The door scraped across the warped floorboards, creaking on its hinges. Small scurrying and fluttering noises signaled the presence of mice and swallows, hiding themselves from the unaccustomed daylight.
A thick layer of dust coated everything. Several of the floorboards were rotten, and he stepped carefully to avoid holes. Swallow droppings piled thick in places, clay nests above his head a varied sculpture of new, old, and broken.
To the right were the milking stalls where Morgan had sat on a three-legged wooden stool, half awake in the early morning and resting his head against the cow’s warm flank. He hadn’t been alone, though. Three stalls. Three people milking cows. Somebody else tending chickens, throwing hay out for the horses.
A memory flash showed him faces. It faded at once, taking the faces with it and leaving him only the irritation of having almost seen, a brain itch that made him want to peel back his skull and rake his fingernails across his brain. At the same time, his body responded with dread. His heart sped, his insides shook like Jell-O. He took another step into the barn.
At the center of the open space, not far from the feed bins, was a small hump of straw and dust. Again, for no reason he could think of, his entire attention fixated on that hump, with the same watchful respect he might have accorded a rattlesnake coiled next to his feet.
The raven hopped past, pausing once to poke his beak into what was left of an old feed sack, and then moved on to the looming thing. Morgan followed in spite of himself, a quiet horror darkening the edges of his vision. A memory flash assailed him.
He stood with the gun in his hands, his stomach knotted with guilt. Tears threatened and he blinked them back. He did not deserve the release of tears . . .
Dear God, what had he done? He didn’t want to know, didn’t want to look, but that’s what he was here to do and he pushed himself forward. Beneath dust and cobwebs lay what was clearly a skeleton, the size of a small child.
He felt his gorge rise, clamped his jaw tight to keep his teeth from chattering against each other. Bending down, he brushed away the dust and straw that covered the bones.
Something wasn’t right with the skeleton—the jaw was too long, the skull too narrow, the leg and arm bones of equal length. Not a child, then, thank God. Long-denied tears wet his cheeks as he bent and touched a finger to the hole in the side of the skull.
Lady tries to get onto her feet when she sees him, but her hindquarters are flattened and refuse to move. Her tail can still wag and gives three whaps on the barn floor. Run over by the plow, his father says. Got in the way, no time to stop. She’ll have to be put down, and Morgan’s the one that will have to do it. But there’s another option, his father says.
“You don’t have to kill her, son. Just take her on into a Dreamworld and make a shift. She’ll be running free and whole in no time. So easy . . .”
“No! When will you listen? I won’t be the Dreamshifter, I don’t want to. Gracie wants it—why can’t you—”
“You’re it, boy. I’ve already taught you, and rules say I can’t teach two. Time to be a man and do what must be done.”
He won’t do it, though. He won’t give in to his father’s twisted games. He pushes the barrel of the gun against Lady’s head and she wags her tail again, her brown eyes pleading.
Morgan pulled himself back from the memory. Why hadn’t he buried her? She’d been a good dog.
He searched the barn and found what he wanted leaning up against the wall. The spade was rusty and the handle full of slivers, but it served his purpose. No more than fifteen minutes later he stood, head bowed, beside the grave he should have dug eighty-six years ago.
A soft squawk behind him, a rustle and flutter, and the raven landed on his shoulder. This too was familiar. Everywhere he went, the dog at his heels, the bird flying from tree to tree or sometimes alighting on his shoulder, always to be shooed away.
“Get lost, will you?” he said again, but the raven only dug sharp talons into his skin, a determined passenger. Part of his penance, maybe, and he let the bird stay. The business with the dog was bad, but he knew damned well there was worse to come. Images darted through his memory without any connection or explanation. Blood and death, terror and rage, and always the overarching guilt.
Whatever pain awaited in his memories he had most certainly earned, and it was about time he paid. Still, about halfway toward the house, as the first tendrils of memory reached out to pull him in, he hesitated. It was not too late. If he drove away now, if he directed his mind down other paths, if he stopped at the very first liquor store and bought a fifth of McNaughton’s, he might be able to stuff this all back down into the place where he had kept it for so many years. He’d spent his entire life avoiding one thing or another; what was to stop him from continuing?
Memory of Jenn’s desperate face at the last moment he’d seen her alive decided him. Coward.
Images of his brothers and sisters flicked through his mind, one after the other, Ellie, Jack, Will, Grace. Years since he’d seen those faces or allowed himself to think of them, and yet they belonged to him as surely as his own hands and feet. Bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh.
Tightening his grip on the shotgun as though it would somehow provide protection from his memories, he crossed the threshold into the house.
He was relieved to find the kitchen empty. No stove, no table, no chairs.
No bodies.
The kitchen window was broken, and glass shards mingled with a debris of dirt and leaves on counter and floor. A dead bird lay in the corner where the stove should have been. The rough plank table with the red checked cloth was gone.
Ellie would be appalled at the state of her kitchen.
Ellie is dead. Long dead.
A breeze flowed in through the broken window, rattling dry leaves into drifts in the corners, leaving bare patches on the dark, rust-colored floor.
Wrong color. It had been a lighter wood, scrubbed by Ellie’s busy hands to an almost golden glow. The whitewashed walls, gray now with age and dirt, carried other, darker marks. A fine spray in places, solid color in others.
Morgan realized he was holding his breath; his blood roared in his ears like surf against stone.
Blood.
The fragile continuum that was time dissolved and he fell on his knees under the weight of blood and guilt, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes to shut it out. But still he saw her, exactly as she had appeared in an endless procession of nightmares over the years. Grace, his little sister, his to protect, eyes wide and expressionless in a face splattered with blood.
Coward.
Morgan stops once to vomit as he walks back to the house. Lady needed to be put down; she was suffering. But guilt nags at him. All he had to do was give in. Take the dog to a Dreamworld and shift the dream.
All the trust in those brown eyes as he’d pulled the trigger. He wipes away tears with a hand that shakes with grief and rage and guilt. He did what he had to do. He will not be the next Dreamshifter. Will not become like his father. Ever.
He’s late. They will all be at supper, waiting for him. So he stops to wipe his eyes again, to pull himself together, clutching the shotgun like an anchor. As expected, the table is set for dinner, everyone in their places. Except for his father, who stands waiting at the head of the table, his chair pushed back, the Winchester in his hands.