“Hurry up and go to sleep already,” I said. “I wanna get this freak show on the road.”
Eli yawned and sat next to me. Then he lay down and swung his legs over my lap, pinning me.
“Hey.” I shoved his legs off and stood up.
Chuckling, Eli said, “Don’t forget that we’ve got to focus my dreams on the investigation.”
I scowled at him, flustered rather than angry. “I won’t. Trust me, I’m sick of ice fishing and football.” I leaned over and poked him in the chest. “You have no imagination.”
He seized my hand and squeezed it. “That’s what I’ve got you for,” he said, grinning. Then his face grew slack and his grip loosened as he fell asleep.
* * *
We were in the tunnels again. Me and Eli. I heard the scream, smelled the smoke and that bitter, nauseating stench of something on fire that shouldn’t be. Something that was never meant to burn.
Not this. Not again. It was bad enough I couldn’t escape what happened with Ankil in my own dreams and nightmares. I refused to experience it again in someone else’s. Closing my eyes, I thought about warm sun, soft sand, and sparkling water. The Hawaii of my imagination.
A warm breeze caressed my face, and I opened my eyes. Eli and I were standing on a deserted beach. He marched over to me, looking furious.
“Whoa, Nelly,” I said, backing up.
“Why did you do that?” Eli stopped a safe distance away and gestured at the tropical landscape. For some reason he was shirtless, his scorpion tattoo exactly how I remembered it, and I forced my eyes away from his chest. “We were right where we wanted to be already.”
“I couldn’t … I mean … I can’t … it’s too soon. I’m sorry.”
Eli’s expression softened. “I don’t want to see it again, either. But, Dusty, we can’t just sit around here.” He waved again.
“I know. It was just an automatic reaction. Give me a minute to fix it, okay?”
“Sure.”
I closed my eyes and concentrated. Going back to the tunnels was out of the question. I wasn’t ready for that. But I thought I could handle the scene with Rosemary. Her death had been less violent and scary. Far less recent.
I pictured the scene as I remembered it from Eli’s dream, the cops in uniform, the cemetery at night. I envisioned Rosemary lying beside the headstone, not as she’d been in the dream, but as I’d seen her in real life that brief moment after her mother broke the shield.
“Wow,” Eli said. “It’s just like I remember.”
I opened my eyes and saw he was only partially right. Somehow I’d managed to combine his dream with the real thing, overlaying them like two pieces of stained glass.
Eli approached Rosemary’s body with the caution of a true cop. He knelt beside her, taking a good, long look. I left him to it while I scavenged for clues. I examined the face of each police officer, hoping for recognition, maybe an indicator of who was behind all this.
After a while Eli stood and came over to me, shaking his head. “I’ve got nothing.”
“Me too.”
“This is so frustrating.” He looked around. “I mean, here we are, right here. Just two hours too late. If we could only hit the rewind button or something.”
I thought about it a moment. “What if we can?”
He swung back to me. “Huh?”
“What if I can?”
“You think it’s possible?”
Here we’re like gods, I remembered my mother saying. If so, then I could control not just the where, but the when. “I don’t know, but I’ll give it a try.”
“All right.”
“Don’t get excited or anything. Probably won’t work.”
He grinned. “You know what your problem is, Dusty? You don’t give yourself enough credit.”
I ignored the comment and the warm fluttering in my stomach. I closed my eyes again and concentrated harder than I ever had before in my life. I had no idea what to do besides follow my instinct. Surely I had to have some.
For a while, nothing happened, and I was close to giving up when I remembered Lady Elaine telling me that all dreams are symbolic. Symbolic … symbols. What kind of symbol represents time?
A clock.
No sooner had I thought it than I pictured it, a huge grandfather clock with a serene face covered in big roman numerals. The hands were pointed at the two, around the time when the werewolf cops had brought me to Coleville. I imagined the second hand moving backward. I expected it to obey the command easily, but instead I felt resistance almost at once, a sort of foot planting in my imagination as the hand refused to move. It pushed back against me, wanting to go forward.
No. Go back. I pushed and pushed, straining against it, willing it to obey. There was a loud, piercing crack like lightning striking a rooftop. My eyes flashed open as Eli let out a gasp.
“What’s going on?”
Around us the world of the dream had gone from something substantial to a swirl of color and blurred images like I usually saw when first entering a dream. For a moment I thought I was being pushed out, only it couldn’t be that with Eli seeing it, too.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” he said, shutting his eyes. But the swirling soon began to slow and the images to grow clearer.
“Eli,” I whispered. “It worked.”
We were still in the cemetery, but the police were nowhere in sight. A living, upright Rosemary stood only a few paces in front of us.