Page 33 of The Secret of the Three Fates
A knit hat was pulled low over his ears. He had his back to me yet I knew it was him. I’d know him in any age, any time.
He was mine.
A bright poppy-colored scarf was wrapped around his neck, stuffed into his mud-streaked uniform jacket. He turned to me as the sniper fire rang out from behind me. The scarf turned into a river of blood, seeping down his uniform front.
A second shot rang out, and he stumbled backward, arms pinwheeling as the poppies bloomed across his chest.
“Ruby!”
I struggled against the hands that held me back. I could save him. I knew I could, if only the bastard would let me go. Let me go to him.
This was Ruan.I’d only just found him again, and I couldn’t lose him. He couldn’t die—I wouldn’t let him.
And yet someone was pulling me away from his lifeless body.
Violent shivers racked me as I screamed. The sound piercing through the night.
“Ruby, wake up! Stop fighting me.”
Somewhere in my deepest consciousness I heard it. Heard him calling me home.
The warm low west country cadence pulling me back across the channel. Away from the trenches and gas and blood. Through the fog of my dreams, back to Britain. Back to him.
Dazed, I stared up into the night sky—the stars above no more than mere pinpricks and streaks of distant color, universes away. Ruan crouched, his arms bracketing me against the earth. He leaned down, cupping my face in his hands.
“Ruby, can you hear me? Gods…” He grabbed me hard, crushing me and my soaking-wet nightgown against his warmth.
“Of course, I can hear you. What’s wrong with you?” I rubbed my face, glancing around, pulling his hands from my cheeks.
Where the hell was I?
“I heard you calling me… I thought… Thought you found something. I went to your room…” I burrowed myself deeper into his embrace, greedily drinking in his heat. “Then I find you here, up to your waist in the water.”
Suddenly I knew without question where I was. I hadn’t walked in my sleep since I was a small child. I’d thought those days behind me. But if the stinging of my bare feet was any indication, they were back.
He ran his thumb across my cheek, voice thick with panic. “I thought I was going to lose you… I’ve only just found youand—” Something in his words echoed in my memory but I couldn’t quite recall why.
I reached up, holding his hand against my cheek and pressed my eyes shut, willing him to be able to hear me now, though I doubted he could—his own fear drowning out every other sentiment—and I didn’t have the heart to speak the words aloud.
I thought the return of my prescient nightmares had been the worst of my affliction, but this was beyond all that. Flashes of my girlhood came violently back. The fear in my mother’s eyes as she held me in her arms, rocking me at the edge of the pond. Words I’d long forgotten gained a foothold in my brain.“Not you too, my little Ruby. I won’t let them take you from me.”I was too young then to ask what she was afraid of—to even realize that the words might have some meaning beyond a frightened mother soothing her firstborn.
“You walk… in your dreams.” Ruan must have heard the memory.
My teeth chattered against his warm chest. “I haven’t in years… I thought it h-h-had stopped.”
“You ran into the bloody lake. I called your name but you didn’t hear me. You wouldn’t stop… Ruby… Gods… I called for you and you wouldn’t stop.” He held me tight enough my ribs might have cracked from the sheer force of him. Our hearts beating, for once, in almost perfect rhythm. Slow and steady.
“Let’s get you inside…”
A branch broke nearby and we both froze as whatever it was crunched across the frost-covered grass.
An animal?
Ruan shook his head.
Boots, then?
A nod.
