“You know my name.”
“I know a lot of things about you.”
“Seems you have me at a disadvantage,” I said coolly. I took another sip of my drink. The metal straw would make a good weapon in an emergency. He must have caught my look because he laughed, a very familiar laugh, and stepped back, raising his hands in innocence.
“Don’t get violent on me, Cuz,” he said. “I just wondered if you got those artifacts back to the people they should be with or not.”
Ah…it was six months and a very good disguise later, but now I saw it. The laugh, the raised hands. My mysterious accomplice from the museum heist.
“Sorry, never caught your name.”
“Does it matter?” he asked, dropping into the seat next to me.
“I like the hair. I was never a fan of blondes.”
“Told you.”
“How’d you find me?”
“It took me a bit,” he admitted. “But the purple dress, the flowers in your hair, the planet the artifacts you lifted came from, and a friend who has a connection to some pirates of questionable morals. It all came together.” He winked. “I got skills.”
“I see you are still annoying.”
He tapped his hands against his stomach. “Listen, do you want to do this or not?”
I frowned. “Do what, exactly? Why are you here again?”
His grin was big and confident. “Imperium’s throwing a birthday party. Heard the empress herself is going to be there, wearing the crown jewels, the ones they usually keep under lock and key. Seemed like the kind of job a princess might be interested in.”
He cocked an eyebrow at me.
I took another sip, stalling. I worked alone. Well, me and Evie. I didn’t need a partner. But…maybe I wanted one.
“What’s your name?” I asked again.
“My friends call me Trevan, but it’s an Imperium name and I always hated it. My partner can call me…Valerian.” He flushed, looking at me with hesitant eyes. He’d picked a flower name for himself, something natural, a reminder of the land.
But I wasn’t ready to accept his story quite yet. “First tell me how you got out of the museum.”
“I didn’t. I was arrested. But they couldn’t find the artifacts, so they couldn’t hold me for theft. Just criminal mischief for breaking the glass. I did four months in minimum security on a prison planet, and here I am.”
He’d done time for me. I was touched.
“What do you say? Partner?”
I sighed. Did I truly want this? Another person to potentially lose, someone to be responsible for? Someone to keep me from being so alone.
“You’ll have to meet Evie. And she has to like you.”
“I can do that.”
“And I’m the captain of the My Heart Will Go On, so whatever happens on my ship, I’m in charge.”
“Still not a problem.”
He leaned over and took a sip from my drink.
So annoyingly rude. I had to laugh.
“Sure, Val,” I said, decision made. “Let’s go take back some pretty rocks from the empress. But listen, you are going to have to learn to pick a lock.”
He stood, held out a hand, and pulled me to my feet. Somehow he’d commandeered my drink for himself. Thief!
“Or maybe you will come to appreciate the benefits of a quick smash-and-grab. Hey! Val and Vi.” He nudged my shoulder. “I like it.”
“Or Vi and Val.” I let the names sit on my lips. “It has potential,” I admitted.
Another grin as he finished my daiquiri. “You bet it does.”
The sun plays coy on the morning that Dream takes to the woods. And she’s encouraged: the way it peeks above the horizon—like she peeks around corners to make sure the coast is clear—almost feels like an act of solidarity.
It’s early winter, and the cool air bites at the tip of her nose as she creeps through the shadows along unlit alleyways she’d typically avoid…not that anything bad ever happens in the town where Dream has spent every day of her short sixteen years. She keeps to brightly lit places out here for the same reason she keeps to them at home: Dream is afraid of the dark.
But she can’t let that stop her now. The big iron gates to the city loom, open as always, and the varied treetops of the forest—some pine, some oak, some she can’t readily identify despite the number of times she’s climbed them—poke into the sky beyond.
It gives her the burst of resolve she needs.
This isn’t a decision she made lightly, this vanishing just before dawn, very much on a mission. Though she certainly didn’t give proper thought to the low temperature. As numbness spreads beyond her extremities and up into her ankles and palms, a wave of doubt crashes over Dream. She stops and looks over her shoulder at the peaks of the red-shingled roofs she’s left behind. Within one of those dwellings are Mother and Father and her mother’s father and her father’s mother, all surely on the verge of waking to find her gone. Dream can almost hear the tongue-lashing she’d receive from the older women at the sight of her poorly covered arms. (Though they’d been the ones to order the froufrou dresses with thin chiffon sleeves.)
She’s tempted to turn back. Slip into her warm bed as though she never left. Choose one of the “suitors” her parents have been parading before her over the past few months, and settle into the life they’d prefer for her. It’s not like it’d be a bad life. The men, though not much older than her, have all been perfectly chivalrous fellows who doted on her and would certainly give her anything she wanted. Doesn’t hurt that they were all really cute, too….
She sighs and shakes her head as that thing, that feeling she’s had lately, tugs her in the opposite direction. Dream has yet to figure out adequate words for it, but it’s like a drumbeat thumping within her veins and setting her blood on fire: there’s a monster in these woods. (Everyone knows that much.) And it needs Dream. She can feel it.
As if in confirmation, the moment Dream crosses the threshold between open field and trees, a rogue gust of warmth presses through her skin down into the marrow of her bones.
She’s not cold anymore. Quite the opposite now. After a quick look around to make sure she’s alone, Dream exhales and lets her head fall back. It’s been over two years since she last set foot in these woods (nothing like an overprotective mother to kill her fun). But now the trees loom large around and above her, and Dream feels better than she has in weeks. “Man, is it good to be back,” she whispers into the breeze.