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his horse shied and crashed into the one to the right, voices shouted as the mounts danced and were drawn back under control.
    A moment later she was past the riders, and when she looked back for another sight of the beautiful young man, the riders had disappeared, replaced by a vast army encampment of men, tents, and horses, with bedraggled women tending the cooking fires and squires cleaning armor. She could smell the smoke, the meat cooking, their unwashed bodies, the manure of animals. As they, too, melted away, vanishing like a vision, she looked forward and saw a field bisected by a column of Roman soldiers marching down a stone road, their leather-clad feet slapping the ground in drumlike rhythm. Their stone road sank away beneath green vegetation, taking the soldiers with it. A herd of strangely horned, enormous cattle grazed in their place beneath a sun that baked Caitlyn’s skin, and when they as well faded away to nothing, Caitlyn felt a chill run over her body, and the landscape turned to blowing snow as far as she could see, as if an ice age had swallowed the land.
    She jerked awake to the skittering sound of sleet on the roof of the car, the ice pellets scrabbling like the claws of frightened mice. She looked around in confusion, the scenes of her dream tearing apart like clouds in the wind, leaving her with only a memory of intense hazel eyes and a name: Raphael.
    The Mercedes was moving smoothly along the road. Where was the semitruck?
    “Excuse me?” she squeaked at the driver. “Er, excusez-moi?”
    The driver’s dark pebble eyes flicked up to look at her in the rearview mirror.
    “Didn’t we have an accident? Un accident?”
    White brows drew down in a frown.
    “With a truck?” she clarified. “ Camisole ?”
    “ Camisole?”
    Shoot. That was an undershirt, not a truck. “Big car, for carrying things?”
    “Ah. Un camion.”
    “ Oui! Did we almost have an accident with un camion ?”
    “I swerved.”
    “Oh.” Of course he did. She remembered the jerk of the car. “Did I faint?”
    He smirked, and turned his eyes back to the road.
    She’d fainted, something she’d never done before. She rubbed her forehead and shook her head. Apparently, she was even more worn out than she’d thought.
    At least she hadn’t had one of her Screecher nightmares while she’d been out cold. Maybe, like the evil spirits of legend, the apparitions that visited her dreams couldn’t cross over moving water and hadn’t been able to pursue her over the Atlantic Ocean. She could always hope that the Screechers had been left behind with her old life.
    Hazel eyes and a head of curly hair filtered up from her unconscious. Raphael , an inner voice whispered, and her heart tripped in response.
    Caitlyn dug in her backpack and pulled out her art journal, flipping through to her last entry, where she’d drawn the tarot cards. The Knight of Cups sat on his horse in his winged helmet and armor, a cup held up in his hand. The only similarity to the boy in her dream was youth, and a horse. Raphael had worn no armor, had held no cup. She dug out a pencil and wrote Raphael? under the Knight of Cups. She turned to a fresh page and sketched the riders on the road, Raphael in their midst, twisting in his saddle to look back at her.
    Her pencil hesitated over the blank of his face, the features already disappearing from her memory, leaving behind only a sense of how vivid they had been, mere minutes before. She tentatively shaded in shadows to give a sense of the proportions of his face, but the features themselves were lost to her. The effect of the shadows on her drawing ended up more ghostly than man-of-her-dreams, and she sighed in frustration. Her artistic skills had never been adequate to the vividness of her dreams. Never did she regret that as much as she did right now.
    She flipped back to the beginning of her journal, and the first entry, from three years ago: a dark-faced Screecher with long black hair howled on the