The man spoke, though his lips never moved. Go on. Do it. Do it, now! He pulled something from his pocket, a small white-robed doll with hair like the woman's. Do it! He shoved the doll toward the railing.
The woman climbed over it.
"No," Melissa whispered. "No, wait."
But neither of them could hear her. It was as if she weren't really there.
The man moved closer to the rail, held the doll out over the water. As he did, a pair of hands, strong astral hands, attached to nothing and no one, appeared behind the woman, hovering above her shoulders.
The woman turned, as if suddenly aware of the presence, and Melissa gasped as she saw her face. It was almost like looking into a mirror.
Do it! the man commanded, and then he flung the doll over the rail.
The hands closed on the woman and pushed her.
She fell silently, her white dress wafting behind her. Like an angel cast from heaven, she spiraled downward. The water opened where she plunged into it, then closed around her, swallowing her down.
Melissa screamed.
The sound of her own voice shocked her awake, and she found herself sitting bolt upright in her own bed. Her skin was damp with sweat, her heart pounding, as she looked around the room. But it was real. She was there, in the beach house, and the rest had just been a dream.
"No," she said softly. "Not a dream. Something else - a prophecy, or a memory, or something - it was too vivid to be just a dream."
She glanced at her nightstand. The clock read 2:00 a.m. A soft, steady beep emanated from somewhere in the living room, startling her for just a second, before she recognized the familiar sound of her answering machine. Somehow, she'd been too deep in the vision to have heard the telephone ringing. Sighing, she got out of the bed, padded into the living room, hit the playback button, and then shivered at the sound of Alexander Quinn's deep voice.
"We're meeting with the writers in the morning, Melissa. Ten A.M., my office." The machine beeped once more to signal the end of the message and then went silent.
Pushing a hand through her hair, she wondered if she should just quit now and have it over with. She wandered through the living room, toward the table in the back where she'd dropped the script he'd given her the day before. As she did, she looked up, through the glass doors.
And she saw something on the beach - a shape, with long golden hair and a flowing white gown.
Her heart tripped and she lunged forward, hands pressing to the glass, eyes straining. What the hell... ?
There was nothing there. Maybe it had just been a reflection, a trick of the moonlight on the water, or a stray light on her glass doors. But she couldn't quite shake the feeling that she'd just seen the woman from her dream, standing in the sacred space of Melissa's own circle.
She checked her locks, just in case. Then she picked up the manuscript and took it with her, back to her bed, where she felt safe.
She wanted to do this job right - and for more reasons than just the money. She'd made a promise to her Goddess that if she could land this job, she would do it justice, set the record straight on prime-time network television. For her Craft, for her fellow Witches, for all those who'd died due to ignorance in the past.
She couldn't quit. Maybe all of this was some kind of a test.
It was not easy, forcing Alex and that troubling dream from her mind. Something was going on with him - with the two of them, maybe. She felt it in her gut, and she never ignored her intuition. It was usually dead-on. She was as afraid of him as she was drawn to him. She knew he felt that attraction, too. The air between them practically sparked with it when he was close to her.
What was the dream then? A warning? Was Alex to become her lover or her killer? Or both? Or was the dream just a manifestation of her own fears of failure and of this sudden, potent desire?
She couldn't dismiss him or the questions from her mind, only push them to the back long enough for her to do her work. She spent the rest of the night with her copy of the season's story arc,