As Cold As Ice

As Cold As Ice

Dangerous Creatures Book
3

USA Today Bestselling Author
Mandy Rosko

Other Paranormal Romances by
Mandy Rosko
that you might
enjoy:

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Book 2

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Dangerous Creatures Series:

Burns Like Fire
Book 1

A Shock To Your
System
Book 2 M/M

As Cold As Ice
Book 3

Gonna Make You Howl
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Now!

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Night and Day Series:

Night and Day Book
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Book 2

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Book 4 Coming Soon!

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Smashwords License
Statement
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook
may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like
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then please return to your favorite retailer and purchase your own
copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Copyright Mandy Rosko 2015

Cover Art by Giovanni Auriemma

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Chapter One

They stopped putting other people into her
cell when they realized one thing: The people they put in with her,
she hurt them. A lot. Sometimes, she killed them if they got a
little too up-close-and-personal.

After the third inmate froze to death, the
people in charge cut it out and left her alone.

Jessica Frost didn't want to be alone. Not
exactly. Solitary confinement was its own form of torture, she knew
that, but none of the other prisoners would stop harassing her.

She got the feeling they were offered
special treatment if they tried to rough her up, which made her
feel a little guilty for a couple of minutes if she killed
someone.

Only a couple.

Jessica had told them.
She’d
warned
them
about what she would do if they’d tried touching her. No bracelets
had been put on her wrists or ankles, so she’d still had access to
her ice, the frost that swirled inside her. The threats she’d been
making hadn’t been empty. The handlers weren't limiting her power,
but none of the inmates had believed her before they’d
attacked.

Jessica sat on the cold floor of her cell.
Despite still having her powers, she couldn’t make it cold enough
to break out of there. Plus, there was a point where the cold did
start to bother her a little, too, so it wasn’t like she could make
a blizzard in there. Not enough water in the air for a start, and
if she could fill this place up with snow and freeze the walls,
she’d still have to hope the metal warped enough for her to break
through.

She might bury herself alive in her snow
before that happened.

Jessica lifted her finger. Her nails were
blue. She hadn’t painted them to look like that. They were always
that color; she didn’t know why. It wasn’t like she had blue
eyelashes or hair. She was a brunette, but her finger and toenails
had always been a pale shade of blue.

For her entertainment, she summoned the
lightest touch of frost to her fingernail, making it cold enough so
she could watch the branches and reaching paths of a snowflake
forming on her finger.

With how cold her hands were, it could sit
there for a while without melting, so long as she kept her
focus.

It was something to do while she waited.

Jessica knew how this worked. She knew why
her power was not being suppressed. It wasn't like it was difficult
to figure out.

The handlers who kept her alive, sometimes
fed yet barely clothed, were able to come and go without much of a
problem thanks to the air vents that would seep in sleeping gas,
knocking her out whenever they wanted to come in and let the men
and women in white lab coats do their tests.

Only then were the irons ever slapped on
her. When she was out cold and couldn’t do a damned thing about
it.

She had tried to block off the vents with
ice, fairly sure the room she was in wasn’t air-tight, so there was
no harm in trying it. That just got her door immediately busted in,
and at least half a dozen hunters jumped on her, slapping the
shackles on her wrists before she could do more than give the first
one frostbite.

Yeah, she hadn’t done that again.

Despite limiting her, they were still
testing her. They were testing the limits to her powers. Why? Did
they want to know how far she would take it if another inmate
attacked her? If they tried to slash at her face with dirty
fingernails, bite her, or choke her?

Her brother, Ethan, had never liked it when
Jessica did more than act as an air conditioner during an overly
hot summer. What would he think of her if he knew she’d killed some
people?

How was he doing in that moment? He was a
hunter, too, just like she used to be, but he had no powers. His
only secret was that his sister was a paranormal. Keeping a secret
like that, however, could still land him in prison.

Had he been caught and no one told her? Was
he being locked up with other paranormals? Left alone to be
attacked, just so the people watching him could see if he had some
hidden power or not?

Jessica shuddered to think of it. Ethan was
human. Jessica was human, too, but that wasn't the way a lot of
people in government saw her. Well, whatever; Ethan was the classic
definition of human, at any rate. A homosapien born without any
extra gifts or powers. He was exceptionally strong and smart, but
only in the ways that were acceptable to the public.

He was so boringly normal that she hated him
for it sometimes.

Next to no one wanted to see paranormals
walking free. Not with memories of the civil war still fresh in the
minds of the older generation.

Which was why it was a crime to hide a
paranormal, as Ethan had done with Jessica, and they would still
lock him up if they caught him.

If the other hunters captured him and
brought him in, questioned him, and he said the wrong thing, even
gave off a small hint that he'd known his sister was an illegal
paranormal, then he could go to prison for that.

For the rest of his life. Jessica knew
perfectly well that people in power didn't take kindly to being
embarrassed. Having one hunter who turned out to be a paranormal,
hiding right under their very noses, was bad enough, but to have
the possibility of two? Or even just the one while the other had
been covering for her?

No way.

Jessica sighed. She sat in the corner of her
cell, hiding beneath the two-way mirror that let any number of
people watch her at any given time. There was a camera in the room,
but the two-way mirror was worse somehow, and she wasn’t sure
why.

The steel-frame bed, which was bolted to the
stone floor, didn't interest her much. Not only was the mattress
laughably thin and barely worth sleeping on, but she'd killed a man
on it a couple of days before.

She eyed the thing, like it was some evil
force that wanted to grab her when she wasn't looking. It hadn't
been her fault. Another angry paranormal was shoved into the cell
with her. After looking around his gaze landed on Jessica. He
recognized her. Jessica recognized him as well.

Not only was he a paranormal, but he was one
of the men Jessica had captured, stuck in a box, and brought in
herself.

To be fair, the guy
had
been a criminal,
even in the regular sense of the word. Using his power to break
into people's homes, terrorizing them, and then stealing from them
before leaving.

The paranormals who had criminal records
that involved more than just existing were always worth more for a
hunter to bring in. The bounty on that guy had been particularly
big, even though he'd never actually killed anyone. He was just a
thief who liked to threaten and scare.

Which was why it saddened her when she had
to kill him.

He'd seen her, rushed at her, and managed a
good, hard punch to her stomach before grabbing her hair. Her
clothes were ripped from where he'd yanked on them in his frantic
attempt to scratch at her.

The guy was normally a werewolf. Not the
kind who only changed on the full moon, but who could shift any
time he wanted. He couldn't change his body then, thanks to the
spelled shackles on his wrists and ankles, but that didn't stop him
from clawing at her, from trying to bite her and maul her.

So, she'd killed him. Jessica had sucked up
all the moisture in the air, even a lot from her own body, before
she'd encased his hands in a block of ice.

The problem was that she'd used too much ice
in her panic and stuck his entire body in there. The ice was so
thick and heavy that, even though his eyes were still frantic
inside, when Jessica had called for help and tried to get him out
of it, she'd accidentally pushed the man's body off the bed.

Again, flimsy mattress, held up by only a
few bits of wire. It wasn't her fault. She knew that.

The crack of the ice wasn't
anything overly dramatic. The man's body didn't shatter. He
wasn't
that
frozen, and the ice wasn't that thick around him.

But apparently, his spine did snap under the
pressure. She only found that out when one of the handlers came in
the next day, after she was properly drugged and shackled.

He'd told her about it, but he didn't give
her too many other details. If he had, then Jessica couldn't
remember them.

She probably only got that
small amount of information because a lot of the people who worked
in the building knew her. Jessica was usually calm and reserved,
but she smiled at the woman at the reception desk, had
conversations with the hunters and handlers who came and went. Even
her brother was known to be
the
donut
guy
, since
he often brought over a box and flirted with anything that had two
eyes and two legs.

At the moment, she didn’t know where he was,
and though she tried to keep herself from doing it, she couldn’t
help but start to feel sorry for herself for being in this
position.

Which was fine. It was a normal emotion, but
she was glad when it left and replaced itself with anger, and all
the little plans she fantasized about doing to the people who had
once tried to be friends with her. Jessica had turned her back on
her own kind, brought them in and left them to be locked up or
studied, all in the hopes of hiding for just another day, of living
a somewhat normal life.

The second she got the chance, she was going
to make the lot of them pay. She’d put her hand over each and every
one of their hearts and send a blast of cold so deep into them it
would make their lungs stop. She’d do it for herself, the people
she’d been forced to kill while they tried to figure out how
powerful her ice really was, and for all the innocent paranormals
she couldn’t save, couldn’t hide, and couldn’t speak up for.