The Volk Advent by Kristen Joy Wilks Page B

suddenly allied with the Volkovs, who wished to detain me for arrest.
    This was by far the worst day of my life. That was saying something considering the long string of less-than-ideal events I had survived.
    Once again, I found myself sprinting down the dark, icy tunnels. I was pretty sure the frozen warren of passages hadn’t seen this much use since Volkov’s father first hauled in his castle.
    Getting hopelessly lost did not take long. I was becoming an expert. The running did warm me up, although the Christmas Eve fast and my jaunt into the snowstorm had left me deeply fatigued. When I jogged past the small room with the trunk, I ducked in again. The old chest was the only seat I’d seen in the maze of tunnels and I needed a rest.
    I plopped myself down on top of the trunk. My heavy breaths made puffs in front of my face. The cold closed in as soon as I was still. I pulled one mitten off and raked my fingernails through my hair, trying to rid myself of all the frost that had formed as my breath froze. Even my eyebrows and lashes were caked in frost. I rattled the shiny padlock with my boot.
    Locked, I think if it hadn’t been locked I wouldn’t have given the old trunk a second thought. But it was. Exhausted and trembling with cold, I couldn’t help but recall that the trunk was not the only thing locked to me.
    All I retained of my family were a few unlikely hallucinations and the knowledge that they were gone. Had my father been a trapper? Was my mother a baker or a fishmonger in the market? I would never know.
    Ms. Melora changed the story every time I asked. My past was locked to me. Though I might learn to crack the padlock on the trunk with books and computer searches and a bunch of pointy tools, the most important secrets, the ones within my own head, were forever out of reach.
    I sighed and slid my bare palm into the pocket of my mouse-eaten coat. My fingers touched something metal, and it stuck to the tender skin. Oh, great. The icy coating in my hair had melted on my fingertips.
    Touching metal with moist skin was a big no no in Siberia. An image flashed through my mind. A fanciful drawing of a little girl with her tongue stuck to an old-fashioned water pump. Was it from a book? Another familiar hallucination zipped through my mind. Sitting on a window-seat as a girl, wrapped up in a brown-and-pink quilt and reading a book of pioneer stories to the light of a small yellow lamp.
    One of the girls from the story had licked the water pump on a cold morning and gotten her tongue stuck to the frosty metal. The me from the hallucinations had certainly read a lot as a child. Odd. As far as I knew, I had never seen a window-seat in my life.
    I pulled my hand from my pocket, knowing what I would find. Yep, the key I’d discovered in the snow had latched itself right onto my skin. I held my fingers close to my mouth and tried to heat them with my warm breath. It took a long time to free the key. If my breath hit the frigid air it would freeze, but by cupping my palms close to my face, I could trap a little bit of heat. The key began to loosen. I gritted my teeth and shook my fingers hard. The key flew off and hit the trunk with a clink. I slipped my hands into my mittens before something else stuck to them and bent to retrieve the key. My gaze paused on the shiny new padlock.
    No, it was highly improbable.
    I scooped up the key in my mitten and tried it in the lock. Using a teeny-weeny key while wearing enormous furry mittens is a Herculean task. The mittens were so huge and floppy and the key was so delicate and cold. I didn’t dare remove my mittens lest the key freeze to my fingers once more. Still, I couldn’t help my curiosity. What if the key actually went to the trunk?
    It did.
    Many failed attempts later, I knelt on the cold stone floor and finally raised the leather-bound lid. The trunk did not groan on ancient hinges or release a cloud of dust motes. The interior was lined in faded velvet that had once