I am standing in a field.
The light is honeyed, late afternoon, and the grass is high and moving in a slow wind. A child is laughing somewhere close by. I turn my head, and the sound resolves into two kids, a boy and a girl, both dark-haired, chasing each other through the grass with the absolute focus children give to nothing important. The boy is older. The girl shrieks when he catches her.
A hand slips into mine.
Sienna.
She is glowing. There is no other word for it. Her hair is loose around her shoulders, her face is warm from the sun, and when she smiles up at me, I feel it behind my ribs. Her other hand rests on the curve of her belly. She is heavy with our third.
“They are exhausting,” she murmurs, and there is so much love in her voice, it almost knocks me down. “Tell me again why we wanted three.”
“Because you said so.” I lift her hand and press my mouth to her knuckles. “I always do what you say.”
She laughs. She tips her face up as I lean over to kiss her, and the world is the kind of warm that does not exist beyond this field.
“Beautiful family, isn’t it?”
A woman has stepped up beside me.
I did not see her arrive. She is just there, on my other side, looking out at the children. She is tall, dark-haired, her face half in shadow.
“It is.” My voice comes out sounding odd, slow. “It really is.”
“This was once my dream.” Her tone is soft. “It was my dream, and it was snatched from me.”
I blink.
A strangeness filters in around the edges of the warmth. I look more closely at the woman beside me, but I cannot quite make out her face. The light has changed. The honey has gone out of it. Above us, the sky is pulling down toward gray.
“What did you say?” I ask her.
She turns her head to look at me. Her smile is gentle.
“It was snatched from me,” she repeats.
The sky goes black.
The wind comes up forcefully. I turn toward the children, their names rising in my throat, but they are gone. There is grass blowing where they were standing, and then there is dust where the grass was. The dust lifts and unspools in the wind, and a piece of me tears loose and goes with it.
“No!” The word rips out of me. “No, no—”
I turn to Sienna. Her hand is flat on her stomach, which is empty. Her face is wet.
“Lucas,” she is whispering. “Lucas, what’s happening to me?”
I reach for her, and the marks bloom.
They start at her wrists, black and creeping, and they climb. Up her forearms. Into the crook of her elbow. Across her collarbone. She makes a small sound that is the beginning of a scream, and then her knees give out. I catch her, I catch her, and the marks keep climbing, and her mouth opens, and the sound that comes out of her is—
I jerk awake.
I realize I am sitting straight up in the bed. My heart hammers against my ribs. My breath saws in my throat. The sheets are damp where I have been lying. The dark of the roompresses in on me, and for one disoriented second, I do not know where I am.
Then, I feel her.
She is curled on her side, her face turned toward me on the pillow, her dark hair spread across the white linen. Her arm is folded under her head. Her breathing is slow. I feel the hum of the bond, low and steady.
A dream.