“They went up the chimney,” Wolf says absently. Then he looks down at me in horror, holding me tight. “I heard you. In my head.” He sounds amazed by this. “I heard you yelling for Solon. What happened?”
“Did you see it?” I ask, tears pricking at my eyes. “Did you see the woman, the thing?”
He nods, his jaw clenched, and I feel nothing but relief, because it means I’m not going crazy.
It also means it wasn’t a dream.
“What was it? What were they?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know. Have you seen them before?”
I nod frantically. “Yes, yes. In the house. But I thought they were just part of my dreams.”
He frowns. “When did this happen? Was this the nightmare I woke you up from?”
“No. It happened after you left,” I say sheepishly. “It’s why I was so tired. And it happened before that too, Halloween night. That was the first time. But I never saw the woman’s face until tonight.”
He swallows hard. “Did you recognize her?” he asks, his voice dropping low, eyes searching mine.
I shake my head. “No. I mean there was something familiar about her…her hands…her mannerisms, I think. But I couldn’t really see her face anyway.” I close my eyes, trying to shake the gruesome image from my brain. “It was awful.” I look at him. “And the thing on my chest! I thought it was sleep paralysis.”
Wolf looks off down the hall, a tightness in his eyes. Finally, he says, “I saw the woman before too.”
I stare at him in disbelief. “What? When?”
“The night I woke you up from your nightmare. I was on your floor because…that’s where the woman was headed.”
My hand goes to my chest. “Wolf. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t want to scare you,” he says adamantly. “I wasn’t even sure what I was seeing. I was down in Dark Eyes after Solon left and I heard something in the cigar lounge, like someone playing pool. I went in there and the balls were all scattered. But there were twice as many as normal and they spelled out ‘pray.’”
“Pray!?” I practically shriek, my stomach cold with dread.
What the fuck?
“Then I saw the woman out in the club, she walked into the house, up the stairs. There were…ravens then too. I saw her on your floor and ran up there but then she was gone.”
I can’t help it, I’m mad. “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me!”
“When should I have told you?” he asks, his voice sharp. “I wasn’t going to tell you in the middle of the night. And ever since then, we’ve been, well, here.”
He has a point, but even so. I pull away, wrapping my arms around myself, suddenly conscious that I’m very naked. The both of us are. “Feels like we’ve been away for an eternity.”
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” he asks, his voice gentler now.
I meet his eyes. He looks reproached. “It’s a good thing,” I assure him. “I just thought whatever I was leaving behind in the city would stay there.” I pause. “What were you doing while I was sleeping anyway?”
He gestures to the stairs. “Couldn’t sleep so I got into the wine.”
“What time is it?”
“Four a.m.”
“Well,” I say, stepping back into Wolf’s room and grabbing a housecoat off the back of the door. “It’s always five o’clock somewhere.”
Chapter 10
Amethyst
We didn’t go back to sleep after the incident. Instead, we both put on the guest housecoats that groundskeeper left for us, cracked open another bottle of vintage wine, then sat outside on the deck, waiting for the sky above the ocean to slowly light up as the dawn came from behind the mountains.
There’s a lot of silence in these early morning hours. As it was before with Wolf, I can still just be with him without having to say a word. In this case, my mind has been stumbling over two things. One is the fact that we both saw that woman and that creature in the middle of the night and that neither of us know what it means, but it’s scaring me shitless.
Two is perhaps the bigger one, and just as scary: I had sex with Wolf. Not just once, but many times. And as much as it felt like we were getting it out of our system, I just want more of it. More of him. I knew that if we ever slept together, it would be something transcendent, but in reality it felt more than that. Like finding a new religion, one that I would be giving tithings to for life.
But then I remember what Wolf asked: can this be casual between us? I said I would give it a shot, but now I don’t know where we stand. Is what happened yesterday going to stay in the past? If more happens between us, will it stay in Shelter Cove? When we go back to the house, will we enter it like before, as friends, or is this the start of something more, even if that something turns out to be a secret relationship or tryst and a lot of sneaking around in the house?