Think of who I love the most.
I know who it’s not. Not my parents. Not Felix. Not… Well, that was a short list. But I remind myself there are all different kinds of love. And three faces immediately flip in my head.
I close my eyes and focus.
One possibility is busy right now, and another is not mortal, which only leaves…
My pegasus surges under me, and I have to open my eyes again to hold on. She flies us up and over a mountain and then spirals down into the clouds that surround the base of Olympus. They remind me of the fog that rolls into the bay in San Francisco, damp and chilly and hard to see through, and I’m used to that. When we emerge from the clouds, that’s exactly where we are. San Francisco. Impossible to miss the soaring columns of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Instead of turning to the city, though, my pegasus flies me away, across the bridge, over the Minos Headlands, past the city of Sausalito, and on to the massive redwoods of Muir Woods.
I’ve never been here.
Maybe I was wrong?
Now with every flap, I’m second-guessing who it could be…or that it’s no one and this is all a terrible joke.
The pegasus drops down between the towering, red-barked trees with their deep-green foliage. She tips this way and that, avoiding their broad trunks and far-reaching branches as she descends.
As we near the ground, the pegasus rears back, flaring her pink wings wide to catch the air and slow herself down. She hits the ground at a run, and I’m thrown forward, grasping around her neck all over again.
After slowing to a trot and then stopping gently—for me, I’m sure—she shakes her body, fluffing out her wings, and I take it as a signal that I should get off. Again, not great with horses, so my getting off is more like falling off, but at least I land on my feet. Then she nods her snout toward more trees. Toward a shadowed part of the forest.
What? Am I supposed to go in that direction?
She nods again, more vigorously, shaking her rose-colored mane, so I shrug and start walking. But after I crest a small hill and the winged horse is out of sight, I realize the problem. How am I going to find my way back to her? This all looks the same. The same the same the same. Guaranteed to get lost in this place. I’m a city girl who navigates by landmarks.
Pushing back my sleeve, I wake my tattoos, breathing a sigh of relief when they spring to life. “Maybe you can help me get around,” I say to the fox. With a touch, he leaps from my arm.
He smiles with sharp teeth visible, then sits for a moment, black ears pricked, and sniffs with his dark little nose. Then he wags his fluffy, black-tipped tail and starts trotting—prancing, really—in the direction the pegasus had indicated. I follow.
I’m glad I asked the fox, because he takes a different route than I would have, right into the heart of the dark trees. Over the rise of another hill, I see it—a tiny log cabin that looks ancient and has seen better days. It sits in a clearing between two of the biggest trees I’ve seen so far, the bases of their trunks almost as wide as the cabin itself.
And it’s guarded by two massive spiders.
66
The Boy I Loved Best
I shout up at the sky. “Are you kidding me? You didn’t say anything about nightmares.”
Which this clearly is. Though maybe not mine, because I don’t have a thing about spiders. Or at least normal-sized ones. These are something else. Their fangs could lop my head off in one snap.
A wet nose against my hand draws my attention. The fox whines, then noses the outline of the tarantula on my forearm. The large, fuzzy red spider wiggles and then lifts both her front legs and waves them.
“Can you do something about this?”
The fox gives a high-pitched yip while the tarantula waves her legs again, both of which I take as a yes. So I touch the tarantula, and she crawls out of my skin, and I hold very still while she tickles her way down my arm and onto the foliage-covered ground. While I stand well back and watch, my tarantula scuttles across to the spiders that could squash her without a thought.
With lots of creepy clacking and more eyeballs than are necessary turning my way, the creatures seem to have a conversation. Then, finally, the nightmare spiders move back into the trees. Not far. I can still catch the sun reflecting off their eyes.
My tarantula gives me a little wave. Not taking a chance, I run the rest of the way and try the door, which is unlocked, and burst into a room.
A single room.
And lying on a bed against the wall, eyes closed and perfectly still…
My heart flies, then drops, because for a second, I thought it was Hades.
But it’s not. It’s…
“Boone.” I whisper his name.
It makes sense, but at the same time, it doesn’t. I mean, I knew I had a crush. I knew I admired him, craved his attention. But love? Is that really love? Or is it that I had no one else?
When I get to his bedside, I crouch down. I don’t take his hand, because that feels wrong somehow. We’ve never touched like that.
Instead, I grasp his forearm and give it a shake, but he doesn’t open his eyes. I can see by a trail of glittery bronze dust across the top of his pillow and forehead that Morpheus has been here.
“Boone?” I frown and shake him harder. Still nothing.
Which is when I remember what I have to do. At least it will be easier with him asleep.
“I have something I have to tell you.”
“Oh my gods, you’re dead,” a low, horror-filled voice blurts out from behind me.
