Keeper of Crows (Keeper of Crows #1)(70)

Would I stay at my house?

I would for a while. I had two days until my first outpatient appointment with Doctor Stein.

She actually let me go.

I wasn’t ready.

My breaths became erratic.

Pinching my eyes closed, I chanted in my head, I imagined him. I imagined him.

The Keeper of Crows. What color was his hair? What color were his eyes?





Chapter 33 ?





Doctor Cynthia Stein watched as the white Range Rover backed out of its space and drove out of the parking lot. She let the sun warm her skin through the glass doors. She’d been cold since Carmen named her other patient; the woman who had been plagued with nightmares so vivid, she believed they were real. Perhaps they were, because she had specifically mentioned someone by name: The Keeper of Crows.

But that was merely a coincidence, she scoffed to herself. It wasn’t possible that he actually existed. Novelists came up with similar ideas, each writing books about the same topic but in their own words, in their own way. Filmmakers, song writers…the creativity of the world often overlapped. This is no different, she told herself.

The mind was a powerful thing, and just because it was unique to the individual, didn’t mean that all thought was unique.

The two women experienced something similar. That was all. Their brains had to cope somehow. Maybe it was something they heard. They were admitted to the same hospital at the same time, and they were in the Intensive Care Unit one room away from each another, according to their records. Maybe it was a song played softly through the speakers, a song whistled or sung by a nurse they shared and both heard. It had to be something rooted in reality that their imaginations ran wild with.

In the afternoon sun, doves cooed loudly from the eaves of the front porch and flew away, following the Rover down the long, gravel driveway.

She snapped out of her daze and turned to swipe her security card by the door, movement in her periphery making her turn her head. In the center of the glossy white tile of the lobby, fluttering in the wind made by the ceiling’s air conditioning vent, was a single, black, downy feather.