Dead and Dusted by Lily Webb (most recommended books .TXT) 📗

The smile Blair had been wearing before had vanished, replaced by a grim look of fear. We’d both tried to downplay my dreams, to convince ourselves that they meant nothing, but we should’ve known better. We should’ve listened. If we had, we might’ve been able to prevent all of this, but we hadn’t, and now two people had died inexplicably on our watch. “Oh, Selena, you poor thing,” Blair whispered.

Thorn squeezed my hands, pulling my gaze to his face. “Why didn’t you tell us sooner?”

I shrugged, ashamed. “I was afraid you’d think I was going crazy. You’ve all been walking on eggshells around me lately, ever since I had my fainting episode a while back. I didn’t want anyone to worry. I thought I could handle it, that the nightmares would eventually just go away.”

“I’m sorry you felt that way, but you still could’ve told me. You can tell me anything. And I mean anything at all,” Thorn said quietly as he stroked my thumb with his. “You shouldn’t have had to deal with this alone.”

As much as I appreciated the gesture, I didn’t know what to say to that, so instead I pulled my hands from Thorn’s to throw my arms around him. He laughed and rubbed my back, and for the first time since all this craziness started, I felt like maybe I wasn’t going nuts after all. Maybe if I’d told someone about this sooner, I wouldn’t have ever felt like I was losing my grip.

“Selena?” Agent Gemwood asked, breaking the moment between Thorn and me. I released him but kept his hand in mine while I faced Agent Gemwood. “I’m sorry to interrupt but given what you just stared and everything that appears to have happened here, I have to ask you some questions. Could we speak privately?”

“Yeah, sure,” I said and stood gingerly, afraid I might pass out again. Agent Gemwood stepped around the corner of the table to join me, then offered me her arm. My cheeks tingled as I took it, but I knew better than to resist; better to show a bit of vulnerability than try to be a hero and end up on my face again.

“Use the front office. It should be unlocked,” Blair called after us.

“Thanks,” Agent Gemwood said and walked me down the hall into the foyer. We stepped around the front desk and I tried to door to the office, which clicked open. “After you,” Agent Gemwood said, so I released her arm and headed for the nearest chair against the back wall. I slumped into it, and Gemwood drifted into another directly across from me.

“I won’t make this any more uncomfortable for you than it needs to be, I promise,” she said with a comforting smile, though I didn’t think it was possible to feel that way around her at all. Her presence had an effortless way of putting me at ease, a quality that had to have come in handy for her in her line of work.

“Thank you.”

“Of course,” she said and waved her hand through the air. A second later, the letter from Zadie’s room appeared in her other, and I shuddered at the sight of it. “I know you don’t want to revisit this, but I need you to tell me everything you can remember about your most recent dream as vividly as possible.”

She was right; I had less than zero interest in recounting the details of the nightmare, but if it could help us catch whoever was behind all this, then it would be worth it, so I started from the beginning and continued uninterrupted until I mentioned the head injury I’d had in the dream.

“Wait, you were bleeding from the back of your head?”

“Yeah, but I don’t know how or why. Whatever caused it happened before I was conscious in the dream.”

“So, you woke up in your dream like that?”

“Yeah, exactly, but I realized pretty quickly that I was dreaming, which was a first. I used to think lucid dreaming wasn’t real, but now I’m not so sure.” Agent Gemwood shifted in her seat and flashed me an uncertain look. “What? You don’t think it is?”

Gemwood shook her head, making her wings flutter. “No, that’s not it. I just wonder if you were really dreaming at all.”

“What do you mean? Of course, I was. It was so vivid.”

“I don’t doubt what you saw. I’m just not sure if it was a dream.”

“Then what else could it be?”

“Well, while we were waiting for you to bounce back, your aunt told me about your abilities to see the past and future, which got me thinking that what you’re classifying as dreams might be more like premonitions.”

“Then why do they only happen when I’m asleep?”

Gemwood shrugged. “Magic works in mysterious ways, as an old friend of mine used to say. Maybe your powers are still developing and can only peek through while you’re asleep and your conscious mind is out of their way.”

“Then how do you explain what’s written on that paper?”

Gemwood chuckled. “That’s what I wanted to ask you. What do you think it means?”

I hesitated, unsure whether I should say what I really thought — because I recognized how crazy it made me sound. I mean, telling her I believed a creature that had only ever appeared in my dreams was warning me about a cleansing avalanche wasn’t exactly the type of thing sane people shared. But I couldn’t come up with anything else. “It’s definitely a warning, though about what I’m not sure.”

“You don’t think it’s about the deaths?”

I shrugged. “I guess it could be, but that seems too obvious. If that creature really killed both Zadie and Leland, why would it leave clues for us about it?”

“Maybe they weren’t clues for us so much as messages to their original recipients,” Gemwood said, and I jolted in my chair. What if she was right? I didn’t know what Leland’s letter said, and there’d been so much going on that