Chapter Seventy-Four Take Me Off the Shift List
“The person who designed it is dead,” Jude says quietly, his voice completely devoid of emotion.
“Then why can’t you change it?” Luis asks him with a nonchalant shrug. “I mean, what’s the point of being a prince if you can’t do exactly what you want?”
Izzy lets out a harsh laugh at that, but when we turn to look at her, she just shrugs and goes back to spinning a jewel-encrusted dagger over her knuckles now that she’s done with her talon-like nails.
“If you don’t put the nightmares directly into the tapestry, what do you do with them? Just walk around wearing them all?” Remy nods to the black, feathery rope that’s in the middle of slowly and stealthily sliding up Jude’s cheek.
I watch it, fascinated, until Jude rubs his hand across his jaw and it slips back under his shirt. How does he lose control of them when they respond to him so readily?
“There are way too many for that. I store them up, then—when there are enough of them—they are generated into monsters. It’s those monsters that get filtered into the tapestry.” He pauses and shakes his head. “Those monsters under the bed aren’t bullshit. They’re just nightmares taking on a corporeal form.”
His words go off like a bomb inside of me as I realize what he’s saying.
“Are you telling me that the monsters in the menagerie—the snake thing and squidzilla and the chricklers—are all there because of you?”
My voice raises on the last part, but I can’t help it. I’ve spent the last several years of my life being tortured by these things, and I am so not impressed.
Now it makes sense why they don’t attack him. He’s their creator.
I shudder at the thought.
And apparently I’m not the only one. “Hold up there, Dr. Frankenstein,” Luis tells him. “You’re over here making monsters that regularly try to kill the girl you’ve been tortured over for the last three years, and it’s never occurred to you that the system might need a revamp?”
“Luis!” I give him a what-the-fuck look.
“What?” He throws up an aggrieved hand. “Come at me if you want, Clementine, but I’m just calling it like I see it. He hasn’t been helping you in that damn dungeon for the last three years. And he sure as hell hasn’t been the one patching you up all the fucking time. So, yeah, I’m more than a little pissed off on your behalf.”
At first, Jude doesn’t say anything, but when he turns to me, I can see the regret in his eyes. His jaw tightens as the guilt and pain take over.
“I’m sorry,” he finally whispers.
And I realize what Luis doesn’t—that Jude didn’t leave me alone, at least not the way my best friend thinks he did. On a lot of the days I was down there feeding the chricklers, he was down there, too, just before me.
Because I can’t help but remember the glimpse of a shadow racing by in the dark or a black hoodie disappearing around a corner. I thought it was my mind playing tricks on me or a ghost but all along it was Jude. I wasn’t alone.
No wonder there were days when the chricklers still had full food and water bowls. Really, Jude had taken care of it, so I wouldn’t have to—and so I would only get a bite or two instead of my usual dozen or so. And I never had a clue.
I’m getting a whole new look at the last three years, and I’m finding out they’re nothing like I thought they were. Something unlocks within me, and another chain keeping me from trusting Jude slowly slides away.
“It’s okay,” I whisper back. “I understand.”
“That makes one of us,” Luis says with a snort.
I shoot him a knock-it-off look. He crosses his arms over his chest and rolls his eyes in response.
But then I remember the red streak we saw rush by us yesterday before the ghosts descended on us.
“Was that you in the dungeon yesterday?” I whisper.
“No, I—” Jude starts, concern painted on his face, but Simon interrupts him.
“So how do you make the monsters? Like, is there a formula or…”
“I don’t know,” Jude says. “I don’t make them.”
“What do you mean, you don’t make them?” Ember asks. “Who the fuck would you trust to whip up shit that goes bump in the night?”
“Again, I was seven when I first got here,” he reminds her. “Would you trust a seven-year-old making those monsters? So Clementine’s mom took on the job, and she’s been doing it ever since.”
I thought I was beyond being shocked, thought everything that’s happened in the last twenty-four hours had already rendered me unshockable. But it turns out I was wrong, because there’s a part of me that can’t process what he just said.
My mothermakes monsters out of Jude’s nightmares?
My mothercreates those nasty, terrible things in the dungeon using magic from the guy she knows I’ve hated for the last three years and then sends me down there to clean up after them?
Because wow. There’s diabolical, and then there’s just completely fucked up. My mother definitely falls into the latter category, especially when I add in all the lies she had to tell me through the years to keep the whole system going. She doesn’t board monsters short term for money for the school. She houses them until Jude can put them back in the tapestry, where they apparently dissolve back into nightmares.
My mind boggles, the pieces of this very complex puzzle swirling around in my head, and I have no idea how they fit together.
I cut the thought off as another question occurs to me. One that has nothing to do with my mother, because I’m definitely not ready to deal with her part in this mess yet. I know I’ll have to eventually, because there has to be more to the story of Carolina being sent away than Jude knows. After all, my mom’s not really the type to be motivated by nightmares—hers or mine. But not yet.
“If the nightmares are condensed into monsters for the sole purpose of putting them back into the tapestry, why do those monsters stay in the dungeon for so long?” I ask Jude. “Some of them are there for months.”
“Because the tapestry only accepts them four times a year,” Jude answers grimly. “We have to wait for when magic is at its most powerful to put them back into the tapestry.”
“The solstices?” Luis guesses.
Jude nods. “And the equinoxes.”
I can tell by the look on Remy’s face that he’s already come to the same realization I have.
“Tonight’s the equinox,” he says slowly.
And Jude looks even more grim than he did a few seconds ago.