The Nightmare Affair

by Mindee Arnett

  “You can stop pretending,” Eli said. “I can see your eyes moving behind your eyelids.”

  I peered over at him. “It’s not called Rapid Eye Movement for nothing.”

  He smiled. “You must be feeling better if you’re being snotty already.”

  I wasn’t feeling better, worse actually, but I didn’t say anything, hoping to avoid the topic of feelings at all costs.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked. He was wearing regular clothes again, but he didn’t appear as if he’d slept much.

  Eli set down the magazine on the table in between the chair and the hospital bed. “I wanted to make sure you’re okay.”

  I blinked in surprise at the sincerity in his words. For the first time ever he didn’t look menacing or dangerous. Instead he looked like I felt—scared, exhausted, and guilt-ridden.

  I sat up and stretched, realizing too late that I was braless beneath the infirmary robe. I wrapped my arms around my chest and looked around, hoping he didn’t notice my blush. “I’m feeling a little better. But what’s been happening?”

  Eli grimaced. “Not much. They haven’t caught the killer or anything.”

  I swallowed, resisting the urge to be sick. My throat ached, and my tummy felt hollow. Of course they hadn’t found him. Someone powerful and crazy enough to go after The Will spell wasn’t going to be caught easily. “Has Paul been by?” I said, searching for an easier topic.

  “He was here, but his uncle came and made him leave.” Eli glanced at the door. “Selene should be back soon. She’s getting something to drink.”

  “Oh. Does she … know what happened?”

  Eli scowled. “She’s not supposed to. The sheriff and those guys are telling people Ankil’s death was an accident caused by a lighting spell backfiring on him due to the ‘instability of magic during Samhain’ or some nonsense,” he said, finger-quoting. “You and I are supposed to play along. But Selene cornered me and made me tell her the truth.”

  I smiled at the exasperation in his voice. “Yeah, Selene can be forceful when she wants to be.”

  “No kidding. Are all your friends like that?”

  I dropped my eyes, not wanting to look at him. “She’s my only true friend. Here at least.”

  When Eli didn’t respond, I fixed my gaze on the door, hoping Selene would get back soon. I wasn’t surprised Ankil’s death was being played off as an accident, but it felt wrong. He deserved better.

  “I’m sorry,” Eli said, his voice throaty with emotion.

  I looked at him. “What for?”

  “Everything. Especially for not making more of an effort to work as a team.” He stood up and started pacing. “I was just so pissed, you know? About leaving my old life. Coming here to this strange place. And I hate feeling like the only kid on the short bus.” He stopped midstride and faced me. “I blamed you at first, but that’s stupid and doesn’t matter. I know it’s not your fault. And now I can’t help thinking that maybe if we’d been friends from the start, we would’ve been more focused on the dreams. Then maybe we could’ve done something to save Mr. Ankil.”

  I stared at him, stunned speechless. Tears welled around my eyes, and I fought to hold them back. “It’s not your fault. I wasn’t exactly waving the friend flag your way. I’ve been avoiding you because the dream-seer stuff scares me. And I understand why you blamed me. I felt the same way when I first came here. Only I was pissed at my mom for being a Nightmare.”

  He opened his mouth to say something more, but Selene arrived in the doorway.

  “Hey you,” she said, beaming at me. “How you feeling?”

  “Better.” I kept glancing warily at Eli as he returned to the chair.

  Selene gave me a look that told me she knew I was lying. She sat down on the side of the bed and handed me the glass of water she’d brought in with her. “You aren’t responsible for what happened,” she said matter-of-factly. “I just want to make that clear right up front.”

  Eli smacked his hands against the arms of his chair, making Selene and I both jump. “Of course she’s not. But what’s the good of having these dreams if we can’t save anybody?”

  “But it’s not that simple, Eli,” I said, feeling the urge to defend us. “There was no way we could have known that the Minotaur symbolized Mr. Ankil.”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Selene, brow furrowed in confusion.

  Eli filled her in about the Minotaur getting beheaded by the black phoenix.

  “Wait,” Selene said when he finished. “The Minotaur had a ring in its nose? And then Ankil’s hand was missing?”

  I nodded, knowing exactly where she was going. I’d already come to the same conclusion.

  “Then the senate must’ve known he was in danger.”

  “How do you figure?” said Eli.

  “Because he was a Keeper,” I answered, setting down the glass of water that I’d finished in three swallows.

  “A what?”

  I hesitated, unsure if I should trust him. I wasn’t supposed to know about the Keepers myself. But I had to tell him. He was as much a part of this as I was.

  A stricken expression spread across his face as he listened. “So all this time the killer’s been targeting specific people?” he said as I finished.

  Selene and I both nodded.

  Eli turned his icy blue eyes on me. He swallowed. “I really wish you’d told me sooner, but I’m glad to know now.”

  As our eyes locked something seemed to click between us, and I felt my resentment toward him slipping away.

  “So if the senate knew Ankil was a Keeper,” said Selene, “why didn’t they keep a better guard on him? And why did he go down into the tunnels in the first place?”

  Nobody answered for a moment.

  Then Eli said, “Maybe he was bait.”

  Selene and I both looked at him, horrified by the idea.

  “Well, if that’s true,” said Selene, “they did a bang-up job of it—he died and they still didn’t catch the guy.”

  “Just goes to show how dangerous and clever the killer is,” said Eli.

  Selene looked sick. “No wonder Ankil was so nervous lately.”

  “Yeah, I noticed that, too,” said Eli. He ran a hand through his hair. “But it only started a couple of days ago. You’d think he would’ve been nervous as soon as Rosemary died.”

  I bit my lip, an idea occurring to me. “He must’ve been a new Keeper. Think about it. The senate probably decided to change the Keepers after Rosemary died to hide their identities. And Rosemary was so young, too. I heard Lady Elaine say that the spell had become more of a rite of passage than something to take seriously. So if the other Keepers were just as young and inexperienced, they would’ve had to change them.”

  “Rite of passage my foot.” Selene scowled. “They shouldn’t have been messing around with illegal black magic in the first place.”

  Eli leaned toward me. “So what’s this Keeper spell guarding?”

  I sucked in a breath, once again shocked by the enormity of the situation. “You won’t believe it,” I said, glancing between the two of them. Then I recapped what my mom had told me about the Arthur legend and how Excalibur was now The Will’s power source.

  “You’re right, I don’t believe it,” said Selene, rubbing her temples.

  “Well, I could believe anything with this crazy magic stuff,” said Eli, his voice wry.

  Selene turned a fierce gaze on him. “Do you know what would happen if The Will stopped working? Total chaos.”

  Eli scoffed. “Why do you think so? Isn’t that like saying if the United States legalized drugs, everybody would turn into crackheads? Don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t do it just because it was legal.”

  Selene snorted. “Drugs are nothing like magic.”

  “She’s right,” I said. “Drugs mostly hurt the person doing them. Magic can hurt everybody.”

  “Especially when we’re talking about the predatory magickind out there,” said Se
lene, hugging herself. “Don’t forget, the only reason why a lot of the demons and such don’t hurt people is because The Will doesn’t let them.”

  Eli held up his hands, his arm muscles flexing. “I get it. No Will is bad.”

  I shook my head. “It might be worse than that. My mom said the killer wouldn’t necessarily want to break The Will but control it.”

  “You mean so he could control us?” said Eli, raising a single eyebrow. “Like how I’m forced to fall asleep for our sessions?”

  “Yep.”

  Selene shuddered. “That’s horrible. Who knows what we might be forced to do.”

  Silence descended around us as we considered the frightening prospect.

  Selene exhaled loudly. “Well, at least we know there’s still one person holding the Keeper spell together.”

  I frowned. “How do you figure?”

  “The senate always does things by threes at a minimum. And since Rosemary was naturekind and Ankil witchkind—”

  “—the third must be darkkind,” I said, making the connection.

  “Right.”

  “But why?” said Eli.

  “Because that’s the way it’s done,” Selene answered. “The senate is divided into three parties, one for each kind. There’s a lot of distrust between the kinds, enough that it’s a sure bet if a fairy and a psychic were a part of the spell, a darkkind was, too. They would insist on keeping things equal.”

  “Makes sense,” said Eli. “But can we be sure there are only three?”

  “We can’t. There could be more, but there are at least three,” said Selene.

  Eli looked at her, his expression hard. “Then someone else is going to die, too.” He turned that gaze on me. “Unless we stop it.”

  Nobody spoke. I kept picturing Mr. Ankil with his big, flamboyant personality. The way he always acted like one of the students. He was so cool and so young.

  And now he was gone.

  Selene broke the silence first. “You’re right. We’ve got to do something.”

  I shook my head, images of Mr. Ankil’s death in my mind and that terrible smell thick in my nose.

  “Come on, Dusty,” said Eli. “You and I can do this. We’ve got the dreams to help, and I know loads about detective stuff. We’ve got to try.”

  I thought about my mother’s insistence that I stay out of it, but I hadn’t actually promised her. Still, we were just a couple of kids up against something huge and terrible, a person clever enough to lure Mr. Ankil down into the tunnels right beneath the senate’s nose.

  But Eli was right. If I didn’t try, the guilt would be unbearable. I had to. We had to. Together. With my friends.

  It was the best thought I’d had in days.

  16

  Task Force

  We met in one of the computer rooms in the basement of the library later that night. Room 013. Pretty much everybody avoided the place—it was rumored to be haunted. But ghosts weren’t the problem so much as a really rampant case of animation. The entire room seemed affected by it, even the furniture. The computers had particularly vile personalities, the kind that would wait until you’d gotten halfway through writing that essay without saving it before deciding to shut off.

  Only the most desperate sought refuge here, but Eli insisted we needed a base of operations where we could work without interruption. The dorm Selene and I shared would’ve been ideal, but no boys were allowed. So room 013 it was.

  Eli was in full take-charge mode by the time Selene and I arrived. He was sitting at the teacher’s station in front of the computer that was linked into the overhead projection screen he’d switched on. The screen depicted one of his suspect graphs. I pulled out the one I’d started from my backpack and handed it to him.

  “Okay,” he said, examining it. “Fill us in on how you got this far.” His focus on this whole investigation thing was a bit scary, but also encouraging in the way it built my confidence about our chances of success. Eli was like a professional.

  I launched into a summary about everything that had happened since Melanie gave me Rosemary’s diary. Well, almost everything. The stuff about Nightmares, and what we were capable of, I kept to myself.

  “So where do we go from here?” said Selene, sitting down on top of one of the desks. The chair beside the desk squeaked its wheels in protest and then rammed into her dangling legs. “Ouch.” She yanked her knees up before it hit her again.

  “Think you might want to sit on the chair instead,” I said, trying not to laugh.

  Selene scowled at me and stood. The chair, which had been rolling back and forth like a bull getting ready to charge, stopped and swung its seat toward her, inviting her to sit. She did so, looking doubtful.

  “Right,” said Eli. “From here we identify all the possible suspects, then try to eliminate them one by one.”

  He indicated the suspect graph where he’d added my entries of F and Culpepper. Frank Rizzo was already on his graph along with a few others, but Eli had put lines through most of them and the word alibi in the Opportunity column.

  “Dusty,” he said, “you say you were following someone in one of those long-beaked masks. Let’s start there. The person might’ve been involved or witnessed something.”

  “If they saw something, wouldn’t they have told the cops already?” said Selene.

  Eli shook his head. “Not if they’re afraid. Lots of witnesses don’t come forward if they think it’s dangerous.”

  “Oh, that makes sense.” Selene sounded impressed by Eli’s knowledge.

  He went on. “Who do we know was wearing one of those?”

  “Culpepper was,” said Selene, “but he’s already on the list.”

  Eli nodded and typed a note next to the line with Culpepper’s name. “It just means he’s still a likely candidate. I saw Coach Fritz wearing one, too.” He added the coach’s name, although it took him three tries to do it. The computer kept deleting the letters as soon as he entered them. “Okay, who else?”

  I swallowed hard, debating whether or not to answer. But I knew I had to. I owed it to Mr. Ankil. “My mother.”

  Selene and Eli both looked at me in surprise.

  I began to fidget with my hair, twisting the red curls around my fingers. “It’s true. I ran into her in the bathroom.”

  “What was she doing at the dance?” asked Selene as the chair gave a little buck beneath her. She grabbed the arms then kicked its wheels with the heel of her combat boot. “Stop that.” The chair squeaked indignantly, but stayed still.

  “I don’t know. She wouldn’t say.”

  “Hmmm,” said Eli, writing her name down.

  His lack of response made me nervous.

  “Who else?”

  We ended up adding another half-dozen names, including Bronson Babbit, a junior werewolf, and Lance Rathbone. Once we had everybody we could think of listed, we went through and eliminated the most unlikely.

  “I know it wasn’t Lance,” said Eli. “I was near him right before I followed you down into the tunnels, so there’s no way he could’ve gotten there before us. Besides, he wouldn’t do something like that.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure,” said Selene darkly.

  Eli scoffed. “Just because he can be a creep sometimes doesn’t mean he’s going around killing people.”

  “You got the creep part right.” Her chair squeaked again, as if in agreement. She gave one of the arms a pat.

  “Hey, focus here,” I said, and snapped my fingers in an attempt to head off an argument. “Doesn’t matter. Eli’s right. He couldn’t have gotten down there before us.”

  Eli put a line through Lance’s name.

  By the time we finished, only Coach Fritz, Culpepper, Frank Rizzo, and my mother were left.

  “Okay,” Eli said. “Let’s talk motive. Why would any of these people want to break the Keeper spell?”

  “Crazy, power-hungry psychos?” said Selene. “I mean, aside from Dusty’s mom.”

  Eli shook h
is head. “Not solid enough.”

  “Okay, try this,” I said. “Since Culpepper and Rizzo are both predatory demons, The Will affects them more. You could argue they’re more oppressed by its restrictions.”

  “Better,” said Eli. He typed “DK” followed by a question mark in the Motive column.

  “But what about Coach Fritz?” asked Selene, tilting her head. “He’s a fairy.”

  “That one’s easy,” said Eli. “He hates humans.”

  This wasn’t exactly news. Fritz was a fairy of the Werra tribe, a group of warrior fairies, definitely one of the most violent. And the coach didn’t exactly censor his feelings about ordinaries. On more than one occasion, I’d heard him complain about how magickind were required to blend in with those “useless ants” or “demon fodder.” If there were a magickind equivalent to the KKK, Fritz might well have been the Grand Dragon.

  “What does hating humans have to do with The Will?” asked Selene.

  “Well, he could use it to make them do things. Or punish them,” said Eli, striding back and forth in front of the blackboard. “I’m an ordinary, and it definitely works on me.”

  I shivered at the idea of a weapon like that in the hands of a guy like Fritz. He wouldn’t have to build concentration camps to kill people, he could just order them to jump in a lake and drown themselves.

  “Put him at the top of the list,” said Selene.

  “Okay. But what about Ms. Everhart?” Eli glanced at me. “She doesn’t have any motive that you know of, does she?”

  I shook my head. None that I knew of, other than her overall contempt for the government and rules in general. My mother, the anarchist.

  “I don’t think she’s a good suspect,” said Selene. “Rosemary was seeing a guy so it couldn’t be her.”

  “True,” said Eli, “but we can’t ignore the possibility there’s more than one person involved in these killings.”

  A chill went through me at the idea. I couldn’t believe it hadn’t occurred to me before. With something this big, there was bound to be more than one person involved.