Chapter 18
Chapter
Eighteen
I’d been dead. Hadn’t I?
No. I just wished I was.
I blinked at the familiar beige walls, watching them come into focus. The clock on the wall ticked loudly.
Did I just imagine getting beaten? Or had that actually happened? My whole body ached, so maybe that was real.
My eyes drifted up towards the clock. The little hand pointed at the two. Two in the morning, or two in the afternoon? Last time I’d looked, it’d been pointing at the ten. So, that meant either four hours had passed, or sixteen.
Or days. Or months. Maybe years.
I looked at my hands. My nails hadn’t grown any longer. I wasn’t hungry.
Hours, then.
Experimentally, I shifted in my seat and felt the deep ache of bruises on my skin. Every single inch of me hurt, like I’d been pummeled by tiny fists all over my body.
The pain was nothing compared to the despair. It settled in now, that deep, endless anguish. It was inescapable.
The door opened, and an unfamiliar no-nonsense voice drifted out from the corridor. “... no longer than half an hour, Ms. Martina. Striker said she’s dangerous; he doesn’t want anyone to get exposed to her just yet. Besides, it’s the middle of the night.”
“I have every right to speak to my client.” The familiar voice was brusque.
“Well, the psych evaluator needs to see her to clear her. He’s coming first thing in the morning.”
“I will see her now.”
There was a snort. “She’s a bit unhinged. You might be wasting your time.”
“Be that as it may, officer, but it’s my time to waste,” Martina replied curtly. The door squeaked. “I must speak with her now. Striker doesn’t need to know.” She closed the door in the officer’s face and turned towards me.
I looked at her. She looked real. My mouth was so dry. I licked my lips. “Are you real?”
Her expression cracked. “Your Highness.”
“Don’t call me that.” Anguish crushed me. She wasn’t real; she was another vision, here to taunt me. “I’m not a highness. I’m nobody.”
“You’re the Chosen One,” Martina said matter-of-factly. She sat down, her wide brown eyes fixed on me. “I don’t have much time. The Prince is hunting the werewolf now?—”
Panic seized my chest. “No,” I whispered. “He can’t. Striker said he’d kill him.”
Martina’s calm expression didn’t change.
“You think the Prince can’t handle a little werewolf?
He would have torn apart this whole precinct to get to you, you know.
He was about to, when he found out where you were.
” Her lips hardened. “The only way I could distract him was to convince him to hunt the wolf so I could come in and speak with you myself.”
The thought of Donovan was too tempting, too comforting. I couldn’t resist it. Did it matter if he wasn’t real? He might be imaginary, but I loved him anyway. “Is–” My breath hitched in my throat. “Is he okay?”
“Oh, God, no. No. He is losing his mind,” Martina said. Her gaze bore into mine. “You might be the one locked up, Susan, but the Prince is on the verge of burning down this entire realm to get you back.”
A sob escaped my lips. I didn’t care if I was just hearing what I wanted to hear. He loved me.
“Listen up. I need you to be the ruler I know you can be, because right now, he can’t,” Martina went on bluntly.
“The rest of the company can’t organize themselves out of a paper bag.
Right now, Prince Donovan is a bomb waiting to go off.
With you in here, locked up, he is incapable of making rational decisions, so I need you to step up.
” She gave me a firm stare. “Can you do that?”
I bristled a little. “I’m not a child, Martina.”
She smiled. “Good, you’re still you. Now, we can figure out what happened to you.”
“I don’t know what happened.” I bit my lip, desperate to hold on to my train of thought. Martina’s brisk, no-nonsense demeanor helped ground me a little better, so I barreled on while I could think straight. “I’ve been seeing things. I don’t know what’s real.”
“Cecil told me you’d been having waking nightmares, but you blew it off as just sleep-deprivation and somnambulism.
Against his better judgment he took your word for it, and now he’s in full self-flagellation mode for not realizing how seriously it was affecting you.
Like, literally self-flagellation mode,” Martina said.
“He made himself a lovely cat-o-nine tails and a big, studded paddle, and he’s been carrying them around, periodically whipping himself.
Violet’s drawing room looks like a BDSM dungeon. ”
She was trying to lighten the mood. But the light wasn’t really reaching the depths that I had sunk to.
Martina sighed softly. “Cecil tried to come in with me, but the officers won’t let him.
He’s in the waiting room.” She rummaged around in her briefcase and pulled out a strange metal object—ball-shaped and made of a dozen dull steel rings entwined together.
“Based on everything Nate told me about Connor’s visit to the Under, and what Cecil said about your panic attacks, and the fact that nobody sensed any foreign magic lingering around you, we think you might have been cursed. ”
I licked my lips. “Cursed?”
“That’s right.” She snapped two of the circles on the metal device; it gave a click, then a whirr.
A green glow lit up the device from within.
“A curse is a chain that binds you to darkness. If that darkness is actually yours in the first place, nobody would be able to sense any strange magic.” Martina eyeballed me sternly.
“Please stay still, Your Highness.” She stood up and waved the device over the top of my head.
“If the curse-bind is here, it will be attached to your crown chakr?—”
The device zapped, sending green sparks in the air. I flinched away, suddenly scared; it sounded like the zap of electricity. Buzzzz. Buzzzz.
Terror and darkness rushed in, blocking out the whole room, swallowing me completely, holding me in an unbreakable grip.
I was strapped down. I couldn’t move. Electric shock treatment. Rubber mouth guard, shoved in my mouth.
“Holy shit.” Martina breathed out.
I reached for her in the darkness, and the rubber guard disappeared. I swallowed desperately, and felt a warm, reassuring hand touch my wrist.
“That's it. He was right; it’s a curse-tie.”
I panted and blinked, trying to clear my eyesight, trying to mentally wrestle myself out of my nightmare.
When my eyesight cleared, I realized Martina wasn’t in front of me anymore.
I turned my head—oh, God, my head was pounding—she crouched behind me, examining my hands, still cuffed behind my back.
“Oh, this is not good,” she said, waving the device around my fingers. It ticked and whirred.
The door banged. “One minute, Ms. Martina,” the officer called.
She reached out to touch my hand; I flinched away.
“Listen to me,” she said urgently, moving back around the table to sit on the chair.
“I know what happened to you. The Devourer did this to you. This is what he did when he journeyed to the Under. Your hands, Susan. You have your nightmares on your hands.”
“What—” I swallowed, trying to clear the lump in my throat. My lips were so dry I felt them crack. “I don’t understand.”
“Connor went to the Under,” Martina explained. “He gathered up your worst nightmares and brought them back to this world. I know this for a fact, because traces of your nightmares are still under your fingernails. It looks like sand, Your Highness. Tiny grains of cold, powdery sand.”
That was ridiculous. A fairy-story. A wild tale, totally unbelievable. “The sandman. Of course,” I mumbled. “That figures. Now, I’m repurposing fairytales to feed my delusions.”
“There is no sandman,” Martina said calmly.
Then, she frowned. “Well, there is, but it’s just an archetype, a shadowy concept.
However, he’s much less powerful than the gods and goddesses that harass the souls of the fae Under.
But in the human Under, your dreams and nightmares and all your unconscious thoughts collect and gather in piles like leaves in fall, waiting for you to move on from this life and gather them up and flick through them again to see what you’ve learned. ”
My chin wobbled. “This sounds insane,” I breathed out. But it was familiar. I desperately wanted to believe her.
She slammed a hand down on the table. “Listen to me. Stay with me, Susan. I need you to understand this, because if you understand it, you will be able to think your way out of it. You’re a smart woman. I know you can do this.”
I swallowed; it hurt. The lump in my throat threatened to choke me.
“When you die,” Martina said. “Your spirit leaves the physical world and travels through the Under—the realm of the non-physical. There, you’re reunited with your unconscious and conscious thoughts, and you are forced to confront them all again.
This is what people talk about when they’re dying and they say their life flashed before their eyes.
You’re confronted with every thought you’ve ever had. Every emotion, every desire…”
“Every fear.”
“That’s right.” She nodded. “Your worst nightmares are there. When you die, you’re supposed to confront them to see what you’ve learned in this lifetime.
But nobody is ever supposed to do that while they’re still alive.
Your nightmares on this physical plane…” She blew out a breath and shook her head.
“They could consume you completely. You wouldn’t know what’s real and what’s fake. ”
“That’s convenient.” Cold tickled my cheeks. I’d started crying. “A handy excuse for my psychotic breakdown. A magical explanation for the fact that I’m just nuts.”
Martina swore under her breath. “The sand is on you now, Susan. Your nightmares have sunk into your physical body, but since they belong to the Under, they’re linking you to the Under.
It's a curse-tie, and you need to break it. Susan… Listen to me. If you don’t fight this, you might get lost in your nightmares—here, in the physical world. ”
“I can’t fight this.” My voice sounded so tiny, so pathetic. “I don’t know what I’m fighting. I don’t even know if I believe any of this.”
“Am I lying?” She eyeballed me. “Did you feel me lie? I know you have the power to tell truth from lies.”
I shook my head. “That’s not real either. I don’t have magic powers. That’s exactly what a person experiencing a psychotic break would imagine someone saying.”
She smacked her hand on the table. “Cecil is the best driver in the entire city.”
A buzz rolled over my skin. I flinched.
“And he is not a high-functioning alcoholic.”
Buzz.
“And he most certainly does not still have three grams of cocaine in his service dog vest.”
That one stung. Goddamn Cecil. I held up my hand. “Okay. Okay I get your point.”
“You have to understand. Connor has done this to you, Susan. Listen to me,” Martina said urgently.
“He went to the Human Under and consumed the sand stone, which temporarily let him wander through the realm of unconscious thoughts. He stole your nightmares and brought them back to the physical realm, where they manifest as tiny grains of sand in a leather pouch. That’s where the legend of the Sandman comes from.
Somehow, Connor managed to get the sand on your bare skin, and the connection solidified into a curse-tie to the Under.
Your nightmares will continue to haunt you until that connection is severed and the curse is broken. ”
A thought nudged me. “Sand?” I remembered something. “I had sand on my fingers… when was— Oh!”
Clarity smashed me in the face. Suddenly the dark edges in my vision disappeared, and everything was too sharp, too bright. I blinked.
“Juliette. It was Juliette!” I gasped. I looked down at the table, remembering.
“Dan Raine told me she’d had a secret meeting with Donovan, but it wasn’t with Donovan.
It must have been Connor, impersonating his brother.
Connor asked Juliette to plant something on me.
That’s why she invited me out for lunch.
That’s why she took me to Cloud, where the fog on the floor hid everything below our knees.
I couldn't find my purse, and she handed it to me.”
I remembered it clearly. “I touched something in my purse, like a leather pouch, but it dissolved the second I felt it. The sands stuck to my fingers. When I swapped purses later, I didn’t see a leather pouch. Or any more sand. I forgot about it.”
“That’s it. This is the direct attack we were expecting. Connor cursed you with your own nightmares.”
“How do I stop it?” I clenched my fists, the cuffs digging into my wrists. “How do I break the curse?”
“I don’t know.” Martina was blunt. “In the Under, it would be easy; you just have to confront your fears. But it’s far easier to confront your fears when you’re in a non-physical form. When you’re still in your meat-suit, it’s too confusing. That’s why it’s driving you crazy.”
“How do I stop it?” My voice cracked. “Martina, I’m terrified of getting locked up in a psych ward again, and it’s coming true! My worst nightmare is losing my grip on reality, and that is coming true, too!” Even saying the words hurt, like being electrocuted.
“I know. The irony isn’t lost on me.” She looked away, clenching her jaw. “Goddamnit. Why couldn’t you just be scared of clowns or something?”
The door banged. “Time’s up!” The short female officer opened the door. “Sorry, Ms. Martina, but if Striker found out we let you in, he’d make my life miserable. He’s already blocked one promotion, and I don’t want him fixating on me again. That man is an asshole.”
“I understand.” She turned and looked at me. “We’ll fix this.”
My gut churned. “Martina?—”
“We’ll figure it out, Your Highness.” She stood up. “Now that we know what we’re dealing with, we can find a way to fix it.” She jutted out her square chin, determined.
“Don’t leave me here.” Panic gripped me again. The walls were moving. I could see them clearly, inching inward, coming closer and closer, closing in on me. The blackness crept in again.
“You need to leave now, Ms. Martina,” The officer snapped. “I told you; she’s dangerous.”
Locked up, locked up, locked up. The phantoms screamed around me. Locked up forever.
Martina’s face loomed out of the darkness one more time. “Fight it,” she said urgently, as the officer grabbed her arm and pulled her out of the room. “You have to fight it, Your Highness.”
The nightmare pulled me under, and I heard nothing but screams.