Rowan Hunter is drowning again.
No. That’s not right. This time, Rowan is floating, but the water churns around him, dark and cloudy, the silt swirling all around, and he can’t see—he can’t see—but he knows in that bone-deep way that somewhere very near, the beautiful boy is dying again.
If only he could see.
In these dreams, the lake is the lake from his sweltering hometown. The calm lake of cut-off jeans and popsicles dropped in the sand, watching the other teen boys shirtless and sweaty, tanned unevenly from the summer sun.
But, in these dreams, the lake is something else too. Something deep and cold. Unfathomably large, an ocean swaddled by rocky shorelines and misnamed, a changeling masquerading as a lake. Ice shards float on its surface, and in these dreams, Rowan worries that their razor edges will harm the beautiful boy. The one he can always sense but can never see. He waits for blood to bloom in the blue-black water.
Something brushes the back of his neck and he twists his body in the water, a contortionist suspended, spinning until he is face to face with the beautiful boy. The boy is around his age, mid-twenties and pretty, broad-shouldered and square-jawed, but those all-American looks are betrayed by full lips and long dark lashes. An undercurrent of melancholy in the drift of his limbs.
Rowan leans close because he can’t resist it.
The boy’s eyelids snap open. Where he should have eyes, there is only darkness. A galaxy of blackness and pinprick stars. Rowan stares into their depths, and when his lips crack open, no bubbles escape, but in his deep voice, he speaks one single word.
ROT—
—Rowan’s eyes flew open.
An alien landscape raced toward him through his windshield. Everything was encased in ice that sparkled under the bright sun. Whip-thin saplings were bent to the ground in lovely but surreal arcs, their tips touching snow, and it took him a long, frozen moment to realize that his car was drifting off the road.
“Oh, shit,” he hissed as his tires rumbled over the ice at the shoulder.
He wrenched the wheel and gasped into the frigid air of his heater-less, and the vehicle veered back onto the road. Its old, rusty body rocked with all the sudden movement.
“God,” he breathed out once he was safely driving again, trying to blink the sleep out of his eyes.
The road stretched out ahead of him, blacktop covered in ice and snow, tree branches arching over the long ribbon of pavement, bare of leaves, their limbs black and crooked.
“Where…? What?” He squinted out the windshield before groaning and dragging a hand over his face. “Damn it, again?”
For the last six months, his bouts of insomnia and narcolepsy had been getting worse, and he didn’t know why. Oh, there had been doctors. Specialists and pharmaceuticals, sleep studies and his very worried mother, and then letters from his university when he stopped showing up to class. First, they were concerned and informative, and then bleak, and finally definitive. Rowan was expelled before the last semester of his senior year.
The dreams didn’t start until after he moved back home.
Rowan flexed his hands on the steering wheel, his knuckles going white as he scanned the road for any signs of where he was.
It’s not like he’d never drifted off while driving before. Who hadn’t? Until recently, Rowan had been a college student—chronically sleep-deprived and underfed, and falling asleep behind the wheel was just something that happened from time to time, even before his brain had started to betray him.
Still, he had never done anything like this. How far had he driven this time?
Last he remembered, Ohio didn’t have any snow to speak of. Now, the world around him was blanketed in white. It was thick and crusty, an ice layer shimmering over everything like something out of a movie.
Like it had been that way for a while. That...wasn’t great.
Rowan glared at the empty energy drink cans and candy bar wrappers that littered the passenger seat. Traitor foods. He’d been trying to stay awake. He knew it was a struggle these days. Even now, his hand vibrated under the influence of caffeine and sugar, but his eyelids were still heavy.
“Stop,” he hissed to keep his eyes open, and then, “oh.”
Up ahead, a beautifully carved sign announced a new city limit, and Rowan read it out loud.
“Morgana Falls, Michigan.” He sighed. “So much for Ohio. I need to call Mom.”
Talking out loud helped. It separated reality from Rowan’s dreams. It helped him to stop seeing the dream boy’s face everywhere. Sometime in the last six months, he had ceased to care if he looked unhinged. Anything he could do to tether his mind to his body, he would.
The trees opened up before him, unfolding their hands to reveal a quaint, snow-covered stretch of downtown. Rowan had woken up in worse places, though never any quite so far away. Squat buildings in neutral colors lined the street, each adorned with a colorful hanging sign: Bent Corner Books, Cream and Sugar Cafe, Dead Drift Tackle Shop.
Morgana Falls was exactly the kind of town he imagined disappearing to whenever he imagined disappearing, which was often. Sweet and nonthreatening with a bait shop, and maybe he would learn to fish. That sounded peaceful. He needed peace now, at least that’s what his doctors told him.
Maybe he would learn to tie flies, and he would sit on the bank of whatever river ran through Morgana Falls, and slowly his mind would float back to him on the current. Maybe he would be an entire man by the end. Maybe he would—
The deer wasn’t anywhere and then it was in the center of his lane.
Rowan slammed on his brakes. His Camry shuddered with the force, crooked sideways, and slid. Morgana Falls sped past his window in a kaleidoscope of colorful signs. Please, please, please, he begged, and his car finally came to a stop in the crunchy snow.
This town seemed determined to kill him in an icy car accident.
Rowan took several moments to slow his panting breath and his drumming heart. When he finally opened his eyes, the deer stood just in front of the nose of the car, exactly where it had been before he’d lost control of his vehicle. The deer stared down into his windshield. Black eyes full of stars. Rowan’s chest stirred with the sudden uncomfortable knowledge that the deer could just crawl right through the glass if it wanted to. He hoped it didn’t want to.
Slowly, frozen like the landscape around them, the doe lifted one front leg. Rowan watched, transfixed. With purpose, she placed it on the rusty bumper, and his whole car creaked with the pressure.
“What?” he breathed out, and the doe’s head snapped up to meet his eyes again.
She gave one determined snort and then bounded off behind the buildings, disappearing into the woods beyond.
“What?” Rowan repeated.
With shaking hands, he carefully pulled the shuddering old Camry into an angled parking spot on Main Street.
So, now he can add haunted by whitetail deer to his list of ailments along with narcolepsy, insomnia, and fugue states. Very good. Maybe he wouldn’t be doing any fly-fishing here after all.
“Gotta call Mom,” Rowan reminded himself and reached into his coat pocket for his phone. “Aw, come on,” he muttered when his hand came up empty.
He was always dropping the damn thing. Letting it fall out of his pockets or leaving it on the table if he went out for a cup of coffee. Forgetful. He’d been that way since he was a kid. His mom used to connect his mittens with a length of yarn, and he wasn’t ashamed to say that he still did the same thing for himself. A good idea is a good idea, even if it’s an embarrassing one intended for small children.
Rowan patted around on the floor for his phone, reaching under the seats but still found nothing.
“Great. Fell asleep behind the wheel and drove for six hundred miles. Almost got trampled by a deer. And now I don’t have a phone.”
With a frustrated groan, Rowan unfolded his body from his tiny car and slammed the door behind him. The force knocked loose the ice that had built up in his wheel wells, and he stared at the dirty piles of it before taking stock of the buildings in front of him.
“The Cream and Sugar Cafe,” he mumbled, “sure. Why not?”
The bell jingled on the door and an assortment of gray heads turned toward him. The air smelled of old grease and burnt coffee, but a pretty, smiling waitress swept to the front of the restaurant with a large menu tucked under her arm.
She might have been sixteen; she might have been forty-two. She had that kind of ageless face. Not young, but eternal.
“Hey, darlin’. Coffee?”
Rowan’s already arrhythmic heart kicked in his chest, but he smiled back and said, “Okay, thanks. And a phone, if you don’t mind? I seem to have lost mine.”
The smile on her face twitched, and the friendly light in her eyes dimmed for a moment before she recovered her expression. She smiled wider./
“Sorry, sweetheart, phones are down with the ice storm.”
And then she drifted behind the counter.
Rowan glanced out the window into the sun-bright snow. The evidence of the storm was everywhere, from the icy roads to the tortured and bent-over trees, but it had clearly settled hours ago. How long could it take to restore phone lines?
“Any idea when they’ll be back up?” he asked.
The waitress’ smile grew a creaking fraction wider. “Hard to say. Things move a little slower up here.”
“Isolated.”
That was one of the gray-haired men and his deep voice made Rowan jump. The man sat at the long table lined with other gray-haired men. He stared at Rowan with blue eyes so pale they almost seemed to have no irises.
“Middle of nowhere,” another gray-haired man offered.
“See?” the waitress said, her smile back to a normal width. “Don’t worry, sugar, have some coffee and the phones will be back up before you know it.”
When she turned around to snag a fresh mug off the shelf, Rowan slipped back out the door. He flit as quickly as he dared down the icy sidewalk. A little distance between him and the Cream and Sugar, that’s what he wanted.
He let himself come to rest at the end of the block.
“Shit,” he muttered, pacing back and forth in front of an antique shop that looked like it had gone out of business thirty years ago. He cupped his hands in front of his face and blew warm breath onto them. “Fuck.”
His mother was going to be worried sick. She had hovered over him ever since he’d moved back home. Was he getting enough to eat? Maybe his room was too warm for sleep? Or too cold? Could she get him anything from the store?
Rowan loved her fiercely, but all he’d wanted was a little space.
“Well, you’ve got it now,” he said, and then his eyes caught on the newspaper box in front of the Cream and Sugar.
LOCAL BOY MISSING, the headline read.
Rowan leaned closer and squinted at the image occupying nearly the entire page above the fold.
The boy from his dreams stared back at him, his full lips open in a laugh, his eyes absent of stars.