Chapter Ninety-Two If You Can Dream It, You Can Kill It
The first thing he does is let out a roar that commands the attention of everyone in the place, human or creature. Then he moves to stand directly in front of me—his way of protecting me from any more attacks.
Jude holds himself loosely, his legs spread and braced beneath him and his arms held out from his sides. The tattoos on his chest and arms start to glow and undulate, twisting and turning and sliding over his skin until his entire torso is alight with the magic and the power of a thousand nightmares. A flick of his fingers calls a gust of wind to him out of nowhere. It whips the air around him into a frenzy, and the entire room drops twenty degrees in an instant. And that’s when Jude sends the nightmares spinning, twirling, flying off his body into the room around him.
He never would have done this before everything that happened at the cellar, never would have trusted himself to wield the nightmares like the weapons they are. But something happened the moment he realized what the Jean-Jerks had done, something switched inside him, and I know this incredible display of power and strength is the direct result of it.
The monsters must see it, too, because they back away, screeching and bellowing their displeasure. But it’s already too late for them. Jude has them in his sights, and it’s obvious he’s determined to settle this once and for all.
Like a conductor at a macabre symphony, he uses his hands and arms to weave a complicated pattern—a safeguard—with the nightmares into the air around us.
I expect them to flow out into the room immediately, even brace myself for whatever will come from that. But instead, they form a feathery barrier spinning around the two of us, gaining speed and power with each twist and turn, until they glow so brightly they light up the whole room.
And that’s when Jude strikes.
A flick of his wrist, a quick spin of his hand, has the nightmares scattering in a hundred different directions. They cover the entire ballroom—and every monster in it—wrapping themselves around the creatures like full-body manacles.
The creatures thrash and scream, claw and gnash their teeth in frantic attempts to escape their astral shackles. But the nightmares hold them fast. Then Jude circles his hand in the air and jerks it backward. Within seconds, the nightmares start slowly, inexorably dragging the monsters closer to Jude.
The tapestry lies in the corner of the room. Remy makes a run for it and sprints it over to Jude. Simon and Mozart, looking very worse for wear, take it from him and unroll it on the ground at his feet.
And even though every muscle in my body aches and I want nothing more than to stay where I am, I force myself to stand up and move to join Jude. My mate.
He doesn’t look at me—his concentration is too fierce for that as he continues to drag the bunch of snarling, furious, ferocious monsters straight toward himself.
But he manages to ask, for the second time, if I’m okay.
Like I’ve said before, ‘okay’ is a relative term—especially since I’m pretty sure I have a few broken ribs. So instead I respond with the only thing that’s true.
“I’m fine,” I tell him, and watch his eyes darken with concern.
“What can I do?” he asks.
“Get the monsters in the tapestry so we can finish this,” I answer. “Do you know how to do it?”
“Not a fucking clue,” he answers grimly.
That’s what I was afraid of. We can’t risk the chance that even one monster comes at us again or escapes—so I do the only thing I can think of.
I walk up to the nearest monster, ignoring Jude’s startled objection. It’s the squid monster that Izzy and I fought. I go inside my mind and find the stained glass window my brain has created for it.
I open the green window first, but the creature’s future is completely absent.
So I move onto the second window—the red one that covers the past. Maybe if I can see how it was made, I can figure out how to get it back into the tapestry.
I brace myself for seeing our fight from its point of view. I scroll backward, past the gym. Definitely past the attack on Izzy and me in its cell. Past days and days of blood hunger and nothing else, until I finally spot my mom.
I slow down and let what works a lot like a video play back slowly as I try to find the moment when the monster came into being.
I pause for a second, try to assimilate what—and who—I just saw on the screen. My mother, yes. The squid thing, yes. But also a person who I’m pretty sure is Jean-Luc’s father. He’s definitely fae, definitely mafia, and has the same orange eyes as Jean-Luc.
But what the hell would he be doing at Calder Academy? And what the hell would he be doing with the monsters? It doesn’t make any sense.
I wave a hand, and the video of the past starts playing again. I watch as he and my mother open a briefcase full of money, watch as seconds before, Jean-Luc’s dad hands it to her, and then seconds before that, when they shake hands.
Suddenly, all of the snippets I’ve seen before start to make sense.
Except…instinct has me fast-forwarding a little past the handshake. And that’s when I see Camilla catch a glimpse of Carolina hiding in the shadows as the dark deal unfolds.
I watch as the woman I thought was my mother doesn’t flinch, doesn’t let on by so much as a sideways glance that they’re not alone. But I can see the fury in her eyes—and the fear.
But something is off. Carolina is off. I pause the “video.” Look closer and closer and closer still. And then I see it—the strange glitter that trails behind every flicker. My mother isn’t seeing Carolina. She’s seeing a flicker of a future where she might have seen Carolina.
And that’s when I know.
This is the night Jude kissed me in ninth grade. The night he was so afraid that a nightmare got loose. But there was no nightmare—and no mistake.
At least not on his part.
We kissed, and time cracked just for a moment. I saw my birth mother. And Camilla saw something she never should have seen, something that may never have even happened. And Carolina paid the ultimate price.
Everyone wants control—over themselves, over their lives, over the school they go to and the world they live in. But there’s a fine line between control and chaos, and where you end up can often take you by surprise.
Tears well up inside me—sorrow, rage, pain. I beat them back, at least for now, because another vision is playing out in front of me.
Because everything is happening in reverse, I back the memories up further into the past and watch straight through as the squid creature is taken away. And how right before that, it’s wrapped in a straitjacket-type garment.
Then I do it again, just to make sure I’m seeing what I think I’m seeing.
By the time I’ve seen it twice, I realize a few things. One, the creature I’m watching isn’t the creature in front of me. I’m actually seeing things through this creature’s eyes. Which means my mother made more of these squid things. Two, I’ve been very naive—and so has Jude. And three—my mother has been lying. A lot.
Because she didn’t put these monsters back in the tapestry at all. No, from the time Jude was a little boy, she’s been conning him into letting her make these monsters with his nightmares and selling them to the most dangerous paranormal organization in the country, maybe even in the world.
My stomach roils at the realization, and it takes every ounce of strength I’ve got not to throw up right here, right now.
So I swallow down the sickness that’s destroying my insides and focus on the problem at hand. Namely that we have a whole hell of a lot of monsters here and no idea of how to get them back into the tapestry. We don’t know if they can even go into the tapestry. I realize now that could have been just one more lie my mother told Jude.
Not knowing what else to do, I scroll back further and further, but I find no other clues.
“Did you find anything?” Jude asks, and for the first time I realize he’s aware of what I’ve been doing.
“No,” I answer, because now is not the time to explain what I just saw. “Except I don’t think the monsters go into the tapestry fully formed.”
“What do you mean?” He glances at me then, eyes filled with confusion. “That’s how it’s always been.”
“No, that’s how they always told you it was. But that’s not how it actually is.”
He starts to ask more, but as soon as his concentration slips, the monster in front of him starts to break free.
“So what do we do now?” he asks as he jerks his attention back to the monsters he’s holding in thrall.
“I think we do what you did with the tapestry,” I tell him, because I’ve got no better ideas. “I think we unravel the monsters, one nightmare at a time.”
Jude’s shoulders droop a little at my words, and I think it’s because he’s figuring out that something is very wrong here. That even if we manage to vanquish the monsters, there’s a lot more to unpack here than just what’s happened today.
I place a comforting hand on his back—though the truth is I don’t know if it’s him or myself that I’m trying to comfort.
Jude nods and says, “Okay. Let’s try it.”
I glance over to see Simon is sitting by Ember. I’m glad to see someone is taking care of her. But everyone else steps forward to join us. Once everyone is in place, I ask Jude, “Ready?”
The look on his face says that he is not remotely ready. But then he gives me that tiny little grin of his, and I know he’s going to be okay.
He starts with the squid monster, loosening the nightmares wrapped around it but keeping them close if he needs them. But when he tries to unravel the monster like he did the tapestry, nothing happens.
He tries a second and a third time and still nothing.
“We could try stabbing them,” Izzy suggests with a shrug. “It worked with the chricklers.”
“I think I’ve got a better idea,” Jude tells us. “But you might want to get behind me.”
None of us has to be asked twice, not after what we’ve seen in the last forty-eight hours.
We angle ourselves to also provide cover for Simon and Ember, and when we’re all safe behind him, he closes his eyes. Takes a deep breath. And flings his arms out.
As he does, every nightmare in the room unravels—including the ones wrapped around the monsters. The second they’re free, they freak out and charge straight for us, blood in their eyes.
“Was this your big plan?” Luis asks skeptically. “Because I have to say I liked them better the other way.”
Jude ignores him as he pulls all the nightmares back to him with one clench of his fist. But the monsters are closing in, too, racing for us like their very existences depend on it—because they do.
“We should run,” Mozart says. “Right?”
“These aren’t enough,” Jude tells us, and for the first time he looks a little sick. “I need more.”
“There aren’t any more!” Luis tells him. “And if we wait much longer, those monsters are going to turn us into flesh spaghetti.”
“Take mine,” I tell him.
Jude turns shocked eyes to me. “What—”
“Take my nightmares!” I say again.
Remy joins in. “Take all of ours.”
Jude stares at us for a second, as if gauging our seriousness.
“What are you waiting for?” Luis demands. “We sure as shit don’t need them.”
Jude nods and then holds out both his hands and closes his eyes again, despite the fact that the monsters are bearing down on us.
“Hurry!” Mozart urges.
Jude nods, and then he starts to pull. He pulls and pulls and pulls, and I watch in wonder as nightmares flow out of us and into the glowing ball of nightmares he has spinning in front of him.
Even after everything that happened in the cellar, I’m still astonished at how beautiful the nightmares are. I assumed they would all be dark, scary shades. But they’re not. So many of them are brightly colored and shiny, and I realize that this is what Jude was talking about.
These are nightmares in their purest form, and they aren’t scary at all. No, it’s not the nightmares themselves we have to fear. But the monsters that we create from them.
Once Jude’s harvested them all, once he has collected every last nightmare the room has to offer, he flicks his fingers, and the huge spinning ball in front of him flies straight at the monsters—and not a second too soon, because they’re just about to bear down on us.
The monsters scream as the nightmares hit them, then arrow inside.
And then we wait, breath held, to see what happens next. And at first, the answer is nothing. The monsters just stand there, swaying, almost like they’re in shock.
“What’s going on?” Izzy whispers, and I realize she’s got her knives in her hands as she looks from one monster to the next.
“I don’t know,” I whisper back.
There’s a moment of deafening silence and—the first monster explodes. And then they all do. One after the other, the thousands upon thousands of nightmares they were made of rain down on us like confetti.