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Wariness prickles through me. Why does he look like that? That cry sounded so scared. Why wouldn’t he want to know where it came?—
Huck suddenly twitches beneath his blanket, whimpering.
Zeb sighs and gets up.
I do the same, my apprehension replaced by concern. “What’s going on? Is he?—”
Zeb holds up a hand. “It’s okay. Just a nightmare. Go back to sleep.” He walks carefully toward Huck, who’s started shaking under his blanket.
I stare after him for a heartbeat and then cast a quick glance toward Phineas. The other man’s eyes are open now, but he’s making no move to follow. Instead, when he sees me look at him, he just nods briefly at the couch as if silently repeating what Zeb said.
Which is ridiculous. I’m supposed to just roll over and ignore this, especially after everything I learned about Huck today?
A grim sense of hell no comes from Creepy.
I start after Zeb.
“Mabel,” he whispers when he realizes I’m following. “It’s okay. Huck just has bad dreams sometimes.”
“From what he went through,” I fill in.
Zeb pauses. “Yeah.” He glances down as a murmured plea for someone to stop comes from Huck. “It’s hard to wake him most of the time. Even…” He grimaces briefly. “Even for me. But if they wake up and the two of them don’t realize they’ve been dreaming, Puck can get violent. It’s best to just let them find their own way out.”
Creepy doesn’t like that either. She shivers through my skin, wanting to cuddle our Jekyll close and somehow fix it all.
I exhale slowly, reminding her he’s still not our Jekyll. He can’t be, not for real.
She doesn’t care. Not when he’s in pain and we’re not helping him. We can handle violence. So there’s no excuse to leave him suffering.
And to be fair, she has a point there.
I step past Zeb, ignoring his stifled noise of protest as I crouch down beside Huck. Beneath his tousled white and blue hair, his pale face is screwed up tight like he’s cringing away from something. Every few seconds, he flinches like he’s being shocked.
Which, based on his scars, he probably was back then.
Creepy won’t stand for it, but I barely need her encouragement to pull the edge of the blanket aside and slip in next to Huck. He’s shirtless beneath the blankets, wearing only a pair of sweatpants to cover his lower half, and it makes something inside me ache to know he’d finally been comfortable enough around me to go uncovered like that. But when I gently put my arm over his side, I can feel the cold sweat covering his scarred skin. “Shh,” I whisper. “You’re safe. We’re here.”
He twitches harder, mumbling things I can’t understand.
“Mabel…” Zeb sounds worried.
I chew my lip. Surely, Phineas and Zeb have already tried various techniques to help Huck and Puck. I can’t imagine there’s anything I can do that the two men haven’t already thought of.
Creepy pushes at me again, refusing to accept that answer.
Okay then…
I close my eyes, focusing on Huck’s tense body beneath my arm. The soothing spell my mother used when I was a child spills effortlessly from my lips.
Huck whimpers briefly and then suddenly switches to an angry mumble, a sibilant quality to the sound that makes me suspect Puck is trying to emerge.
I focus harder, murmuring the spell over and over until the words and sounds loop so seamlessly, even I can barely track where they begin and end.
Prickles course through my skin. My nails tingle as they lengthen. I don’t need to see them to know they’re turning black.
Creepy’s not waiting. She wants to help, and I can’t begin to predict what she’ll do if Puck attacks us.
Or what Puck will do if he sees her as a threat.
