For one who saw dreams just as the mind’s way of coping without sensory information, as pictures that played at their leisure behind closed eyelids, Vesper was plagued by nightmares surprisingly often.
She wouldn’t really call them “nightmares,” but they were always replays of the less savory parts of her life, or sinister alternative realities. Sometimes she dreamed of Juniper, of Oliver and his snapping words, and her injured hind paw would twitch behind her. Sometimes she dreamed of a failed hunt, warped so that she slunk away with a bruised rib that soon punctured a lung. Sometimes—the worst times—she dreamed of stepping onto ice that cracked, dropping her into freezing depths, refreezing over her head.
This time she dreamed of a black face, teeth shimmering yellow-white in a gaping maw. The face was raised above her, but it struck down swift as a snake, and a hot line of pain cut across her brow. Those teeth closed on her ear, ripping it in half. Blood was in her eyes then, and she recoiled, snarling, not wanting to give up, but a tall body—oh so tall, she had been even smaller then—shoved her to the ground.
This was the part where her father jumped on her, tearing his fangs across her hips as she struggled. It was the part where he leaped away once she’d managed to tear his lip, where he muttered what a pity it was, where he left her alone and her sister tagged along.
In the dream, however, small Sparrow grinned sinisterly, her father’s daughter, and jumped in to bite Ves while she was down.
Teeth connected in her heel, and the coywolf let out a high-pitched snarl of fury, whirling around and wrinkling her lips back over teeth and gums gleaming with ropes of saliva. She realized she was no longer in a dream when the sight of a cat’s departing tail and the watery horizon greeted her. She leaped up in the grassy-covered sand, too furious to cool down as she usually wound. Her dream had sent a pulse of adrenaline through her, and she wanted to rend the feline’s flesh from its bones.
She chased after the cat, snarling still, her tail straight out behind her as she sprinted toward it. She was beginning to catch up when another shape—canine, merle with hints of black and orange around a face—appeared ahead of her. She slowed down but did not stop, her blue eyes fleeting only briefly across the dog’s face before they sought out the cat again.
Oh, she was going to destroy it.
