I curled my body around him and snuggled against his warmth.

“Try to sleep,” he whispered into my hair.

“I can think of other things I’d rather be doing.”

“Relax and think about sleep.” His voice sounded strained—which made me smile against his chest.

One of his hands began rubbing the tight muscles of my back. I sighed with pleasure.

“That feels really good.”

He grunted a response that sounded like a muffled order to be quiet. His kneading hand worked the muscles of my back and began moving its way down to my very sore and very bare buttocks.

“Uhhhh, that’s sore.”

“I know. Be still.”

Now he sounded like my grandma.

But I hushed. The combination of my exhaustion and his warm, insistent massage was better than a Tylenol PM. I felt the stress drain out of my muscles. Sleep came suddenly, carrying me away on a tide of relaxation.

At first my dreams were disjointed snippets—scenes of being in a hot tub with the Lone Ranger and his horse, Silver. Which is odd enough, because I’ve never dreamed of the Lone Ranger before (if I’m going to dream of a masked guy, it’s usually Batman—his good/bad boy stuff really does it for me), but add to that oddity the fact that my dream persona was coming on to Silver, and kept trying to tell the Lone Ranger to take a hike, and you really have a weird dream. Even for me.

Anyway, that didn’t last long. Unlike Mr. Ed, Silver couldn’t talk, so I lost interest. My dream faded out from the hot-tub fiasco and I found myself plunked down in the middle of a large Saks Fifth Avenue store with a big wad of money in my fist and several salesladies salivating to help me. I was just making my way toward the blush-colored cashmere sweater set (price marked $529.00—it was on sale), when my body was suddenly sucked through the ceiling of…

…Oh, great. The barn.

I was floating above the two campfires and the sleepy centaurs. The moon had risen and was a sliver of light against the star-filled sky. This time I steeled myself against the feeling of vertigo as, against my will, my body lifted higher and began floating toward the northeast.

I looked off to my left and I could see the glow from the smoldering castle. I closed my eyes and pleaded with who or whatever was in control to please not make me go there. Instantly I was filled with a sense of reassurance and comfort. I relaxed a little and opened my eyes.

Sure enough, I wasn’t traveling toward the castle. Instead, I was heading in the direction of the distant mountains. I tried to will myself to the east so that I could check on Epi and maybe even float over the temple and snoop around and see what was going on there, but as I had discovered before, I had no real control over this type of dream experience.

But I told myself this time was different. Before, I didn’t realize that what I was seeing was reality and not a dream. This time I knew better.

My floating body traveled over the dark settlements. I peered down, trying to make sure that there were no people left who had disregarded the evacuation warnings, but I had little time to look for signs of life because as I reached the edge of the forest, my speed increased so that the trees below me became a dark blur. My body hurled ahead as if it had been shot from a sling.

Then I slowed and stopped before a structure perched at the base of a rugged mountain pass. The castle was large, almost as large as my father’s, but as I became accustomed to the darkness of my surroundings I realized it was not at all like MacCallan Castle. Where MacCallan Castle had been graceful and picturesque, this building was stark and imposing.

And then I felt it. If I had been standing, I would have doubled over at the waist. It was the same feeling I had had the night I witnessed MacCallan’s destruction. From the castle before me evil emanated, thick and cloying like honey dripping from a comb. The echoes of that night’s horror reverberated from the walls beneath me—not in the form of sound, but of feeling. I blinked as I tried to focus on the castle and see it objectively—but the shadows of MacCallan stayed with me; death colored my perception. I could not shake the ghosts of those men from my soul.

The castle looked as if it had been carved from the mountains. It was a perfect square with thick walls and barred doors. The walls themselves were built of a rough gray stone, which gave its exterior the appearance of age, like gnarled wood that had withstood many storms. As I studied the castle the setting of one of Edgar Allan Poe’s more obscure short stores, “Ligea,” flashed into my mind. The main action takes place in an ancient monastery, walled by thick, old stone. Within the walls Poe’s character subsequently watches his second wife killed by the specter of his first—who then revives and consumes the second wife as the narrator plunges into madness. Somehow the comparison felt appropriate.

My hovering body moved forward until I hung directly over the middle of the building. The castle was not asleep. I could see many open fires burning in the large, square courtyard. Although my dream body could not feel temperature, I realized it must be cold here because the shapes that tended the fires were covered with heavy blankets and capes with cowls. I shuddered, and for a moment I was afraid I had mistaken blankets and capes for wings as I had once before. But one of the figures shrugged off a blanket as it added another log to a fire, and I saw that it was definitely human. A human female. Of its own accord my body moved closer. All of the figures were women, but they moved methodically and didn’t speak to one another, like they were automatons.

“The women from MacCallan Castle.”

I spoke aloud and saw one head turn in my direction. She was young, probably only thirteen or fourteen. Her cheekbones were high and promised a striking profile to come, but now they were still sweetly rounded with cherubic youth. Her eyes were large and thickly lashed—they swept like butterfly wings as she tried to blink away the vestiges of a numbness in which the other women looked to be deeply entwined. She stared in my direction, straining to see something that had no real substance. Her hair was a mass of curls that caught the light of the fire and gleamed like faceted stones.

I felt a surge of sadness at the sight of this lovely girl. Something terrible was happening. I knew it with a surety that was fueled by more than the clinging horror of what I had witnessed the last time the dream magic had overtaken me. I didn’t understand it yet, but I knew what I was spiritually eavesdropping upon went beyond kidnapped slaves or abused concubines.

And then a horrible shriek split the night and the girl who had been straining to bring herself to see and feel retreated to the rest of the cowering females. Her eyes were once more glazed and empty. The women milled together like sheep whose shepherd had betrayed them to the wolves. They plucked nervously at their clothes and fretfully held their wraps tightly around their trembling bodies. Their attention was focused in one direction. They were staring at a closed entrance. The door was large enough to suggest it might lead to a main hall or chamber.

The shriek repeated. A couple of the women started to move forward toward the door, but several of the others fretfully called them back.

Again the shriek sounded—almost inhuman in its raw pain. I couldn’t stand it. With everything inside of me I wished I knew what was happening—and I wished I knew how to stop it.

As if answering my plea, my body flashed forward and was sucked through the ominous door like a gerbil through a vacuum cleaner. I was spit out into the air, hovering near the ceiling of an immense room. My first impression was that the room reminded me, in a vague, shadowy way, of the dining hall at Epona’s temple. Fireplaces, big enough for several people to stand in, were blazing in each corner of the room. Flaming tapers were lit. But none of this dispelled the gloom of the chamber. Crude tables like ancient picnic benches had been pushed near the walls of the room, and in the flickering light I could see people seated all along the benches. Many of them had their heads lying on their arms and appeared to be asleep. None of them were talking.

Then another shriek, followed by a panting moan, drew my attention to the middle of the room. A group of people clustered around a single picnic bench. My body drifted toward the group and as I got closer I began to feel inundated by waves of evil followed by what I could best describe as a misting of despair. As on the night of the attack on MacCallan Castle, my premonition was almost palpable. I didn’t want to look—I didn’t want to see what was on that table, but my eyes refused to close.

Everyone in the group of people surrounding the bench had something in common other than their concentration on the table. They all had wings. Wings that rustled and stirred even though their bodies remained very still. I took a deep breath and braced myself as my spirit floated into position over the table.

I had found the source of the shrieking. It was a woman—she was naked but it was impossible to tell how young or old she was. She was lying on top of a table that glistened red with her blood. Her arms had been stretched over her head and tied down. Her legs were spread and her knees were up and bent. Her feet had been pulled back to her body and tied down, too. She looked like she was being prepared for some kind of obscene Pap test. Her distended belly rippled and writhed with a life of its own and she shrieked again—her neck muscles straining and her body quivering.

The watching creatures didn’t touch her or move to comfort or help her. They stood silently watching. Their restless wings the only outward sign of their tension.

Then the laboring woman’s screaming began anew with the raw terror of the doomed. As I watched, her pubis bulged outward—stretching…stretching…I had never imagined the human body could expand that much. Suddenly her groin exploded in a shower of blood that rained red droplets on the quivering wings of the waiting audience. Out of the gaping hole in the woman’s twitching body protruded a cylinder-shaped thing that seemed to be wrapped in thick wrinkled skin dyed the brilliant scarlet of new blood. My mind rebelled with shock and horror at the scene playing out below me, but my eyes refused to obey my command to close, just as my body refused to take me away. In the cavity of the woman’s ruined body the thing quivered. Something glinted amidst the hideous tube of flesh. Unwillingly, my eyes were drawn to that glinting; it sparkled wetly like light glistening off the sharpened blade of a freshly used knife.

My body floated down until I was only a few feet above the heads of the creatures.

Time seemed to slow. The creatures under me were frozen, as if an invisible hand had pressed a lifelike pause button. As I got closer, my eyes focused more clearly on the lump of deformed flesh still trapped in the woman’s body, and I realized that I was looking at a newborn creature. What I had mistaken for wrinkled flesh was really a pair of immature wings, which totally encased the embryonic body within—much like a cocoon would encase a caterpillar. The light of the tapers flickered off two appendages at the topmost point of the joined wings. They looked like talons and they were shiny with amniotic fluid and blood.

“Oh, my God!”

My exclamation ended the freeze-frame. A head snapped up in my direction and the creature’s eyes searched the air above the table.

“Take it to the incubating cavern!” His voice had a rough, breathy quality. His words sounded as if they had to fight to escape his throat.

A female winged creature rushed forward and plunged her hands into the open wound, carefully extracting the cocooned fetus. Before I could glimpse any more of it, the adult’s wings folded forward, completely covering the newborn. She quickly exited the room, followed by almost half of the other creatures who had observed the obscene spectacle. I watched them scurry away and my gaze was drawn to the benches that lined the walls. The figures sitting on the benches cowered back as the entourage rushed past them to the exit—I gasped with renewed horror, realizing that those people were women, human women, all in varying stages of pregnancy.

A hissing sound near the table caused my attention to be pulled away from them.

The male who had spoken was still looking up, and I felt my spirit body tremble. I tried to remain very still.

“Nuada, what is it?” one of the creatures asked tentatively.

“I do not know.” His rough voice spat the answer. “I can feel something here. I have felt this presence before, at MacCallan Castle just as we were defeating that lone warrior.” His wings stirred aggressively as his hot gaze raked the air around me. “I can almost see it…”

In one fluid stride he leaped up on the table, legs straddling the bloody body of the dead woman. He was now directly under me.

“Perhaps I can touch it.” He began to reach up toward me with one long arm, taloned fingers extended.

I felt a scream building in my chest and—

11

“Aaaahhhhh!” The scream shot from my mouth with the force of an exploded land mine. I panicked in the darkness even though my frayed senses whispered to me that it smelled like springtime and horse, not blood and horror. But my mind was numb with terror and I struggled violently, kicking and biting against the bonds that had me trapped.

“Rhiannon! Stop, you are safe!” ClanFintan’s voice broke through the ice of my fear. I realized that I was back in the barn and I quit struggling, but adrenaline still coursed through my body. I was shaking uncontrollably.

“Oh, God. It was horrible.” His arms tightened around me.

“It was the Magic Sleep?”