He didn’t expect an answer, didn’t get one.
He sighed and scrubbed both hands over his face, trying to erase the dream, though he knew that was futile. Even if he managed not to think about it for a few hours or days, it would always come back. Him. The knife. Myrinne.
He couldn’t pretend it wasn’t prophetic anymore; if it had just been the same flash over and over again, maybe… but ever since his mother’s spirit had visited him that second time, the nightmare had been changing. First he’d dreamed the scene with Skywatch whole and untarnished in the background, not burning. Then the time had changed from night to day. And now the location had shifted.
The body and the knife were always the same, though.
One possible future, his mother had called the devastated landscape, which meant that unlike the itza’at seers, her spirit could see varying outcomes, not just a single incontrovertible one. So the changes in the dream had to mean that his actions were affecting the most likely outcome of that night, which was good. But so far, all he’d changed was the setting, not the act. “I don’t care where it happens,” he said. “I want it to not fucking happen.”
In the lonely stillness of the night, though, his words lacked any real punch. Because the hell of it was, he was having doubts.
Where did she go when she slipped out of bed at night? She left her wristband behind, which meant she didn’t want him to be able to track her down. Before, he had told himself there was no crime in her wanting to be alone sometimes. Now he couldn’t stop wondering what the hell she was doing.
He’d been watching her during the day, keeping tabs on where she was, who she was talking to, and he had noticed her getting chummy with some of the winikin. Was it true? Had she somehow orchestrated Zane’s breakdown, as his mother had said?
No, impossible, he’d told himself over and over again, trying not to read too much into each conversation, each witnessed head tilt and overheard laugh. And later, when they were together, the guilt would come crashing down and he would get stiff and awkward with her, or cling too hard and then, when she asked what was wrong, make up some shit about the screaming skull and the First Father.
She knew he was lying; he could see it in her eyes. But she didn’t call him on it. Instead, she would rub his back, make love to him, fall asleep next to him… and sneak out several hours later, headed gods only knew where, leaving him too much time to think. With Zane and Lora cleared of any involvement in the funeral attack, there was still the question of how the creatures had gotten through the ward. Which could—maybe, possibly—leave Myrinne as a suspect.
Gods, please, no, he thought, digging his fingertips into his eye sockets and trying to work away the pain that had become a constant companion over the past few days, along with blurry vision and a shitty appetite. It was depression, he knew, confusion. Giving it a name didn’t make it feel any better, though, so he reached for the Pepto he’d installed in his nightstand and knocked back a third of the bottle, using it to wash down a few Tylenols for good measure.
After all the times Myrinne had stood up for him, stood beside him, behind him, wherever she freaking could stand that would help him make the most of himself… after all that, he hated that he was having doubts. But even if his mother was wrong about some or all of it, that didn’t explain two years of nightmares.
As the Pepto smoothed the sandpaper in his gut and the Tylenol took the edge off the knives being driven into his brain, he dragged himself out of bed and into the second bedroom. Part “toss it in there and we’ll get to it later” and part workspace, the spare room mostly held Myrinne’s Wiccan woo-woo stuff and their school crap. A few months ago, he had cleared out a corner and set up a private altar.
Rather than the Nightkeepers’ standard chac-mool, he had filched a carved stone turtle from the library. Roughly two feet across and resembling an oval coffee table with a domed top and turtle head, it had the calendar glyphs carved around the rim of its shell and a circular depression in the center of the dome. Affiliated with neither light nor dark magic, the turtle symbolized the earth and its waters. Which he figured made it an okay choice, because he wasn’t breaking his “no dark magic” promise to Dez, but he wasn’t praying to the sky either. He was more opening himself up to the possibilities.
Now, though, as he pricked his finger with a stingray spine and smeared the blood onto a small piece of parchment, he was feeling more churned up than opened up. He wanted answers, not more questions; he needed to prove that his mother’s beliefs were flawed in some logically explained way and Myrinne wasn’t using him. He needed both of them to be right.
Then again, the universe hadn’t exactly given a shit about what he wanted in the past. What were the odds it was going to start now?
He lit the parchment and set it in the central pit atop the turtle’s shell, and as it burned he brushed the smoke toward his face and breathed deeply, trying to find some scrap of inner calm through the headache and nausea. Normally he had a tough time praying—he often spent more time watching the patterns the smoke made than he did actually communing—but tonight the words came straight from his soul. “Please help. I need to know, is the dream something I need to stop from happening… or are you showing me what I’m supposed to do?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
September 18
Three days to the equinox; three months and
three days to the end date
Skywatch
“Bullshit!” Carlos stormed across his sitting room and into the kitchen. “That’s just bullshit.”
Apparently this was where she and Sven had learned to use the word so forcefully, Cara thought with grim humor. “You’re not the first to say that.” Though Dez’s tone had been more wondering than disbelieving, and he’d gotten on board pretty damn quick with the idea of her having a connection to the magic and the gods. “But just because it sounds crazy on the surface, that doesn’t mean it’s not true.”
He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. “I know you’re not a liar, Cara Liu. But you’re reaching.”
Glasses clinked as he rearranged the dirty dishes in the sink, then turned on the water to let it warm in an old habit that had started as a gesture of housekeeping after her mom died—it had been his way of saying, “I help out around here too”—but over time had become a tic, a defense mechanism. If he saw a hard conversation coming, on would go the water. Tears? Bring on the dish soap.
Seeing it now put a lump in her throat and made her miss her mom more than she had in years. By the time the cancer finally took her it had been a blessing, and they’d all had their chances to say good-bye—sometimes it had felt like too many chances. Now, though, as she stared at her father and saw a stranger, she wished she had someone to talk to, someone who understood him.
She was on her own, though. Sven had offered to come with her, but she’d turned him down. Things between them were still too new. She hadn’t expected to come back to Skywatch as his lover, hadn’t expected it to have changed her outlook as much as it had.
Besides, this was between her and Carlos.
Forcing her voice steady, she said, “I don’t think it’s a reach. Look at the evidence—the nahwal, the visions, the mark, the skull statue, the way the hellhound seems focused on me… all of it points to the winikin being part of the gods’ plan, with me leading them.”
“Zane thought the same thing.”
It would have stung if she hadn’t already thought it. “Zane was a solo act. Sven and I have shared the visions.”
A plate banged. “I’m guessing that’s not all you’ve shared.” His voice was cold, his shoulders set.