THE DREAMS ALWAYS began with smoke.
Restless in a cramped hotel bed, in a hiccup of a town halfway down the jagged Portuguese coastline, my sister stole the sheets and muttered sleep-talk beside me while I dreamed again of smoke. There was a shade of paint called Vantablack that was rumored to be the darkest known pigment, but this smoke was darker yet somehow, drinking in all light. The smoke seeped out from under the hotel bed mattress, devouring the color from the room until it had expunged the sunny yellow from the walls, leaving the space grayscale, like an old movie. A dark promise snapped in the air like lightning.
I sat up in bed, sunken-eyed, watching myself from outside my own body. Another hotel room, another town. We’d been traveling so long they all blended together. The smoke from under the bed slowly took shape as it pulled itself into a pillar the size of a person, then inclined over me in wormlike form. Immobile, I could only watch as it hovered, hovered, hovered, and then crashed down into a thunderclap of black soot—
I jerked awake.
For real this time. Sitting up with a gasp—touching my face, assuring myself I was awake—I checked for Kylie’s slumbering body next to mine. She was there. She was safe. Her chest lifting and falling slowly, her lips silent now.
I sagged back against the pillows.
How long had it been now—two weeks? Since we’d boarded the plane in Salt Lake City bound for Portugal, hungry to follow the trail of clues my father had left behind, meager crumbs that might lead us to our family, to answers. We hadn’t had much to go off: a thirty-year-old Lisbon return address on an envelope and town names mentioned in his short stories. Winemakers, he’d called the Acosta side of the family. Occultists. Artists. As though being an artist was the worst thing a person could be.
The thing was, I was starting to believe he was right.
Copyright © 2023 by Megan Shepherd. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
