Phil grabbed my hand. “Have you eaten today, Mae? You're freaking me out a bit, and you're very pale.”
I pulled my hand away. “I’m fine. Just tired because I haven’t slept properly since I got here. And I’ve probably lost a gallon of blood from this.” I went to check on the wound across my knee, but there was nothing there. A trail of vine spread across my shoe, but there was no cut, no blood, no sore. Shit.
She frowned. “What am I looking at?”
“Nothing.” My tongue was dry, my voice weak. I straightened but couldn’t meet her eye.
“Mae,” she carried on, “you haven’t stopped sleeping since you got here.”
I turned a grim expression for the trees. “There is something here, I know it.”
Her fingers wound around my elbow. “Okay, I believe you. We can go searching, find out what we can. You are right, there are so many bits of this castle we don’t have access to, anything could be here.” She turned me back for the building. “I’ve always wondered why some of the outer wings are cordoned off. Maybe we can ask Mr Bonner if he knows? He likes you.”
She was humouring me, but I appreciated it and I gave her fingers a squeeze. “Thanks. I promise I’m not crazy.”
She laughed. “It’s that room, I tell you.”
I shivered and considered the prospect of room thirteen. The dreams were no longer just in room thirteen, though. Now they were everywhere. The memory of Tristan Prince and his sketch pad came back to me. Maybe I should tell Phil about that?
A shadow flickered under the low bough of a wide oak. A man, his shoulders broad, walked past, his hair glinting under the leaves. A leather belt slung around his hips, pinching a tunic in at his narrow waist. In his hand he held an axe. An axe I recognised.
I darted, chasing the shadow. The trees edged me along, so even when my breath became tight and laboured, I could still inhale the oxygen they supplied.
“Mae! Where are you going?” Phil’s call was distant as I followed the shadow. I didn’t stop.
It was him. Tristram. I could see him just as clear as I could feel him in my dreams.
My crashing footsteps led me nowhere and eventually I staggered to a halt, hands on knees, breath screaming in my lungs. My legs quivered and buckled like a new born foal's and I crumpled to the ground. On my back and winded, I stared at the sky. It was darker, rolling with heavy clouds. It was going to rain again, great.
What was happening to me in this place? Clutching my head and running fingers through the tangled, strands of my hair, I tried to focus. Tried to see life with the logical cynicism I’d maintained through my entire unpredictable upbringing in New York. I wasn’t stupid. You didn’t survive the care system if you didn’t have your wits about you. So why was I chasing fragments of dreams through the Scottish undergrowth?
Sighing, I lifted onto my elbows. I was losing my mind. It was official.
There they were. The stones. Tall and proud, two of them glinted, their speckled surface riddled with trails of moss and lichen were in touching distance. Scrambling to my knees, I moved towards them. Ivy and small buds of rose scattered around them like confetti. “Why won’t you let anyone else see you?” My spoken words startled some birds, and I whirled around. The forest thrummed with life. Planting my hands onto the floor, I closed my eyes. My cynicism was truly switched off, dead and buried, as I felt into the ground.
Crazy but natural, all at once I stilled my mind and called to the earth. For a girl growing up in a cement jungle, my love of all things green had always been an unusual phenomenon. A warm tingle licked along my palm, and within my mind a shining vision of gold warmth spread until I sat basking in its glow as if on a summers day under the midday sun.
Move away. I told myself.
I ignored the prompt of reality and checked out of normal. “I don’t want to move away.”
Along my throat, my newly found gemstone vibrated and pulsed. I knew what I wanted. I wanted to see the shadow from my dream. Him. The haunting moments from my dreams chased me through the daylight hours, following and calling. Within me, somewhere deep in my soul I was desperate to dream so I could see him again.
The gem pulsed again, and I clutched it in my fingers. A thump echoed through the earth. It was agreeing with me. Opening my eyes, I blinked into sunlight. The warm glow I thought was in me, was just the sun peeking through the dense clouds.
My heart squeezed in my chest. What did I think? That I was like the girl from my dreams? I was nothing like her. The dreams were muddled: hazy, yet achingly real. They didn’t make sense, but at the same time they were nothing but clear.
Impulsively, I scrambled to my knees, wading across the dry earth until I settled alongside the first stone. I pulled at the scrawled ivy, thorns from the wild roses stabbing the palms of my hands. “Ouch,” One rigid thorn sent a gouge of blood along my lifeline. It oozed with crimson red and I stared at it in dismay. “That was unfair,” I grumbled into the ethereal silence. My uninjured hand continued to uncover the grey slabs, running across the dimpled surface. My eyes stayed firmly averted from the embracing skeletons.
If my dreams were true—the memories of ghosts who
