Sweet Nightmare, page 31
She ignores the question. “There are no fluctuations? The lightning isn’t bothering it?”
Now he just looks baffled. “No. Why?”
She shakes her head. “No reason.”
“We’ve got this, Camilla. I’ve done it a thousand times before, and this feels just like every other time.”
She studies him—and Ms. Picadilly—for a moment, her gaze shifting back and forth between them. Then she seems to make a decision. “Okay, then. Keep up the good work.”
She hustles back to the opening of the portal. “Let’s get this done, Clementine.”
“Of course.” I’m still shocked that she took what I said seriously when I don’t even know if she should have. What I saw only lasted for a split second before it vanished. Unlike everything—and everyone—else around here, all of which are sticking around in triplicate.
She calls for the first group of seniors—in reverse alphabetical order this time—and I start checking them off just as another gust of wind rips across the beach. Seconds later, lightning flashes while thunder rumbles at the exact same second.
“Get in there,” my mom orders Izzy, who has been patiently waiting her turn. “Now.”
Izzy shoots her a very unimpressed look, but she does what my mom asks, disappearing into the portal just as giant, cantaloupe-size hail starts falling from the sky.
One slams into the ground inches from my feet, and I jump back, horrified.
All around us students start yelling and running for cover. But there is no cover out here. The dorm is too far away, and there’s nothing else. We’re sitting ducks.
“Mom, we have to—”
I break off as another huge hailstone slams down right in front of my mom, so close that it catches the toe of her boot.
She jumps back with a startled scream.
“Are you hurt?” I ask, bending to check her foot.
“Get in the portal,” she tells me urgently.
“What?”
“Get in the portal, Clementine.” She raises the megaphone to her lips. “Everyone, get in the portal, now!”
Pandemonium ensues as everyone left on the beach stampedes for the portal all at once—except for Ms. Picadilly and Mr. Abdullah, who stay exactly where they are so they can hold the portal open.
“Go, go, go,” my mom shouts, rushing students in three and four at a time.
Behind us someone screams, and I turn to see one of the senior witches on the ground, her head cracked open and blood slowly leaking out.
“Come on,” my mother yells into the microphone as Ms. Picadilly and Mr. Abdullah widen the opening of the portal. “Everyone in!”
She turns to me. “Get in there, Clementine!”
“I’m waiting for you!”
She doesn’t bother to answer me. Instead, she just puts a hand on the center of my back and shoves me into the portal as hard as she can.
I’m not expecting it, and I fall forward just enough that the portal grabs me.
And then I’m falling, falling, falling.
Chapter Sixty-One
In Grave and
Portal Danger
I’ve never been in a portal before—they’ve been blocked on the island my whole life—so I don’t know what it’s supposed to feel like when you’re in one.
But this feels weird. Really, really weird. As if my whole body is being stretched out like one of those rubber pop tube toys. It’s like with each second that passes I’m getting longer, narrower, flatter… And then suddenly I’m not. The stretching stops in an instant, and then I boing back together, my body going from elongated to normal in the blink of an eye.
I take a deep breath and try to adjust to the feeling of being normal again. Then wonder why I bothered when abruptly the walls of the portal start to close in on me. I throw my hands out to try to stop them, but it just keeps pressing and pressing and pressing in on me until I can feel myself getting smaller. Feel myself compressing down, getting shorter and flatter with the contraction of the portal.
At first, I’m just a little alarmed as I wait for it to spring back like the first time. But it doesn’t. It just keeps squeezing inch by inch until it’s like a piano sitting in the middle of my chest.
I know there are a lot of people in this portal with me—I can hear them banging around, knocking into its weird, elastic walls. Some are even screaming, though I have no idea where they get the oxygen for that. Is this normal? And if it is, who would travel like this? I know it’s supposed to be faster and safer than a boat, but right now I’d rather take my chances with the storm-tossed Gulf of Mexico.
But I can’t even lift my head to look around, to try to find someone else going through this same thing. All I can do is lie here, suspended, and try not to freak the fuck out while the portal does its best to crush me to death.
It’s not easy.
All of a sudden, the weight on my chest gets heavier, and it goes from hard to breathe to impossible. Instinct takes over, and I start to claw fruitlessly for air. But everything hurts and things start to go fuzzy, until there are just a few small points of light in the distance.
The fuzziness gets worse as darkness takes over inside my head, and I start to float away on a sea of—
The compression stops as abruptly as it started, and I free-fall several feet in an instant.
Instinct has me throwing my arms out again as I suck breath after breath into my starving lungs. The fuzziness fades, and I’m alert again…just in time for a terrible ripping sound to echo through the air around me.
Suddenly the screams get worse. More terrified and definitely more desperate. And then I’m falling again.
Only this time it’s not in a vacuum. It’s through fierce winds and rain and lightning, straight into the raging, roiling ocean.
I hit the water hard and go down, down, down into the sea. There’s one moment where I wonder if this is just part of the portal, part of the magic. But then a big fish—a really big fish—swims by, and it sinks in. I’m not in the portal anymore. I’m in the freaking Gulf of Mexico.
At night.
In the middle of a hurricane.
With sharks.
And I’m sinking fast.
Everything I’ve ever read about getting pulled under in the ocean always says to find the light and swim up. But from where I’m at, there is no light. Just fathomless darkness in all directions.
I tell myself the monsters I’ve faced at Calder Academy in the last day or two are way worse than anything in the ocean. All of which sounds well and good until something brushes against my leg in the water, and I finally give in. I freak the fuck out.
I start flailing and thrashing—the absolute worst thing I can do, but terror is a desperate, clawing animal within me, and all I can think is, Get out, get out, get out.
Plus I’ve been underwater for at least a minute now—maybe more—and my lungs are burning.
So I do something that feels so wrong but may be my only chance of survival. I read somewhere that as long as you have air in your lungs, your body will try to float. So I roll myself around until I’m lying prone in the water—or at least, I think I am. And then I force myself to relax every muscle that I can.
It takes a few terrible, nerve-racking, desperately important seconds, but then I break the surface and take a deep breath, inhaling almost as much salt water as air, before I am dragged under again.
But that’s all I need. I spin around and start swimming without any hint that I’m going the right way. Panic tries to set in again, but I beat it back.
Seconds later, the water changes—somehow it grows even choppier and harder to move through. I take that as a sign that I’m getting closer to the surface, especially since what’s beyond the water, directly above me, seems a little lighter. Like maybe, just maybe, I’m getting closer to shore. My head breaks through the surface of the water again, and this time when I try to take another deep breath, I slap my hand over my mouth as a makeshift filter. It works, kind of, and I actually manage to get more oxygen than water this time around.
I do that a couple more times before I feel up to looking around and trying to get my bearings. If I’m lucky, I’ll be close to the island, and I can swim to shore.
The irony of wanting to get back on the island, now that I’m finally off, is not lost on me, but I figure, at this point, it’s any island in a storm. Literally. I’ll worry about getting off again if I manage to live through the next ten minutes.
But bobbing around in an angry, storm-tossed ocean isn’t exactly the best vantage point, and I can’t see the island. I can’t see anything but the next wave set to crash over me. And then the next one. And then the next one after that.
Every wave takes more energy from me, and every struggle to stay on the surface leaves me more and more exhausted. But I manage to keep from going under again. With no idea of which way I’m going, only knowing that I have to do something, I wait for the next wave to roll into me. Waves move toward shore—or at least, I think they do. It’s not like I’ve had much experience with them, despite growing up on an island. But maybe, if I go with the wave instead of fighting it, it will take me closer to the island.
Closer to safety.
The wind is wild now, and it’s got the ocean whipped into a frenzy, so it doesn’t take long before another wave comes through and I get to test my half-baked theory.
I can see it building, see it growing taller and taller. So I take a deep breath and tell myself that when it rolls over me, I shouldn’t fight it. Instead, I should relax and just let it take me.
It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Harder than losing Jude. Harder even than losing Carolina—to the prison and then to death. It’s definitely harder than accepting that I might die out here, without ever seeing anything but the walls on this island.
I think I’ve always known that, though. It’s why I’ve fought for control for as long as I can remember. Control over my choices, control over my body, control over my magic. Control over anything and everything in a world designed to wrest that control from me at every opportunity.
I’ve lost more battles than I’ve won—a lot more. But no matter how bad things have gotten, I’ve never stopped fighting. Never stopped trying to hold on to some manner of control over my own life.
So now, to have to give that up? To have to give myself over to this storm, to this wave, to this endless, roiling ocean that doesn’t give a damn about my life or my choices, is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.
But I know if I don’t, it will be all over anyway. Because I’ve already lost any chance I had of controlling anything that matters. All that’s left is accepting it…and then seeing what happens.
The wave is bigger now, so big I can’t even see the top of it. Fear is a nightmare running rampant inside of me, but I ignore it. And then, as the wave finally crashes through me, I stop fighting, take a deep breath, and I give myself over to whatever comes next.
Chapter Sixty-Two
Where There’s a Will
There’s a Wave
It turns out what comes next is nothing good.
The wave takes me down, spins me around, tosses me back and forth under the water so that I lose track, once again, of which way is up. But I force myself to wait for a few seconds, force myself not to use up all my energy fighting something that can’t be fought.
No one is more surprised than I am when it works. Instead of continuing to pull me down, the current pushes me back up as the wave rises and swells. My head breaks the surface, and I suck a giant gulp of air into my lungs before the wave rolls forward and takes me under once more.
Again, I fight every instinct I have and let the water take me.
Again, it drags me under and then lifts me up on another cresting wave.
This happens several times, and each time I come up the wave is a little bigger and takes me a little higher—until finally I can see something besides the roiling ocean and the pounding rain.
Far ahead of me—so far that I can’t be sure it isn’t a mirage considering my eyes are burning from the salt water and I’m still seeing everything in triplicate—I can see lights.
Bright lights and a lot of them, like the flood lamps that line the wall that surrounds the island.
I blink and rub my eyes several times to try to clear them. But that just makes the burning—and the cloudy vision—worse. So in the end I have to give up on confirming anything and just trust that what I’m seeing is real.
Yet another thing I’m really not good at.
But the storm is getting worse and the waves more violent. Lightning splits the sky above me followed by thunder so loud that not even the roll of the ocean can mask it.
The next current that grabs me is completely dominating. It drags me under, deeper and deeper, until my lungs ache and I begin to think that this might be the time it doesn’t bring me back up.
So I start to swim up, determined to get to shore now that I know it’s there and that I’m going in the right direction.
The ocean showed me what I needed it to. It gave me the course for my escape route. The rest is up to me.
And so I push myself to the limits—and then past them—as I swim harder than I’ve ever swum before.
After what feels like an eternity, I finally break through the ever-growing wall of water. I expect to be on the surface, but when I look down, I realize I’m actually several yards above the ocean’s surface—in the crest of a wave that’s growing higher and higher with each second that passes.
I only have a moment to notice there are other students with me in the wake of the wave and think that this is going to hurt all of us before it crashes back down, taking me with it.
I slam back into the surface of the water—all that work swimming, for nothing—and get rolled, hard. I turn over and over again, completely out of control as the ocean tosses me around like spindrift.
I finally stop rolling after what feels like hours but is probably less than a minute. I start to kick out, to try to move toward the lights I can see in the distance. But another current grabs me and starts pulling me down, down, down.
Panic sets in as it drags me steadily lower, and though I try to shut it out, try to think logically, it’s almost impossible. Because this time feels different.
This time it feels like I’m not going to find my way back up.
I start to struggle, start to claw at the water dragging me steadily downward. But the current has me in its grip, and it’s not letting go. Not this time.
The realization comes to me slowly, the understanding that I’m going to die out here and there’s nothing I can do about it.
Grief slams into me hard—along with the knowledge that I’ll never see Jude again.
I’ll never get to see his eyes swirl wildly with all the emotions he refuses to acknowledge.
I’ll never get to smell his warm honey-and-cardamom scent as it wraps around me like a hug.
And I’ll never again get to feel his heart beat against my cheek or hear his low, gravelly voice tell me that he loves me.
Losing that—losing him for a third and final time—hurts as much as losing everything else put together.
It’s at that moment that I realize that my love for Jude is infinite.
It’s as deep as the ocean, as powerful as this hurricane, as endless as the sky that stretches above me even now. It’s every dream I’ve never had, every monster I’ve ever slain, and it’s…forever. That’s what it is. Forever. No matter what.
And admitting that, even to myself—even alone in the middle of this raging sea that seems hell-bent on killing me—brings me an incredible sense of tranquility.
An incredible sense of right.
Another wave crashes over me, and I’m going down now, sinking farther and farther under the water. Surprisingly, it isn’t so bad. In fact, now that I’m not fighting it, it almost feels kind of…nice.
There’s no pain anymore.
No hunger for air.
No struggle to somehow best a world that doesn’t give a shit whether I live or die.
Instead, there’s an insidious kind of peacefulness to this, an odd, syrupy lassitude that slides through my veins. That quiets my brain and my frantic heart. That makes it almost easy to slip lower and lower and—
All of a sudden, something grabs my wrist and yanks on me, hard.
Chapter Sixty-Three
How Do I Love Thee?
Let Me Count the Waves
At first, I think it’s some kind of shark or something, but there’s no pain in the hold, no teeth slicing into my skin. Just determination, as whatever it is pulls me up, up, up.
I break the surface several seconds later and immediately start coughing as I try to drag air into my starved and waterlogged lungs.
Dawn has broken across the sky, and though it’s still gray and dim inside the storm, I can see my rescuer for the first time.
And somehow, someway, it’s Jude. But that’s impossible—he already went through the portal. He should be at the warehouse in Huntsville.
At first, I think I’m hallucinating, that I’ve blacked out and am about to die and he’s a figment of my oxygen-starved imagination. But then Jude spins me around and drags me against him, my back to his chest. He joins his hands just below my bra line and starts jabbing them into me over and over again.
It hurts way more than drowning did. As does the copious amount of seawater that immediately comes rushing up my trachea.
I start coughing as I vomit it all into the sea.
I’ve barely finished, barely had a chance to take a breath, when Simon surfaces right in front of me. There’s three of him—big surprise—but they all look so different that it’s easy for me to figure out which one is present Simon, even before he grins at Jude and says, “Looks like you beat me to her.”
