would live together under the water and leave Holly alone. She couldn’t imagine a worse fate.
She threw her bathrobe around her shoulders and tiptoed out of the room. She hurried down the landing past closed bedroom doors on both sides. Most of those rooms were empty now, with the guys being gone. She didn’t want to stop there, and she didn’t want to wake up the few people she had left.
She dashed downstairs. The double doors stood open to the fragrant night air. A breeze ruffled the curtains leading to the forest. She paused on the threshold, peering into the shadows.
She could go out there and run around as a bear all night, but that wouldn’t solve her problems. The bear soul inside her might come from the baby, or it might belong to her.
That mindless, animal soul might succumb to the Dryad’s urges. She might wander to Witch River and throw herself into the water without thinking.
Either way, it didn’t matter. She had bigger to fish to fry. Losing herself in the woods would only distract her for a few hours.
She didn’t want to get distracted. She wanted a solution, and the woods wouldn’t give her one.
She turned her face into the breeze and sniffed when a gruff voice startled her from her right. “Are you going somewhere?”
She spun around and gasped. “Garret! When did you get back?”
“Just a few minutes ago. I was just trying to settle down before I go to bed.” He cocked his head and examined her. “What are you doing up?”
She peered into the gloom. His huge outline loomed in the armchair near the corner. She could barely see him in the shadowy living room. He looked strangely sunken and wilted, but that might be a trick of the dark.
His words drew her attention to the forest outside. She gazed out at the trees lit up with silver moonlight. “I was just thinking about the witches. I was going to talk to them about Fair Dryad. I can’t stop thinking about her. I even see her in my dreams.”
“I have already asked them to help us defeat her,” Garret replied. “They’re doing something or other in that cave of theirs. They said they’ll come back here as soon as they finish. Then they can help us with our Dryad problem.”
Holly didn’t turn around. Her awareness ranged through unseen territory out there in the dark. The Dryad problem? She didn’t even know anymore what the Dryad problem was.
What if defeating the Dryad wasn’t the solution after all? That dream she just had called everything into question. It departed so radically from everything she understood about this situation that she didn’t want to believe it. She wanted to ignore it, to consign it to the realm of fantasy.
That insidious voice wouldn’t let her. It kept repeating in her head. Holly. It called to her even when she was awake. She didn’t have to make contact with the Fair Dryad or the Dryad’s watery home to hear that voice. It haunted her all the time since…since that dream. Waking up didn’t turn it off. Maybe it would never turn off. Maybe it would keep repeating until…
She tried to push that thought out of her head, but that voice never went away. She didn’t want to think about it either. Much as she ached to find a solution to this mystery, to put it behind her and go back to living her life, she didn’t want to think about the one solution staring her in the face.
That dream told her what to do. The baby—Ursula—had to go under the water. The Dryad would never quit until she got Ursula for her own. Holly had to turn Ursula over to the Dryad. None of her party would ever live their lives in peace until she did.
Garret interrupted her thoughts. “Come over here, darling.”
That voice spoke to her in an even more imperious command. Without removing her gaze from the outside world, she inched around the couch. She halted by his chair, still peering through the open doors.
He circled her waist and drew her down on his lap. He cradled her in his embrace, but his presence contained no hint of sexual compulsion. He didn’t want or need that from her.
Even his powerful arms wrapped around her didn’t bring her back from the phantom world she witnessed in that dream. Nothing would dispel it because it was real. That was the horrible truth. She saw something real in that dream,