Chapter 37
Ash
This time I know I’m dreaming when I open my eyes to a clear summer day.
The knowing settles into me like muscle memory. After the last dream—Lucy alive, timelines twisting—I’ve learned to recognize when my brain is taking me somewhere my body can’t follow.
The heat from the asphalt shimmers on the road, waves of it rising like ghosts, and the scent of soft pretzels lingers in the air. Salt and dough and something sweeter underneath.
The cherry syrup from the Italian ice stand two doors down.
“Flavor?” the vendor asks, her heavily tattooed arm leaning on the counter. A sleeve of flowers and skulls disappears under her tank top.
“Orange.” I blink, the memory settling into place like puzzle pieces clicking together. This day. This exact day. Summer after senior year.
“Pretzel?” She snaps her gum, already reaching for the warmer.
“One please, yes.” I clear my throat and turn to my cousins.
Sabina is eating her cotton candy Italian ice with her spoon, and I’m pretty sure she inhaled that pretzel in under thirty seconds. Her dark hair is pulled back in a messy braid, arrows tattooed along her forearm in a pattern that moves if you stare too long.
Vanessa is using her pretzel as a spoon to scoop her large cherry ice, which is both delicious and deeply impressive.
Her eyes catch the light wrong, too reflective, too hungry.
Even then, before any of us knew what we really were, she looked at the world like she was calculating how it might taste.
Pepper got a bag of pretzels, which she will stash in the freezer when we get home. Ridiculous, since the stand is literally on the corner, but that’s Pepper. Her blueberry ice is halfway gone, purple staining her lips.
“Here ya go, honey.” The vendor sets my treat on the counter and I hand over the cash.
“What are we doing today?” Pepper asks, walking backward toward the house. “Gotta stash these.”
This summer, this very one, may have been one of my favorite summers.
“We should go to the lake,” Vanessa offers, licking cherry syrup off her thumb. “Sab?”
“I can ask Dad.” Sabina kicks a few pebbles, but we can tell she isn’t that into it. Her dad was strict about the lake, something about too many bodies of water attracting too many wolves.
Talk about foreshadowing.
“Let’s go to Main and see what we see,” I say. Words I uttered back then. The ones that led us to the river, a bonfire with strangers we’d never met before, music from someone’s shitty Bluetooth speaker, and honestly? The time of our lives.
“Hey.” Pepper steps up beside me.
I blink and the dream shifts. We’re halfway to the river now, the road stretching ahead, summer haze making everything soft at the edges.
“Hey.” I glance at her, the Pepper from all those years ago. Band t-shirt, some metal group with an unreadable logo. Cutoff shorts frayed at the hem. Dark hair spilling down her back like ink poured from a bottle.
“You’re lucid, right?” She raises an eyebrow. “This dream shit. I am so over it.”
I nudge her elbow, thinking about one of my dreams. Kieran’s hands on my hips. His mouth on mine. The way he felt inside me while the dream world bent around us. “Not all so bad.”
“I didn’t think the last one was good.” She pauses, and her expression shifts. Softer. Sadder. “It was insane to see Lucy again.”
My feet stop moving before my brain catches up.
“Lucy?”
“Oh yeah.” Pepper snorts, but there’s no humor in it. “I was in the last dream, too. Apparently whatever bullshit you are going through right now is bleeding onto me.”
The last dream. The one where I saw an alternate timeline. Where Lucy was alive. Where I almost married Davis. Where she forgave me for choosing myself.
Pepper saw that?
“But it was good to see her,” she says softly. Her voice cracks on the last word, and I watch her swallow it down, then store it somewhere she can obsess over later. “Listen, I’m not sorry.”
I snort. “Pepper, I wouldn’t expect you to feel sorry. And I don’t.”
“It’s all so fucking messy.” She kicks a stone that skips over the sidewalk, ironically landing on a hopscotch square.
“Lucy came into my life fast and hard. I fell in love with her in a way that only two friends can fall in love, and no one warns you that recovering from that loss is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. ”
As fucked up as it sounds I’ve thought about it. Hell, it was all I could think about when we didn’t talk for so long. Would I let my last words to be the last words?
Could I survive a life without them? No.
“I am sorry,” I tell her. “For not being there.”
The words are too small for what I did. Three years of silence. Three years of letting them grieve without me.
“I know even if I had showed up in the way you needed, eventually it wouldn’t have made a difference, but—” I pause our walk and turn to face her fully. “That doesn’t excuse my not reaching out.”
“It doesn’t.” She elbows me, hard enough to sting, and we keep walking. I kind of hope I wake up with a bruise there. “But I understand. We all process things in our own way. Vanessa will eventually eat people.”
“Already do,” Vanessa calls from ahead, not turning around. “Sabina will probably shoot them with an arrow.”
“Arrows,” Sabina corrects. “Plural. I believe in redundancy.”
“You’re all awake?” I laugh so hard my ribs hurt.
“Yeah, it’s trippy and amazing and I love it.” Vanessa spins in a circle, far too balanced for her teenaged self.
“And you?” I ask Pepper.
She flings her hands out and wiggles her fingers, chaos magic sparking at her fingertips like purple lightning. “Poof. Gone. Dead to smithereens.”
Her chaos magic is unrivaled. It’s also kind of terrifying. I’ve seen her unmake a car once—just unmake it, molecules scattering like startled birds.
So I’m not surprised she out of all of us can break the no magic in dreams rule.
“And you.” She sighs, the edge leaving her voice. “Tell me about your magic.”
It’s the first time she’s talking to me without hatred coating every syllable, and I soak it up like the thirsty bitch that I am.
“It’s weird. Faerie is nothing and yet everything I ever dreamed of.
” I sigh, thinking of the thorns beneath my skin, of wild magic answering my call, of three men who look at me like I hung the moon.
“The courts are a mess. The politics are insane. There’s this bitch named Amarantha who needs to die slowly and painfully.
But the magic itself...” I trail off, not sure how to explain it. “It feels like coming home.”
“Speak for yourself.” Pepper shudders dramatically. “I watched a damn tree uproot itself and walk to a sunnier spot yesterday. Walked. On its roots. Like legs.” She makes a face. “I prefer Tartarus.”
I laugh, full-bodied now. Can’t help it. It’s just like Pepper to find the Greek underworld more comfortable than Faerie.
“Where are you three?” I ask, sobering slightly.
“Fuck if I know.” Pepper shrugs. “Vanessa says she knows where she’s going. She gets an aerial view and we head toward her instructions.”
Aerial view. Right. Because Vanessa is a dragon. I keep forgetting that my cousin can sprout wings and scales and burn cities to the ground if she’s feeling spicy.
“Please tell me it’s a legitimate destination.”
“Academy?” Pepper questions.
“That’s a great starting point.” I nibble my lip, doing the mental math. “I’m in the borderlands. Between courts. At a tavern. They need to strip my glamour.”
“Will it hurt?”
“I really have no answer for that. Not one.”
“We’ll just come to you.” She shrugs like it’s simple. Like crossing between realms and navigating hostile territory is a minor inconvenience.
“Hey, how did you get past the sentries? The light and dark guardians?”
“You mean the little bastards that you can’t kill with a sword?”
“That’s the one.”
“I ate them.” Vanessa turns around, and the smile on her face is deeply, disturbingly satisfied. “Now I know why I was told not to eat too many temptations here. They’re delicious.”
Gods help us all.
“I’ll keep her in line.” Sabina turns, too, and then it’s the four of us standing on a street corner in my hometown. Summer light golden around us. Almost like old times. “I’ve been pointing out these vile little bastards in the trees. She picks them off.”
“They get stuck in my teeth.” Vanessa’s face wrinkles in distaste. “Very crunchy. Need sauce.”
“BBQ,” Sabina answers, turning to me with an expectant look. “We need more.”
“Yeah, seriously, we would have died if it weren’t for Nessa.” Pepper points out. “Can you make more BBQ?”
I think about the Dagda. About his seemingly endless ability to produce food and drink from nowhere. About the way he showed up with a tray of beers like it was nothing.
“Know what? I’ll put Dagda on it.”
“Who?” they chorus.
“You’ll see.” I smirk. “Let’s get to that party.”
“Oh, you remember, too.” Vanessa’s eyes go dreamy, unfocused. “I am pretty sure that one guy is why I love to be tied up now.”
“Weren’t you a virgin?” Sabina points out.
“So many ways to play,” Vanessa answers, then skips off down the dream-road.
“The sluttiest virgin I know.” Pepper winces. “Well, then. Now she gets railed by five.”
“So do you,” I laugh.
“Me, too,” Sabina says, not to be outdone. “Can you add two more mates? Five seems like the right number.”
“I am good with three.” I chuckle, shaking my head. “Way too many dicks.”
“Triple penetration.” Pepper holds up three fingers, ticking off the logistics like she’s explaining a recipe.
“You get option one, three cocks rammed up in your hot pocket. Or you can do one in your pussy, one in your mouth, one in your ass.” She pauses.
“Actually, four if someone’s got good hands, double P in the V. And one in the evacuation center.”
I need a diagram. Maybe one with those little stick figures.
“Ugh, the amount of lube.” Sabina groans. “I’ve had to have it on a monthly subscription since the babies were born.”
“Girl, tell me about it. Same.” Pepper nods sagely. “Fucking hormones. I just wanna be a whore that moans.”
“I’m still just a girl who loves to moan.” Vanessa sighs wistfully from up ahead.
This. This is what I missed. The filthy, unhinged, completely inappropriate conversations that only happen between women who’ve known each other since they were small. The kind of talk that would make anyone else clutch their pearls but feels like breathing to us.
Three years without this. Three years of thinking I didn’t deserve it.
“Whose fucking choice was it to walk Green Lane?” Pepper grumbles as the road shifts beneath us, tilting upward. The dream has decided to send us home. To the moment we left the party. “Even dream me can’t escape that fucking hill.”
“The Wall claims all victims,” Sabina intones solemnly. “Why is it nighttime?”
“The dream decided endless walking.” I huff.
“I hate cardio.” Pepper pants, even though we’re barely moving. “I hate it in the waking world and I hate it in dreams. What kind of bullshit magic makes you exercise in your sleep?”
“Your magic,” Vanessa points out. “Chaos breeds chaos.”
“I will unmake you.”
“You’d miss me.”
“Debatable.”
The dream wavers. Edges going soft. Colors bleeding together like watercolors left in the rain.
“Ash.” Pepper grabs my arm. Her grip is solid. Real. “We’re coming. You hear me? Whatever happens with your glamour, whatever bullshit your Faerie courts throw at you, we’re coming.”
“Arrows ready,” Sabina adds, and the glint of her bow materializes at her shoulder. Artemis’s granddaughter. Her arrows never miss.
“Teeth sharp,” Vanessa grins, and for a moment the dragon flickers beneath her skin. Scales shimmering. Eyes going molten.
“Chaos loaded.” Pepper’s fingers spark purple. “You’re not alone anymore. Got it?”
I nod because I can’t speak.
My throat closed up around something that might be hope. Might be terror. Might be the realization that I have people again. People I could lose again. And that’s the scariest thing I’ve felt in years.
The dream dissolves like hot asphalt in summer, melting away at the edges, taking the golden light and the pretzel smell and the sound of my cousins’ voices.
But the image lingers.
Three women walking on a dream-road. Toward me. Getting closer with every step.
A dragon. A goddess. A chaos witch.
My family.
Coming for me whether I deserve it or not.