“Why’d he do it?” Caitlyn asked, bewildered.
“I don’t know. I thought he was doing all right; he’d had some trouble with drugs, but he was better. It could have been an accident, couldn’t it?” Brigitte pleaded, as if Caitlyn could have an answer.
“I guess so.”
Brigitte nodded, then went on, “It took half an hour to get help down to him. He survived, but something happened to his brain. He can’t remember any of his life from before the fall. He can’t remember any of us.” A few tears ran down her cheeks. “He’s a different person now. The doctors say he must have brain damage from being underwater for so long, but they can’t find it on their scans.”
They rose, and Caitlyn put the plant back on the windowsill, centering it on a square of scarred black metal embedded in the stone. She felt obscurely guilty for all the fuss she had made over her bad dreams. She had nightmares. So what? Brigitte’s brother had tried to kill himself, and emerged from the experience with brain damage.
Je suis au bord du gouffre
, Caitlyn thought. I am at the edge of the abyss. The psychological and literal meanings had come together in Thierry.
“I’m sorry about your brother,” Caitlyn said, not knowing what else to say. “I hope he gets better.”
“Thank you.” Brigitte sniffled, and then gathered her composure. “Anyway, all this is the reason I ended up going to a therapist. Do you like the lucid-dreaming idea?”
“I do, very much. I’ll try it tonight, and tell you what happens.”
“
Bon
. You can tell me how you decorate your house.”
Caitlyn only smiled in answer. It wasn’t home decorating she was going to pursue in her dreams: it was Raphael.
CHAPTER
Sixteen
After dinner, while Amalia was watching TV in the Grand Salon with Daniela and Brigitte, Caitlyn plumped the pillows on her bed, turned out all the lights except her desk lamp, and lay down on top of her duvet. She folded her hands over her abdomen and tried to relax: an impossible quest, given her excitement. She was going to see Raphael again, and
this
time she’d be in control!
Passing voices in the hall outside her door seemed unusually loud and distracting: Soma, a girl from India, was telling Japanese Kaori that she’d gained a kilo in the past month and was going to try a new coconut-oil diet to lose weight.
Caitlyn groaned in frustration and flipped on her alarm clock radio, tuning it to the white noise between stations. The sounds of the hallway quickly became indistinct under the wash of static.
Dream but stay in control,
she told herself.
After several minutes she finally felt herself sinking into the first layer of sleep, awareness of the room around her fading.
Raphael. I want to dream about Raphael.
She imagined his face and loose curls, and his hazel eyes. The deliberate effort briefly brought her closer to the surface of consciousness, but as she held his face in her mind she began once again to sink toward sleep.
A thrill ran through her as Raphael’s face suddenly came to life. He and the old man, Beneto, whispered near a leaded-glass window with a painted panel in its center. Moonlight spilled through the glass, tracing their profiles in silver and glimmering softly on a box Raphael held in his hands. Caitlyn stood a few feet away, in shadows untouched by the moon, and unnoticed by either man.
“We have to find someplace more secure, Beneto,” Raphael whispered in Italian, the meaning of the foreign words forming in Caitlyn’s mind without effort. “We can’t keep moving it around, hoping to stay ahead of the thief.” The small box or chest in his hands was about six inches long and four inches wide. The sides were made of small pieces of what looked like cloudy glass, the edges held together by gold. The lid, too, was gold, set with an enormous quartz crystal cabochon—a rounded stone. It was almost as long as the box, two inches high, and polished to glassy smoothness.
Caitlyn’s heart tripped. She suddenly knew that
that
was what had been lying in the depths of the locked trunk she’d opened, when she’d visited Raphael and had been driven half mad by the sound of the beating heart. That box had been what glimmered in the depths after she’d flung aside the blanket.
“Whoever is looking for it is getting desperate,” Beneto said. “They took no care to hide the signs of searching my room.”
“We need someplace permanent to keep it.” Raphael handed the crystal chest to the old man. “You said you had one last place you could hide it, until we find the Templar’s treasure.”
Beneto nodded and slipped the chest into an opening in his robe.
“Be careful,” Raphael said.
“I will guard it with my life.”
“I know, my friend, just as you risked your life to bring it to me from out of the ashes.”
Caitlyn felt a hand lightly touch her shoulder. She started, and turned to look, but no one was there. The scene around her suddenly started to flicker, and Caitlyn panicked as she felt herself rising toward consciousness.
No! Stay here. Stay here,
she desperately commanded herself.
The scene quickly stabilized. Beneto put a hand on Raphael’s shoulder. “She is with us still. Do not doubt it, Raphael.”
“I’m starting to believe you may be right.”
Again, the scene flickered, as if some outside force was trying to draw Caitlyn away.
Stay! I want to stay with Raphael!
Beneto squeezed Raphael’s shoulder and departed. As the door closed behind him Raphael began to turn toward her, and then her vision went dark.
No
, she cried silently, reaching through the darkness.
Stay!
Her vision suddenly cleared, and she found herself standing exactly where Raphael had been, in front of the window. Disappointment swamped her as she realized he was nowhere to be seen: she was alone.
Moonlight glowed through the yellow sun of the painted glass
Fiat Lux
window, and Caitlyn felt a flicker of awareness that she was dreaming; this room was the library of the Fortune School.
The mixing of real and dream worlds confused her, and her thoughts seemed to slow down, as if she were hypnotized, or drugged. She looked down at the windowsill: the potted plant was gone, and the dark square of embedded metal it had sat upon was now polished to a bright silver sheen, looking like a mirror set into the stone sill. Caitlyn leaned over it to look at herself.
A black shadow passed over the square, devoid of features. A chill ran down Caitlyn’s spine, and she felt the instinct to bolt, to run from something evil that was fast approaching, but she couldn’t move or look away from the square. The shadowed square darkened to a depthless black, making it look as if the plate of silver had disappeared and a deep square hole had opened in the windowsill. It mesmerized her, and as she looked into it, a small smudge of pale light formed at the bottom of the hole.
The smudge began slowly to rise out of the depths, dragging with it an inexorable sense of dread. It expanded and changed shape as it came up to Caitlyn as if from a great distance, its presence seeming to poison the very air she breathed. Her mind struggled to make sense of the thing, unable to fit a meaning to the shape. Dread tightened her chest, her breath coming in shorter gasps with each passing second, her heart racing with an inexplicable certainty that the thing slowly rising toward her was not of this world. Trapped by her fear, her body refused to flee.
The pale shape was mere feet from her now, its mass almost filling the square of the mirror. Terror burst upon Caitlyn as recognition came at last.
It was the top of a woman’s strawberry-blond head.
Waves of shuddering horror rolled through Caitlyn as the head continued to rise; she could see the part atop the woman’s scalp, and the pins holding in place a coronet of braids. She was paralyzed with fear, unable to move as the head continued toward the top of the hole.
The woman’s face suddenly tilted upward, her dark brown eyes locking on Caitlyn’s own. A scream choked in Caitlyn’s throat: it was Bianca de’ Medici. The noblewoman’s cold alabaster face showed no expression. Her hands shot up, out of the mirror, grabbing Caitlyn by the sides of her head and pulling her with sudden fury into the depths of the hole.
Caitlyn screamed as she fell into blackness, clawing at the stonelike hands clasped to her head. The pressure of the hands increased until it felt like her skull would be crushed between them. Nor could she breathe; bands of pressure were tightening around her chest, and Bianca’s blank face was the only light in the abyss.
The darkness suddenly turned to the broad light of day and Bianca vanished. The pressure around Caitlyn’s chest tightened, and she looked down and saw ropes wrapped around her, her arms pinned to her sides. She was fastened to a post, and she wore the cherry-rose satin dress. All around her were stacked bundles of sticks.
A voice intoned its judgment in Latin, the meaning of the words somehow clear: she would be burned, her ashes scattered, salt sown into the ground where she had died.
Panic swamped her. She tried to speak but had no air. The faggots of wood were already lit, the fire burning with greedy flames. She struggled against her bonds as smoke stung her eyes and seared her lungs.
A flaming brand fell upon her skirts, and the silk erupted in flame. Caitlyn screamed—
And then all was gray, all sensation gone.
Caitlyn found herself hovering in the air, her bodiless soul suspended over a pile of smoldering ashes and charcoal from which fragments of charred bone protruded: it was the remains of her pyre. She watched, confused, as a hunched and hooded man crept to the edge of the pile and with a stick began to poke through the cinders. His hand was spotted and wrinkled with age, and Caitlyn knew that it was Beneto.
A moment later, Beneto’s search through the ashes was rewarded when he knocked aside a bit of wood: in the midst of a black, greasy smear of carbon sat a lump of deep burgundy flesh the size of a fist.
Caitlyn knew it was her heart, untouched by the flames.
His shoulders shaking, Beneto retrieved the heart with his bare hands and tenderly folded it into a cloth. He bowed his head and wept.
And then shocking cold suddenly hit Caitlyn in the face.
Wrenched from sleep, Caitlyn sat bolt upright and knocked heads with Amalia. The princess yelped and stumbled back.
Coughing and sputtering, Caitlyn heaved for breath through a nose full of water. Her mind was caught between sleep and waking, and for a long moment she couldn’t make sense of what was happening. Cold water was dripping down her face and had saturated her shirt.
“Water?!”
She gaped at Amalia. “Did you throw
water
on me?”
“I thought you were dead!” Amalia said, her face pale.
“Dead?! Why the hell would I be dead?”
Amalia shook her head. “You weren’t breathing.”
Caitlyn’s muscles went weak. She hadn’t been breathing? A flush of horror ran through her as she recalled the gray lack of sensation as she floated above her ashes.
She’d died! Bianca had killed her in that dream!
But then she felt the cold of her wet shirt, and reason sharply reasserted itself. She was alive, wasn’t she? She was sitting here, awake. “How could I not be breathing? Of course I was breathing!”
“I called your name and shook you, and you wouldn’t wake up.”
“And knowing how bad I’ve been sleeping, you thought that my sleeping soundly was a good reason to wake me?” Caitlyn snapped, the frightening dream having put her on edge.
Amalia bit her lower lip. “I was scared. You looked … unnatural. Something wasn’t right.”
A shiver ran down Caitlyn’s spine. She crossed her arms, rubbing them as if she could chase away the horror of the dream as easily as she could a chill. She saw the worry on Amalia’s face, and her anger drained away. “I’m sorry I snapped at you,” she said at last. “I was startled and lashed out. I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry I dumped water on you. But you ought to get that checked by the school nurse.”
“What?”
“The no breathing. I think that’s called sleep apnea. Maybe it explains your nightmares. Your brain gets no oxygen and panics.”
Denial was on Caitlyn’s lips, but then reason intruded. “Maybe you’re right,” she said slowly. Could it be that simple? Her nightmares might be caused by something as commonplace as sleep apnea.
“I’ll get you a dry pillow,” Amalia said.
Caitlyn nodded her thanks, but her mind was lost in confused thought. She changed out of her wet clothes and into her nightgown as she mulled over the dream she’d just had.
The nightmare about Bianca had been different than a Screecher nightmare. For all the horror, it had been more like one of her usual, vivid dreams. It had a story to it, a sequence of events. Newly dry, she sat on her bed with her dream journal and sketched out the scenes from her dream: the Fiat Lux window, Raphael and Beneto standing in front of it with the crystal chest; the silver square in the windowsill that became a pit holding a rising Bianca; the pyre; and then Beneto uncovering her unburned heart in the ashes.