Speak (Witches & Warlocks Book 1) (10 page)

“What about you?” Luke pauses the game and turns to me. “Are you still having nightmares?”

Ya. Lucky me, I traded my imaginary tiger for nightmares about tigers. And dragons. And snakes. And sometimes there’s this voice, calling my name over and over. Ugh. The voice is always so frantic and desperate … it makes me upset just thinking about it. “Had one last night.”

“First one in a while?”

I hate hearing the hope in his voice because I’m just going to crush it here in a second. “No. Every night. I still have them every night.”

That’s one of the other things that changed about me since that night at Flannigan’s. Not only do I have a big gaping hole in my memory starting right around the time I caught Noah watching us at the pool table — apparently I got back from the bathroom and had more than my weight in margaritas — but now I wake up, sweating and shaking and out of breath. Heart racing. Palms sweaty. It’s awful. It’s the same dream, or at least the same elements over and over and over again. There’s a tiger being swallowed whole by a snake and a dragon lighting the world on fire. Sometimes I watch. Sometimes I’m the tiger. Sometimes I burn, too.

“Same stuff?” asks Luke, unpausing the game and breaking eye contact. He’s learned I do so much better when I’m not crushed under the weight of all of his attention at once.

“Ya. Tigers and snakes and dragons, oh my.”

“I’m so sorry.” And he really is. I can hear it in his voice. We don’t have much to say after that — just lose ourselves in our game.

When you live like a hermit, your life shrinks down really small. Before I lost the second half of the first night I met Luke, my life wasn’t much. I’d go to work in cubicle village; I’d come home. Becca and I would go out. There was a pattern to our days, but there was also the unpredictability that comes with being out and around people. Now that we stay in night after night, life has just, I don’t know. I guess I’m bored. I’m totally happy. But I’m bored.

Funny thing is, whenever I start to admit that, maybe tell Luke I want to go out, or ask Becca if she wants to go shopping, I think of the tiger. That side of me that used to beg me to get out from behind my terminal shyness. And as soon as I think of the tiger, I think of the nightmares, and my hands start sweating and I lose all desire to leave the apartment at all. So I try not to think about being bored and as soon as I do, I squash the thought flat. That’s why I’m glad for the Xbox. Whenever I feel that ghost of an urge to do something, I fire it up and play a game or two.

The other thing that’s happened is that I’m totally, completely, one hundred percent not interested in having conversations with people that aren’t Becca or Luke. At all. At work, I do my best, but I’m in and out of there as fast as I can, avoiding the other people like an absolute ninja. If I do end up getting caught, maybe by my boss with a new stack of papers for me or some such nonsense, I smile and murmur my answers, but my palms are sweating the whole damn time. Even on the Xbox, the one time Luke talked me into playing an online multi-player game, I couldn’t handle talking to people through the headset. But that might have been because I felt ridiculous wearing the thing. Honestly though? I don’t mind. I’m better this way. Better off keeping quiet. Better off in my small —very small — circle of friends.

All in all, other than the nightmares, life is good. Oh, and the worrying about Becca stuff. That kind of gets in the way of the whole life is good thing, too. But she swears she’s ok, and Luke swears she’s ok, so maybe it’ll just be better for me to believe them.

Life goes by in a string of days without meaning, making it all the easier to convince myself that everything is, indeed, good. It’s one of the rare nights that the guys aren’t over and Becca’s got me watching some awful chick flick.

“So how are things with Carter?” I can’t help myself. I need to know more about what’s going on between them. I want to hit her with a million questions: How did you meet? How long have you really known him? How can you stand being around him when he’s so morose all the time? But I don’t. I know she’ll just clam up if I do. I’m going to have to be patient and do this slow.

Her lips tighten into a thin little line. Even the safest of questions has her tense. “Oh, we’re good.” She tries to smile at me, but it’s not a pretty smile.

“Ya?” I pretend not to notice her reaction. “Seems like it.” Neither one of us breaks eye contact with the TV.

There’s an extended period of silence and I pretend to care about the plight of the too-pretty-to-be-real girl crying on the screen. This is so not the way Becca and I talk. Well, wait. This is definitely the way I talk — as in, I don’t talk — but it’s not at all the way Becca talks. Normally, we’d be laughing as she made fun of the movie and chirped away about her time with Carter in between jokes. I’m so over all this strangeness just compounding the amount of worry I’m feeling about her. I decide to press the issue.

“I’m glad you’re happy, but he really doesn’t seem like your type.”

She flinches and then smiles. “Ya. Back atcha kid.” She totally ignored the second half of what I said.

Well, in for a penny, in for a pound, I guess. “Really though, when did you two meet?”

“It really bothers you that you don’t know, doesn’t it?”

Ahhh. Becca’s classic diversion technique. Answering a question with a question. Well, two can play at this game. “Well, wouldn’t it bother you?”

I’d hoped she’d get all playful and tease me back and we could be Becca and Zoe again, laughing on the couch. Instead of her eyes doing that crazy sparkle thing that shouldn’t happen in real life, they go dark. “There are parts of my life that you don’t know about, Zoe.”

Well, that actually hurts. It shouldn’t, I get that. Everyone needs their secrets, I guess. It’s just that I don’t have any secrets I keep from her. She knows every last thing that’s happened to me in my life because she’s either been there when it happened or I told her about it afterwards. I guess maybe that’s the difference between needing a seeing-eye dog and being one.

We finish the movie without much else being said between us. My stomach is upset and I can’t focus on what the characters are saying on the TV because there’s this wailing siren of worry going off in my head. Not only have I upset her, but I’m more than certain she’s hiding something from me. Well, clearly she’s hiding big chunks of her life from me but what I mean is that she’s hiding something about Carter from me. I don’t think Becca is ok, and it just makes it worse that she won’t talk to me about it.

Sleep takes a long time coming and that’s fine because I’m dreading the inevitable nightmares. Just as I cross the line between consciousness, there’s this, I don’t know, pop. I might have heard it, but I think it’s more like I felt it, or maybe I started to dream and it’s all my conscious mind and my sub—conscious mind crossing the lines and playing together. There’s a flare of light behind my closed eyelids. Bright. Warm. Like cinnamon rolls on a Saturday and sun streaming in through the windows.

I must be dreaming. Kind of a nice change of pace not to be scared yet. So often, the dreams start out with me lost and alone and I’m nervous from the time I close my eyes until I open them again. But if tonight is going to wrap me up in warm golden light …

There’s something there. In that thought. Light, golden light, spiraling around my body … was it a firefly? A sparkler from the fourth of July?

My whole world quakes and shakes and fire leaps up around me. That strange thought about sparklers or fireflies is overcome by the feeling that I’ve got to get out of here. I’ve got to find …
it
. It’s looking for me and I’m looking for it and nothing’s going to be ok until I get it back. I’m in so much danger. Danger everywhere. Smoke rolls off the fire, great purple clouds of it, spilling onto the ground and seething towards me. I run but it’s faster than I am. The ground hisses and churns, huge snakes wrapping around my feet and dragons swoop down from above, breathing flames into the treetops.

“Zoe!”

It’s a voice that feels like home and if I could just make my way to it, everything would make sense. But the snakes are pulling at my feet and their fangs rake across my ankles. Slithering and creeping up my legs, tightening their bodies until I think my bones might break. Poison wanders through my veins, spinning the world into a dizzying array of colors.

“Zoe!” The voice is insistent. Impatient. Desperate for my attention. I’m dying, being gobbled up by snakes, burned by dragons, and suffocated by smoke so dark it’s purple.

“Help me!” A snake has worked its way up my legs and is crushing my chest. I try to scream but the smoke pours down my throat and I can’t cough because the snake won’t let me take a breath and I’m suffocating and the fire touches my skin. There’s sizzling and crackling and the world tilts on its axis and another set of fangs pierces my cheek.

“Zoe! You have to see! You have to hear me! Just fight a little harder!”

The hissing and roaring and pain — so much pain! — makes it impossible for me to hear what the voice is saying. My lungs burst and fire envelopes me and just before I succumb to death I see a tiger with vibrant blue eyes standing and watching from afar.

She roars and I wake, sweat mingling with tears and my heart racing in my chest.

Chapter 12

I’m worried about Becca. I worry about it all morning while I get ready for work. I worry about it all day while I’m at work — which is fine because my job is brainless — and I’m still worried about it now that I’m on my way home from work. Normally, when I’m worried about something, I talk to Becca about it, but I can’t really do that because she’s not been very supportive of me chewing over this particular set of concerns. Luke just brushes the whole topic off like it’s no big deal and I don’t think I’ve said more than two words to Carter like, ever.

What’s a girl to do?

I could call her mom and find out if she knows anything. Except not really ‘cause that sounds awful. I can’t imagine how I’d feel if she did that to me. I guess that just means that I’ll need to, what? Leave her alone, I guess. Which isn’t exactly going to be easy because we live in the same two bedroom apartment and I can’t help but get all nervous and weird whenever she and I cross paths. I guess that just means that I might have to go out. Alone. Me. Out in the world without my seeing-eye dog.

‘Cause that’s always worked so well.

I’m not stepping another foot into Flannigan’s. My coffee shop experiment was an absolute bust, although, the little park I found that day was pretty. There’s still many hours of daylight left, I could grab something to eat and head back over there. I stop at home long enough to change out of my boring old work clothes and put on something comfortable. On a crazy whim, I grab my journal out of my top drawer and find a pen. Maybe, if I can’t talk to anyone about what’s got me all worried, I’ll find some measure of comfort in getting the words out onto a page.

It’s kind of weird being out in the world again. I mean, don’t take that quite so literally. I’ve left the apartment for things like work and groceries, but being out without a purpose, you know, without a clear and concise destination and a plan to return home immediately after reaching said destination and completing whatever purpose, is … well it’s kind of relaxing. I wander the streets, clutching my journal to my chest, enjoying the sounds of life. Cars and conversations. Birds and sunshine. Someone rolling by with their windows down and their radio up. It’s good. A breeze lifts my hair off my neck, cooling the sweat that’s broken out at my hairline.

I go for simple as far as dinner is concerned, just grabbing a protein bar from a gas station and wander towards the park. I don’t remember much about the last time I was here, only that it was pretty and restful. There’s a bench nestled under a tree that looks particularly appealing. I head over there, plop myself down, and open my journal.

At first, my pen just kind of hovers over the page, like the words I want to say aren’t formed enough to even come out yet. I start scratching some random drawings into the margins, hoping that eventually the sketches will turn into words that will turn into sentences and I can start to make sense of what’s going on with Becca. Instead of words, I find myself drawing the same flower over and over again, each with a strange spot on one of the petals. The human psyche is so strange, and mine is probably a little stranger than most.

Clearly, sketching until words appear isn’t going to get me anything but a page filled with doodles, so I bring my pen down to the first line and write Becca’s name. And then I just let it loose. Whatever comes to my head, I write it down.

Becca. Friend. Worried. I’m worried about my friend. My friend who isn’t my friend. Something’s wrong. I have to see. I have to hear. I have to fight just a little bit harder.

My hand is sweating and I rub it on my shorts before picking my pen back up and trying again.

What’s wrong with Becca? What’s she hiding? She’s hiding. She’s hiding from me.