Page 47 of Sweet Nightmare

Desperate, terrified, I wrench myself through—and away from her. Then I use the last burst of strength I’ve got to twist in midair before slamming to the ground and rolling, just as I finally break through the tree line.

The moment I clear the forest, there’s silence. The static stops, as do the screams, the laughs, and the strange vibrations inside of me. The pain vanishes with them, so quickly that everything feels like nothing more than the product of my overactive imagination.

I’m trembling as I push to my feet, stumbling several steps away from the forest while my breath lodges in my throat and my heart continues to beat like a metronome at high speed. I shine my flashlight at the forest, but I can’t see anything move—not even the leaves or branches. The rain has stopped, and even the wind has died down for the moment.

Weird. Very, very, very weird.

I turn the light on myself, searching my chest, my hands, my legs—everywhere I felt pain slice through me—but there’s nothing new there. No blood, no bruises, not even any new tears to my shirt. Nothing that wasn’t already there from before. It’s as if everything that just happened…didn’t.

But it did happen. I know it did. I heard it. I felt it, on my skin and deep inside myself. Something was in that forest, something I’ve never felt or heard or seen before.

I suck air into my lungs and tell myself that it’s over. That whatever just attacked me isn’t going to come after me again. But saying that and believing it are two different things, and I keep glancing over my shoulder at the trees as I suck in huge, noisy gulps of oxygen.

Determined to get myself as far away from here as I can, before whatever that was comes back, I turn left and half run, half stumble along the rocky path that borders the teachers’ quarters. And I don’t stop until I finally make it to the round, six-story-tall former hotel annex that is now the residence hall for underclassmen.

I take a few seconds to get my breath back, then scan my eye and head inside, bracing myself for whatever I’m going to find.

“There you are!” Luis pounces on me the second I walk through the door, his silver eyes flashing. “Where have you been?”

“Later,” I answer out of the corner of my mouth, because he’s not the only one whose attention I’ve attracted. My mother is watching me from her spot at the center of the common room…and she doesn’t look happy.

Then again, neither does anyone else in the building.

The hallway finally ends in the center of the building, where the main floor common room is located. Because the building itself is circular—a common design in hurricane-prone areas in the late 1800s—each of the six floors is built around a central room, with the student dorm rooms forming a full circle around it.

On the upper floors, that central room is divided into study rooms, a small library, a TV room—though the TVs have long ago been stolen out of all of them—and a small snack kitchen. But down here, on the first floor, the room has pretty much been left alone since it functioned as a room for guests who actually paid for the privilege of being here.

The pale-blue paint from its heyday is chipped and peeling.

The lobby chairs and sofas are stained and torn in some places, lopsided in others.

And, like the rest of the school, half of the lightbulbs are burned out. Here, the dead bulbs are ensconced with stained glass lampshades depicting sea creatures. Somehow the remnants of over-the-top resort decorations just make the building look even sadder and more neglected.

A vibe that’s only helped along by the eerie dimness that fills the place, along with the strange darkness from outside leaking in through the hallways that bisect the circle.

In preparation for the meeting, my uncle Christopher has had the furniture moved against the walls and filled the center of the room with enough chairs to fit the whole student body. Most of the chairs are full by now—I’m definitely late to the party—and the whole place is filled with a restless energy that has my nerves on high alert.

Because this kind of energy almost always leads to trouble, even without the threat of a major storm hanging over the island. Something that is proven out by the harried way my aunts and uncles are running between groups of students, trying to catch things at the skirmish level before they develop into full-blown wars. My mom—who has changed into a tracksuit the same bright red as my uniform shorts—stands in the center of the room watching the clock and waiting for it to count down to the exact second she can begin the meeting.

Apparently, keeping the peace while also crowding a couple hundred paranormals with control issues, bad attitudes, and a penchant for violence into a tight space isn’t as easy as it sounds. Not to mention it’s a full moon tonight, which always makes the student body act wilder than usual.

“I got us seats over here,” Luis hisses, handing me a towel to dry off as he leads the way to two chairs that are as far from my mother—and the other students—as we can get.

But before I can take more than a few steps in that direction, my aunt Claudia comes rushing toward me. “Clementine, thank goodness you’re here!” she calls, her normally high-pitched voice made even more so by the stress of the situation.

Her blue eyes are twice their normal size, and her towering red bun quivers a little more with each second that passes. But before I can say anything, Caspian appears out of nowhere, in full-blown super helpful nephew mode. “What can we do, Aunt Claudia?” he asks.

“Oh, you dear sweet boy.” She pats his cheek, then points to Uncle Christopher, who is currently standing in front of a pissed-off mermaid who is shouting at two even more pissed-off fae. And while they’re currently keeping their cool—barely—Uncle Christopher is trapped. Because the second he walks away, someone is getting punched. And once that happens, anything goes. “Why don’t you go see what can be done with that…situation?”

But Caspian’s already gone, racing toward his father to see how he can help. He weaves through the crowd like someone who’s been doing it his whole life…because he has.

On the other side of the room, Uncle Carter is locked in a battle of his own—with what looks like a newly formed pack of wolf shifters, all of whom are circling him like they’re about to go for his jugular.

“Clementine, sweetheart—”

I sigh. “On it, Aunt Claudia.”

“You aren’t really getting in the middle of that, are you?” Luis asks, alarmed, as I head toward my uncle. “Those guys are bad news.”

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