Blood Brothers Page 0,26

of the moon-drenched trees swam a black owl, its great wings stirring a storm in that soft air, chilling it until she shivered. And was, even in the dream, afraid.

With that cold wind stirring, she saw, stretched across the path, a golden fawn. The blood from its slit throat drenched the ground so it gleamed wet and black in the night.

Her heart squeezed with pity. So young, so sweet, she thought as she made herself approach it. Who could have done such a thing?

For a moment, the dead, staring eyes of the fawn cleared, shone as gold as its hind. It looked at her with such sorrow, such wisdom, tears gathered in her throat.

The voice came now, not through the whipped air, but in her mind. The single word: devoveo.

Then the trees were bare but for the ice that sheathed trunk and branch, and the silver moonlight turned gray. The path had turned, or she had, so now she faced a small pond. The water was black as ink, as if any light the sky pushed down was sucked into its depths and smothered there.

Beside the pond was a young woman in a long brown dress. Her hair was chopped short, with the strings and tufts of it sticking out wildly. Beside the black pond she bent to fill the pockets of her brown dress with stones.

Hello! Quinn called out. What are you doing?

The girl only continued to fill her pockets. As Quinn walked closer, she saw the girl's eyes were full of tears, and of madness.

Crap. You don't want to do that. You don't want to go Virginia Woolf. Wait. Just wait. Talk to me.

The girl turned her head, and for one shocked moment, Quinn saw the face as her own. He doesn't know everything, the mad girl said. He didn't know you.

She threw out her arms, and her slight body, weighed heavy with her cache of stones, tipped, tipped, tipped until it met the black water. The pond swallowed it like a waiting mouth.

Quinn leaped-what else could she do? Her body braced for the shock of cold as she filled her lungs with air.

There was a flash of light, a roar that might have been thunder or something alive and hungry. She was on her knees in a clearing where a stone rose out of the earth like an altar. Fire spewed around her, above her, through her, but she felt none of its heat.

Through the flames she saw two shapes, one black, one white, grappling like mad animals. With a terrible rending sound, the earth opened up, and like the waiting mouth of the pond, swallowed everything.

The scream ripped from her throat as that maw widened to take her. Clawing, she dragged herself toward the stone, fought to wrap her arms around it.

It broke into three equal parts, sending her tumbling, tumbling into that open, avid mouth.

She woke, huddled on the lovely bed, the linens tangled around her legs as she gripped one of the bedposts as if her life depended on it.

Her breath was an asthmatic's wheeze, and her heart beat so fast and hard it had her head spinning.

A dream, just a dream, she reminded herself, but couldn't force herself-not quite yet-to release her hold on the bedpost.

Clinging to it, she let her cheek rest on the wood, closed her eyes until the shaking had lessened to an occasional quiver.

"Hell of a ride," she mumbled.

The Pagan Stone. That's where she'd been at the end of the dream, she was certain of it. She recognized it from pictures she'd seen. Small wonder she'd have a scary dream about it, about the woods. And the pond...Wasn't there something in her research about a woman drowning in the pond? They'd named it after her. Hester's Pond. No, pool. Hester's Pool.

It all made sense, in dream logic.

Yeah, a hell of a ride, and she'd die happy if she never took another like it.

She glanced at her travel alarm, and saw by its luminous dial it was twenty after three. Three in the morning, she thought, was the dead time, the worst time to be wakeful. So she'd go back to sleep, like a sensible woman. She'd straighten the bed, get herself a nice cool drink of water, then tune out.

She'd had enough jolts and jumps for her first day.

She slid out of bed to tug the sheets and duvet back into some semblance of order, then turned, intending to go to the adjoining bath for a glass of water.

The