Sweet Nightmare, page 27
The rain is still pounding, thunder and lightning still devastating the sky, but terrified students are coming out in droves anyway.
Which can only mean one thing.
Eva and Belinda aren’t the only ones.
Chapter Fifty-Three
Nightmare on
My Street: Part ?
My stomach churns at the thought that more people are dying, and I swallow down the sudden fear that’s dragging me into an abyss of horror. Because if all of these students are outside, and none of the adults who are currently in charge of us are anywhere to be found, something really bad is happening.
Or, more likely, has already happened.
“What do you think is going on?” I whisper to Jude.
He must not hear me above the chaos of the storm, because he doesn’t answer.
I turn to look at him, but his face is stoic even as the rain slaps against him again and again.
“Jude.” I raise my voice this time to make sure he can hear me, but he still doesn’t answer as he stares, blindly, into the storm.
“Jude!” I yell his name now. “We’ve got to help them.”
He nods, but he doesn’t move. Just keeps peering into the dark.
I don’t know if that means he’s in shock or if he’s just as overwhelmed as I feel. Either way, I can’t leave him like this. Can’t leave any of them like this—not when so many people obviously need help.
I grab his shoulders and shake him until his multicolored eyes meet mine and snap back into focus. “We have to help them,” I say again.
“I’m trying,” he answers, which makes no sense considering he’s just standing there.
But now that I have his attention, I’m not going to ask what he means. Instead, I say, “I think we need to find our friends. They can go get help while we look for Bianca.”
I studiously avoid mentioning the fact that our friends might not have made it through whatever this is. Eva didn’t. And neither did Belinda.
I can tell by the clench of his jaw that the same nightmarish thoughts are running through Jude’s head.
I pull out my phone again and try to text Luis. But—just like earlier with Michaels and my mom—it doesn’t go through. I try to keep the panic at bay, but it’s hard when I think about Eva.
“Where do you—” Jude starts but breaks off when a scream splits the night, followed by a series of several more.
I whirl around, heart in my throat, just in time to watch a girl run out of her cabin and melt not twenty feet from me. Like actually dissolve right in front of me.
“Oh my God!” I scream and take off down the ramp toward her while Jude simply vaults over the railing.
But he’s only gone a couple of steps before he snarls, “Fuck!” and turns back toward me, holding a hand out to stop me in my tracks. His voice is hoarse when he says, “Don’t come this way.”
At first, I can’t figure out what he means. But he’s standing under one of the old hurricane lamps that line the center mall, and I watch in horror as the rain washes blood off his shoes.
A scream wedges in my throat, and it takes every ounce of self-control I have to swallow it down.
“Whose is that?” I ask when I finally succeed.
Jude shakes his head, and for a second, he looks as defeated as I feel.
“We need to find them,” I tell him. “We need to—”
“We already have,” Mozart says as she and Simon come up on Jude’s left. “It belongs to one of the freshman girls. A fairy.”
“What happened to her?” I ask.
Mozart just shakes her head.
“The same thing that’s happening to a bunch of people in the dorm,” Izzy tells me as she and Remy come toward us, making sure to skirt the ever-growing puddles of blood-tinged water pooling on the sidewalk. “They wake up all freaked out and then—”
She breaks off as more screams split the air.
My stomach plummets as I glance toward the cries just in time to see one of the senior banshees walking on the roof of her cottage. Her eyes are closed, and it seems like she’s still asleep as she walks closer to the edge.
“No!” I scream as I run toward her, waving my arms. “Wake up!” Izzy races ahead of me, but even the vampire can’t get to her before she dives straight off the roof of her cottage. A sickening crack fills the air as she lands right on the top of her head.
“We have to stop this,” Ember whispers, eyes wide with horror as she comes up behind me. “We have to…”
She trails off, as lost as the rest of us are right now.
Across the center mall from her, a sophomore dragon is crawling along the ground, pulling himself forward one slow inch at a time.
Jude gets to him before I can and crouches down beside him, looking devastated.
At first, I don’t know why, but as I get close, I realize that half the boy’s face is missing and his jugular is torn. He’s hemorrhaging blood all over the path, and it doesn’t take much more than a freshman health class to know that if we don’t stop the bleeding, he’ll be dead in three minutes, maybe less.
I drop to my knees beside him and press my hands to his wound, but Izzy—who is right behind me—says, “That’s not going to be enough, Clementine. He’s already bled out too much.”
“We have to try,” I tell her. “I can’t just leave him like this.”
“No one’s asking you to.” She squats down next to me. “Move over a little bit.”
“If I move, I’ll—”
She gives up waiting and just flat-out shoves me out of the way. Then she leans down and licks the wound several times.
My stomach revolts, and I turn away. I know vampires’ saliva has special coagulating properties that our power lockdown doesn’t take from them, but it’s one thing to know that and another to see it in action. Still, I’m grateful she wants to help the boy, so I force myself to look anywhere but at them until she’s done.
When Izzy finally lifts her head, I whirl back around and do my best to ignore the fact that she has blood dripping down her chin. “Did you stop the bleeding? Is he going to be okay?”
She says something, but there’s so much going on around us right now—screaming and crying and yelling and fighting—that I can’t hear her even though she’s only a few inches away from me.
I glance at the boy, and he’s still alive, which is saying a lot considering the shape he was in. But his eyes are at half mast, and his breathing is so shallow that it’s hard to believe he’s not going to die any second.
“We need to get him to your aunt,” Jude says as he starts to pick him up.
“We’ve got him,” Remy answers, and there’s a seriousness to his usually amused tone that I’ve only heard when he’s talking about Carolina. “You stay here, see who else you can help.”
At first, I think Jude is going to argue, but then he nods grimly and hands the boy over to Remy, who takes off running toward the faculty quarters with Izzy right behind him.
“We need to find my family members,” I say as I watch them go. “And anyone else who can help.”
“We can do that,” Ember volunteers.
“Yeah, we’ll split up. See who we can find,” Mozart agrees while Simon nods.
As they take off running, I turn to Jude. “We still need to find Bianca. She could still be alive.”
“She’s not,” he answers.
I’m really scared that he’s right, but still, we can’t assume. “You don’t know that—”
“I do. I found her on our way over here.” He points to a broken-down bench in the shape of a giant pink sea anemone that’s been here since resort days. “She’s right there.”
There’s one of the old-fashioned standing hurricane lamps not far from the bench, and now that I know where to look, even through the rain, I can see her legs sticking out from behind the bench, both bent at weird, unnatural angles.
Sorrow floods through me as I think about the year we spent in group therapy together. She used to talk about how she wanted to move to Greece one day. She’d tell me stories about the Mediterranean and how beautiful it is and how amazing the people there are. She even memorized Greek recipes so that she could make them when she got out of here.
It seemed like she had a really nice life planned there, and it guts me that she’ll never get to see the sun sparkle off the water like in the pictures she showed me.
Because she’s gone, just like Eva and Serena and Belinda and who knows how many others at this point.
It’s heartbreaking and terrifying, and I would give anything to wake up in my warm bed—even with a snake on top of me—and realize that this is all just a bad dream. That none of it is true. That everything in my life, in all our lives, hasn’t gone completely sideways.
But as I look at Jude’s face, I realize that’s just a fantasy. This is real. It’s happening right now, right this instant, to all of us. And it’s going to keep happening if we don’t figure out what’s going on.
“We have to stop this,” I tell Jude.
He nods grimly, the sharp planes of his face gone craggy with a pain I don’t understand. “I will,” he tells me, and it sounds like a vow.
“You? How can you—” I break off when I hear someone calling my name from behind us. I turn to find Luis staggering toward me, his shirt soaked with blood.
Chapter Fifty-Four
All Through the
Night-mares
Not Luis, too. Please, please, please, not Luis.
I sprint toward him, slipping and sliding on the slick, broken sidewalk. Jude passes me, catching my best friend just as he stumbles and starts to fall.
“What’s wrong with him?” I demand as Jude lowers him to the ground.
“I’m okay,” Luis says, but his eyes are glazed with pain, and he’s trembling despite the heat. “I just need a minute to…” He trails off in a coughing fit.
“We need to get his shirt off.” Jude’s face is bleak as he crouches down next to me. “See what we’re dealing with here.”
I nod, but the moment I try to ease Luis’s shirt over his head, he gasps in pain.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper as I try to pull his good arm through its armhole.
“It’s okay,” he bites out. But he’s gray and sweating, and he’s clearly anything but okay.
Before I can figure out what to do, Jude steps forward and grabs the neckline of Luis’s shirt.
“What are you—” Luis gasps out, right before Jude rips the shirt in half with one quick yank of his hands.
I blink at him, shocked, for a second, but he just gives an impatient nod toward my best friend.
And he’s right. Now is far from the time to marvel at just how easy that was for Jude. So I turn back to Luis. And try not to gasp at the gaping wound that covers his side, stretching from right under his armpit to his waist.
“Who did this to you?” I ask as I use his torn, sodden shirt to wipe away as much of the blood as I can. Thankfully, his shifter metabolism has already started to clot the wound, so it’s a lot easier than it normally would be.
As long as it’s not a life-threatening wound like the dragon we were just trying to help, most shifters can heal themselves pretty quickly. That ability is slowed down a little bit by the power dampening on the island but not completely decimated as it’s part of their normal body chemistry as opposed to their magic. The same goes for the coagulating properties in Izzy’s saliva and Simon’s ability to seduce anyone with a pulse.
“A wolf.” Luis’s voice is grumpy as he answers my question.
“Who?” I demand. No one should be able to shift right now, not while the power lock is still in place.
“Not a student,” he answers, trying—and failing—to sit up. “An actual wolf.”
What the hell? I shoot a baffled glance toward Jude, but he doesn’t look anywhere near as confused as I feel. Instead, he looks…devastated.
“We don’t have wolves on the island, Luis.”
“Tell that to the giant gray one that sliced me open,” he answers. Then he yelps, “Fuck, Clementine! Could you be a little more sadistic?”
I ignore him as I continue to wipe his wound clean as gently as I can. “We need to get him to Aunt Claudia, too,” I say to Jude. “He’s going to need stitches.”
“I’m okay,” Luis gasps. “I just need to shift and I’ll be much better.”
“Yeah, well, that’s not exactly an option at the moment, in case you’ve forgotten.”
“Just get me out of this rain and I’ll be fine.” This time he actually makes it to a sitting position—though he curses quite a bit as he does it. On the plus side, the wound already looks much better than it did when he collapsed.
“You should probably lay back down for a few more minutes,” I suggest.
“In this mess?” He shoots a disparaging look at the rain- and blood-soaked ground. “No, thank you.”
And just like that, I breathe a sigh of relief. If Luis is back to his normal, snarky self, then I’m pretty sure he’s going to be just fine—unlike a lot of the people we’ve seen in the last hour.
At least the screaming has stopped.
I look around, trying to figure out what’s happening. I’ve been so worried about Luis that I stopped paying attention to everything else.
Right now, the students are all milling around in the rain, looking traumatized but not hysterical anymore. Some of them are obviously injured while others look fine, but no one appears to be actively bleeding or fighting.
“It’s over,” I say to Jude as I stand up.
He doesn’t answer, and when I turn to him, it’s to find him staring into the distance again.
Jaw clenched, face blank, eyes far away. But this time his hands are out in front of him, like he’s reaching for something.
For one horrible second, I’m terrified that he’s suffering the same thing so many of the other students suffered. That he’s about to burst into flames or have his jugular ripped out or any of the other awful things that have happened tonight.
“Jude!” I call his name, but he doesn’t answer.
I put a hand on his shoulder and shake him like I did earlier, but there’s still no response.
“Jude!” Panic sets in, and I start shouting. “Damn it, Jude! Answer me!”
Still nothing.
“Hey, help me up,” Luis tells me uneasily. When I turn back to him, I realize he’s watching Jude, too. And he looks just as concerned as I feel.
Reaching down, I grab Luis’s hand and pull him up before turning back to Jude and shaking him much harder than I did the first time.
But this time he doesn’t just look out of it. He looks like he’s in some kind of a trance, completely out of reach. I can’t begin to imagine what’s happening to him right now, but judging from what everyone else has gone through, I know it must be horrible.
Fear claws at my throat, has my heart beating wildly and my hands shaking as I grab onto Jude’s arms in a desperate attempt to anchor him.
“Help me!” I tell Luis as I frantically try to pull Jude back from wherever he’s gone, tugging him onto the porch of a nearby cottage.
Luis nods, but he doesn’t look like he has any better ideas. Though he does say, “You know what was weird about that wolf that attacked me?”
I shoot him an incredulous look—I can’t believe he thinks now is the time I want to talk about that. “The fact that there was a wolf on the island at all?”
“Well, yeah. And also, the fact that I used to have nightmares about him when I was a kid.”
I’m barely listening, too busy trying to get through to Jude, so it takes a few seconds for Luis’s words to hit me. When they do, I remember waking up with the snake on my bed—my worst nightmare. I also remember Eva telling me that burning alive, like Ember did in the hallway, was her worst fear.
I turn to Luis, eyes wide. “Nightmares?” I whisper. “You think these are all people’s nightmares coming to life?”
“I don’t know what to think,” he answers me with a solemn shake of his head. “But I don’t have a better explanation, right now. Do you?”
No.
I want to. I really, really want to. But I don’t.
Luis’s idea seems far-fetched, but Jude is an oneiroi, a dream daimon. And all I can think about right now is him standing, just like this, a few minutes ago and telling me that he was trying to help people.
I didn’t understand it then—hell, I don’t understand it now—but somehow, I’m not surprised at all when I turn back to Jude and see that the black tattoos are back to slithering around on his body. And like yesterday, they’re not content to stay on his back and arms anymore. They’re climbing up his neck to his jaw, his cheeks, even his forehead.
I glance down at his hands, which I’m currently holding in mine, and realize the black things are there, too. Dozens—maybe hundreds—of the serpentine, feathery black ropes are crawling all over him.
The realization has fear turning to absolute terror inside of me. I must not be the only one, because Luis says, “I’m going to go try to find help.”
I’m too busy freaking out over Jude to answer. Instead, I grab his shoulders again, and this time I shake him over and over and over again. When that doesn’t work, when he continues to stare sightlessly past me, I do the only thing I can think of.
I slap him across the face. Not hard, but—hopefully—enough to get his attention.
Jude’s body recoils from the slap, his eyes jerking to mine. I barely stifle a scream as I see the black things there, too. Crawling through the whites of his eyes, but also spinning themselves around and around in the depths of his multicolored irises.
They look beautiful and macabre and absolutely terrifying, all at the same time.
