Evan

The landscape was dark and oppressive and Evan had been walking for miles—at least, it felt like miles. It was hard to tell time or speed or space here because the emptiness of the desert was unwavering in its sameness. He’d stopped calling Arrabelle’s name long ago because it had begun to seem like a moot point. It was becoming very clear that Arrabelle wasn’t here, and that screaming his throat raw wasn’t going to bring her back.

There was a part of his brain that said she’d been taken away because he hadn’t wanted to be with her. He’d planned on telling her soon. That, though he cared for her, he didn’t . . . no, couldn’t . . . be in a relationship with her. He just couldn’t be a partner to anyone. Couldn’t give her what she needed emotionally. He was happy with his life . . . with who he was . . . he couldn’t be put in a position again where he had to defend his right to be himself.

He knew she would protest, tell him that she loved him and wanted to be with him no matter what—and then he would have to tell her the truth. That he’d been in love with someone once, before he’d met Arrabelle, and that the person he’d thought he loved—and who he’d thought loved him back—had left him when they’d discovered more about Evan than they’d wanted to know.

He’d thought the pain he’d suffered would go away—but the rejection had opened a wound deep inside him. One that would not heal. He would tell Arrabelle the story. He would make her see that no matter how much he cared about her . . . he could not be vulnerable like that again.

“Arrabelle!” he called out, the gesture futile. “Arrabelle, please! Wherever you are, listen to me!”

He stopped walking, just stood there in the semidarkness, swaying on his feet, and then he sat down in the sand. But that wasn’t good enough . . . he lay back and let the sand fill in around him, slipping inside his clothes so that the tiny granules scratched at his skin.

He stared up at the sky—there were three moons the size of cantaloupes circling each other. He reached up, wanting to touch them with his hands, but they were too far away . . . so far away that to claim them, he’d need a spaceship and the ability to travel at light speed.

“Arrabelle,” he said, her name soft on his lips. “Where are you, Arrabelle?”

She didn’t answer him, but it almost didn’t matter anymore. He was content in the knowledge that no matter where she was, he was with her in spirit. This was how he’d expected to go . . . alone . . . and now it was happening. Just as he’d imagined.

“Arrabelle, if I’m being completely honest with myself here—and that’s something I should be, honest with myself, because why lie to me, right?” He said all this out loud. “Besides, there’s no one else here to lie to anyway.”

He lifted his arms, making angels in the sand, and he wondered if the Goddess was watching him.

“Arrabelle, I’m terrified of you. I have been since the moment we met.”

He was talking, words coming out of his mouth that he didn’t even know he had inside him.

“You are everything I could ever want, but I’m too scared to let you love me. I’m a pusillanimous fool and I hate myself for it.”

The first raindrop hit Evan on the forehead. It was so unexpected that he recoiled, sitting up and wiping at his face. But then he realized what was happening and started laughing.

“Your rain scared me!” he said, yelling up at the sky. “Who the hell is afraid of a little water?”

A lyric from a song danced through his head . . . something about needing someone like a desert needed rain, and he laughed even harder. He was sitting in the sand, laughing his head off, getting rained on . . . and he wasn’t happy, per se, but he wasn’t so miserable now, either.

“Arrabelle!” he screamed, his voice reaching up to the three moons. “I love you!”

The rain began to fall in sheets. He was getting drenched, but he didn’t care. He lay back in the sand, his clothes and hair plastered to his body. He closed his eyes and let the rain wash everything away.

•   •   •

He woke up to the smell of growing things. It was a rich, loamy scent and it filled his nostrils and made him smile as he shook away the last fingers of sleep. He rubbed his eyes, the memory of the impromptu rain shower making him laugh.

The smell of damp soil was only getting stronger. He turned his head, surprised to find himself smack-dab in the middle of a field of mushrooms. He sat up, brushing his hair out of his eyes, and looked around.

“Whoa.” The word slipped out of his mouth before he could stop it.

No matter where he turned, as far as the eye could see . . . mushrooms.

He got up and stretched, surprised at how one rainstorm had changed the whole tenor of the landscape. He was so busy marveling at the bizarreness of the dreamlands and not paying attention to where he was going that he almost missed it. The hillock in the middle of all the flat land. It was the only part of the landscape not covered in mushrooms and once Evan had seen it, he was obsessed. He walked over to it, crushing little mushroom bodies under his heels as he went, drawn irresistibly to whatever lay beneath it.

It was a large rectangle of dirt, a mound of soil that looked as though it had lain undisturbed for a long time. Without understanding why, Evan knelt down beside the mound and thrust his hands into it. He began to dig, slowly at first and then faster, shifting soil out of the way with a frenzy that made him light-headed.

Finally, he stopped, his fingers touching something soft. He brushed the dirt away . . . and discovered Arrabelle’s sleeping face.

•   •   •

He tried everything to wake her up. He called her name. Gently slapped both cheeks. Shook her. Yelled her name. He tried everything until there was only one option left.

It feels like a test, he thought. And I hate tests.

But he wasn’t the same man he’d been—something had happened to him during that rainstorm. He’d been purified by a supernatural event greater than himself. It almost felt like a religious experience, like he’d gone out into the desert and waited for the Goddess to find him and lay a kiss of absolution on his brow. With that accomplished, he had the confidence to do anything.

Like wake up a sleeping princess.

“Arrabelle,” he said, as he knelt before her, a prince with dirt-covered knees.

He ran his finger down the side of her cheek, then lowered his face until his lips were inches from her left ear.

“Arrabelle, I love you. I know that if I do this and it works, I will be tied to you for life,” he said, and cleared his throat, his mouth dry. “So I promise to always be honest with you and tell you what I’m thinking. I’m ready to be vulnerable again, to have a better life with you at my side.”

He stopped and closed his eyes.

“Arrabelle, please wake up.”

He placed his mouth gently against her lips, felt the dry crackle of his own parched skin as he kissed her. She tasted like dirt and growing things, her lips moister than he’d expected. He felt her stirring and then her arms were encircling the back of his neck and pulling him toward her.

“I thought you’d never get here,” she breathed against his mouth.

“Me neither,” he said—and then he kissed her again.

She held him close, her body warming under his. She was lithe, yet firm, and he could feel her taut muscles tensing as she ran her hands up and down his back. He enjoyed the feline grace with which she moved underneath him, wanted to get closer to her, fill his senses with her.

“You’re so beautiful,” he murmured as he kissed her throat. “So damned beautiful.”

“Thank you for not letting me go,” she said, her voice thick with emotion.

He stopped what he was doing and rolled onto his side so he could see her face. Her eyes were dry, but deep lines cut into the skin around her mouth and between her eyebrows.

“I couldn’t do it,” he said, tracing the curve of her jaw with his finger.

She shivered at his touch and closed her eyes.

“It was like being dead, but with dreams. It’s not bad . . . not really.”

“What’re you talking about, Bell?” he asked.

She opened her eyes and shrugged.

“I don’t know. It feels so far away now. Like with each breath I take, it gets further and further away.”

She smiled at him, her dark brown eyes clearer than they’d been only a few moments earlier.

“You’re feeling better?” he asked.

She nodded.

“I am.”

“So what next?” he asked.

She sat up, pulling her knees into her chest. She yawned, but the exhaustion was beginning to fade from her eyes, the lines disappearing from her forehead and around her mouth.

“Well, I think we should try to find the Red Chapel. It’s the only place I know of in all the dreamlands,” she said, arching her back and stretching like a cat. “I don’t know how we find it, but maybe if we just think about it, it will come to us.”

“It’s an awful place in real life,” Evan said, wishing they would go anywhere but there.

“It’s where you lost your coven,” Arrabelle said, in understanding.

“Lost them . . . ? It was a massacre. The Flood stole Laragh, then burned Yesinia and Honey on a pyre in front of the Red Chapel. Niamh saw the whole thing.” He didn’t get into the fact that Niamh was the reason the chapel had been burned down to its foundations. Suffice it to say, it had been a horrific night. He and Niamh had both almost died and their coven had been destroyed . . . all because of The Flood.

“We don’t have to go—” Arrabelle started to say, but Evan took her hand in his, brought it to his lips, and kissed it.

“I go where you go, Bell.”

•   •   •

It was funny, but they didn’t have to go far.

They’d set off as soon as Arrabelle had felt well enough to walk, their hands intertwined. He found himself just happy to be in her company, pleased he was the reason she was up and moving, alive, not buried in a field of mushrooms.

“I ate it, like an idiot,” she said, swinging her arm as she walked—and by proximity and connection of their hands, his arm went with hers as they matched their steps. “I’m an herbalist and I ate a poisonous mushroom.”

She laughed, a clear throaty sound that made Evan’s heart beat faster.

“It happens,” Evan said. “I’m just glad I found you.”

“How’d you know where I’d be?” Arrabelle asked, swinging their arms faster.

“I didn’t,” he said—which was the truth. “I just started walking. The others thought you were dead, but I didn’t care. I just felt like I had to go and find you.”

“I’m not mad at them for leaving me,” Arrabelle said. “I get it.”

“You were there one minute and the next you were gone, Bell,” Evan said. “It was surreal.”

“I walked for so long,” Arrabelle said. “And there was nothing. Do the dreamlands scare you as much as they do me?”

“They do,” Evan said, nodding in agreement.

“And I haven’t been hungry since we got here. Except when I was being compelled to eat those mushrooms.”

Evan realized he hadn’t had a meal since they got to the dreamlands, but when he did a mental check of his hunger level, he found it at zero.

“Very strange.”

“I wish Lizbeth or Lyse or someone would just swoop in and find us,” Arrabelle said—and before the words were even out of her mouth . . . a shadow cut across the sand.