Sweet Nightmare, page 39
Remy tries to come to her rescue, darting forward and tearing away several of the little beasts who are caught in Izzy’s hair. But they don’t go without a fight as they turn to snap at Remy.
Mozart is fighting her own battle as she lets loose a stream of flames meant to keep them at bay.
It’s dragon fire, so it takes the rain at least a minute to tamp it down. Miraculously, they’ve lost interest in us for a moment as they watch the blaze—before jumping straight into the fire, one after the other, only to emerge seconds later at least five times bigger than when they went in.
“What the hell, Clementine!” Luis snarls. “You didn’t tell us they evolve like fucking Pokémon.”
“Sorry, but it’s not like I’ve ever set them on fire before!” I shout back.
At that moment, one of the now Great Dane–size chricklers—a blue one—turns to face me, its giant fangs dripping a noxious combination of blood and spit.
And fuck this. We are way too outnumbered to do anything but, “Run!” I yell.
So we do, all of us taking off in the direction of the old dance hall. But, impossibly, the wind and the rain have gotten worse, so that every step feels like we’re slogging through quicksand.
One of the largest ones—who now happens to be the size of a Great Pyrenees—jumps straight at me. I juke to the left, but the wind is too strong, and it slows me down. The thing lands on me and goes straight for my jugular.
Jude, who is running right beside me, grabs onto it and tears it off right before it sinks its teeth—each one now the size of a large pizza slice—into my neck.
Jude manages to fight it off—and slam the thing into the nearest tree.
But something about the attack—maybe being in such close proximity to a bunch of condensed nightmares—activates his tattoos, and they start glowing in the dim gray of the storm.
The second they start moving, the chrickler attached to his back lets go with a yip. When it lands on the ground, its whole body is shaking like it’s just been zapped by electricity.
Jude looks as surprised as I feel, but now that the monster isn’t in the way, I watch the tattoos swirl restlessly on his back, up his neck, and up and down his arms through the tears in his hoodie. It looks like they’re trying to get free, trying to help him fend off the attack.
Jude suppresses them with a quick clench of his jaw and touch of his hand against his exposed skin so that the glow fades as quickly as it came.
But the second the glow fades, the chricklers are on him again. Dozens of them swarming him at the same time.
“Go!” he yells to us as they start dragging him to the ground.
He breaks off as even more pile on, smothering him beneath their sheer weight and numbers.
I watch in horror as Jude falls to the ground.
His tattoos start to move and glow again, but there are so many chricklers on him at this point that the outer layer can’t see or feel the tattoos and keep burrowing, and the inner layer are screaming in fear as they try to get away. They are in a total frenzy.
Simon, Mozart, Remy, and I rush over to him—or do the best we can to rush when we’re dragging our own chrickler accessories along with us.
“Can you charm them or something?” Mozart asks Simon as we work together to try to tug a couple of the vile beasts off of Jude.
“I’ve already tried,” he tells her, and he sounds as panicked as I feel. “They aren’t really sentient, though, just nightmares in an organic form.”
“So what do we do?” Mozart sounds near tears.
But no matter how hard we try to pry them off Jude, nothing works. I look around for something to do, some idea I haven’t tried yet, but before I can find anything, Izzy stabs her knife into one of the chricklers trying to bite her leg.
The second the blade enters the monster, it hisses—then instantly condenses into one of the dark, wispy nightmares that Jude wears on his body.
Now that she’s figured out she can kill the chricklers by stabbing them, she’s in her element. With a knife in each hand, she starts hacking away. Seconds later, a dozen nightmare ribbons are spinning through the air.
I watch in astonishment as the wind catches them. “Give me a knife!” I yell to Izzy, but she’s having too much fun taking on the next layer of chricklers attached to Jude to listen.
So Remy takes things into his own hands and reaches up the back of Izzy’s shirt to get a knife—and almost loses a hand for his effort.
“The fuck?” she asks him as she turns to look at him, wide-eyed. And somehow, she still manages to kill two purple polka-dotted chricklers—one after the other even though she’s facing in the other direction.
“We need knives!” he tells her urgently.
“Why do you always have to take the fun out of everything?” she pouts. But then she pulls a giant knife out of her pant leg and hands it to him.
One of these days she is going to tell me where she gets them. Because there is no way that any person carries this many knives on her person. No way. I swear, this one is almost as big as she is.
Remy turns around and starts hacking away at the chricklers, too, wielding the knife like a scythe.
“What about the rest of us?” Mozart calls desperately.
Izzy rolls her eyes and pulls out the tiniest dagger I’ve ever seen. She lobs it at Mozart and says, “Knock yourself out.”
“Seriously?” Mozart looks totally offended.
“Yeah, well, next time think before you fire.”
I lean over and try to pull a chrickler off Jude—apparently, I’m not blade-worthy—and get a pair of teeth in my hand for my trouble. But, on the plus side, I can actually see part of Jude’s leg, so I feel like we’re getting close.
Izzy must feel the same way, because she gets a little too enthusiastic and cuts a massive swathe through a bunch of chricklers—and, also, Mozart’s forearm.
“Ow!” Mozart shrieks, dropping her knife. “You’re as big a menace as the chricklers.”
“Please,” Izzy scoffs. “This is me with the child locks on.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.” Mozart doesn’t look impressed.
Since she’s currently bleeding and can no longer use it, I pick up her knife. I’ve never stabbed anything before, and if you’d asked me ten minutes ago, I would have told you I’d be quite happy living the rest of my life without ever stabbing anyone or anything.
Refusing to give myself a chance to think too much, I plunge my knife into the nearest chrickler. Then nearly recoil, not because it’s gross, but because it isn’t.
It’s the strangest feeling. The monster is nowhere near as solid as I’d expect it to be. It feels almost…empty. There’s no resistance once the knife slides in, and the moment it’s buried to the hilt, this chrickler does exactly what the others did. It condenses into a black plume and blows away in the wind.
I take aim at a second one, then freak out because a whole new horde of chricklers is racing up the path toward us. And they all look loaded for paranormal.
Simon, who has been behind us with Remy, Ember, and Luis trying to keep the other chricklers off us so we can help Jude, groans. “Damn, Clementine. We can’t fight them all.”
“I know,” I answer grimly as I brace myself for what may very well be a bloodbath.
When all of a sudden, a loud shriek fills the air—followed by the sound of teeth clattering to the ground.
“Oh, fuck no,” Luis says, voice dripping in horror.
But he and I aren’t the only ones to hear the battle cry of that hydra snake monster thing we had to fight in the dungeon. The chricklers hear it, too, and their heads come up in alarm.
Ears pricked, eyes straining through the rain, they freeze for several seconds. Then with howls of terror, they abandon the fight and scatter in all directions, leaving the eight of us to stare after them.
“So, dance hall, anyone?” Luis asks.
The rest of us don’t have to be asked twice. We take off running straight for the run-down old building.
Chapter Eighty-One
No Rest for
the Scary
We fight the wind as we haul ass toward safety. Every once in a while, we run across a rogue chrickler, but Izzy’s got popping them down to a science, and we make it to the dance hall with almost no more injuries.
We skid to a stop at the door, ready to pile inside. But a giant padlock and chain hang from the door handles, clattering in the wind. I look nervously behind me to make sure no more chricklers have found us.
“What do we do now?” Ember asks, desperation in her voice.
“Allow me,” Mozart says as she steps up to the door and breathes a precise stream of dragon fire directly at the lock. Granted, she melts the door handles and a small chunk of the door right along with it, but who are we to complain? It works.
We race inside just as a group of chricklers round the corner and set their sights on us. “Move it!” Jude yells as he sweeps the door shut and throws the lock just in time. Seconds later, we hear the bang, bang, bang of chricklers slamming into the door and bouncing off.
“Let’s not do that again,” Simon comments as we all take a second to catch our breaths. When we can breathe again, Luis and Remy grab a couple of old chairs from a stack in the corner and barricade the door, just in case, and then we all move deeper into the dance hall.
The whole place is dim and quiet, except for the whoosh of the wind outside. There’s no electricity, but there are enough small windows so that the place isn’t completely dark as we amble to the middle of the dance floor, finally able to breathe—though we are all drenched, bleeding, and exhausted.
As we walk, we kick up dust in our wake—it’s been a long time since anyone has been in here. It creates an eerie haze in the low, natural light, but it’s a million times better than being out there with the monsters in the hurricane.
And that is not a sentence I ever imagined thinking.
“If those are the baby nightmares, what the fuck do the grown-up ones look like?” Simon asks as he sinks to the ground, resting his back against the old-time stage at the front of the dance floor.
“Like Hell itself,” Luis tells him.
I start to explain in more detail, then stop myself because Luis really did give the perfect description.
“You know what this group really needs?” Remy says as he, too, slides to the ground.
“To get the fuck off this island?” Mozart answers, sprawling out on the floor.
“Well, yeah. That,” Remy agrees with a laugh. “But we also need a healer.”
“I’ll put that on the wish list,” I tell him dryly as I reach a hand out to help Jude sit down. I really hope his self-sacrifice out there doesn’t end up killing him.
Just the thought has my lungs aching and my heart beating violently in my chest. But when I turn to look at him, the cuts on his face are already healing.
The scratches on his arms—which I know were really bad because I saw them just a minute ago—are already gone, and the ones on his chest are fading right before my eyes.
“How?” I gasp, shocked at the fact that he has almost no damage on his body even though I saw those bastards bite and claw the hell out of him.
When he doesn’t answer, I look around at the others, then glance down at myself. But nope, all of our wounds are still very much present. And I know Jude healed fast in Aunt Claudia’s office, but that was only after I mixed up an elixir for him. This is happening in real time, and it’s the most astonishing thing I’ve ever seen.
“I don’t suppose there are any medical supplies in here, are there?” Jude asks, brushing my hair out of my eyes. The chrickler attack finally did in the bun I’ve been wearing since yesterday afternoon.
“There are some in my backpack,” Ember tells him. “I picked them up from the basket when we were at the dorm. Give me a few minutes, though, because there’s no way I can get them for you right now.” She is lying face down, arms outstretched, cheek splayed on the cold hardwood floor, completely spent.
“I’ll take care of it,” Jude tells her before turning to me. “You should sit down.”
“You’re not wrong,” I tell him.
I’m about ten seconds from the adrenaline wearing off and I’m not sure what’s going to happen then.
Ironically, Jude’s the one who helps me sit down before picking up Ember’s pack. “Do you mind if I go through it?” he asks her.
“Mind? If you can find me the damn ibuprofen, I’ll have your babies.”
The rest of us laugh at that, but I realize Simon doesn’t.
Jude gets the supplies out and starts by hand-delivering ibuprofen to everyone in the room—except Izzy, because she’s healing almost as quickly as he is.
Vampires, man. And apparently Nightmare princes.
Then he makes the rounds, cleaning wounds and patching us up as best he can. He starts with me.
I suck in a breath as he uses an alcohol wipe to clean a particularly deep chrickler bite. On the plus side, he’s at least gentle about it. He does have practice.
When the burning finally stops, I ask the question that’s been bugging me since we stepped through the door. “How are you healed so fast? You were in the worst shape out of all of us.”
He nods to acknowledge the question but takes his time answering it as he continues to doctor the bite. After a minute or so, though, he answers, “I’ve been wondering the same thing—I’ve never been bitten by one of the monsters before, so healing this quickly is a new experience for me. But I think it’s because nightmares can’t hurt me.”
“No offense, man, but I beg to differ,” Simon tells him. “I saw you get your ass kicked.”
“That’s not what I mean. I mean, they can momentarily cause me pain—bite me, scratch me, whatever—but nothing else they did to me stuck. But the rest of you look like you’ve been trapped in a cage with a hungry bear, so the difference has to be that…”
“You’re the Prince of Nightmares,” I finish for him when he trails off.
He shrugs.
Jude finishes cleaning my last wound, then moves on to Ember and the others.
The ibuprofen kicks in about ten minutes later, and I push myself up to help.
It must be kicking in for the others because they’re moving around, too. Mozart even heads over to the old, out-of-tune piano at the edge of the stage and starts playing “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” from R.E.M. And holy shit, I think it’s at least as good as the original—and that’s on a decrepit old piano. I can only imagine what it would sound like on a decent instrument.
Apparently, she got her name for a reason.
Also, I can’t think of a more perfect song to sum up the shit show of the last twenty-four hours.
Not to mention the even bigger shit show I have a feeling is still to come. So good on her.
As if to underscore my feelings, an ear-piercing screeching—louder even than the thunder, the wind, or the other distant roar—sounds from just outside the dance hall.
Chapter Eighty-Two
Two Truths
and a Love
“What the hell is that?” Mozart demands as she stops mid song.
When it comes again, I kind of wish she’d just keep playing because I’m pretty sure I know exactly what’s making that noise.
“Squidzilla,” Izzy says so that I don’t have to. “That thing sounded just like that when it was trying to kill us yesterday.”
“So that means all the monsters are out?” Luis asks flatly. “Because that’s three now.”
“I don’t know about all—” I break off as a different scream fills the air, higher and more eerie than the first one.
“Pretty sure that answers your question,” Remy tells him dryly.
“But how? I’ve been down there a hundred times with you. The cages aren’t electric. Maybe one lock failed. But all of them?” Luis shakes his head. “No way that happened.”
“The waves haven’t hit hard enough to have fucked things up in the admin building. If they had, this whole area would be flooded,” Mozart comments. “So what did it?”
“I think you mean who,” I answer.
I can’t help remembering Jean-Luc’s face yesterday in Brit Lit, after that snake monster thing attacked. He was really excited, gleeful even. At the time I couldn’t figure out what had him in such a good mood, but now that I know Jude wasn’t the mysterious visitor in the dungeon yesterday, all of this is starting to add up.
“The Jean-Jerks.” Luis beats me to it. We’ve been best friends for a long time, and he can obviously read my face.
I tell them about yesterday and finish with, “It’s the kind of petty bullshit thing they would do.” I look over at Jude, who looks absolutely guilt ridden. Because the mafia rule tends to be if you fuck with them, they go after the people you care most about. Jude shut them down in class, and I nearly got my ass kicked by the grossest snake monster imaginable.
“Kill our friend and I’ll let loose a plague of monsters on everyone?” Remy sounds skeptical.
“I’d do it if someone pissed me off enough,” Izzy tells him.
As one, we all turn to stare at her in horror. But Mozart is the only one brave enough to ask, “Really?”
Izzy draws it out for a second, then laughs and says, “No. But I one hundred percent believe those assholes did it.”
“For what purpose?” Ember’s been listening to the whole conversation, but this is the first time she actually has something to say.
“Revenge?” I suggest.
