The squall had been creeping after him ever since he left the station. He glanced in his rearview mirror at an apple grove he’d passed a few minutes earlier. Shadowy curtains hung like cobwebs from the threatening sky and swallowed the trees as he watched. Up ahead, enough sunlight still peeked out of broken clouds to paint a field of pumpkins a bright shade of orange while greens, golds, reds, and yellows poured out of nature’s palette to color the autumn leaves blowing onto the empty road.
The juxtaposition of images seemed far too striking to be part of a dream.
A squirrel burst out of a clump of bushes and raced across the pavement. The critter looked up at the car, did a quick three-sixty, and hurried away, but a beat too late. Brewster swerved to avoid it. His passenger-side wheels hit the shoulder, and the rougher surface vibrated through the shock absorbers, jostling him and again bringing the dream idea into question.
Not only that, he’d experienced icy-cold weather in the lot. A sensation that sharp sure wasn’t coming out of his pillow.
He caught a whiff of skunk. He kept his eyes on the road and groped his hand across the dashboard to find the air circulator button. Dreaming, huh? Not hardly. This was more along the lines of what Carla talked about the night they lay together, baring their souls. She said she’d been falling through wormholes from one reality to another. She thought her soul had lost connection with her body and had begun taking flight. She’d also been dragging the fear of insanity around with her like her own shadow, but thanks to this wraith or witch or angel or whatever Gabriella was, Brewster could now put that diagnosis to rest. After all, he’d just stumbled across the same kind of wormhole, and maybe not for the first time. Had he been dreaming in Latin or living in some Latin-speaking universe at night lately?
The realization this might not have been his initial fall through the looking glass was a little more than he could handle while driving. He needed to chew on something else, too—the hint of manipulation prickling the back of his neck. He glanced again at the approaching snowstorm through his rearview mirror, then slowed his car, pulled to the shoulder and switched the ignition off.
Dreams and reality. Dreams and manipulation. Kara Danahey had touched on both combinations during their lunch. Presuming dreams were real and he was being manipulated by someone scary strong, as she put it, he needed to reexamine what had been happening to him at bedtime lately.
Carla’s disappearance hadn’t been the only bizarre event the evening they first met. His Virtus dreams had become sharper. The last two about Adala had been so vivid he could still tap into the memories as if they’d been real events. And labeling this little road trip a dream was definitely out of the question. An actual snow squall crept ever closer from behind, not some subconscious fantasy. The sudden chill in his car came from switching the ignition off, not from forgetting to pull the blankets up to his chin.
The brain-teasing manipulations of time and space were like the squares of a cosmic Rubik’s Cube. He gave it a few simple twists in his mind and came up with a solution that seemed to match all the colors. He and Carla had been swept into a supernatural whirlwind, and whatever barriers separated one dimension from another had been flattened by the relentless storm. The two of them blew from here to there like the spits of snow now blasting past his car, landing for a moment in one place only to lift and move on to another. Somehow—and here was the weirdest aspect of the whole mess—he and Carla had been falling out of their dreams and into the waking world with their trappings in tow—clothing, a placeholder card, a coin with dreams spelled in Latin, and, incredibly, an entire automobile.
That last trapping was the real mind-bender. He hadn’t been in his car when he fell asleep. He’d been in bed with Carla. He remembered finding her in the street, bringing her inside, carrying her upstairs, and discovering the rapture of pure love. They’d whispered endearments back and forth until she dozed off.
Or had he been the one to fall asleep? Yeah, he must have been. And when he did, his grip on the cosmic grid faltered. The maelstrom swept him away and dropped him into the wrong coordinates of a world with a broken calendar. This all might have been plausible in a universe frequented by wormholes, except he came fully equipped to hug the road—in a car, an actual automobile, a rental, by the looks of it, transportation to a gas station where he noticed the date. That sure smacked of manipulation, and he had a good idea who was behind it. Gabriella. She even spoke like a puppet master, didn’t she?
“I can’t LET anyone see you flapping your wings here.”
The sense of foreboding he’d suffered in the lot still clung to him like stale smoke. He couldn’t shake the notion Gabriella might be the villain in this fantastic story they’d fallen into. Yet this wizard-child behind the curtain might have been the one to bring Carla into his life. If so, he’d need to take the pitchfork out of her hands and paint a halo over her head.
Was she good or evil? The imminent squall provided an encouraging clue. In a world shifting off its axis and twisted by a girl evidently able to spin time and place like a top, anything might have come raining down on Brewster’s shoulders, from tidal wave to nuclear cloud to volcanic ash to a trillion white butterflies fluttering their wings. But no. She brought snow.
And he’d loved snow all his life.
The squall overtook his car, sweeping all deductive reasoning aside
