Taken by Storm
Page 23

I just pictured myself there, surrounded on all sides until I could taste it, smell it, feel it in my pounding pulse. Fear. It was endless, infinite and overwhelming.
Copper on the tip of my tongue.
Chills on my skin.
A breath caught like sandpaper in my throat.
Can’t stay here, I thought desperately. Can’t. It’s too much, it’s all too much. Have to—
Escape. That wasn’t a thought. It was a feeling, familiar, but ancient.
Escape. Escape. Escape.
My eyelids fluttered.
Survive.
“Bryn?”
Archer made the mistake of placing a hand on my shoulder, and suddenly, it was like I was watching myself from outside my body. The world around me settled into slow motion, silence—
And the next thing I knew, he was down.
Realizing, on some level, that Archer wasn’t actually a threat, I jerked myself out of the room I’d built for my fears, slamming an extra set of mental walls up all around it.
Safe. The feeling—the instinct—the adrenaline subsided.
“I’m sorry,” Archer said. Coming from someone I’d just tossed through the air like I was training for the shot put, that was the last thing I’d expected to hear.
“Sorry for what?”
Archer tilted his head forward and rolled his eyes up to meet mine, his brows slightly arched. “Not entirely sure what the right answer is here, so I’m going to hedge my bets and go with everything.”
His tone was sardonic enough that I wasn’t sure whether he meant the words or not. If Devon had been there, he probably would have started crooning apology songs, just to break the tension.
“Well, I’m sorry—for kicking your butt,” I said finally.
He snorted.
“Did you find anything?” I asked, then amended my question. “Maddy.” I made myself say her name. “Did you talk to her?”
Archer shook his head. “She wouldn’t talk to me. She ran.”
I was fairly certain that when Archer had entered my dreams, I hadn’t been able to run. He’d been able to freeze me in place, or beckon me forward.
“I could force her,” Archer said lightly. “I don’t want to.”
My first instinct was to tell him to do it anyway, but the part of me that was still human couldn’t form the words.
Archer saved me the trouble. “I’m hoping that if you come with me, I might not have to get rough.”
“Come with you?” I asked. I hadn’t known that kind of thing was even possible. “How am I supposed to come with you?”
He shrugged. “I enter your dream. I enter hers. We hope I can splice the two together, and voilà.”
That seemed like the kind of thing he should have mentioned in the first place. He must have seen the irritation on my face, because a matching expression flickered across his features, and I remembered that, technically, he was the one doing me the favor.
“Do you need a piece of my clothing?” I asked, deciding this wasn’t worth arguing over.
Archer gave me a look. “You’re right here,” he said slowly, as if I were very dull. “Why would I need your clothes?”
Well, excuse me for not knowing exactly how his knack worked—I was just learning the ins and outs of my own.
“You sleep,” Archer said, in a voice that reminded me he could be a dangerous person. “I’ll do the rest.”
I might have balked at the idea of letting him inside my head again, but he was still holding that ratty old teddy bear that smelled like Maddy and had probably belonged to one of the younger kids, once upon a time.
It’s hard to hold anything against a guy with a teddy.
“Okay.” I didn’t say any more than that. I just made my way back inside the tent and lay down, ignoring the open-eyed Caroline sleeping six inches away.
I closed my eyes, I opened my mind, and I slept.
My dream started off the way my dreams always seemed to these days—in the forest. I didn’t remember, at first, that this wasn’t real, but then I came to an opening at the edge of the woods and saw a cartoon mouse the size of a man. He was wearing overalls and sitting on a motorcycle, and although that didn’t strike me as particularly unlikely or strange, I began to get that nagging feeling that said, “Something isn’t right.”
“Bryn.” A voice called my name softly. The moment I saw Archer, I remembered—why we were here, what he was trying to do.
“Maddy?” I asked.
He reached out to take my hand. I didn’t hesitate as I slipped my fingers into his. He caught sight of the mouse on the motorcycle and shook his head.
“I’m not even going to ask.”
The scene around us changed slowly. The sky overhead went from night to day. The leaves on the trees thinned to needles; the grass underfoot turned a bright, spring-sheen green.
And then I saw her.
Maddy.
I wasn’t sure whether I thought her name, or said it out loud. Either way, she heard me.
She ran.
I ran after her, and for the first time in days, I wasn’t scared of her, of what we would find. I just wanted to be there, to see her, to put my arms around her and know that she was real.
Or at least, as real as anything in a dream could be.
“Maddy, wait!” This time, I called after her out loud, and she turned to glance at me, just for a second.
Something isn’t right.
I didn’t know what it was, so I kept running—through forest after forest, with changing scenery, changing leaves. Abruptly, Maddy stopped running. I stopped running, too. I walked toward her, weightless and light on my toes. Her brown hair was straight and neat, not a strand out of place. Her clothes were dirty and torn, but there was grace to Maddy’s stance, the tilt of her head.
I reached out to touch her shoulder, and my hand passed right through.
“It’s my fault,” Maddy said, without turning around. “Everywhere I go, it never stops.” She turned her head to the side, until I could see her profile in the shadows. “You shouldn’t touch me.”
I couldn’t touch her. Whether that was the work of her subconscious or mine, I wasn’t sure.
“Everything I touch dies,” Maddy said, the words quiet, but distinct.
Suddenly, the two of us weren’t in the forest anymore. We were in a cabin. Samuel Wilson’s cabin, in Alpine Creek.
There was blood everywhere—fresh blood.
“I didn’t do it,” Maddy said. “I didn’t mean to.”
“Maddy.” I tried to touch her arm again and failed. “Where are you?”
She didn’t answer, but a jolt of images crossed from her mind to mine: sharp stone, dark walls, a little river.
A tiny slat of light.
“Maddy, look at me.”
She looked at me, and I was struck by the fact that she didn’t look different. She looked like Maddy, our Maddy, not the specter from my dream that night before.
She didn’t look like a killer.
“The Senate knows about Wyoming.”
She weathered those words like a blow.
“Callum’s stalling them, but if I can’t find you, if something happens again—”
I couldn’t put what had been done in that house in Wyoming into words. I couldn’t even think the word
monster.
“The other alphas will come for you. First come, first serve. I need to find you, Maddy. You need to let me help you.”
“Help me?” Maddy said, and this time, she didn’t sound like herself, not at all. “You can’t help me, Bryn. The only person who can help me is dead.”
Lucas.
She was talking about Lucas.
“You don’t know,” Maddy said. “You just don’t know.”
She didn’t cry, but the intensity in her voice made me want to. A physical change came over her body—the way she stood, the arch to her back, the lines of her threadbare clothes.
“You just don’t know,” she said again.
I touched her arm, really touched it this time, and she turned all the way around to face me. I watched as she brought her right hand to rest on her stomach.
Her very pregnant stomach.