“I don’t know where the danger will come from, Rhy, only that I always sensed something. Maybe not from her, and before you ask, no, I had no idea she was for you.”
Rhiannon let the remark slide. They were not going to have the one out in the open now. Too much thinking needed to still be done there. But she had one more question.
“Have you ever had dreams so vivid they feel like memories? But the moments relived aren’t your own?”
Ceridwen covered her hand with hers.
“Mom knew all about dreams, Rhy. I was never a big believer in them, I guess?”
Rhiannon smirked.
“Really? I’d have thought out of the four of us?—”
“That I’d be the one? No, maybe I’m too grounded.”
Ceridwen waited a beat. Rhiannon’s mouth actually dropped open.
“Was that a pun? An Earth pun? Damn, Ceri!”
Rhiannon fought the laughter as valiantly as she could, and then she was brave enough to glance at Ceridwen, who burst into the giggles the second their eyes met, and that was that. Rhiannon dissolved in a fit of joy, Ceridwen almost draped over her shoulder. It felt good, to laugh with her sister, to be held, to be sharing inside jokes, and to be understood. She missed this. She missed Ceridwen. Like a limb. Like a heartbeat.
The moment lasted. For once the warmth lingered even after the hilarity subsided. Ceridwen sat still, her chest rising and falling with breaths that matched Rhiannon’s. Her hands in her lap, tapered nails, carefully cut short. No nail polish.
“It would be useless, and you know it, the way I’m elbow deep in dirt most days.”
“And here I was about to suggest a spa outing.” Rhiannon knew she didn’t quite pull off the sarcasm she was aiming for. Would it be so bad to get pampered with Ceridwen at someexpensive place and forget everything? This damn island and their damn past. To her shock, the idea appealed a little too much.
“Green frog slippers aside—and honestly, what were you even thinking, you walking cliché—are you okay?”
Ceridwen blinked, clearly taken by surprise by Rhiannon’s question. Hell, Rhiannon took herself by surprise asking it.
“I am. Yes. In several ways thanks to you. I don’t have to worry about finances?—”
“Don’t go there. If you’re gonna thank me or something, it will just be embarrassing for us both. I repaid the debts I was always going to repay.”
Ceridwen threw her hands up in the air.
“Oh, for crying out loud, you never owed me money.”
“What I owed you for leaving you with the twins, I couldn’t give you, Ceri. So it had to be money.”
It was perhaps the desperation in Rhiannon’s whisper that stopped Ceridwen cold. She took Rhiannon’s hand again, gently, carefully. Rhiannon felt nothing but the body heat and was grateful for it.
“I feel like we are standing on the precipice, Rhy. And I think you are the harbinger of whatever is coming, no matter what it is you came back to Dragons for.”
Rhiannon let the “harbinger” remark slide. She wasn’t. And she wasn’t about to tell Ceridwen about being blackmailed by her dead spouse into returning. A tale for another time.
“You felt the curse?”
The grandfather clock by the fireplace struck midnight, the twelve beats measuring time, measuring their breaths.
“I don’t know for sure, Rhy.”
“Always so cautious.”
“Merely trying to be certain. I am turning forty-five in nine months, baby sister.”
The words hung in the air like mustard gas, their stench leaving marks.
