North Star

Chapter Thirteen: Carlyle

Somewhere, in the corner of my mind, I'm aware that I'm dreaming—not a Selene dream, just a regular dream. My dream self stood in a familiar alleyway. It was familiar because, even though I'd never been there in real life, I'd had this dream before.

Wake up, I told myself. Just wake up. 

It didn't work—it never did. I wouldn't wake up until the screaming started.

I walked down the dimly lit alley, my traitor feet carrying my forward even though my brain was screaming at me to turn and run. There was a figure standing near the end of the road, tall and broad, he was lit from behind and all I could see of his face was dark shadows where his eyes should have been and a wide grin, his crooked teeth almost luminous in the dimly lit alley.

He looked down at his right hand, his grin stretching so wide that his mouth split at the corners. I followed his glaze down to where a crumpled Selene drooped, held up only by his hand in her matted hair.

I sprinted towards them when he lifted her up by her hair and slammed her into the wall, but the faster I ran the longer the alley way seemed to be. And then his hand was a knife and he was plunging it into Selene's chest. Her back arched off the wall and the metal crunched into the brick behind her. The man let go of her hair and Selene slumped to the ground in slow motion, the knife in her chest making an awful nails-on-chalkboard sound as the tip scraped its way down the wall.

And then, without either of us having moved, I was suddenly standing nose to nose—although it was more like nose to chest—with the man. There was a knife in my hand and with a scream I buried it up to the hilt in his stomach. But when I looked up at his face, he was Spencer, looking exactly the way he had when he had died. Blood trickled out of the hole where his eye had been. He fell and I fell with him.

That's usually when the screaming started.

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The clock on the box that acted as my nightstand said 8:15am; I'd only gotten around three hours sleep. I threw a pillow at it and burrowed back under the duvet, bundling up in the mountain of blankets until the last of the nightmare-induced tremors had stopped. It was late summer in Paris, and even though it was still warm outside, my box-room of an apartment was always freezing.

The apartment was tiny—barely enough room for my little army cot, a mini-fridge and the microwave that sits atop it. If I stood in the center of the room, I could touch all four walls at once. Its saving grace was the equally small—but washing machine including—adjoining bathroom, and next to nothing rent. It was located above The Bombardier, the little English pub in central Paris, where I'd been working for the past year and a half, and I think it used to be an office, although the only access to it was up the fire escape around the back of the building. It had been empty when I had shown up at the pub after weeks of living on the streets, seeking work and board. Charlie, the owner, had sympathetically looked passed my lack of references and experience and offered me both a job and a place to stay. I'd found out later that he was known for taking in strays—that his daughter had gotten murdered while she was living on the street somewhere, looking for her Soulmate.

I was exhausted, but I knew I wouldn't be able to get back to sleep. Instead of drifting back into a peaceful slumber, shoving the nightmare into a neat little box in my mind, where it would stay until unconsciousness dredged it up again, I pulled myself out of bed, and stumbled into the shower, letting the hot water work out all the army-cot-inducing kinks from my muscles, lingering until the water began to lose its heat. Wrapped in a towel, I blow-dried my hair, still amazed at how little time it took for it to dry; in an attempt to save money, I had gotten my previously waist-length hair cut to chin-length at one of those cut-or-shave-your-hair-for-cancer-charity-drive-things. It had grown a bit since then, and now hung straight and dark in a blunt bob that skimmed the tops of my shoulders, with wispy bangs that I had cut myself. My streak of pink had long since grown out.