Page 89 of Whisper of Nightmares

She feels as though she’s dangling over the edge of a cliff.

“Like what?” she asks tentatively.

Through the skull, she sees his eyes pinch shut. He won’t look at her as he replies, “It is like you are my True North. Every time I am lost, you appear like a bright star in the darkness. Whenever you are around, I feel like I might find my way home.”

The depths of her stomach tighten.

The blasted heat in her face won’t subside.

But she cannot let him do these things to her. These sinful reactions…she needs to be done with them. That was a past version of herself. The more youthful, heedless version who didn’t understand that actions had consequences. Euphemia knows that now.

She tosses her dark curls over her shoulder and simply says, “Oh.”

He watches her, gauging her for a reaction.

Euphemia refuses to give him one.

Swallowing the thickness in her throat, she dregs her tavern wench smile from the swamp that is her cursed soul, and says with all her teeth, “All the more reason to keep me around then.”

She can’t see much of his expression, only eyes that scrunch with—is that amusement she finds reflected in them? It’s gone just as fast as it arrives. Darkness casts a shadow behind them, their brightness dimming.

Euphemia hardly knows this man, and yet, already it breaks something in her to see how easily his hope is dimmed.

“Come,” she says gently. “Let us find the answers we both seek.”

Chapter 17

Unexpected Guest

For days after, Euphemia moves through the waking world like a specter, her mind never fully present. She thinks of only the dreamscape. Of finding her father.

But more often than not, she thinks of Ash too—the strange, horned man and the mysteries they might uncover.

Each night Euphemia puts herself to rest, she fears the dream will not return.

But every night, she is relieved to cross that threshold and find herself surrounded by the violet hills of Helheim, her skull-faced companion never too far behind.

Although, it isn’t long before the landscape changes.

Night after night, Euphemia drifts to sleep and discovers a new region she’s never seen before. An endless road that seems like it could stretch for an eternity. A damp cave with something hungry growling inside. The gates of a fortress larger than the trees. A river made entirely of ice.

No matter where she enters, Ash is always there.

Waiting.

Expecting.

She asks him every night how he knows where she’ll appear. But he cannot explain it. He merely wanders from one end of Helheim to another, fighting beasts with names she can hardly pronounce as he awaits her return.

Not knowing what happens to him while she is away has made her waking hours increasingly difficult to endure. Euphemia spends most of them anxiously pacing the lonely halls of the manor, counting down the hours until sundown. Even though every time she returns to him, he’s somehow managed to survive.

His stories become more harrowing by the day.

Euphemia can’t help feeling like peril is circling him like a vulture.

Today has been one of the more restless days.

Last she left him, he was in a bloodstained cave. Snarls echoing around them. The stench of death thick in the air.