Chapter 5
Five
Sand explodes around me and coats my sweat-slick skin. The impact of the ground against my back knocks the breath from my lungs, dust flooding my mouth before I can gasp.
I groan. Limbs splayed, skin scorching, spine sinking into heat-packed grains. The sky above is so aggressively blue it looks fake, like some divine being cranked up the saturation. The clouds are wispy and few, painted on like set dressing.
Desert wind blows over me like an oven door swinging open. Whatever bullshit people say about dry heat doesn’t mean it’s not fucking hot. It’s a mouthful of cotton. A fever that’s impossible to sweat out.
I try to sit up, but my head pounds—an internal warning bell clanging hard enough to rattle my teeth—and I crash back into the sand.
I crane my neck. Nothing but dunes.
Gone are the candles.
Gone is the night.
This isn’t Ember. This isn’t even New York.
I scrunch my face, shut my eyes tight, and tense every muscle in my body one at a time, just like my former therapist used to tell me to do when I needed to ground myself in the here and now.
I release slowly, blowing out a steady breath, keeping my eyes shut as I wait for the sounds and smells of Manhattan to knit themselves back together around me.
But there’s no car exhaust. No blaring horns, or distant shouts. Just heat, silence, and—
A shadow moves over me.
My eyelids fly open.
A figure bends, their outline haloed in a spill of sunlight.
I blink hard, but my vision swims. All I can make out are the dark shape of a robe shifting in the wind and two eyes glowing like hot coals pressed deep into shadow.
Dazed, I squint up and croak, “Who are you?”
It’s quiet; there’s only the hiss of sand sliding over itself. Then her voice drifts down—light and airy, curling around the syllables like smoke. “It has been so long since I have had a name.”
“I’m sorry, what?” I lift a hand to shield my eyes, trying to push myself upright, but the world tilts violently. Nausea swells in my throat, and I collapse back against the sand.
“Fate has led you here,” she says. “To us. To me. But why? I cannot remember.”
“I don’t understand,” I say, heat drying my tongue. “There’s something wrong. I don’t… I don’t know where I am or—”
“I have kept the wheel turning,” she interrupts, her voice carrying over the wind. “Counted the cycles. Lit the path for those who will choose change. For those who will risk everything to step beyond what they know.”
A familiarity in her words snags in my chest, pulling me back to the card that’s been stalking me for weeks.
She straightens, the sun flaring behind her so bright it blots out detail. Even as she tips her chin toward the sky, her features stay hidden, swallowed in shadow as if the light itself refuses to touch her.
I repeat her words under my breath. “The wheel… The path for those who will choose change.”
I groan again, the sound scraping up my throat. “Of course my brain would conjure a tarot card hallucination.”
Her fiery gaze snaps back to mine. The shift is sudden enough to make me flinch. “I am as real as you are.”
The words ignite the flicker of heat in my chest. It builds, an urgent, insistent force that thrums so loudly I swear it’s echoing between us.
I grope at the sand for anything with weight, anything that could prove that this is real.
“Seriously…” My voice is thin, breathless. “Who are you?”
“I have told you.” Her eyes burn hotter, twin flames fixed on me. “I am—”
The word blossoms in my mind before she can speak it. It’s there all at once, as familiar as my own name.
“Fortune.”
We say it in unison, the syllables hanging in the air like they’ve been waiting for us, heavy on my tongue like a truth I’ve always known.
I push up onto one elbow, sand cascading off my arm, trying to get closer, to see her clearly, but the world lurches sideways. My vision narrows at the edges, black creeping in. My ears ring like struck bells.
Memories flash uninvited—the Wheel of Fortune card landing at my feet, heat flaring up my legs, the crack of lightning splitting the wheel in two. Declan’s hand reaching for me. The rush of wind, glass shattering, the world going white—
“I think…” My voice shakes. “I think the universe was trying to tell me you were real. Or that I was supposed to find you.”
Her head tilts, assessing.
“Not find,” she murmurs, her voice crackling like fire through dry wood. “Remember.”
From somewhere nearby, Declan groans like he just got hit by a truck.
I twist toward the sound, the motion setting off a brief wave of vertigo that tilts the horizon and makes my stomach pitch.
He’s sprawled in the sand a few yards away, one hand braced against the ground, swearing under his breath.
When I glance back toward the possible figment of my imagination, she’s gone. Vanished without a trace. No footprints. No distant receding figure. No proof she was ever there at all.
“Shit,” I grumble. “I’m losing my mind.”
That awareness slips through the cracks in my hazy thoughts, slowly at first, then crashes in all at once, an avalanche of wrongness that threatens to bury me.
Golden dunes ripple around me like frozen waves.
At my back, silk tents bloom across the sand in shades of red, orange, and yellow.
Smoke coils from bronze torches spiked with lit incense and tucked between tent aisles, perfuming the air with earthy, spicy scents.
Heat wraps around my legs, crawls up my spine, licks at my neck with greedy fingers.
I’m in…the desert?
“This isn’t real,” I whisper, swiping the sweat from my brow, panic prickling beneath my skin as I stand.
A camel lumbers out from between two tents, completely unbothered. “Nope. No. No way. This is a hallucination. A stress response. My brain hit overload and now I’m trapped in a Sahara-themed metaphor for my relationship issues.”
The camel slows beside me, one massive glossy eye blinking down at me. It lets out a deep, guttural bellow then sneezes a wet spray of camel snot and desert dust directly in my face before plodding toward the dunes.
Declan fails to hide his chuckle behind a cough as he rises to his feet.
“You’re seriously laughing at me right now?” I throw up my hands. “This is my hallucination. Is it too much to ask my own brain to give me a little more Prince Charming?”
“I’m…appreciating the spectacle.” He dusts sand off his black velvet jacket.
Against the riot of silks and firelight colors behind him, he looks like an inkblot on a painting.
“This isn’t a hallucination.” He straightens to his full height and stretches out his back with a faint wince.
“Pretty sure hallucinations don’t hurt. And I’m very sure they can’t be shared by two people. Not on this level.”
“So, we’re actually here?”
Neither of us speaks as we both take in the scene—the curve of desert dunes, the scent of spice and smoke hanging in the heat, silks rustling in the breeze.
“Yeah,” he says finally, his tone unreadable. “We are exactly where we are.”
For some reason it was better when I thought this was all in my head. Eventually I’d wake up in a hospital bed with Gemma hovering, ready to hear my wild, delirious story about the flaming space-time portal and the camel snot and the fact that Declan hadn’t once tried to save me.
But with no modern medicine about to surge through my veins and fix this, I’m left with a familiar question: What the actual fuck am I supposed to do?
Something catches my eye in the sand—my things, partially buried in glittering drifts. My purse lies on its side, the zippered mouth gaping open. A few feet away, my ritual pouch pokes out of the sand.
I snatch it up, clutching the warm fabric to my chest before scrambling to my bag. I yank it open and drop to my knees. Lip gloss, mascara, receipts, protein bar wrappers. I shove it all aside in my hunt for the one thing that might actually help.
My phone isn’t here.
“Shit, shit, shit.”
I stand again, purse and ritual pouch hugged tight, spinning in a frantic circle.
“What are you doing?” Declan calls.
“Trying to get us out of here. Wanna help?”
Something shiny catches the light near a dune. I dive for it. My fingers close around a card, sand spilling away to reveal the ornate gold edges of the Wheel of Fortune.
I brush it off and run my finger over the arcane symbols stamped into the center of the wheel. If this isn’t a hallucination then that woman, Fortune, wasn’t a hallucination either.
Nope. Too much. My brain is already a jumbled tangle of panic and heatstroke. I am not unpacking that right now.
I shove the card into my bag.
“Looking for this?”
I turn to see Declan holding up my phone, shaking his head.
“You don’t have any service.”
I rush over and snatch it from him. “It’s incredibly rude to go through someone else’s phone.”
“I wasn’t going through it. You can see the bars from the lock screen.”
Ignoring him, I clutch my phone tighter, thumb already jabbing at the screen.
“Oh no no no no no. Please work. Please connect. Please do literally anything.” I hold it up and angle it toward the sky like that might do the trick. But he’s right. There are no bars. No hope.
“Do you have any service?” I ask, whirling around to face him. “Please tell me you have some sort of signal.”
He wrinkles his nose in a way that would be endearing if I weren’t on the edge of a full-blown panic attack. “I don’t have my phone.”
“What?”
“I left it in my office. At Ember.”
“What do you mean you left it in your office?” My voice pitches so high I wouldn’t be surprised if a pack of wild dogs appeared. “Who just…doesn’t have their phone?”
He shrugs. “I thought it would be rude to check it while I was trying to give my date my full attention.”
“That should be the most charming thing anyone’s ever said to me, but right now it makes me want to strangle you.”
With shaking hands, I dig through my emergency ritual pouch, whip out the chunk of rose quartz, and press it to my chest.