Chapter 28
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Lennon
“And that’s it,” Jasper finishes, spreading his hands like he’s just produced a rabbit out of a hat instead of a plan that involves all of us pretending to be the same comatose woman to catfish the boogieman. “Confuse him. Make him let go of all his promises. Get her out.”
Nobody speaks for several long seconds.
“Okay,” Paul says eventually. “Say that part again. The part where he releases every promise ever made to him. Not just Tessa’s or Nevan’s.”
“All of them.” Jasper nods like this is obvious. “It’s the only way the math works.”
“Okay, wait.” Ridge shakes his head. “What if Tessa makes a soul contract with Lennon instead? Wouldn’t that override whatever promise she made to him? Soul contracts are supposed to be the stronger thing, right?”
Seraphine sets down her tea. “You can give as many promises as you like in this life, but you cannot promise the same truth to two different people. You can with your mouth but not with your soul. You can only stand in one place with what’s real.”
“So, a promise can’t be overridden by a contract, and a contract can’t undo a promise?” Nevan asks, and Seraphine nods absentmindedly.
“Which means he has to release the promises first,” Paul says slowly, as if he has finally understood the plan.
At least one of us does.
Ridge, with his arms crossed, mutters, “Dumbest, most ridiculous plan I’ve ever heard,” which, frankly, I can’t disagree with.
“And it has to be two nights from now,” Jasper adds. “Because that’s the blue moon.”
Nevan frowns. “The blue moon?”
“Second full moon in the same calendar month,” Jasper explains.
“It’s rare. Maybe once every two to three years.
The veil’s thinner on a blue moon, between here and 4D, probably between 4D and 5D too.
I don’t know. I have no experience with that.
But it’s easier to manifest on a blue moon, and I bet it’s easier for a group to get in together and actually hold formation instead of everyone’s dreamscape ripping apart at the seams the second somebody panics. ”
“So it’s a math thing,” Paul says, still on the previous subject.
I have not understood a single thing so far.
“It’s a math thing wearing a moon costume,” Jasper says with a grin, delighted with himself. “But yes.”
I pull out my phone to find the picture I took of Tessa when I was doing her nails a couple of weeks back. I have to scroll to find it, which is its own small miracle.
A few months ago, my camera roll was a graveyard. Screenshots of recipes I never made. A few photos of my mom I can’t look at but can’t bring myself to delete. Otherwise nothing, because you don’t document a life you’re only trying to survive in.
Now I have to thumb past an avalanche. Mr. Muffin in a little paper crown Jasper made him.
Forty near-identical shots of one lemon tart I was unreasonably proud of.
Ridge mid-scowl, because he refuses to be photographed, and I refuse to stop trying.
Nevan asleep on the couch with his mouth open, kept for blackmail and for no reason at all.
Paul’s hands around a coffee cup, because apparently I’m a woman who photographs a man’s hands now.
And under all of that, I find the one of Tessa.
I have prettier ones from when we were younger, but Jasper said it was important that it’s a recent one, which is honestly bullshit because Dream-Tessa is way more vibrant than the one in the picture.
I set my phone on the coffee table where everyone can see it anyway.
Seraphine slowly leans over it, both hands wrapped around her tea, but her eyes stay locked on the picture for a long while.
“If you want to give your best performance, you all need to actually look at her,” Ridge says, arms still crossed. “Not glance. Look. The shape of her face. The space between her eyebrows. You can’t borrow a face you haven’t memorized. Your subconscious will fill in the gaps with guesswork.”
“I’ll send it to each of you so you can look at it some more later,” I say, and Ridge nods in approval.
“This is genuinely insane.” Nevan is sitting right next to me, staring at the photo, too, his jaw tight. “We’re going to stand in front of whatever he is, and just cosplay as Tessa and hope he picks wrong?”
“Rule two.” I grab his neck and pull him down to me so I can kiss his cheek.
His jaw works, but then, begrudgingly, he murmurs, “Fine. Rule two.”
“When you all go to sleep, Mom and I will put some crystals on your chakra points to make sure your dreams are as deep and stable as can be for this.” Jasper hands out crystals to everyone. “But make sure to put these under your pillow for the next two nights.”
“Crystals,” Ridge says, holding one of Jasper’s moonstones up to the light. “I don’t believe in these.”
Jasper shrugs without even looking up. “They work even if you don’t believe in them. They’re mostly an anchor. If you’ve already got something that anchors you in waking life, you can use that instead.”
Ridge fishes out what looks like a white pebble from his pants. “Would this work?”
Jasper takes it, turns it over once. “Absolutely. If it’s significant to you, it’ll anchor you. Doesn’t have to sparkle. It has to matter.”
Ridge actually nods at that. “Yeah, that it does.”
Jasper chuckles. “And you make fun of my crystals.”
“Don’t mind him,” I say. “Ridge is a different kind of untethered.”
“You mean unhinged,” Paul deadpans without looking up from the notepad he’s been making notes on, like a man preparing for a board exam.
Once the bickering settles down, we quickly map out the rest of the plan.
Jasper will go with Derek and Melanie to the Vaughn mansion, setting crystals and incense up in Tessa’s room so Derek can fall asleep right beside her and wait in 4D for the moment she slips out of elsewhere long enough to be reached and help her wake up.
The rest of us will go to the cottage, where Mabel and Seraphine can work the tea, the herbs, and whatever else it takes to get four dreamers stable enough to walk into the same dream at the same time without anyone’s subconscious setting the place on fire.
“Two nights,” Jasper says again, like saying it twice will make it feel less terrifying. “Then we’ll get Tessa back.”
Two nights.
Let’s hope her body has that much time left.
I look around the room at all of them, gathered around a coffee table with a photo of my best friend in the middle, like an offering, and think, not for the first time, about how Jasper once told me that we’re supposed to be family.
This is the strangest family I’ve ever had.
I love them anyway.
“I’m gonna swing by the inn real quick,” Nevan says as he stands. “Just to check on things.”
“I’ll come.” I’m on my feet in an instant. “I want to check the kitchen anyway.”
Ridge chuckles from beside us. “Workaholics.”
“There’s nothing to check.” Mabel’s not even looking up from where she’s refilling Seraphine’s tea. “No service tonight, just the three overnight guests and breakfast tomorrow. The kitchen’s fine, Lennon.”
I grab my cardigan anyway. “I just want to check.”
Nevan is already at the door, holding it open, and the look on his face says he understood exactly nothing about why I needed to say that out loud and also exactly everything about why I needed to go anyway.
The kitchen is quiet, the smell of bread still hanging faintly in the air. I run my hand along the steel counter out of habit, check the walk-in latch, confirming what Mabel already told me that everything’s fine, everything’s been fine. I needed my hands on it to believe it.
Nevan leans against the prep table, watching me do my little circuit, arms crossed, something working behind his eyes that he’s clearly been chewing on for a while.
“You know,” he says, finally. “I’ve been thinking about this. About when I have this place, now that I actually believe I will have it someday. I don’t want to do it alone.”
I stop and look up at him. “You don’t?”
“No.” He shakes his head. “I don’t. It’s not mine yet, and I know you’ve got your own plans, your own… whatever. This is only for manifestation reasons.”
I let out a startled laugh. “Are you Jasper now?”
“Rule two.”
I shut my mouth so fast my teeth click. “Okay.” I cross my arms right back at him, mirroring. “What exactly are we manifesting?”
He pushes off the table and closes the distance in two steps, hands finding my waist. Before I can finish the thought, he’s got me up on the counter, his mouth already on mine, warm and lemonadey in a way that’s becoming distressingly familiar.
“Can I manifest…” he murmurs against my lips, “… that this inn is mine someday? And the restaurant inside it is yours?”
I tilt my head back to look at him properly. “Mine?”
“Mm-hmm.” His thumb brushes along my jaw. “You could do whatever you want in here. Only dinner service, if that’s all you want, keep it tucked inside the inn, exclusive to guests, or make it a separate restaurant and something completely different from what it is now. Whatever you want it to be.”
“I… wow. Could I do that with Tessa?”
He smiles so broadly that it crinkles all the way up to his eyes, then kisses me again before he answers, “It can be whatever you want.” His nose runs up the bridge of mine. “With whoever you want. As long as you’re here.”
“Yes,” I whisper. “You’re allowed to manifest this. We’re doing this together.”
“I can’t wait for the future, baby.” He kisses me again before he straightens, presses one last kiss to my temple, and heads off toward reception, already pulling his phone out of his pocket, leaving me sitting on the counter in the quiet, half-lit kitchen that might someday actually be mine.
I let my hands glide flat across the steel.
Five fingers each. No breadsticks.
This is real.
It still feels like a dream anyway.
I hop down and head out, catching sight of Nevan through the reception doorway, phone pressed to his ear, looking like he’s back in his element.
I leave him to it and slip back outside, heading for the others in the cottage, but then find Seraphine in the garden, crouched toward the herb bed, a basket resting on her hip.
She glances up when I come to stand in front of her.
“Herbs for more tea, or—”
“Everything costs something.”
Okaaay, ominous.
“Seraphine.”
“Sometimes, we have to sacrifice ourselves for the people we love.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
She straightens, then reaches out and taps the moonstone on my chest twice.
“With this, everything becomes stronger.”
I don’t love how she says that.
“Dreams?”
“Dreams. Promises. Contracts.” She gives me a long look before she turns and walks toward the door. “Sometimes, we have to sacrifice ourselves for the people we love.”
I don’t know what to do with any of that. My brain is already running in six directions at once, because yes, I would, obviously I would, sacrifice myself for them, but why is she telling me this?
“I heard you the first time,” I mutter when she opens the door and steps inside. “God, Seraphine. You and Lucien are the same brand of creepy.”
What does she know that we don’t?
Jasper said she told him that it will work out, that Tessa will be able to leave, wake up, and…
“I think I’m going to go wait in the car,” I say to no one, then head around to the front of the inn.
I’m almost at the parking lot when I hear Sydney’s voice. “No.”
I keep my eyes forward. I haven’t seen her since Halloween, and I genuinely don’t know if she remembers me trying to rip a fistful of her hair out at that party, or if she was too many drinks deep to remember any of it at all.
I don’t want to chance it.
“Don’t be like that.” Comes Simon’s voice, the one I have been avoiding on principle since he started working here.
I’m the reason Nora fired him, and he hates me for it, which is fair.
We’ve achieved a fragile, unspoken peace where I walk past him at the reception as though he’s part of the architecture, and as long as he keeps his mouth shut, I let him keep existing in my general orbit.
I’m three steps past the inn when I hear Sydney again.
“I said no.” This time there’s something underneath it that wasn’t there a second ago.
She’s scared.
I turn and march right back toward the inn and find Simon pinning her against the side of the building, one hand braced on the wall by her head, his mouth at her neck while she’s pushing at his chest with both hands.
The edges of my vision turn hot and red, the way they did exactly once before, over a voicemail I was never supposed to hear.
I cross the distance faster than I knew I could move, grab Simon’s shoulder, and yank. He lets go out of pure shock, given how his face contorts with it, stumbling half a step, and that’s all the opening I need.
I knee him directly in the balls with everything I’ve got. “No means no,” I yell while he folds in half with a sound like a dying accordion. “You disrespectful walnut!”
Sydney is looking at me like a deer in the headlights, so I grab her wrist and pull her with me. “Hurry.”
I have no idea what Simon will do when he’s done clutching his balls.
We round the corner with Simon still groaning somewhere behind us and walk directly into Mabel.
“What happened?” Mabel’s eyes go straight from me to Sydney’s face, and whatever she sees there has her setting the basket of clothes down she was holding without a second thought.
Sydney bursts into tears and throws both arms around her, and Mabel folds her in like she’s done this a hundred times before.
“What happened?” Mabel asks again, but this time, sharper and directed at me.
“Simon doesn’t know what no means,” I explain, still breathing hard, still feeling freaking furious. “I’d strongly suggest you fire him.”
“Simon Laurin?”
“I have no idea what his last name is.” I gesture vaguely back toward the building, toward the sound of him still groaning somewhere. “Your reception guy.”
Mabel nods once, and the expression on her face isn’t one of surprise. “I’ll take care of him.”