Cocooned in Thom’s arms, I eventually drifted back to sleep, though it wasn’t mercifully dreamless like most of my nights had been lately. Someone was laughing, cackling almost madly, and it left my skin crawling even as I jerked awake again, only marginally conscious of what I’d been dreaming. The fading fragments of nightmare and vision were jumbled together in a dark haze as I hunched over, breathing hard, skin puckering at the chill of our cot in the early hours before dawn.
Thom touched my arm, pushing himself up on an elbow. “Mar?” he whispered over the sound of the raging storm. “What’s the matter now?”
“Nightmares,” I whispered. “Visions. I…I don’t know, Thom. I can’t remember them now, just someone laughing and fingers like…like claws…” I swallowed hard against a knot in my throat, against bile that crept higher and higher.
Don’t be sick. Keep it together. For the love of everything holy and sacred, keep it together.
I shuddered as Thom sat up and put his arms around me, drawing me tight against his chest. My eyes stung as I curled into a ball.
“It must have been bad,” he murmured. “Especially if you don’t remember them now.”
“I know,” I whispered. “God, I know. Maybe it was nothing.”
“It was something,” a voice said from the darkness near our door. I squinted in the dim and just barely made out Neve’s shape in the darkness. She leaned against her crutches in the open doorway, her face as pale as the long nightgown that shrouded her. I was shocked we hadn’t heard her coming.
“How do you know?” I asked, almost breathless as my heart began to beat a little faster. She was as powerful and as sensitive as her cousin, though both were loath to admit it.
“I just do,” she said, limping deeper into our space. Thom and I moved over in the bed so she could sit on the edge and take weight off her bad leg, off her injured back. She settled there, her face a mask of pain for a long moment, her eyes sparkling with tears she barely held inside. “I can feel it deep down in here.” She pressed a hand against her belly as she caught her lower lip in her teeth. “Can you feel it, too?”
I swallowed again and nodded. “Yeah. Ever since the storm started.”
“It’s the beginning,” she whispered.
“Of what?” Thom asked. His arms tightened around me and I rested my head against his shoulder, my forehead against his neck. Even as the storm howled outside and a ball of dread coiled in my belly, I felt safe in his arms. He’d never let anything hurt me—not as long as he could do something about it.
“I don’t know,” Neve admitted softly, “but I know it’s not good. Maybe Phelan…”
“Maybe,” I agreed. “Maybe.”
