AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He sounded frustrated and I didn't blame him. I also knew it wasn't me he was frustrated with, but himself, and the fact he had to share things with me he so obviously didn't want to. But I wasn't going to bend on it. If it involved me, then I felt I deserved to know, that I had a right to know, and no one was going to take it away from me. I wouldn't apologize for wanting, no, demanding, to know what was going on. Nobody had asked me to be strong but myself, and I wasn't about to let myself down. Not when I was working so hard on being the person I wanted to be, and that girl didn't apologize for taking control of her life.
"Agreed," I told him. "If I can't sleep, then I will have no one else to blame besides myself. I would never dream of blaming you, Dash. I will own up to my own crap."
Maybe I would own up to it, it all depended on who I was talking to at the time. I didn't like to own up to things when I was talking to Quinton, it made things too easy for him, and we couldn't have that.
He sighed again. I ignored it and laid my head down against his shoulder. I closed my eyes and waited.
He didn't make me wait long. They never did.
"I had my door closed, and it was Binx who woke me up," he whispered for some reason. Maybe he was afraid to say it any louder, but I didn't know why, because as far as I knew we were alone in the house. There was no reason to whisper.
When he didn't seem in a hurry to continue, I prompted, "Binx woke you up?"
"Yeah, sorry. Binx woke me up. He was at the door, hissing and clawing at it like he wanted out or there was something on the other side that he wanted to get to. I didn't think much of it because he did it the first night you stayed here, and he did it then because he wanted to be with you. I opened the door and let him out. He immediately bolted and ran down the hallway towards your room, but it was weird because he never stopped hissing. I followed him because that's not usually like him. I stopped at your door because I didn't want to just barge in on you while you were in your bedroom, but then I heard it..." His voice trailed off and he was quiet and still.
Did I really want to know?
I was almost too afraid to ask, but I had to. "What did you hear, Dash?"
"I heard you," he said. "You were making almost whimpering noises, and when I looked in to check on you, because, Ariel, I had to go in and check on you after that, you were moving around a lot. Your arms were out at your sides and above the covers. You kept sweeping them up and down, over the covers. Almost as if you were swimming. You kept whimpering, and your arms kept sweeping. It was unnerving, and it scared me. I called out your name, trying to wake you, but it didn't work. Binx didn't stop hissing until he hopped up on the bed beside you and sniffed your face. For whatever reason, he scented your cheek and went and curled up at the foot of the bed against your feet. I don't know why, but you kept moving after that, and he started to purr and immediately dozed off like nothing had been bothering him in the first place, and all was right in his world. It was bizarre."
I believed him because it sounded bizarre. It also sounded scary.
I looked down my body to said furball. He hadn't moved since the last time I'd checked on him. How often did Dash have to get out of bed and open the door up for Binx when he wanted to come and sleep with me? Did it happen every night? And, if so, then why didn't he simply sleep with the door cracked open? I realized then that the door to his bedroom was almost always closed, whether he was in there or not. Did he do that because he had a roommate now, or had he always done it? It seemed weird to me. Maybe it was just me being a chicken. I knew that if I lived all by myself I wouldn't have the doors shut. I would leave them all wide open with the lights on inside so that I knew what was going on in there when I wasn't in there. Any number of things could be hiding behind closed doors, especially when there was a dark room on the other side.
"I kept saying your name over and over again, and, yet, you still wouldn't wake," he said, cutting into my thoughts.
My arm around his middle tightened, and I wondered if I was hurting him. He didn't complain, so I left it. I needed something to hold on to, and he was all there was. Not that I was complaining.
I moved my eyes from the end of the bed where the cat was and turned them up, to where my dreamcatcher hung above me. It kept the bad the things out while I slept, Tyson had sworn by it.
"I shook your shoulder and you stopped moving your arms, but the whimpering didn't stop there. It only stopped after I got in bed with you and wrapped my arms around you. It almost seemed like you were trying to escape something, and you couldn't. Not while you were alone. You immediately calmed after I was next to you."
“What-"
"I don't know," he said and this time he hadn't whispered, but his voice sounded tired.
"Did you sleep at all after you came in here?" I asked him. If he'd stayed up most of the night keeping vigil over my sleeping body, then it would make sense why he sounded so tired, and why he kept insisting we go back to sleep.
"No, not for most of the night." He admitted. "I think I dozed off right before the phone started to ring.”
Yup, that would explain why he was tired and pushing we go back to sleep. I didn't blame him. If I had stayed up most of the night watching him sleep and making sure he didn't get weird on me again, I would have wanted to get some more z's, also.
The only problem was, I no longer wished to sleep. He'd been right about that. After hearing what he'd had to say, I no longer wished to go back to sleep. Heck, I might not even want to go back to sleep when night fell once again.
His breath evened out as I stared up at the dreamcatcher, memorizing every part of it that my eyes traced over.
It was pretty, to be sure. But I wasn't so sure I wanted to be sleeping underneath it any longer. Tyson had cast the spells, etched in the words, and likely bled over it. It had to have been a labor of love for him, and, no, that's not me saying I thought he loved me because he'd put the labor and time into it because of me. That wasn't the problem. The problem was that I had asked little to no questions when he'd given it to me, and I had trusted in it completely. I had assumed it had been working and doing its job because I hadn't had so much as a bad dream since I started sleeping under it. In fact, I hadn't dreamed of anything, and it had started to bug me. All my life, I'd had vivid, memorable dreams, that always stuck with me when I woke up after having one. And I had always believed they meant something, but I had never had it confirmed one way or the other.
I had overheard a phone conversation Quinton had had with an unknown to me person where he'd talked about someone being a dream walker. I was sure he hadn't been talking about me when he'd said it, but it certainly had spiked my curiosity, because my dreams had always been so important to me, so I'd listened carefully to the one side of the conversation that had been, unbeknownst to Quinton, open to me. He'd called himself a dream walker, and I knew that by the tone of his voice that it was something he thought he had a right to be smug about. I wasn't sure how serious I should take it, because I didn't think it would take much for Quinton to be smug.
Adrian had brought the term up to me briefly in a conversation we were having about searching for Rain, but he never got too in detail about it, and, at the time, I'd been too intimidated by him and the Council and all that they represented to ask him about it. Perhaps he'd felt the term spoke for itself, because there didn't seem to be too many ways to interpret the term dream walker. Adrian had spoken of another member of the Council, who I'd yet to meet, that could supposedly walk through dreams, and Adrian had hoped to see if maybe this mystery member would be able to walk through mine. I hadn't agreed to try anything out because I hadn't been a hundred percent on what the hell he'd been talking about. Now, I wondered if maybe he'd been counting on that. Counting on the fact I would have been too intimidated by him and the rest of the Council to have asked in depth questions or pushed for more information.
Now, I wondered if Adrian and his witchy cronies had actually tried to invade my dreams in some witchy way. Would that explain why I had been whimpering and moving my arms around in a way Dash would describe as me trying to escape someone or something?
That thought absolutely terrified me and left me shaking in the warmth of Dash's embrace. His heat, his magic, would normally have been enough to chase of any chill. I wasn't sure there was any kind of warmth that could ever chase this cold horror away.
I needed to talk to Quinton and let him know my suspicions, my fears.
