Niam bolted up in his bed. His stomach heaved and gave up its contents. He barely had time to gather his sheets and hold them before he threw up. The acrid taste of half-digested food filled his mouth. And he vomited a second, and then a third time. Images of the dream flooded his mind and his body reacted violently to them. He knew, even as his stomach clenched and evacuated itself, that it was not the food he had eaten hours earlier that it was ridding itself of, but the rancid memories.
When he was done, Niam sat in his bed, trembling for a moment, and then he doubled the sheets together and tiptoed down the hall and into the kitchen where a cleaning pail sat near the hearth. He deposited the sheet in it and grabbed a mug and filled it from a pitcher containing clean water. Niam rinsed his mouth and spat the taste of sickness into the pail.
His arms and legs still trembled.
On the wall hung a lantern that gave off a low, flickering light. Niam grabbed it, and took the pail outside to the burning pit beyond the kitchen door. There was already wood in the pit and all Niam had to do was light the tinder kept in a small shed nearby. After the flames began to spread and catch, he emptied the pail. The fire eventually took, and as everything burned, a warm circle spread around Niam, illuminating his nightshirt and pale arms. Niam looked at them and thought about how thin they were, and in a world where strength and brawn ruled, thin was tantamount to impotence—like the impotence of a boy who couldn’t, even in a dream, defend his sister.
No. Boys like that could only sit in terror and pray for the dream to end, and once again, the Bode’s and Ravel’s of the world won. Niam shook his head and sobbed. A shame like none he had felt before hit him, and for a moment Niam thought he was going to be sick again. Only, this time, it was a different kind of sick, born of remorse and self-recrimination.
No. He thought. No. I won’t let that happen.
And then there was this: as he slowly allowed the feeling to diminish, his thoughts began to center on the actual events of the dream itself, which had been no ordinary dream. He remembered how the thorny vines had lashed at his shins and bit into his skin like hundreds of sharp, tiny teeth and the way his throat really ached as he tried to call out to Sarah. And then there was the dark, rich smell of wet earth and decaying plant matter he had inhaled after toppling over the low-lying branch as he chased after his her.
He knew.
Although he had not actually been there the day she died, what he had seen and experienced tonight had been real.
Murder.
Niam sat there allowing the realization to sink in. And it sank and sank. Where his sister could only float and wait to be found drifting like a piece of pale, dead wood on the surface of Siler’s Lake, this awareness sank until it struck bottom within him like a stone thrown into the cold waters where she died.
Murder.
Someone had been chasing her. The voice told him to look. To listen. To remember. Someone had been chasing her. Had he killed Seth and then chased her, screaming to the water’s edge? In his mind he imagined her murderer struggling with his brother. Seth would have put up a fight. He had never been the weakling that Niam was. Then he saw the bastard catching up with her in his mind’s eye, he saw him strike her with a rock. That must have been why everyone thought she had plummeted down the gorge’s edge.
The Voice told him to look.
And there was always a reason behind the Voice to do the things it told him to do. But Niam burned. And the thing within him that burned made the fire in the pit before him seem cold by comparison. Whatever the Voice was, it had the ability to reach back in time, to show him events and give him commands. Before this was all over, Niam vowed that he would live long enough to know why the source of the Voice hadn’t warned his sister and his brother that a killer stalked them. Instead, it played with Niam, sent the ghost of a dog to rescue a boy at the bottom of a drop off but didn’t bother to send a damned soul to rescue them.
And then there was Jort.
Did the three of them share the same killer? Niam simmered and fumed. He threw another log on the fire and watched as the flames crept higher and higher. Somewhere in the night did a killer stalk another victim?
As the fire ate greedily at the wood that fed it, Niam allowed his anger to feed on his sense of inadequacy. He vowed that he wouldn’t always be Niam the runt. One day he would find his sister’s and his brother’s killer. And if possible, Jort’s. And he would see to it that the bastard paid for what he had done the people he knew and loved. One day there would be a reckoning. In the east, a bloody slice of crimson glowed like an angry wound in the sky. The morning sun rose in its pitiless progression into the darkness, eating the stars as it climbed, fracturing the night’s hold on the world.