The fever arrived somewhere past midnight.
I had not undressed. I had merely collapsed onto the chaise in my study, still wearing the damp wool of my coat, the gas jet turned low until it was nothing but a blue, sleeping flame. My mind, refusing to quiet, played the second carriage ride on an endless loop. The tilt of her head. The slow, appraising gaze. The white kid glove tracing the gold embroidery. It was a cinematograph inside my skull, burning silver nitrate into the backs of my eyes.
Sleep, when it finally took me, did not come as a mercy. It came as a deeper, more dangerous chamber of the same prison.
In the dream, there was no city. There were no cobbles, no gaslights, no clatter of iron wheels. There was only an infinite, grey-white expanse—a frozen lake under a sky the color of milk. The cold was absolute; it bit at my exposed hands, turning the skin a chapped, mottled red. I was walking, walking without destination, my footsteps echoing off nothing.
And then I saw her.
She was standing in the center of the frozen lake, dressed not in the heavy, medieval armor of her bonnet and wool, but in a single, simple shift of white linen. The fabric was so thin it was nearly translucent, clinging to the planes of her body as if it had been painted on. The cold should have made her shiver. It should have turned her lips blue and drawn her shoulders up to her ears. But she stood perfectly erect, her shoulders back, her spine a column of straight, unwavering ivory.
The wind, which I could not feel but could see, lifted her pale blonde hair from her neck in thick, undulating waves. The strands were dry, weightless, ethereal—and in the dream, I knew with a strange, lucid certainty that I had never actually seen her hair unbound in the waking world. This was a gift from my own hungry subconscious; a vision of the golden cascade that I had only guessed at, hidden beneath the heavy silk of her bonnet.
She was looking at me, her glacial blue eyes the only spot of color in the white void. They held that same terrible, unblinking stillness. But in the dream, the silence did not terrify me. It invited me.
I walked toward her. The ice beneath my boots was smooth, frictionless, and I felt myself sliding forward without effort, drawn by a gravitational pull that emanated from her chest.
When I reached her, I did not touch her. I stood a foot away, close enough to feel the faint, paradoxical warmth radiating from her skin—a biological heat that defied the frozen air around us. I could smell her. Not perfume, not soap. It was the clean, sharp scent of crushed wintergreen and cold linen, and underneath it, the faint, dark musk of living blood and breath.
She raised her right hand. The motion was impossibly slow, as if moving through deep water. Her fingers, pale and slender, reached up and brushed the stray strand of hair from my own forehead—a reversal of the gesture I had fixated on in my waking hours. Her touch was feather-light, a ghost of pressure against my skin, yet it sent a bolt of electric heat straight down my sternum, pooling in the pit of my stomach like molten lead.
I could no longer feel the cold. I could only feel the thrum of my own pulse, a frantic, percussive drum that shook my ribs.
In the dream, I reached out. I placed my hands on her waist—the first time I had ever touched her. The linen was damp, cold to the touch on the outside, but beneath it, her flesh was searing. I could feel the heat of her through the fabric, the tectonic warmth of a living body. My thumbs pressed into the soft, yielding curve of her hips, and I felt her breath catch—a tiny, sharp intake of air that fogged the space between our faces.
She did not pull away. She did not avert her eyes. She leaned forward, a single, infinitesimal degree, and her lips parted. That lower lip—fuller, softer than the upper—trembled. It was the tremor I had been hunting. The collapse of her stillness, finally made manifest.
"I have been waiting for you to dream of me," she whispered. Her voice was low, rough, like honey mixed with gravel. It was the first time I had ever heard her speak, and the sound of it—the sheer, intimate reality of her vocal cords vibrating—shook me to my core. "I knew you would. The question is: will you have the courage to wake up, and find me?"
She reached up again. This time, her hand did not touch my face. She brought her fingers to her own throat, to the pale, vulnerable column of her neck. She traced the line of her jugular, a slow, deliberate stroke, and I watched, transfixed, as the skin flushed pink beneath her touch.
Then she pressed her own fingers against her lips—the same gesture she had made in the carriage, but amplified, made explicit. She parted her lips and took the tips of her own fingers into her mouth, wetting them, before pulling them out with a slow, deliberate drag.
It was the most obscene, innocent, devastating thing I had ever witnessed.
I surged forward. I wanted to taste her. I wanted to press my mouth to the wet, swollen curve of her lower lip and feel the silent, glacial hum of her mind collapse into pure, animal heat. The gap between us closed to a single breath. I felt her warm exhalation on my cheek. My hands tightened on her waist.
And then the dream shattered.
I woke with a violent, gasping start on the chaise. The gaslight had burned out. The room was black, save for the grey, pre-dawn seepage through the frost-laced window. My chest was heaving. My hands, still raised in the air, were gripping nothing but the cold, empty wool of my coat.
The dream clung to me like a second skin. I could still feel the phantom pressure of her hips beneath my palms. I could still smell the wintergreen. I could still hear the rough, gravelly intimacy of her whispered question.
Will you have the courage to wake up, and find me?
I stared at the ceiling, my pulse hammering a deafening rhythm in my ears. I had not touched her. I had not kissed her. But my subconscious had just given me a roadmap, a detailed cartography of exactly what it would feel like to hold her, to breathe her, to shatter her porcelain stillness with my own animal hunger.
I stood up. My legs were weak, trembling. I poured a glass of water from the decanter and drank it down, but it did nothing to quench the fire in my chest.
The third carriage would pass in twelve hours.
I was done dreaming. It was time to find her.