Free Dream a Little Dream (The Silver Trilogy) (F) by Kerstin Gier

sorry for? And what oath were they going to fulfill? I was almost bursting with curiosity, but I dared not get any closer in case they discovered me. Particularly as Henry was looking straight in my direction. The flames reflected in his eyes looked really scary. No, I couldn’t steal any closer to them. Not unless I really was a cat … Just a moment! This was a dream, after all. I could be anything I liked, even a cat. I’d often turned into an animal in a dream. (Not always of my own free will. I shuddered to remember the dream when I’d been a mouse and Lottie had chased me with a broom.)
    “ Custos opacum  … we humbly ask you to show us who is to fill the empty place … non es aliquid absconditum  … please…”
    I narrowed my eyes and thought as hard as I could of the barn owl I had once been allowed to hold in a wildlife park in Germany. Owls could see at night even better than cats, and above all they could fly without a sound. When I opened my eyes again, I found myself at an airy height several yards above the ground, with my claws around a branch of the cedar tree.
    This was a great dream! It had missed the part where I’d have had to learn to fly and taken me straight to the right place, at the perfect observation post. I squinted past my beak and down to the ground. The four boys were standing just below me, and now I could also see what Arthur had been drawing on the ground: a large, five-pointed star, a pentagram with a circle around it. The grass was still burning half a yard high in some places; in others the flames were already going out.
    “We have come together on this night of the new moon, O Lord of Shadows and Darkness, so that you can tell us the name of her who is to complete our circle again, so that we can keep our part of the pact,” cried Arthur.
    O Lord of Shadows and Darkness —well, now it all sounded somehow more menacing and less ridiculous. But I was glad that he was speaking English and not Latin. It meant that at least I could understand him. I couldn’t wait to see whether the Lord of Shadows and Darkness was going to turn up now in person.
    At first the flames only burned higher, and then the earth rose up in the middle of the pentagram and, with a dull growl, something pushed up out of the ground. Okay, so now it was getting really creepy. My cedar tree was shaking. Terrified that some kind of zombie was going to crawl out of the ground (you could bet that the Lord of Shadows and Darkness didn’t look cute), I instinctively closed my eyes and wound my arms around a branch. I was entirely forgetting that I was an owl and didn’t have any arms. A stupid mistake. When I opened my eyes again, I no longer had claws and feathers, and I was crouching rather awkwardly in human form in the branches of the cedar, complete with nightie, hooded sweater, polka-dot socks, and the certainty that my weight was far too much for the thin branches. They cracked, giving way under me, and although I reached for anything that came my way as I fell, I dropped like a stone into the middle of the pentagram and right onto what had come up from the ground. It wasn’t a zombie, only a polished stone slab about the size of a kitchen table.
    By all the laws of nature known to me, I ought to have broken every bone in my body when I hit the stone slab, but luckily the laws of nature didn’t seem to apply in this dream. A few cedar needles trickled down onto my head, and a cone landed in my lap, but I hadn’t suffered any harm at all.
    I could move without any pain and look at the totally astonished faces of the boys around me as they looked at me, wide-eyed.
    All the same, it was rather embarrassing and kind of beneath my dignity. I didn’t feel a bit like Catwoman now, which was not a good way for my dream to turn out. Far from it. I quickly closed my eyes, hoping that I could simply turn back into an owl and fly away. Unfortunately I couldn’t manage to concentrate on owlishness—no wonder,