The Dragons of Heaven by Alyc Helms Page A

garden.”
    â€œGarden?” I echoed. “I don’t remember any garden.”
    â€œYou don’t…” Jim trailed off as Mrs Hu appeared between us to fill our cups. Jill plopped down on my other side to extol the virtues of some hot pebble wrap she’d just learned about from our hostess.
    â€œBad continuity,” Jim kept mumbling, his sharp eyes darting about the room. He took a sip of his tea, then grimaced as if he’d tasted something foul. I tested mine before turning to Jill with a half-shrug. Jim was weird. The tea tasted fine to me.
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    O ur cozy party gabbed well past dark, but Mrs Hu was kind enough to offer us lodging in the loft above. Nothing fancy, she warned, just some old hammocks strung between the beams. We happily accepted whatever she could offer. I had just managed to nod off in spite of the hammock’s creaking and swaying when Jim’s poke startled me awake. I jumped, and my stomach lurched as my swaying bed threatened to overturn me. I struggled onto my side.
    â€œShouldn’t you be dangling next to your bride?”
    â€œContinuity errors,” he whispered, as if this explained everything.
    â€œHuh?” I said, because it didn’t.
    â€œAnita is allergic to nuts, but she ate the nutcake, and when I asked her about it, she said it wasn’t nutcake at all, it was fudge.”
    â€œSomebody’s a nutcake,” I muttered, but he ignored me. He was on a roll.
    â€œJill’s vegan, but she ate one of Gunther’s sausages. You have scrapes on your hand, but you don’t remember going out to the garden.”
    Jim ran a hand through mussed hair. The look he gave me was almost mad. Pleading. “Something is wrong. We missed the bus.”
    â€œJim.” I struggled to sit up, then abandoned the effort in defeat as my aching shoulder protested. The hammock swayed, refusing to grant me purchase. “Go back to bed. We’ll talk about this with the others in the morning.”
    â€œNo!” he hissed. “They want to believe everything is fine. You knew differently. You knew, and then you came back, and you didn’t know anymore.” He grabbed my wrist, shaking it. “What bit you? What’s happening? Why can’t you remember? And why doesn’t it bother you that you can’t?”
    â€œI…” He had a point. Every time I tried to think about the scrapes, or what had brought us here, or why I wasn’t able to recall these things, my thoughts broke into a million fragments, all distractions. I remembered being shot, could still feel it like a sore muscle, but I couldn’t recall how I’d gotten the fresh scrapes on my hand, or where I was, or how I’d gotten there.
    â€œI can’t think,” I whispered, the beginnings of panic crawling up my throat.
    Jim nodded. I struggled to rise again, but the hammock held me fast. The more I struggled, the more the mesh tightened around me. “Help me!”
    Jim tried to steady the hammock, but my struggles left me cocooned in the netting. With a curse, he pulled something out of his pocket. A tiny blade snicked open, and he began cutting through the individual strands. A hole widened at the bottom of the net, and I wormed my way out, falling onto my injured shoulder. My yelp pierced the cobweb-festooned rafters.
    â€œYou OK?” Jim hoisted me to my feet. I dusted myself off, shooting an irritated glance at the hammock. I froze at what I saw.
    â€œJim…” his name was more strangled whisper than anything.
    â€œI see it. I don’t believe it, but I see it.”
    The hammock had morphed into a thick wrap of grey, sticky webbing, too much like something a spider would weave around its prey for my tastes. I shuddered and swiped my arms again to brush away phantom remnants of the webbing.
    â€œWe have to free the others.” Jim turned, and I realized mine wasn’t the only cocoon. Dim light flashed off