by J M Fraser
She gasped. “After the way I acted back there?”
“I pick odd times to blurt these things out.”
“I love you, too, Brian. More than you can ever imagine.”
“Even though you poof away without warning?”
She kissed his cheek, whispered in his ear. “I poof back, don’t I?”
Yeah. And he’d figured out how, or thought he had. “You’re using dreams, aren’t you?”
She gaped at him, eyes twinkling more than ever. She didn’t confirm or deny. Just took his hand, started walking with him, and swung her arm with his. She hummed.
He was in love with a hummingbird. “Rebecca, you’re using dreams to come and go, just the same way I poofed into that girl Laura’s room with you and then popped back at her later in the flower garden.”
She stopped. He did, too. She moved her hands to his cheeks. “Don’t think you’ll figure out everything so easily, mister.”
He hugged her. Tight enough to feel the beat of her heart.
“Look at you warming me like a fire, Brian. My heart is lumpy.”
“Same here. Totally.”
“Peas in a pod?”
“Uh-huh.”
* * *
Another two weeks dragged by without her, except in dreams.
One afternoon, Brian joined a group of guys for a three-on-three game of basketball in the university gymnasium. One of them pointed at his shirt. “You’re skins, dude.”
Brian peeled it off and threw it toward the risers.
“That means you don’t pass to the guys in shirts.” A shaved-headed jerk in an oversized Milwaukee Bucks jersey hanging almost to his knees leered at him. The last time they played together, Brian got tricked by somebody calling his name from behind. He passed the ball to a guy on the wrong team. This idiot couldn’t let it die. Brian would have liked nothing more than to dunk the basketball right in his face.
Right. Fat chance of jamming at five foot eight. He just needed to remember the basics, like not passing to the guys with shirts on.
They started a game to eleven, with one point awarded for each basket. The other team had the ball first. Brian fell into his usual playing style, hanging out near the half-court line. Defense wasn’t his thing. Better to let his more capable teammates do the heavy lifting, being careful not to let them trip over him in the process.
Early on, the players on both teams passed the ball back and forth and took their shots without giving him a second glance. He tried to get his ass in gear and at least move on offense, but that only led to his fumbling the ball away the one time he got it in his hands.
His two fellow skins were nice enough not to say anything, but one of them glanced toward the risers, probably hoping a suitable replacement might come along before the next game started. If the universe did have a Scotty, Brian silently pleaded to get beamed up. Basketball wasn’t his thing.
After the shirts built up a seven-to-two lead, Brian managed to grab a rebound when it deflected off two sets of taller hands. He started a clumsy dribble, nearly lost the ball, but kept going to the half-court line. He brought it back and eyed the hoop.
“Pass it to me!” The taunting goof, Mr. Dress-for-Success, pressed close. Brian glanced around, found nobody free, and tried a wild fadeaway shot over the guy’s head.
The ball hit the rim, bounced on a sideways angle to the backboard, made an impossible return on the same angle, and fell through the basket. Seven to three. “Wicked spin!” one of his teammates shouted.
Yes!
On the next play, a shirt tripped and lost the ball. It bounced into Brian’s hands at half court. He went into an out-of-control dribble toward the basket and flipped the ball up. The crazy thing spun a stubborn circle around the rim, refusing to let centrifugal force send it airborne. Laws of physics be damned! It dropped into the net. Seven to four.
All of a sudden, playing basketball was a lot more fun.
His teammates started looking at him differently. A shirt missed a shot, and a skin got the rebound. He actually passed the ball to Brian.
Intoxicated by his burst of luck, Brian lobbed the ball from the top of the key. The shot was beyond his range, and he regretted it the moment he let go, but the ball floated well past the point where gravity should have claimed it as a victim…and into the net. Seven to five.
“Awesome, dude!”
Heaven.
The moment he let himself bask in the glory, his flat-footedness returned, forcing his two pals to go up against the three shirts with little assistance on his part. He did his best to stay out of their way while they grunted, shoved, stole, shot, and rebounded until they tied the game ten to ten.
One more point. Had he ever been on the winning side? Coming this close, and better yet, having scored three actual points ranked this day no lower than the seventh best of his life—way below meeting Rebecca, but somewhere between his first kiss and the day he passed the road test for his driver’s license.
Before he could walk off the court and retire from the game for good—why risk a letdown by playing out that final point?—the jerk on the other team came straight at him with the ball. Brian had no delusions he could ever defend against whatever fancy move was about to unfold. He should have gotten out while the getting was good.
But his right hand took on a life of its own, scooping low and deflecting the ball enough for him to knock it from the guy. He looked down at the thing. It was in his hands! He moved the ball to the half-court line and stopped.
“Pass it!”
“Over here!”
“Shoot it!” A girl’s cry rose from the risers, and not just any girl.
Rebecca.
Adrenaline blasted through Brian’s veins like a rocket ship. He dribbled toward two defenders and took a jump shot from a little behind the foul line. The ball hit the rim, went straight up, and came down.
Swish.
One of his teammates slapped his back. “Sweet!”
“That was epic, man!” the other said.
But who cared about a game of hoops anymore? Not with Rebecca returning to his life. She clapped like crazy from the risers.
“The dude has a fan,” one of the guys said.
He rushed over to her.
Rebecca shot up and wrapped her arms around his neck, her loud pink scarf tickling his ear. “We sure showed them, didn’t we?”
“We?”
Her eyes gleamed with mischief. “I love doting on you.”
The scarf. What was it about that scarf?
* * *
He sat with Rebecca across an old kitchen table facing a poet from a forgotten era. A warm, gold Saint Brigit coin proved their little get-together went beyond the bounds of waking reality, but according to Rebecca, whatever went down would be genuine all the same.
“Your verses are clever, Rebecca, but you need to take greater risks!” Walt Whitman had the bald-headed, scraggly-bearded look of somebody’s hippy grandfather. No, that wasn’t it. His voice boomed like Santa Claus. Hearing ho, ho, ho out of this guy would have been no great surprise.
Rebecca slid her book of Ogham across the table. “Show me what you’d change.”
Walt flipped through the pages and paused in the middle, moving his lips as he read. “Good alliteration here.”
Wait. Walt had to be putting them on. Brian leaned forward and tried to read the page upside down. “How can you make that out? It’s Ogham!”
“Ogham?” The poet pushed the book across the table. He’d opened it to a page showing a series of verses written in English.
“But I thought—”
“She’s a handful, isn’t she?”
Somebody knocked on the door.
Brian grabbed the book and paged through it. More English. Rebecca had hidden secrets in her poetry—clues—and now he could read them! He saw something about reflections. A mirror. Would he remember this when he woke up?
Please. Let me remember mirrors.
The pounding
on the door grew louder, relentless. He cracked his eyes open.
“In a minute!” Oh man, of all the times to wake up. He’d been learning something. But what?
More pounding.
“Coming!” He dragged himself out of bed.
The tapered end of a Christmas tree pushed the front door open. And the girl at the other end? “Rebecca!”
A six-foot fir exploded into the room. He hurried around, brushed some needles out of her hair, and kissed the tip of her nose.
Rebecca touched his face, warming him from head to toe, while Simon darted by and started swatting branches with his paw. “I know it’s early, being two days before Thanksgiving and all, but you’re probably going home to your family, aren’t you? I thought we could dress a tree before you leave.”
“I don’t have any ornaments.”
“I’ve got that covered.” She motioned beyond the doorway to two cardboard boxes on the porch. The first overflowed with the kinds of glass ornaments found only in dusty antique stores. Angels, Santa Clauses, snowflakes, teardrops, birds. All hand-painted in Christmas colors. The other spilled over with strings of red beads, gold garlands, and blue lights.
“Rebecca, tell me you didn’t drag this stuff up to the door all by yourself.”
She bounded into the kitchen, a stream of words trailing behind her. “I’ll make hot chocolate. Do you have any Christmas music? Plant the tree in the stand, would you? And change out of those pajamas, Superman! It’s ten in the morning!”
“Yeah, I’ll get right on it.”
He didn’t want any of it to end—the dreams, Rebecca’s wonderful, albeit rare and all too brief appearances, her bursts of childish glee. He’d follow her to the end of the earth and beyond. But beneath the elation, hidden in a corner of his mind he hated to visit, lurked the nagging worry she might disappear one day for good, and he’d never be able to find her.
What was that dream about? He’d seen something. A shelf. A table. A window. No, something else. He needed to pepper her with questions. Maybe she’d slip up and tell him what he’d seen, code or no code. He couldn’t just ride along, hoping the merry-go-round would never stop.
Rebecca called from the kitchen. “I see you still keep my book in a cherished place, right next to the food sorcerer. Honestly, Brian.”
What did he dream?
“Take my verses home to show your mother.”
“What?” He headed into the kitchen. “Why?”
“Just do it, Brian.” Rebecca stood balanced on a chair, fumbling in a cabinet above the stove. “I forgot my hot chocolate mix. Where’s yours?”
She wobbled, and he reached up, catching her by the hips.
“Thank you, Brian.”
“Uh, yeah. You bet.” Only the thin fabric of her dress separated her warm flesh from his hands.
What dream?
Chapter 19
The crash of waves faded to whispers by the time the sound reached Rebecca at the top of the cliff. She’d come to find peace in just such white noise, but a stone captured her attention instead. Lumpy and forgettable on one side, sparkling with jagged crystals on the other, it served as a reminder that all clouds do have silver linings.
She could almost forget her troubles here in this dream, on this rock, but not quite. “Too many visits have come and gone, Simon.”
The cat clicked his teeth at a fly.
“But we’re not here to worry.” She ran her free hand through Simon’s comforting coat.
A climber reached up from below. She started, but then recognized the crescent-shaped ring he wore. Henry Stoddard. Would this cretin never leave her alone? She shifted away.
Another hand joined the first one, then a mat of dark hair. In a moment, the entire sorcerer hauled his conniving self up and perched next to her. He wore a bright purple cloak and handsome pants instead of farmer’s jeans this time, but her mother had always said a dandelion is still a weed, even when it blooms.
“Henry Stoddard! I told you once already your assistance isn’t welcome. I have everything under control, thank you.”
“And this is why you chose a brooding rock for a sitting stool?”
“Feel free to crawl under it.”
The sorcerer winked. “Your skills as a hostess are lacking, dear. I noted the flaw on the day I first came courting.”
“I didn’t climb up here to take a walk down memory lane with you, Henry.”
“Then let’s talk about the present. Where’s the handsome young man?”
The audacity of his question stole her breath away. She counted to ten. She listened to the foaming waves far below. She found her voice. “Where Brian might be is of no moment to you.”
“Oh, but it is! I’ve taken a special interest in him.”
Rebecca clenched her fists. Saying the wrong thing out of anger might provoke the sorcerer to escalate his interference into a mission rather than what she hoped would be a passing fancy. But she couldn’t stop the rage from boiling out of her mouth, un-distilled. “How dare you send Abigail to torment us! And now you ask where Brian is, as if you hadn’t provided exact coordinates to her.”
Stoddard tossed a small rock over the edge. It hit the side partway down and set a small avalanche of gravel into motion, tumbling, bounding, until the entire mess disappeared into the waves below. “I suppose thinking Abigail is on my leash would be less frightening for you than to imagine she’s running wild on her own.”
“You think I fear an imp?”
“I think we both should fear this one, if she’s an imp at all.”
She shuddered. “What are you suggesting?”
“Nothing. Let’s focus on Brian. You’ve been in love with him all this time, from the day you first met him, haven’t you?”
Rebecca didn’t dare speak for fear the flood of emotion bringing tears to her eyes would also break her voice.
They sat in silence until he touched her hand. Gently. And he smiled. The sorcerer could be a disarmingly likeable sort to the unwary, thanks to those perpetual crinkles of humor at the corners of his eyes. “I didn’t expect an answer. Still, I feel obligated to give a piece of advice.”
Rebecca pulled her hand away. “No thank you.”
“I took the trouble to do some research, Rebecca. This prophecy of yours says nothing about the witch falling in love. How many of your precious visits have you squandered prancing around with this boy?”
His worthless advice came a little too late.
“That isn’t my advice,” he said.
“You read minds now?”
“Your heart is on your sleeve. My advice is for you to take control and stop waiting for things to happen. How did you know the boy would arrive in Sidney on that August day?”
She’d been holding the half-plain, half-crystal stone in her palm until that moment. She dropped it now, or it fell on its own and disappeared into the foaming waves without anything close to the splash he’d sent through her stomach. “What do you know about Sidney?”
“Save your misdirection for the boy. Just tell me how you knew.”
“An angel told me, a long time ago.”
“Demons are always bent on telling me things, but I take their counsel with a grain of salt.”
“You liken angels to demons?”
Stoddard’s booming laugh cut across the sea in search of the nearest rock to bounce against. “They’re both part of the ruling class, aren’t they? Call me an anti-establishment type.”
“It’s not the first name comes to mind.”
“Rebecca, I’m simply saying if an angel told me a young man would appear at a certain time and place, I’d do something to make sure it happened. Maybe I’d give him a nice dream and plant a billboard.”
“A what?” Stoddard’s maddening babble would surely drive her to distraction.
“Does this lad have a keen sense of direction?” he asked.
“Are you asking whether he’s a schemer, like you?”
“No, here’s wh
at I’m asking. By showering the boy with love in that hypnotizing manner of yours, are you inspiring his curiosity or stifling it?”
“Go away.”
Stoddard’s laugh found a cliff several furlongs distant and echoed all the way back. His image faded, but his voice lingered. “Your love for Brian prevents whatever control you might have had over this situation, not that you knew how to run the game to begin with. I suppose things will just have to play out on their own, unless you choose to tell him everything.”
“I won’t violate the code! What makes you think you can come here and—”
Stoddard disappeared. He’d accomplished his obvious mission to set her heart pounding over the uncertainty of a random future.
“Henry, you’ve seen the void, haven’t you? You know it’s real. That means the prophecy is, too.”
No answer.
How had Henry researched the prophecy? She’d learned about it from her mother, her mother from her grandmother, and so on through scores of generations. Suppose whatever source Stoddard came across provided greater detail? She should have asked him whether the prophecy foretold the champion would be a witch’s son. Not that she needed further evidence. Brian had to be the chosen one. She felt it in her bones.
A fleeting thought of her mother renewed her worries. The void had started shifting west again, threatening to snuff out every old dream in its path. And Abigail was helping it grow.
How long would the cabin be safe from its clutches?
Chapter 20
Brian sat shoulder to shoulder with his dad at the basement worktable, sifting through mounds of plastic pieces. Shelves lined the walls, displaying models of houses, forts, Star Wars cruisers, and even the Eiffel Tower, all assembled brick by brick with painstaking care. They’d spent the better part of the afternoon preparing this latest project, a scale model of the Taj Mahal, by organizing its thousands of pieces by color and size into plastic containers.
“We’re missing the girl with red hair,” Dad said.
“We’re what?” Brian hadn’t broached the topic of Rebecca with anyone in his family. How could he? I’m seeing this girl, but mostly in my dreams—a relationship in dire need of progression beyond that obligatory modifying clause. Otherwise, his parents would interrogate him about drinking parties while his sister laughed her silly head off.
