Tomorrow night. I stared at him blankly, and he grinned. “Date night, remember? An actual date? No sandworm bits, no blood, no Pellars, much as we love them. Just you and me like regular folks.”
I flushed a little. “Right. Date night. A thing which I can totally do. Wait, if we’re not hip deep in sandworm viscera, what are we even going to talk about?”
“Boring things,” he said solemnly. “Local elections. Gluten allergies. The effects of marijuana legalization on the state economy.”
“Oh, so, Boulder things.”
“Exactly.”
I stood on my tiptoes and gave him a light kiss. “You’re on.”
I was smiling when I climbed into my car to head home. But something about Ford and the attack still wasn’t sitting right. It wasn’t until I’d gotten back to the cabin, showered off the road dust, and climbed into bed that I figured out what was bothering me.
Why had they wanted me alive?
In the early morning hours when I finally went to sleep, I dreamed of the desert. Again.
I never used to dream about my last two days in Iraq. Until last fall, I couldn’t even remember the events that had culminated in me stumbling out of the desert, covered in sand and dried blood. Oh, I had plenty of nightmares after my discharge, but those were generic, comparatively toothless, and they eventually faded after I took in my rescue animals. But I never dreamed about the worst of it.
Then, six months ago, I learned the reason: my brain had walled off those memories to protect itself from the trauma. A healing witch had inadvertently taken down that wall when she restored my ability to see ghosts. I was aware of the irony: I’d wanted to see ghosts in order to speak to Nellie, and now I couldn’t avoid my own personal ghosts. Each night, I thrashed against the blankets and experienced the same horrors all over again. Helplessness. Pain. Violation. Grief. Impotent hatred and fury for the people who had hurt me and killed my friends.
If Quinn was there, he would wake me up, never minding if I hit him or screamed in the process. He would hold me and kiss away my tears, reminding me that I was home, safe. That I had a different life now. And that would help me cope until the next night, when it would happen all over again.
Only one thing ever varied in the dream. Sometimes, when I relived those days, I had my boundary powers, the ones I’d developed and practiced since that night vampires had tried to kidnap Charlie. In this version, as I dragged myself away from the blast that had destroyed our Humvee, I saw the perpetrators closing in and I howled, reaching for my magic. Their life forces flew into my hands, their corpses dropping instantly into the dirt. And I laughed.
“No!”
I woke up drenched in cooling sweat, blinking against the morning sunshine. Automatically, I reached for Quinn, but he wasn’t there, of course. I curled into myself, bringing my knees to my chin, shaking. Next to me, my dim-witted Yorkie, Dopey, nosed my side, making a little whining noise.
“Sorry, girl,” I mumbled, not quite myself yet. “M’fine.”
I don’t know how long I laid there, staring at the ceiling and trying to collect the person I’d rebuilt after I’d been forced out of the army. The next thing I knew, my phone was vibrating on the nightstand. I reached over and picked it up to see the screen. Jake.
I answered the phone, glancing at the clock on the bedside table. It was almost ten. “Hey, Jake.”
“Hey. I got your, um, present.” I smiled. Nobody considered a dead fox much of a present, not even Jake. “Do you want the good news, or the bad news?” he went on.
I sat up in bed, petting my herd of rescue animals as they began wandering in to greet me. “Um, the good news, I guess.”
“It’s definitely not rabies.”
I relaxed a little. “Oh, okay. Good. Wait, then what’s the bad news?”
“The symptoms got me curious, so early this morning I called a couple of other vets in town,” he reported. “There are three more cases just like this one: a wild animal that has suddenly lost its mind and attacked someone.”
Simon would have sounded a little excited by the prospect of a medical mystery; hell, he’d probably be rubbing his hands together. But my quiet, even-tempered cousin couldn’t enjoy a situation that involved dying animals. “Attacks? Was anyone hurt?”
“Mostly the other animals were too small to do much damage, but a college kid did get his arm scratched up pretty good by a squirrel.” Jake replied. “The hospital gave him the rabies treatment right away, although an autopsy revealed that the squirrel didn’t have it.”
“So what did it have?”
“No idea. I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s probably some sort of new virus that can go from animal to animal—but not to humans. It happens sometimes.” Humor crept into his voice. “And before you ask, the college kid did not turn into a zombie. That was Dani’s first question.”
I had to smile at that. Jake’s daughter Dani was probably my favorite of all my cousins’ kids. “All right, well, thanks for getting back to me. I’ll keep an eye on the herd when they’re outside, just in case.”
“Good idea. Meanwhile, the Department of Natural Resources is looking into it.”
We spent a few more minutes catching up on family news. Dani was thinking about trying out for the volleyball team in the fall, which would be her first team sport. She had also been exchanging e-mails with Grace Brighton, who was the daughter of my friend Sashi, the healing witch in Las Vegas. Grace was a couple of years older than Dani, but apparently they spent hours playing some online game together on the weekends. Jake and his wife Cara were even talking about going down to Vegas for Dani’s thirteenth birthday in a couple of months.