“Wait!” That purple-haired woman was no hooker. He needed to buy her a coffee and trade notes about wormholes, but the unexpected puzzle piece in a world holding precious few had already gotten into the man’s car and sped away.
Brewster had no choice but to resume his original plan. He found the Greyhound station and caught a bus to Kenosha.
* * *
A few hours later
Kara’s napkin map proved right on target. After getting off the bus, Brewster walked three miles to the X, Sacred Heart Cemetery, and found Sarah’s grave in a neglected section where hundred-year-old trees shaded a weedy stretch of forgotten plots. The weathered marker was the only one decorated with a wreath. Someone had also left a dazzling bouquet of blue roses.
He bent to examine the stone’s faded inscription—A rose always blooms for my beloved Sarah—and the date—1676 to 1756. He swallowed. Henry Stoddard’s wife had been dead for over three hundred years?
Brewster dropped to the stone and closed his eyes. They were useless, anyway. He couldn’t trust what they saw anymore.
CHAPTER 29
Meanwhile, in Virtus’s capital
Another strange dream shattered into shards, leaving Quintus groping for his own name.
He’d been visiting the impossible world in his sleep for as long as he could remember, a land of amazing machines, fantastic weapons, and dazzling women. Each time, he experienced the journey through the eyes of a man named Brewster. He usually awoke without emotion, but this latest turn in the story had him sweating. A wonderful woman had gone missing, presumably dead. Now, not only Brewster, he—Quintus!—ached with longing. Imaginary or not, this Carla had found a way to pounce out of his sleep-addled head and seize his soul.
He’d fallen for someone in a dream, a dream, nothing more than a dream. He’d fallen for… His heartbeat quickened. He shook the cobwebs and realized he’d come across the spitting image of this woman in the waking world. She was the slave Adala had sketched! And earlier today before his nap, he’d met this defiant woman dragging her cross up a hill.
Were Maynya and Carla the same—one the body and the other the soul? He rolled over and groped through the rift between reality and fantasy. On one side, daylight streaming in from a window tried to tickle his eyes open. And on the other? The dream hovered just beyond his desperate reach.
“Quintus?”
“Halt!” He shot a hand to the knife sheathed in the leather belt at his waist but came to his senses before lashing out with it. By all the gods, had he been at the front so long the voice of a harmless maidservant would stop his heart? Even worse, Teasha had stolen in on him, and he hadn’t been aware of her presence until she’d spoken his name—not a good sign for a soldier who prized his life.
Too much dreaming threatened to get him killed. He blinked the last wisps of Carla’s image from the backs of his eyes, leaned with an elbow on his cot, and gazed up at neither a doomed woman from an imagined world nor the real-life forced bride who refused his pitcher of water.
Teasha beamed at him. She was easy on the eyes, a shapely brunette with a flair for fashion, to the extent possible for a slave. In this case, she wore a captivating turquoise dress—he wondered whether someone’s curtain had disappeared in the dead of night—and an improvised necklace made of dried flowers. Best of all, her personality matched her looks—quirky, carefree, and full of good humor. She’d shown a quick wit when he flirted with her earlier.
Why not defeat his sour mood by teasing her again? “You’ve changed your mind, dove? Come to lay with me?”
Her smile evaporated. She swept her arm toward the window of his bungalow and the palace beyond. “I see through this façade of yours, Quintus. Unlike those others, you respect a woman’s virtue.”
He threw his blanket aside and shifted off the cot, but she blushed at his near nakedness. He slipped behind a changing screen. “In this kingdom, the man who respects virtue is labeled either fool or traitor.” He grabbed his trousers from a chair.
“Then your brother sent for a fool.”
“Ah, him.”
“Albus will see you now.”
He reached for his shirt. “Let him wait. We’re on the subject of virtuous men and women.”
“Idle chat about rare creatures is more important to you than the wishes of your king?”
“Idle chat about one of them is.” He stepped from behind the screen. “I came upon a raven-haired slave lugging a cross up a hill this morning. Whom did I see?”
Teasha crossed her arms. “Even the fool who respects virtue has the wandering gaze, does he?”
“A beauty as proud as this one would catch any man’s eye.” He went to his dressing table, unlocked the drawer, and considered which weapons to choose. The knife at his belt was too puny an arsenal. He pulled out a pistol to holster beside it and a second knife to hide against his calf. As he bent to sheath it, Teasha’s skeptical gaze bore into the back of his neck. This slave had to be part Mystic, able to read a man’s true motives no matter which words he utters. “You think I should bring more?”
“We slaves are told not to think.”
He couldn’t help but chuckle at her wit. “What would you say about a man who fell for a woman before they’d ever met, just by chancing upon a sketch of her face?”
“We’re not supposed to speak much, either.”
“Now this woman is troubling my dreams.”
A mischievous gleam intensified the sparkle in Teasha’s eyes. “Maynya troubles every soldier’s dreams. This is why we find hope in her.”
“Hope?”
She motioned her hands to signify flight…escape.
Quintus gasped. “Have you gone soft?
