Page 2 of Proven By The Highlander (Highlander Forever #15)
CHAPTER 2
S he kept waiting to wake up. The strange beings around her were helping her to her feet now, incredibly gentle but impossibly strong. Even close to them, she couldn’t make out their faces… only that they were tall and strange and ethereal, and somehow difficult to think of as human beings despite their humanoid shape. Something unsettling about that, for all that she still felt the eerie conviction that she could trust them. As they moved her to her feet, she began to feel the room materializing more clearly around her, though it was still impossible to make out its edges in the gloom, especially not with the bright glow of the tall, slender figures interfering with her eyesight.
Her headache was gone, though, she noticed as she squinted her eyes. For some reason, she thought of the way the beings had stroked their long, slender fingers through her hair, and wondered if that massage had something to do with the easing of the ache… but that didn’t make any sense, did it? This was a dream. How could a dream cure her headache?
Dream or not, it was all feeling very real. She took a halting step at the quiet urging of the figures around her, then another, feeling her bare feet pressing into a cool, hard surface a little like stone but not quite. She was still in her pajamas… the very same set she’d worn to bed that night, in fact. Strange. Usually in dreams her clothing changed from minute to minute.
“What’s going on?” she tried asking, her voice feeling oddly far away. This was the ultimate test of whatever lucid dreaming situation was going on here. She’d never been able to successfully speak aloud in a dream – it would always lead to her coming awake in her bed, lips moving as her body attempted to obey the instruction that her dreaming-self had issued. But that didn’t happen. Her voice felt quiet and subdued here, as though the space around them was impossibly vast. The figures shifted in response, clearing hearing her, but they didn’t reply.
“Hey – who are you?” Leanne tried again, feeling oddly worried by their refusal to respond. “What is this place?”
Again, no response… and now there was almost an impatience in the movements of the figures as they led her slowly but surely away from the bed. She followed obediently, but she could feel her frown creasing her forehead more and more deeply as she looked around the place, trying to get more of an insight into where she was. Somehow, it was getting harder and harder to write this off as a dream. Dreams took place in settings familiar to her, drawn from her own memories… but she’d never been in a place like this one before.
There was a door up ahead, somehow… though she couldn’t make out the wall around it, or even the floor in front of it, she somehow sensed what it was. The glowing figures were bunched up around her now, most of them behind her, a couple on either side of her, and the implication was clear – they were going through the door. Or at the very least, she was. To her right, one of the figures leaned forward and reached out with one slender, glowing arm… and though she could see no sign of a doorknob or any kind of mechanism on the door before them, nevertheless the great door swung slowly open.
Beyond it was utter darkness. Leanne stood at the threshold, staring ahead of her into the dark, confused and a little frightened by what she was looking at. It was dark, yes… but this whole room was dark, too. This was different. Somehow, this darkness was mobile, dancing and shifting before her eyes like moving water… but how was that possible? One thing was clear. It couldn’t be safe to step through that door. But before she could so much as turn to her escorts to ask a question, she felt a firm press on her lower back, reassuring but undeniable. Before she could resist, she half-stepped, half stumbled forward… and found herself enveloped by the darkness as completely as if she’d fallen into dark, cold water.
Hang on a moment. Leanne was grateful she’d taken a sharp breath of air just before the figures had pushed her through the door, because when she opened her eyes again, it was to the sudden, shocking realization that she was underwater. She couldn’t remember a shock of cold, a splash, any indication that a transition between air and water was taking place… but nevertheless, here she was, submerged in dark, cold water with her limbs flailing and her pajamas ballooning out around her limbs.
This would have been the time to panic, Leanne knew that. But somehow, her absolute disbelief in what was happening kept her cool as a cucumber. She blinked around the darkness that surrounded her, turning back to look for the door, knowing before she even turned that there would be nothing to see back there. Sure enough, there was no sign whatsoever of the glowing figures. Only darkness, more darkness, cold, wet darkness. She was underwater. How the hell was she underwater?
Leanne kicked her legs, and the movement seemed to stir her body into action. Before long, she was swimming, her heart pounding in her chest as the quiet itch for air grew less and less quiet. She had no idea which way was up, that was the thing. She was fairly certain she was going toward the surface… but for all she knew, she might have been swimming further down. If there even was a surface to swim for. What if she drowned? She’d died in dreams before, of course, but the more time she spent here, thrashing her legs furiously in the wet, heavy embrace of the water, the more trouble she was having believing she was dreaming. No dream had ever been this vivid.
But even with that fear beginning to press in on her, what happened next shook her conviction that all of this was really happening. A gray shape loomed suddenly in the dark water around her, easily differentiated from the dark water by its rapid movement and the slightly lighter shade of its skin… there was something whale-like about it, though it had a very long neck, and for a moment she wondered if she’d somehow ended up in the ocean. The creature moved closer, whatever it was… and she found herself thinking of the dreams she’d had her whole life, dreams of meeting a dinosaur or some kind of cryptid in person, of making a connection with an animal thought by the rest of the world to be either extinct or imaginary…
Her lungs were burning and her body was beginning to pulse with panic as her need to breathe grew overwhelming. She could feel some great force beneath her, bearing her forcefully in the direction she’d been struggling in, and as the darkness around her steadily brightened she realized with a rush that the creature was propelling her toward the surface. Upwards… upwards… but was it going to be too late? She hung on for dear life, both to the rough surface beneath her hands and to her fading consciousness… and just when she thought she was going to pass out no matter how hard she tried, a fresh shock of adrenaline ran through her and she felt her head break the surface of the water.
Leanne gasped for breath, thrashing and struggling in the choppy water, the freezing air on her face the most delicious thing she’d ever felt. Her vision was clearing with each fresh gasp of air, and she realized she was treading water, paddling to keep herself upright in the water, the reassuring pressure of whatever had borne her up to the surface long gone. Leanne spun around in the water with some difficulty, scanning the surface in search of her rescuer, but she couldn’t see anything but dark, choppy water spreading out in all directions.
Was she in the ocean? she wondered faintly. No — the water slopping into her mouth didn’t taste of salt. This must be a lake, or something like it.
That didn’t mean she wasn’t going to drown out here, though, she thought with another ripple of fear running down her spine. She stared around herself, disoriented and frightened, pajamas clinging wetly to her legs as she kicked them to keep herself afloat. It was the middle of the night, and she couldn’t make out anything but moonlight shining down from the partially cloudy sky above… no sign of lights on the distant shoreline, or even a shoreline at all. The relief of having air to breathe was beginning to fade, replaced by a fear of death with a slightly longer timeframe — though if the freezing cold water gave her a cramp, that timeframe was going to be a lot shorter in a hurry…
But then there was a stirring in the water a few feet away from her, a stirring at odds with the choppy waves that troubled the surface. Suddenly, leg cramps and cold water couldn’t have been further from Leanne’s mind. Because extending up from the surface of the lake, like some kind of graceful periscope, was the unmistakable shape of a sinuous, serpentine neck… and she stared up into the curious dark eyes of the aquatic beast that had come to her rescue.