Chapter 20-What Happened

Odett’s POV

  “We are going to examine what happened without deciding what it means first,” Mom promised.

  “That sounds like Dad’s reporting rule,” I said.

  “It is a useful rule,” Mom said with a small smile.

  “Fear becomes much harder to manage when we fill every blank with the worst answer we can imagine,” she explained calmly.

  We left after Mom sealed the broken glass. The hallway remained quiet, and no doors opened as we passed. Dad’s power rested beneath the castle wards, awake and watchful, but Mom guided me toward the smaller family sitting room instead of his office.

  Grandma Ezmerelda entered minutes later with a heavy shawl around her shoulders and a leather case in hand. She kissed my cheek, studied my eyes, and sat beside Mom. Neither looked frightened, although both watched me more closely than usual.

  “Your mother told me the little she knows,” Grandma said.

  “You may describe the dream, or you may let us view the memory with you,” she offered gently.

  “Neither choice will give us an answer unless the memory contains one,” Grandma cautioned.

  “Can you view it without making me see it again?” I asked.

  “I wish I could, my sweet child,” Grandma said with sympathetic regret.

  “A dream memory has to be opened from the inside,” she explained carefully.

  “I can keep you anchored here, and your mother can end the spell the moment you ask,” Grandma promised reassuringly.

  Grandma had taught me the memory spell when I was fourteen. She had also taught me how to refuse anyone who tried to enter my mind without permission. I trusted her and Mom, but remembering those lessons did not make opening the nightmare easier.

  “We can wait until morning,” Mom said.

  “You do not have to prove anything tonight,” she added reassuringly.

  “I want to know whether I missed something,” I said.

  “If I go back to sleep without looking, I’ll spend the rest of the night imagining something worse,” I added honestly.

  I sat between them on the couch. Grandma placed one hand against my forehead and the other between my shoulder blades, while Mom rested her palm over my shoulder. Their magic settled around mine instead of pressing into it.

  “Open only the last dream,” Grandma instructed with focused calm.

  “Do not reach for the earlier ones, and do not chase anything that tries to move beyond the memory,” she warned firmly.

  I let them into the last dream. The field returned in flashes: cracked ground, still smoke, bodies laid in rows, and children with crimson eyes. Mom caught her breath when the blonde girl appeared. Grandma ended the spell before the darkness reached my ankles.

  The sitting room returned so quickly that I leaned into Mom before realizing the vision had ended. Grandma kept her hand against my back until my breathing steadied. Lorilie pressed close inside my mind, present through every second this time.

  “It was Black Claw,” I said.

  “I remembered the decorations near the western tree line,” I explained shakily.

  “I think I know the blonde girl, too, but I cannot remember from where,” I added.

  “The field came from a real memory,” Grandma said.

  “That does not establish when the rest happened, whether it will happen, or whether the location means what it appears to mean,” she clarified carefully.

  “Dreams borrow familiar places when the mind needs somewhere to hold unfamiliar fear,” Grandma explained gently.

  “The children felt real,” I said with troubled insistence.

  “Feeling real matters, but it is not proof,” Mom said.

  “I am going to confirm that the pack is safe,” she continued decisively.

  “I will not tell them about the dream or send investigators into their territory,” Mom promised.

  Mom contacted the Black Claw household through a family channel. She asked the night guard to confirm the protection seal from the recent ceremony, keeping the question ordinary so she would not frighten the pack with a dream she could not explain.

  The reply came minutes later. Black Claw’s boundary was intact, fresh snow covered the celebration field, and every child registered to the pack was safe. I was relieved. I was also ashamed of the small part of me that had wanted an answer badly enough to fear the relief.

  “They’re safe,” Mom said.

  “Right now, the place you saw has not been attacked,” she added reassuringly.

  “Then why did I recognize it?” I asked with frustrated confusion.

  “We do not know,” Grandma said.

  “I wish we knew more, too, but I won’t give you an answer I can’t trust,” she said gently.

  Grandma found no foreign spell around my mind. She refused to name the dream a prophecy or an attack without proof, then gave me a journal. She wanted the places, scents, injuries, and every detail that changed, written down before fear chose what I remembered.

  “Dates, places, scents, injuries, symbols, and anything that changes from one dream to the next,” Grandma said.

  “Write what happened before you decide what frightened you most,” she instructed patiently.

  “Patterns become useful only when we record them honestly,” Grandma finished with quiet emphasis.

  “Do I have to show Dad tonight?” I asked with weary apprehension.

  “Your father already knows you are safe and that your grandmother is here,” Mom said.

  “We will tell him the rest in the morning, but this remains a family matter unless we discover a reason to treat it differently,” she added firmly.

  Mom stayed while Grandma reinforced the protections around my room. If my power surged or my connection with Lorilie vanished, the spell would alert them. It wouldn’t stop me from dreaming. Neither of them pretended it would, and I was grateful they didn’t ask me to feel safe just because they had finished.

  By breakfast, Black Claw was still safe and Sam’s team still waited at Edric’s border. Dad listened to the dream and said it would not enter an investigation report as evidence. Joshy saw how tired I was at the Academy, but I told him I had slept badly, and he let me keep that much to myself.

  Our morning leadership exercise concerned damaged winter supply ledgers. I spent two hours comparing delivery totals while part of my mind returned to the little blonde girl standing among the bodies. The ordinary work felt almost insulting, but it also gave me something solid to hold while the dream remained impossible to explain.

  That evening, I recorded every detail in Grandma’s journal. Beneath the date, I wrote that Black Claw was safe when Mom checked, Lorilie could not reach me, and the children turned together before the ground held me. I left a blank beside the blonde girl’s description because her name still would not come.

  I had no witness and nothing Dad could use as proof. In the journal, I had drawn a place I remembered and a child whose name I didn’t know. I looked once more at the blank space beside her face before closing it. Leaving it empty felt worse than I had expected.