Page 142 of Sweet Nightmare

“Did anyone else see that?” Luis asks. “Or is the stress making me hallucinate?”

“Oh, we saw it,” Simon tells him.

“Because this wasn’t hard enough,” Mozart deadpans.

“There has to be some way to—” I crouch down next to the tapestry so I can get a better look at it.

I’m cut off as an argument breaks out on the other side of the room. I turn just in time to see a dragon in human form go tumbling across the front half of the common room.

He hits the wall hard, and it takes him a moment to recover. But then he’s running full tilt toward the vampire that hit him. As he runs, he stays in human form except for the huge pair of greenish yellow wings he sprouts out of his back.

When he’s about five feet away from the vampire, he grabs her and takes to the air, climbing all the way to the top of the room’s thirty-foot ceiling before dropping her.

Amazingly, she lands on her feet, then launches herself into the air after him. She can’t fly, but she can jump pretty damn high, and she almost manages to grab his foot.

But he kicks out at the last second and hits her square in the face. This time when she falls back to earth, it’s more of a crash. She lands on her side and goes skidding across the worn-out tile, only to come to a stop at Danson’s feet.

He blows a whistle, and when the dragon ignores him, he bellows up at him, “Land, now!”

But the dragon is suddenly the least of his problems, because a pack of four wolf shifters in their human forms takes advantage of the momentary distraction and surrounds a small group of banshees.

“Oh, shit,” Jude murmurs next to me.

“They wouldn’t,” I tell him.

“Fuck, yeah, they would,” Izzy says, as if there’s no doubt in her mind about what’s going to happen.

Danson’s got his hands full, so I look around for Ms. Aguilar, only to find her mediating some kind of disagreement between a siren and a witch.

I want to yell at her that we’re about to have a major problem, but it’s not worth it. Because no matter how strangely endearing Ms. Aguilar is, her discipline is no match for an obstinate kindergartener, let alone a bunch of pissed-off paranormals.

So instead, I take off running toward them just as the wolves advance. If I can get there soon enough, maybe I can stop this from turning into an absolute, unsalvageable shit show.

Jude passes me about halfway across the room and all but throws himself between the wolves and the banshees. But it’s already too late, because the second one of the wolves makes a grab for one of the banshees, she lets loose with a scream that is one of the most horrifying things I’ve ever heard.

In the first couple of seconds, she brings the entire room to a halt. The next few seconds she has all of us—even the fighting vampire and dragon—covering our ears and dropping to the ground. Several seconds after that, the wolves start howling right along with her as their delicate eardrums burst from the extremely high-pitched scream. And finally, about thirty seconds after the banshee starts to wail, the windows explode into a million shards of glass.

And that’s when all hell really does break loose.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX

SPOILING FOR

A FRIGHT

As the windows crack one after the other, the storm rushes inside and the banshee finally stops wailing. But her screams—or the sudden lack thereof—are the least of our problems as the wind and rain tear through the room.

Ms. Aguilar calls for everyone to take cover and then dives behind the closest piece of furniture she can find—a TV cart with an empty center console that gives us a perfect view of her cowering behind it.

At the same time, Danson starts shouting for all the witches to assemble in the center of the room—I’m guessing because he wants them to do some kind of spell to fix the windows. But only three witches show up. Which means either the ocean got them or their nightmares did.

For a second, Eva’s face flashes in front of me, but I blink it away—blink her away. There will be time later for me to mourn. Right now, I just have to get through this.

Fights break out even as glass flies across the common room, shards turned into projectiles by the vicious, violent wind.

Fae against dragons.

Dragons against vampires.

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