Chapter 4
“If you are the dreamer, I am what you dream.
But when you want to wake, I am your wish,
and I grow strong with all magnificence
and turn myself into a star’s vast silence
above the strange and distant city, Time.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Madelyn woke slowly, the memories of parents she didn’t know and the life she never had a chance to live fading to intangible presences at the back of her mind until they were half-forgotten dreams. Her eyelids were heavy and her tongue felt like sandpaper. She blinked slowly as the leaden feel of her limbs dissipated and the fog in her head lightened. She sat up, a thick blanket of white fur dropping down to her waist.
Fur? She stared around at the master bedroom she was in.
“Oh my . . .” The tall four-poster bed was made of dark black woo
