Page 104 of Our Crooked Hearts
The trapdoor popped free with a shotgun bang and a ladder rattled to the floor inches from my head. When my heart had descended back into my chest I looked up.
More dust. More moonlight. I set a foot on the ladder and climbed. It was quiet. My head broke even with the ceiling and I saw their bodies lying on the floor.
I hauled myself up and staggered to them. My mother and my aunt lay on their backs. Aunt Fee’s right eye was bruised and my mother’s face was covered with what looked like rug burn along one side. Their hands reached toward each other but didn’t quite meet. Their eyelids jittered with dreams.
It wasn’t a natural sleep. Even before I touched them, shook them, pleaded with them, I knew they wouldn’t just wake. The whole room was filled like a cup with enchantment. When Itried to get an arm under my mother her body was stone-heavy, sodden.
I touched their faces and thought of the sleepers in the house in the woods. This spell wasn’t so breakable: I reached for its edges and it had none. I plumbed for its bottom and felt deeper water than I could dive through.
But if they were sleeping, there was a chance I could reach them. I could fall asleep right here and pull them out of Marion’s nightmare, and into a dream of my own. One they could wake from. I had no time for it—Marion couldn’t be far—but no better ideas, either.
I lay between them on the attic floor. Eyes closed, I reached for the lucid dreaming that had waited for me across five long years, locked with all the rest of my magic inside a golden box.
