Page 74 of Woods of the Raven

“Not going anywhere,” he rumbled, and breathed in and then out, deeply, settling, and I could hear how bone-weary he was. It was a lot, what he’d been through today, even for a seasoned cop from the big city.

Draped across his chest, I heard the beat of his heart, and I couldn’t remember ever feeling so content or safe.

NINE

Most people believed that dreams were just that, offering a glimpse into your psyche as you slept. I’d read somewhere that no one new ever appeared in your dreams that you hadn’t actually met in real life. But I’d dreamed about Jennifer Aniston on more than one occasion and never crossed paths with the actress ever. That part, I suspected, was crap.

For witches, and I was betting for many others, dreams were places where the dead could visit, crossing the veil easily during that time to answer questions, offer guidance, or point out something obvious that had been missed. I liked to dream and always hoped that my grandparents, or my parents, whom I knew only vaguely, as they’d both passed in a car accident when I was barely two, would visit.

I always knew I was dreaming because there were odd things that made little sense. Right now, I was riding across Corvus on a tandem bicycle with my grandmother, Enedina Corey, in front of me. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, and she looked amazing, laughing, with her long brown hair flowing behind her and tickling my face. She kept looking over her shoulder and smiling at me, and I was yelling at her to watch where she was going. What was weird, other than us riding so easily across the countryside, was that she had never ridden a bike in her life as far as I knew, and her clothes were like something from the 1880s, petticoats and all. In fact, she looked like she should be on a penny-farthing and have a weird hat. When we stopped, having nearly plowed into a huge angel oak I knew was near the rift site, we were both laughing.

“Why are we out here?” I asked her.

“I don’t know.” She spun in the wind with her arms out. “I just love it here so much. Don’t you?”

I did. In the spring I sat in the meadow close by and watched the does bring their fawns, the mother quails walking with their chicks, and all the rabbits. It was like a scene out of Bambi, and it never ceased to make me smile. Where we were, though, was toward the deeper forest, nearly where the preserve began, but you could still smell the salty ocean air on the breeze because that too was close.

“Why are we here?” I asked her again, staring at her, marveling at how beautiful she was, her long lashes brushing the tops of her cheeks when she closed her eyes.

I was missing something; that had to be it. We were riding along, she was as distracted by me as I was by her, and everything else had been moving in a blur. Something occurred to me.

“Why are you so happy?”

She smiled and bit her bottom lip. “I met someone. He’s in the Peace Corps, and he loves my village, but he’s worried, I think, that I would never leave it. But I would, you know. For him I would, and his home sounds lovely.”

My grandparents, Enedina Bautista and Arthur Corey, had met when my grandfather was sent to El Salvador. She was a nurse at a local hospital but also a healer, taught by her grandmother. He was there to build homes, wells, all the things needed. They were smitten with each other from the moment they met, and then came love. But what did any of that have to do with me? With now?

“You’re distracted, you said?” I asked her as she spun some more, faster, until she lost her footing and fell down into the grass.

I moved—floated, really; it was a dream, after all—over to her and stood still, staring down at her, seeing she was older now, the woman I’d known.

“Sometimes when we’re not looking, we find our future.”

Oh, dear Lord. I groaned loudly, stepping back.

She sat up and grinned at me.

“You’re pushing,” I told her. “Lorne might not want to be tied to the land, or to me.”

She made that humming sound that meant she was considering something, and I noticed she wasn’t looking at me anymore but over near the oak. When I turned, I saw blood there, and then more, rising through the rift.

But that wasn’t possible. No matter what they did on the other side, the number of souls murdered, it would never be enough blood to wash into our dimension and create a path. That simply couldn’t happen.

And I’d cleansed the body that had once been Rulaine before the land consumed her. So there was no tainted blood on my side of the rift to call on.

“You’re saying I’m missing something,” I said to my grandmother, who was now my grandfather, getting up and dusting himself off.

“Like logs on the fire,” he told me, which didn’t help at all.

“Is there any way you could be more clear?”

He shrugged and turned away but then looked over his shoulder at me. “He seems like mortar to me.”

“Listen,” I began, ready to give him a piece of my mind because he was slipping around from subject to subject without any context. He’d gone from giving me a warning to talking about Lorne. I knew that because he’d always said I was foundational, like the bricks of the hearth the house was built around, and suddenly Lorne was the mortar?

He was gone, though, on the breeze, and I was left in the dream alone. It was dark suddenly, the blood was rising, and I was starting to get scared.

Being a dream, I was swimming in blood in seconds, and I saw a doe standing on a small hill, screaming, which I’d never heard a deer do in my life, and I just knew her fawn was lost. I had to find her baby, so I dived under the blood now moving river-fast, but there was nothing underneath except bodies, so many, moving with me in the current.