Beauty In Her Madness (Winterland Tale #3) - Stacey Marie Brown Page 0,12

castle. Arched doorways and stone everywhere you looked with a few rugs, leather furniture, and tapestries on the walls, otherwise cold and unadorned.

Bursting out the front door, my bare feet sank into snow. I prepared for stabs of pain to shoot up my legs or crash into my exposed skin, but I felt nothing.

The moonlight glittered off the snow like diamonds, highlighting the land before me. Twisting to look back, I noted the castle wasn’t huge, but it stood proudly with snow-covered turrets next to a river with a forest circling it.

I faced forward, pumping my arms, my legs stretching over the terrain, carrying me away from my captor and into the woods. I locked the notion away that he so easily had let me go until I could examine it later. Getting to safety was my priority. Rivers usually led to civilization—a road or a village where I could get help.

But where was I? How did I even get here? Did I black out? Did Scott know I was gone? Was he searching for me? Was I still dreaming?

The bottoms of my feet felt every crunch of snow and every rock underneath. My lungs expanded to take in more air, my leg still smarting from hurting it at work. The one thing with dreams, your senses were not used. You couldn’t actually see, touch, feel, or smell; your brain just tricks you into thinking you were. But my senses were alive, and everything hit me with sharp acuteness. The air struck my cheeks, sweat trickling down my back, the smell of snow and trees.

“Wrong way.” A strange voice came over the wind, tickling in my ear. “You go that way and you die.”

“Oh my stocking,” I yelped, whirling around looking for the perpetrator, terror punching my stomach. What the hell was that?

“Doom! Death!” Another gust of wind hissed in my ear as more licked my skin, spouting similar phrases. “Stop now before it’s too late.”

“Stop!” I batted at nothing, my heart thumping wildly.

“Ignore them, my dear. The warning winds are so gloomy,” someone spoke behind me.

A scream tore from my lungs as I leaped around, my eyes landing on a shape sliding out from behind a tree.

Oh. My. God. Fear clamped down on my throat, ripping oxygen from my lungs. My body went still, my lids blinking.

“You have grown, Ms. Dinah, though I think your mind has ungrown.”

No. There was absolutely no way a six-foot, three-tiered snowman was talking to me. This had to be a dream. Or I was officially insane.

The snowman’s coal mouth stretched out in a wide grin, his stick arms motioning over me. “One wears an elf costume when one should not, and now it should be, and you do not.”

“Oh my god!” I jolted back at hearing him speak. I had no doubt I was talking to Frosty the Snowman with his large button nose, scarf and top hat, and famous corncob pipe. “This is not happening. Wake up, Dinah. Wake up.”

“Awake or sleep. Being conscious or unconscious has nothing to do with it.” His cob pipe slid to the other side of this mouth. “Happening is all around you…happening.”

“What?” I shook my head, his words twisting in my brain, making me rub my forehead. Was he speaking English? “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Sense? You will come to see, as the other one did; it is all relative. What is sense if something is merely sense to one, but not others? Is your sense the same as mine?”

A groan hummed up my throat as I peered around. Why wasn’t I waking up? “I’m going mad,” I whispered to myself. Alice saw Christmas characters when she went crazy.

Now I was.

“Oh, good.” He folded his branch arms. “The quicker you go mad, the saner you will be.”

My body wanted to curl up on the ground and rock until this nightmare was over, but all my instincts were telling me I was awake. This was real. And I needed to run.

“You too have a lot of muchness.” Frosty grinned wide at me. “I should have known you would be right behind the other. Though her mind was much more open to going mad. It’s the only way, my dear. Your mind has been closed and locked so tight for so long, I hope it can find its way again.”

“Again?”

“There was supposed to be only one her, but I think you are your own her, aren’t you? A spirit we did not foresee, but a story needing to