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Lainie brought her knees up and hugged herself. She felt inexpressibly cold, as if she might never really be warm again.
"It can't be real." She said the words softly, wishing she could put a spine into her voice.
She took a deep breath and forced herself to calm down. There was no point in going off the deep end. She just had to be rational. That was not something she was usually good at?remaining calm and logical. She was more used to swinging her fist first and asking questions later. But this time it was important. She had to look at her situation squarely, without fear or panic, and try to understand. Okay, it can't be real. Why?
"It can't be real," she said slowly, "because it's fiction." Yes. That was it. The facts comforted her, gave her an anchor in the shifting bleakness of her world. Fortune Flats, and "The Ridge" hideout, and Killian were all figments of her own imagination. None of it could possibly really exist.
She wasn't crazy. After all, if it was just Arizona in 1896, she might have to face the possibility of time
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travel. But time travel couldn't be possible to a fictional place. It couldn't.
She sighed, relieved. "So where the hell am I?" She glanced around, taking in the towering stone walls that came full circle around a large oval plain. A single crack marred the smoothness of the sandstone cliffs, and that was the entrance to the tunnel. It was a perfect hideout. Two men could hike out to the ridge above the entrance and keep a posse of one hundred men at bay. If a rider couldn't get into the tunnel, he couldn't get to the hideout.
It was exactly as she'd envisioned it. As she'd created it. It wasn't that this hideout couldn't exist; it was simply that it didn't. She'd done a ton of research on the old West, and there were three primary outlaw hideouts. Brown's Hole, Robber's Roost, and Hole in the Wall. This one, The Ridge, was a combination of all of them. And Lainie had created it.
So that left the question: Where was she, really, since she couldn't in fact be here?
Drugs. She was on life support back home, hooked up to a morphine IV that was a bit too strong.
The minute she thought it, she discarded the idea. She'd taken morphine?more than once. It made her feel . . . tingly, sluggish, lighter than air. Not delusional.
Dead. She was dead somewhere, lying in a coffin in an empty church, awaiting rebirth.
She shivered at the thought and hugged herself more tightly. That was too grisly to contemplate.
"Okay, so I'm sleeping at home. It's an ordinary dream."
The words were wimpy-sounding, wistful. She knew the moment they left her lips that she couldn't believe in them anymore. Too many things didn't fit.
Like the proportion. It was a simple thing; nothing
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much, really. But how often did you have dreams in which the proportion was perfect? In which doorways never bled to the side and turned into fishhooks, and clouds never merged into an immense ice cream cone?
Everything here was perfect, fixed, immobile. The wolf's cry had sounded real, the wind touched her face in soft, realistic feather-strokes. Nothing at any point in this dream had been bizarre, impossible, fantastic. The horses never changed into goats or flew over cliffs.
And pain. How often did you dream you were in pain?
She eased her sweater down her shoulder to reveal the angry red of her sunburn.
Who in the hell dreamt they got sunburned?
Shot, maybe. Stabbed, strangled, run over, certainly. But sunburned?
Gingerly she touched the burnt skin, felt the familiar sting of it through her shoulder. She winced and drew her hand back. It felt real. So did the rock-bites on her bare feet and the scrapes on her hands. And the blisters on her backside were too ugly to consider.
She sighed and closed her eyes, not wanting to think about it anymore and yet unable to think of anything else.
Warmth caressed her face.
She opened her eyes and watched, spellbound, as dawn crept over the rim of the canyon, tossing a gauzy, purplish pink net across the smooth rock walls. Light slid down the steep, naked cliffs, turned the stone to burnished gold. The cottonwood trees along the stream seemed to turn toward the light with a glossy green shiver.
And in that instant, as she smelled the dirt and dryness in the air and felt the familiar touch of the sun on her face, she knew. She just knew. It was no dream.
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