Chapter 26
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Ridge
She’s crying.
She’s trying to keep it quiet, which somehow makes it worse.
I lie awake and listen, purposefully avoiding why I’m listening instead of putting a pillow over my head or simply getting my shit together and making my way over there to comfort her.
I need something to keep my hands busy, and Derek forgot to restock my lollipops.
Sabotage takes many forms.
Instead, one of Melanie’s crystals sits on the nightstand, so I pick it up without looking, turning it between my fingers in the dark.
My phone is face down on the nightstand beside me. Miller has called four times today. Four.
Apparently, my publisher is starting to develop opinions, and the only thing standing between me and a spectacularly expensive contractual meltdown is getting back into someone’s dream and doing what I’m very good at.
Except she is crying.
So, I lie here and listen, and even if she were to fall asleep now, I wouldn’t be able to make myself go in. Wouldn’t open that door and start building things designed to frighten her while she is already upset.
Not tonight.
There are lines. Apparently, I own at least one.
The crying stops, and then there’s a male voice.
I put the crystal back down and hold my breath, listening to the muffled conversation happening on the other side of the wall.
I can’t hear what they’re saying, the words don’t make it through, just the cadence—Lennon talking the way Lennon talks, which is to say at length, with feeling, and in multiple directions at once.
I’ve gotten used to the sound of it. It’s become a thing I notice the absence of, which is its own problem I’m not examining right now.
What I’m examining right now is the other voice.
I’d bet a pretty big amount that the Shaw boy is in her apartment.
In her bed.
At whatever this hour is.
The thing I feel about this is irritation.
That’s what I’m calling it. Irritation, which is a perfectly reasonable response to being kept awake by noise from next door and has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that last night she said yours in a dream with her eyes blown dark and her whole body reaching for me.
Then she woke up and did not knock on my door.
Instead, Nevan is currently in her bed.
I consider, briefly, making my way over there.
Looking at the Shaw boy and asking Lennon, just like last night.
Him or me? Except I already know the answer, and even without full information, she chose correctly.
She chose him. In waking life, with her eyes open and her full-conscious brain engaged, she chose him.
The conversation on the other side of the wall eventually goes quiet. They’ve probably fallen asleep, which is a thought I’m not going to linger on, and I’m still lying here in the dark doing the thing I do, which is think.
I think about Nevan Shaw.
Not the dream version, the actual one. The one she called at some point this evening to get comfort, presumably, instead of knocking on my door.
The thing about people who show up for someone in the middle of the night is that they either mean it or they don’t, and there’s no middle ground.
I want to know which one he is. I want to know if he’s honest with her.
If he sees her how she deserves to be seen, or if she’s a game to him, a soft thing, a girl with sad eyes and a good heart that someone like him gets to feel good about.
I want to know if he deserves it.
The choosing.
Which is, I’m aware, a rich thing to want, coming from me, but also how I decide to do something stupid.
With Paul, sharing dreamscapes was not exactly easy. I had to want it and had to work toward it deliberately, easing into the shared space like opening a door you weren’t sure was unlocked.
With Lennon, it just happened. No effort, no intention.
I still don’t entirely understand why, except that whatever she is to me, the dreamscape noticed before I did.
Whether that thread extends to someone she’s tangled with is a completely different question, and the honest answer is I have no idea.
I’m lying here in the dark at whatever this hour is, awake, irritated, and curious, and those three things together have historically led me places I didn’t plan to go.
I close my eyes.
Think of the Shaw boy.
The last time I saw him in waking life, he was barely an adult.
Maybe eighteen, nineteen. Back then, I worked at Bennett Logging, and Nevan did odd jobs around the place like half the young guys in town did.
Occasionally, someone would decide that the teenager needed supervising, and I was the one to do it, which I never volunteered for and never successfully argued my way out of.
He was all angles and uncertain height, knocking things over because he hadn’t finished learning where his edges were.
I was mostly annoyed by his responsibility. Mostly.
I try to pull up the specifics of him now. The color of his eyes—blue, I guess—but I genuinely can’t remember. I didn’t look at the dream version too closely, for reasons I’m not revisiting, but it’s now difficult to find anything concrete to focus on.
I breathe in slowly through my nose.
The Shaw boy.
The voice through the wall tonight. The outline of him assembled from secondhand information, and a dream projection that was probably nothing like the real thing. It’s not enough to focus on. I know it’s not enough.
I breathe again anyway.
Out through my mouth, slow. The Shaw boy. Whatever blue or green his eyes are.
My thoughts start to soften at the edges.
In.
The Shaw boy.
Out.
The Shaw boy…
The ceiling goes soft.
The ceiling goes… and something nearly takes my ear off.
I duck on instinct, and whatever it is whips past me with a paper-cut whistle and disappears into the golden light ahead. I straighten up and turn to look at it.
A tarot card. Folded into a paper plane.
What the hell?
Another one follows immediately, banking left, close enough to feel the air move.
Then three more in formation.
I watch them go, then look around at the airspace I’ve apparently wandered into, which is thick with the things, dozens of tarot cards folded into planes, circling, diving, and occasionally colliding with each other in small papery explosions before reforming and continuing on their way.
Last time muffins tried to kill me, now it’s tarot cards. Great.
I watch a particularly aggressive one come directly at my face and sidestep it.
Wait.
This is weird as fuck.
I look down at my hands.
Left one has nine fingers. Right one has four.
Right…
… I’m dreaming.
The air smells like incense, and the light is wrong, too warm and golden, filtering through things overhead that rustle even though nothing is moving. The ground is soft like it was designed to be, by someone who had feelings about it.
I do a slow turn, taking in the full picture.
Crystals are hanging everywhere from things that aren’t quite trees.
Each one is strung by a thread, scattering it in small rainbows across surfaces that shift a little when you look at them directly.
The colors are too saturated, a palette that exists only in dreams and very confident interior design choices.
Whoever built this has, to put it charitably, a lot going on.
In the middle of it all, cross-legged on the improbably soft ground, is a boy.
He’s maybe sixteen? Shaggy and wild dark hair over blond that curls, a face that will be striking when it finishes deciding what it’s doing. He’s shuffling a tarot deck, eyes half-closed, lips moving.
In front of him, receiving this reading is an enormous pickle.
My attention is focused on the pickle, trying to understand what is happening, but in turn, it doesn’t acknowledge me.
The boy draws a card, holds it up, and murmurs to the pickle.
All right, whatever. Who am I to judge weird shit?
But this is not the Shaw boy.
Although, I squint at him. There’s something, actually.
Huh.
A younger version of Lennon’s dream version, even if he’s not quite the same.
Does Nevan have a brother?
Okay, so maybe not quite right, but adjacent to right, like I got the general direction and slightly missed the target.
Something shoves me.
Hard.
From behind, with no warning, flat-palmed between the shoulder blades, and I stumble forward three steps before I get my feet under me and spin around, ready to ditch another tarot card paper plane, but it’s an older woman standing a few feet away from me.
Long silver hair streaming behind her, crystals everywhere, around her neck, on her fingers, in her hair. Blue eyes that are wide and furious are aimed at me.
She’s moving fast, faster than makes spatial sense, closing the distance between us while she’s screaming. “Leave! You are not allowed here!”
Her hand connects with my chest, flat-palmed, and the force of it knocks the breath out of me. The dreamscape tears, and I’m pulled backward through the membrane of sleep itself like being yanked through a wall, and I brace for the hard landing, but instead, I land softly on my back.
I lay still, breathing, with the distinct impression of a hand still flat against my sternum. “What…” I pant, “… the actual fuck was that?”
I try to get my bearings and register that I’m still somewhere because it has texture, smell, and the quality of light that means a dreaming brain made it.
I look at my hands.
Left one has seven fingers. Right one has eleven.
Still dreaming, just somewhere else.
I sit up, looking around as I stand.
It’s a classroom.
The fluorescent-lit institutional misery of one of Vernonia’s high school classrooms that smells like dry-erase markers, anxiety, and someone’s lunch from three hours ago. Rows of desks, a blackboard at the front, windows along one side, and every desk is occupied.
Teenagers. Dozens of them, all facing forward, and they’re laughing, the collective cruelty of a group of teenagers who have identified a target and decided to make it someone’s worst memory.
I follow their gaze to the front of the room.
And there he is. Nevan Shaw.