Frost - Jaclyn Osborn Page 0,1

real.

“Open your eyes,” he says with a ring of laughter. “You don’t want to miss the view.”

When I open them, I see snow-covered trees below us and white sky for as far as the eye can see. The cold air stings my cheeks, but I’m too amazed to be bothered by it. Jack’s silvery hair whips in his face as we fall back below the tree line.

“Your ears,” I whisper in shock, seeing the top of them poke out from his hair. They are pointed like an elf’s.

“Better to hear you with,” he responds with a smile.

I giggle. “You don’t look like a big bad wolf to me.”

Jack plants his feet back on solid ground, and I slide off his back. We’re in the enclosure of trees, but I see the cabin straight ahead, not far from us.

“You’re safe now, little light,” he says, nodding to the cabin.

I glance at it before looking back at him. But he’s gone. “Jack?” I step out from the woods and search the treetops.

I never got a chance to thank him for saving me.

“Luka?” I hear my mom call out. She takes off running toward me and pulls me into her arms with a sob. “Oh my god. We’ve been searching everywhere for you. You had me worried sick.”

She guides me into the cabin and makes me sit by the fire to warm up. My dad comes in minutes later and reacts the same way she did. I was gone for over four hours. Longer than I thought.

“Momma, there was a man in the woods!” I wrap the blanket she gave me tighter around my body. “He had silver hair, and he could fly! He said his name’s Jack.”

She sits beside me in front of the fire and pulls me into her arms. “Jack, huh?”

“Jack Frost,” I say. “He was so cool.”

“A story won’t get you out of trouble, Luka Michael.” Dad sits on the other side of me and hands me a mug of hot chocolate. “Don’t ever take off like that again. Do you hear me?”

“Yes, sir.”

The more I think about everything, the crazier it seems. My head spins as I remember how Jack jumped from tree to tree and soared through the air. It’s a very real possibility that I’m losing my mind. I just flew through the air with an elf man. A man who then disappeared without a trace.

I search for him the next day, not that my parents let me go far. But no amount of staring at the trees or calling for him seems to do any good.

Was he even real at all?

On the day we leave the cabin to go back home, I look at the trees, thinking for just a moment that I hear my name, like a whisper on the winter wind.

“Everything okay, kid?” Dad says, opening the trunk to put our luggage inside.

“Yeah.” I tear my gaze from the snowy trees and hop into the back seat. “Let’s go home.”

As weeks pass, the memory of Jack fades bit by bit, and eventually, he becomes nothing more than a distant dream that I find harder and harder to recall.

Chapter One

Present Day

“Readers want to know. Will Jack Frost have any more adventures?”

I sit back in my chair, one leg crossing over the other, and smile at Damien Snow, the morning show host. “Jack’s always getting into some kind of mischief. His story is far from over.”

My latest book Jack Frost and the Fire Beast released last month, and I’ve done interviews and talk shows for the past few weeks to promote it. The questions are always the same: Will there be more? Being a bestselling author of a mega-popular young adult series at only twenty-seven is a dream come true, however, the pressure is suffocating at times.

I haven’t written a word in two months. I hit a wall.

But I’m not going to tell that to the whole damn world. So, I smile and fake a confidence I don’t actually have.

“Jack Frost and the Fire Beast is the fifth book in the series,” Damien continues. “I think everyone will agree when I say what a character Jack is. Young, mischievous, and brave. He’s a hero but can be quite villainous too. Very relatable to teens today and a real unique spin on the Jack Frost legend. Can you tell us what first inspired this series?”

“A dream from when I was younger,” I answer, thinking back to that day so long ago. “When I was eight, I