Mindee Arnett - The Nightmare Dilemma

I walked over to my nightstand and picked up my cell phone. As usual, it had taken the liberty of shutting itself off during the night, its surly personality a result of the animation effect. I pressed the on button and waited impatiently for it to boot up.

No messages. No missed calls.

I dialed Selene’s number and let it ring until her voice mail picked up. Then I texted her and waited for a response. Fifteen minutes later I was still waiting. I checked the desk and the nightstand to see if she’d left her cell phone but didn’t find it. A cursory glance at her shoes lined up neatly on the floor of her closet showed me her black boots were missing. Wherever she was, she’d gone deliberately. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have been too worried, but considering what had happened to Britney, I couldn’t help feeling a little concerned.

I sat down on my bed and sent Selene another text. It took me the better part of five minutes to type it, as my cell kept shutting off, making obnoxious twittering sounds as it did so. It was supposed to be a smartphone—oh, the irony.

I was just about to hurl the damn thing across the room, when the door into the dorm opened and a disheveled-looking Selene stepped inside. She was indeed wearing her black boots as well as camo jacket and matching camo ball cap and black pants. Her outfit wasn’t particularly suspicious—Selene had been rocking the tomboy look for more than a year now—but the telltale wetness on her hair told me she’d been outside.

I just stared at her for a moment. She stared back, her mouth dropping open as if I had taken her by surprise rather than the other way around.

I stood up, narrowing my eyes at her. “Where the hell have you been?”

Right away I knew I’d struck the wrong tone as Selene’s surprised expression turned stormy. Never mind that my harsh tone stemmed from fear rather than anger. She put a hand on her narrow waist and flung her black hair over her shoulder. “What’s it to you?”

I gaped. “What do you mean? You were gone. You snuck out in the middle of the night. Without me.”

Selene’s nostrils flared. “It might come as a surprise, Dusty, but my life doesn’t end and begin with you .”

I took an involuntary step back. She might as well have slapped me. Selene never acted like this. Not toward me.

She bit her lip, a stricken expression crossing her face. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to snap. It’s just … I didn’t think you’d be awake.”

I crossed my arms, her apology having little effect on my tumultuous emotions. Anger and hurt were stubborn that way, quick to come and long to leave.

When I didn’t answer, Selene unzipped her coat and flung it over the nearby sofa. “So why are you awake?”

I fought back the automatic instinct to answer her. We were best friends. We shared everything—or so I thought. I opened my mouth to demand she tell me what she’d been doing first, but I closed it at once, certain she would refuse. I didn’t think I could handle that kind of rejection right now.

I shook my head. “No reason.” I turned and headed back into the bedroom, switching off the light as I went.

Then I lay down and closed my eyes, all the things I’d needed to talk about like caged, restless animals inside of me, pacing back and forth, pawing at the door. It took me a long, long time to finally fall asleep.

The nightmare was my own, the same one I’d been having for weeks now. I stood on the top of a tall stone tower. Wind buffeted my body, ripping my hair from its ponytail. The force of it pushed me backward until my back hit the hard edge of the parapet. Pain arced down my spine. I lurched forward, struggling against the wind as a terrible, all-consuming need drove me forward. Ahead, a stone square block sat dead center of the tower. I had to reach the plinth.

I didn’t know why I needed to get there, and I didn’t care. The need was too great for thought. My life depended on it. The world depended on it. At first, nothing happened as I moved my arms and legs. It was as if a cruel puppeteer held me back with invisible strings attached to my body.

Then finally, slowly, I began to make forward progress. Each step was like trying to swim through wet concrete. By the end of it, I crawled on my hands and knees. But that was okay. I needed to be on the ground. I needed to read the word etched into the side of the plinth. I pulled myself up to a kneeling position before it. If I could have stood, the plinth would’ve reached my knees, but now its top was level with my eyes. The wind continued its assault on my body. Tears streamed from my eyes as I forced them open against it.

I stared at the letters, but I couldn’t make them out. The impressions were too faint. I stretched my hands toward them. If I tried hard enough, I might be able to read it like Braille. The plinth felt as hard and rough as uncut diamonds beneath my fingers. An idea rose up in my mind: if I could break through that hard surface, then I could read the letters. I began to scratch at it, a frenzy coming over me.

Scratch, scratch, scratch. My nails broke off one by one. My fingertips began to bleed. I balled my hands into fists, scraping away with my knuckles, oblivious to the pain. My skin ripped to shreds, but still I persisted. A part of me, the part of my brain that remained tethered to the waking world, even in dreams, knew that I should stop. That this was madness. Even worse, that it wasn’t real.

But I couldn’t stop. The part of me that existed only in dreams knew I had to read those letters. That part held sway here.

I would succeed or die trying.

I woke exhausted the next morning, but was glad to be awake. Glad the dream was over. I slapped the wooden lever on the side of the alarm next to my bed, engaging the snooze spell. The alarm clocks at Arkwell were standard-issue and one of the few fully magical instruments on campus. The school administrators didn’t want students blaming tardiness on the animation effect. Shame, I could’ve used such a handy excuse this morning.

Sighing, I rolled onto my back. I raised my hands and squinted at them, my eyes stinging from lack of sleep. I half expected my hands to be covered in sores from a night spent clawing at a stone plinth, but they looked as normal as ever.

I should’ve been relieved but I wasn’t. I felt empty on the inside, my body hollowed out, as the need to know what those letters spelled lingered like the hangover of some powerful drug. I lay there for a couple of minutes, picturing the faint imprint of letters on the plinth. Maybe my waking mind would have better luck discerning them.

When my alarm went off again, I gave up and got out of bed. Typically, Selene was still asleep. As a siren, she didn’t need to spend as much time getting ready in the morning. Her alarm would go off in twenty minutes, and she would roll out of bed with her dark hair looking perfect and shiny and her skin aglow. She had to bathe as regularly as anybody, of course, but she didn’t have to worry about hair dryers and flatirons, and she hadn’t worn makeup regularly since her turn toward tomboy-hood. She didn’t even wear it to hide the long thin scar running down the side of her face from where she’d been attacked by Marrow’s familiar, the black phoenix. Not that she needed to. If anything, the scar gave her a wild, fierce look that only enhanced her beauty.

I gathered my things as quietly as I could then headed for the shower. But when I returned a half hour later, Selene was still in bed. I poked my head through the door. “You getting up?”

Selene rolled over, turning toward the wall. “Sleeping in,” she mumbled. She sounded as exhausted as I felt. I supposed it made sense, considering she’d been out half the night. I considered confronting her about it right then, but I already had one tough discussion to accomplish today. Just how I was going to broach the subject with Eli, I didn’t know.