Dralle's Bride (Crystal Glass Dragons 4)

3

Heather

The ground was wet with rain, and thunder kept rippling overhead, punctuated with strikes of lightning cracking out into the air. My sneakers were caked in mud, but I was running as fast as I could.

As fast as I always did in this dream.

“Stop! Please!” I could feel my throat crack with hoarseness from shouting, and another strike of lightning silhouetted the two of them. My brother had the upper hand for now, but I knew that never lasted long. Shifting, I felt my clothes tear away from me as I rushed to their sides to try and stop all of this madness, to get them to quit. I needed to protect my brother.

Isaac couldn’t die again.

The stranger, whose name I now knew, Dralle, turned the tables and shifted.

His form was significant but blurry to me.

Some kind of green monster that I’d never seen in real life. He looked like the mountains themselves came to life and grew teeth and claws.

My brother was pinned beneath him, and I was just sixty yards away.

Maybe this time I could run fast enough.

Maybe I could finally stop this from happening.

I couldn’t let my brother die again.

Dralle leaned down in the same way as he ever did, his neck serpentine in his shifted form, and he ripped out my brother’s throat. There was so much blood, so much red. In my wolf form, I hollered and roared, my throat broke and cracked along with the lightning, and I tumbled down into the mud beneath me.

I couldn’t stop it.

I never was able to.

Maybe if I just ran faster, if I tried harder, I could get there. I needed to try.

My brother couldn’t die like this.

He couldn’t.

I-

Waking up in a pool of sweat and tenseness, I gasped for air into my pillow and shivered despite how heated I felt. My head was throbbing and aching, and I could feel tears starting to spill again.

Why wasn’t I used to this by now?

Why couldn’t I just find a solution that stopped it from happening?

Sobbing into my pillow, I slowly released the tension from my body, but it felt like I was falling apart.

Why was he real?

Why was he at my shop?

My dog jumped up onto my bed and started licking my face to calm me down.

“Billy, no, babe,” I shook my head and huffed out a laugh. Billy kept at it until I was breathing a little slower. “Come here.” I hugged the silly shepherd against me, and he let out a distressed whine. “I’m okay; it’s just the same thing.”

I knew he couldn’t understand me, but I felt like I needed to soothe both of us into calming down.

Seeing Dralle at the shop meant this dream was absolute and could happen. Almost all of my visions happened precisely as I saw them, with only one or two getting even minor details wrong.