Page 179 of Sweet Nightmare

MY DARLING CLEMENTINE

- JUDE -

The thing about nightmares is sometimes they end.

Sometimes dawn breaks across the sky.

Sometimes the sun rises over the ocean.

And sometimes, if you’re lucky, the girl you love finds you before you can lose yourself completely.

The wall that’s kept us penned up inside the school is rubble now, and I sink down on a pile of broken bricks and wait for a still-sleepy Clementine to make her way across the debris-strewn beach to me.

The night is my domain, and I spent it the way I’ve spent so many nights before—harvesting nightmares while she slept. But it feels fucking amazing to watch her walk down the sand and know that she’s come to find me. That she’ll always come to find me and now I have the right—and the privilege—to do the same for her.

She smiles at me when she gets close, and it lights up her whole face. Makes her blue eyes sparkle and her face shine in a way I’ll never take for granted. It was too fucking hard getting here—there’s no way I’ll ever not be grateful for her persistence, her kindness, her love.

Her scarred hand sliding into mine feels like a dream. And so does she when she settles next to me, snuggling into my side. Nothing in my whole fucked-up life has ever felt better than this moment, and I breathe it in—breathe her in.

“You okay?” she asks. Her voice is soft, but her body pressed against mine feels strong. Powerful. Real.

Ember’s death is an open wound in a sea of scars, but somehow holding my mate makes the misery a little less raw, the grief a little more bearable.

“I’m fine,” I answer, because it’s true, and I don’t ever want to lie to Clementine.

“Yeah,” she says with a sad sigh. “Me too.”

I pull her closer, try to give her back some of the strength, some of the shelter, she gives me.

I don’t know if it works, but I know that I feel her release a long, slow breath as her body relaxes against mine.

“I don’t want to see my mother today,” she whispers. “I’m not ready.”

“We’ll get through it,” I tell her, because I’ve got no fucking interest in seeing her mother, either. Between the way she hurt Clementine, what she did to Carolina, and the way she duped me into giving her the means to make monsters to sell as weapons on the black market, I’m good with never seeing her again.

But that’s not a choice I get to make. One of the many, many downsides of Calder Academy is there aren’t a lot we get to make. Mozart seems to think the last twenty-four hours will change that, but I’m not so optimistic.

As if just thinking about the headmaster has conjured her, a portal shimmers open just up the beach from us.

Apparently, the cavalry has arrived.

Clementine stiffens against me, and I squeeze her just a little more tightly. If I could take this from her, I would. I would take everything that hurts her.

But in a surprise move that none of us saw coming, it isn’t Clementine’s mom who walks out of the portal. Instead, it’s Caspian, arms laden with first aid kits and food. He’s followed by several Calder Academy teachers, and together they struggle their way up the beach as the portal closes.

Like everything else at this school, it’s a bargain-basement cavalry. “Clementine! Jude!” Caspian yells when he catches sight of us. He tries to speed up and ends up falling, face-first, into a massive bag of dill pickle potato chips. “We’ve come to save you!”

“Oh, is that what we’re calling this?” I ask softly.

Clementine elbows me in my ribs. “Behave, he’s trying.”

I roll my eyes in response, but I keep my sarcasm to myself, as requested. Besides, it’s not Caspian’s fault the last twenty-four hours have played out the way they have. If he wants to think he’s rescuing us, far be it from me to disabuse him of the notion.

We watch as he picks himself back up, walks two steps, and promptly falls over again. “Come on,” I say, pulling Clementine up. “Let’s go rescue the rescue crew.”

If left to his own devices, I’m afraid he’ll hurt himself—not to mention we’ll end up stuck here ’til the next hurricane. We make our way down the beach to her cousin, and while I help him to his feet, Clementine picks up all the supplies he’s dropped like breadcrumbs over the sand.

“I’m so glad you’re all right!” he gushes once we make it to the wall. “I know it’s been terrible for you being here with no electricity, but don’t worry. Everyone will be here soon, and we’ll get everything fixed.”

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