Dreams of Gods & Monsters (Daughter of Smoke & Bone #3) - Laini Taylor Page 0,152

being chosen, oh, glory.

Oh, misery.

And how many portals had they cut by then? How many worlds had they “stitched together with their light”? How many laid open to the Beasts and left unprotected as they wheeled and fled, again and again? They sealed the portals as they raced back toward Meliz in panic and despair. Each portal in turn they closed behind them and then watched the Beasts sunder it and keep coming. They couldn’t hold them out. They hadn’t been taught how to do that, and so, world by world, page by page in the book that was the great All: darkness. Devouring.

Nothing worse had ever been done, by accident or design, in all of time, in all of space, and the guilt was theirs.

And finally there were no worlds left between the Cataclysm and Meliz. Meliz first and last, Meliz eternal. The Faerers came home, and the Beasts came behind them.

And devoured it.

66

SO MUCH MORE THAN SAVED

Eliza woke from the dream to find herself still dreaming. She’d been very deep, she was aware, and supposed she must be emerging through layers of dreams, like climbing up out of the earth, out of one of those open-pit mines that are like hell made real, and each level bringing her nearer to waking.

It had to be a dream, though, if only because it defied reality.

She was sitting on a step. Real enough, so far. A girl was beside her: small but not a child. A teenager, doll-pretty and wide-eyed. Staring at her.

With an audible gulp, the girl swallowed, and said, in hesitant, accented English, “Um. I’m sorry? Or… you’re welcome? Whichever one seems… appropriate… to you?”

“I’m sorry?” said Eliza. She meant it in the vein of: What? What did the girl mean? But she seemed to take it as an answer to her question.

“Sorry, then,” she said, deflating. Her eyes were held wide and unblinking. Eliza shifted a glance to the young man by her side. Matching wonder in his eyes, she saw. “We didn’t mean to,” he said. “We didn’t know… that… was going to happen. They just… grew.”

The wings, he meant: dream wings growing from Eliza’s dream shoulders. Awakening—if you could call the passage from one dream to the next awakening, which she supposed you really couldn’t, much as it felt like it—she had been aware of the change in herself, without visual confirmation or even surprise, as is the way with dreams. She turned her head now to see what it was she already knew.

Wings of living fire. She shifted her shoulders, feeling the play of new muscles there as the wings responded, flexing and dropping a pretty rain of sparks. They were the most beautiful things Eliza had ever seen, and awe bloomed in her.

This was a much better dream than she was used to.

“Sorry about your shirt,” said the girl.

At first Eliza didn’t know what she meant, but then she realized it hung loose and tattered, as though the wings had torn it when they grew. It hardly seemed consequential, except for one thing. It was an unexpected detail, for a dream.

“How do you feel?” asked the young man, solicitous. “Are you… back?”

Back? Back where, or… back from where? Eliza realized she had no idea where she was. What was the last thing she remembered? Being in a car in Morocco, in disgrace.

She looked around now and beheld a twist in a narrow alley that could almost have been a stage set. Cobblestones and marble, iconic red geraniums lined up on a window ledge. Laundry lines roped overhead. Everything said “Italy” as clearly as Eliza’s glimpse of desert out the airplane window had said, “not Italy.” An old man in suspenders even leaned heavily on his cane, frozen as still as a cardboard cutout, staring at her.

It was like a tingling, at first, the presentiment that this was not a dream. The old man’s cane had duct tape wrapped around the handle. One of the geranium plants was dead, and there was litter, and noise. Tinny horns just out of sight, a brief canine quarrel, and some kind of muffled drone lying over it all: a hive sound of many distant voices. The blares and dents of the world, intruding in a dream? That was when Eliza began to understand.

But to understand her situation truly, she had to listen inward.

The sensation of stirring within her had gone still. The things known and buried, they weren’t trying to dig themselves out anymore. It took her a