Chapter One

Xia was an expert on dreams. It was safe to say fewer than a dozen souls on the planet had more knowledge than she. Clawing her way across the sweaty, plaid sheets, she choked, body trembling. Her mind tumbled but already her training kicked in. She gasped in one raspy breath. Flashback, she realized. Not real.

Coughing shook her. A body could be slow to strip off the mind’s tricks. And a morphi, a Chamber-trained dreamer witch, knew that invisible magic killed just as surely as physical steel. With another rasping breath, she wrestled her pounding heart. It’s been twenty years since I survived Aqua’s mind. I’m in Scotland. I’m Xia.

Brushing her long, tangled auburn hair from her hot face, her fingertips grazed wet cheeks. Cursing her own weakness, she scrambled to scrub her face dry. I’m not drowning in my own bed. Lady take it, she knew better than to lounge half-awake, even well after dawn. A morphi’s magic worked in the twilight hours of half-light, but with so many years of missions, she had plenty of nasty memories. Her dreams were stronger than most, and her nightmares… Well there were instances where morphi went insane overnight. She’d been so cozy, so lazy, and her subconscious had slipped her a zinger.

She rolled to the edge of the bed and curled her mauve-painted toenails into the bland, sturdy beige carpeting of her rental cottage. Her shoulders still heaved with deep breaths. She’d been here for a frustrating month. If it were a normal assignment, failure to glean information out of her dreamlike elemental patrols would piss her off. But when the assignment was this personal, this momentous, this dire… Her fingers clenched so tight around the edge...