To Overthrow the Guardians

Chapter 25: The Mist

When Haven came back from meeting the woman in the cave, having gotten nowhere with her dreams, she found unconscious glowing Fearlings and Black Sand everywhere.

"What happened?" she asked aloud, and she heard the front doors being unlocked. Matt's tense face appeared as he opened one. It immediately brightened and smiled.

"Haven, you're alright!"

"Yes, I'm fine," Haven said as Matt ran to her and pulled her into a hug. When he stopped and took a step back, she looked at everything some more. "What happened?"

Matt's grin was wiped from his face. "Mallory attacked. He looked different; his hair was gray, though lighter than yours, and he was wearing dark clothes. He brought Fearlings and Nightmares and tried to kill us. And he did something to Whisper and Fiona. I don't know. They look like they're dead, but when we checked, they had pulses and are still breathing, barely. We don't know if they're going to wake up."

"Should we take them to a hospital?"

"I don't know if they'd be willing to do anything to Whisper, at least; she's not human. But we could at least try..."

Haven heard groaning come from inside, and Angelia gasped.

"They're waking up!" she cried. Matt and Haven ran inside. There on the ground, Whisper and Fiona were beginning to open their eyes and stretch their limbs. They looked up at everyone looking down on them, including the North Hall's E.A.D.

"What did Mallory do to me?" Whisper asked, sitting up. "He hit me with some sort of black mist, and then I fell unconscious and started having a horrible nightmare."

"We thought you were dead!" Angelia said.

"But we're alive." Fiona massaged her temples. "Getting hit with that wasn't very fun, though."

"Are you guys okay?" Haven asked.

"Yeah, I'm fine," Fiona said.

"I am good," Whisper said. "I can't believe how out of practice I am with my power, though. I would usually be able to keep the Fearlings and Nightmares away, but I couldn't." She sighed. "I guess I will have to retrain my ability."

"That's alright," Matt said, but by the grim look on his face, he wasn't happy about it.

Haven checked the time on her phone. "I have somewhere to go soon. I have to meet up with someone tonight."

"Will you be safe?" Matt asked.

"Yeah. They'll be here to pick me up in a few minutes. See you later!" And with that, she dashed back outside, then when no one was looking, ran into the forest to be found and picked up by the woman she had met with earlier.

*}{/*}{/*}{/*

Mallory looked down the street in the fading light. He was in his dark form just because he felt like it, and he had his launcher in his hands and his extra Dreamsand bag in his blue backpack. He shot Dreamsand at one house window and nearly missed, but some made it inside.

"Maybe you should have had us practice before doing this," he told Beatrice, who was next to him. Other people had taken other neighborhoods.

She nodded, though her blue eyes were narrowed. "Perhaps I should have. But that would have taken much more time, and Fracture was already up so late. I didn't want her to be groggy in the morning or else my parents might have suspected something." She shot Dreamsand into another house with perfect aim. She had clearly been practicing.

"Why don't you move out and leave them?" Mallory asked. "They sound pretty limiting."

"They wouldn't allow it," Beatrice replied, and they continued delivering Dreamsand to houses. "After I returned from The- that's the name of the Prophecy People's planet- they never wanted me to leave their sight because they thought I was 'insane'. I tried to go off on my own sometimes, and sometimes I succeeded. I watched Haven Sloan- Haven Avery at the time- until my parents decided to move when they saw I was doing that."