The Woman in His Dreams
I was suddenly overcome with emotion. It was bad enough that we kept moving through different realities, but there was nothing to hang on to.
The grief hit me hard—a sucker punch that stole my breath and left me shaking. It had been building for hours, days, lifetimes, this terrible knowledge that Emry was gone. Again.
Maybe it was just now catching up with me that I had lost my best friend, Emry, got her back, and lost her again.
I remembered the last time I heard Emry’s genuine laugh—not the polite chuckle she offered strangers, but the full-bodied, unguarded howl that only emerged among people she trusted. It had been at Dru’s dinner party, when we’d discovered that Rune and Samantha detested each other because Rune had stolen a spell book from Samantha, then sold it back to her online. Samantha hadn’t even recognized her own book until she’d already paid for it. Months later, Rune stole it again and listed it for the highest bidder.
“Can you imagine?” Emry had gasped between fits of laughter, leaning against my shoulder for support. “Can you imagine being so shameless?”
Then she’d wiped tears from her eyes and added, “I aspire to that level of petty someday.”
Somehow, that had set us off again. The two of us clutched each other, barely able to breathe.
Did Emry ever reach that level of petty? Would she have, if she’d lived? If I hadn’t argued with Samantha’s then-boyfriend that night and sent him storming off, would Emry have still stumbled near the pool edge? Would she have fallen in? Would she be alive today?
I pressed my hand to my chest, trying to push down the grief that had been following me like a ghost—unseen, but always present. Emry’s laugh. Her eye-rolls. The way she used to braid my hair while quizzing me on incantation theory. All of it—gone. Again.
My hands shook so badly I had to press them together. My vision blurred, tears threatening to spill over. I opened my mouth to speak, but my voice caught, stuck somewhere in my throat like a poison pill I couldn’t dislodge. I swallowed as hard as I could, twice, but it didn’t help.
Even worse, it was so obvious now that I felt I’d taken Emry’s place in Raven’s heart.
The guilt of it was suffocating. I was the reason Emry died, and now I was slipping into the void Emry left behind—not just in the priesthood, not just in our circle of friends, but in Raven’s life. In his heart. The wrongness of it burned in my chest. I didn’t deserve this. Not any of it.
“I’m sorry,” I finally managed. “I’m so sorry.”
He came to me and held me in his arms. His hesitation was so brief I almost missed it—the millisecond where his hand hovered near my shoulder before settling, warm and solid. His touch was careful, almost reverent, telling me that no, no one could ever take Emry’s place in his heart—that he loved us both, but in different ways. And obviously, he could have loved us both at the same time… in some other reality.
“Don’t you see?” he said, his voice low and urgent against my hair. “It was never about replacing her. Never.” His fingers brushed against my cheek, tucking a strand of hair behind my ear with unexpected tenderness. “Emry was… she was light. She was joy.” His voice broke a little. “And Lilah, you’re strength. You’re endurance.” He pressed his forehead to mine, close enough that I could feel his breath against my lips. “How could I possibly compare you? How could anyone?”
But he’d always known that he and Emry didn’t have a future.
“I think she knew it too,” he admitted, pulling back just enough to look into my eyes. “She used to say we’d burn too bright, too fast. That eventually we’d consume each other. But you and I…” He took my hand and placed it against his chest, letting me feel the steady thump of his heartbeat. “We’re built to weather storms.”
What he felt, he didn’t have to say. As an empath, I could feel the truth of the moment. He’d known for a while now that it was me—I was the one who was meant to share a future with him on the other side of the apocalypse. But until then, his commitment was to the priesthood. As long as he was the Last Priest, he was married to that position, and there was little to no room for anyone else.
He hesitated, almost like saying it might make it more fragile. “I should’ve told you sooner,” he murmured. “I just… didn’t want to push. You and Emry had so much history. And I didn’t want what I felt to feel like a betrayal.”
I stared at him, stunned. How long had he felt this way? How many times had I caught him looking at me, only to glance away when our eyes met? How many moments had I misread, too afraid to hope?
“I suspected,” I admitted, my voice steadier now. “But I wasn’t ready to… to admit it to myself. It felt too much like letting go of her.” I took a shaky breath. “And I wasn’t ready to let her go.”
His frown softened with understanding. “I know. I’m not asking you to. Lilah, we just have to find a way back.”
“Yeah, I know. I wasn’t always happy with how things were. The world was all messed up in our original reality, but now I’d give anything to have that world back, as messed up as it was. Because whatever we’re in now… it’s so much worse.
We brainstormed for a few minutes about what to do next.
“We have to get out of here. We’ve got less than 24 hours to figure something out, and the answer isn’t here. It’s back there. In the library. I can feel it in my gut.”
“Too dangerous,” he said. “We don’t know if Aoife’s page has been removed—or if there’s some new danger out there. I might be invisible in this reality because I don’t naturally exist in it anymore. But you, Lilah, are still very visible—and in danger of being picked up by Aoife’s goons and injected with Angelseed DNA that could kill you in this reality.”
I waved his words away. “Wait, Raven, did you see that?” I pointed toward the window where a shadow seemed to flicker and stretch, moving against the light in a way that defied physics.
“What?” Raven followed my gaze. “Another shift?”
“I don’t know. It felt…” I trailed off, distracted by a strange reflection in a shard of broken mirror—something metallic and gleaming that didn’t match anything in the room. As quickly as it appeared, it was gone.
I thought I heard something and shushed him. I pressed my fingers to his lips, but he laughed loudly, knowing that only I could hear him here.
“You need to shush yourself instead, Lilah.” He pulled me into a corner of the room, behind a wall of boxes that appeared to be prepper supplies.
Just as we ducked down, a high-pitched whine cut through the air—barely perceptible at first, but growing louder. The sound seemed to vibrate in my bones, setting my teeth on edge. Fine dust drifted down from the ceiling, catching the dim light like sparklers.
“Drone,” Raven mouthed, his eyes tracking something through the broken window.
The silence around us tightened. Trying not to gasp, I counted the seconds between my breaths. I thought I heard a faint whir—like a surveillance drone—buzzing overhead and fading. For one terrifying moment, I thought it was directly above us. My pulse thundered so loud I was certain it would give us away. Then the buzz shifted, moving away down what was left of the hallway. My thigh cramped. Raven didn’t move at all.
As we hid behind the boxes, voices entered the room—three, maybe four people.
One of them was giving orders about moving the supplies to another location after dark. They talked about having to pass through Jaryx’s Daeganean territory and how dangerous that might be, given their reputation for raising wolves.
“Those mangy beasts tore through three of our scouts last month,” a gruff voice said. “Didn’t even eat them proper—just ripped ‘em apart and left the pieces.”
“The queen would have handled them,” a younger voice replied, thick with disdain. “Cut off their heads and mounted them on pikes. These old priesthood factions are weak. Too soft.”
A woman chuckled. “Careful now. Her Majesty has ears everywhere.” There was something in her voice—a dark loyalty, almost reverence. “And she rewards those who speak well of her… almost as generously as she punishes those who don’t.”
“Did you see what she did to that traitor from Jaryx’s group?” the first voice asked. “The one who tried to infiltrate her inner circle? They say she removed his eyelids first. Made him watch what she did to the rest of him.”
A pause. “Her rituals require blood. The ancient texts are clear on that.”
“Not just blood,” the woman corrected. “Sacrifice. Willing or not.”
I peered through the cracks between the boxes. I could see two women and a teenage boy standing at the dining room table. The older woman sharpened her knife on a whetstone. All three had a variation of the Daeganean bind rune—green—on the inside of their right wrists.
As they moved to the other side of the table, I could no longer see them, but I could still hear them discussing the politics of different factions of the Priesthood of Daegan. Each one was referred to by a soul name.
Raven stood up. I quickly yanked at him to stay hidden, clutching desperately at his sleeve, but he signaled that they couldn’t see him—then actually said it aloud. The people at the table kept talking, completely unaware that Raven was standing and peeking over the boxes.
“Lilah, this makes sense. Either Aoife is dead or been erased. For all her faults, she was able to bring people together for a purpose. That’s why there are multiple factions now, all warring with each other instead of pulling together as a unit.”
“I don’t think she gave people a choice,” I mouthed.
“Regardless of her means,” Raven said, “Aoife was a unifying force.”
I said nothing but gestured—I was still here in this reality. The others in the room could see me.
A deep frown cut into Raven’s forehead. “We need to get out of here. Now.”
“No shit,” I mouthed back. If he’d worried about leaving the compound before, the news of the factions and their torture must have changed his mind. That or the fact that the boxes that kept me hidden would soon be removed.
I nodded, then pointed to the boxes and held up three fingers.
“If they catch you—” Raven started.
I shook my head firmly. No. They wouldn’t.
Raven started to make similar gestures, then rolled his eyes and stopped himself. “Sorry,” he said. “You’re right. When they move these boxes, you’re going to be exposed—and we don’t know how they’ll react.”
He glanced over his shoulder at the group.
“Look, Lilah, we also don’t know whether… if they killed you here… you’d die in our reality as well. We just don’t know how this works. So I’m going to distract them, and I want you to find a better hiding place—outside this bunker. Maybe in the shed, if it’s still there. Somewhere safe until we can find a way out of this compound. Dru knew what she was doing when she chose this place. It’s easy enough to fortify, and it sounds like this group has already done that.”
I nodded my agreement. There was plenty more I wanted to say but didn’t dare.
“We don’t know what kind of booby traps might be outside,” he added, “so it’s best if we wait until dawn and try to find our way back into the woods.”
I started to say something—made a slight noise—and quickly clamped my hand over my mouth.
It was confusing—speaking to someone who couldn’t be heard—but the others in the room could certainly hear me.
As soon as I made that squeak, the other people went quiet and began to question: “What was that?”
He touched my shoulder before he went. “If something happens—” he began, then stopped himself. “Just find the mirror. Always find the mirror.”
My throat tightened at the intensity in his eyes. Always the mirror—our constant across realities. The one thing that might lead us home.
Raven quietly left the room. Just as I heard footfalls next to the boxes—one of the boxes started to move—a deafening crash echoed from another room, followed by the unmistakable sound of shattering glass.
I heard their footfalls running away. They were yelling. For a moment, I could see them again through the cracks in the boxes. Two of them drew knives from their belts. The other carried an old-fashioned rifle.
I poked my head around the corner of the box and watched them run out of the room, just as I heard another crash further away.
Raven was leading them away from me.
My heart swelled with fierce gratitude, and fear for him. But this was what we did. This was who we were. We protected each other, again and again, through whatever hell the world threw at us.
I scrambled in the opposite direction. I hurried through a bombed-out portion of the rooms where we’d been during the past several shifts in reality. The compound’s architecture seemed to warp around me—doorways that should lead to the kitchen opened into half-furnished bedrooms, hallways ended abruptly in piles of rubble, staircases twisted at impossible angles. It was like the building itself was caught between realities, unable to decide what it should be.
I poked my head outside and ran for the shed next to what was left of the main house where Dru and I used to have quiet dinner parties.
I ran past the pool… where Emry died in Raven’s arms while I stood by, helpless.
It was different now.
The pool’s surface was still and black, reflecting nothing but darkness. No ripples. No evidence of what happened here. No evidence that Emry ever existed at all.
My Emry.
Raven’s Emry, too.
I pushed away the thoughts of anything but survival.
The faction whose compound we were in were all wearing long-sleeved button-down shirts and utilitarian pants with belts, as well as boots. They looked more military than priesthood.
I watched through the cracks in the shed walls as the faction members circled the dilapidated carriage house. They searched for interlopers and called out, saying they wouldn’t harm anyone.
One of the women—who looked to be in her forties—swished her knife blades together and grinned at the boy beside her, who looked enough like her to be her son.
“I won’t harm you a bit,” she said and winked at him.
He grinned back and tightened his grip on his own two knives.
The other woman told them to stop playing around—that the rest of their group would be arriving shortly and expecting dinner.
“Besides,” she added, “it was probably just a cat or a squirrel.”
The boy grinned. “All the better. I love squirrel, especially grilled.”
I shrank further into the shadows of the shed, trying to make myself as small as possible. My pulse throbbed in my ears, drowning out all other sound. I strained to see through the slats in the wall, searching for Raven, but there was no sign of him.
A floorboard creaked behind me.
The door of the shed opened slightly.
I was watching the three people—and suddenly realized I could no longer see one of the women from my vantage point. Panic flooded my system, ice-cold and electric. My breath caught. Where did she go? My eyes darted across the yard—nothing. Just shadows and the glint of a blade. My grip tightened on the board in my hand. If the woman was behind me now…
The hinges of the shed door protested with a slow, agonizing creak. A sliver of dusky light widened across the dirt floor. My muscles coiled, ready to spring. I quickly grabbed a narrow board beside me and took aim.
Then I heard breath behind me. Too close.
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