the others, it had felt so real. It had felt like it belonged to me.
Isaac loved Riley. I knew that. Felt it deep inside me. He’d loved her when she cried in the library with her lips busted and bloody. He loved each tear as they came and it was only her mouth, her touch that had kept him from finding that Trent asshole and ripping him to pieces. It was only Riley’s sweet words and sweeter taste that kept him from risking his neck to be with her. No matter that Lenny warned him. No matter that the world was set against them. Isaac had loved Riley with a fierceness that made him made it impossible to do more but keep on loving her. That scared him, that made him brave.
But she had given him a son. He’d had a link to the world, a name and place and moment that would keep her with him always. Riley had given him a reason to get out of bed each morning. She’d given him a family.
I sat up straighter, elbows on my legs, hands on the back of my head, trying to steady my heartbeat. It raged quick and desperate. The dream was dimming, but the emotions, the feelings Isaac felt, swam inside me like she had been mine, like I had lost her.
And when I remembered what Isaac felt, how it seemed to him that his heart had come right out of his chest, like someone had taken a light that lit his entire world and snuffed it out. I did something I hadn’t done since my mother’s funeral. I sat in the middle of my bed and cried.
Riley had not been mine. That boy, the baby, Winston, had not been mine, but I wept like they were. I cried for the loss. For the memory. For the man I’d never known and the life that had been stolen from him.
“Damn.”
I fell onto my mattress, dragging the back of my hand over my face, pushing back the ache in my chest until it became duller. Until it was only a small thud that smarted like a bruise and not the gash that pulsed and bled Isaac dry.
Outside I heard voices: many of them, workers likely, a few crews tackling potholes down on the street below. It was the noise—their voices, the thump from their radios and the squeak from their tires that I tried to focus on; anything to move the ache of my dream from feeling so real.
I wondered, idly, as I lay there, if I’d called out in my dreams. Had I spoken Riley’s name? Had I begged her not to die? Had Willow heard me? Despite myself, despite the argument we’d had two nights ago, I still couldn’t shake her from my thoughts. I couldn’t ignore the connection she seemed to hold between all the strange things that had been happening in my life. Had I had been wrong about everything? No one could make me dream impossible dreams. Not unless their juju was real and by the sweat drying on my forehead and the slowing pace of my heart, I began to believe that Willow’s was.
“You’re doing this,” I’d told her, face tight as I’d yelled at her. “You planned all of this, didn’t you?”
“How the hell could I do that?” She’d waved the picture at me, and I caught a glimpse of Sookie’s smile. “I’m not supernatural, Nash. I can’t make up pictures from ninety damn years ago, and I can’t make it that you have the same dreams as I do!”
But it wasn’t logical, not any of it. It wasn’t possible. And I knew it, even before I’d accused her, I knew she hadn’t done anything. It was deep down, in the center of my brain, that reality. It told me Willow had only reacted. It told me she was feeling everything I had, reliving the same lives I had.
But how?
The sheets rustled as I turned, arms stretched out over my head and I stared off at nothing, reliving the dream of that day at the hospital. Most likely the worst day of Isaac’s life. He’d watched her blink twice, her gaze on him, then shifting to their son. There was a softness in her expression, the peace that comes when you know you don’t have to fight anymore. It relaxed the tension in her facial muscles and made the whites of her eyes seem brighter. Isaac had watched Riley do all that