“Why not today?” Mozart asks as she flops back down on the sofa.
Jude grabs a bottle of water out of our allotted stash and cracks the top before handing it to me.
“Thanks,” I say, relieved that he hasn’t asked me any questions. But that relief is short-lived when our eyes meet and I realize he may not be asking any questions, but he’s definitely searching for answers.
Everyone is.
I know I owe them an explanation, but the truth is out of the question, and I have no idea what else to tell them.
Before I can say anything, though, Remy jumps to my rescue. “Sometimes when you see the future, you see shit you don’t like. It’s happened to me dozens of times. But I think we should focus on fixing that damn tapestry instead of whatever Clementine saw.” I’ve never been as grateful to another person in my life as I am to Remy at that moment.
But his rescue doesn’t stop Jude and Luis both from giving me looks that promise a reckoning later.
It also doesn’t mean the group doesn’t have questions—only now, they’re aimed at Remy instead of me. Thank God.
“You mentioned before that you were a time wizard,” Simon says. “But I thought they were really rare.”
“I think they are.” He shoots him a rueful look, and when he answers, his Cajun accent is thicker than usual. “Though, to be fair, I’ve been in prison nearly all of my life. I have no idea what’s actually rare and what’s not.”
I don’t know what to say to that, and judging from the looks on their faces, I don’t think anyone else does, either. I think being stuck on this island for my whole life is bad, but I can’t imagine what Remy’s been through. Born into the worst, most notorious prison in the paranormal world, only to finally escape and end up here.
“Fair enough,” Mozart finally says. “But just so you know, they are very rare. And yet we seem to have two in our friend group alone. Does anyone else find that weird?”
“I’m not a time wizard,” I tell them. “I don’t know what’s going on with me at the moment, but I am definitely not a witch of any kind. I’m a manticore—you’ve all seen it.”
“There’s no law that says you can’t be both,” Izzy says.
“Yeah, well, it makes no sense.”
“Except for the fact that you can see a whole lot of things you shouldn’t be able to,” Simon tells me quietly.
I don’t know what to say to that, because he’s not wrong. But I also don’t want to talk about it anymore, not when everything they say just gets me more freaked out.
Remy must sense it because he crouches down to look at the tapestry and does the most obvious subject change in the history of subject changes. “So tell me how this thing works, Jude. You wove it with people’s nightmares?”
CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE
INSOMNIA IS
A WITCH
At first, I don’t think Jude is going to answer. But then he sighs and says, “My father wove it a long time ago. I came to Calder Academy with it ten years ago.”
“And you’ve been using it to play in people’s nightmares ever since?” Simon asks.
“That’s not exactly how I would describe it, no.”
“So how would you describe it?” Remy asks.
“He uses it to give people nightmares,” Mozart answers with a shrug. “How complicated could that be?”
“I haven’t used it to give anybody nightmares,” Jude snaps. “Why don’t all of you think back? When’s the last time—before last night—that you actually had a nightmare?”
I start to argue, but then I do what he suggests. The last time I had an actual nightmare, before the snake last night, was probably ten years ago. How could I have never noticed that before?
How could none of us have noticed it before?
Then again, people don’t think about being sick when they’re healthy—maybe it’s the same thing with this. It’s easy to forget nightmares exist if you aren’t actually having any.