That was the beauty of hindsight, of course. It was always twenty-twenty.
The trouble began almost immediately. He retired directly to his bed chamber from the study, slipped into a nightshirt, and crawled beneath the covers. He was exhausted, but sleep would not come. He was keyed up from the day’s events, and the mystery of the dreams played about like a cornered rat in his mind. He chased the rat, but he couldn’t catch it. It was a shadow that eluded him effortlessly. He could see its outline, but could not grasp its form.
Its eyes glowed crimson in the darkness.
He blinked and shoved himself up on his elbows. The rune stone that Willow had given him shone fire red on the nightstand where he had placed it. He blinked, aware suddenly that he must have been nearly asleep when the light had brought him back. The color of the stone meant danger threatened — just as it must have threatened during the whole of the trip back.
But where was the danger to be found, damn it?
He rose and walked about the room like a creature stalking prey. There was nothing there. His clothes still lay draped over the chair where he had thrown them; his duffel still occupied its spot on the floor by the dressing room. He stood in the center of the room for a moment and let the warmth of the castle’s life reach out to him. Sterling Silver responded with a deep, inner glow that wrapped him from head to foot. She was undisturbed.
He frowned. Perhaps the stone was mistaken.
It was distracting, in any case, so he covered it with a towel and climbed back into his bed. He waited a moment, closed his eyes, opened them again, closed them a second time. The darkness cloaked him and did not tease. The rat was gone. Questions and answers mixed and faded in the night. He began to drift.
He might have dreamed for a time, then. There were images of unicorns, some black, some white, and the slender, timeless faces of the fairies. There were images of his friends, both past and present, and of the dreams he had envisioned for his kingdom and his life. They ran through his subconscious, and their fluid motion lulled him as the rolling of an endless sea.
Then a curious fire flared to sudden life within his mind, disrupting the flow. Hands reached from out of nothingness, and fingers clasped the chain about his neck — his hands, his fingers. What were they doing?
And suddenly there was an image of Meeks!
The image appeared from out of a black mist, the wizard a tall, skeletal form cloaked in gunmetal blue with a face as rough and hard as raw iron. He loomed over Ben as if he were death come for its latest victim, one sleeve empty, the other a black claw that reached down, down…
Ben jerked awake with a start, kicking back the bedclothes, sweeping blindly at the dark with one hand. He blinked and squinted. A candle’s flame lit one corner of the room, a solitary pinprick of white-gold against a haze of crimson fire given off by Willow’s rune stone as it blazed in frantic warning on the nightstand, the towel that had covered it gone. Ben could feel the presence of the danger it signaled. His breath came in sharp gasps, and it was as if a giant hand pressed down upon his chest. He fought to push it off, but his muscles would not obey. His body seemed locked in place.
Something moved in the dark — something huge.
Ben tried to shout, but the sound was no more than a whisper.
A figure materialized, scarlet light covering it like blood. The figure stood there and, in a voice that sounded of nails on slate, whispered, “We meet again, Mr. Holiday.”
It was Meeks.
Ben could not speak. He could only stare. It was as if the image that had haunted him during his visit to the old world had somehow managed to follow him back into this one. Except that this was no image. He knew it instantly. This was real!