Beautiful Dreamer

Chapter 22

Chapter Twenty-Two

It was Saturday.

Eleven days had passed since I'd had nightmares. Eleven days since Laury had gotten rid of the incubi. Eleven days since Logan had so much as looked at me.

Thanksgiving had passed in a blur of food and cooking and greeting all the friends and neighbors who my mother invited to dinner. Logan wasn't speaking to me, of course, and I wasn't speaking to him—but I was trying to ignore that. Juliette thought we were having problems in our “secret relationship,” and I was too tired to convince her of anything else.

Aubrey left on the Friday after Thanksgiving, and by then, everything felt like it had gone back to normal—but a better normal. Zipper was getting healthier, my mother and I were getting along, and Dr. Hennessy had called and graciously scheduled a makeup date for the midterm, which I studied for properly and took without a problem. Everything that had gone wrong was slowly piecing itself back together.

Except that something didn't feel right.

In the grand scheme of things, ending this had been astoundingly easy. But when I thought about the amount of grief that the nightmares had been giving me, that didn't seem plausible. I should have had to fight so much more to banish the monsters from my head; they should have tried to stop me. They hadn't, though. They had let me win.

And that was the problem.

I was at the pool on Saturday, and it was so empty and so quiet that my mind was almost forcibly compelled to think. The last time I had been here was the day of the necklace incident, and though I had no plans to relive that event, I couldn't stop the feeling that something, somehow, was going to go wrong.

As I cut silently through the water, eyes burning with chlorine, I remembered the auburn-haired boy's appearance in my lucid dream and thought, with a slight rush of dread, that he had just been toying with me. He had been there, inches away, a single aspect of my dream that wasn't under my control. I saw his black eyes clearly in my head—his ebony pupils so dilated that they left no white, no veins, nothing to vouch for humanity, because in him, humanity didn't exist.

It couldn't have been so easy. They were messing with me, taunting me, letting me believe that I had achieved normality, raising me to a pinnacle of relief just to rip every shred of imagined comfort right out from beneath my feet. They were cruel, and they wouldn't be turned away so easily.

I was convinced that I was not safe, not really, not yet, and the lingering fear made every breath of air I took harsh and desperate. It had been eleven days of silence in my head and in my dreams, but that meant nothing. The most terrifying monsters were the ones who knew patience.

The air was cold when I left the pool, and it stung my skin until I found my towel and pulled it tightly around my shoulders. Everything felt strange and not quite real: the air, the water, the smooth tile underneath me. It was if everything was taking a deep breath. The calm before the storm, I thought, and shivered.

My phone buzzed as I was leaving the recreation center, but by the time I managed to dig it out of my bag, I was on the front steps and the call had gone to voicemail. I paused against the railing, shuddering as heavy gust of wind blew my damp hair across my face, and played the message.

It was Laury.

“Parker, it's me,” she said, her lilting voice urgent and strained. “I made a mistake. When you broke the connection in the dream, I”—she swallowed—“I thought they were gone for good. But I was wrong, and I'm so, so sorry. I don't know when you'll hear this message, but I can only hope that it's soon. Listen to me, Parker: I need you to stay inside your house. Stay indoors and don't leave; that's the safest place for you right now. I'm on my way this very second and I'll be there to explain as soon as I can, but please, stay in your house. Don't let anyone in, no matter who they are. They aren't gone, and I—”