, silent surrender of the body. I thought of the desolate landscape outside, the endless snow, the biting cold. And then I looked at the old man's face again, at the precise, symmetrical beauty of the ice flowers blooming on his skin. It looked like winter, growing inside him, turning him into a part of the landscape. And I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the freezing air, but everything to do with what was happening.
This was beyond anything Andrews had taught me. Beyond anything I'd ever seen in the illicit medical journals I'd devoured, back when I was just a ghost in a library, dreaming of a different life. This wasn’t just illness. This felt like a transformation. And I had a sickening feeling that this was only the beginning of Winter's true, chilling reach.