“I was all that and more.” Her ghostly form grinned. “But I had a weakness. My heart. And it was that he used against me.”
I wanted to close the roiling distance between us, as if I could keep her from leaving before I got the answers I needed. But it was as if there were an invisible barrier between us—or as if she wasn’treallyhere in my dream.
She was a magical projection. I could only imagine how powerful she was, keeping this much of herself alive while her body was long-since buried and decayed.
Goddess help me, Ihopedhe’d the decency to bury her. Whoeverhewas.
“You do know it is the heart, don’t you?” she asked.
I didn’t understand.
“The weakness. The unraveling thread you seek. If he chooses you, he can never possess it, but the curse over him will end.”
“Do you swear it?” I asked, trying and failing once more to take a step forward in this black abyss.
That was when I recognized it. The Bride wasn’t in my dreamspace because my own magic was keeping her out. Protecting me.
If that wall didn’t exist between us, I had no doubt she would’ve attacked me.
“I don’t need to swear to anything,” the Bride said, smiling slowly as if she knew I understood the real reason she was here. “It is the way of this death curse. To break it, he must do what my husband would not.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
“Then you will die like the rest of them.”
It was hard to sound fearsome in dreams. “You won’t find me easy to kill.”
The Bride laughed. “Little girl, I have so much more power than you. I am a thousand times the sorceress you’ll ever be. You can’t keep me out forever.”
“Magic is different now,” I said, showing my teeth in a false grin. “This is my era, not yours. And you don’t have that power any longer. You’re just a ghost.”
“Am I?” Her laugh echoed, growing distant. “He cut out my heart, and gave it to the Queen of the Sea. But I had the last laugh. He may have unlocked the Queen’s power, but he never got to use it. Come to my cavern, little sorceress, and you’ll see just what I am.”
“You’re just a ghost,” I repeated, like a frightened child in the dark. The dream was shifting, threatening to end.
“Let me do you a favor, child. I think you already know the answer. You just don’t remember.”
“The answer to what?”
“To the question you’ve been wrestling with: Why can’t he have the treasure and you, too? For you know he’ll never choose you. You’ll do anything to convince yourself it won’t matter. But you know. You know. You know…”
As her words faded, the void crashed over me like a wave, and my eyes fluttered open, unsure what to make of the light.
I woke to Jax standing at the side of my hammock.
“There’s a sunrise you should see,” he said, his voice particularly low and rough.
I blinked away sleep, only to find the pirate captain looking like a nervous schoolboy at my side.
“You woke me up to see the sunrise?” I mumbled. “I’ve seen them before.”
“Not like this you haven’t.” He cleared his throat, as if nervous. “Are you coming?”
Grumbling all the while, I let Jax help me out of my hammock and lead me outside onto the deck.
We weren’t the only ones viewing the sunrise. The crew seemed transfixed by it.
“The magic centered on this Isle is what makes it so red,” Jax explained, standing behind me. “Like a storm coming.”
