Free The 13th Mage by Inelia Benz

wardrobe!” Owen shouted from the other room, “pull the … the… light bulb down and it opens up.”
    There he was again, answering her thoughts before she said anything. She was sure she had not said anything that time, besides, Owen wasn’t even in the room, so even if she had said something he wouldn’t have heard her.
    She waited until she heard Owen going into his study then run up the stairs. It was true, she pulled the light bulb inside the wardrobe a small trapdoor opened at the back of it and the area it revealed with stuffed with chests. She opened the one on top. I t was filled with clothes, shoes, a diary, photographs, and hats . I n short , everything it should be filled with. It was perfect.
    That evening she heard Owen walking around the house talking in a foreign language, she went out to see what was going on, he had simply looked at her and in a deep and strange voice said, “ forget .”
    “Forget what?” she answered, at which point Owen dropped a stick he was carrying and stared at her dumbfounded, “ forget ,” he repeated, and she felt wheezy, her memories were folding over, then snapped back.
    “What was that!” she shouted at him, “was that some kind of hypnosis thing? Don’t you dare try to mess with my head like that again Owen O’Neil,” she said and stormed back into her room, slamming the door behind her. She was furious.
    She thought about leaving, Owen seemed like a nice boy, but if he was dabbling into occult things or hypnosis there was no way she would hang around to be his guinea pig. But then she thought about Sean. The last time she had asked him about Sean he simply said he didn’t know where Sean was. Then tried to rectify it by insisting he didn’t know anyone named Sean, lying was not one of Owen’s strong points. She was sure he would tell her all about Sean soon, how to contact him.
    The dreams began soon after that, they were very bright, colorful dreams . T hey were like an enhanced version of reality. Sean was in them, they would sit together among the trees or by a lake. He would ask her about things, she told him about Owen and Sean was surprised to find out about his brother being alive. He would ask her where she was living, but try as she might she couldn’t remember the address in her dreams. All she could remember was that it was in London .
    One of the things that most surprised her in the dreams was that she was not pregnant in them. She was so shocked the first time that she woke up instantly, but as time went by she learned to move in and out of the dreams at will.
    Most of the times she dreamed of Sean they simply held each other in silence. At other times Sean would ask about Owen, small things, like his routine, his attire, his interests, that kind of thing. Jennifer would then find herself watching Owen more closely than was polite. She would watch the way in which he would play with a non-existing beard while he read, the way in which a small wrinkle would appear as he struggled with a new thought or concept. Or the way in which he would stop to think while in the middle of a sentence or with the fork about to touch his lips, he could spend quite a few seconds like that, completely still, until the thought was concluded and then would carry on as though nothing had occurred. Or the reaction he’d had when he found her “Strange Happenings, the newspaper of the unexplained” on the kitchen table. He was like a small child with a new toy, kept reading things out to her in complete awe and surprise and made more than one entry in his little notebook.
    She would remember those little things and tell Sean about them, but after a while Sean started getting sad every time she spoke about Owen.
    It was all fantasies of course, dreams to make things better, but they seemed so real to her that for a couple of hours after waking up she was still sure she had gone somewhere else, to a place that held Sean prisoner. Then the morning news, vacuum