Dreamspell

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, incidents, and dialogues are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author.

ISBN-10: 0985352905

ISBN-13: 978-0-9853529-0-5

All rights reserved. This book is a copyrighted work and no part of it may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photographic, audio recording, or any information storage and retrieval system) without permission in writing from the author. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the author’s permission is illegal and punishable by law. Thank you for supporting authors’ rights by purchasing only authorized editions.

Editor: S. Hunt Schmanski

Cover Design: Kim Van Meter, KD Designs

To my all-time favorite heroes: David, Skyler, and Maxen.

I am so blessed.

PROLOGUE

London, 1376

E
ven I would have killed for thee.

Dawn lit the words etched in stone, bade him draw near. Aye, he would have killed for her, though not as it was told he had done. Still, this day he would die. For three years, he had languished in this wretched cell awaiting a trial that was only a formality, and yesterday he had been brought before his peers. Now, with the newborn day, the Lieutenant would take him through the city to Smithfield where a noose awaited him.

He rose from his pallet and crossed his cell to where he had carved the words by which he would soon die. Head and shoulders blocking the light that shone through the small window, he traced each letter through to
thee
.

“Nedy,” he whispered, remembering everything about her, from the gentle curve of her lips to her long legs to mannerisms not of this world. More, he remembered the last time they had kissed and the promise she had made him—a promise not kept. But at least he had loved.

The door opened, but it was not the Lieutenant who came for him. Though the years had cruelly aged the man who stepped inside, rounding shoulders that had once been broad, there was no mistaking the third King Edward.

“Wynland.” The king inclined his head.

It was three years since Fulke had been granted such an audience, but he remembered himself and bowed. “Your majesty.”

Edward peered into his prisoner’s face. “You are prepared to die?”

“I am.”

“Yet still you say it was not you?”

Fulke stared at him, those few moments all the confirmation needed of the idle talk of guards. Edward’s mind was on the wane. Was the recent death of his son, the Black Prince, responsible? Though not since the queen’s passing seven years ago could he be said to be right in the head, this was worse, as evidenced by his neglect of affairs of state. The great King Edward was no longer worthy of the crown, the power he had once wielded now in the hands of his greedy mistress, Alice Perrers.

“I trusted you,” Edward said, his jaw quivering in his fleshy face. “When all opposed your wardship of your nephews, I granted it. When my fair Lark was attacked, I would not believe ‘twas you.”

It was an opening for Fulke to defend himself, but he was done with that.

“Have you naught to say?” Edward demanded.

“I have had my say, my liege. There is no more.”

Edward cursed, turned to leave, and came back around. “Beg my forgiveness and mayhap I shall allow you an easier death.”

“There is naught for which I require your forgiveness.” This did not mean he did not seek the forgiveness of others. But it was too late for that.

Anger staining the king’s face, he looked around the cell and lingered on the words that covered the walls. “I was told of this. The troubadours pay well for the guards to bring them these words by which they compose songs of love.”

Fulke considered all he had carved into the stone these past years—words never spoken.

“Why do you do it?”

Feeling a pang at his center, Fulke said, “That she might know.”

Edward shook his head. “You loved wrong in choosing a woman such as that when you could have had—” His voice broke. “I would have forgiven you anything, except my Lark.” He stepped from the cell.

As the door swung closed, Fulke stood motionless, each moment that passed drawing him nearer his last. Finally, he crossed to his pallet and retrieved the worn spoon that was only one of many to have lent itself to his writings. Thumbing the rough edge of all that remained of its handle, he eyed the last words he had inscribed:
Even I would have killed for thee.
They said much, but there was more.

When they came for him an hour later, the final line read:
And now I shall die for thee.
As he stood to be shackled, he considered his words carved around the walls. They were for Nedy, wherever she was.

CHAPTER ONE

University Sleep Disorders Clinic

Los Angeles, California

“I
was there,” Mac said amid the tick and hum of instruments. “Really there.”

Kennedy waited for his eyes to brighten and a grin to surface his weary face. Nothing. Not even a flicker of humor. Dropping the smile that was as false as the hair sweeping her brow, she said, “Sorry, Mac, I’m not buying it.” She turned to the bedside table and peered at the machine that would monitor his sleep cycles.

“You think I’m joking?”

Of course he was. For all the horror MacArthur Crosley had endured during the Gulf War, he was an incorrigible joker, but this time he had gone too far. She unbundled the electrodes.

“I’m serious, Ken.”

Her other subjects called her Dr. Plain, but she and Mac went back to when she had been a doctoral student and he was her first subject in a study of the effects of sleep deprivation on dreams. That was four years ago and, at this rate, it might be another four before she was able to present her latest findings. If she had that long. . .

Feeling the snugness of the knit cap covering her head, she said, “Serious, huh? I’ve heard that one before.”

The familiar squeak of wheels announced his approach. “It happened.”

Meanwhile, the clock kept ticking, the minute hand climbing toward midnight.

“Listen to me, Ken. What I have to tell you is important—”

“Time travel through dreams, Mac?” She uncapped a tube of fixative and squeezed a dab onto the electrodes’ disks. “How on earth did you hatch that one?” Though she might concede some dreams prophesied the future, time travel was too far out there. “Let’s get you hooked up.”

“That’s not what I’m here for.”

She turned and found herself sandwiched between the table and the wheelchair that served as his legs.

“I’ve been holding out on you, Ken. I would have told you sooner, but I couldn’t—not until I was certain it wasn’t just an incredibly real dream.”

“Come on, Mac. It’s midnight, I haven’t had dinner yet, and I’m tired.”

He clamped a hand around her arm. “I’m dead serious.”

Though she knew she had nothing to fear from him, alarm leapt through her when a tremor passed from him to her. Never had she seen Mac like this, and certainly he had never taken his jokes this far. Was it possible that what he said was true—rather, he
believed
it was true? If so, he was hallucinating, a side-effect not uncommon among her subjects, especially beyond sixty hours of sleep deprivation. But she had never known Mac to succumb to hallucinations, not even during an episode four months back when his consecutive waking hours broke the two hundred mark. That had complications all its own.

He released her and pushed back. “Sorry.”

Kennedy stared at him. The whites of his eyes blazed red, the circles beneath shone like bruises, the lines canyoning his face went deeper. Forty-five years old, yet he looked sixty, just as he had when his two hundred and two waking hours had put him into a sleep so deep he had gone comatose. But he had reported eighty-seven waking hours when he called an hour ago.

He had lied. Kennedy nearly cursed. She knew what extreme sleep deprivation looked like, especially on Mac. True, he had cried wolf before, convinced her of the unimaginable to the point she would have bet her life he was telling the truth, but this came down to negligence. And she was guilty as charged.

She consulted her clipboard and scanned the previous entry. Five weeks since his last episode, a stretch considering he rarely made it three weeks without going a round with his souvenir from the war. But why would he under-report his waking hours? Because of the safeguard that was put in place following his coma, one that stipulated all subjects who exceeded one hundred fifty waking hours were to be monitored by a medical doctor?

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