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Brinna pulled herself from his dream and screamed, “I can’t do anything!”
With a frustrated sound, she stalked to the back room to check Mattias’s dream and watched as he battled a knight in dark armor, a relentless warrior. Over and over, her brother was struck down, blood blooming across his belly. Mattias would look up, flicker away, only to return healed to face the knight once again, a cycle that repeated with her brother’s feral cry at his inability to change it.
Brinna left him to visit Tarley’s dreamscape. Her older sister sat at the edge of the river in the woods holding a pile of clothing against her breast, crying. “I’ve lost him. I’ve lost him. I’ve lost him,” she sobbed, again and again, then adding, “I should have seen it coming.”
Brinna leapt from Tarley’s grief into Jessamine’s dream.
Her oldest sister was in a room of a sparse cottage, kneeling on the floor next to an indecipherable lump, her apron bloody. At a knock at the door, Jessamine looked over her shoulder, fear flashing on her face.
She hesitated, then stood and slowly moved across the wooden floorboards. When she reached the door, she twisted open the doorknob. Standing on the other side was an old woman and an old man, their skin sagging on their faces. They were dressed in tattered rags, their bodies emaciated. The old woman smiled a toothless smile and held out a teacup as the man offered her an armful of wood.
As Jessamine reached for the cup, a conspiracy of ravens attacked the door, wings fluttering, whipping up a frenzy of chaotic noise. The cup crashed to the ground, shattering, and the birds plucked at the couple’s eyes, skin, hair as they screamed, “Daughter! Daughter! Help us!”
Jessamine cried out and jumped into the fray. The ravenous black birds pecked her apart, only to have the dream begin again—Jessamine kneeling on the floor once more.
Brinna blinked back into the cottage and whirled around, looking for a solution.
But there wasn’t one.
Tears streamed from her eyes, and she sank to her knees. A sob followed by another bubbled up from inside her, until she was nothing more than a crying mess on the floor between the beds where she and her sisters slept. Stuck. She was stuck, they were stuck, and there was nothing she could do to fix it.
She screamed, a howl of absolute pain and hopelessness.
With her face in her hands, Brinna cried, “Lucian? Where are you? I don’t know what to do.”
He didn’t answer; she hadn’t expected him to.
And for the first time, Brinna allowed the deep gray of the spell to take her, drawing her into its viscous power.
20
“You’re brooding,” Lexa said, filling Nix’s tumbler with the amber liquid Luc knew his brother liked. “You both are.”
Luc looked away from their sister’s astute observation and glanced around the bungalow nestled below Alabastrine, their family home in the heart of old Elcadia City. Lexa was rarely in residence, spending most of her time beyond them in the Netherrealm where she was most comfortable, where her dragon form was protected at the heart of the labyrinth, and claiming she wasn’t keen on what up-worlders did with their time. “Boring lot,” she’d said once.
“I don’t brood.” Luc took a sip of his drink.
“Beg to differ, little brother.”
Luc pushed a sound through his nose and sat back. “You haven’t done much with the place.” He rested an ankle on his knee and smirked at Lexa.
“Why should I? I only come to visit Nix.”
“I’m hurt,” Luc replied with a tone like smooth gray sky.
“And why would that be? Was it jealousy that had you trapping your twin, Lucian? So you could take his place as my favorite?” She smirked back.
They both glanced at Nix, waiting for him to join in the repartee, but he was ruminating with focus elsewhere. Luc’s smile faded, worried for him.
“Ha. Ha,” Luc said with very little intonation. “I get it. I screwed up.”
Lexa looked from Nix to Luc, her brow furrowed. “How are you doing now, since Father has taken your power?”
Luc huffed at her then took another sip of his whiskey. “Fine.”
She took a sip of her drink, watching him too closely. “You don’t look it.” Lexa had a way of seeing through to the heart of him. And she was right. The discomfort in his chest had grown more insistent, turning toward pain, and he wondered if this is what his father had promised, claiming he would beg for his powers back. The only relief he found was when he slept. Dreamed. Which made him return to what he’d wondered in the Library of Oracles. Could he be god-yoked with Brinna?
He was relieved when Lexa turned her golden gaze on Nix.
