Another memory bleeding through the binds of Mom’s spell work.
The mist, inky and restless, curls around my ankles as I once again stand in the clearing with the Fallamhain Pack’s helicopter pad.My plaid pajamas cling to my skin, the same ones I wore the last time I dreamed of this place—the ones that belong to a life I lost nearly eight years ago. As expected, the wind isn’t warm or cold. It justis. It carries a metallic hum, a trembling distortion, as if the world is being filtered through old speakers that can’t properly hold sound.
This time, instead of staring at the old supply shack from a distance, I stand before the doorway.
The wood of the weather structure, as if it’s a breathing thing, groans with each gust of wind. I search the dark, shadowy interior, but no matter how hard I try to focus on the little details, they keep dissolving like wet paint.
Then, from somewhere inside that dark abyss, a whimper echoes out. Small. Frayed. Soaked in fear and exhaustion. It’s the kind of sound a person makes when they’ve already given up.
It’s the memory of someone screaming from this same blackness the last time I woke up here that has pricklesgrowing under my skin and my pulse crawling higher. I inch forward, shoulders squared and breath held tight. It’s like some delusional part of me believes if I trap the air in my chest, that I can hold my courage there too.
The second my bare foot lifts to step inside, I’m ripped away. Not by someone’s hands, but by some unseen force that hooks under my ribs and catapults me backward through the air.
The dream blurs. Spins. Reforms entirely.
When my feet finally find steady ground again, I’m thirty yards from the small building, positioned in the middle of the clearing as though the building never let me near it. It’s jarring, a violent kind of relocation that makes the earth feel unreliable beneath my feet.
Before I can recover, a voice cuts clean through the dream.
“You shouldn’t have come here.”
The hairs on the back of my neck rise. The voice is the same dark, heavy echo as before. It slithers into my ears and rises from the ground all at once, a chorus from all different directions that make head spin. I can’t pinpoint its source, I’m not sure I want to, but before I can fully process the familiar warning, the dream skips again.
And another voice joins, spoken as if made of the wind itself.
“I know what you want most.”
My lungs seize as I jerk toward the achingly familiar sound just as the twirling gray mist at the edge of the clearing splits open. Mom steps out of it as if she’s crossing a veil into a different plane of existence. Her long hair lifting in the breeze, her gaze sharp and fixed on something only she can see.
My body reacts before my mind can catch up.
I shift toward her. Or try to. The sudden, desperate ache to reach her, to touch her, to feel her arms around me again is overwhelming in its intensity. But my feet never close the gap.The dream tilts and glides beneath me, keeping her at the same unreachable distance no matter how many steps I try to take.
“Mom!” I shout, or I think I do, but the wind swallows my voice whole. The sound eaten alive, chewed up into nothing before it can reach her.
She doesn’t look at me. Not once. Even when my grief-filled heart is actively twisting itself into a knot inside my rib cage. It’s like my presence means nothing here.
I’m nothing more than a spectator for this part of the memory, not a participant.
It takes me far too long to realize that her attention is pinned on something over my shoulder. She watches like she can’t afford to look away.
My stomach drops.
I turn, and this time the dream doesn’t fight me. It wants me to see.
A massive beast made of shadow and smoke towers behind me. The shape resembles a wolf, but it ripples and seethes like storm clouds forced to hold an unnatural shape. Obsidian eyes, somehow both glassy and dead, stare back at me. The attention has some old wound inside me pulling tight, threatening to split open all over again. The fear that courses through me like ice water isn’t remembered by my mind, yet my body reacts like it’s lived this moment before.
Mom’s voice echoes again. “What you’re so desperate for…I can give it to you.”
The creature laughs. The sound drips with cruelty and scrapes at the back of my skull, needling with a familiarity I can’t place.
“Bargaining is beneath you, weaver.”
The deep, masculine voice from before, the one that’s told me twice I shouldn’t be here, belongs to this demon-like wolf.
Behind me, Mom’s answer shivers through the clearing. “I’ll do anything to keep my daughter safe.”
My breath hitches.
