“Not unless we both are.”
CHAPTER 21
Refuge
Thanks to toasty air bathing Brewster from the heating vents, the storm out the windows of Carla’s car transformed from a brutal endurance test to soft entertainment. Carla sat frosty-cheeked beside him, and together they watched windblown white sheets perform pirouettes across the hood. As he held one of her hands in his—a warm hand, despite her recent dance in the snow—he tried to trace his steps backward to figure out how he’d landed in such a wonderful place. The effort dizzied him as though he’d risen too suddenly from a prone position.
“Do you know where we are?” Carla asked. A mind reader.
“Upstate New York?”
“Okay, when?”
He hesitated. To answer would be to admit the universe had twisted into shapes he could never understand. “Yeah, I know that, too. Two thousand twelve.”
“So what do you think of my time-travel delusion now?” She focused the soft, gray-green eyes of a kindred spirit on him.
“I don’t know the definition of delusion anymore.”
Carla leaned her head on his shoulder. “Do you know the definition of a dream? Mine have become so much sharper since we met. It’s like you flicked a switch in my mind. I remember every detail.”
He closed his eyes and summoned the image of the red-bearded lieutenant riding beside him as they crossed the hot scrublands of Virtus on horseback. “These aren’t dreams at all, are they?”
“No,” she whispered. “They’re real.”
Real. Because somebody had flicked a switch in the universe, igniting a black light that made everything look different than it had before. “Carla, I met a creepy kid who implied she’s behind all of this. Have you dreamed about a Gabriella?”
She tightened her hold on his hand. “She’s the girl who never ages.”
He caught his breath. Gabriella hadn’t just gotten around, she’d left an impact. Igor Tesfaye dreamed about her, the trucker’s girlfriend feared her, and now Carla spoke of her in a reverential tone. “Can you elaborate?”
“Pilgrims journey for hundreds of miles to hear Gabriella’s teachings. You don’t remember her from your visits to the other side?”
“No.” But another image floated to the surface of his addled mind—a crude church huddling in the shadows of a town’s fortress walls. Something bad had happened to its builders. Luckily, his memories of Virtus were few and far. They often dragged sadness with them.
But Carla’s mood was brighter. She looked up at him with a gleam in her eyes. “Listen to this. Two days ago, my mother mentioned something I didn’t remember. She and I met a girl named Gabriella when I was three. We met her in Syracuse, on this side. My mother says Gabriella came back to her later in a dream and left the Roman coin I gave you.”
“When you were three?” Evidently, the wormholes spinning him and Carla out of their dreams had been building momentum for ages. He reached into his pocket and closed his hand around Carla’s coin. Somnium. Had Gabriella been stalking Carla, in and out of dreams, for almost thirty years? “I’m not ready to fix a halo over that girl’s ponytail quite yet.”
“Saint or not, we should definitely drink a toast to her.” Carla opened the console between their seats.
Somehow she’d managed to defy the laws of physics by cramming a small thermos into a space already overloaded with enough clutter to fill a woman’s purse and then some—lipstick, tissues, dental floss, sunglasses, first-aid kit, needle and three spools of thread, a paperback, and a packet of unmentionable womanly stuff that had every chance of striking Brewster blind. He averted his eyes until she drew him in again by unscrewing the thermos and releasing a cloud of steam. The chocolaty scent summoned the image of roaring fires on cold winter days. She filled the cap to the brim, took a slow sip, and lifted her eyes heavenward.
They passed the cup back and forth.
The drink warmed his hands, the steam bathed his face, and the taste of chocolate and marshmallows sent him straight to paradise. He let Carla have the last of it. “I’d toast Gabriella with a little more gusto if she’d brought us together from the same page of the calendar. Why a year apart?”
Carla polished off the drink, screwed the cap back onto the thermos, and stowed it away. When she turned to him again, she wasn’t smiling anymore. “I think she’s doing it to save my life.”
“What?”
“Hear me out.” She switched the wipers on. Crescents formed on the windshield with each swipe. The storm filled them in, and the blades repeated the process. Again. And again. An impasse between technology and nature. “I live in Sanctimonia over there, and you’re from?”
“Virtus.”
“Two nations perpetually at war. I need saving there, too, believe me, but we’re too far apart.” She turned to him. Her eyes had moistened. “We’re worlds apart here, too. You’re from 2013, and I’m from 2012. Why? Because I don’t think I’m still alive in your world.”
Alive could have had a dozen possible meanings, but the tremble in Carla’s voice narrowed the options, sending a chill down Brewster’s spine. “What are you talking about? Sure, you—”
She pressed a finger to his lips. “I don’t do well as a puppet on a string. Do you think I’d just sit on the sidelines for an entire year, waiting for Gabriella or wormholes or whatever to drop me into your neighborhood the few times they got the whim? No.” She motioned to a travel bag in the backseat. “I’d pack my things and come calling on the Brewster DeLay who lives in 2012, my year. But if I did, the Brewster who lives in 2013, your year, would have known me when I wandered into his neighborhood during that thunderstorm.”
He racked his brain for a counterpoint. “Wait. Maybe we have a fight and break up.”
“Think that’ll happen?” Her gaze reflected the same, deep, misty-eyed love swelling his own heart and soul. “Maybe a subway train kills
