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No —
I reached for the sheets and blanket and pulled them back.
My husband’s sightless eyes stared back at me, a red gash livid against his neck.
I screamed.
Chapter 13
BRUNCH BUNCH
A hand shook me awake. “Selena! Selena!”
Air rattled in my throat as I pulled in a gasp and opened my eyes. Calvin was leaning over me, face urgent with worry.
Calvin. Oh, dear Goddess, he wasn’t dead.
My arms went around him, and he pulled me close, holding me as I fought to pull more oxygen into my heaving lungs.
“Bad dream?” he asked, and I nodded, even as I continued to cling to him.
He was real. I had to keep reminding myself that he was real.
“The worst dream,” I said. “Thank you for waking me up.”
Strong, gentle fingers pushed at my disheveled bangs. “You kept making these little meeping noises, but then you tried to scream and were breathing like you’d just run a marathon, so I thought it was better to rouse you.”
Thank the Goddess for that. I wasn’t sure whether experiencing a terrifying dream was enough to cause a person to die of fright…and I never wanted to find out. Still holding on to him, I said, “Yes, it was much better that you woke me up.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
I looked at him, at his worried dark eyes, at the long black hair that was trying to escape the band he used to keep it confined while he slept. Although I knew now that it had only been a dream, some part of me worried I might give the horrible visions of the nightmare strength if I uttered them aloud.
So I shook my head and replied, “Not really. Let’s go back to sleep.”
No further dreams haunted my sleep that night, but when I woke up the next morning, I couldn’t quite shake a troubling thought from my mind.
What if the same person who’d placed the hex on my car had also sent that nightmare to me?
I wanted to tell myself that was ridiculous, but I knew better. It was easier than some people might think to conjure a particularly bad dream and send it to roil the thoughts of an enemy.
But I wasn’t anyone’s enemy. I was just…Selena.
Pregnant women have awful dreams all the time, I thought. It’s all those hormones messing with your brain.
Maybe that was true. Nevertheless, I was very, very glad that I’d be staying at home with Calvin today.
I did my best to shrug it off, and he seemed to guess that I wanted to put the nightmare well behind me, so he didn’t ask. Instead, we watched TV together in the living room, unpacked the last few bibs and bobs for the nursery that had arrived this week but hadn’t yet been set in their proper places, and even went and sat in the sun for a while after lunch, since it had turned out to be an unseasonably warm day and we wanted to enjoy it.
“Maybe we should plant some grass there,” Calvin said, indicating the cactus-studded gravel wilderness that stretched beyond the patio. “Otherwise, there isn’t much room to play in the yard.”
No, there wasn’t. And although I knew the baby wouldn’t be toddling for a while yet, eventually we’d need to come up with some way to make our yard more kid-friendly. I’d always loved its wild beauty, but I also realized that it didn’t offer many opportunities for a child to play safely.
“That’s probably a good idea,” I said. Yes, the property was xeriscaped to conserve water, but one patch of grass shouldn’t be too much of a drain on the well. We could find a variety that was drought-tolerant and hardy, something that would provide a soft surface without requiring the kind of upkeep that grasses from other parts of the country would have needed in our hot climate. “Is there still enough time to plant?”
“I honestly don’t know,” Calvin replied. “I never worried about that kind of thing before now.”
“Well, people are just setting out their spring plants,” I said. “So we’re probably safe. Maybe it’s something you can look into on Saturday while I’m at brunch with the girls.”
