Lord of the Wolfyn - By Jessica Andersen Page 0,18

to return in time. He recited a message from his father’s spirit, telling him to wait for a guide, and that when she arrived he needed to be back on Castle Island by the fourth night, to reunite with his siblings and kill the sorcerer. He paused, expression going hollow. “The next thing I knew, I was stuck here in the wolfyn realm, doing my damnedest to make them believe I’d lost my memory in the vortex and keep them from guessing that I was a member of a royal house…and all the while, waiting for my guide to show up. Then, about a week ago, I started having these dreams.”

“Dreams,” she whispered, body heating suddenly.

He nodded. “I saw you, Reda. Your face. Your eyes. The magic was making sure I would recognize you when you arrived.”

She moved restlessly, shifting her legs away from his. “There’s no such thing as magic.”

“Maybe there isn’t in your world. But there is in mine.”

Her pulse thudded loudly in her ears. The department shrink had talked about hospitalization but in the end had signed off on an outpatient program with intensive sessions that had started off daily and tapered from there. Now, she wondered whether that had been a mistake, whether she had faked her way through her recovery, fooling even herself, until now. Was she in a hospital room somewhere, staring blankly out a window while her mind roamed free? Panic sparked in her chest as she tried to imagine it but couldn’t, tried to connect with her “real” mind trapped somewhere else, but couldn’t do that, either. The cave, the man and his story felt entirely real. Which would mean…

“No,” she said, pushing herself up to the hunched-over crouch that was all the cave allowed, which made her feel trapped and squirrelly. “This isn’t… I’m not your guide. There’s been some sort of mistake.”

He hadn’t moved a muscle, except to follow her with his eyes. “When you first woke up in the cabin, you recognized me. I saw it in your face.”

“I…” dreamed of you, lusted after you, imagined you were all the things I haven’t been able to find in a flesh-and-blood guy. “Okay, maybe there were a couple of dreams, but there wasn’t anything about me guiding you anywhere.” She didn’t mention waking up hot, bothered and alone. Clearly, their dreams had been very different: she had dreamed of finding love; he had dreamed of saving his people. Was that what her subconscious wanted her to see? That she was too wrapped up in her own problems? That one resonated a little too well, making her queasy. Pressing a hand to her stomach, she said, “I need to…you know. Outside.”

He touched her free hand briefly in support. “Go out the back and stay close. There’s a grove of borer trees on the other side of the stones, and you don’t want to mess with borers.”

She didn’t ask why, didn’t intend to find out. “I’ll be back in a few minutes. I think I just need some air.” And some space without him there to remind her how numb she’d been for too long, just going through the motions, stuck in her own little world.

Outside of the cave, the air was cold, stark and silent, with none of the howling of earlier. The huge moon lit her path as she picked her way over the rocks, getting clear of Dayn’s sight as if looking for someplace to relieve herself. Then, with her heart pounding and fear souring the back of her throat, she looped around and headed back downhill, stumbling in her haste to get to the stones and break out of the hallucination before she did something really stupid… Like buy into it.

With Reda gone, the cave was cooler and far less interesting, drained of the intense, compressed energy that practically shimmered around her. But it was also a whole hell of a lot calmer.

Dayn exhaled slowly, telling himself that it was going to be okay. This was going to work. She finally seemed ready to consider that she wasn’t caught in some strange and elaborate dream, and once they got past that, he was sure her memories would resurface and she would be able to guide him. At least he hoped to the Abyss that it would work that way. He was starting to fear it might not, because a human seemed a very strange choice for someone to guide him through the magical realm of Elden. Which made