Verum (The Nocte Trilogy 2)

“Your mind is a gift,” she says simply. “But you have to learn from it, or you will go crazy from it.”

Her words don’t make any sense.

I stare at her, not comprehending.

Her eyes contain a thousand lives.

I stare into them all, into her gypsy mind, and I see that she believes everything she’s saying as truth.

“It’s as much a part of life as the wind or the sun,” she says in her husky, old voice. “It’s not strange, it’s not abnormal. We know what happens while others don’t.”

She pauses and looks out the windows, out at the black waving grasses of the dark moors.

“You can see things,” she says finally. “Little things, things that might seem like dreams. You might feel sick afterward, you might have a headache. You might even feel crazy. You’re not.”

The crypts.

Dare’s parents’ room.

The Sanitarium and Dare’s mother.

I try to hide my expression, but Sabine has already seen and she smiles with her grotesque teeth.

“See? You know what I’m speaking of.”

“I’m not….it’s not… real.”

She cocks her head.

“Your dreams are important. Even when you’re awake.”

I want to scream from the insanity of it, because it does feel like a nightmare.

“Why am I here?” I ask her, because all along, I’ve felt like there was a bigger reason.

“To recover,” she tells me, but I know there’s more.

She hands me a necklace. It gleams gold in the night, a locket with a flower engraved on the front. A calla lily.

I try to open it, but it’s locked.

“It’s your secret,” Sabine tells me, her dark eyes so knowing.

“Why do I have a secret?”

“Because we don’t get to choose,” she answers cryptically. “Because we pay for the sins of those who came before us.”

With a sigh, I leave her room on shaky legs and retreat back to my own. Against my better judgment, I wear the locket to bed, and it nestles against my breast as I drift to sleep.

And that is the first night I dream of her.

Of Olivia.

Of Dare’s mother.

She wears a white nightgown, filmy and light, and she stands at the window.

Her hair falls down her back dripping wet, and her figure is small and slight.