Page 163 of Sweet Nightmare

Jude doesn’t answer, just pounds up the stairs. He starts having to duck before he’s halfway up.

I start up the stairs behind Jude, while the others mill around, mystified but curious.

But I don’t even get to the top before he’s yelling, “Fuck!” and heading back down.

I’ve never seen Jude like this, so beside himself with rage that he’s barely coherent. “What’s up there?” I ask, wanting to check it out myself.

But he’s already brushing past me, visibly distressed.

“More jars,” he says curtly.

“They’re all open, too?”

“Every fucking one of them,” he growls.

“You know what this means, don’t you?” Remy says when we’re both back on the ground.

“It means I should have killed the other three when I had the chance,” Izzy answers nonchalantly. But there’s a rage in her normally distant eyes that I’ve never seen before.

Not that I blame her. If a Jean-Jerk showed up here right now, Izzy would have to wait in line, because I’m more than ready to decimate every single one of them myself.

What they did here is unconscionable. What they did here is… There’s not even a word for what they did.

“They let the nightmares out.” Jude says out loud what we’ve all already figured out because I think he needs to hear it. “I didn’t fuck up and let them escape when I was helping you. They did it.”

“Yes,” I tell him as I reach out to take his hand. “They did it.”

He swallows convulsively, and for the first time in the ten years I’ve known him, there are tears in his eyes. “I didn’t kill all those people.”

“No,” I whisper, tears pouring down my own face because his pain is as palpable as his relief. “You didn’t. That’s on them. They did that.”

“I didn’t—” His voice breaks, so he tries again. “I didn’t kill Eva.”

“No, Jude. No, you didn’t.”

He nods, then blows out a long, slow, shuddering breath as the others gather around him.

I glance at their faces, see the same devastated rage in their eyes that I feel. Because Jude doesn’t deserve this—and neither did any of the people who died.

Remy puts a supportive hand on Jude’s shoulder and says, “So what do you want to do?”

Jude doesn’t even have to think about it. “I want to fix that fucking tapestry, capture the monsters, and then feed the Jean-Jerks to them.”

Luis nods, then opens the tapestry and spreads it on the table in the center of the room. “Well, then, that’s what we’ll make happen.”

CHAPTER EIGHTY-SIX

SHOOT FOR

THE JARS

“We should probably get the jars ready,” Simon suggests, bending over to pick up a few of the ones on the floor. He’s right, so we spend the next five minutes setting them up so Jude can funnel the nightmares into them.

When that’s done, I look at him. “You can do this,” I say.

“Oh, I know I can.” He’s more in control, more focused, and more confident about his powers than I’ve ever seen him. He’s also incandescent with rage, so this should be one hell of a show.

“Okay, then. What do you need from us, man?” Simon asks, shuddering a little. I assume that’s because he’s brushing against a witch from the past who is currently mixing her own herbal elixirs.

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