Hourglass

“Make it a week and a half. You wouldn’t want to start work next Monday, would you?”

That would be my eighteenth birthday. I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten, but Lucas had remembered for us both.

So, for the next week, I was a lady of leisure. I mean, there was work to handle: dishes to clean, dirty clothes to bundle up, so we could haul them to the Laundromat on the weekend. But most of the days, while Lucas was at the garage, I was basically alone without anything much to do. This was the first time it had felt like summer vacation. I took it easy, just as Lucas and I had agreed. Although I sometimes went for a walk or something like that, I watched a bunch of the DVDs, read the eclectic group of books Vic had chosen for us, and took a lot of naps. By the time I’d gone four days without a dizzy spell, I felt like there was no more reason to worry.

But one day, during an afternoon catnap, a dream intruded.

“Do these dreams mean something?” I asked.

The wraith smiled. “You’re finally figuring that out, huh?”

We stood on the roof of Evernight Academy. It was an early morning, foggy and cool, and somehow I knew we weren’t alone, although she was the only one I could see. The sky above looked milky and gray, like the fog below; the only substantial thing in the world seemed to be the school’s stones jutting up dark and real. The gargoyles’ silhouettes snarled around us.

“So you’re really speaking to me,” I said, “through my dreams.”

She shook her head. “We’ll meet again soon. I don’t know anything about it yet, though.”

“How is that possible?”

“I’m not telling you our future,” the wraith replied. “You’re the one who sees it. Not me.”

I could tell the future? That didn’t seem very likely, given how many times I’d received nasty surprises. “I think these are only dreams. I don’t have to pay any attention to them.”

She floated upward, and at first I thought it was because she was trying to leave me behind. Then I realized that I was floating up with her. The roof was no longer beneath my feet, but it didn’t matter.

The wraith looked down at me, her face almost inexpressibly sad. “You’ll have to face the truth soon enough, Bianca. The lies can’t protect you much longer.”

She rose faster than I could, though I reached upward in a vain effort to speed my ascent. “Wait!” I cried. “Wait!”

I awoke on the sofa. For the first time, after one of the dreams of the wraith, I wasn’t frightened. If anything, I felt calmer than before.

Seeing the future—well, I clearly wasn’t psychic or anything like that. But some of the dreams I’d had before had sort of come to pass: the black flowers that later turned up on the brooch Lucas bought for me, or Charity helping to set Evernight Academy on fire. I’d have to think about that in-depth later, really ask myself what my dreams might be telling me about days to come.

But what I thought of most was the last thing the wraith had said to me: The lies can’t protect you much longer.

“I feel stupid wearing this blindfold,” I said. “Is everyone on the bus looking at us like we’re crazy people?”

As I tried to pull the scarf away from my eyes, Lucas playfully caught my hands to prevent me. “Mostly they’re laughing, because they can tell I’m trying to surprise you.”

“I don’t need a surprise!” I protested only to make him insist. Really, I loved the fact that Lucas had thought up something special for my birthday.

“We’re almost there,” he insisted. “Hang tight.”

Finally, we reached our stop, and Lucas guided me off the bus and down the steps. Bright sunlight made the scarf slightly translucent, a soft turquoise shade that I thought I would always love because it would remind me of this day.

“Ready?” Lucas began untying the knot at the back of my head. I bounced on my heels in excitement as the scarf dropped. We were standing in front of a museum but not just any museum.

“The Franklin Institute,” I said. “The planetarium.”

He gave me a lopsided smile. “Thought you’d like that.”

“I love it!”

I’d lost my telescope when the school burned. Shuttling from city to city since then, I hadn’t had a chance to go stargazing in months, and I missed it desperately. This would be the next best thing. I loved that Lucas had thought of it; this really was the best present imaginable.

We went in and goofed around for a while before the next show, climbing through an enormous model of a human heart that thump-thumped so loudly it made us laugh. But the best part was when we finally got to enter the planetarium itself.

I loved planetariums. They were big and cool and quiet, with high-domed ceilings; they reminded me of the presence of something really infinite, really beautiful. I always wondered if maybe that was what a cathedral felt like, for people who could enter churches.

Lucas and I took our seats. I was about to point out a funny T-shirt someone else in the crowd was wearing when Lucas said, “Better do this before it gets dark in here.”

“Do what?”

From his pocket he pulled out a beautiful bracelet of red coral. As I stared at it, he said, “You like it, right? I didn’t know what kind of thing you might want, so I figured this was kind of like the brooch.”

“It’s—amazing.” The carving on this bracelet was even more delicate than on the jet brooch. Chinese dragons rippled across the silver links that held together the ovals of coral. Although I desperately wanted to slip my hand into it, I had to say, “Lucas, I love it, so much, but—”