A Glimmering Girl Read Online Free Page B

hour or so before the gang invaded Faeview later this afternoon for the big game.
    The mist shifted somewhat, and the horizon beyond the bay came more clearly into view. She half dreaded she’d see a tell-tall dark bump sitting on the line between sea and sky.
    Don’t let it be real.
    Dumnos was a land of mist and rain. Right. And of wyrd and fae, of gods and goblins and magic rings and tether jewels. A land where trees channeled the energy that animates all things and where mothers traveled through time.
    Like Lilith’s mother. When Lilith was an infant, her own mother had brought her from the eighteenth century to the twentieth to escape a bad fairy. She’d grown up in a desert on the other side of the world. Then after her mother had supposedly died, strange dreams had called Lilith back to Dumnos.
    Dreams of Igdrasil and Tintagos Castle, dreams of a wyrding woman named Elyse.
    Thank the high gods she’d answered Elyse’s call. It had led to the weirdest, most unbelievable adventure of a lifetime. And to Cade.
    Now last year’s drama was over and Igdrasil restored. You’d think she’d be allowed to get on with her life. But no. New dreams, terrifying dreams, threatened her lovely new world. And that wasn’t all of it, not even half.
    Again she looked for the island. In her dreams it was so clear, so real. But the mist again thickened, and the horizon disappeared. Certainty and doubt played checkers in her mind.
    The chill had already seeped into her bones. If Dumnos were a normal place, she’d call or text Cade and suggest they have their picnic at the lake near the Temple of Joy and Wonder instead. It would be a risk to meet so close to Mudcastle, but the lake was nearer home, and the mist rarely made it that far inland.
    She couldn’t text Cade if she wanted to. In Dumnos cell phones— mobiles —were inoperable due to atmospheric conditions , as Marion’s daughter Sharon put it.
    Lilith went back to the Mini and retrieved the basket and quilt she’d put in the trunk— boot. In a grassy spot between Igdrasil and the Lovers, she spread the quilt and laid out lunch—Hobnobs, cheese and pickle sandwiches, and a blended red wine. Nothing she would have eaten living in California. The wine was too expensive and the cookies and sandwiches too foreign.
    Yet the foreign felt so familiar. This is where she belonged. In California she’d been the stranger in a strange land. She loved the thousand iterations of green in England, the constant rain and sudden surprising sunshine, and how in this rediscovered world so many things had names. Trees, for instance. Even her house had a name.
    Two names. Faeview , the estate’s real name and the one Lilith preferred, and Bausiney’s End , the nickname laid on years ago by locals when they feared their lord would never produce a son. One way or another, the former Lady Dumnos had at length delivered Cade.
    Igdrasil wasn’t the only tree in Tintagos with a name. The Lovers, a hazel tree entwined by a honeysuckle, had volunteered from the ground at the far end of Igdrasil’s visible roots and had grown to full maturity within minutes. The Lovers were said to embody the spirits of a cursed prince and princess bound to the mundane realm until Cade and Lilith had set them free.
    Lilith knew better.
    Galen and Diantha hadn’t escaped the gold and silver prison of the oracle’s ring only to be bound in hazel and honeysuckle. These plants had sprung up spontaneously, as if set by the mystic to mark the event. The real lovers had been accepted into heaven by Brother Sun and Sister Moon—along with Elyse, who had bound them. The high gods were merciful.
    High gods! Until she’d come to Dumnos, Lilith had never heard of Brother Sun and Sister Moon. Now she realized her mother’s favorite oath— great gods!— had an actual source.
    A horn bee-beeped from the road.
    “Cade!” She waved as her husband parked his DB5, one of the actual Aston Martins used on the film set of