The Nightmare Affair (2 page)

I lowered myself to the ground, a safe distance away from Eli. One of the best things about dream-walking was that reality was flexible. I could fly, change my appearance, you name it. Usually the first thing I did when arriving in a dream was to replace my frizzy red hair with sleek, straight platinum. Not this time though. I was too distracted by the dream’s strangeness for vanity.

My gaze fell on the name etched in the stone above the doorway of the nearest mausoleum—
KIRKWOOD
. This wasn’t any old graveyard Eli was dreaming about, but Coleville Cemetery, the local burial place for magickind. Only that was impossible. Coleville was located on the grounds of Arkwell Academy—
my
high school. It was a school for magickind, with twelve-foot-high, magically enforced fences and security-guarded gates, and completely inaccessible to ordinaries. Eli
couldn’t
have been here before.

Yet somehow he must’ve been. The details were too good. The place looked exactly like it did in real life, right down to the bell tower in the distance and the odd placement of statues and stone benches among the grave markers. Coleville wasn’t just a cemetery, but a local recreational spot for Arkwell students and teachers, sort of like the campus green, only with dead people.

The heady scent of lilac bushes and jasmine tickled my nose. Even the smells were right on. They were so real, for a moment I almost forgot I was in a dream.

That was impossible, too. Dreams were never so close to reality. Most were like trips through the funhouse, complete with distorted images, naked people—usually the dreamer himself—and disturbing settings like public rest rooms that resembled torture chambers.

I focused on Eli, trying to ignore my growing unease. He was talking to some of the uniformed officers, a serious look on his face. He kept gesturing behind him to where some more cops stood circled around something. Curiosity got the better of me, and I walked over.

Sprawled on the ground lay a pale-faced girl with bright blond hair, the kind I would’ve killed for in real life. Only, it looked as if someone
had
killed her. She was perfectly still, her eyes open but staring at nothing. Dark, purplish bruises rimmed her throat like a grotesque tattoo.

A thrill of fear went through me, and I covered my mouth to muffle a scream. It was Rosemary Vanholt, one of the fairies who attended Arkwell Academy. And she wasn’t just any fairy; she was the daughter of Consul Vanholt, the head of the Magi Senate. A lot of the politicians’ kids went to Arkwell. The magickind capital city of the United States was located nearby on a hidden island somewhere in the middle of Lake Erie. The lake itself was one of the most magical places in America.

She’s like the president’s daughter
. And someone had
murdered
her.

“It’s just a dream,” I whispered. It was possible Eli had seen Rosemary around town or that he knew her. Seniors like her were required to hang around ordinaries for practice sometimes. That was the whole point of a place like Arkwell, to teach magickind how to live undetected in the human world.

Sure, that made sense, but it didn’t explain the Coleville setting. There wasn’t one for that.

On the verge of a freak-out, I turned around, trying to put more distance between me and Rosemary’s body.

In my horror I hadn’t realized that Eli had moved. He now stood less than a yard away from me, so tall and physically imposing he might as well have been a brick wall in the path.

“Crap,” I whispered, sidestepping to avoid him. My foot caught on a tombstone, and I stumbled but managed to swerve my momentum left, barely missing a collision. Too close for comfort, I hurried past Eli, heading for a safe distance.

Something touched my arm, and I shrieked as a jolt of pain went through my entire existence. I turned to see Eli’s gaze fixed on my face, his hand gripping my arm. The world around me began to slip away, the colors melting like fresh paint in the rain. Then my consciousness was hurled out of the dream back into my body hard enough that I screamed again—for real this time. I let go of Eli’s forehead and grabbed my own, trying to stop my brains from rolling around like marbles inside my skull.

The pressure helped for a moment, but then Eli sat up and shoved me. I tumbled off the bed, landing on my back. I tried to take a breath, found I couldn’t, and panicked, arms and legs thrashing. Eli’s bewildered face appeared over me. He grabbed me by the shoulders and hauled me to my feet as easily as if I weighed nothing at all.

As soon as I was upright, my wind came back. So did my senses, and I cast the corrector spell like I’d been taught to do in moments like this. “Aphairein!”

The spell struck Eli, then
bounced,
hitting me instead. The corrector spell worked like an undo button on a computer, but it wasn’t meant to be self-administered. Instead of undoing my actions, it slammed into me with the force of a battering ram. Eli still had hold of my shoulders, and both of us went crashing to the ground this time. He landed on top of me so hard I felt like I’d been sat on by an elephant.

“Get off,” I said, struggling to breathe. I cast another spell at him, but it bounced, too.
What the—?

Eli rolled off me and stood up. When I realized he’d been lying on top of me in only his red boxers, I blushed from head to toe. My skin was so hot I thought I’d turn to ash any second.

“Who the hell are you?” Eli pointed at me, his chest muscles flexing in a way that made me want to giggle.

I resisted the urge and leaped to my feet. We were close enough to the window that the moonlight shone full on my face.

Eli made a choking sound. “I know
you
. What are you doing here? And what’s wrong with your eyes? They’re
 … glowing
?”

I groaned inwardly, ashamed that this hot boy who’d probably never noticed me before was now seeing the worst of me, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
Stupid, stupid, unreliable magic
. In the daytime, Nightmares looked as human as anybody else, our unusually pale eyes strange but not alarming. At night, our eyes glowed white. The glamour I usually wore to hide the glow must’ve come undone.

“What kind of
freak
are you?” Eli said.

I glared at him, ignoring the sting of his words. “At least I’m not the freak dreaming about dead girls.”

He gaped. “How do you know that?”

Uh …
More embarrassed than any one person should ever have to be, I decided it was time to make a break for it. I could hear loud footsteps outside his door and knew I had about two seconds to escape. His dad was a cop; I was certain he would shoot me first and regret later.

I ran to the open window. Rule number two in dream-feeding: always have an escape route. I climbed over the edge, grabbed hold of the ivy-covered drainpipe, and slid down as quickly as I dared. Thank goodness for all those gymnastic lessons when I was younger. Normally, I would’ve used a glider spell to get down, but with my magic misfiring, I couldn’t risk it.

As my feet touched the ground, I looked up to see Eli staring down at me, mouth open. I stuck my tongue out at him. Then I turned and sprinted up the sidewalk.

A few minutes later, I slowed to an easier pace. I had a few blocks to go until I reached McCloud Park, where I’d stowed my bicycle in some bushes. Would’ve been nice to have a car or motorcycle for these late-night dream-feeding adventures—hell, I wouldn’t have turned down a moped—but my chances of getting any kind of motorized vehicle were slim to zero. Arkwell was a boarding school with a strict no-student-vehicles policy.

I spotted my bicycle sitting between some bushes where I’d left it and dropped down to a walk. If Eli or his dad hadn’t caught up to me by now, they probably weren’t going to.

Should’ve known better than to trust my luck.

An enormous black sedan rounded the corner into the parking lot, and I froze as the beam of headlights struck me. It came to a stop, and all the doors opened in unison. Four hairy-looking men in matching gray suits stepped out.

Four
werewolves,
to be precise. Local law enforcement for magickind.

2

Dream Come True

They put me in the back of the sedan, a werewolf on each side. The guy on my right was Hispanic and the guy on my left black. Not that it meant anything. Most magickind didn’t come from any one ethnic group. We had enough trouble getting along without adding racial divisions. Our divisions came from our magical classifications. Think Carl Linnaeus, although instead of class, genus, species, we had “kinds.”

There were three main kinds with loads of sub-kinds, all under the generic umbrella of magickind. The divisions were based on how we get our magic. There was witchkind, like wizards, witches, and psychics, whose magic was self-fueled. Naturekind, like fairies, dryads, and mermaids, who derived power from nature and the elements. And darkkind, like demons, werewolves, and Nightmares, of course, whose power came from other living creatures. I was part-ordinary, considered halfkind, which put me one step above reject in the social hierarchy.

I cleared my throat. “Um, where are we going, guys?”

All four ignored me. Werewolves tended to be surly that way. They also tended to be big, even when in human form, as they were now. I kept my arms tight against my sides to keep from bumping into the two beside me as the car turned corners.

I wasn’t going to get anywhere with this conversation.

I leaned back on the seat, trying to ignore the smell of wet dog so prominent in the confines of the sedan I might as well have been locked in a kennel. My hair was so poofy from the late summer humidity that I had to pull the ponytail over my shoulder to rest my head. I spotted a leaf tangled in it and plucked it out. I was too far from the window to toss it, and I didn’t think throwing it on the floor was a very good idea, so I closed my hand around the leaf and whispered, “Cine-aphan.”

There was a loud crack, and all four werewolves jumped.

“Oops, sorry.” I opened my now empty hand and freed a puff of smoke from where I’d just disintegrated the leaf. I’d meant to vanish the darn thing, but after my dream-feed with Eli, my temperamental magic was on supercharge. Well, that and I wasn’t very good at spells in general. Most halfkinds couldn’t work magic at all, but were born magically sterile.

I tried to ignore the wolfish glowers fixed on me and zone out for a bit, but I couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened with Eli. Temperamental or not, my magic
should’ve
worked on him. The Will was the gatekeeper for all magic usage, and its prime directive was to keep the existence of magickind a secret. The disaster at Eli’s house had to be the reason this werewolf police force picked me up. The Will spell must’ve alerted them about my magic misfiring. But it wasn’t my fault. It was as if Eli was made out of magic rubber. I didn’t doubt that this apparent immunity was why he detected my presence in his dream in the first place.
He
touched
me
. Surely somebody would believe the truth when they heard it.

But in my heart I knew that wasn’t likely. When you were Moira Nimue-Everhart’s only daughter, everybody was keen on you living up to the bad reputation. My mother was, after all, the girl who in her senior year set fire to the Alchemy building at Arkwell, an act she claimed was an accident, but which everybody else suspected had been revenge against a teacher who dared to give her a failing grade. Nobody could prove it though. Getting away with things was Mom’s special talent.

Too bad I didn’t inherit it.

After a while, the car slowed, then came to a stop. The driver lowered his window and spoke briefly to someone outside before moving on. When we came to a stop again a few moments later, the driver killed the engine and all four werewolves got out. I figured they wanted me to follow, so I scooted over and stood up, taking a big gulp of dog-free air.

I recognized our location at once. We were at Arkwell, on the northeast side of campus, parked next to one of the entrances into Coleville Cemetery. The stone archway leading into the cemetery looked three times larger than usual set against the backdrop of the night sky. Through it, I could just make out the first row of headstones.

My stomach did a nosedive as goose bumps blossomed on my arms and legs. If there was one thing I’d learned about the magical world, there was no such thing as coincidence.

“Follow,” said the werewolf who’d been driving.

“Where’re we going?”

He gave me a stern look then turned and strode off toward the archway. I fell into place behind him, the other three following suit. I tried not to panic, surrounded as I was by four creatures capable of turning me into Kibbles ’n Bits in about 2.3 seconds. I knew The Will prevented werewolves from attacking anyone without due cause, but given my current criminal status, I wasn’t sure that included me.

We followed a winding path in and around mausoleums, benches, statues, trees, and flowerbeds. The place was beautiful in a creepy, gothic kind of way. It was scary, too, full of shadows and odd noises.

Eventually the lead werewolf came to a stop out front of a gigantic mausoleum I recognized at once as the Kirkwoods’. A sudden sensation of déjà vu made me shiver with dread.

The werewolf pointed at a bench next to the door into the Kirkwoods’ tomb. “Sit. Wait.”

Did I mention werewolves were chatty?

I sat and waited.

He walked around the building, leaving me alone with the other three. They continued ignoring me and I them. We had a mutual understanding.

I focused my attention on the murmur of voices on the other side of the tomb. Lights flashed here and there above my head, reflecting off leaves and structures, but I couldn’t see anything from where I sat.

“Who found her?” a male voice said. To my surprise, I recognized one of my teachers, a wizard named Mr. Marrow. Knowing there was somebody I knew here made me a little less nervous. I liked Marrow, mostly because he taught history, a subject that didn’t require us to use a lot of magic, thereby lowering my chances for making a fool of myself.