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“I apologize if I frightened you today. It was not my intention.”
He cupped my cheek, sweeping his thumb across my lip. There was no cut or pain. I leaned toward his hand, closing my eyes at his touch. A compulsion I couldn’t resist. Why?
“That’s right, love. Deep down, you know where you belong.”
When his lips pressed hard against mine, I felt the icy chill of death at once but could not make myself resist him. On the contrary, I wanted him as he wanted me, all along feeling the grip of ice crawling up my spine, bleeding into my bones.
“You are mine now,” he whispered against my lips.
“Yes,” I murmured, threading my fingers into his golden hair, leaning into his cold embrace.
The great black doors exploded open, knocking them off the hinges. A gusting wind carried chanting words, a familiar voice, snuffing out every candle and the roaring fire in one swoosh.
The prince’s eyes flared blood-red. My body slid away from his with my arms still outstretched toward him. He stood, furious. A golden prince veiled in shadow. I felt myself being carried by the wind back out of the luxurious room, past the smashed doors, through the open gates, and past the thing cowering on a precipice of the rocky outcropping, scuttling deeper into its crevice.
My eyes shot open.I gasped as if I’d been underwater. The figure of a man, Jude, was beside me, over me, chanting with large hands wrapped around my skull.
The cold fear that had been absent in my dream gripped my body so tight I started to cough and spasm. I jumped backward on the sofa, punching out at him, totally freaking the fuck out. A cold sweat covered my body and dampened my scalp. Jude held his hands out in a calming gesture.
“Shhhh. It’s me, Genevieve.”
“How do I know it’s you! It was supposed to be you last time!”
“It’s me.”
He leaned closer into the lamplight from where he sat beside me. Black eyes swirled with flecks of gold; the whites of his eyes had returned to normal. The familiar hard, impenetrable mask shielded his thoughts. Yes, it was him.
“Well, damn it! I couldn’t tell. We need a code word or something.”
“A code word.”
“Yes! Like Rapunzel or Rumpelstiltskin or something.”
“A fan of fairy tales?”
My breathing was almost back to normal. “Yeah, actually, I am.”
“Then Rumpelstiltskin it is.”
I nodded, noticing an unusual smell on him—earth and electricity. He appeared calm and in control again.
“What happened? Where’d you go anyway?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Okay, then how in the hell did you get there! And don’t tell me I was seeing things. You just vanished.”
He straightened himself on the sofa facing me and sighed in a sort of resigned way. “It’s called sifting, moving between space, not vanishing.”
“You mean like time travel?”
“No. More like travel between space and dimension.”
“Space, like stars-and-the-cosmos space?”
“Space as in the unlimited or incalculably great three-dimensional realm or expanse in which all material objects are located and all events occur.”
My heart still hammering from that insane dream and my body buzzing with adrenaline, I finally said, “You lost me there, Einstein.”
