Beautiful Dreamer

Chapter 24

Chapter Twenty-Four

Laury smiled at me, her back to the mass of shadows that lined the clearing. Confusion lived in my veins, fueling my rapid heartbeat and making my head spin. I was vaguely aware of my teeth chattering, but the cold was forgotten as I tried to make sense of the medium's sudden appearance.

“She was coming to warn you,” the cruel boy hissed, and I could feel his breath on my ear. “We stopped her.” To Laury, he barked, “Get up.”

It was only after a moment that Laury attempted to rise, and even then, it was with considerable effort. Now, as she struggled to her feet, I could see that her bare, drenched arms were darkened with bruises and smeared blood; her bottom lip was swollen, too, and she couldn't stand all the way up.

“What have you done to her?” I breathed, afraid to look at her but too fixated to turn away.

The boy simply chuckled. “We dealt with her.”

As if on cue, a thousand twisted voices rose with his in a sick symphony of laughter, shuddering through the air and stabbing my ears with its discordance. Never before had I stood somewhere and felt such evil around me—this, I thought, was every tale of the devil ever penned, suddenly manifested into being. And right now, I was being slowly lowered into the depths of hell; though for what sins, I didn't know.

Forcing myself to breathe, I looked back at Laury, only to find that she was staring right back at me. Except now, rather than a smile, her eyes were brimming with an unspoken apology.

“I should have known,” she murmured, her whisper carrying in the wind. “Oh, Parker, I shouldn't have let them fool me.”

Looking at her sent a pang through my chest, and my knees buckled beneath me. Were it not for the monsters still clutching my arms, I would have crumpled to the ground. Laury's words brought me back to her hurried message on the phone, cut off before she could finish her sentence. The reason for that was now clear, and though my friend was certainly not okay, I found myself thanking God that she was, at the very least, alive.

“You wouldn't have had a chance against us, regardless,” said the boy, still beside me. “You're only human.”

Laury's eyes were still strained, but her mouth opened to bark out a harsh laugh. “If you're using the words 'only' and 'human' in that context, you clearly don't know this species as well as you think you do. You feel so superior to us, yet all you are is a nightmare that we make up in our heads. We don't believe in you—not really. You are nothing here.”

“We are trying to survive.” His voice was sharpened metal.

“The survival of one species is not worth the death of another,” Laury stated coolly.

“Do you hear yourself, medium? One human death, just one, and an entire species can survive just a little bit longer. And really, your kind die by the thousands everyday. Every time you blink, a person takes their last breath. So what does it matter, in the grand scheme of things, if we borrow one more life?”

Borrow, he said; I snorted dizzily. I was beginning to lose feeling to everything around me: the cold, the shadows, the implications of the cruel boy's words—all of it began to blur and spin. Darkness crept into my vision quite suddenly, and I felt myself begin to slip into unconsciousness.

I jolted awake.

But not from a dream: I was still in the clearing, swaying beneath the rain as the shadows pinned my arms back and the boy lurked at my side. His auburn hair glinted in the frosty moonlight, and he looked straight ahead, not seeming to notice the way I jumped beside him. I was certain that I had just woken up, yet I was still in the same place I had been before.