The Nightmare Affair (3 page)

The voice that answered him, however, I’d never heard before and hoped never to again, it was so horrible. Female and ancient, it sounded like the grinding of old gears in desperate need of oil. “The maintenance man found her. Mr. Culpepper was on his way home from fixing a plumbing problem at Flint Hall when he heard a disturbance.”

“This late? I’ve never known him to be so willing to repair something in the
student
dormitories after hours.”

“Yes, well, he says he was worried about structural damage if he didn’t fix it right away.”

“I see.” There was a long pause, then Mr. Marrow said, “I suppose, given the missing hand, she was one of the Keepers?”

Missing hand? Keeper?
I didn’t like the sound of that at all.

“Yes. I’ve been telling the senate for years they shouldn’t allow Keepers so young, but the families have started to treat it like a rite of passage, mere ceremony. They’ve grown complacent about the threat.”

“Well, now I imagine they’ll realize none of the Keepers are safe.”

The old woman took a deep breath. “Ambrose, I didn’t see this coming.”

“No sign at all?”

“No. It’s as if something’s blocked my visions. I can’t begin to fathom the kind of magic necessary to do that.”

“Yes, but best to focus on what we can for now.”

“You’re right. I’ll know more once I speak to the girl.”

Sheriff Brackenberry appeared from around the side of the mausoleum. He stopped beside the bench and stared down at me, so big he blocked the moon from sight. He looked like an NFL linebacker with some extra paunch and body hair. Not only was he head of the magickind police force in Chickery, he was also the alpha werewolf.

“Listening in, were you?” said Brackenberry.

I swallowed.

The sheriff shook his head. “I would think someone who’s been up to as much trouble this evening as you, Miss Everhart, would know better than to press her luck by eavesdropping.” He paused and smiled, his mouth all long teeth and snarl. “Then again, I guess it’s not that surprising after all.”

His condescension was a little undeserved, I thought. Aside from the night last March when I first came into my Nightmare powers and went on an unauthorized dream-feed on the neighbor boy, I’d never been in serious trouble. Nothing worse than a couple of detentions and a D on my alchemy final last year. Well, there
was
that incident in spell-casting class when I turned Katarina Marcel into a snake, but it had been an accident.

He must be judging me by my mother. Made sense, given he was a cop. He’d probably arrested her a couple of times before he became sheriff. Mom had been a social activist in her twenties, leading protests on magickind issues, such as when she tried to get the ban on romantic relationships with ordinaries lifted. She’d gone to all that trouble just to be with my dad, only to divorce him a few years later. Typical that her self-serving behavior would be causing me trouble now.

“I didn’t do anything wrong. I swear.”

He grunted. “Like I’ve never heard that before. Funny, but I expected a little more originality from Moira’s daughter.”

“Yeah, well, the dog ate my notebook with all my good excuses.”

Okay, so mouthing off to the sheriff wasn’t my smartest decision of the night, but I couldn’t help it. Smartassitis might not be a clinically defined disease, but it should be.

Brackenberry growled at me. Seriously! He
growled
. I closed my eyes and pretended to be invisible. A small part of me half-expected it to work. There were spells for stuff like that. Not that I knew any.

“I think that’s enough intimidation for now, Sheriff,” Mr. Marrow said, appearing behind him.

Relief bloomed inside me, and I beamed up at Marrow. He didn’t smile back, but I detected a friendly twinkle in his eyes.

“Come with me, Dusty.”

I stood up like someone had lit a stove burner beneath my butt and hurried past Brackenberry. Marrow led me around the Kirkwood mausoleum, then came to a stop. He faced me, resting his hands on top of his cane. He didn’t need the cane to walk, even though he was kind of old. Silver threaded his storm-cloud gray hair and neatly trimmed beard, and his skin resembled aged leather. The cane was Marrow’s wizard staff disguised by glamour. All wizards and witches needed a magical object in order to use magic, sort of like needing a mouse to use a computer. I was glad Nightmares didn’t need wands and stuff. I would’ve just ended up losing mine—or breaking it.

“I must say, Dusty, one of these days your tongue is going to dig its way right into your grave,” said Marrow.

I sighed. “I know. I don’t mean to. My mouth just works independent of my brain sometimes.”

“Obviously. Though I’m glad you’re wise enough to admit your shortcomings. That’s the first step to overcoming them. However, I suggest you make every attempt to control yourself now. There’s someone waiting to talk to you who won’t be as tolerant as the sheriff. Lady Elaine is an oracle. Do you know what that means?”

I nodded. I paid enough attention in his classes to know that an oracle was a witchkind born with the rare ability to see far into the future. They were prophets whose predictions almost always came true.

“Good,” Marrow said. “Show her the utmost respect and be completely honest about everything she asks you. Understand?”

“Yep. Will do.”

He turned and walked on. Ahead of us, a woman stood in between a row of headstones. She was staring at me as if I were a science experiment starting to bubble over the side of the beaker. Behind her, I saw some kind of magical shield, like a wall of woven light, hiding the area beyond.

As we drew closer to the woman, I slowed down. She looked about four feet tall and seventy-five pounds, but I knew enough about the power of oracles to be afraid of her. Her arms, visible beneath the tight black turtleneck she wore, resembled broom handles, the bones the same width from shoulder to wrist. I reckoned it wouldn’t take much to break one, but I doubted very many people would try to harm her. She had a look in her pale, almost milky eyes that made me think of dragons and other creatures that favored teenage girls for dinner. Besides, she’d probably see an attack coming.

Marrow came to a stop a few feet away from the oracle. “Lady Elaine, this is Destiny Everhart.”

I cringed at the use of my real name. It was so important sounding, like somebody with, well, a
destiny
. Not me. That was why I went by Dusty—it fit better. Plus, my mom
hated
it.

Lady Elaine looked me up and down with a dire expression, her lips compressed into a tight line. “You were dream-walking earlier?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Did something go wrong?”

I started to fidget with my hair. “Oh, you could say that, yeah. The guy woke up and then my magic wouldn’t work on him.”

“Yes, I see. Good.” She nodded to herself. “This confirms it.”

“Um, confirms what?”

But the old lady wasn’t listening. “Tell me what happened.
Everything
.”

Now, I knew the definition of everything meant, well, everything, but I didn’t see any reason why this old woman needed to know how distractingly hot I thought Eli was in his red boxer shorts. So I censored the more embarrassing details and spilled the rest—the setting at Coleville, Rosemary, even the way Eli had touched me, and kicked me out of the dream. If Lady Elaine was surprised by any part of my tale, I couldn’t tell. The expression on her face, grave with a side of crankiness, didn’t change.

Not that I looked at her much. My gaze kept drifting to the wall behind her. It didn’t take someone with less of an imagination than mine to guess it might be hiding a pale-haired fairy girl. But I didn’t want it to be Rosemary Vanholt. Not just because the idea of someone so young being murdered, especially someone I knew, was so horrible, but because if it was her, then that meant there’d been something
special
about my dream-walk. I didn’t want to be a part of anything special. Bad things happened to special people. Usually failure followed by an early death.

When I finished recounting the story, Lady Elaine asked, “Was Rosemary’s body intact in the dream?”

“Um, yeah,” I said, trying not to remember the missing hand business.

“Was she wearing a ring?”

I gulped, certain the ring in question was no doubt magical and probably dangerous. There was no shortage of magical artifacts hanging around. If it weren’t for The Will keeping stuff in check, a lot of those things could kill you just by touching them, like a cursed sweater designed to shrink the moment you put it on and not stop until it squeezed the life right out of you. Magickind was pretty civilized nowadays, but it didn’t used to be.

“Well?” Lady Elaine said.

“Um … I don’t know. Looking at dead people’s not really my thing.”

“I see.” She sounded disappointed. “What about this boy, Eli Booker? You knew him already?”

I forced my hands away from my hair and the knots I’d managed to put in the ends of it. “Not really. I only know who he is because we were in the same grade at my old high school.”

“But do you have…” She broke off as a terrible noise sounded behind us. A loud, piercing shriek. I glanced back, expecting to see a banshee or maybe a harpy, but it was far worse. A woman with the same bright blond hair as Rosemary was stumbling toward us.

“Tell me it’s not true.” She stopped when she reached Lady Elaine and grabbed the old crone by her bony arms. “Tell me it’s not!”

Lady Elaine didn’t respond, but I guessed that was response enough from an oracle. The woman let go and continued her stumbling walk toward the magical shield. I knew who she was, of course. Mrs. Vanholt, Rosemary’s mother.

I fought back tears, struggling to breathe as the woman’s grief filled the air around us. I watched as Mrs. Vanholt approached the shield. She stopped before it, raising her hands. The shield vibrated a moment like a plucked harp string, then vanished.

I caught only a glimpse of what was behind it before Marrow took hold of my arm and turned me around, but it was enough to confirm my worst fear. Lying on the ground in the same position as I’d seen her in the dream was Rosemary. Her right hand was missing, cut off at the wrist.

“Let’s go,” said Marrow.

He didn’t have to tell me twice. I hurried back the way we’d come, wishing I could run and fighting the urge to be sick. When we reached the other side of the Kirkwood mausoleum, Marrow said, “That’s far enough.”

I disagreed. A hundred miles wouldn’t be far enough, but I halted and faced him.

He touched my shoulder, squeezing it gently. “Are you all right?”

I started to nod, thought better of it, and shook my head. “What’s going on? Is that really Rosemary? Why’s her hand gone? And how did I see it in Eli’s dream, and…”

“Shhh,” he said in his soothing, gravelly voice. “Take a deep breath. There, that’s better.” He smiled, the gesture creating deep caverns on his face. “I know you have a lot of questions, and I’m certain the oracle will address them as soon as she’s able. But now is not the right time. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” I said through a throat tight with the thought of Mrs. Vanholt’s grief.

“Good.” Marrow waved at Sheriff Brackenberry, who was standing with a couple of the other werewolves a few yards away. The alpha approached us alone.

Marrow said to the sheriff, “Would you mind escorting Miss Everhart to her dormitory? I think it best, given the circumstances.”

The expression on Brackenberry’s face suggested he definitely minded, but he said, “Yes, sir. Of course.”

“Thank you.” Marrow looked back at me. “Try to put everything out of your mind for now.”

Yeah sure, no problem
.

“Come on,” said Brackenberry as Marrow walked away.

The sheriff made me sit in the back of the car like some kind of jailbird, but I didn’t complain. My dorm, Riker Hall, was on the opposite side of campus, a good ten-minute walk that I didn’t feel like making in the middle of the night with a killer on the loose.

I sat back and tried to think about nice things, like my dad making French toast on Sunday mornings or how I’d kicked the winning goal at the soccer play-offs last year, back when I’d still been an ordinary. Back when dreams were only dreams.

But all I could see was Rosemary’s dead body.

The car pulled to a stop a few minutes later. Brackenberry got out and opened my door. “Hurry up. I’ve got things to do.”

I climbed out and looked around at the familiar buildings, a mix of stone cathedrals and mini-castles, complete with looming towers, a lot of pointed arches, and walls as thick as bank vault doors. Riker Hall stood to my right, looking like a squat fortress. I didn’t want to go in there and back to my dorm room. What if I dreamed about Rosemary? I didn’t have nearly the amount of power in my own dreams as I did in everybody else’s.

In a pathetic attempt to stall, I asked, “What about my bike? It’s still at McCloud Park.”

“I’ll have one of my boys drop it off later.”

“Oh. Um, thanks.”

“Something wrong?”

I bit my lip. “Well, I guess I’m just surprised I’m not in trouble. I mean, I exposed myself to an ordinary.”

Brackenberry snorted. “Would you prefer I haul you to jail? I can do that if you’d like.” He opened the door again and waved.

“No thanks.” I wasn’t entirely certain he was joking. “I guess it’s just a lucky break or something. That’s kind of unusual for me.”

A wide, unpleasant grin stretched across his wolfish face. “Well, maybe your luck’s changing.”

He couldn’t have been more wrong.

3

Dream Duty

News about Rosemary’s death spread through the student body the next day faster than a Facebook chain post. It didn’t help that there were now werewolf police officers walking the hallways and patrolling the grounds. The atmosphere in the underclassmen’s cafeteria at breakfast hummed with voices, the sound a mixture of fear and excitement. I tried not to listen, but it was impossible.

“She died?”

“Someone
murdered
her. On campus.”