“Kai!”
Our weapons collided powerfully. We held in stalemate for a second until Kai abruptly slid her blade along mine and headbutted me. I faltered and she knocked the sword out of my hand. It flew to the side. I clutched my head as I recovered my balance.
“So now what?” I snapped. “You’re really going to murder me?”
“You murder people all the time.” She shrugged. “How hard can it be?”
“Not as easy as you might think. I’m not the simplest target.” My confusion finally melted and morphed to anger. I spun into the most impressive kick I’d ever managed. My boot thwacked her sword hand mightily, causing her to drop her weapon. I dashed at Kai before the blade had even clattered to the floor and body-slammed her. She stumbled back into the rock wall next to one of the tunnels. I swiped a knife from the nearest table and shut the distance between us in an instant.
Blood pumping, I grabbed Kai’s throat with one hand and pushed her against the wall, holding the knife next to her ribcage. I was so livid with betrayal that I felt sure that if my magic worked in this place, it would have already drained her dry.
Kai glowered at me. “Go on, do it,” she choked—no fear, only defiance and provocation in her eyes.
Oh, don’t tempt me.
I wanted to do it. I’d used my powers to take life from people who hadn’t cut me nearly so deep. Kai had betrayed me after I welcomed her into our group, offered her space in our room, and even trained her in magic. Tara and Arian had easily manipulated her in a matter of hours, and if I let her go now, I would have to deal with one more person trying to destroy me.
Which meant I should do it.
But I just . . .
My knife hand quivered. I thought about my promise to SJ to be more careful with my choices. More than that, I thought about the horrifying images I’d seen in that nightmare vision the goo flower sent me into—all the bodies and the faces that belonged to them.
While acting in the gray, I’d operated like bad guys were faceless, nameless creatures—not real people, just sacks of wickedness that I was doing the world a favor by disposing of. But I’d been wrong; they were people. Facing Kai made me realize that. Even if someone led a villainous life, it was still a life, not a number on a spreadsheet or a target that I could just take out and brush off. Whether it was right or wrong to put an end to antagonists was not the issue. What was had to do with my attitude. If I was going to keep taking the lives of bad guys I had to fully accept the weight of what I was doing. I couldn’t be so blasé about it. And I certainly couldn’t act in the name of revenge, anger, or self-satisfaction. I had to think. I had to consider other options. And I had to remember who I was and wasn’t trying to be at the end of this.
I grunted in frustration and shoved Kai back, then took several large steps away from her. “I’m not going to kill you, Kai. I can’t.”
“Because of Daniel,” she said resentfully.
“No, because of me.” Irritation and ire flooded my body. “This isn’t about some boy. I’m not a monster, Kai. No matter how much you and Arian and Nadia want me to be. I’ve made mistakes. I’ve been too cold and ruthless lately, and I need to reevaluate my approach to things. But at the end of the day, I’m just a person who’s trying to make the best choices. Maybe not everything I’ve done is the right thing by traditional standards, but it felt right to me at the time, and I’ve never done anything that I didn’t believe from my own experiences was wrong. You and I trying to kill each other is wrong, Kai.”
“Why?” Kai spat bitterly. “How is killing me any different than killing the other people who’ve gotten in your way?”
I paused. The glowing cracks had consumed almost every square inch of the Shining Ward and the tunnels. They throbbed from floor to ceiling, threatening to break the scene once more. Larger quantities of red sand poured through the fissures as well, along with chunks of ceiling in some places. We were running out of time, but I needed to give Kai an answer. For her sake as much as my own.
“It’s different because those people knew what they were doing when they tried to hurt others. I don’t think you do. Not really. You’re confused and you’re blinded by how much you hate me, but this isn’t you. You’re not a bad person . . . You don’t have to be, anyway.”
Several large slabs of ceiling collapsed around us.
“I know I’m not a bad person, Crisa,” Kai said coolly. “I’m just making gray choices like you taught me. Though in this case, the choice is also a bit blue.” Her eyes went to the tunnel behind me.
“What?” I glanced back. My heart stopped. Two counting sheep stood on the threshold of the tunnel. The creatures darted at me with teeth bared. I had no time to operate my Dream Catcher. One leapt in the air, the other dashed low. I held up my knife and stabbed the leaping sheep, causing it to burst into smoke. However the other rammed into me so hard that I fell and dropped the knife. The sheep went for my throat, but I raised my arm and blocked it. The sheep’s teeth caught around the metal of my Dream Catcher mostly, but also pierced a part of my skin.
Shouting in pain, I managed to activate my Dream Catcher. With the monster right in front of the trigger, I squeezed and fired multiple times in a row—setting off a barrage of blue energy blasts that blew the sheep back and obliterated it in three sections before it puffed into smoke entirely.
My problems were solved for scarcely a millisecond. A kick to the shoulder sent me rolling across the red-fissured floor.
Ow.
I didn’t even have time to groan before Kai fired her Dream Catcher at me. I tried to move out of the way, but the energy net caught my right arm. Thankfully, the net didn’t decimate the limb. I supposed these devices had been designed to only destroy counting sheep. Unfortunately, the net didn’t dissolve either. Since I wasn’t evaporating like a sheep was supposed to, the net pinned my arm to the ground then sizzled with continuous energy that burned and sparked like biting fireflies.
Kai’s boot came down on my left arm a second later—pressing it into the ground as she bent to take a knee with her other leg beside my chest. I struggled from the combined pressure of the crushing boot trapping one arm and the searing net constraining the other. The ceiling continued to collapse around us.
Kai had retrieved my knife from the ground and now held it in her hand. She brought the long, sharp blade slowly, delicately above me. My heart beat wildly. My breath was harsh and panicked. I retained eye contact with Kai as she ran the edge of the knife along the side of my face.
“And now here we are again,” she said. “Only the tables have turned.”
“Kai . . .”
“Tell me, did you forget what it was like? What it felt like to be afraid of death? To be this close to it? Your power is life. Does this make you appreciate it more?”
As much as fear shook me, and as much as I was using my energy to keep from crying out against the pain, I kept my gaze steady and locked with hers.
Kai moved the tip of her knife to the center of my face, allowing it to just graze the area around my eyes.
“You know, you were wrong before, Crisa,” she said. “I don’t hate you. Honestly, while I dislike you, I admire you too. It’s important to me that you understand that. You are stronger and more defiant than most anyone I’ve ever met. If things had been different, we may have truly been friends. But that was not the way this story was meant to play out.”
She raised her knife! My eyes widened.
Then the fissures gave way and the floor shattered, sending Kai and me into nothingness once more.
I flailed and flapped through the darkness. I was pretty sure I lost consciousness for a while. The next thing I knew, someone was calling my name.
“Crisa? Crisa, are you okay?”
I tried to sit up, but something stopped me. I glanced around. I was in a low-bearing cavern that had partially caved in; a small pile of stone covered my right arm, trapping it.
“Crisa?”
I looke
d up to see Jason’s face through a hole in the cavern ceiling, barely a few feet above where I lay. Carefully, I pulled my arm out of the rubble. My Dream Catcher was busted and I had cuts, scrapes, and small gashes from the sheep attack, but the limb was okay overall.
“Give me your hand,” Jason said. “We’ll pull you up.”
I gave him the one that was in better shape, and he and then also Daniel aided me through the opening. We were in the same red sky landscape we’d been in prior to plummeting through the Lake of Misery. Only now the distant horizon had a black castle. It reminded me of the palace in Alderon only it was much sharper, as if every edge had been filed as finely as possible.
“We’re outside Nightmare’s heart,” Jason said. “Everyone made it through.”
“Everyone?” I turned around and saw my brother and all my friends—Blue, Girtha, Chance, and . . . Kai.
“What happened to your arm?” Daniel asked worriedly, noticing my chewed-up Dream Catcher and the marks on my skin.
“That looks bad,” Kai commented, approaching me with concern. “How did it happen?”
I scrambled away from her. “What kind of stupid question is that? You were there.”
“Knight,” Daniel said. “Kai’s been with me and Jason for a while. We found each other in Nightmare’s heart and made our way out together.”
“What? That’s not possible,” I stuttered. “I was just with her.”
“Maybe it was a Nightmare vision,” Girtha suggested. “I was trapped in a few of those while going through the heart. Some of them featured you guys. The visions were so visceral and traumatic I didn’t even have time to figure out they weren’t real. I just had to fight and run until I escaped.”
My face crinkled with dismay and confusion. Kai’s face, meanwhile, was free of any anger or malcontent; she genuinely seemed worried about me.
That couldn’t have all been a dream. Could it?
You could die in Dreamland visions, so that explained the genuine peril, but were the players in my near death experience all an illusion?
Did I ever actually run into Kai? Did I speak to Arian for real or was he a dream too? Was all that confrontation really just a product of Fear?
I glanced down at my broken Dream Catcher and injured arm. Could this have been caused by the cave-in and rocks I woke to find crushing my arm?
“Crisa,” Alex said steadily, walking toward me with care. “Nightmare’s heart is called Fear for a reason. It plays on the things we’re most afraid of and brings them to life, usually in a lot clearer ways than other realms in Dreamland. No one makes it out of here without getting plagued by terrible visions. But they’re not real. Everyone here is.”
“And so is that,” Blue said, pointing at the castle. Thunder and thick congestions of Shadows swarmed over it like the building was the eye of the world’s darkest storm. Blue reassuringly put her hand on my shoulder and spoke calmly, but with strength. “We lost precious time in Fear, Crisa. There are only four nights left until Book’s August full moon. We have a job to get done or we’ll be trapped here until September. I can see you’re freaked out, and I’m sorry, but can you pull it together and put the nightmares behind you?”
My heart raced a bit. The fear of what I’d just been through clutched my chest in a vice. But I guess if in Sweet Dreams I had a vision of Kai apologizing to me and mending our relationship, it did make sense that I’d experience the complete opposite in Nightmare.
Still . . . that didn’t stop me from trembling slightly when I thought about the very real sensation of Kai’s knife running beneath my eyes.
I took a deep breath and steadied my nerves. Blue was right, and if Girtha and Alex and everyone else could push past the awful dreams they’d had, I owed it to them to do the same. I took off my broken Dream Catcher and abandoned it on the ground.
“Yeah, I’ll be fine,” I said to Blue. “No more fear. Let’s get this done.”
I looked around at my group for reassurance.
They are real, I said to myself.
Then I glanced at Kai and gulped.
That was all just a nightmare.
I think . . .
hat’s the Shadows’ hive,” Alex explained as we headed for the dark palace. It loomed over us with the foreboding presence of the greatest monsters.
“The building is composed of energy,” my brother continued. “It provides the Shadows with their life force. If you’re looking for someone trapped in Nightmare by a Shadow, they’d be in there. That’s where antagonists go to become Shadow Guardians.”
“Arian brought you there?” I asked.
He nodded. “You just have to be inside the palace and focus on dark thoughts. A Shadow will come. Then you touch it and bam, the process is done.”
Like the reverse of focusing on joyful thoughts to trigger flight with fairy dust in Neverland.
“Did any of you run into Arian, Tara, or their men when we were separated?” I asked the group.
“I saw some of their men in the Wanderers’ Void,” Kai said. “They outnumbered me four to one, so I ran when they started to chase me.”
“And I bumped into Tara in Sweet Dreams,” Girtha said. “I didn’t know who she was at first. I’ve never seen the girl in person. But she knew me. And the way she talked sounded so much like Mauvrey, I put two and two together pretty quickly.”
I raised an eyebrow. “How did that interaction go?”
“Well, she tried to kill me, so not great overall. We got separated when a giant bunnifly appeared.”
I nodded. “I thought I saw Arian in Fear, but apparently that was a hallucination. Either way, we’ll probably run into a few antagonists in the Shadows’ hive. If we survived this dimension’s obstacles to make it here, it’s a safe bet most of them did too.”
“You better hope not,” Alex said darkly.
I glanced at my brother. “Your old boss and ex-girlfriend can’t beat the seven of us, Alex,” I said. “They pose a threat, and we should be careful, but we can handle them as a team.”
“Maybe out there,” Alex replied, stopping. “But in here is a different story. Arian is a Shadow Guardian, Crisa. Tara isn’t anymore—former Guardians can never be possessed again—but their men probably have Shadows, which makes them all stronger in Nightmare. Shadows in this realm have the sensibility of a hive mind, and Guardians can control that force to a certain degree.”
“But a Shadow can’t possess us unless we invite it in,” Jason said. “So as long as we don’t touch them, we’re okay.”
Alex paused and I read his expression. “Alex . . . Did you forget to mention something?”
He hesitated, then sighed and conceded. “In this dimension Shadows can hurt you in other ways. They may not be able to touch mortals on their own, but Shadows are made of dark energy and this realm nurtures dark energy like bacteria cultivates plaque.”
“Charming metaphor,” Blue said. “Remind me to tell it to my dentist when we’re back in Book.”
I narrowed my eyes at my brother and crossed my arms. “Thanks for telling us now.”
The most powerful burst of thunder yet suddenly seized the sky and caused a sinister sound like deep cackling laughter to resonate around us. I glanced down at the wand in my boot. It was useless. I had no magic. And I was injured. I’d bandaged up my wounded right arm with a scrap of fabric from the bottom of my dress, but the limb still ached. I wasn’t in the best shape to take on our enemies, which was too bad considering I was all but certain a confrontation was imminent. Ours had never been the kind of story where things simply ran smoothly. Given that we were moving with the intent to tip the scales by waking Mauvrey, the universe was bound to send us increased villainous resistance the closer we got to that goal. Only . . .
“It bothers me that we don’t fully understand why Arian came here,” I finally said as we continued for the castle. “Arian is smart. His team trying to wake Mauvrey while her physical body is still under our guard in Clevaunt doesn’t compl
etely check out.”
“We were betting that he planned to have his forces kidnap her while a bunch of us are in Dreamland,” Jason said. “Arian is always so sure of himself; he probably figures the antagonists in Book have already been successful by now and Mauvrey will be in their possession when he gets back.”
“Yes, I know,” I said. “But it just . . . it feels like that’s not the total picture. The last time I wasn’t sure what the antagonists were playing at, it turned out to be a massive trap for getting me to give in to my Pure Magic and start on a descent to corruption.”
We arrived at the base of the small rocky mountain that the dark palace was built on. The sharp points of the structure looked like they were trying to puncture the sky and its surrounding storm of Shadows. I sighed and gazed up at the enormity, then started up the steep path.
“Well, it’s not like they’re going to do that twice,” Kai—hiking two people behind me—said. “So that’s at least something you don’t have to worry about. And if the antagonists are truly here for another reason, we can protect each other. We just need to not get separated again.”
Sage and calming words from the person I am now low-key skittish around.
“Exactly,” Blue chimed in from behind Kai. “Besides, Arian’s probably just trying to kill you again. No big deal.”
“Blue,” Daniel said.
“I’m only trying to lighten the mood,” she said. “Sorry.”
“Some things need to be taken seriously, Blue,” Jason called. He was in front of me and glanced back to give her a critical look.
“Agreed,” Chance said. “That’s not a matter to be taken lightly since this is the one place where Crisa’s magic won’t save her. I
would wager that Arian’s motives for being here have a great deal to do with that.”
He was probably right. I mean, I thought Arian told me himself that he wasn’t trying to kill me in Dreamland because he was sticking with Nadia’s plan to turn me dark. However, apparently that had all been a dream. So . . . yeah. Maybe my friends were right?
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