Dark Stars by Danielle Rollins (best affordable ebook reader txt) 📕

be coming. But—it was the strangest thing—see, the storm only seemed to be brewing in this one, very specific part of the sky. If he turned his head either to the left, or to the right, the clouds were still light and fluffy.

Weird, he thought. He’d seen a lot of storms in his time, but he’d never known them to act like this.

His eyelids were growing heavy. Lightning flashed, and he thought he felt thunder rumble through the earth, the vibration moving up his bed. His pillow was so soft. . . .

And then, smoke appeared. He smelled it before he saw it, that acrid, engine smell leaking through the glass in his windows. His eyes fluttered back open at the exact same moment that the shapes of two people appeared in the clouds. Ash watched, drearily, certain he was dreaming as the people fell to the earth, their bodies thudding into flattened grass. For a moment, they were still. Ash wondered whether they were dead. They hadn’t fallen a long way, but it had certainly looked painful.

He began to drift. He was stuck in that halfway point between sleep and waking. He wasn’t entirely sure whether his eyes were open, and everything felt so heavy, so warm.

The two people who’d just dropped out of the sky began to move. They crawled to hands and knees, and then stood, dusting off pants and shaking out their jackets. The smoke around them began to fade, and the clouds overhead lightened and thinned. One of the people was a woman—

Dorothy, Ash realized dimly. What was she doing?

She knelt, offering a hand to the other person. Ash squinted. It was a man in a tweed jacket, his salt-and-pepper hair strangely familiar. . . .

Okay, Ash thought, grinning stupidly. This was definitely a dream. Because that wasn’t just any man, it was the Professor, and he happened to know that the Professor was dead. He’d died at Fort Hunter complex in 1980. He and Zora had seen the footage, and they’d stood on the bloodstained rooftop, so he knew it was true. The Professor was long gone.

So he couldn’t be standing outside just now.

Couldn’t be.

Ash’s eyes closed. He felt himself sink farther into his pillows, drowsiness washing over him in a wave. He hadn’t fully recovered from his stab wound, and he needed rest to heal. Rest, and some morphine, preferably. Why couldn’t Dorothy have taken him to a time period where they had better drugs?

Sleep, he thought groggily. Sleep sounded so good right now.

But something nagged at him.

All the other dreams he’d had while unconscious, they were of the past, of things that had actually happened. There was the time he met Dorothy in the clearing outside the church, and that first moment he saw Quinn Fox’s hair on a security camera and realized that she was going to be the one to kill him. But the only time Ash had ever seen the Professor and Dorothy together was at the Fort Hunter complex.

And . . . well, now that he thought about it, that was a pretty strange coincidence, seeing them together. When had it even happened? Dorothy had never mentioned going back to Fort Hunter with Roman. And what had she wanted with the Professor, anyway? As far as he knew, the two had never met in real life. She’d have told him if they had, wouldn’t she?

My daughter just left, Loretta had said. Ash had tried to get her to tell him more, but she’d refused. She’d stood, saying that he needed his rest, and then she’d left his room without another word. Ash hadn’t given it much more thought—Loretta had been right, he had needed his rest—but now he frowned.

What the hell?

Curiosity was enough to get him to pry his eyes open again. The last of his drowsiness had faded, and the scene outside his window wasn’t quite so swimmy and strange. He could clearly see the Professor and Dorothy walking across the grass. Talking to each other.

His heart began to beat a little faster.

“Professor?” he murmured. He pushed himself up to a sitting position, groaning deeply. Everything ached. He felt like he’d been hit by a truck. It took him several tries to get his legs out of the bed, and several more tries before he could put any weight on them at all. He grabbed for the wall to steady himself, thinking, Easy now. He moved one foot and then the other. It wasn’t until he walked all the way to the end of his bed that he trusted himself to move his hand away from the wall. He swayed, a little, but managed to stay upright. So far, so good.

He hobbled across the room, toward the door. The door was heavy, and it took all his remaining strength to pull it open, but the hall outside was empty. Ash felt his heartbeats falling like hammer blows. He wanted to run, but he didn’t want to end up flat on the floor, so he forced himself to move slowly, carefully. It was excruciating, how long everything was taking.

Ash limped out of his room and down the hall. By the time he made it to the staircase, he’d managed to convince himself that he’d been hallucinating. He had to have been hallucinating. The Professor was dead. He couldn’t have been outside. He couldn’t have been.

Slowly, slowly. Each step down the staircase was agony, but he would have gone down a dozen staircases if that’s what it would take to know the truth.

He made it to the first floor and stumbled up to the front door seconds before it burst open and Dorothy appeared, silhouetted against the light.

“Ash?” She reached for him, worry lines etched across her face. “What on earth are you doing out of bed? You’re ill—”

“I—I saw you . . .” Ash murmured, looking past her. “I saw you with—”

The rest of his sentence died on his tongue as a man stepped inside the house. He wore a tweed jacket covered in bits of dust and debris. He