Remember Me

Chapter 7

Ava

By the end of the night, my mind is blown by what Lupa has told me. I'm lying on my bed staring up at my ceiling with Lupa sleeping peacefully on the bed beside me. I think the mission for the evening has been completed. I really got to know Lupa, and I feel like she let her guard down with me. She took off her mask after the carnival and let me know some rather private things about herself. She really has been through a lot.

For some reason, I can't sleep. We've been home since eleven, but now it's two thirty in the morning and I'm still awake. Whenever I try to sleep, the words Lupa said on the walk home and the memories in my mind come together to form a reoccurring nightmare. I close my eyes and it starts again. It begins with the walk home.

We are walking home together, just her and I, down a dirt road that is non-existent in Radcliffe. As we walk, the memories from the carnival are replaced with ones in a little wooden cabin in the woods. We were with a kind old lady who lived there and who we knew well. I look up at the night sky and the stars that glisten from above the crisscrossing tree branches, and I see no moon. There is no moon, only thousands of glittering stars, just like it was when we were walking home earlier.

"That's odd," I say, and there is an echo to my voice like another person is mimicking me at the same time, "I could've sworn it was a half moon last night."

"It was," Lupa replies, in the same ominous tone as earlier, "The moon just hasn't risen yet."

Her voice sends chills up and down my back, and as we keep walking, Lupa begins to fall further and further behind. When I look back at her, the road and the woods disappears to be replaced with the clearing from my dream I've had before in the hospital when I was on medication.

"Are you cold?" Lupa asks.

"A little," I reply. It is an exact repetition of the hospital dream, only worse. This time, when Lupa changes into a wolf, she attacks me violently, ripping me limb for limb and clamping down until my blood paints the far walls of the cabin-

Wait, I think, the cabin? How did I get here? I must've ran here before she caught me. This is a weird and slightly painful dream.

As Lupa makes shreds of my torso and left arm, I reach out for anything to help me. My fingers touch something hard and cold. A fire-poker. Yes. This can help me. This can-

Groaning and the sound of glass breaking jerks me awake before the dream is complete.

I glance down at Lupa, who has rolled off the bed, and see her underneath my fallen nightstand. The remnants of the broken lightbulb are all around her thrashing body.

"Lupa!" I exclaim in alarm, leaping out of bed and pushing the stand off her. I don't know what's happening and I'm debating calling my mom for help-she went back to work after meeting Lupa because of an emergency-when Lupa's eyes open.

They are golden.

I gasp and scramble back, all thoughts of anything but my most recent dream leaving my head, as her body begins to bend in odd ways. There is sickening pops and snaps as the bones reform under her darkening skin. Lupa meets my eyes and she groans through what must be killer pain.

"D-don't look," she half-growls, half mutters in a rough, deep voice, "I c-can't let you... See me like... Ugh... This-Arrrrah!" Her eyes close and her sentence ends almost in a snarl as her body begins to swell and continue to change.

I can't look away. The white shirt rips and stretches before tearing nearly in two, and her jeans become ribbons immediately. Her feet swell and her fingers join together while her thumb and big toe shrink and reposition themselves higher on her foot, the nails on her fingers and toes becoming sharp claws.