“You won’t, little seer,” he tells me. “You wouldn’t dare.”
And then he shows me why.
Over and over and over again.
31.
I fall asleep like that, wrapped up with him, no part of me left that isn’t entirely his.
No part of him that isn’t mine.
You know exactly what it means,Maddox said once, and I do.
Bound is what it sounds like. Tied up and tangled into one, forever.
Asleep, wrapped up in his cool embrace, I fall into a dream.
Moonlight. Starshine.
I am outside, maybe in the yard here, twirling around and around.
But the dream becomes a vision in the middle of a happy spin.
I find myself in the woods, following a path, until I realize there are footsteps ahead of me.
I feel the urge to hurry, so I do, and I see Briar.
Not like I’ve ever seen Briar before. She’s not wearing a hat, and I see that her ears are long and pointed, sticking up through her black hair.
Also, she’s wearing Augie’s medallion.
She turns back as if she hears me, when that shouldn’t be possible in a vision.
And when she sees me, she laughs.
As I watch, she becomes Vinca.
I watch her face as it melts, one into the next. I see the worms as they slither through her eyes, and I can feel them all over me, too.
I want to scream, but find I can’t.
“Sleep while you can,” the goddess sneers, so close to my face that I can feel the brimstone heat of her rotted breath. “Rut with your little leech. I know where you live. And I’m only just getting started.”