Prologue
This dream is not my dream.
I know this lake, I know the house roosted on its beach, and I even know the woman next to me—and it’s still not my dream.
I know it because I don’t have dreams.
I only have memories. On the bad days, visions. But never this—never the blurred delirium of things that are both real and not real.
The woman wades into the water, her dress swirling around her legs. She turns to face me, and the moon behind her is a ripe bloodfruit suspended in the sky.
I love her, even though I’ve always known how this could end.
“Show me,” she says, and her voice is like the lake itself—soft and beckoning and musical. Joyful. “I need you to show me.”
“I can’t,” I say. “You know I can’t. It doesn’t work that way.”
“Then I’ll make you,” she says, still joyfully, and from the water lapping around her waist she pulls out a sword. She will plunge it in my chest and twist until I’m emptied out into the clear water of the lake. She will do it while she’s smiling because she was born smiling and she’ll kill me smiling.
And still I love her.
Even though I’ve always known how it could end.
1
A hiss in the darkness, then a flame, bright and dancing and unwelcome.
A match, I think, and then I think, why?
And then: where am I?
“You’re awake,” says a voice like water. A voice I love. It still doesn’t help me figure out where I am.
“Am I?” I ask. “Awake?”
Like I said earlier, I don’t dream as such, but when I close my eyes, the memories and visions are there, dogging my sleep. And I think maybe—yes, there is also a memory like this. A memory of a dark-haired girl and a cave sparkling with light, the night air heavy with the ecstatic cries we fed it.
“You are awake, Merlin.” The flame moves, calves another flame, and then is blown out. A candle now glows softly against the face of a woman standing at the end of the bed I’m on.
Dark brows arch high over clear blue eyes and a long nose curves gracefully down the woman’s oval face, framed by a high forehead and cheekbones, and a beautiful, if narrow, jaw. Her lips are on the thin side, but perfectly sculpted, giving her an expressive, fascinating mouth. Coffee-dark hair hangs in glossy sheets around her face and down her back.
She’s haunting. Haunting even as a girl, but now even more so as a woman.
“Nimue,” I say, and for the first time I notice how thirsty I am. I make to sit up—and realize my hands are tied to the bed.
Nimue sets the candle down on an end table, and it illuminates the space enough to show me that I’m indeed in a room and not in the damp mouth of a cave.
It means it’s now and not then, which I suppose I should be grateful for.
After all, I died then.
A silver key glints from just below the smile of her clavicle, the bottom tip of it pointing to the sweet valley between her breasts I used to know so well. They are small and pert—her body still the lithe dancer’s body she had as a girl—and my flesh responds to the sight of those little handfuls, the memory of them. The fantasy of her dusky nipples dragging along the underside of my aching cock is enough to have my body warming, and that’s when I really become aware that I’m not only tied to the bed, but I’m also dressed in a pair of black boxer briefs and nothing else.
Well, nothing else except for the padded cuff around my ankle.
Nimue leans forward to untie my wrist, which leaves the front of her swishy dress gaping forward enough that I can see those nipples now, dark rose and erect.
I’d tasted them frequently once upon a time.
Once upon a time, twice.
