A Heart of Bones by Lily C. Strauss

Author:Lily C. Strauss [Strauss, Lily C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-05-28T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

THE DREAM WAS THE SAME ONE I’D HAD hundreds of times. Except this time there was…more.

The dark water I was drowning in had a particular kind of opaque muddiness that I’d never noticed before. I could see particles moving before my open eyes, the swirling white water at the surface. The light coming through had a strange flat quality, the way light looks during a solar eclipse.

I reached for that light, desperately trying to pull myself up. I couldn’t swim for some reason—dream physics, I supposed—and like every time before, I had no magic, no way to force the world around me to do what I wanted. I was helpless. I felt myself sinking down, the water sucking at me, the current pulling me further and further away from the light.

And then a voice, saying my name. Jack.

“Jack.”

I startled awake with the voice still echoing in my ears. I was in a place I’d never seen before—a bizarre tiny room with walls made of metal—lying on a bed. The room was so small that the bed took up pretty much the entire space. Jaunty curtains with little yellow flowers on them were drawn across small windows above me. I stared up at them, blinking.

Nothing hurt, but I was hungry as hell and slightly woozy. Luna was up near the low ceiling, doing little loops. Watching her made me dizzy, so I looked away.

And there was Detective Dick—Richard, I reminded myself, I should probably call him Richard, all things considered—sitting on the edge of the mattress next to me, that small, crooked smile on his face.

“Did you…” I licked my lips. My throat was so dry my voice came out all weird and croaky. “Did you just say my name?”

His smile grew wider. “Nope.”

“Oh,” I said. That must have been part of my dream. Another new thing.

This was weird. I looked around some more, trying to figure out where the hell we were. I could see to the front of the space we were in. There was a sink at a little kitchen counter. There was a tiny table along the side with built-in benches. More tiny windows. Something clicked inside my brain. “Is this an RV?”

“Close. It’s an Airstream trailer.”

Didn’t clear up much, really. I took a closer look at Detective D… Richard. He looked healthy, normal—his usual sexy self. But he still had that iron collar around his neck. He was wearing a white t-shirt and jeans—the first time I’d seen him in something other than his wrinkled dad chinos. They looked good on him.

I cleared my throat and decided I should look at something other than his pants before my sleep-drunk leering got too obvious. Stuff from before I’d passed out was slowly filtering back into my consciousness.

“I brought you back to life,” I said. I mean, technically, he wasn’t all the way dead, just mostly dead. But the whole idea was still pretty wild to me. I had no idea I was capable of something like that.

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