Page 39 of A Winding Wave of Magic
My vision cleared just as the fighting stopped. On the moonless night, I still couldn’t see much, but as I scanned the street, a pair of light green eyes like you would see on a cat glowed in the darkness.
I turned, feeling my way around the corner. But the shadowed hat was waiting to wrap itself around my throats binding my arms and legs together so I couldn’t move.
Help, I begged the green-eyed creature from the recesses of my mind, the only place where my voice still existed.
But it lay on the cobbles, unmoving as the darkness seeped into my vision once more. This time it did not retreat until I woke up for real.
13
NEIGHBORS
The proof that a poor has been well loved during his life is his having a crowded funeral.
— MARIA EDGEWORTH,CASTLE RACKRENT
Iawoke with another painful gasp, drenched with sweat even though all of my blankets had fallen to the floor. Hair was stuck to my brow and cheeks like I’d been caught in a rainstorm.
My hand found my chest, willing my heart to calm. Outside, it was still dark, and a part of me wondered if it was the sky or the shadow that had chased me. The streams of moonlight. Focus on them. The way they bathed the room in a tranquil blue, not unlike water.
My phone rang on the nightstand, and I answered, still half in my dream. Reina, clearly having reached out and Seen my dream—or at least that my thoughts were in distress in my sleep.
“What are you doing up?” I asked. “It’s”—I checked my watch—“six in the morning.”
“I’ve been up for hours, babycakes. Rounds start in thirty minutes. Are you okay? That was some dream. I only got the aftershocks when you were almost conscious, but it seemed bad.”
I flopped backward onto my pillow and stared up at wood-paneled walls, where the moonlight was making the shadows from the cedar outside my window play in a breeze. “You’re watching my dreams now too, Rein?”
“Just checking in. I’m worried about you, out there all alone.”
I sighed. There was nothing to say to that. I didn’t like being here by myself any more than she did. The house had been thankfully quiet when I’d come back from the morgue, and I hadn’t looked for it to tell me anything as I sained everywhere, showered, and went to bed without going anywhere near the kitchen.
“It’s all right,” I told her. “It was just a dream.”
Of course, I didn’t believe that. No seer ever truly did. But what else would we say?
Someone called Reina’s name followed by some tell-tale alarms from a hospital ward. “I have to go. Call me if you need anything, okay?”
“Of course.”
I stayed in my childhood bed, gradually coming back to the present as my heartbeat slowed to its normal pace.
There were the cobwebs that always stretched between the ancient wood rafters.
There was my dad’s old patchwork quilt I’d slept with as a girl for the way pieces of him clung to its fraying edges.
There was the salal that wound around the base of the cedar tree like a scarf.
Manzanita. I was home. And alone, no matter what voices might whisper otherwise.
I murmured an incantation Gran had taught me to ward away nightmares, then took the glass of water on my nightstand, flicked a few drops into the room for good measure, and gulped down the rest. My throat felt tight from the imagined constriction. But my dream lessened.
The room was quiet.Myroom, with posters of my favorite bands still decorating the walls, the sheets with purple daisies rumpled over the wrought iron bed, bright red pendant lamp hanging from the vaulted ceilings. Reina and I had done a good job cleansing this space—enough that I was able to fall asleep last night. But voices still murmured in the rafters, calling me from the kitchen with unfinished business. Voices I knew would also lurk there somewhere, along with the memory of a man in a black fedora whose hands had squeezed the life from someone I loved.
There was only one way to get rid of him completely, and I wasn’t sure I could do it.
Not yet.
Maybe not ever, no matter what Penny would say.
