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Jewel woke suddenly in the middle of the night, wresting herself free of the trailing shreds of a nightmare. Automatically, she reached out to the pillow beside her, the one that had lain empty and cool for the past several nights. Her seeking fingers encountered the warm bulk of a shoulder, and she exhaled on a sigh. She breathed in again deeply, concentrating, for the moment, on the simple act of drawing air into her lungs and pushing it out again, feeling her thudding heart slow. Instead of surrendering immediately to sleep, she hitched herself up a little, resting an elbow on her own pillow and allowing herself the luxury of watching her love sleep. Very delicately, she smoothed a strand of hair back from his face with a fingertip, revealing the livid scar across his left eye. She resisted the urge to kiss it, preferring to leave him to his much-needed sleep, and instead resigned herself to thinking about the bad dream... if dream it was. That's the trouble with being a mindbender, she thought to herself. Other people's realities, other painful pasts, often had a nasty way of bending themselves around her dreams, and nightmares could become too easily real. It wasn't was bad as it used to be. She remembered, with a shudder, the first nightmare, the one that had driven her fourteen-year-old self from a sound sleep, out of bed, and nearly out the attic window, bars or no, just as her cousin had done ten years before. She hadn't known. All she'd known on waking-- at least, she felt awake-- was a thick muffle of smoke, a flickering orange bedspread of flames, and then a figure hurtling past her in the uncertain light, out the window in a brilliant shower of glass as though the sturdy iron bars didn't exist. Of course... they hadn't, then. Ten years ago on the night, her cousin had fallen asleep with the lamp lit, and knocked it onto his covers in his sleep. He'd woken in a panic, disoriented and terrified-- gods, she could still taste the memory of his tears-- and pitched himself through the window to escape what turned out to be a small, easily doused fire. The breaking of glass woke his father, too late to save his boy from breaking his neck on the fall. Jewel-- Cat, then-- had been given his very bed. Well, not the same bed, of course, that had ruined past use. But his death-memories had been scorched into the timbers above her deeper than a coat of paint could cover, and the sobbing young girl who stuttered out her nightmare the next morning to her shocked aunt and uncle had been forced to experience them all as an eyewitness. No one had known, until then, that anyone in the family had inherited her great-grandmother's "sensitive nature." Jewel sighed and rubbed her temples. That episode had just been the beginning... and her first-learned gifts would always be the hardest for her to control. She grimaced. Her first kiss-- well, her first *real* kiss, on the lips-- had been spoiled by a forty-year-old unreported murder. That class picnic on the old battlegrounds, that didn't even bear thinking on now. Always a friendly and open child, she'd had to learn caution in shaking hands, for fear that someone might be wearing a ring that would speak to her unawares. And the one time she had visited that bar that San and Val and Tarri and, she'd heard, sometimes Roni frequented-- sweet gods. She wished she *had* been hallucinating. The Psionics Academy had taught her how to control her dubious gifts; her husband and the dangerous world she shared with him now had motivated her to acquire the discipline she'd sadly lacked at school. But lately, her control had been slipping... whether it was the stress of their latest troubles with the law, the renewal of contact with other psionics, or... something else. She frowned to herself. Memories-- the histories she pulled from places, from objects-- were generally very clear to her. This was... different. Fragmented, muddled, confusing... a sense of time out of joint, instead of the immediacy of a historical event. And yet, they still *felt* real. It was... strange. Perhaps it was just a nightmare. Wouldn't that be reassuring, she thought wryly. But this hadn't been the first time, now that she thought on it. She couldn't remember them well, and had put the disturbances down to Angel's absence-- she never slept as well when he was gone-- but... perhaps this *did* bear looking into. She looked at her sleeping husband again, leaning a little closer to peer at the healing gash on his scalp, the fading bruises on his jaw. Later, perhaps, when they weren't so harried by the rest of the world. Ha. In the meantime... she slipped quietly from their bed and over to the exercise mats, sitting down with a thump and beginning her warm-up. |
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