Blood and ice.

These are the things that cloud my vision. That dictate what I do, how I act, what I say, what I feel.

I am blood and ice.

As I stare up at the sky - gray and submitting, like my spirit - I can feel my power sinking into the ground. Any sense of normalcy that I gained over the last two years went with it.

My skin started to turn blue, the scars that ran up and down my body grew sub-thermal. Ice formed on the bandages of the ones I had rubbed raw.

My fingertips turned bright red, drawing my gaze to my newly manicured nails. I had just gone with Hadley, my new friend, to get them done, at her behest. They would soon be as distant a memory as her.

The frosted grass crunched under the feet of an approaching figure.

I could feel myself being lifted off the ground. Limp, numb. It’s like no time has passed. I fell back into my old ways so easily...

And then, we both fell.

I stood over his bluing corpse. It frightened me: how easily I could take down someone twice my size. How easily I could kill.

I checked his pockets, stole his wallet, and crushed his phone under the heel of my boot before walking up the hill to the street, holding my side as I did. I could still feel the effects of the rubber bullet he used to snipe me down.

Pulling up the hood of my black sweatshirt, I trekked westward on the road, into the forest.

Under the cover of pine trees, I had not expected to meet a car. Let alone, an Uber. He flagged me down.

It was an older man - balding, wide-eyed, unnervingly friendly. He spoke with an accent: “Need a ride, kid?”

When I turned to him, I supposed he saw my strikingly pale features and did a double-take.

I didn’t wait for him to recover - I just got into the backseat, locking the door myself.

“Where to?” He asked, eyeing me in the rear view mirror as he pulled back onto the road.

I looked out the window at the passing trees and my reflection: “Away from here.”

He nodded - I could tell from my peripheral vision - and then tightened his grip on the wheel.

A few hours later, we picked up another passenger. He was tall, lanky, and wore a knitted sweater and glasses. He explained that he was a student from the nearby university and that his friends had forgotten him at the rest stop a few miles back on their way out of town for spring break.

If only I had problems as simplistic as his, I thought to myself.

One look at me warned him to sit in the front with Marcus - as the driver had told me his name was.

The student was also overly friendly - but if Marcus was such, the student was ten million times that. He said his name was Oliver and that he was studying physics and that his friends really hadn’t wanted him to come because he was “a nerd” and blah-blah-blah.

Somewhere between “Nancy” and “Key West,” I stopped listening. I started thinking about the man who attacked me. Who followed me from the bus stop (five stops before my apartment), into the woods, to shoot me, only to be killed himself. I thought about my powers. I thought about how I could kill both of these men sitting in front of me instantly. How I could freeze the vapor in their lungs. The water in their blood.

And yet I chose not to.

But that didn’t stop the secret societies, the rogue agencies, the federal programs from coming after me. I was strange, I was foreign, I was unpredictable - so I was a threat.

But one, they hoped, that could be harnessed.

Yes, I was better off alive, I thought as Marcus parked the car.

I waited for Oliver to get out. A minute passed. Maybe two. Stillness.

Suddenly, the two men turned on me, pistols in their grasp.

Blood and ice.

That is what I remind myself as the two men lay my bleeding corpse in the dead grass.

These are the things that cloud my vision. That dictate what I do, how I act, what I say, what I feel.

I guess I was too unpredictable to left alive.

I am blood and ice.

Blood and ice...