Page 35 of Synodic

“Do I look marked to you?” I said through clenched teeth, kicking my legs beneath me. But the more I struggled, the more my arm twisted in his grasp.

I was sure my shoulder was about to be pulled from its socket, but the threads of my sweater gave way first, and the sound of my collar ripping filled the air.

Graem froze, the smile of an idea creeping across his bunched features. “Only one way to find out,” he said, bringing his free hand up to my shirt.

I thrashed against him, ignoring the debilitating pain shooting up my arm like white-hot fire as he grappled for purchase on my sweater. His daft fingers were tearing and bruising, but he eventually managed to get a grip on the neckline of my shirt, and my body jerked as he violently ripped the fabric from my skin, baring the top half of my body in nothing but my black bralette.

Graem’s intrusive stare roved over me, lingering at the swells of my breasts, the indent of my waist, and the contours of my hips. His expression turned to confusion, then indignation. “This cannot be The Marked. This is awoman,” he wailed as he shook me like a rag doll, rattling my brain and clattering my teeth.

He was seconds away from crushing my bones or snapping my arm, if he didn’t shake me to death first.

I slammed my eyes closed, waiting for the inevitable break, when a stir of air washed over my cheek, followed by a sickening thud, then an ear-splitting wail.

My eyes squinted open to the arc of Rowen’s ax embedded in the beefy wrist of the man who held me to his face—the blade finding its mark mere inches from my nose. Graem didn’t release me as he pried the ax from his hand and tossed it to the ground. A surge of terror and adrenaline rippled through my body like a gravitational wave, and the giant shrieked again.

The last thing I remembered was being violently thrown to the ground, Rowen running towards me as the world tilted and darkness closed in.

15

I woke up in my room with a jolt, my heart beating out of my chest and my shoulder aching from sleeping on it wrong.

That’s it! I needed to see a doctor or finally work up the nerve to talk to my parents, to come clean that the dreams were back and potent as ever. This was bad, very bad. I couldn’t go one measly night without having overly vivid dreams, and now I was waking with body aches and heart palpitations.

I pushed myself up from my sheets only to feel a sharp pain in my wrist, and I hissed between my teeth. I gently cradled my tender arm to my chest, noticing my forearm was severely bruised and swollen. I examined the bruise more closely, and to my utter shock, it was in the perfect shape of a hand.

Wincing, I wrapped my own hand around the welt to measure it against the markings. It was much bigger than my own—there was no way I could have done this to myself.

Suddenly, I was hit with the momentum of worlds colliding in a crash of spiraling stars and vines that bloomed into sparks of luminous matter. And I lost my breath.

“It’s real. It’s all real,” I gasped aloud.

My chest felt tight, too tight, and I couldn’t breathe. I began running my hands through my hair in building panic. Every conversation, every look, every touch, wasreal.

I kicked off the blankets and started pacing back and forth in my room. In my frantic state, I accidentally hit my knee on my dresser and let out a curse. My parents would be telling me I was having a panic attack right about now, and yeah, no shit I was. I just found out my dreams were really happening and that the forests I visited in my sleep were actual places.

I wanted to fall apart, but I needed to pull it together, especially if I was going to make it back to the Wyn village. Back to Rowen. I found him once on my own, I could find him again.

I slowly pieced together what I could, including what little they were able to tell me before that giant came and nearly mangled me to death. Takoda believed I had the gift of traveling between worlds. An astral traveler.

That would explain the dreams that had always felt too real; the silver petal I woke up with in my hand all those years ago; and the ruined mud-caked shoes. I had probably been slipping in and out of Luneth my entire life.

But it had all come to an end when my parents intervened. Whatever drugs they’d given me must have been powerful enough to suppress my ability to travel. Lord knows, it extinguished more than that; I was a shell of a person while on them—a woman with two worlds yet not a single spark of life.

I hadn’t taken a pill in years. Why were the dreams returning nine years later? Had the drugs taken that long to leave my system? Had they caused irreversible damage?

Somehow I was now able to return to Luneth, but Nepta said I was a half-faded creature. Was that a lasting side effect I would have to live with for the rest of my life?

Regardless of why, I couldn’t stop marveling at the fact it was all real, it had always been real, and I let out a combination of a sob and a laugh.

With a startled gasp I noticed Natalie in my doorway, watching me with eyes as wide as saucers. Holding my throbbing knee, I froze as she scanned me up and down, no doubt taking in my crazed expression and bruised arm.

Her face twisted in horror. “What happened?”

“I’m fine,” I managed to say in a rushed squeak. “I hit my knee on the dresser.”

“It’s obvious everything is not fine. What happened to you? It looks like you’ve been mauled.” She took a step closer. “You’ve been screaming.”

“I hit my knee,” I said again, hoping it would explain the scream.

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