Читать книгу Storm of Ash - Michelle Kenney - Страница 14

I was alone. Save for the rustling trees, and the ground beneath me which was as dry as a bone. For a second I stared upwards at the protective canopy of branches, entwined over my head as though to protest, ‘She’s one of us … a land creature … not of the water.’

Adrenaline fired my limbs into action and I bolted upright, a million thoughts misfiring. I could see the silvery gleam of the lake through the trees, yet somehow I was dressed again – and as dry as though I’d never been swimming at all.

Was it all a dream?

Then I heard a rustle in the jade grass beside me. I turned slowly, still caught in the web of my dream.

There was a man asleep next to me. My breath stilled. A familiar, missing man.

My breath caught on a painful cough as I reached out. It was him. My brother. Lying asleep beside me as though it were the most natural thing in the world. His skin peachy and perfect. Arafel perfect. As though we’d never lost him at all.

For a moment it was as much as I could do just to sit there, drinking in every tiny contour of the face that was so like my own, and had yet been so difficult to picture these last few weeks. Then at last, I smiled. Not gratefully. But blissfully. A real smile that broke through the walled-up fissures of my heart and reached into my cheeks to make them stretch until they ached.

It really was Eli. Glistening and whole, as though he’d never known Pantheon, Cassius or the research facility. And then he was opening his grey-blue eyes, and rolling his head towards me. Fixing me with his gentle smile, and healing me in a way no one else could.

He raised his head in bewilderment as I reached for his hand. His fingers were a shade of field-gold just before harvest, and I recalled how pale he was when I whispered my goodbye. The thought sobered me faster than if I’d plunged into the river myself, and I threw my arms around him with a sob.

‘I’m OK, I’m OK,’ he soothed as I held him fast, uncertain I would ever let him go again.

He looked the same, felt the same, and yet his eyes glinted with the light of another world and its secrets. And he was alone. My heart ached for Max and Lia, but it only made me hug Eli harder.

‘Where have you been?’ I whispered finally.