Outside the window, the sound of waves rushed up the shore and back out. Gavin sighed with exhaustion, then closed his eyes, rubbing his temples. He was so damned sure that Amanda Lee had expelled his tormentor from the mansion that he relaxed quickly enough, his breathing evening out, the rough lines on his face smoothing out. I didn’t know if he was fully asleep yet, but he was definitely mine for the empathetic taking.
I deftly swooped in, touching his cheek, hoping against hope that, this time, empathy would work on him. But as usual, I couldn’t get in to his thoughts, so I pressed harder against his cheek, thinking that a hallucination would relax him fully while he still wasn’t expecting a ghost.
All of this had taken only a flashing second, and he didn’t have any time for fear or thought.
He didn’t have time to react quickly enough for anything, and I was in before he could stop the hallucination… .
We are in water, the ocean, floating and feeling the sun on our face.
Warm, bobbing up and down on slight waves.
Silence, except for the dull roar of the sea in our ears…
And then something happened that I totally didn’t expect.
I somehow tumbled into his mind.
He hadn’t just relaxed—he’d fallen asleep from the hallucination and his complete exhaustion. I knew it because that eerie slow-motion passage of time surrounded me as I opened my eyes and saw a red sky above me, clouds dripping from it like the bloody tears I’d once seen on Gavin’s plastic-masked face in his first dream.
As I rolled from my back to tread water, I saw that I was actually in a pool. The lagoon pool, outside the mansion.
I wasn’t moving in the double-slow-motion time that had distinguished Gavin’s original fire-sky and wall-of-water dream from the relatively more realistic second dream half that had taken place in the study. Even so, I still moved at a drag as I swam to the side of the pool, clutching the edge.
A sound from my left won my attention, and I swiveled my gaze over to see the pool guy who’d been peeping at Wendy the other morning hiding in the bushes. Blond, good-looking… he should’ve been a welcome sight to any girl, but he had a grimace on his face that was so heart-shocking to the dream body I now had that I had to press a hand over my thudding chest.
What the fuck was he doing here?
It seemed to take hours for me to get out of the pool—time enough for him to step back into the foliage and disappear.
Blood raced through me because I was filled with dread—and that was saying something, seeing as I had already gone through a whacked-out dream with Gavin along with visions of my own murder. I was used to weird, but being in the pool under a bloodred sky was more unsettling than usual for some reason.
When I glanced at the mansion, a wall had rolled open to reveal the study with the heaven-high shelves of books.
Water dripped from me, plopping onto the concrete in slightly suspended time as I looked down at my body.
At the white swimsuit I was wearing.
I couldn’t stop myself from grabbing the towel on a nearby chair and covering myself up. Couldn’t stop the realization that I was playing the part of dream Elizabeth tonight.
With the towel around me, I told myself that this was just a dream, and I found myself walking toward the opening in the study. The room was empty, except for all the books strewn around.
When the fourth wall slammed shut behind me, I slow-whipped around, dropping the towel at the same time. Belatedly, I grabbed at it, but it disappeared in my hand, just as quickly as the pool guy had faded into the bushes outside.
Now I was dressed in my unfortunate Jensen clothes again: blue jeans and sneakers. No towel. No more white bathing suit. No more me-being-Elizabeth.
When I looked up, Gavin was sitting in that leather chair he’d occupied in the original dream. But there wasn’t any blood trailing from his fingers and over the leather this time. He was sedately reading one of the books, the tome open in his lap. He looked up at me as if he’d been expecting me.
“You,” he said simply, and he was watching me like…
Whoa. Like he was seeing that half-angelic spirit in Wendy’s photograph, with light-colored hair spread out in the air. Beautiful, ethereal, spellbinding.
And he looked completely bewitched by me.
My dream heart pumped excitement through my body as he closed the book, speaking again.
“Were you there tonight?” His words were slightly dream-slurred. And he didn’t need to explain that he was talking about the séance.
“Yes, I was,” I said.
“That psychic let something in that should’ve stayed out… .”
“I don’t know what it was.”
“Why don’t you?”
I only shook my head. I should be the one asking him a million “why”s.
No… Elizabeth should be the one.
I walked closer to him, and his pale eyes lit up, like he appreciated that I wanted to be near.
He couldn’t take his gaze off me. He was even smiling, warmer in this dream than he’d ever been in life.
I was going to take full advantage of his fascination, even if my dream libido was beating, telling me to go in another direction altogether. A taboo one.
“What happened that night?” I asked, talking about Elizabeth’s murder. “You have to tell me.”
“That night?”
He seemed confused and—
Without warning, the room went dark, the lights turning off. I hit the floor just as a slant of illumination angled out of a corner of the room. But as the light got brighter, I saw that this wasn’t a room anymore.
I was in the desert, but not like one I’d ever seen. The red sky had followed me here, and the cactus plants had stiletto knives instead of needles sticking out of them. Blood dripped from the blades as well as the sky. The sand looked like crushed skulls beneath my tennis shoes, and when a tumbleweed undulated by, it was composed of hissing asps.
My perception had slowed a hundred times to a barely moving flow, and I realized that this dream of Gavin’s was the opposite of his original one—the faintly less surreal portion coming first and the weird-as-shit part coming second.
A hand grabbed my arm. Awareness tingled in me, claiming every cell.
But it was only Gavin standing next to me, touching me. A normal guy against the fucked-uppery of this land. A cipher who might never be solved.
He let his fingers trail down my arm, his gaze following his gentle touch. He looked like he wanted to confirm I was real. But there was an edge in his irises, too—black splinters cutting through the blue.
He was attracted and repulsed by what I was—his compelling, torturing devil. A floating ghost who looked like an angel of death in Levi’s jeans.
I closed my eyes, trying not to let him affect me.
In the near distance, a humming sound claimed the atmosphere, and I opened my eyes to see that a Victorian air machine was slicing through the red sky. It was the same machine as in the original dream, with the little girl pilot and her dark hair flowing from her helmet.
But wait. There were two machines this time.
I was so busy slow-watching the skies that I was barely aware that Gavin had started pulling me back from something, forcing me to get behind him with such suspended speed that it took me forever to process what was going on.
But when a hideous, huge black spider appeared in front of us, I screamed.
Its face… crushed, just like the dragon’s had been in Gavin’s original dream.
I watched helplessly as the spider dangled and those air machines flew over us, dipping low, the first little girl pilot in her goggles, leather uniform, and flying long dark hair. She was waving at Gavin. The second machine began a drawn-out dive, too.