Drink Deep - Chloe Neill [10]
“I see the storm,” I told him over the rising wind. “But I can’t stop it.”
Ethan yelled something out, but the words were lost in the howling wind. He started walking toward the thundercloud, pulling my arm in an attempt to drag me with him.
But I resisted, pulling back. “That’s the wrong way. We can’t walk into the storm!”
He was insistent, but so was I. Positive we’d be swept off the plateau and into the sea if we didn’t seek shelter, I began running away from the wall of clouds . . . and him. But I couldn’t resist a final glance back. He stood frozen on the plain, his hair whipping in the gale.
Before I could reach out to him, the storm reached us and broke, the wind knocking me off my feet, the pressure sucking the air from my lungs. The rain came as I hit my knees, blowing sideways and turning the landscape gray, the wind howling in my ears. Ethan disappeared in the onslaught, leaving only the echo of his voice on the wind.
“Merit! ”
I jolted awake, bathed in sweat, gasping for breath, the sound of his voice in my ears.
Tears slipped from my eyes as I pushed drenched bangs from my forehead, and scrubbed my hands across my face, trying to slow the feverish race of my heart.
My first dream of Ethan had been miraculous; we’d bathed in the sun—a taboo to vampires. I’d savored that last memory of him.
But this was the sixth nightmare in the two months since he’d been gone. Each was louder and more vivid than the last, and waking up was like emerging from a tunnel of panic, my chest squeezed into a knot. In each nightmare we were pushed to some crisis, but the end was always the same—he was always torn away from me. Each time I woke with his voice in my ears, screaming out my name in panic.
I dropped my forehead to my knees, grief pounding at my heart like a kettledrum. The helplessness of loss overwhelmed me. Not just from the loss of Ethan, but from the frustration—the exhaustion—of being visited again by a ghost who wouldn’t let me go. Tears fell, and I let them, wishing the sting of salt would wash away the hurt.
I missed his voice. The sight of him. The smell of him.
And probably because of that, I was stuck in a cycle that kept me dreaming about Ethan—watching him die over and over again. My grief had become a hollow I couldn’t climb out of.
When my heart slowed, I sat up again and wiped the tears from my face with a shirtsleeve. I grabbed the phone from the nightstand and dialed up the one person who could calm me down.
“Crap on toast,” Mallory answered over the resounding bass of a man’s voice. “I’m on a study break—Catcher’s naked and Barry White’s on the stereo. Do you know how rarely I get study breaks?”
Mallory was a belatedly identified sorceress in training. She had just finished her apprenticeship with a cute boy-next-door type named Simon and had been prepping for her “finals” for weeks. Simon had seemed okay in the five minutes I’d been in the same room with him, but Catcher was definitely not a fan. That probably had something to do with the fact that Simon was a member of the Union of Amalgamated Sorcerers and Spellcasters (euphemistically called “the Order”), an organization that had kicked Catcher off its rolls.
Her voice was testy, and I knew she was super stressed this week, but I needed her, so I pushed on. “I had another dream.”
There was a moment of silence before she yelled out, “Five minutes, Catch.”
I heard grumbling, and then the room went silent.
“How many is this?” she asked.
“Six. I’ve had two this week.”
“What do you remember?”
Mal quizzed me every time I had a dream—her morbid curiosity and love of the occult combining into a post diem interrogation. I obliged and gave her the details.
“Mostly just the end, as per usual. Ethan was dressed like an old-school warrior. There was this storm moving in, and he was trying to warn me, but I think he was speaking Swedish.”
“Swedish? Why in God’s name would he be speaking Swedish? And how would you know what Swedish sounds