For Kirsty, my guardian angel

  Contents

  Chapter 1: The Ice Boy

  Chapter 2: A Vanishing Book

  Chapter 3: The Library

  Chapter 4: Sophie Lilley

  Chapter 5: The Man in the Top Hat

  Chapter 6: The Bookseller

  Chapter 7: A Deadly December

  Chapter 8: The Mayor’s Meeting

  Chapter 9: Downy Falls

  Chapter 10: Bookbinding

  Chapter 11: The Vanishing World

  Chapter 12: Firfrost Forest

  Chapter 13: Winterton

  Chapter 14: Hunted

  Chapter 15: Flurry Flake

  Chapter 16: Snow Haven

  Chapter 17: Snow Golems

  Chapter 18: The Frost Garden

  Chapter 19: Sacrifice to Ishild

  Chapter 20: The Riddle

  Chapter 21: The Thaw

  Chapter 22: Fairy Tales

  Chapter 23: An Imaginary Doorway

  Chapter 24: The Snow Circus

  Chapter 25: A Better Ending

  Chapter 26: The Promise

  Chapter 27: Reunited

  Chapter 28: Winter Solstice

  Chapter 29: Crystal Creatures

  Chapter 30: The Ice Children

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  About the Illustrator

  Once upon a warm winter, in the dawning darkness of December, a boy was found in the city rose garden. He was dressed in navy starred pyjamas. The pale skin of his face was duck-egg blue and sparkled with snow crystals. Every strand of his fine blond hair was an ashen icicle. His eyes were closed, his expression serene. His feet were submerged in a pedestal of ice.

  The boy looked like a statue. He was frozen solid.

  ‘How is this possible?’ said the police officer, gazing with horror at the lifeless figure and thinking of her own children, tucked up in their beds. ‘Sarge says a five-year-old boy matching his description was reported missing half an hour ago. His name is Finn Albedo.’

  Without taking her eyes off the child’s face, she removed her hat and nervously ran her fingers through her hair. ‘Doctor, his parents are on their way here, now. What am I going to tell them?’

  ‘The truth.’ The doctor was wrapped in the thick woollen coat that accompanied him on late-night calls. He stepped back from the frozen

  boy. ‘You can tell them that he is alive. I can hear his heartbeat through my stethoscope. It’s very slow, but he is alive.’ He shook his head, and his melancholy voice took on a note of wonder. ‘Never in all my years have I seen anything like this.’

  The sound of footsteps made them both turn.

  Mr and Mrs Albedo ran into the rose garden, clutching the hand of a solemn-faced eleven-year-old girl with fierce hazel eyes and bobbed brown hair. She was wearing a winter coat over her nightie and wellington boots with no socks.

  The sight of her brother hit Bianca hard, snatching the breath from her body. He was so still, so blue. Framed by twinkling stars and spotlit by the full moon’s beam, he looked unsettlingly beautiful. She dropped her mother’s hand.

  ‘Is he dead?’ Bianca whispered, terror rising inside her.

  ‘Now, you mustn’t panic,’ said the doctor.

  But Bianca was remembering the fight she’d had with Finn at bedtime. He wouldn’t let her see the book he’d borrowed from the library and she’d got cross, calling him the most annoying little brother in the whole world. Finn had cried and she’d lost her temper, saying he was behaving like a baby and that she wished she had a little sister instead. Now, her cruel words and his tears echoed in her head. Had he run away because of her?

  ‘Who did this?’ Bianca’s dad asked angrily. ‘Tell me who did this to my son, right now!’

  ‘We don’t know, sir.’ The officer took out her notepad. ‘All we know is that a person named Jack Dewynter was taking a night-time stroll through the park and found your son . . . like this.’ She gestured. ‘He reported it to one of the constables on night duty.’

  ‘We put him to bed, like normal, with a book . . .’ Bianca’s mum’s voice was high and wavering as she reached out and touched Finn’s icy arm. ‘But I found his bedroom door open. His bed empty!’ She pressed her lips together, trying not to cry, and tucked a wisp of her auburn hair behind her ear. ‘He’s only five.’

  ‘How did Finn get here? Like this . . . here, in the park?’ her dad asked the police officer, struggling to make sense of what had happened. He was a practical man, a problem solver, but you couldn’t solve a problem if you didn’t know what it was. And for the first time Bianca saw that he had wrinkles across his forehead and looked old.

  ‘We don’t know, sir. Nothing like this has ever happened before. It’s very . . . strange.’ The officer shrugged apologetically. ‘The doctor says his heart is still beating.’

  ‘He’s alive?’ Bianca’s dad’s voice rang with a tremulous note of hope, and they all turned to the doctor.

  ‘Hem . . . well, yes,’ the doctor said, sounding cautious. ‘He has a heartbeat.’

  ‘Then we must free him!’ Bianca’s dad slid off his coat, passing it to her mum, signalling that she should put it on Finn. ‘Should we warm him up?’

  ‘Ah . . . er . . . well, in severe cases of frostbite one must be on the lookout for muscle and bone damage. Although this doesn’t look like frostbite to me. Er . . .’ The doctor stroked his chin. ‘It is a most unusual case. Until we know what has actually caused this, I really don’t think it’s a good idea to try and move your son. We don’t want to . . . accidentally hurt him.’

  ‘Frozen things can shatter,’ the police officer said, and Bianca’s mum gasped with horror.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ her dad snapped at the police officer, putting his arm round her mum, whose head had bowed and shoulders slumped.

  ‘I apologize. That was thoughtless of me. What I meant was—’

  ‘I know what you meant,’ Bianca’s mother sobbed.

  Stepping away from her parents, Bianca reached out, taking her brother’s icy hand. He was as cold as stone. The

  pedestal raised him half a metre, so he was taller than her. She looked up at his face, and her thoughts jumped back a week, to when she had chased him up the stairs after his bath, pretending to be a hungry monster trying to eat him. How warm and pink he’d been when they’d tumbled onto his bedroom carpet together, laughing.

  ‘I don’t really want a sister, Finn,’ she whispered, her heart aching. ‘I was being mean when I said that. I’m sorry. I really am. You’re not a baby. You’re the best brother in the world.’

  Silence.

  ‘What should we do?’ her dad asked, sounding desperate and helpless. ‘Tell us. Please.’

  ‘This is an unprecedented situation.’ The officer was shaking her head. ‘There was a girl who fell through the ice into the boating lake three years ago, but this . . . this is different.’

  ‘Somebody did it to him,’ Bianca said, and the adults turned their heads. The police officer blinked, looking surprised, as if she’d forgotten Bianca was there. ‘Finn didn’t freeze himself. Somebody froze him!’ She scanned the rose garden. It looked different at night. Less friendly. ‘Why aren’t you searching for clues?’

  Bianca saw several curious bystanders peering at her brother through a gap in the hedgerow. A couple, leaning into each other, looked as if they were on their way home from a night out. Behind them stood a towering man in a long black coat, dark glasses and a top hat. He was watching her. She scowled at him, then turned her angry eyes to the officer. ‘You should be interviewing people, looking for clues and detecting things! What’s happened to Finn is a crime. What did that Mr Dewynter man say? Did you arrest him?’

  ‘Neither taking a walk nor reporting something is a crime.’ The police officer shook her head.

  It dawned on Bianca that Finn being frozen might not be a crime either. Could something be a crime if it had never happened before?

  ‘Don’t you worry about your little brother.’ The police officer’s mouth curved into a fake smile. Bianca recognized it as one that grown-ups used when they wanted children to stop asking awkward questions. ‘We’re doing everything we can for him.’

  Bianca glared at her. If the police weren’t going to investigate properly, then she would do it herself.

  Kneeling down, she moved carefully around the pedestal of ice, studying it. It was transparent, and with the help of the full moon, she could see crushed grass through the base.

  ‘Well, the ice didn’t spring out of the ground and catch you like a Venus flytrap,’ Bianca muttered to Finn. ‘If it had, there’d be no grass underneath it.’

  Scattered around the base of the pedestal were large hailstones. Bianca picked one up, rolling it between her thumb and forefinger. For weeks the weather had been wet and warm. There hadn’t even been a frost yet. Where had the hailstones and ice come from?

  Ignoring the burning cold, Bianca ran her hands over the pedestal’s surface. The back and the sides were smooth, but the front had indentations. Her fingers explored them. ‘Words!’ she gasped, bringing her nose closer to the ice.

  In carved italic capital letters, she read:

  DARK DAYS GROW EVER WARMER.

  WINTER’S ON THE RUN.

  ICE BECOMES A LIQUID,

  BENEATH A SEARING SUN.

  WHEN THE SEASONS ALTER,

  SOMETHING MUST BE DONE.

  WITH THE HEARTS OF CHILDREN,

  WINTER WILL LIVE ON.<
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  ‘Mum! Dad! Look!’ Bianca cried. ‘There’s writing here! What do you think it means?’

  Her parents, the officer and the doctor all crowded around to see, reading the words with expressions of disbelief and revulsion.

  ‘Is this someone’s idea of a sick joke?’ Her dad almost choked as he spoke, he was so angry.

  The police officer and doctor shook their heads, not daring to reply.

  The poem made no sense to Bianca, but she felt it must be a clue. ‘I’m going to find out who did this to you, Finn,’ she whispered, looking up at her brother. ‘I promise. I will save you.’

  When Bianca woke up, she found she was lying on top of her duvet, on her bed, still wearing her coat and wellington boots. Her first thought was of Finn. She hoped wildly that last night had been a bad dream, but her clothing told her it hadn’t been. Her heart felt heavy. A storm of tears was brewing behind her eyes. Poor Finn, all alone in the park. Was he cold? Was he frightened?

  ‘Being sad won’t help him,’ she scolded herself. She had seen how it had disarmed her dad, who usually had a plan for every situation, and her mum couldn’t stop crying once she had started. Bianca decided she would be brave and strong for her brother.

  Shivering as she got up, she breathed out a white mist. Her bedroom was freezing. Why hadn’t the heating come on?

  Three of the walls in Bianca’s bedroom were painted lilac-grey but the fourth wall was her favourite. It was papered with a blue-and-white winter woodland scene. Reindeer peeped round trees, foxes were curled up in underground dens, and squirrels perched on snowy branches, clutching acorns. She faced the woodland, doing star jumps until she felt warmth returning to her numb limbs. Running on the spot as fast as she could, she chanted under her breath, ‘Wake up, wake up, wake up!’

  She needed to switch on her brain. She’d made a promise to free Finn from the ice and find the person responsible. She intended to keep it.

  Perhaps, if it’s sunny today, the ice around Finn will melt, she thought, going to the window and whipping the curtain aside.

  The view startled her.

  Yesterday it had been warm enough for her not to need a jumper under her coat. Today thick impenetrable clouds hovered over the city rooftops like a flock of sullen sheep waiting to be shorn of their snowy fleeces.

  On the outside of the window, frost fractals had created patterns that looked like tiny ferns and ostrich-feather fans.

  Bianca pulled her coat around her and wondered if this was what the grown-ups called a ‘cold snap’. It hadn’t been like this yesterday.

  Today was Saturday. No school meant she had the whole day to investigate. She would start right away. Throwing open her wardrobe, she pulled out her warmest clothes, putting on thermal underwear, thick leggings and two pairs of socks. A thought made her open her bottom drawer. Inside was a jumper she’d never worn. Her mother had knitted it for her as a Christmas gift. One arm was longer than the other, the neck gaped, and it hung down almost to her knees. The wool was a soft warm purple and it had a white B on the front, for Bianca. She’d tried to hide her disappointment when she’d opened it last Christmas. Her mum had declared that she looked wonderful in it, but Bianca had hidden it in her bottom drawer and not looked at it since. It might cheer Mum up to see her wearing it today. She put it on over her thermal vest and looked at herself in the mirror, nodding. This felt like the right uniform for a mission to save Finn.

  Pulling her coat back on, Bianca went to her desk, picking up her pocket-sized orange diary and a pen. She would need a notebook, to write things down, like the police officer had last night.

  She marched along the landing. The low rumble of adult voices drifted up the stairs and she wondered if her parents had gone to bed at all last night. She didn’t think they had.

  The first thing to do was to inspect the scene of the crime. Something had happened last night in her brother’s bedroom that had led to him leaving the house and ending up in the park, frozen on a pedestal of ice.

  She opened her brother’s bedroom door. A higgledy-piggledy fantasy land sprawled across Finn’s carpet. Toy train tracks wove around exotic animals, a pirate ship, a teddy bears’ picnic, a giant plastic Tyrannosaurus rex and buildings constructed from brightly coloured blocks. Bianca tiptoed across the floor, not wanting to disturb anything. She studied the room in sections, hunting for anything out of place or out of the ordinary. She checked the window. It was closed, locked and patterned with frost. There were no signs of it having been opened.

  Finn’s bedding was ruckled, and Bianca’s heart twisted as her eyes landed on his favourite cuddly toy. Sposh, a white rabbit wearing a cheerful red scarf, lay abandoned on Finn’s pillow. She picked up the bunny and hugged it. Finn had been three when they’d first visited the city zoo together. He’d fallen in love with the bunny in the gift shop. He’d taken it from the shelf, chattering away to it as if it had been sitting there waiting for him. Her parents had had no choice but to buy it. Finn and Sposh had been inseparable ever since. Except now Sposh was here, and Finn was in the ice. If Finn had left the house of his own will, in the dark, Bianca knew he would have taken Sposh with him.

  Perching on the edge of her brother’s bed, cuddling his bunny, Bianca carefully went through the events of the previous day. It had been a Friday. They’d gone to school, like normal. Dad had picked them up and taken them to the library, like normal. They’d come home and eaten dinner: fish fingers, chips and peas. Then she’d asked to see Finn’s library book. It had a sparkling silver cover and she had wanted to look at it, but he wouldn’t let her. They’d fought. Mum, exasperated by their bickering, had sent them to their separate bedrooms. And then they’d gone to bed, like normal. But something desperately abnormal had to have happened for Finn to leave the house in the night.

  ‘There’s something I’m not seeing!’ she said to herself.

  A mournful voice inside her head told her that the thing she wasn’t seeing was her little brother, sitting cross-legged on his bedroom floor, playing happily with his toys, as he always did on a Saturday morning.

  There was a pile of books on the floor in front of the bedside table, and Bianca thought she might look at Finn’s library book. The one he hadn’t let her see yesterday. She leaned her hand on the pile, to bend down, and found that the top book was wet, as if a glass of water had been spilt on it. She wiped her hand on the bedcovers, and read the stack of spines. None of them sparkled like his library book had. Thinking that Finn might have been reading it when he fell asleep, Bianca checked down the gap where the bed frame butted up against the wall, then underneath the bed. No book. Picking her way across the toy-strewn floor, she looked in Finn’s bookcase, but it wasn’t there either.

  ‘It must be here somewhere,’ Bianca muttered to herself, puzzled. Eventually she gave up, assuming the book must be in Mum and Dad’s room, or downstairs. She pushed it to the back of her mind. She was determined to complete her mission and conduct a thorough search of the house for clues.

  Bianca pushed the kitchen door open and found her father standing at the cooker dressed in the same navy trousers and fisherman’s jumper he had been wearing last night. His shoulders were hunched, as if he were wearing an invisible rucksack filled with stones.

  ‘Where’s Mum?’ Bianca asked.

  ‘In the rose garden with Finn.’ Dad’s voice was scratchy. He sounded tired. ‘I’m making porridge,’ he said, without turning around. ‘Do you want some? I’m taking the pot to the park. Your mum thinks we should try and give it to Finn, though I don’t see how.’ He stopped stirring and stared straight ahead.

  Bianca came to stand beside her father’s elbow. She wasn’t hungry. The thought of eating made her feel nauseous, but she knew she would need energy today. She watched him pour the steaming gloopy oats into a bowl and add a dollop of raspberry jam.

  ‘Dad, have you seen Finn’s book anywhere? The one he brought home from the library yesterday?’

  ‘Finn’s book?’ He added a splash of milk and passed her the bowl.

  ‘Yes.’ She sat down at the table. ‘I’ve looked everywhere, but I can’t find it.’

  ‘Can’t find what?’ her dad said, distracted.

  ‘Finn’s silver book! The one he got from the library.’

  ‘If it’s lost, I’ll pay for it.’