The Nightmare Charade Read online

I shifted to my side and saw that Eli was lying beside me, our bodies almost touching. Almost, but not quite. We couldn’t touch, not in a dream. If we tried I would be ejected out of the dream. Painfully.

  I smiled. “Real me.”

  He smiled back. “I can tell. The real you is way more beautiful than my dream one.”

  I smiled at the compliment, but Bollinger’s insult came back to me. “Are you sure about that? Cause I can do a lot better than this.” I closed my eyes for a second, concentrating. When I opened them again, I’d transformed my appearance, trading my red fuzzy hair for sleek platinum. “Do you like this better?”

  “No,” Eli said. “Not even for a second.” He raised his hand and reached toward my face.

  I jerked back.

  Eli froze. “Damn. I forgot. No touching.”

  Grimacing, I exhaled. “Stupid dream.”

  “Stupid chaperone.” He sat up.

  The reminder brought tears stinging to my eyes again. It was so unfair, so ridiculous.

  “Hey,” Eli said, staring down at me. “It’s not the end of the world. We’ll find ways around it. Who’s better than us at sneaking around?”

  “Nobody.”

  “It might even be fun.”

  I laughed and sat up, too, taking my first real look at the dream world, which had slowly come into focus. A gasp lodged in my throat when I saw we were lying in a boat on a dark, fathomless river. The moment I realized it, I became aware of the subtle rock and sway of the water’s movement beneath us.

  “Well, this is weird,” said Eli.

  I nodded, my gaze still processing the strange sight. This wasn’t a normal ship, but a barge, like the kind Egyptian pharaohs and princesses used to cruise around the Nile on. It was low-sided, the railing no more than a lip, but large, easily the width of a tennis court and twice again as long. We were lying near the rear of the boat, and ahead of us was a raised platform with a canopied roof. The white gauzy curtains hid whatever was inside. Beyond the platform, I could just make out a little of the boat’s prow, rising up and in front of the ship like the neck of a dragon.

  “Weird is right,” I said, getting to my feet. The boat’s movement grew even more pronounced as I stood, and I realized that we were moving forward, following some unknown current. I looked out over the boat’s edge and spotted what looked like a distant shoreline, although it was hard to tell in the dim light. I glanced up, once again seeing nothing but an endless black overhead—no moon or stars, nothing to light the way. Nevertheless there was light coming from somewhere. It filled the cavernous space around the ship just enough for me to make out shapes, but it had no source, and it made no sense. We shouldn’t be able to see anything. And yet as I strained my eyes toward the shore, I could almost make out people standing there, observing our slow, silent passage.

  I turned my gaze to the front, wondering where the boat was headed, but there was nothing but an endless black horizon. A sense of absolute isolation, something akin to claustrophobia, came over me, icy fingers clutching at my heart.

  “Where are we?” Eli said. The sound of his voice jolted me from the momentary terror, and I rolled my eyes at myself. I was a Nightmare and this was a dream. I wasn’t trapped on this barge. I could trade this dark, water-filled landscape for a field of baby unicorns and kittens if I wished.

  “I have no idea.” I motioned toward the platform ahead. “Have you ever been on a boat like this?”

  Eli pushed himself into a standing position. “Nope. I’ve never even seen a boat like this. Outside of the movies, anyway.”

  I inhaled, a thrill of excitement going through me. If he’d never seen this before, then that meant we were on the track of something. I didn’t know if it was related to the Death’s Heart, but it hardly mattered. I’d missed the thrill of dream-seeing.

  “Let’s look around,” Eli said, his gaze focused on the platform.

  As we walked forward, I let my eyes wander to my left, out over the water. The glass-smooth surface glistened from that unseen light. Farther away, the bodies now moved on the shoreline, faint and ghostly and humanoid.

  “Wait,” I said as a new and far closer movement caught my eye. I stopped and turned toward the boat’s edge. “There’s something in the water.” My throat tightened. Anything could be in there. At once I pictured grayish-white corpses floating beneath the surface. “You’ve seen too many movies, Dusty,” I whispered, forcing air back into my lungs.

  “What did you say?” Eli asked from behind me. I shook him off and approached the low railing. There was indeed something in the water. Lots of somethings. But not human corpses. They looked like sharks or eels. Long, thin bodies slid beneath the water’s surface, moving up and down, sideways, and turning in circles.

  “Some kind of fish,” Eli said, joining me at the boat’s side. “That’s normal enough.”

  “If you say so, but I’m not going for a swim anytime soon.”

  “Probably wise.”

  We both turned and resumed our slow march toward the platform. Although there was no breeze, the curtains billowed outward. Seeing it, feeling the wrongness of it, I wanted to turn back, or just leave the dream all together. I didn’t want to know what was hidden behind that curtain.

  “Eli, wait.”

  He stopped and looked over his shoulder, frowning. “What is it?”

  “I don’t want to get taken by surprise.” This might be a dream, but we both knew that didn’t make it safe. There were things in dreams that could hurt you, and not just psychologically.

  Eli nodded, a single up and down of his chin, his expression uncertain.

  I closed my eyes and reached out with my Nightmare-keen senses. At once I felt the dream as a physical thing around me, the magic of it like a tightly woven tapestry. But I was a master weaver, capable of pulling it apart and putting it back together again as I chose. With the feel of the dream firmly fixed in my mind, I opened my eyes again and focused on the curtain, willing it to disappear, to un-be.

  For a second the curtain flickered, like a picture coming in and out of focus, but then I felt the dream push back. It solidified, going from a tapestry to something denser, less easy to break apart, like granite. Frowning, I pressed harder, but the dream’s resistance only strengthened in response. It did not want to be vanished away.

  “Can’t you manipulate it?” Eli said.

  I bit my lip. “I’m trying, but it won’t go.”

  He ran a hand over his head, combing his fingers through hair that wasn’t there anymore with his new military-short haircut. “Maybe you’re out of practice.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” It was possible. I rarely had reason to manipulate the dreams of anybody else—not unless they were dreaming something gross that I didn’t want to see. But I’d been fortunate all summer, most of the dreams I visited were pretty tame as dreams go. Only one of them had been a showing-up-naked-to-school dream, but I’d just kept my eyes averted.

  Giving it up as a bad job, I disengaged my magic and let the dream settle back into place. It must be something important to resist the manipulation so strongly. I pictured the Death’s Heart. Maybe this wasn’t an Egyptian pleasure barge at all, but a funeral barge.

  A shiver slid over my arms as if from a phantom wind. But again there was no wind. Then how is the barge moving? For it certainly was, the floor in a constant, subtle shift beneath our feet. An image of corpses in the water came to my mind once more, only this time they were reanimated. They pushed us along, their dead, water-swollen fingertips pressing into the ship’s hull.

  I shook the vision off before it could fully materialize. If I wasn’t careful, I might end up bending the dream into a nightmare on accident.

  “I’ll go first,” Eli said, and he stepped forward without waiting for a reply.

  Chiding myself for being a coward, I hurried up beside him. We would do this together, same as everything else.

  When we reached the curtain, Eli grasped the right panel while I took the left.
Then in unison we pulled them aside, revealing a narrow room. Same as outside the boat, a strange, impossible light permeated the space beneath the canopy.

  Just ahead was another raised structure, this one unmistakably a bed, despite its round shape. There was a mattress or cushion, and beneath it, some kind of dark wood comprised the frame, its side rounded and intricately carved with triangular spoke-like objects sticking out from it. A person lay on top of the mattress, the head nearest us with the feet pointed toward the front of the boat. It was an unmoving person. Perfectly still, as if asleep—or dead.

  My bet was on the latter, of course. Because this was a dream, and we were dream-seers, tasked with stopping a great evil once more. Besides, it wasn’t the first time we’d come across a dead person in a dream. They had a different kind of stillness, deeper and more solid, like the difference between a still, quiet pond and one covered with ice.

  Eli and I exchanged a look and then together we stepped up onto the platform and under the canopy. The curtains whooshed closed behind us. The air was cooler in here, but as before there wasn’t any wind.

  Moving closer to the bed, I raised my hand toward the lantern hanging from the canopy directly above it, willing it to light. Unlike the curtains, it obeyed at once, a flame sputtering into life in the center of the glass globe. Shadows began to dance across the room.

  I blinked once, adjusting to the light, and then I lowered my gaze to the prone figure. The shape looked female, but I couldn’t be certain. A sheet covered the face and body. It was some kind of burial shroud, the cloth thick and coarsely woven. I stared at the person’s head, checking to see if there was any sign of breathing, just in case. As I’d said to Eli before, I didn’t want to be taken by surprise, and this scenario seemed ready made for a horror movie gotcha. To my relief, the cloth and body beneath it remained still.

  “Shall we pull back the sheet?” Eli said.

  “In a minute.” I scanned the bed once more. The person beneath the sheet was important but there were other details to observe, too. Even the most literal of dreams were still symbolic. Sometimes minute aspects could hold meaning.

  I ran my finger along one of the triangular spikes on the bed frame. As soon as I touched it, the design of the thing came into my mind.

  “It’s a dragon,” I said. “This is the neck.” I motioned to the pointed triangles, which I now saw were actually spines.

  “Huh, you’re right.” Eli bent toward the bed frame, taking a closer look.

  I circled around, wanting to see the rest of the dragon. The neck gave way to shoulders with the short stubby legs reaching toward the top and bottom of the bed, clawed hands wrapped around the edges. The serpentine body continued on, its scales forming ridges in the wood. If a bed like this existed in the real world, it would’ve taken the artist a long time to craft it. Even in the uneven light I marveled at the intricate, lifelike details. The tail wrapped around the foot of the bed where it met up with the dragon’s head. The creature’s mouth was opened, swallowing the tip of the tail.

  “The dragon is eating itself,” I said.

  Frowning, Eli stepped nearer to me, observing the sight. “Huh. Now this I have seen before. My aunt has a tattoo like this. It’s called an ouroboros.”

  “An or-ro-what-oh?”

  He grinned. “She got it after a motorcycle accident that almost killed her. It’s a sign of renewal or something.”

  “Motorcycle accident? Tattoos? That’s some aunt.”

  “I know. You’d like her.”

  I smiled up at him, but quickly looked down again, transfixed by the tail-eating dragon. “Renewal,” I said, my thoughts churning. “Or maybe rebirth. Like the Death’s Heart.”

  “Or Marrow.”

  I shivered, gooseflesh rising on my arms.

  “There’s only one way to be sure.” Eli moved around the bed, nearer to the person’s head. He glanced back at me. “You ready?”

  I nodded, my breathing going shallow. From this angle, I wasn’t certain that it was in fact a woman lying there. It might be Marrow instead. I didn’t know if I was ready to see him again, even if only inside a dream.

  But it was too late to protest as Eli grasped the edge of the shroud and pulled it down, revealing the person’s face. All the air in my lungs evacuated at the sight, horror a compressive force against my chest, cutting off oxygen and blood flow.

  As I originally thought, the person was female and definitely dead. Her skin was a molten blend of sallow and gray. It sagged over sunken, hollow cheeks. Two silver coins, of a currency I didn’t recognize, were set deep inside her eye sockets. The eyes themselves were completely sunken in, hapless victims of gravity and decay.

  It was a gruesome visage. Even still, the person’s state of death didn’t shock me. It wasn’t the source of the scream clawing its way up my constricted throat. No. The source of my terror resided in the familiarity of the person lying there. A familiarity that could only be described as intimate.

  This corpse, this dead thing.

  Was me.

  4

  Nondisclosure

  I left the dream a short time later, only to discover that leaving was a mistake, no matter how badly I wanted to escape the vision of my dead body lying there. Eli didn’t wake up with me, not even after I gave him a hard shake.

  At once I understood why. I turned to find Bollinger kicked back in the desk chair, her eyes half-lidded. “Do you mind taking off the sleeping spell now?”

  Bollinger jerked upright. “What?” She glanced around, the look of surprise on her face quickly settling into her usual scowl. “Yes, I mind. The session is over. Let’s get you back to your dorm.”

  “What?” I put my hands on my hips, if only to still the trembling in my limbs. “But Eli and I always discuss things afterward.”

  Bollinger shook her head. Several strands of mouse-brown hair had worked their way out of the ponytail. “My instructions don’t include giving you time to chat afterward. Let’s go.” She motioned to the door.

  Too shaken and defeated to argue, I headed for it. I tried to steal another glance at Eli as I stepped into the hallway, but Bollinger was already swinging the door closed. I glared, hating the finality of that shut door, the certainty that this was how it was going to be—my time with Eli always restricted, always delayed.

  I turned around, thoughts roiling in my head. There was so much to process, so much I wanted to discuss. Needed to discuss. Eli had reminded me just before I left the dream that they were symbolic, not literal. He wasn’t wrong, but I’d gotten the feeling he was trying to convince himself of this truth as much as me.

  Symbolic, yes, but I didn’t know how many ways you could interpret my dead body in a dream. The dragon—the ouroboros—might have dozens of interpretations. But not me.

  To my relief, Bollinger didn’t loiter outside my dorm when we arrived. In fact, she didn’t even bother coming down the hallway. She just shooed me along like an indecisive house cat and disappeared around the corner the moment I got the door open.

  I stepped in, unsurprised to find the place dark and quiet. Of course, Selene would be asleep already. Classes started tomorrow, and it was well past midnight. Still, I was disappointed, enough that I debated waking her for several moments. But with the nondisclosure agreement, I didn’t know if I could even talk to her about the dream.

  Besides, I needed to write my dream journal before turning in. Only I desperately didn’t want to. The presence of my dead body was so weird and scary. Even worse was the worry of how Lady Elaine and the rest might interpret it. They would likely see it as a sign that I was in mortal peril. I could end up with a twenty-four-seven Will Guard chaperone instead of just Bollinger. The idea made my stomach knot.

  Sighing, I sank onto the chair beside my desk. My eTab sat in its cradle in front of me. Aside from the rune marks etched around the outside, which were designed to help ward off the animation effect, it looked like an ordinary electronic tablet. I pulled it off t
he cradle and switched it on, the debate still raging in my head. I was torn between what I ought to do and what I wanted to do, what was right and what was desirable. Why did it always seem like these two things always had to be fundamentally opposed? Why couldn’t the universe line up properly so that what I wanted could also be what was right? Like ice cream being good for you. Or French fries. Or sunbathing. What a happy, wonderful world that would be.

  Gritting my teeth, I switched the eTab on and navigated to the dream journal app. Then without taking time to fret over it, I began to summarize the dream. When I reached the part about the corpse, I wrote: I didn’t recognize the person. Guilt made me feel queasy, but I told myself it was all right, that this was just self-preservation. Heck, it was just simple privacy. It was my dead body after all. And that made it feel like a secret that shouldn’t be shared, my own personal nondisclosure agreement.

  Besides, I told myself after I’d saved the journal and sent it off, if my being the dead person was significant, then there would surely be other signs to come along. Often, Eli’s most important dreams were repetitive.

  If it happens again, I’ll tell them.

  But even as I thought it, I knew it was a hollow promise.

  * * *

  Predictably, my dreams were bad that night, and I woke the next morning feeling as if I hadn’t slept at all. Most of the dreams—when they hadn’t featured images of my corpse—had been about Eli. Over and over he told me he didn’t want to see me anymore. Just like that. Cold, heartless, and absolute. Then he’d turned away from me and walked right into the waiting, open arms of his ex-girlfriend, Katarina Marcel.

  I woke with my heart stuttering in my chest, the hurt of his betrayal refusing to fade even as I lay there awake, eyes closed and wishing those false dream-feelings away. Problem was, they felt so real. As if the dream was some kind of repressed memory. Or maybe a future one.

  I shook my head. Only Eli’s dreams predict the future. Not mine. Except even as I thought it, the silver band on my wrist began to warm, as if to remind me of the recurring dream I’d had about Bellanax last year, months before I’d actually bonded with the sword.