Page 4 of Realm of Dreams & Shadows

The question lands like a punch to the gut. “My dad was never in the picture.”

Tia’s face falls. “God, I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“How could you?” I shrug, aiming for nonchalance despite the familiar tightness in my chest. “It’s fine. Ancient history. But I get what you’re asking. To be honest, Uncle Finn was a little freaked at first. I think he wanted me to major in history or something, just so we could both forget about the way mom died.”

“Does that bother you?”

Hell, yes. But all I say is, “It’s fine. It’s been four years, and I get that he wants to move on.”

I flash an it’s all good smile. Except it’s not good at all. Not when I still wake to the sounds of my mother’s screams. Not when I still remember how it felt when she convulsed in my arms as the nightmares took her, just like they’d taken almost all the women on my mother’s side of the family for generations and generations.

And certainly not when I know that, unless I find a cure, those same nightmares will one day claim me too.

I hold my breath, waiting for Tia to nail me with more questions, but Tia is like a bumblebee, and, thankfully, she’s already moved on to her next flower—this one a freshman mixer.

“It’s in the building,” she says, sitting up and making prayer hands. “Don’t make me go alone. Pretty please?”

I laugh, then agree, even though what I really want is a hot shower and an early night, preferably with the aid of the sleeping pills I got from a walk-in clinic before I left St. Pete. But I also want the illusion of a somewhat normal life.

Besides, I really like Tia.

“Thankyouthankyouthankyou,” she says, clapping like a little kid.

“But I’ll have to meet you there,” I tell her. “I promised my uncle I’d have dinner at his place.”

“Just so long as you don’t stand me up,” she says, then bounces off the bed. “I’m going to change, then go check out the library and the dining hall before I hit the mixer.”

As she rummages through her already overflowing closet, I begin unpacking my own clothes, then pause when I pull my scrap box from beneath a stack of jeans.

It’s nothing special, just an old wooden box I’d found at a garage sale when I was twelve. It’s where I normally keep Mom’s ring. It doesn’t fit, and it’s not my style, and I don’t like wearing jewelry. But Mom always said the lapis lazuli ring was special, so I wear it on a chain on special occasions like Christmas. And starting college.

Now, I put the chain and ring back into the box to rest beside a few other treasures—old concert ticket stubs, a dried rose from my very first date, and the remnants of a ripped-up letter I’d found in my mother’s bedside trashcan a few days before she screamed and writhed and thrashed in bed as I called 911—a useless move since her heart succumbed to the power of her nightmare long before the paramedics arrived.

I pull the taped-together letter out, then run my finger over the remaining text, foolishly hoping that this time when I read it, the full letter will magically appear, and I can finally truly understand my mother’s message.

It doesn’t, of course. But I read the neatly printed words and fragments anyway, even though by now I know the whole thing by rote.

A surge of anger cuts through me, and I want to ball it up and throw the damn letter across the room, because this is what she left me? This lame letter that tells me nothing about how to survive some stupid family curse? A letter she didn’t even give me. Instead, I’d had to dig it out of the damn trash.I’d been terrified the first time I’d read it. Not of the nightmares that I’d known for years had plagued all the women in my family, but that my mother was losing her mind. I almost asked her about it, but it seemed so nonsensical. And I hadn’t wanted her to know I’d poked around in her trash.

Then I saw her on the night the mares won.

I saw her scream and convulse like something out of The Exorcist, only to end up still and dead with fifteen-year-old me staring in shock and terror, knowing I needed to run—to get the hell away from the thing that would now be coming for me. A hunter or a king or a nightmare creature. I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that something was coming, and there was no escaping it, because the danger lived in my dreams.

I couldn’t run. I couldn’t leave. I could barely even breathe.

And I’d desperately wished that I’d asked her about the tattered letter. Because everything I needed to know had just died with my mother.

I did the only thing I could do that night—I’d called 911 and Uncle Finn, and then I’d curled into a ball beside my dead mother’s bed and cried and cried and cried.

I’m crying a bit now too, just from remembering, and I roughly wipe my tears away, trying to push the letter out of my thoughts. That horrible letter that anyone else would think was fantasy or madness, but which I know is the truth.

My poor mom was dealing with all of that plus raising a kid plus managing her jewelry-making side hustle.

She kept dream journals too, though I only ever found one when I was fourteen and snooping for Christmas presents. I don’t know for sure, but I think she wrote out her dreams—words and sketches—and then destroyed each journal as she finished it. Like trying to let go of bad memories. The one I found in a shoe box under a pair of pink sandals was her last, and it had only a few entries in it, along with sketches of men and monsters. The man she called the Hunter with golden eyes and the Nightmare King, with eyes of silver, the only colors in the book.

There were other drawings too. Rough sketches of dragons and monsters and a dark cave with an odd pool like a low bird bath surrounded by stones. And she’d drawn a black-cloaked figure bent over it and the moon reflecting in the water.

All things that I’ve now seen too, though at the time I’d found the journal, I’d had no dreams and hadn’t understood at all.