CHAPTER 17
That night I dreamed of music.
A familiar tune, it drums into my marrow and plucks a few perilous notes from the lyre made of my veins. I know the song. I’ve heard it once before, and the fact this is a dream doesn’t make me any less afraid.
It’s different from the time when the song lured me from my bed and to the banks of the strid. Now, Kessian is by my side, hair damp and tousled, smears of dirt on his cheeks.
We move purposefully through the woods, not in the direction the music pulls me like a wayward child yanking on my hand, but in the direction of the sound itself. The closer I get, the less it sounds like rushing water and percussive heartbeats, the more it sounds like—
A flute. Sort of. There’s more resonance, like a flute with multiple chambers.
Shrill notes slide into deep, haunting ones, layered over one another, played inexpertly, as if by someone who learned when they were little and has only picked it up on the odd occasion since.
A tang of magic tinges each note and makes the air taste like metal.
We venture farther into the woods, Kessian careful to pick his way over a tree root with his cane, until the trees thin and the rush of the strid joins the chorus of the flute.
This part of the bank is familiar to me, a rock jutting so far over the water it nearly forms a bridge.
Movement disturbs the foliage on the other side, and a man with a thick beard walks out holding the hand of his sixteen-year-old son.
My dad. And me, nine years younger. We sightlessly walk toward the bank, and I don’t want to watch us go under, though already it feels as if I swallowed a lungful of water and silt.
Kessian’s voice compels me to open my eyes again. “Look.”
I follow the point of his finger to a spot in the trees on our side of the bank, in the direction the music’s coming from.
It takes me a while to pick out the darker shape from the other shadows and trees.
A figure—from its size, a man, though I couldn’t swear to it.
The dark obscures its face, but in silhouette I can see the strange instrument in its hands.
My blood runs cold looking at the shape—branching, hollow tines for multiple resonances, its fingers dancing along two.
It has the hollow sound of a flute, but it’s shaped like an antler.
It’s enchanted, music and magic burning through the air, drawing us to our deaths.
I thought it had been the strid’s song, but all along someone else had been behind it.
On the crescendo of a shrill note, my father and I splash into the strid. I choke on the memory of how cold it had been. I might have frozen, locked up, but at the sight of this figure—the one responsible for all my misery—I rush toward him.
A branch snaps underfoot. In the nonsensical way of dreams, I didn’t think he’d hear me.
Then I realize it wasn’t Kessian or I who’d made the noise, but someone else.
The figure’s head snaps ’round, searching the trees.
I hope he’ll flee toward us, but in a burst of magic, he opens a portal, stepping through and closing it behind him.
Wherever he’s gone, it’s too dark to see, and with his back to us, I can’t see a face illuminated by the spell. The strid’s poisoner, my grandfather’s murderer, is gone.
I think I hear a ticking clock chime the hour when the scene melts away, dropping me from one world into another, this one softer.
It takes me a moment to register my surroundings, and for a second I think I’ve woken up because I’m in my bed.
But it’s warmer, and a body shifts against me.
Shifts very deliberately, arse grinding back against me, and it’s Kessian.
I know it before he looks over his shoulder, a scratch across his cheek and his hair come loose from his plait.
Not the Kessian I fell asleep beside, because this one is naked and smiling dizzily at me.
I count the freckles on his skin. “They’ve always reminded me of stars. We should make wishes on yours.”
“I wish this night could last forever.”
“We made the time we had count.”
He kisses me, grinds against my lap, and I clutch his hips and groan in his ear, half aware this is a dream, half confused because he feels so real. The warmth of his neck under my lips, the taste of his sweat.
His tone shifts. “When I said ‘Come and get me,’ this isn’t quite what I meant.”
We’re still tangled up, but in the bedsheets and pajamas and—
The transition between dreaming and wakefulness hit me like a bucket of cold water. I jolted with it, my arm still around Kessian’s waist, my palm brazenly splayed against his belly under the T-shirt I loaned him, pulling him back against my—
Oh no. I was hard. I was very hard.
Kessian looked over his shoulder. “Fully awake now, are we?”
I leapt backward, trying to gather the covers to hide myself, for all the good it would do. He’d have been given a stiff poke in the backside with how I’d been spooning him.
“I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be embarrassed.”
“I’m mortified.”
“It was a dream. Perfectly natural response. If it makes you feel any better, I’m just as hot and bothered; I’m just blessed with stealthier tells than you.
” His eyes flicked down to where I’d bunched the covers over my lap.
For a fleeting moment, I thought he would offer to help, but he stuck to what he’d told me, and I had to respect him for it.
He was beautiful, experienced, and surely could find somebody else with ninety percent less baggage than me.
That plastic bag full of other bags my mum kept under the kitchen sink—that was a decent representation of the infinite layers of my baggage.
He said, “If you need to sort yourself out, I can go.”
“No, no, I’ll go. Just, give me a minute.” I shifted to the edge of the bed, dragging the covers with me. “Maybe avert your eyes.”
He covered his eyes like we were about to play hide-and-seek, and I bolted from the bed, hastily fiddling with the clock so I could hide in the bathroom.
I didn’t think a cold shower would really help as much as rubbing one out, so with my forehead against the cool tiles and the steam pooling around me, I took my cock in hand and imagined how my morning might have played out if I wasn’t so damn terrified.
If running away wasn’t my default. When I’d finished, toweled off, and emerged once more, I found Kessian making breakfast, a teapot brewing.
“Nice shower?” he asked with a knowing smile.
I pushed aside the thought of shoving him back against the counter as a demonstration of just how inadequate the shower had been but instead—with as much dignity as I could muster—said, “It’s free now if you need one as well.”
“I think we need to talk about the dream.” At my mortified look, he added, “The other dream. I had a less sexy one before, and now I’m not sure I was the only one in it.”
I paused mid-pour of my tea. “You had the same one?”
“I think so.”
“Both of them?”
“One where we saw someone going full Pied Piper on the residents of Shearwater, yourself included. Another where we reenacted the night we first met, yes.”
Waking up cuddling him with morning wood was somehow less humiliating than him experiencing the dream with me. It had been emotionally charged, more intimate than our first time by far. “I need to sit down.”
“If it helps, let’s focus on the first dream.”
I scalded my tongue on my tea.
Kessian continued, “The night you went into the strid, do you remember seeing someone in the woods playing the flute?”
“No. Not at all. This whole time, I thought it was the strid calling to us.”
“I think it’s safe to say the strid had help.”
“The same person who murdered my grandfather?”
“Seems likely. If he was trying to find a way to help you, maybe he stumbled across the identity of the man behind it all.”
I tapped my thumb and pointer finger together in an agitated stim, head buzzing.
The only suspect I had was Warwick. It had looked like a man in the dream.
He had to be a witch; he’d used a portal to escape.
If he’d lured all those people to their deaths to feed the strid on the tithes of their lives, perhaps my grandfather discovered as much, and Warwick killed him to keep it secret.
“The last time we shared a dream, it was my memory. Something straight out of my past. This time, it was your memory, only not really? We weren’t living it as you did, when you went into the strid with your dad.
In this dream, we stood on the sidelines, watching the mastermind behind it. So, whose memory were we living?”
“I don’t see how it could be anybody else’s. I saw you with me.”
Kessian’s cutlery scraped the plate, making my teeth ache. “How could you have been both in the woods watching the flutist, and on the shore being drawn into the river by the song?”
I finally looked at Kessian after avoiding his eyes all through breakfast. The trace rune on his temple glowed with a silvery light. “Maybe that spell can tell us?”
An hour later, Emery and Ambrose greeted us with a knock at the door.
“Sleep well?” Ambrose asked brightly. When we both cringed and muttered noncommittally, he added, “I’ll take that as a no.”
“Follow-up question, shall we take a look at the trace spell?” Emery said.
“How exactly does this work?” I asked delicately.
“It will give us an inclination as to how the dreams function. Whether it’s letting you share dreams, memories, a window into another realm. Hard to say what it will reveal until I perform the transfer.”
“It’s not a … recreation of the dream, is it?” I asked while Kessian avoided my eye like it’d turn him to stone.
“No, no. That would involve a memory spell. I have done that, but it would be useless in this case. I’d learn no more from it than you have from experiencing the dream. What was it about?”
We told him the non-pornographic half and left the rest out, relieved we weren’t about to cause a strange, magical variant of public indecency.
I leaned against the counter, twiddling my thumbs while Emery prepared the second half of the spell. I assumed that’s what he was doing, anyway, as he soaked a piece of parchment in a concoction that looked a mix of tea and soup.
When he removed the parchment, it was dry. He held it up in front of Kessian. “Excuse me. This part is a bit awkward.”
He flattened the parchment to the rune on Kessian’s temple and scrubbed a knuckle over the spot, as if trying to transfer a temporary tattoo.
When he pulled the parchment away, the rune had stuck to the parchment and promptly began to disassemble, the ink spreading like ants across the page until it arranged into runic words.
I puzzled over it. I wasn’t adept at reading runes quickly, having never been formally educated and making up most of my spells through intuition and experimentation. Emery’s eyes glossed over the words before he sat back.
“This ability of yours is not average magic, Kessian. It’s far more complicated.
According to the trace, you aren’t merely visiting Taliesin’s dreams or sharing your own.
You’re tapping into the wild magic of the strid.
It’s acting through you as a conduit, showing you things deliberately. Both past events and future ones.”
A selection of runes I could translate stuck out to me. “It calls him a time walker. Not like—?”
“Time travel,” Kessian said, huffing in disbelief. “Through these dreams, I can time travel?”
Emery flexed his fingers. “This is where it gets a little messy. If I’m reading this right, you can’t walk through time except from a specific location. A location only referred to here as the Bloodstream.”
“Doesn’t sound like a pleasant place,” Ambrose put in.
I silently agreed. The very notion of time travel set me ill at ease. My life had already gone off the rails when time was a chronological affair; I didn’t want to imagine how much worse it could become if I mucked about with the past and future.
But if I was to deal with my wraith problem, I’d have to find out more. Perhaps my Grandad’s research could shine a light on it all. He had been obsessed with clocks. Maybe they were related to time travel and this “Bloodstream.”
“It doesn’t get any more specific about where this Bloodstream is located?” Kessian asked.
“No, but I believe these dreams of yours are like clues. Breadcrumbs you can follow to find answers. This could be why the strid gifted you with the ability in the first place; it meant for you to have it, meant for you to meet and help one another,” Emery said.
“That’s … incredible.” There was something the matter with me, because while Kessian sounded delighted by the revelation, my heart sank.
I didn’t trust in fate. If the events of my life had happened by design, that only made me hate the strid more. So many of my choices had been taken from me, so I was only left with one: run away.
The past few days, I’d wrestled with my desire to kiss Kessian again, to let him in further than I’d let anyone for the past nine years.
I wish this night would last forever.
Futures were not fixed. Plenty of people who visited the spring saw events that never came to pass.
But plenty of them did.
We only have the one, so make it count.
It appeared my fears were not unfounded. Whatever future I had with Kessian, I would not get to keep it for long.