One Night

In these dreams . . .

Stumbling along a broken road piled high with rocks and sand, I run, breathless and sweating, toward the darkness ahead.

On either side of the road, fires burn, flames swallowing trees and shrubs and an abandoned truck tipped sideways into a ditch.

Over chunks of asphalt, blocks of concrete, through puddles of oil and mounds of dirt: I scramble up a hill of debris. At the top, I chance a quick glance backward toward the sea.

She’s still there, following me with a surefooted determination, skimming the rutted road with her wings outspread for balance. I wonder briefly why she doesn’t fly but the flames in the treetops would scorch those pretty feathers. Just like always, on she comes, the knife in her hand gleaming with all the colors of the flames.

In every dream of her, I wake before she catches up to me. Before she kills me. But this time…

My boot snags on a piece of rebar and I pitch headfirst, sliding, scrambling, flailing for balance, down the slope toward what’s left of this road. And as I land on my knees in the asphalt and the dirt, she springs on top of me, the knife blade cool and steady at my throat.

That's when I usually wake up. But this time I meet her eyes. It's the first time I’ve had a good look at her.

Wild black braids filled with beads and feathers and bits of silver spill around her face. Her eyes are wide and dark, reflecting the flicker of flames. I breathe in the scent of her, diesel fuel and roses and the iron tang of blood.

The knife presses harder, slicing skin. The pain of it runs bitter and bright all along my nerves. What happens, if you die in dreams? Will they find me, days from now, dead in my bed with not a scratch to be seen?

And why does she come to kill me, over and over, in this hellscape of my dreaming?

I open my mouth to ask, but no sound comes.

With a laugh, she sits up and slips the knife back into its sheath. Then she leans in close, and her indigo lips brush my forehead. Her wings flap gently above my head.

“One night," she whispers. "But not tonight."

I wake trembling, staring into a darkness broken by the flickering neon sign across the street. Somewhere, a dog howls.

I touch my throat. The blood trickles hot onto my pillow and my heart still thunders from the touch of her lips. I close my eyes again in search of sleep. One night she'll come again. But not tonight.

Behind the Scenes: This little piece belongs to the Moon Road universe, where much of the action takes place on the living road that links up our human world with the Other Side of faeries, shapeshifters and all kinds of creatures from myth and legend. It's a gritty, atompunk kind of world, lawless and filled with dark magics. And it's a lot of fun to write.