The scene changed once more, the colors melting and bleeding together before righting again. This time Britney and I stood in the middle of a forest full of dead, deteriorated trees like hundreds of brittle finger bones sticking up from the earth. A stream full of glowing green water ran sluggishly through the trees. Garbage lined its banks. A terrible chemical smell hung in the air, burning my nose. The stench of rotting fish blended in with it. Several animals moved among the trees, all of them looking as sick and listless as the water in the stream. A deer hobbled past me on three legs, scorch marks on its body.
The scene shifted again. We were back in the tunnel, but the water no longer boiled. This time Britney stood beside the alcove’s pool in her human form, her hair more blond than pink, her skin fair but not covered in translucent scales. A dark figure stood a few feet down the tunnel across from her, face hidden in shadows.
The residue. I moved toward the figure, eager to see his face and leave this dream behind. But the scene shifted again, back to the underwater bedroom. The change was so abrupt, I fought back dizziness. Pinwheeling my arms through the water, I focused on Britney still caught up in the argument with her mother.
A moment later, we were back in the forest. But as with the tunnel scene, we were no longer alone. Britney was arguing with a guy, one whose face made my heartbeat double and all the air vanish from my lungs. Paul Foster Kirkwood, my ex-boyfriend. What was he doing in Britney’s dream? For a moment, I thought he must be her attacker, until I remembered that Paul was in jail, awaiting trial for his involvement with Marrow’s scheme to overthrow the magickind government.
I took a step toward him and realized it wasn’t Paul, not exactly, but close, as if Britney had seen the real Paul but her dreaming mind had forgotten the details.
The scene shifted again, back to the tunnel. After that, the changes started happening so quickly, my vision blurred as if I were riding an ultrafast merry-go-round. I tried to close my eyes, but couldn’t. I kept catching glimpses of the almost-Paul and Britney’s mother, even Britney herself, crying out in pain.
Finally, when I didn’t think I could stand it any longer, I reached out with my Nightmare magic and willed the dream to stop its chaotic swirl. At once, everything went still.
The scene before me was the strangest yet. It seemed to be a mash-up of the three scenes, blended into one. I stood in the tunnel again, but the walls were now made up of those spindly, dead trees. The canal water glowed the same sickly green of the stream. It wasn’t boiling. In fact it wasn’t moving at all, but looked as if it had been frozen in place.
Glancing around, I realized that everything was frozen, including Britney, who hung suspended mid-jump into the pool. A look of terror darkened her features. Behind her, I saw the shadowed figure again, frozen as well, but in an attack position, one arm stretched out in front of him as if he were hurling a knife at Britney’s back.
I took a step toward the figure, and pictured a flashlight in my hand. It appeared there at once. I switched it on and shone it at the person. He carried a wand, held out in front of him like a gun. I raised the light to his face and let out an involuntary gasp of alarm. It wasn’t Paul, as I’d expected. It wasn’t even Britney’s mother.
It was Eli Booker.
2
Dream a Little Dream
Dreams are symbolic, not literal. Dreams are symbolic, not literal. I told myself this over and over as I walked back to my dorm room, escorted by a silent, lumbering werewolf policeman. It was a futile attempt to staunch the guilt bubbling up inside me with every step. I hadn’t told Lady Elaine about Eli. I just couldn’t. It seemed too much like a betrayal. Eli was my … friend? Partner?
Soul mate.
No, we weren’t even together. But there was definitely something between us. It had been there since the night we defeated Marrow. Since the night he kissed me.
The policeman left me at the bottom of the stairs leading up to Riker Hall. I climbed them slowly, my mind full of the images from Britney’s dreams. Seeing Paul in there was almost as troublesome as seeing Eli. I couldn’t think of any reason why Britney would dream about Paul. As far as I knew, they’d never met. Paul was a senior, two grades above Britney and me. Sure, everybody knew who he was now because of all the press about his involvement with Marrow. But that didn’t seem a strong enough reason for his presence. He was more likely to haunt my nightmares than Britney’s.
Still, when I mentioned him, Lady Elaine had dismissed it. Paul was in jail. There was no way it could’ve been him. Then she pointed out that Britney wasn’t a dream-seer, which meant her dream was just a dream and nothing more.
When I emerged into the foyer, I gave a half-hearted wave to Frank and Igor, Riker Hall’s resident suits of armor and security guards. Frank bowed his head in my direction. The knights used to ignore my greetings, but lately they seemed to be developing more prominent personalities from the animation effect of magic and electricity. It wasn’t surprising, honestly. Since The Will broke, the amount of magic usage on campus had gone up a thousand percent.
I went faster up the three flights of steps to my floor, eager to talk to my roommate. Selene hadn’t woken up when the policemen knocked on our door an hour ago to fetch me down to the infirmary, but I would wake her now. I needed her to validate my reasons for not telling Lady Elaine the whole truth of Britney’s dream. The idea of Eli being the attacker was absurd. He couldn’t even do magic. He was an ordinary, just like my dad and all my old friends at my old ordinary high school. The only reason why he attended Arkwell now was because of the dream-seer stuff.
Feeling better already, I pushed open the door to my dorm and let it swing closed harder than normal. I glanced expectantly at the doorway from the living area into the bedroom, but nothing seemed to be moving in there.
Stifling yet more guilt at the idea of disturbing Selene’s sleep, I walked into the bedroom and approached her bed on the far wall, opposite mine. The light from the living area illuminated just enough that I could see Selene’s massive poster of a teenaged Bob Dylan hung over the foot of the bed. Even though Dylan was an ordinary, he was Selene’s favorite musician. She believed he possessed some diluted strain of siren blood. I doubted it, but Selene insisted no ordinary could be that good without some kind of magic. Me, I thought it was more a matter of opinion.
I stopped and looked down at the bed, my brain slowly processing what my eyes had been telling me for the last thirty seconds. Selene was gone. I touched the mattress, confirming it.
Where was she? It didn’t make sense. There was nowhere else for her to be but here. It was a Monday night and well past curfew. I thought back to those few seconds it had taken me to climb out of bed and answer the door when the werewolf policemen had come knocking. Had she been there then? I thought so, but I hadn’t actually checked. Come to think of it, it was a little weird that she hadn’t woken up, too. She was a light sleeper, normally.
I walked over to my nightstand and picked up my cell phone. As usual, it had taken the liberty of shutting itself off during the night, its surly personality a result of the animation effect. I pressed the on button and waited impatiently for it to boot up.
No messages. No missed calls.
I dialed Selene’s number and let it ring until her voice mail picked up. Then I texted her and waited for a response. Fifteen minutes later I was still waiting. I checked the desk and the nightstand to see if she’d left her cell phone but didn’t find it. A cursory glance at her shoes lined up neatly on the floor of her closet showed me her black boots were missing. Wherever she was, she’d gone deliberately. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have been too worried, but considering what had happened to Britney, I couldn’t help feeling a little concerned.
I sat down on my bed and sent Selene another text. It took me the better part of five minutes to type it, as my cell kept shutting off, making obnoxious twittering sounds as it did so. It was supposed to be a smartphone—oh, the irony.
I w
as just about to hurl the damn thing across the room, when the door into the dorm opened and a disheveled-looking Selene stepped inside. She was indeed wearing her black boots as well as camo jacket and matching camo ball cap and black pants. Her outfit wasn’t particularly suspicious—Selene had been rocking the tomboy look for more than a year now—but the telltale wetness on her hair told me she’d been outside.
I just stared at her for a moment. She stared back, her mouth dropping open as if I had taken her by surprise rather than the other way around.
I stood up, narrowing my eyes at her. “Where the hell have you been?”
Right away I knew I’d struck the wrong tone as Selene’s surprised expression turned stormy. Never mind that my harsh tone stemmed from fear rather than anger. She put a hand on her narrow waist and flung her black hair over her shoulder. “What’s it to you?”
I gaped. “What do you mean? You were gone. You snuck out in the middle of the night. Without me.”
Selene’s nostrils flared. “It might come as a surprise, Dusty, but my life doesn’t end and begin with you.”
I took an involuntary step back. She might as well have slapped me. Selene never acted like this. Not toward me.
She bit her lip, a stricken expression crossing her face. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to snap. It’s just … I didn’t think you’d be awake.”
I crossed my arms, her apology having little effect on my tumultuous emotions. Anger and hurt were stubborn that way, quick to come and long to leave.
When I didn’t answer, Selene unzipped her coat and flung it over the nearby sofa. “So why are you awake?”
I fought back the automatic instinct to answer her. We were best friends. We shared everything—or so I thought. I opened my mouth to demand she tell me what she’d been doing first, but I closed it at once, certain she would refuse. I didn’t think I could handle that kind of rejection right now.
I shook my head. “No reason.” I turned and headed back into the bedroom, switching off the light as I went.
Then I lay down and closed my eyes, all the things I’d needed to talk about like caged, restless animals inside of me, pacing back and forth, pawing at the door. It took me a long, long time to finally fall asleep.
* * *
The nightmare was my own, the same one I’d been having for weeks now. I stood on the top of a tall stone tower. Wind buffeted my body, ripping my hair from its ponytail. The force of it pushed me backward until my back hit the hard edge of the parapet. Pain arced down my spine. I lurched forward, struggling against the wind as a terrible, all-consuming need drove me forward. Ahead, a stone square block sat dead center of the tower. I had to reach the plinth.
I didn’t know why I needed to get there, and I didn’t care. The need was too great for thought. My life depended on it. The world depended on it. At first, nothing happened as I moved my arms and legs. It was as if a cruel puppeteer held me back with invisible strings attached to my body.
Then finally, slowly, I began to make forward progress. Each step was like trying to swim through wet concrete. By the end of it, I crawled on my hands and knees. But that was okay. I needed to be on the ground. I needed to read the word etched into the side of the plinth. I pulled myself up to a kneeling position before it. If I could have stood, the plinth would’ve reached my knees, but now its top was level with my eyes. The wind continued its assault on my body. Tears streamed from my eyes as I forced them open against it.
I stared at the letters, but I couldn’t make them out. The impressions were too faint. I stretched my hands toward them. If I tried hard enough, I might be able to read it like Braille. The plinth felt as hard and rough as uncut diamonds beneath my fingers. An idea rose up in my mind: if I could break through that hard surface, then I could read the letters. I began to scratch at it, a frenzy coming over me.
Scratch, scratch, scratch. My nails broke off one by one. My fingertips began to bleed. I balled my hands into fists, scraping away with my knuckles, oblivious to the pain. My skin ripped to shreds, but still I persisted. A part of me, the part of my brain that remained tethered to the waking world, even in dreams, knew that I should stop. That this was madness. Even worse, that it wasn’t real.
But I couldn’t stop. The part of me that existed only in dreams knew I had to read those letters. That part held sway here.
I would succeed or die trying.
3
The Will Guard
I woke exhausted the next morning, but was glad to be awake. Glad the dream was over. I slapped the wooden lever on the side of the alarm next to my bed, engaging the snooze spell. The alarm clocks at Arkwell were standard-issue and one of the few fully magical instruments on campus. The school administrators didn’t want students blaming tardiness on the animation effect. Shame, I could’ve used such a handy excuse this morning.
Sighing, I rolled onto my back. I raised my hands and squinted at them, my eyes stinging from lack of sleep. I half expected my hands to be covered in sores from a night spent clawing at a stone plinth, but they looked as normal as ever.
I should’ve been relieved but I wasn’t. I felt empty on the inside, my body hollowed out, as the need to know what those letters spelled lingered like the hangover of some powerful drug. I lay there for a couple of minutes, picturing the faint imprint of letters on the plinth. Maybe my waking mind would have better luck discerning them.
When my alarm went off again, I gave up and got out of bed. Typically, Selene was still asleep. As a siren, she didn’t need to spend as much time getting ready in the morning. Her alarm would go off in twenty minutes, and she would roll out of bed with her dark hair looking perfect and shiny and her skin aglow. She had to bathe as regularly as anybody, of course, but she didn’t have to worry about hair dryers and flatirons, and she hadn’t worn makeup regularly since her turn toward tomboy-hood. She didn’t even wear it to hide the long thin scar running down the side of her face from where she’d been attacked by Marrow’s familiar, the black phoenix. Not that she needed to. If anything, the scar gave her a wild, fierce look that only enhanced her beauty.
I gathered my things as quietly as I could then headed for the shower. But when I returned a half hour later, Selene was still in bed. I poked my head through the door. “You getting up?”
Selene rolled over, turning toward the wall. “Sleeping in,” she mumbled. She sounded as exhausted as I felt. I supposed it made sense, considering she’d been out half the night. I considered confronting her about it right then, but I already had one tough discussion to accomplish today. Just how I was going to broach the subject with Eli, I didn’t know.
I headed down to the cafeteria still trying to figure it out. I approached the table I usually sat at with Selene and Eli, but he wasn’t there. I scanned the room for him, but the chaos of people and activity made it difficult to see much.
Mealtimes at Arkwell had become even more interesting since The Will broke. Paper airplanes flew complicated loop-de-loops in between the tables, obeying the magical commands of their makers as they delivered notes or dive-bombed unsuspecting victims. A girl across the way was manipulating the water in her goblet to make it flow upward in an inverted waterfall. The boy sitting behind her juggled a half-dozen glowing magical orbs that changed color every time he touched them.
Two tables over, a crystal goblet half full of some white liquid drew my attention as it hovered above the heads of several unsuspecting students. I watched it tip sideways right over Nick Jacobi. Milk—at least I hoped it was milk and not some dangerous potion—splashed downward. Nick raised his hand a split second before the liquid hit him, freezing it with a spell. Everyone at the table applauded his quick thinking. Nick started laughing at the boy across from him who had been controlling the goblet.
No sooner had Nick vanished the milk with a second spell than a saltshaker appeared above him and dumped its contents into his hair. This time several other people laughed as Nick leaped to his feet and tossed his head, flinging salt.
Stifling a smile, I glanced at the next table over, fully expecting to see Lance Rathbone behind the saltshaker. Lance was a wizard and Arkwell’s resident trickster. Only he wasn’t at his usual table either. What, is this Sophomore Skip Day and nobody told me? The real culprit, I saw, was a dryad by the name of Oliver Cork.
I glanced past Oliver, continuing my search for Eli. No luck.
He couldn’t have done it without magic, I reminded myself.
I went through the breakfast line and sat down at our table alone. Still no Eli. Where was he?
As if the thought had been an incantation, I spotted Eli coming through the massive wooden double doors of the cafeteria. He looked the same as any other day in his faded jeans and a dark, long-sleeved tee with a band logo on the front. But going by the huge yawn he tried to hide behind a raised fist, I guessed he hadn’t slept well. All my speculation ceased as Eli’s eyes alighted on me and a wide, cocksure grin slid across his handsome face. My stomach did a little flip at the sight of it, and a funny, achy feeling went through my knees. Good thing I was sitting down. If any ordinary had a diluted strain of siren blood, it had to be Eli Booker. Forget Bob Dylan.
As he walked toward me, I tried to recall all the openings I’d considered for asking him what he’d been doing last night around 11:45. But I abandoned the endeavor by the time he reached me. The whole thing was absurd. Even if Eli could do magic, he wouldn’t hurt Britney. That sort of thing just wasn’t in his nature. He would more likely beat the crap out of whoever had attacked her.
“Hey,” Eli said, sliding into the bench opposite me.
“Hey.”
He reached across the table and snagged a piece of bacon off my plate and popped it into his mouth. “Where’s Selene?” he asked a couple of chews later.
The Nightmare Dilemma (Arkwell Academy) Page 2