Arrabelle

Arrabelle had never been happier to see a dead person in her life. When she turned her head and caught sight of Eleanora Eames, the former head of the Echo Park coven and Lyse’s grandmother, she was overwhelmed by a feeling of joy so great that she wanted to cry. Arrabelle, who did not like to show emotion, welcomed the tightness in her throat. It was all a jumble inside her: tears, joy, relief. The sense of being alone in a dark wood with no source of light had lifted and she felt better. For the first time in a long time, Arrabelle knew they would make a plan. That Eleanora would take charge and make sure things ended well.

It was a naïve thought. That Eleanora could fix everything. But Arrabelle decided not to question it. Maybe the little voice in her head was right: Eleanora couldn’t solve all their problems. But just having her there to help guide them made Arrabelle relax.

She recognized the giantess standing beside Eleanora from the picture on Eleanora’s bookshelf. This was Hessika, the Echo Park coven’s Dream Keeper before Lizbeth. Her appearance was jarring at first—you just wanted to stand there and stare at her. She was tall and imposing but with a true sweetness and joy to her face. Obviously, she’d chosen to stay behind after her death and become a Dream Walker, so she was on their side. And if Eleanora trusted her . . . then Arrabelle trusted her, too.

“Thank the Goddess,” Arrabelle said, unable to stop herself from grinning with pleasure. “You’re a sight for sore eyes.”

Here in the dreamlands, Eleanora and Hessika looked as if they were made of flesh and blood—they couldn’t manifest so strongly back in the real world—but Arrabelle still didn’t want to try to touch either of them in case it wrecked the illusion.

“Hessika and I have been preparing for your arrival,” Eleanora said, smiling back at Arrabelle. “But we should get moving. The girls are at the Red Chapel and as much as they are safe there with Lizbeth for now . . . soon she will not be there to protect them.”

Eleanora turned to Dev.

“They’ve been waiting for you.”

“And I’ve been waiting for them,” Dev said, eyes shining with tears.

“So you’re our maker, ma belle?” Hessika asked, her gaze fixed on Niamh. “You can build here, make us something to travel with?”

Niamh nodded, and until the giantess turned her attention to the young woman, Arrabelle hadn’t realized how unsettled Niamh was. She was deathly pale, her thin body shaking with nerves. Arrabelle had read Niamh’s journal, knew that back in their reality she and Evan had lost their whole coven at the Red Chapel. She could only imagine how terrifying it would be to go back there—even if it was only the dreamlands’ version of the actual place.

“Why did you call her a maker?” Lyse asked.

Hessika gave Lyse a lazy smile.

“’Cause it’s their particular energy that vibrates here in the dreamlands, dear heart,” Hessika replied. “Their very existence powers this place. Shall we say—just as an analogy—that they are the dreamers who dream the dreamlands into existence? Does that make sense? It’s how come they can manipulate matter here. Dream Keepers have a bit of a talent for weaving in the dreamlands, but it’s impermanent. Only builders can make things that stand the test of time.”

“What do you want me to make?” Niamh asked, her face still pale.

Hessika waved a long, thin arm in the air.

“I’ve always been partial to pontoon boats . . . but that’s just because my papaw had himself a little catamaran I used to love as a child.”

Arrabelle had a feeling that even on a “little catamaran” Hessika would still look regal.

“The sooner we get there the better,” Dev said, looking expectantly at Niamh.

“So you want her to put a motor on it,” Arrabelle asked dryly.

“Whatever gets us there sooner,” Dev said, grinning back at Arrabelle.

“Let Hessika and me take care of that,” Eleanora replied as Niamh took a deep breath, raised her hands in the air, palms up, and closed her eyes.

The others stood in a semicircle watching her work.

“I’m not sure I really know what a pontoon boat looks like,” Niamh murmured from behind closed lids. “So I’m just gonna give you what I think it is.”

There was no shock wave of magic, no loud noise to connote the arrival of something that a maker had built. It was so much simpler than that. One moment there was nothing, the next, a big, flat-bottomed behemoth floated on the water in front of them.

To Arrabelle, it was more raft than boat, its thick round timbers lashed together with heavy twine—but there was more than enough room for all of them. It seemed buoyant even with their combined weight as they climbed aboard—although Arrabelle was pretty sure that neither Eleanora nor Hessika contributed to the weight load. There was just something about the way the two Dream Walkers moved that clued Arrabelle in. The difference was so slight, almost as if they were floating, and Arrabelle would never have noticed it if she hadn’t been paying attention.

“Will it work?” Niamh asked once they’d all embarked.

“Yes,” Eleanora said from her perch at the bow of the boat—she and Hessika had taken up places at the front while the others had filled in toward the stern. “Now let us handle the power.”

She waved a hand and a swirl of wind encircled the makeshift boat, pushing them forward. The wind picked up speed and soon they were skimming along the surface of the water toward their final destination. Hessika and Eleanora remained standing, no matter what speed the boat was going. The rest of them had to sit down and hold on to the twine that kept the timbers in place, afraid they’d be knocked overboard by the wind buffeting the boat.

Arrabelle stayed close to Evan. She didn’t need to touch him to feel the tension he held in his shoulders. The more time they spent together, the better able she was to read him. It was like she’d developed a sixth sense attuned only to him and his needs. She’d never felt this way about another person before, never cared as much about someone as she did about Evan. And as much as she wanted him, she was afraid of the vulnerable way he made her feel.

It was like balancing on a seesaw, fear and need vying for precedence in her mind.

Unable to help herself, she reached over and placed her hand on Evan’s shoulder. She felt the muscles of his back go rigid under her fingers. She removed her hand, and when he didn’t turn and acknowledge her in any way, the rejection she experienced was heart-wrenching.

She hadn’t felt as close to him since he’d been miraculously healed by the blood sisters in the underground lab—and though she knew Evan was still guarded about his feelings, part of her worried that he’d only been open to her love because he was dying. She felt bad about judging him so harshly. He wasn’t fickle and she knew he wouldn’t play with her heart like that.

But still, round and round she went, her brain unable to stop trying to fit the pieces of the puzzle together. She hated being in a holding pattern. Was the worst when it came to patience. She would rather push things to a resolution, even a negative one, so long as it ended the uncertainty. She was trying really hard to not do that in this situation. She cared too much about Evan to screw things up with her impatience . . . and, besides, they were in the middle of a crisis and her attention needed to be directed elsewhere. Her brain should be focused on problem solving, not on whether Evan wanted her.

But it was hard not to reflect on that kind of stuff when you were trapped on a raft cruising down an endless sea, the sound of the wind filling your ears and making it impossible to talk. All she had were her own thoughts to occupy her. Thoughts that did nothing to ease her worry.

“It’s coming,” Eleanora called out over the hiss of the wind. “We need to go faster.”

At first, Arrabelle didn’t know what Eleanora was talking about, but a few moments later she saw it: A cloud of darkness had formed behind them, eating up the water they’d left in their wake.

“What the hell is that?” Arrabelle cried, pointing at the swirl of storm clouds that were quickly gaining on them.

“It’s what animates The Flood—here the darkness is in its true form,” Eleanora yelled back at her.

They’d picked up more speed, the front of the boat slamming into the cresting waves as it went faster and faster, trying to escape the oncoming storm. Now Arrabelle could see that the darkness was sucking up funnels of water into the clouds.

Too late, they realized the darkness had a plan.

“Hold on tight!” Lyse screamed as the boat went airborne.

A moment later, it crashed back into the surface of the water. Only the water had become so shallow that the stern of the boat slammed into the solid ground underneath it and the raft split apart, sending everyone flying. Arrabelle felt fingers grasping at her ankle, trying to hold her back, but then her own velocity ripped her out of its grasp and she sailed away. With a thwack, Arrabelle’s hip connected with the ground and she cried out in pain, holding on to her side.

The water was freezing, soaking into her pants and shirt, and she began to shiver uncontrollably. Her hip throbbed—she’d probably taken a layer of skin off as she hit the ground—but she gritted her teeth against the pain, rolled over, and crawled to her knees. She’d been thrown on the other side of the darkness, but instead of a maelstrom of cloud and water and wind, she found herself inside the calm.

She was in the eye of a storm.

There was no wind here and the sky had been blotted out by the black clouds swirling above her. Inside the eye, the air was heavy with water, and her lungs fought to pull oxygen from it.

“Evan!” she cried. “Lyse?!”

There was no reply. She felt her ears pop as the pressure changed, and she knew that she had passed out of the eye of the storm. All around her, there was nothing but sand. She realized that the dreamlands had changed again on her. The water was gone and a powdery red sand had taken its place.

“Hello?!” she screamed, the heaviness of the air blunting her cries. “Help me!”

After a while, she gave up calling for help and began to wander, looking for a way out of the darkness. But it was like being trapped in smoke. The gray smog made it hard to see very far in any direction. And the more she walked, the less confident she was that she wasn’t going in the wrong direction.

She must’ve walked for hours, anger giving way to frustration and then frustration giving way to fear. She was in a strange place and she had no idea how to get back to her own reality. She gave up on finding the rest of her coven and began to try to call up one of those orbs Lyse used to transport them in and out of the dreamlands. She went around and around, working on figuring out a way to use magic to get herself out of the darkness.

As an herbalist, she knew how to manipulate plants to make tinctures and poultices and powders . . . what she didn’t know how to do was take those skills and use them to save herself.

It didn’t take long for her to give up and start walking again. The red sand began to change, replaced, instead, by bright white rocks in various shapes and sizes. It only took stepping on one of the “rocks” to discover that it was made of a soft and fluffy material—and not a rock, at all. She knelt down and picked up one of the smaller “rocks” and held it up in the palm of her hand.

“What are you?” she asked it, lifting it to her nose and sniffing. It smelled like steamed sweet rice, a heady sugary scent that made her stomach growl.

She raised an eyebrow, not really believing that the dreamlands were trying to feed her. She pinched off a section of the “rock” and put it in her mouth. It tasted heavenly. Starving, she stuffed the rest of the “rock” in her mouth and barely chewed, the fluffy rice ball melting as she swallowed.

She knew it was a mistake the moment it hit her belly, the ache she felt there spiraling out to the rest of her body. She clutched her stomach and groaned, but she was in such pain that she was hardly conscious of doing it. All she could see was the darkness. All she could feel was the evil in her stomach slowly dissolving her from the inside out. Black dots appeared in her peripheral vision, and a deep ache of pain filled her every cell. It took over her senses and leached all the life from her veins. She fell forward, her body sprawled across the ground, smooshing the “rocks” beneath her.

If she’d been aware, she would’ve quickly understood her mistake. She would’ve realized the “rocks” were actually mushrooms, and, as an herbalist, she would’ve kicked herself for touching the poisonous things to begin with, let alone eating them. It was the stupidest of mistakes.

The mushrooms began to expand and grow, surrounding and covering Arrabelle until she disappeared underneath them. Unconsciousness settled over her and, for all intents and purposes, she appeared to be dead and buried . . . even though she was not.

She was merely sleeping the sleep of the dreamlands.