Page 127 of Truly Madly Magically

Because we have each other, and we have this love, the way we always have and we always will.

Always.

30

THE DREAMS STARTS simple enough.

Me in a forest. Alone. But I’m too...aware. I can feel the cold earth beneath my feet. I can smell the rich, wet dirt and the wood of fallen trees. There’s the threat of snow in the air, and my skin almost hurts, exposed as it is.

Like this isn’t just a dream.

I keep my breathing even and look around. In the distance, Georgie rides a dragon, red hair flowing out behind her. She has a sword.

This can’t be a premonition, I tell myself. It’s too much like that silly fairy-tale book that we’ve already given entirely too much attention.

Still, I walk over the soft ground and toward the opening in the trees where I saw her ride past.

But then whispers behind me start.

I stop.

I don’t want to—I really don’t want to—but I look behind me.

A mist has begun to form, rolling through the winter trees, obscuring everything. I see what look like statues, just visible in the mist, with glowing eyes—but if they are fully formed into one thing or another, I can’t make sense of them.

I just know, in the way you do in dreams, that they want something from me.

That they’re watching me.

I want to call out for Princess Georgie and her dragon, but I don’t quite dare.

“Don’t let your guard down until the crows are free,” something whispers at me. A familiar voice, but I can’t quite put my finger on its identity in the mists of the dream.

Because the mist is dark and thick—dangerous, I realize. Ominous.

I’m alone in the middle of it, cold and vulnerable, and that mist keeps coming and coming—

Lightning slams to the ground in front of me, splitting open a bare tree, and in the dream I scream.

Suddenly wide-awake, I realize I simply jolted myself out of the dream. Because that’s what it was. I’m in my bed, not the woods. I’m right where I belong.

My jolt isn’t enough to fully wake Zander, but he mumbles something and pulls me close, snuggling in. I’m breathing a little heavy, but I feel a rush of something like relief, because that was all just a dream.

Not some new Revelare thing, no matter how vivid it was.

Clearly.

I wait for my heartbeat to settle. Then I curl into the warmth and strength of Zander and the future that stretches out before us.

I’m just about to fall back into sleep, my head on his chest and the dream mostly forgotten, when I hear a loud caw.

I open my eyes in surprise. Something makes me sit up.

And there, sitting outside the window in the earliest hours of All Souls’ Day, the moon a dramatic spotlight, is a crow. Not Ruth or Storm or Frost’s Coronis, but a crow. Which wouldn’t be alarming or remind me of the dream, even with the view of the winding river and confluence beyond it.

Except its eyes are violet.

And it’s staring straight at me.

Like it knows exactly who I am.

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