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I swore under my breath as I looked out the window. Sunlight poured in through the open curtains. Ihadslept in. Normally, Dash woke me up with the mornings with a cup off coffee and some toast. Why hadn’t he woken me up today? I should really start setting the alarm on my cell phone for those things, I didn’t need to be relying on someone else to wake me up, that was ridiculous.
I blew out a deep breath, and said, “I’m sorry. I overslept. It won’t happen again.”
That last part might have been an out and out lie. I couldn’t promise that it would never happen again, telling the future wasn’t one of my talents.
“Where’s Dash?” He demanded to know.
I looked back over my shoulder. Dash was still in my bed, now sitting up with his back against the headboard, the blanket pooled around his hips. His chest was bare, and his lap was full of Binx, his little black and white cat. Briefly, I wondered if the little furball had come in after we’d woken up, or if he’d been here the whole time. He’d probably been here the whole time, Binx didn’t have to sleep alone, ever. He either loved attention from you, or he loved to hiss and bite at you. Luckily, he loved me as much as I loved him.
“Uhh…” I mumbled. “I’m pretty sure Dash just woke up, too.”
“What do you mean, Dash just woke up, too?” He asked suspiciously. “Dash doesn’t sleep in, he’s up with the birds. Put him on the phone.”
His tone was really starting to bother me.
“Why do I have to give him my phone?” I asked. “Why can’t you just call up Dash on his phone? Now you’re just trying to boss me around.”
“Ariel,” he groaned. “Nowyou’rejust trying to be difficult.”
I shrugged even though he couldn’t see me. What could I say, I was pretty good at being difficult. But, then again, so was Quinton.
I rolled my eyes as I walked towards the bed with the phone held out in front of me. Normally, I wouldn’t want to subject Dash to Quinton’s bad mood, but, at the moment, I was happy to hand it off to someone else.
Dash smirked at me as he took the phone out of my outstretched hand. With his other hand, he took hold of my now free hand and gave a slight tug. I got the point and climbed up on the bed as he scooted over, closer to the middle and made room for me.
I scooted along with him, when he stopped moving, so did I. I leaned back against the headboard and pressed my shoulder into his while he put my phone to his ear. He reached out and took hold of my hand and slipped his fingers through mine. I laid my head back against the wall and closed my eyes as I tried to make out what Quinton was saying to Dash. It didn’t work, I couldn’t hear him, just the slight murmur of his deep voice.
“Normally, I would have,” Dash said. Then, “No. She woke me up. I heard her cry out and I came in to check on her. She was moving around a lot and Binx was sitting up at her feet, watching her. It was weird, and it was almost like she was trying to wake herself up for something. Or, like, something else was trying to wake her up but couldn’t manage it. She quieted when I got in bed with her. And Binx went back to sleep when I did, too. I meant to stay awake and watch over her, but I must have fallen asleep at some time… Mmmhmm.. Yeah. It’s my fault she wasn’t up on time. Sorry about that.”
Dash kept talking, but I ignored what he was saying. I was too busy thinking over what he’d already said. I opened my eyes and looked up at the pretty yellow and black dream catcher that Tyson had gotten for me. It had words worked into it in white, and they weren’t in English. Tyson had put magic into the dream catcher to keep out the big bad things while I slept. It worked, it more than worked because I hadn’t had a single dream once since I started sleeping under it. And I used to dream every night, not all of them being good dreams, and some I would even consider nightmares.
Had I been dreaming and just didn’t remember it? Had I been fighting things off in my sleep and didn’t know about it? What exactly did those words mean that Tyson and etched into the dream catcher with white chalk? It never occurred to me to ask him about it, I simply trusted that he knew what he was doing, and I trusted in his skill. Now, after what Dash had described I was doing, I wanted to know.
“Yeah,” Dash said. “I’ll tell her, and I’ll see you later.”
He pulled the phone away from his ear and ended the call. He threw the phone towards the end of the bed, close to Binx, and I watched as it bounced once before landing and staying put. Binx didn’t even bother opening his eyes. That cat was adorable, but weird. If anyone but Dash had thrown something so close to him, he would have gotten up, hissing, and maybe tried to scratch at someone. It’s like, even with his eyes closed, he knew it was Dash, and that made it okay. For a cat, he had quite the personality. He never hissed at me, I was one of the few people that he just seemed to like, and he slept with me more now than he slept with Dash. I had grand plans of stealing him away and keeping him as my own.
Dash squeezed my fingers and pulled our joined hands over to his lap.
“Quinton is in a mood,” he told me unnecessarily.
I laughed softly as I squeezed his hand back. “Quinton is always in a mood. Whether it’s a good mood or a bad mood just depends on the day, I guess. Well, that and whatever chaos we are dealing with at the moment. I think he’s still freaked out over what happened yesterday.”
Beside me, Dash stiffened. “He told us about Adrian’s new pet. And that he wanted you to keep him.”
I shivered at his words. Humans shouldn’t be described as pets. There was something very, very wrong about it. But, wasn’t that, in a way, an apt description of what Chucky possibly now was to the Council? Dash would know better than I would.
“Do you-”
“I don’t want to talk about him,” Dash said in a quiet voice. “The Council should either punish quick and be done with it, or wipe his memory and give him happy thoughts before returning him home where he belongs. Our time having to deal with him should be over, and I’m upset thinking that the Council is going to keep shoving him in our faces when, if they’d left him in jail, we wouldn’t be having to deal with him at all. The Council is just making things worse for the rest of us, like they usually do.”
His voice was quiet, controlled. He was upset and didn’t want to be talking about this. I didn’t blame him.
I realized something then. Dash and I had never once talked about what had happened on his front steps.
Quinton and I had talked about it. Tyson had glossed over it with me. Jules had talked to me about it. The Salt and Pepper twins hadn't brought it up to me, and I wasn't expecting them to any time soon. They didn't like to talk about the bad things that went on around them; if you pretended it wasn't there enough, then it made ignoring it on the daily a whole lot easier, and life just a little more bearable. I didn't blame them or begrudge them this tactic. I wished like hell it was easier for me to pretend like the bad didn't exist until I couldn't look away from it because it was staring me right in the face.
But Dash? He'd kept quiet on what had happened when I was around. I wasn't sure he'd talked to anyone about what had happened to us, to him. I got the whole male thing, where they didn't like to talk about their feelings and over examine every tiny little detail the way girls sometimes do, but it wasn't good to keep it all locked away inside. It could make you bitter and eat at you until you were nothing left inside but something dark and angry. I didn't want that for Dash, and I didn't want it for myself. So, I talked to the others when they wanted to talk to me about it, but I didn't go out of my way to bring it up like they did. Who would Dash talk to if he needed to talk about it, to let it out? Would he talk to me? Somehow, I wasn't sure he would. And that bothered me.
