Past the common room was the cafeteria, which—Gomez explained—doubled as the classroom for the girls who lacked the privilege points to attend public school. Her slacks swished as she marched into a kitchen and small serving area. “Our full-time cook has Tuesdays and Thursdays off, but you’ll meet her tomorrow. Penny is our relief cook.”
Penny waved as she worked a commercial size can opener around the edge of a huge can of tomato sauce.
I nodded, then followed Gomez back through the kitchen and around the corner. “We have twenty girls ranging in age from thirteen to seventeen. The older girls are on this wing; the younger ones are down there.” She turned to point behind us, at an identical hall. “Each wing has a community bathroom. There’s no door, obviously, and they’re pretty closely monitored by the techs.”
One of which was visible through the bathroom doorway, wearing slacks, a blouse, and an ID tag hanging around her neck.
“This is your room.” Gomez opened the last door on the left—notably missing a lock.
The room was sparse. A bed, a dresser, a built-in desk, and a window. I set my suitcases down and headed straight for the window, hoping to find the grass that was missing from the front “yard.” There was a small patch of green, sprinkled with concrete picnic tables, squeezed in next to a basketball court and an open recreation area. The whole thing was surrounded by a tall chain-link fence.
Easily climbable. I made a mental note.
“You can wear your own clothes, so long as you stick to the dress code. Jeans and plain T-shirts. Sweats are okay, when it gets cold. Athletic socks and shoes. If you lose privileges, you wear the issued tees and sweats.”
“What about phone calls?” I leaned against the desk, trying not to be overwhelmed. It’s better than the detention center. And probably way better than Ron Jackson.
“You can call the people on your approved list, unless you’ve lost privileges. You’ll need a calling card for long distance.”
Shit. The approved list would include only David and Jenny, Navarro, and my court-appointed lawyer, who was about as useful as the gum on the bottom of my shoe.
The only person I actually wanted to talk to wouldn’t be on the list. Nash. I couldn’t handle six months with no contact. I’d lose my mind. Or my temper. Or both.
“No matter what you hear, you’re currently our only violent offender,” Gomez said, recapturing my attention.
I frowned up at her. “I’m not violent.”
She raised one of those arched brows at me. “You gave a car a baseball-bat makeover.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t make Tucker over.” Which was what I would have done in his nightmare, if he’d been there.
“Your file says you broke a girl’s jaw with a lunch tray in the detention center.”
I rolled my eyes. “She tripped me and called me a white-trash whore. I came up swinging.”
“You put her in the hospital.”
“She put herself in the hospital. I was just defending myself.”
Gomez narrowed her eyes at me. “Sabine, if you defend yourself so vehemently around here, I will let them lock you up. These girls aren’t dangerous. Most of them just took a wrong turn in life, and they’re getting themselves back on track. Holser is the best halfway house in the state. Eighty percent of the girls who leave here never return to state custody, and sixty-two percent go on to attend college. I won’t let you ruin our record.”
“I’m not looking for trouble.” I held her gaze, letting her see the truth in my eyes; there’d be plenty to hide from her soon enough.
“Good,” she said, one hand on my doorknob. “Cristofer thinks you’re worth the effort. I hope he’s right.”
Me, too.
She pulled the door closed as she left the room, and I sank onto the bed. Welcome to Holser Hell.
* * *
I lay on my bed in the dark, in a tee and baggy gray shorts. Staring at the ceiling. Missing Nash. It was hard not to think about him at night, when there was nothing to distract me from his absence. I could feel him squeezing my hand. His lips warm on mine. I could hear his voice in my head, warning me not to let myself get too hungry. Promising he’d be there when I got out. Telling me he loved me.
No one else had ever said that to me. Ever.
But those bits of him were figments. Memories at best. I’d lost him, at least for the next few months, and I couldn’t even see him in my sleep, because I can’t dream. Maybe that’s normal for a mara, but I don’t know; I’ve never met another one.
The closest I can come to dreaming is feeding from someone else’s nightmare. I need that, like I need food and water. Or maybe more like I need air.
Hunger gnawed at me—a ravenous beast chewing me up from the inside. I hadn’t fed much in the detention center, because so many of the kids there were medicated. Their sleep was unnatural, thus beyond my ability to manipulate, and if I couldn’t mold their dreams into nightmares, I couldn’t feed from them.
The same could be true at Holser, but I hadn’t seen many meds handed out, so I clung to the hope of a nightly buffet as the one bright spot in an otherwise gloomy sentence. Because Nash was right—I’d lose control if I got too hungry.
Lights out for the last group of girls—those with the most privilege points—was at ten o’clock. My alarm clock read 12:13, casting a weak crimson glow over the small room.
I rolled over and stared at the wall, silently reaching out to the rooms around mine. I can sense sleep like a rat smells cheese, even when he can’t see it. Most of the girls near me were out cold, and so far, the slumber felt natural. Organic. Delicious.
It was time.
I closed my eyes, mentally drawing energy into the center of my body. It coiled there, pulsing slowly, cold and sluggish from hunger, but eager to be used. That energy gradually stretched into my limbs, mimicking my physiology. I stood and felt this energy-me separate from my body—the metaphysical equivalent of dislocating a joint, only it didn’t hurt. It felt satisfying, like stretching first thing in the morning.
The energy-me crossed the room. My footsteps made no sound. My form had no substance. No one would see me, even standing right next to me. I turned to look at the bed, where the physical me still lay, eyes closed, one hand resting on my stomach, breathing steadily.
Privately, I call this part Sleepwalking, because while part of me is up walking around, my physical form seemed to be sleeping, and that’s exactly what anyone who saw me would think. They’d notice how peaceful I looked, and how innocent.
The irony of that thought gave me a small, secret smile.
My Sleepwalking form enjoyed a freedom my physical body could never experience, but there were some weird restrictions—like a limited Sleepwalking range—most of which I’d discovered through trial and error.
Not like Nash. He was a bean sidhe—no more human than I was—but his mom and brother were around to teach him stuff and answer questions. I had only instinct, and ignorance on a cosmic scale. Kinda tragic, if you think about it.
So I don’t think about it. Instead, I think about the stuff I do know. Like Sleepwalking physics, I thought, stepping into the dim hallway without opening my door. I could Sleepwalk through doors, climb through closed windows, boarded up holes in walls, and anything else that might serve as an entrance or exit for my physical body. But I couldn’t fall through floors or walk through solid walls. My Sleepwalking self slammed into them just like my physical form would have.
It made no sense. But then, very little of my life did.
The hallway was empty and quiet, but I could hear the night-shift tech watching TV in the common room. She would make rounds, checking all the beds and bathrooms, but with any luck, in a nonsecure facility, nights would be pretty low-key.
The room next to mine belonged to a girl named BethAnne. During dinner, my fingers had brushed hers when we’d both reached for a saltshaker, and I’d slid into her fear as easily as sinking into a tub full of hot water.
Sometimes fears exposed secrets—a glimpse of the memories they were based on. Other times—especially in little kids—they were a fleeting terror inspired by a scary movie or a dark closet. But BethAnne’s fear had the gritty feel of real pain—a hearty meal, as opposed to a quick snack.
I glanced down the empty hall again, and stepped through her door into a room just like mine. BethAnne slept on one side, her knees tucked up to her stomach. I knelt by her bed. Her face was inches from mine, and if I’d had a physical presence, her breath would have stirred my hair.
I ran one finger over her cheek, and that I could feel, warm, and soft, and bumpy from a mild breakout. I could feel her in my incorporeal Sleepwalking form because she was dreaming, and I was pretty sure she could feel me, too, though how she’d interpret my touch in her sleep was anyone’s guess.
But she wouldn’t wake up while I was touching her. No one ever had. I was part sedative, part leech, and all bad dream—literally. And I wouldn’t even have known that much, if not for Nash’s mother.
You’re a mara, she’d explained patiently the night he’d taken me to her in tears. Though my relationship with her son seemed to make her nervous, Harmony wasn’t one to withhold comfort or information. One of several breeds of parasitic empath. My generation would call you a Nightmare. You can read people’s fears, and when they sleep, you guide their dreams to cultivate that fear. Then you feed from it.
She was right, though I could never have explained it so well on my own. For years, I’d done what my body wanted—what it needed—with no understanding of what was actually happening. Of what I really was. I’d only known that when people touched me, they saw their worst fears reflected in my eyes, and that scared them.
Hell, for all I knew, that’s why I’d been abandoned on a church doorstep when I was barely a year old, by the social worker’s best guess. No one knew my birthday or my real name. For all practical purposes, I was born that afternoon, in social services, to the woman who named me after the heroine in a romance novel and the label on a can of her favorite soup.
But she didn’t keep me. No one kept me for more than a few months at a time. I made them uncomfortable. When I was around, fear floated in the air like dust motes in sunlight. Floorboards creaked louder, goose bumps grew fatter, and the dark felt darker than ever before.
Obviously, I don’t make a lot of friends. But when people go to sleep, I know them better than anyone. I see things they wouldn’t show their best friends. Hear things they wouldn’t whisper to their therapists. Sometimes I know things they don’t even know about themselves. Buried memories. Forgotten trauma. The quiet terror slowly rotting away at their souls.
I gave their terror life. I gave it form and purpose, carefully weaving borrowed images to form a dream tapestry, sticky as spider’s silk and a million times stronger. They struggled pointlessly against my carefully plaited dream threads while I rode their fear, gorging on it to nourish my own soul until the hunger ebbed—at least for a while.
In their nightmares, I had power, and for those few moments—precious because they were so brief—I felt sated. Full, in the most hedonistic, pleasure-filled sense of the word.
Just thinking about it made my hunger swell, a cold-blooded beast demanding warmth and nourishment. Tonight, BethAnne would be both.
She sighed beneath my finger, and I laid my palm flat on the side of her face, treasuring her warmth. I slid my hand over her jaw and down her throat to her shoulder. Then I pushed.
BethAnne rolled onto her back with a soft grunt. Her forehead furrowed, but her eyes didn’t open. I pulled the covers back and knelt on one side of the mattress. She was helpless, and practically plump with energy she didn’t even need, while I was cold and starving. It’s not wrong, some stubborn voice in my head insisted. It’s survival. She’ll live, and this way, so will you.
I slid my leg over her stomach and straddled her on the bed. Her tee was soft against my thighs, her skin warm through the material, in contrast to the cold hunger chilling me from the inside.
My eyes closed, and I scooted forward until I felt her rib cage beneath me. Her breath hitched, struggling beneath my weight. But I wasn’t heavy enough to truly suffocate her, and I would only take as much energy as I needed.
I leaned forward and touched her face. Warm cheeks, warmer neck. The physical contact I needed to establish a mental connection.
Then the world shifted, and I saw what she saw. I wasn’t truly in her dream, but I was in firm control of it. The wizard behind the curtain of her subconscious.
BethAnne sat on a beach in the sun, sculpting a sandcastle with the handle of a broken plastic fork. She glanced up and smiled at a man in a folding lawn chair, then carefully scraped sand from the side of a turret. The man had no face, and I’d been in enough dreams to interpret that one—BethAnne had never met her father, but her subconscious hoped he was the kind of man who’d set aside an entire day just to watch her. To be with her.
So peaceful. So hopeful. So...completely useless to me. Peace and hope are cute. But fear is my medium. It’s the vibrant paint on the canvas of my life, the only color bright enough to mean anything. To truly feel.
With it, I could paint her dream into a nightmare....
I started with something simple. The next time BethAnne turned to look at her blank-faced father, he was gone. So was his chair. I was proud of that little detail; it said that he hadn’t merely left her—he’d never really been there in the first place.
Next, the sand melted beneath her feet, flattening and hardening into featureless gray concrete, gritty against her bare legs.
BethAnne stood, frightened by the abrupt changes, and that’s when I dropped the rest of the nightmare around her, as sudden and disjointed as any natural dream.
I dried up the ocean, giddy with power in my dream-state kingdom. Then, when BethAnne whirled again, bars slammed into the ground in front of her, clanging like a prison-cell door. Three more bar walls dropped on her other sides, and she was trapped. Caught. Alone.
BethAnne tried to shake the bars, but they didn’t move. She yelled, but her throat made no sound. She was locked up—cut off from the world. This was the fear she’d shown me. Total isolation. Being gone and forgotten, like she’d never existed in the first place.
She was afraid now—the real BethAnne trembled beneath me on her mattress, so small and scared—but I needed more. There is a well of true terror in everyone’s heart, and she was hiding hers from me instinctively.
No fair holding back. I wanted it all.
The Sleepwalking me leaned forward and stared down at BethAnne in her bed. Her eyes were squeezed shut, her fists clenching the sheet at her sides.
I closed my eyes again and swiped an eraser over my mental whiteboard. In her dream, the concrete beach disappeared, along with the dry ocean bed. But the bars remained, and BethAnne could see nothing beyond them but a yawning black abyss. I’d left her no sign that the rest of the world still existed.
She opened her mouth for a scream, and I gave back her voice. But the blackness devoured it the moment the sound flowed past the bars. No one would hear her. No one would see her. She could scream, and cry, and bang on the window all day, but...
Wait, window?
And that’s when I saw through the cracks and into that well she’d tried to keep from me. I fell into the well and landed in the middle of her true nightmare—the remembered terror I’d somehow recreated for her with no conscious thought. I was on autopilot, gorging on her fear without noticing the changes until they’d gone too far.
BethAnne whimpered.
A basement, pitch-dark, but for the pitiful streetlight shining through a narrow, filthy window at the top of one wall. A child version of BethAnne sat in the stretched rectangle of dirty light, tiny arms hugging her knees. Something skittered in the corner, and BethAnne sobbed. Her empty stomach growled and cramped. Her tongue felt thick and dry. She’d wet herself the day before.
The stairs were lost in dark
ness and the door at the top was locked from the outside. With a padlock. BethAnne had gotten out of the house once when her mother went out, and someone called social services. Mommy wasn’t taking any chances this time. She had to keep her daughter safe from nosy strangers with cell phones. Safe from anything until Mommy came back with food and water, smiling and playing the hero. And when she did, BethAnne would love her, and hug her, and cling to her shining salvation. So what if her savior was also her jailor?
But what if her mommy didn’t come back this time? What if no one ever heard BethAnne again?
Beneath me, her heart beat faster. Too fast. She was sweating now, and her pulse was irregular.
Too much. Too far. What kind of sick-ass parent would do that to a kid? No wonder BethAnne kept that one buried.
Maybe I was better off without a mom.
I opened my eyes and withdrew from her dream, and without my will to support it, BethAnne’s nightmare collapsed like a house of cards. I was done with her. Just like some restaurants are too dirty to eat at, for fear of finding roaches in my fries, some fears are too filthy to consume, for fear of planting rot in my own soul.
Her breathing slowed, and I slid off her. BethAnne rolled onto her side. She pulled her knees up to her chest and tucked one hand beneath her cheek. Silent tears streaked her face, but she breathed deeply now, without my weight to constrict her lungs. She looked so vulnerable—a larger version of the girl huddling in the basement—and suddenly I wished I’d chosen someone else to feed from on my first night at Holser. Someone a little less damaged.
I was warm and full—nearly glutted—but the meal sat heavy on my soul, like bad fish in my gut. There was nothing left to do but lie awake in my bed and wait for morning. And try to forget BethAnne’s basement, and the fact that I—a walking Nightmare—had been outplayed by the memory of an ordinary, human nightmare of a mother.
* * *
Morning couldn’t come fast enough. It never did. You’d think I’d be used to that, after fifteen years of lying awake in bed—I only seem to need three to four hours of sleep—but it never gets easier to fill the empty hours when you can’t do anything without waking someone else up.