Chapter Twenty-Nine - Evie
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Evie
I WASN’T SURE when the bedroom changed. That was the first strange thing.
One moment, I was lying in our bed, half-aware of the IV tugging lightly at my arm every time I shifted and the taste of sleep still heavy in my mouth.
The next, I was standing barefoot on cool stone, wearing Luc’s same soft shirt I’d gone to sleep in, only now the hem moved faintly around my thighs like there was wind.
I looked back instinctively. My bed was gone. But there wasn’t even a bedroom or ceiling. It was just open air and silence and a garden stretching out in front of me like it had been waiting for me to arrive.
I stood very still.
“This has to be a dream,” I said out loud. But it didn’t feel like one.
Dreams usually had a softness around the edges. They skipped. They blurred. They accepted absurd things too easily. But this didn’t. It felt… precise.
The air was cool against my skin. The stone beneath my feet held a faint warmth, as if it had been touched by sunlight recently, except there was no sun overhead.
The sky was a deep silver-black, vast and luminous, but empty.
There was no sun, no moon, and there weren’t any stars, just a strange, endless glow that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.
Ahead of me, the garden spread wide, but it was unfinished.
I wasn’t sure how I knew that, but I did.
It hadn’t been made yet, or maybe it had only just begun.
Trees stood in graceful rows. But some had leaves, and some did not.
Some were fully grown, twisting and elegant, heavy with dark blossoms and fruit, while others looked like sketches of trees, pale trunks and half-formed branches still deciding what they were meant to become.
Flowers opened in scattered beds along the path, but not all of them seemed real yet. A few were nothing but white outlines hovering over green stems. One patch held blossoms that changed shape every time I looked at them, roses one second, lilies the next, then something I couldn’t name.
Water moved through the garden in narrow channels lined with black stone. Except it didn’t move the way water should. It ran upward in some places, lifting itself in delicate streams toward the blank sky before disappearing into light.
I turned slowly, my pulse beginning to thud harder. Everything was beautiful, but it was also wrong. And somehow, none of it frightened me as much as it should have.
The path beneath my feet curved through low flowering hedges and arching branches.
A breeze passed through them, and the whole garden seemed to breathe in response.
Leaves rustled. Water lifted. Petals fluttered.
It was the kind of place that should have felt peaceful.
But it didn’t. It felt awake and aware, as if it was watching or waiting.
“Okay,” I muttered, mostly to myself. “That’s unsettling.”
A child laughed, and I froze. It wasn’t far away.
The sound came from somewhere beyond a stand of pale trees to my right, light and bright and unmistakably little-kid laughter. Then another laugh followed it, almost identical, overlapping the first so neatly they could have been echoes of each other.
Cautiously, I turned toward the sound.
My hand had already instinctively moved to my stomach. That had become the habit lately. Every time I was afraid, or nauseous, or startled, or sometimes for no reason at all, my hand went there first as if some part of me had already decided my body was not entirely my own anymore.
The path shifted beneath my feet. It wasn’t enough to send me stumbling, but it made me realize that the path had changed directions, curving towards the laughter.
I stared down at it. “I didn’t do that,” I said softly.
The garden said nothing. But it seemed pleased that I’d noticed. So, I followed the path anyway. Because apparently in dreams—or whatever this was—I made excellent choices.
The air changed as I walked. It grew warmer, touched with the scent of rain and something sweeter underneath it, crushed pear, maybe, and the faint green smell of things just beginning to grow.
The deeper I went, the more finished the garden became.
The trees grew fuller. The flowers stopped flickering between forms and settled into themselves.
Moss climbed over stone borders. Vines curled around trellises that I would have sworn were not there a second before.
And then I saw them. Two little girls stood in the center of a clearing beside a narrow pool of upward-moving water. They looked exactly alike. So identical that for one disorienting second, my mind refused to believe there were two of them.
They looked to be maybe four or five years old, small and slight and barefoot in pale dresses that moved softly around their knees.
Their hair was dark auburn, thick and softly wavy, falling past their shoulders in wild little tangles that caught the strange light like polished copper.
Their faces were delicate and serious in a way that made my chest tighten instantly.
But it was their eyes that undid me. Pale blue. The same impossible, glacial, luminous blue that belonged to Luc and no one else. My breath caught so sharply it hurt.
They looked like him, but not in the broad, obvious way children resemble a parent.
It was something stranger than that or deeper.
The set of their mouths. The stillness in them.
The almost eerie self-possession in such tiny bodies.
Even standing side by side in a half-made garden under a sky with no sun, they had the unsettling composure of creatures who expected the world to arrange itself properly around them.
One of them crouched by a closed flower, her dark auburn hair slipping over one shoulder. The other peeked up at me. She didn’t seem surprised to see me.
She grinned up at me, and I couldn’t help but stare at her.
The other girl stood and turned, and now both of them were looking at me with those pale blue eyes, clear and bright and far too knowing for children that small.
My throat went tight. I tried to speak, and nothing came out.
Then, because my brain always betrayed me at the worst possible times, what I finally said was, “Well, that seems significant.”
The girl on the left smiled wider, and the one on the right blinked slowly, letting her hair fall over her face, as if she were deciding whether I was serious.
I laughed once under my breath, half hysterical, half on the edge of tears. “You’re… really here?”
Neither of them answered. They glanced at each other first, a quick look that felt less like children checking with one another and more like something ancient passing silently between them.
Then the girl on the left pointed at me, and the way she did it made my skin prickle.
I took one cautious step closer. “Are you…”
I stopped. I didn’t know how to finish that question. Real? Mine? A dream? A warning?
The girl on the right tilted her head, and the motion was so much like Luc when he was humoring someone he considered mildly ridiculous that my heart gave a painful squeeze.
She nodded as if saying, “You know.”
I replied, “I really, really don’t.”
That made both of them smile. They were beautiful in the way children often were, soft-cheeked and delicate, with little hands, bare feet, and hair that needed brushing. But there was something in them that didn’t match their size. They were something very old.
The girl nearest the flower reached down and touched one of its petals with one finger, and it instantly bloomed.
The flower just opened all at once, white petals unfurling into deep crimson, then gold, then brilliant white like it glowed from within.
The scent hit me a second later, rich and impossible and sweet.
The second girl touched the flower next, and it changed again.
It didn’t die or wither. Instead, the blossom folded in on itself and turned into something smaller, stranger, its petals narrowing into translucent wings until a tiny winged thing lifted from the stem and hovered between them like a living ember.
Neither girl seemed impressed.
“Okay,” I said faintly. “I definitely don’t know what that means.”
The girl on the left reached toward me and nodded slowly.
“No, I’m pretty sure I’d remember if I knew how to turn flowers into… whatever that was.”
The girl on the right held out her hand, and the tiny thing settled into her palm, folding itself into a point of light.
My hand tightened over my stomach. A strange little warmth answered beneath my palm, like an awareness so immediate it made my breath hitch.
My eyes snapped back to their faces. “You’re them,” I whispered.
They smiled and looked at each other, and the garden seemed to go still around us. Water paused in the air. Leaves stopped fluttering. Even the strange light overhead seemed to lean closer.
But the girls simply looked at me. And I knew immediately. The knowing didn’t come from logic. It came from somewhere lower, deeper, older than language. It moved through me like a bell being struck inside my ribs.
These little girls were my babies. My girls. My impossible daughters. My knees almost gave out under me.
“Oh my God,” I breathed.
One of them made a tiny face. The other shook her head, and a chill moved across my skin. Before I could ask what they meant, the light in the garden changed. I felt it before I saw it. Pressure. That was the only word for it.
A brightness pressed against the edge of the sky like something massive had leaned its weight against a wall. The silver-black glow above us sharpened at the edges, blanching toward white gold. The pool beside the girls rippled once. Hard.
Every hair on my body lifted.
No.
I knew that feeling. I knew that pressure. My body knew it faster than my mind did. My blood ran cold. My lungs locked. Something terrible moved through my bones, a memory of that honeyed light that burned, and the crushing horror of being seen by something that never should have touched me.