THE SANDMAN ☞ TRAVIS STOLL

FOUR

VALERIE CAN'T BREATHE.

    The dream is so fresh in her mind that terror grips her like iron shackles, and she is paralyzed in her cot in the infirmary, frozen and unable to move or breathe or think of anything besides the overwhelming pain she feels.

    She hasn't dreamed of Noelle in over a year, and she had forgotten the pitch of her voice, the precise shade of red that her hair had been, how the freckles on her left cheek formed a constellation, the grassy green of her eyes.

    The dream feels like a punishment two years too late, like her littlest sister, the kindest person she's ever known, is haunting her.

    Everything hurts, pain flaring at every inch of her body and soul. It's not just the physical injury from the cynocephalus, the bite that had cracked her hip bone. No, it's deeper than that. Deeper than bone, deeper than her bloodstream. The very string of Fate that ties her to her humanity, to the earthly plane, burns with the agony of death.

    It's a blinding, deafening pain. She can't feel the sheets against her skin, can't feel the bandage binding her broken hip, can't feel the hair plastered to her sweaty forehead. She's blind, deaf, and numb to everything except her own pain.

    The sound of Noelle's laughter morphs from a beautiful, tinkling, happy sound to something more deranged, more cruel.

    "Please," Valerie whispers, voice hoarse. "Please, Father. Don't use her against me again. I can't do this again."

    Someone answers, but whoever speaks does so far too quietly to hear. Or maybe it isn't someone speaking—it's a presence, stronger than the pain and colder than the fever that wracked her body.

    It takes her several heartbeats to recognize the feeling.

    It's a dream. Someone else's dream, brushing up against the edges of her consciousness, calling to her like a siren's song.

    She grabs onto that dream like it's her lifeline, and she yanks herself upwards, out of the pain and the fever and the scraps of the nightmare that still hold her.

    Valerie claws her way out. Her nails dig into the walls of the tunnel between her mind and that dream.

    She has never, in her entire life, had to force her way into a dream in this way, ripping into a dream like her life depended on it. For all she knows, her life does depend on it.

    The human mind is a fragile, delicate thing. She's known that for a long time. She has broken human minds a time or two, and while demigods are built slightly differently—the children of gods are meant to burn bright and quick, and they are forged for battle, made to be stronger, faster, and smarter—they crack just as easily when pressure is applied to their minds.

    If she was broken by her own abilities, if she was trapped inside of her own mind...

    She has to get out, no matter what it takes.

    When she falls into the dream, it feels like she is seeing the sun for the first time in years. The fever breaks, her pain subsides, and she can think clearly again.

    Instinct replaces fear, and strength replaces agony. She feels like herself, even as she tumbles into a foreign plane of existence.

    "Val?"

    She jumps, her father's gifted shadows lashing out from her. They stop short, inches away from slicing into Travis's face. "It was you. Your dream." She says.

    Of course it had been his dream. She's not surprised.

    His dream is, for a lack of a better word, cozy. They stand in the middle of a wooden cottage, somewhere deep in the mountains judging from the view out the window. It's nowhere Valerie has been before.