Page 18 of Xantera
She looks up at me, hopeful. “You dream too?”
“I do. But mine are less courageous, more constricting. Like the Wall flattening me into the ground, burying me into the earth, or that my heart is a blood moon, pumping crimson moonlight through my body.”
I suddenly startle myself, snapping back to who I’m talking to, and how I shouldn’t be saying any of this out loud. I’m not a child anymore. I can’t just cry about my nightmares in my mother’s arms. Besides, I shouldn’t scare my young patient.
But then Odette says something that makes my breath pause.
“Just the other night, I dreamed of something like that. One of the Guardians, actually.” She wrinkles her nose. “Not the Third one who’s so handsome, but… which one has the thing on his neck again?”
“The Eleventh,” I answer immediately, knowing what she means: an Adam’s apple. All the images of the Eleventh Guardianalways depict him with a long neck and a bulging Adam’s apple. I squint at her. “Why do you think you dreamt of him?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know. Dreams are just funny like that, aren’t they? Uncontrollable, just like yours. This one was really vivid, though. I thought I was already awake until Iactuallywoke up.”
My breath seems to unstick itself in my lungs in one giant exhale.
“What did the Eleventh Guardian do in your dream?”
“Just stared down at me and told me to go back to sleep.”
A frown drags down my lips. “That’s it?”
She shrugs. “Yeah.”
“Were you scared?”
“No,” she replies, shaking her head. “At first, he was just standing there, protecting me. Like they always do, watching over us to make sure we’re safe. It was boring, actually. And then I woke up and he was gone. But I’d rather dream of flying or rainbows. Do you like rainbows?”
“What? Oh. Yes,” I say, thinking of the flimsy films of colors that sometimes stretch from cloud to cloud after a bout of rain—how they fall across the sky and land somewhere beyond the Wall, somewhere we can’t reach. What I don’t say is that I much prefer the deep shade of red that glares from the blood moon against a black-as-ink sky—it’s both terrifying and exhilarating. “Well, Odette, why don’t you get some rest? I’ll be back with your lunch in about an hour.”
The girl sighs and lies back down, but her words leave me in a state of confusion that slowly buds into more anger by the end of my shift.
I don’t know what happened to Diggory. I don’t know where his partner lives. And I don’t know why a little girl’s dream seems to bother me. All I know is that there’s a forbidden necklace waiting for me in my drawer at home.
And this time, I’m going to ask the right questions to figure out who is speaking from the other end.
Abolt of lightning strikes, connecting my heart to my head.
She’s back.
And I’ve been waiting—impatiently, for sure, pissed off and alone.
They all leave me alone when I’m in this mood. Nobody wants to feel the spitting heat of my temper, which is probably for the best in this particular circumstance. Because it’s notjustmy temper that’s been burning down my spine over the last twenty-four hours—it’s her voice, too. That colorful wave that travels through my body, and the soft pitch that she accentuates with. I couldn’t get it out of my head, even after she wrenched herself away from me with hardly any warning whatsoever.
Back so soon, my little nightmare?I ask, though it’s felt like a fucking lifetime of wondering if she’d be back at all.
She says nothing in return—except the flooding thoughts of someone desperately tryingnotto think.
I chuckle, trying to coax a reaction out of her.Curiosity is a strong emotion, isn’t it?
Still nothing comes, and for a second, I simmer on the vile possibility that she actually has turned over the necklace to a Guardian before I catch a fleeting thought through the crisscrossing pattern of electricity between us.
Unmistakablyher.
But her next gift comes as a surprise—one that ignites my veins and makes me want to bottle up her voice to examine the change in tone. It’s not timid or bewildered like it was last night, but demanding, almost as angry as I am. Like a sting to my senses that makes every last one of my hairs perk up on command.
Who are you?
Little nightmare has bite.
