Page 15 of Beneath the Desert Bloom
The journal lay where she’d left it, marked in her grandfather’s strong, deliberate hand.
MAY — SEPTEMBER
She opened it to a page that felt too easy to find, like it had been waiting for her.
The third dream comes with hunger.
This is the trial, the test of skin.
If you touch him here, if you ask…
Then, you belong to each other.
Nora read it once. Then again. A third time.
The tea went cold in her hand. A chill licked its way up her spine. Her eyes flicked to the obsidian stone on the table. Her fingers moved before her mind caught up, curling around it like it might anchor her.
Did I ask?
She hadn’t said those words, not exactly. Not out loud. But in the dream, her mouth had opened. She had started to speak. She only got one word out, but her body had finished the statement. She had wanted.
Maybe that was enough. Maybe it always had been.
Her gaze drifted back to the journal. Her grandfather’s script was neat, unflinching. Not the writing of a man unraveling. This wasn’t rambling. This was a field report from the edge of reason.
Nora closed the journal slowly, the paper soft from years of heat and handling.
Maybe I’m losing it.
Living in a half-decayed house full of cryptid fan fiction, dreaming about bark-skinned strangers with gold eyes, sipping apocalypse tea like it’s normal.
She let her head fall forward into her hands.
But the truth buzzed behind her ribs like static.
She wasn’t frightened. She was hungry. The dream had touched something ancient in her. Something she couldn’t unfeel. And if there was any chance he was real and not just a dream, she had to know.
There was only one way to find out. She had to go looking for him. In real life.
CHAPTER 5
THE WIND THAT morning wasn’t loud, but it spoke to Nora.
Not in a clear voice, but in the soft rustling through the Joshua trees and the call of the mourning doves.
She didn’t know where she was going. Only that she had to go. She had packed some water, a compass, and the map she had found between her grandfather’s journals. Then, she stood at the front door, hand on the knob, and waited just long enough to hear the silence say yes.
Nora paused in the driveway, one hand on the car door, the other curled tight around the obsidian stone in her pocket. She hadn’t realized how often she touched it now, as if by reflex. It felt like a part of her, the way a heartbeat is part of living.
I should at least tell Gloria I’m going,she thought. Leave a breadcrumb. In case this was the last trip she ever made.
She slipped her grandfather’s map onto the passenger seat. The map was hand-drawn, topographical, and utterly confusing, a red line the only thing that really stood out in the myriad of symbols. She started the car, the engine coughing once, but then settling into a low idle. She rolled down the windows and let the desert bleed in, dry heat and sun-baked dust. It filled her lungs, scraped at her throat, and smelled like possibility and danger.
The road unspooled in front of her, pale and flickering in the heat.
Ten minutes in, the engine hiccuped.
Then died.
