by Lisa Ladew
She realized he was standing stock still and she looked up at him. “Crew?”
He stared at her neck, his hand frozen against her hair. She frowned. Was he staring at her tattoo there? He should like that one. Or was there some taboo against a tattoo of a wolf here? Nerves fluttered in her belly. He pulled his eyes away, to her shoulder.
“You should shift.”
“I can’t,” she bit out.
“You can’t,” he repeated, then his eyes met hers.
“Crew…” she said, but a pained look in his expression stopped her. He didn’t want to know the truth. But she did. “The woman, Mackenzie, is she an ex?”
“No,” he said absently, like it was no big deal.
Her jaw clenched. “A current?”
That shook him. “No! She’s Mac’s sister. I’ve never encouraged her attentions.”
Dahlia stepped to the side and indicated the heart drawn in lipstick on the mirror.
“She must have done that earlier this evening, before the rut.”
“She was in your room?”
Crew touched her elbow softly, his voice low. “She’s nothing to me, never has been. She cleans up here sometimes. But I won’t let her in my room again. It’s hard to talk her out of things she wants─”
“─and she wants you.”
Crew smiled sadly. “Even if I were interested, which I am not, Mac is my best friend in this world. I would not date his sister.”
Dahlia stiffened, playing those words back over in her mind. This world. Surely, he’d meant, the world.
Dahlia pulled her hair forward, covering her shoulder and her tattoo, then gathered her clothes. “Ok,” she said simply. She believed him and exhaustion was hitting her hard. Her eyelids drooped, her real world called. “Crew, I─do you mind if I sleep here, with you?”
He nodded vehemently. “I want you to.”
Then why did his face look panicked, like she had asked him for something he couldn’t possibly provide?
***
Crew hurried into the living room, glad to find Mackenzie gone and Mac eating cereal again. “Was Mackenzie ok?” he asked, his mind still mostly on the black and silver tattoo of the wolf behind Dahlia’s ear. A shot from above, showing the wolf’s back, and the two white stars on its shoulders, just like his renqua. He shuddered, knowing it meant something that he did not want to face. Not now.
Mac waved his spoon at him. “She’ll get over it. She was upset when I told her you thought you’d found your mate, but it probably makes her doubly determined to find her own. Congrats again, wolf, how did it go here, with her? I stayed away as long as I could.”
Crew grunted and ignored the question, not sure how he could respond. It had gone both wonderfully, and awfully. “You could have come home about three minutes earlier.”
Mac laughed at that. “Nah. Then I woulda missed you rolling around on the floor naked with Mackenzie in your arms. I bet she loved that.”
“Fuck off,” Crew said companionably enough, crossing the room to get Dahlia’s notebook out of her jacket that she had asked for. He resisted the urge to look inside it.
On his way back to his room, he stopped at the kitchen table. “She wants to sleep here. I told her she could.”
Mac froze, his spoon halfway to his mouth. “She wants you in there with her, right?”
“Yeah. I’m not sure what to do.”
Mac waved the spoon at him and milk splattered across the table. “Go, lie down with her. Make sure she falls asleep first. If she wakes up before you get back, I’ll tell her you had an emergency at work and you’ll be back soon.”
Crew resisted the strong urge to shift and fight at the thought of Mac even talking to Dahlia. It was the only thing that would work, and he needed Mac. Plus, he trusted him. And he had no other choice. He hated this affliction more than he ever had before. Maybe today would be the day to take enough sleeping pills to make him sleep permanently. If only he knew what would happen!
“Mac, there’s one more thing.” He glanced towards his room where the door was still shut. “She hasn’t come out and said it, but she’s implied that she got hit on the head and has amnesia.” And she can’t shift.
Mac whistled and shook his head. “Just like you, Spook, when I first discovered you in our barn stealing eggs, twenty-two years ago.”
“Yeah.” Crew grimaced. Exactly like him.
Mac leaned forward. “Could she be from your world?”
Crew clenched his fists so hard he felt his nails slice his palms.
Rhen help him if she was.
Chapter 14
Dahlia woke up slowly, confused at first as to where she was. Her head felt dull and thick, her eyes gritty, like she hadn’t slept at all. She blinked, saw her own bedroom, groaned and sat up straight, clutching at her shoulder. Blood had seeped through her shirt.
Emotions warred within her as she jumped to her feet and padded into the bathroom for bandages and antiseptic. Relief to be home, in her own bed, in her real world, hit her strongly. But the weight of missing Crew already sat on her chest, making it hard for her to breathe. Back in her own house, with her belief she’d never see him again, she regretted not sleeping with him. What they shared had been amazing, but not everything she wanted from him.
Their last few moments together had been bliss. He’d brought her notebook to her, smiled acceptingly at her while she half-heartedly wrote a few things down, then he’d crawled into bed facing her and stroked her hair until she fell asleep, her notebook clutched to her chest. She hadn’t felt so loved and cared for since her mom had been alive.
Dahlia peeled off her shirt and dropped it to the floor so she could clean the deep scratches in her shoulder, wondering about infection. She carefully taped a bandage over the wound, then stared at the shirt on her floor. It was the same shirt she’d been wearing when she went to sleep, which had never happened before. When she went to sleep, normally she entered her dream world sometimes with her life there already in motion, the dream Dahlia going about her business like normal. But whenever she had woken up still in bed in that world, she’d never been wearing what she’d been wearing when she went to sleep in the real world. And vice versa. It didn’t appear back on her body until she woke up in her real world.
Her notebook! Dahlia squeezed her hands open and shut then ran back to her bed. Her notebook was there, pushed partially under the pillow. It had made the transition with her. That had never happened before either.
So what? That was different. That wasn’t your dream world. You died in your dream world. You’ll never go back there, and you’ll never go back to Orion’s Belt, either.
Panic made her muscles cramp. She still wasn’t used to thinking that she’d died. She would miss her second life. A noise sounded somewhere else in her house and she jumped, a small scream erupting from her throat.
She grabbed onto her notebook and squeezed it in her hands. Oh, goodie. Back in the real world with its impending death. Fun times to be scared of noises in your own house.
She heard a yowling from the other room. The sound had been the rescued bobkitten coming in his cat door. “Angel!” she called, rushing out to see him. He bounded up to her immediately, looking like he’d grown overnight. She picked him up, smoothing the black tufts on his ears, nuzzling him into her neck.
She picked a burr off his fur, wondering if he’d ventured into the woods behind her house yet, like she encouraged him to do. So far, he seemed like he would rather stay in the house and yard. She felt guilty keeping him, but his mom hadn’t been around when she’d found him and he’d been too young to survive on his own. She should have let the veterinarian at her work─her old work─decide what to do about him but instead, she’d quit that night, taken him home, and never gone back. She winced, knowing it had been shameful and impulsive, but she’d been less and less able to control her impulses lately. Maybe knowing you were going to die did that to a person. She had enough money in savings to pay rent and eat
for a year, if her death didn’t happen soon.
She inspected the sores on his back. When she’d found him, or rather when her friend, Heather, had found him and several housecats, plus a woodchuck, inexplicably caught in monster spider webs on the other side of the forest she lived near, he’d been missing fur in a patch on each of his shoulders. Now all that hair was grown in nicely, although strangely.
He was an atypical bobkitten, in that he had much more white fur than most. He wasn’t albino; he still had the black patterns and spots of a bobcat, but the white coloring was unusual. The bare patches had grown in completely black with no pattern to them. When she petted his hair straight down towards his tail, they looked like short, stubby angel’s wings, which was how she had named him.
She squinted at them, then brushed his fur the wrong way. She frowned and put him down so she could see him from above.
Dahlia gasped. Now the black patches looked like the almost-stars she’d seen tattooed on Crew’s back. Her feelings for him came flooding back to her and her knees felt weak. She stared at Angel, then sat straight down on the floor, tears threatening. Angel made a dangerous cat noise, then ran up to her, putting his paws on her chest, pulling at her chin with one velvet paw until she stared into his eyes. He liked to do that for several minutes each day, and she didn’t know why. She’d taken care of a lot of cats at her time at the ASPCA, maybe thousands, and she’d never seen a cat or wild animal do it.
She stared into his eyes, not thinking, letting her mind drift, her hands reaching up to her throat. She normally wore a necklace in this world, too, but it was not there. As her fingers brushed her skin, a memory slammed into her, making bile rise in her throat. She retched dryly, broke eye contact with Angel, and fell backwards to the floor, remembering everything that had happened at the moment she died in a rush of images and sounds.
Dahlia slammed on her brakes and spun her wheel, knowing in her heart she didn’t have a chance, either, but unable to give in, give up, not at least try to live, but she impacted the truck anyway. She screamed inside her head as her car crumpled, metal and flesh melding.
Silence. Dahlia screamed, throwing her hands in front of her, turning her head to the side, but it was over. Just over. She looked straight up into nothing. Complete darkness. She blinked, feeling her eyelids scrape against her corneas, but open or closed, she saw nothing different. She tried to get her bearings. She was lying on something soft. She felt around with her hands and found only the softest fur she’d ever felt in her life.
Heaven? Hell? Purgatory? She rolled over and gagged, then got herself under control and tried to stand. Her body worked, but felt stiff and rusty. “Hello?” she called. The sound coming back to her told her she was in a vast open space, but she felt no wind on her face, no atmosphere.
Everything shifted in a nanosecond. The fur underneath her became hard ground, a soft light appeared, and four walls rushed at her until they stopped fifty feet away on all sides. Two of the walls had one ordinary-looking door set in them.
“Hello, ayasha,” sounded, and she couldn’t decide if the booming voice was in her mind or in her ears. She turned frantically.
Behind her, sat Angel, looking up at her with intelligence in his eyes. No one else was in the room.
“Am I dead?” she said, looking up for the source of the voice, turning in another circle.
“You are. In that world.”
Was the voice coming from Angel? Her stomach rolled and she moaned at the saliva filling her mouth, as intense nausea hit her. Around her, in the room, a vision like a movie began to play in the very air. If she wanted to, she could walk right through it. It was the semi-truck, swerving the first time on the road, the point of view of the person watching was hers, in her car behind it. She swallowed hard and put her hands in her hair, pulling on it. “No, no, I don’t want to see this again. I’m dead, I’m dead, I died.”
“Stop it, then.”
The semi swerved again, crossing the lanes of traffic and Dahlia couldn’t tear her eyes away. The car next to her was about to impact and she squeezed her eyes shut, but she could still hear it, so faintly.
“Ayasha, calm yourself. You are creating this vision. You can control it if you try. Take a deep breath. Imagine only blank space, whiteness, goodness.”
Her tires squealed and remembered momentum grabbed at her, but she did as the voice told her, seeing the light inside her head.
“Good. Remember that your emotions may spark the chimera, but your intellect controls it. You will need the power in the future.”
Dahlia opened her eyes. The room was only a room again. She blinked, then looked at Angel, still sitting and staring at her. She had a thousand questions, but sensed she wasn’t going to get to ask them all.
“Ask the most important ones, ayasha, our time here is short.”
“What does that mean─ayasha?”
“It means young one, little one, precious one.”
Dozens more questions sprang to her mind at that, but he’d said important ones, so she forced her mind to focus.
“Good,” the voice boomed. “Focus is everything.”
“Why am I here?” she asked, holding a hand to her head. She could feel he wanted her to ask it, so she did. Why the hell not, right? Crazy or not, she wanted to play by the rules. Rules meant safety.
“You must choose to move on.”
“Move on to where?”
Angel’s eyes shifted to the door behind her and she looked over her shoulder at it. “Where does it lead?”
“To another world. You will only have one night there, and you must find him in that time.”
“Who?”
“He who will hold you above all others.”
Dahlia looked at the door again. She liked the sound of that, but what did it mean? Even though the situation was crazy, it was also familiar to her, like she’d been waiting for something like this to happen her entire life. Like it was something she glimpsed in the spaces between going to sleep in her real world and waking up in her dream world.
“How will I know him?”
“By how he treats you, and how he makes you feel.”
Dahlia stared at the ceiling. She knew what Angel wanted her to ask next, but she wasn’t going to. Instead, she would ask her own question. “Did I die in my dream world so this could happen?”
“No, ayasha, your time was up there, as it soon is in the world where we first met.”
Dahlia winced at that. She’d known she was going to die, but here was confirmation. She sighed, and went back on course. “Why must I find him?”
“He is the key to your fate, your destiny, your unification with your true family. If he does not meet you in this manner, he will never let himself love you, because he believes if he does not let himself love you, you do not have to die. But he is wrong. If he does not fulfill his destiny in regards to you, you will still die, and he will be lost.”
Dahlia clenched her teeth. “Didn’t I just freaking die? Are you playing games with me?”
“No, ayasha, no games. Only life. You must die again.”
“Is there no way out of it?”
“There is but one way. Another could take the death for you. You can choose that in the moment, if you like.”
That didn’t sound good either. Why was on her lips, but the voice spoke quickly, as if heading her question off.
“If you choose to go through the door, you will only have until you fall asleep in the world, and there is much to be accomplished, so listen to me now. Walk in to town, go to the event that all are attending. When you are inside, he will find you. He will be helpless not to.”
Angel shifted and the room seemed to grow smaller. “We only have a few minutes left here, ayasha, do not be scared. Your father knew the road ahead of you and your sisters and your mates would be long and dangerous, so he gave you tools, both internal and external to help you find your way. Go, find your mate. It is he who will save you and lead you to your true
life.”
“Save me from? From my death?”
“No. From what happens after.” The small bobkitten stood and crossed the room to the door, where he sat again. “Hurry. No door stays open forever. Do you choose to move forward?”
“What if I don’t?”
“Your lives in this plane will be over, an innocent one will die instead of you, and your mate will be lost.”
That got Dahlia moving to the door. She could feel the urgency now. She grasped the doorknob. Turning it felt like the end of everything she’d ever known. As it opened a crack and cold wind rushed in at her, her mind slip-slid, like on ice, the conversation she’d just had skittering away. “No! Am I forgetting?”
“You must, ayasha. He who will hold you above all others is powerful and willful. He cannot read your mind but he can sense your being and sometimes your intentions. If you enter this world with an aim, he will resist you.”
She chose.
Chapter 15
Crew woke up all at once, knowing his office was empty. His hands clenched. “No! Goddammit, no!” he shouted, twisting off his couch to his feet, kicking at the books that lay on his floor. Fierce hatred for this world flooded him. He wanted back with Dahlia.
He strode to his desk and yanked open the drawer, pawing at his right temple with his hand. Directly behind there, that was where he felt Khain’s hook. With him again. In the drawer, instead of his pills, he found a note.
Shit’s going down. Find me. Don’t make me find you.
Beckett’s handwriting. Fucker had his pills. Crew would get them back. He strode out of the office, plucking at the hook in his mind as he went. He had to get rid of that thing. He would find the dragon soon and see if he had any ideas on how to get rid of it. But he would do it himself and never go to Wade under any circumstance.
He found Beckett upstairs in the strangely empty duty room. Beckett stood near the back door, arguing with a male who was almost as big as Beckett. Wolfen? Crew loped over, listening, but realized as he got closer that the male was human.
