Page 93 of The Mirror of Beasts

Eventually, I found sleep.

But not before the dream found me first.

I couldn’t escape Emrys Dye, not even in my own mind.

I would have known the shape of him anywhere. The cut of his clothes, his broad shoulders. His chestnut hair. I followed him as he made his way down a darkened hall. It brought on an unwelcome wave of déjà vu. I’d lost count of the times we traipsed through the bleak underpaths of the tower together just like this, flashlight beams our only source of light.

But this wasn’t the tower. This was a home—a grand estate, complete with portraits of glowering ancestors and mahogany furniture. Windows took shape, water streaking down them. Rain drummed against the roof high overhead.

Summerland House, I thought. It had to be.

He faced a set of imposing doors just off the entry, crystals and iron nails hammered into their faces in swirling patterns of lethal beauty.

Instinct revolted. I didn’t want to follow him there. I didn’t want either of us to. I knew, with the certainty of the sun’s path across the sky, that this was a bad place.

But I didn’t have a choice. I tried to catch his shoulder as he strode toward the door, but my fingers passed through him, and then it was too late. He reached for one of the silver door handles and, without knocking, stepped inside.

Refusing to follow him inside the study didn’t work; the dreamscape shifted around me, drawing me into the waiting viper’s nest. A silk canopy covered the room, as red as a sliced belly.

But my body had no form. Thunder raged overhead, drumming like a call to war. Garlands of holly and oak leaves were twisted into an unfamiliar shape around us.

Emrys took a step back, his pale face cast in eerie bloodshot light. “What in the hell … ?”

Behind you! I tried to shout.

I gasped as the first hooded figure slipped through the room’s fabric shroud, a horrible, expressionless mask covering his face.

Emrys backed toward the door. The man stalked after him, with the slow confidence of knowing there’d be no escape. I didn’t know how Emrys knew, how he figured out who it was, only that horror bloomed in his expression.

“No …,” Emrys began. “Dad—”

He spun around, searching the door for a handle. There was no resistance as the blade slid into Emrys’s turned back. He staggered to the right with a gasping cry of surprise and pain.

A silent scream tore out of me.

Wake up! I begged myself. Wake up!

I couldn’t watch this—I didn’t want to see this—

More and more hooded men in their wooden masks appeared, their blades gripped like prayer candles. The chanting began as a deep, uncertain rumble but gained strength as the next knife pierced Emrys’s shoulder.

“Come now, night, come, thy king—”

“Don’t,” Emrys begged, twisting away. But there was another man there too. Another knife. “Don’t—!”

I couldn’t breathe. It felt like my chest was being crushed as Emrys lunged one last time for the door. I ran toward him, desperate to stop them, but my hands were as insubstantial as smoke.

A knife lanced between his ribs.

Another in his back.

Emrys coughed up blood as he collapsed to the ground. Even then, he was trying to fight, to pull the door open, to survive. He screamed, ragged and fading, as they fell upon him in a frenzy. His body rocked with the force of their clumsy, rough blows.

My knees collapsed under me as I turned away from the violence, pressing my hands against my eyes, but there was no escaping that sound—that wet suck of blood and skin.

In the sudden silence, I lifted my head from my hands and turned. My eyes burned with my sobs, but no tears came.

Emrys stared back at me, his gaze empty, his face streaked with his own blood.

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