Promise Bound Read Free Page B

Why drag out hope for the Pettits that Jack was alive? It was cruel, really. Irrational thought must be the result of interrupted sleep. Right now, I wanted nothing more than three solid hours of dreamlessness. Was that really so much to ask?
    No more
, I said soundlessly.
    Though Nadia had been dead for over thirty years, I trusted she could hear me.
I’m just so tired. No more dreams
.
    “Don’t fall asleep,” Calder said.
    But I counted my breaths like sheep, marking each one with another plea because I knew Nadia had more to say tonight, and just like that, in the silent space between two breaths, the line between our two selves began to blur and blend like cream stirred into coffee. I slipped deeper into the dark well of her mind, my bloodstream cooling and my mind roiling bleak and black until the moment when I lost myself: I am me, and then I am we, and then I am not.
    *    *    *
    Nadia swims the shoreline. Her body is a solid sheath of muscle and pink iridescent scales that dazzle the school of fish trailing in her wake. Her mind is a tangled web of fury and grief. Someone has wronged her, and whoever that is, he should be afraid. She emerges from the lake, breaking the silver plane with head and shoulders. Dark rings of water run from her body.
    Through her large eyes I see my house. Lichen grows on the shingles. Ah, I understand things now. It has been a long time since Tom Hancock has been here. It has been many years since he took Nadia’s son.
    I clutch my chest in pain. From Nadia’s center, dark anger simmers, then boils like pitch, finally exploding in a bolt of electricity from her eyes and fingertips. The electric charge strikes an enormous willow tree at the shoreline and splits a branch down the length of the trunk, charring it, laying it bare on top of the water. Small green leaves rain down.
    A sound of disgust rattles in the back of her throat, and with a great whip of her tail, she drowns the beach in a wave.
    The dream drifted effortlessly to a new scene: a very young Maris cowers in the shadow of a sunken log and watches her mother. Nadia feels her eyes on her but does not acknowledge her daughter’s presence. Instead, she weaves in and out of caves, scraping her belly and tail along the rock, releasing her grief in a long trail of blood. She sings a lullaby that turns into a dirge.
    Then there is a noise, or the feeling of noise: a suction and a sinking. And then again, this time louder and heavier than before. The sound pulls Nadia away from the rocks, andshe spies a tiny boy clawing with open fingers for the surface. His jaw slackens as his head falls forward, his body rising as if pulled upward from the shoulders. A tremor of bubbles, and the last bit of air escapes the little boy’s nose.
    Black heavy curls float around the boy’s small face like a dark angel’s halo. “Calder!” I call out with a gasp.
    I woke with a start. A cool hand rested gently on my shoulder and rocked me back and forth. “Babe, it’s time. You’ve got to get ready.”
    I scowled at whatever was shaking me. Too rough. Too much. Stop it.
    “Babe, it’s time to get up.”
    I opened my eyes, disoriented for a moment, thinking the window was in the wrong place and I was too high off the ground. I gripped the edge of my blanket, hoping to find my place in the texture of its fabric.
    “You fell asleep downstairs,” Calder said. “I had to carry you up before your parents woke up.”
    “Oh,” I said, slowly recognizing the dead-poet portraits on my bedroom wall and the mountain of clean and dirty laundry on the floor. “Sorry.”
    “Never a problem.”
    I could still feel the coolness of Nadia’s pulse in the pendant. I rolled over so Calder couldn’t see my face. He had an easy enough time reading my emotions without letting him see the worry so plainly on my face.
    “You really need to get a good night’s sleep,” he said. “It’s like trying to raise the dead with you.”
    That’s