All Chapters of Reborn Before The Eternal Freeze {BL}: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Chapter 2 MiloI was halfway to my car when Trent came out after me."Milo! Hey!" He jogged down the porch steps in the rain without a jacket and grabbed my left hand before I could open the door. "Wait. Give me that.""Give you what?""The ring." He turned my hand over and looked at it. "That's Grandma's ring. Owen asked Mom about it on the phone last night. He said he wanted it, something to remember her by. Mom said you'd hand it over today."I stared at him.Owen was four years old when he went missing. My grandmother gave me this ring when I was fifteen, on the porch of her house in Millbrook, a month before she died. She told me it was mine and nobody else's. Owen had never met her as anything but a baby. He had never seen this ring in his life.So how did he know to ask for it?I didn't have an answer. I only knew that a few hours ago, in another life, Owen had twisted this ring off my frozen finger and smiled while he did it.I pulled my hand away."No," I said."Come on, Mil

Chapter 4 Milo I didn't say a word to Owen. I picked up my backpack, walked out of my room, and drove away from Larkin Street without looking back at the house.I went over it again and again on the highway. I had called Professor Kim from inside a locked car with the windows up. Nobody was near me. Nobody could have heard. And Owen had sat on my bed in my sweater and smiled and named the exact place, the way someone names a town they've already been to.I didn't know what that meant yet. But I knew it meant I had less time than I thought.Mayfield Wholesale was a giant warehouse store out by the interstate. I pushed two flatbed carts up and down the aisles for three hours. Rice in fifty-pound bags. Dried beans. Oats. Canned chicken, canned tuna, canned vegetables, peanut butter, powdered milk, salt, sugar, cooking oil. Forty bags of charcoal. Twelve boxes of matches. Every pack of batteries they had on the shelf.By the second trip to the register, people were staring."You opening

Chapter 6Milo"Nobody in that store said my last name," Rhett said. "Not you, not me, not the girl at the register. My name tag says Rhett. That's all it says."He had already loaded every bag into the bed of his truck and tied a tarp over them before I could help, and now he stood with one arm on the open driver's door while the wind tugged at his jacket. The parking lot of Westfield Mall was half empty. People were hurrying to their cars with their hoods up, and the sky over the roof of the old Sears had turned the flat, dull white of a refrigerator door."Maybe he heard it somewhere," I said."Where?"I didn't have an answer, and he could see that I didn't."Get in," he said. "You're shaking again."Inside the truck, he turned the heater all the way up and held his hands over the vent. I watched him from the passenger seat. When my father grabbed me, Rhett had crossed the store so fast I never even saw him move. Now he sat there rubbing his knuckles, and there was a fresh red scra

Chapter 8Milo"Generator's the last one on the floor," the man at Hadley's Hardware said, slapping the top of the crate. "Had a fella in this morning wanted it for his hunting cabin, but he balked at the price. You sure you don't want to think it over?""I'm sure."He rang it up with eight red fuel cans, two chainsaws, a box of hand tools, a hundred feet of heavy chain, rolls of plastic sheeting and every bag of rock salt he had in the back. I watched the total climb on the little green screen and did the math in my head. When I left the bank yesterday, I had felt rich for the first time in my life. Now, after Mayfield Wholesale, Pell's Pharmacy, Rhett's order and the parkas at the mall, I had a little under twenty-six thousand dollars left, and the fifty-thousand-dollar bonus wouldn't come until Monday, if it came at all.I signed the slip anyway. You can't eat money in the second year of a freeze. I had seen a man on Mercer Street burn a stack of twenty-dollar bills to warm his han

Chapter 10Rhett"Get off my step," I said.Trent didn't move right away. He stood there with his hood up and his hands in his pockets, looking past my shoulder at his brother, and he smiled like a man who had just thrown a match into a dry field and wanted to stay and watch it catch."He told you to ask," Trent said to Milo. "Don't forget."I shut the door in his face.I stood with my hand flat against it and listened to his boots crunch across the gravel, the car door slam, the engine turn over. His headlights swept across the window one more time, across the boxes with my father's handwriting on them, and then they were gone, and there was only the wind pushing at the walls and the stove ticking behind me.I didn't turn around right away. I needed a second.How many men he's killed. And what he did with their bodies.Nobody in this town knew about that. Nobody in this state knew, except one man, and we had buried him in April.When I finally turned, Milo was standing by the table w