A Chalice of Wind by Cate Tiernan Read Free Book Online Page B

house—I’ll get you some cold lemonade, okay?”
    She blinked then and glanced around us once more. “No, I’m all right, honey. It’s just—a storm is coming.”
    “It always comes in the afternoon in the summer,” I said, still gently tugging her toward the front steps. “Every day, around three, a storm. But they always blow over fast.”
    “No,” she said. “No.” Her voice sounded stronger, more like her. “Not a rainstorm. I mean a bigger storm, one that will . . .” Her words trailed off again, and she looked at the ground, lost in thought.
    “A hurricane?” I asked, trying to understand. She was totally creeping me out.
    She didn’t answer.

Thais
    I looked around and sighed. Great. One of these dreams. Just what I need.
    I’d always had incredibly realistic, Technicolor, all-senses-on dreams my whole life. I’d tried telling Dad about them, but though he was sympathetic, he didn’t really get what I was talking about. It wasn’t every single night, of course. But maybe 65 percent of the time. In my dreams I felt cold and hot, could smell things, taste things, feel the texture of something in my mouth.
    Once, after a shop downtown had been held up, I’d dreamed I’d been in that shop and had gotten shot. I’d felt the burning heat of the bullet as it bored through my chest, felt the impact from the blow knock me off my feet. Tasted the warm blood that rose up in my mouth. Felt myself staring at the shop ceiling, old-fashioned tin, while I slowly lost consciousness, bleeding to death. But it had been just a dream.
    The really annoying thing was, even though I almost always knew I was dreaming, I was powerless to stop them. Only a few times I had called, “Cut!” and managed to get myself out of some situation. Mostly I just had to suck it up.
    Which explained why I was standing in the middle of this swamp/jungle place, thinking, Damn it.
    This would teach me to buy touristy postcards to send to my friends back home. At the time I’d thought they were funny—pictures of a Louisiana swamp, or a huge plantation house, or the front of a strip joint on Bourbon Street—all with a tiny picture of myself pasted on them. But apparently the images had sunk into my subconscious too well.
    Hence the swamp. Okay, I need to release any feelings about this place, I thought, and just see what happens, what the dream needs to show me. I looked around. My bare feet were ankle-deep in reddish-green-brownish water, surprisingly warm. Beneath my feet the bottom was super-slick clay, fine silt that squished up between my toes. The air was thick and heavy and wet, and my skin was covered with sweat that couldn’t evaporate. Hardly any sunlight penetrated to the ground, and I tried to convince myself it was a fascinating example of a rainforestlike habitat.
    Then I saw the ghosts. Translucent, gray, Disney World ghosts, floating from one tree to the next, as if playing ghost hide-and-seek. I saw a woman in old-fashioned clothes, a gray-haired man in his Sunday best. There was a hollow-eyed child, wearing rags, eating rice from a bowl with her fingers. And a slave, wrists wrapped in chains, the skin scraped raw and bleeding. I began to feel cold, and all the tiny little hairs all over my body stood on end. There was no sound—no splash of water, no call of bird, no rustle of leaves. Dead silence.
    “Okay, I’ve seen enough,” I told myself firmly. “Time to wake up.”
    The mists around me got thicker, more opaque, swirling in a smoky paisley pattern around the trees, the cypress knees, the Spanish moss. Maybe ten yards away, a log rolled—no, it was an alligator, covered with thick, dark green skin. I saw its small yellow eyes for a moment, right before it silently slid into the water, headed my way.
    Crap.
    Something touched my bare ankle, and I yelped, jumping a foot in the air. Heart pounding, I looked down. An enormous snake was twining around my bare leg. It was huge, as thick around as my waist,