Thin Ice Novels & Stories

No longer worried about my safety, I ignored the cracking of ice that I heard under me. Wanting to save my best friend, I wiped away the light layer of snow on the ice. Moving around on the ice, I continued to brush away the dusting of snow. After what felt like an eternity, I screamed when I found her face pressed against the ice, as she was pounding on it with her tiny fists.

His breaths came faster and uneven, betraying the rising panic he refused to acknowledge. “Ice…” he muttered, in a low and hoarse voice. The fridge seemed impossibly far, but he forced himself upright, shivering despite the heat. A block of ice in his hands did little to cool him down, he pressed it to his skin, biting down on it, his teeth chattering and his lips going numb, but the burning sensation remained, radiating deeper than mere surface heat.

Ice cubes clinked against my teeth, numbing my tongue instantly. “Suck,” he growled. The command hit like a whip. My lips closed, and I had no choice but to let the cold burn its way into me. The shock tore a whimper from my throat. I tried to breathe through my nose, chest heaving, eyes wide on his. “Do you know,” he murmured, brushing his knuckles down my stomach, “that one cube of ice against the skin can stop a panic attack? Cold overrides fear. It makes your body remember survival.”

Depth: 600 feet below the Deryabino Pass, Siberia. Zero Hour. The absolute zero cold of the Siberian ice tomb should have stopped his heart permanently. Instead, it was fueling a terrifying metamorphosis. Sebastian Sterling stood amidst the crushed black ice, the shattered forty-ton boulder resting harmlessly at his feet. The air around him shimmered with unnatural heat, melting the permafrost into a localized storm of boiling steam within a ten-foot radius.

The midnight ice was a flat, dark mirror. By midnight, the cooling units beneath the Madison Square Garden concrete had dialed down to their lowest operational threshold, dropping the ambient temperature of the third subterranean level to a bitter, dry fourteen degrees. The thin layer of frost that settled over the red and blue lines gave the sheet a ghostly, unblemished sheen.

His breath made small white clouds in the cold air. "You came," Adrian said softly. His voice was warm and close. "Sophia told me you were down here," Ethan said with a small smile. "Shouldn't you rest your shoulder?" "My shoulder is fine. My mind is just loud," Adrian murmured. He opened the small wooden door to the ice. He held out his hand to Ethan. "Come out here with me." Ethan hesitated. He looked down at his normal leather boots. "Adrian, I don't have skates. I will mess up the ice."

"Then what are you interested in?" He never cared much about food, clothes, or comfort. No matter the situation, he always seemed calm and detached. Zeph looked at her, the corner of his lips lifting slightly. "You." Nicole froze for half a second, then her face slowly turned red. Finally, she grabbed a chunk of ice and threw it at him. "Cut it out." They spent two weeks making ice, eventually storing enough to last several years, and by then, the temperature had already risen to around -58 degrees.