Page 104 of Sweet Nightmare

I ignore him as I continue to wipe his wound clean as gently as I can. “We need to get him to Aunt Claudia, too,” I say to Jude. “He’s going to need stitches.”

“I’m okay,” Luis gasps. “I just need to shift and I’ll be much better.”

“Yeah, well, that’s not exactly an option at the moment, in case you’ve forgotten.”

“Just get me out of this rain and I’ll be fine.” This time he actually makes it to a sitting position—though he curses quite a bit as he does it. On the plus side, the wound already looks much better than it did when he collapsed.

“You should probably lay back down for a few more minutes,” I suggest.

“In this mess?” He shoots a disparaging look at the rain- and blood-soaked ground. “No, thank you.”

And just like that, I breathe a sigh of relief. If Luis is back to his normal, snarky self, then I’m pretty sure he’s going to be just fine—unlike a lot of the people we’ve seen in the last hour.

At least the screaming has stopped.

I look around, trying to figure out what’s happening. I’ve been so worried about Luis that I stopped paying attention to everything else.

Right now, the students are all milling around in the rain, looking traumatized but not hysterical anymore. Some of them are obviously injured while others look fine, but no one appears to be actively bleeding or fighting.

“It’s over,” I say to Jude as I stand up.

He doesn’t answer, and when I turn to him, it’s to find him staring into the distance again.

Jaw clenched, face blank, eyes far away. But this time his hands are out in front of him, like he’s reaching for something.

For one horrible second, I’m terrified that he’s suffering the same thing so many of the other students suffered. That he’s about to burst into flames or have his jugular ripped out or any of the other awful things that have happened tonight.

“Jude!” I call his name, but he doesn’t answer.

I put a hand on his shoulder and shake him like I did earlier, but there’s still no response.

“Jude!” Panic sets in, and I start shouting. “Damn it, Jude! Answer me!”

Still nothing.

“Hey, help me up,” Luis tells me uneasily. When I turn back to him, I realize he’s watching Jude, too. And he looks just as concerned as I feel.

Reaching down, I grab Luis’s hand and pull him up before turning back to Jude and shaking him much harder than I did the first time.

But this time he doesn’t just look out of it. He looks like he’s in some kind of a trance, completely out of reach. I can’t begin to imagine what’s happening to him right now, but judging from what everyone else has gone through, I know it must be horrible.

Fear claws at my throat, has my heart beating wildly and my hands shaking as I grab onto Jude’s arms in a desperate attempt to anchor him.

“Help me!” I tell Luis as I frantically try to pull Jude back from wherever he’s gone, tugging him onto the porch of a nearby cottage.

Luis nods, but he doesn’t look like he has any better ideas. Though he does say, “You know what was weird about that wolf that attacked me?”

I shoot him an incredulous look—I can’t believe he thinks now is the time I want to talk about that. “The fact that there was a wolf on the island at all?”

“Well, yeah. And also, the fact that I used to have nightmares about him when I was a kid.”

I’m barely listening, too busy trying to get through to Jude, so it takes a few seconds for Luis’s words to hit me. When they do, I remember waking up with the snake on my bed—my worst nightmare. I also remember Eva telling me that burning alive, like Ember did in the hallway, was her worst fear.

I turn to Luis, eyes wide. “Nightmares?” I whisper. “You think these are all people’s nightmares coming to life?”

“I don’t know what to think,” he answers me with a solemn shake of his head. “But I don’t have a better explanation, right now. Do you?”

No.

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