Chapter 32
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Lennon
There are eleven crystals on the floor of Seraphine’s living room. I’ve counted them four times, which tells you exactly how calm I am about all of this.
Jasper laid them out an hour ago in points and groupings, with a small one by each pillow where we’re supposed to put our heads.
I’m lying on my back on a nest of cushions between Ridge and Nevan, staring at the ceiling, where the incense smoke is doing loops toward the light fixture.
It smells like sage and something sweeter underneath, something I don’t have a word for that only ever exists in this cottage.
Mabel moves around the edges of the room with a tray, handing out tea.
“Drink all of it,” she says, pressing a cup into my hands when I sit up. “All of it, Lennon.”
“I will.”
“I mean it.”
I take a sip to prove it—mugwort, valerian, and lemon balm.
Across the little circle, Paul is sitting up against the base of the couch with his cup balanced on his knee, his glasses off, making him look younger and somehow more serious at once.
He hasn’t touched his tea. He’s watching all of us instead, cataloging the way he does, and when he catches me looking, he gives me the downward smile and mouths, okay?
I nod.
I’m not okay. But I nod.
Nevan’s hand finds mine on the cushion between us without either of us looking. His fingers are warm and too big, and they curl around mine like that’s where they live now. He doesn’t say anything. He’s been quiet since dinner, and I keep wanting to fix it, knowing I can’t.
“Rule two,” I whisper to him.
“That’s still not your hex, Lemon.” But his thumb moves over my knuckles once.
“Fine, rule four then.”
His shoulders come down a fraction before he leans in and kisses my temple. “I love you too.”
On my other side, Ridge has shifted down onto the cushions and arranged himself as if he owns the floor. He has the white pebble in his fist, turning it over and over with his thumb.
He catches me watching and holds it up. “My crystal is better than yours.”
“You sound like Jasper.”
“Take that back.”
My phone buzzes on the floor. Speaking of…
Jasper:
We’re set up here. Derek’s asleep already next to her. It was so fast. The man is RUNNING toward this. Melanie’s down for the night and Nora’s sitting with us. Crystals are placed. We’re ready when you are.
Lenny, you’ve got this. Be the light, I mean it!!!
I type back a thumbs-up because if I type words, I’ll type too many. Then I put the phone face down, which I have decided helps.
“They’re ready,” I say to the room.
“Then so are we.” Seraphine rises from the couch in that boneless way she has, and there’s nothing foggy in it.
She’s sharper than I’ve ever seen her. What usually pulls her away from herself seems to let go completely the second there’s dreamwork to do.
She crosses to the old record player in the corner, the one I always assumed was decoration, and sets the needle down.
It’s not exactly music. It’s strings or voices or both, a sound that doesn’t seem to start anywhere or go anywhere, but turns and turns like the smoke. It gets under my skin in about four seconds, the hair on my arms lifting.
“What is—”
“Lie back, little dreamer.” She drifts past me and crouches, her cool fingers pressing a final crystal to the center of my chest, right over the moonstone, right over my heart. “Sleep tight.”
The tea is warm in my stomach, the strings are turning, Nevan’s hand is heavy in mine, and Ridge’s breathing has already slowed on my left. The room is getting soft at the corners.
Breathe in.
Tessa’s green eyes.
Breathe out.
The sound of the waves.
Breathe in.
The doors standing in the tide.
Breathe out.
The sand…
There’s sand under my hands.
I open my eyes and find sky the color of a bruise healing and a thousand colored doors standing upright in the sand, all of them closed, all of them facing the water.
I know this beach.
I look down at my fingers in the sand.
They’re breadsticks, which means…
…I’m dreaming.
I stand too fast.
“Tessa.”
She’s standing at the waterline with her back to me, looking out at nothing, and when she turns around, my whole chest does a flip.
This has to work.
God, I hope she isn’t still mad at me for bringing Derek into my dreamscape.
Her lips pull into a smile as she crosses the sand, and we meet halfway. I hold on so hard it hurts. She smells like cocoa butter and salt.
“I’m sorry,” I murmur into her chest. “Please don’t hate me.”
“I could never hate you, silly. And I’m sorry, too, but he’s just…”
“I know.” I lean back to look at her. “And I’m sorry this is making it worse before it gets better, but, Tess, I need you to do something, and I need you not to argue with me about it, which I know is your second-favorite hobby.”
“What’s the first?”
“Being right.”
There’s a flicker of the dry smile I love so much. “What do you need?”
“I need you to open your dreamscape, right now. So the others can step in.”
The smile drops. “Why?”
“Where’s Lucien?”
Her eyes go to the doors, then to the water, then back to me. “Elsewhere. I couldn’t stay. I keep…” she makes a small motion with her hand “… bouncing in and out.”
“Can he see us right now? Can he watch this?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t think he can watch the dreamscapes while he’s in elsewhere, but I’m not sure, Lenny. I’m not sure of anything in here anymore.”
“Okay. Okay, that’s enough.” I take a breath.
“We have a plan, and it’s probably better not to tell you everything about it if we don’t know if Lucien can hear us.
But you don’t have to understand it, and you don’t have to do any of it.
You have to go along. Let them in, and then come with us, and stay quiet. ”
“Come with you where?”
“Tess.”
“No, you can’t just…”
“If you love me,” I say. “You’ll do it.”
“That’s manipulation, Lenny.”
“No.” I keep my voice level. “Manipulation was you telling me to drive three thousand miles and come find you in a dream. This is me asking nicely.”
She looks at me, but her eyes go glassy while the corner of her mouth pulls, and I think she’s going to cry, yell, or both. “It won’t work,” she says instead. “Whatever it is, it won’t work.”
“It has to. But you have to play along for me.”
She swallows, then closes her eyes, and one by one, they arrive.
Derek first, stumbling out of nothing, but the second he sees her, he stops breathing in a way I can hear.
Ridge effortlessly steps in after him, as if he had just used the door.
Then Paul arrives and looks around the beach once, like he’s mapping it.
His gaze catches on the doors immediately, but his expression doesn’t change. Which is how I know he hates it.
Paul only gets quiet when he’s afraid. His eyes find me, and I can tell he knows I am afraid, too, just as Nevan stumbles in, arms wheeling, landing hard on the sand with an ow. His gray eyes find mine instantly, like he had to check I was there before anything else.
I told Derek before we went under. I told him very clearly. “Whatever happens on that beach, you keep your mouth shut until I say otherwise.”
The idiot lasts about four seconds.
“I’m waiting here for you,” Derek says softly to her. “I’ll wait right here, and then we’re going to wake up again together.” He slowly crosses the sand to Tessa, as if she’s a deer that might bolt, and reaches out to take her hand. Both of mine clench, ready to peel him off her.
We’re so not going to risk the mission because he can’t stay away from her, but Tessa lets him.
She lets him take her hand, and she doesn’t pull away. Something in my chest cracks clean down the middle. Grief flickers across her face, as if she already knows what she’s about to lose, but Derek doesn’t move. Neither of them do.
Twelve years of waiting stretched thin between them, and I can see it.
She has never fully untethered from him.
Then she lets go of his hand and turns to me, composure snapping back up like a wall. She puts her chin up and breathes through her nose. “So, what now, Lenny?” she asks.
“We’re all going in there together.” I tip my head toward the door to elsewhere. “We’re all going to turn into you, and you need to act as normal but also as quiet as possible not to tick him off.”
“Turn into me? What…”
“Like this,” Ridge says, and on the next blink, Tessa’s face on Tessa’s body stands exactly where Ridge was, and it is so deeply, skin-crawlingly wrong that the real Tessa actually gasps.
“See?” Ridge says, in Tessa’s voice, which is even worse. “Your part is to stay quiet. And to wake up as soon as you can.”
“Why would he…” Tessa starts, but Paul and Nevan turn into her next, and the words die on her lips, replaced by an “Oh.”
For the first time since I got here, she looks scared.
I squeeze Tessa’s forearm before I turn into her, too, and now there are five of her, standing on a beach of closed doors under a healing, bruised sky.
And Derek, who looks like he’s going to be sick.
Hell, I’m going to be sick. I don’t have my own stomach right now, and I’m going to be sick anyway.
“Derek.” I point at him with a hand that’s wrong. “When she comes back out, you get her up to the surface. Understand? It doesn’t matter what else is happening. If she’s able to wake up, you guys do.”
He nods but looks like a man being asked to stay on the shore while everyone he loves rows out into a storm, which is almost what’s happening.
I lead us to the door that stands apart from the others, the only one the waves haven’t reached, dark wood, with the long flowing grain lines.
My stomach twists.
What if we walk through this thing and disappear?
What if this is the last time I ever see Derek standing on this beach?
What if this is the last time I see any of them?
The moonstone on a chest that isn’t mine has started to warm, a low heat against the breastbone that I have learned to read as danger, danger, danger.
“Okay,” I say to the four Tessas behind me. “Now you have to let go. Just enough. Just for tonight.”
Nobody moves.
Ridge looks at the black doorway. “This is a terrible idea.”