Page 49 of Sweet Nightmare

“Get out of my way, Dear Prudence.”

His eyes darken, but he stands his ground. “Tell me what has you looking so freaked out and I will.”

My heart—and my breathing—speed up, and my fingers suddenly itch with the need to reach out and smooth away the crease by the side of his mouth. It’s a little bit dimple and mostly worry line, and it’s been there since he was a kid.

The more concerned he is about something, the deeper that little groove gets. And right now, it’s looking really deep.

Not that I care, I remind myself as I shove my hands into my sodden pockets.

“I’m fine,” I tell him.

“Remind me.” He lifts a brow. “What does fine stand for again?”

I roll my eyes at him, mostly because he’s right. At the moment, I feel exactly like Aerosmith described in that song. But considering Jude’s the one who’s caused a lot of those feelings, I’m not exactly in the mood to share with him.

“It stands for okay,” I shoot back. “Which I am. Or I will be, if you would get the hell out of my way.”

Jude’s jaw tightens, but before he can say anything else, my mother blows three times on the gold whistle she wears whenever she’s on headmaster duty—which is the signal here at Calder Academy for everyone to sit down and shut up.

“I need to go,” I tell Jude, and this time when I try to push past him, he lets me. But I can feel his eyes following me as Luis slides up beside me and steers me toward our seats.

“What was that?” Luis asks, brows arched.

But I just shake my head—partly because I don’t want to talk about Jude and partly because I don’t actually know what that was.

What I do know is that having Jude look at me like that makes me feel all kinds of things I’m better off not feeling—especially since I’m pretty sure he doesn’t want to reciprocate them. I can’t help wishing we could go back to the way things were, when we just ignored each other.

At least I knew where we stood.

“All right, everyone.” My mother’s voice booms through every corner of the round, cavernous room as she takes hold of the microphone my uncle Carter holds out to her. “I have some updates on the current storm as well as some instructions I’m going to need you to follow. I know the conditions aren’t ideal, but if we stick together, we can get through this.”

She pauses for a moment, and Luis leans over to me. “Updates?” he repeats, brows raised. “It’s going to rain a lot. What else is there to say?”

“I’m assuming she didn’t get the hurricane sirens out for nothing.”

He shrugs, waves a hand. “Hurricane, shmurricane. Sounds like a tempest in a teapot to me.”

“Yeah, until your cottage is underwater.”

“Hey, I know how to doggy paddle.” He grins.

Before I can think up a suitable response to that ridiculous quip, the room around us grows quiet and my mom continues.

“The storm we’re getting right now is just foreshadowing of bigger things to come. I’ve spent the afternoon communicating with several expert meteorologists and paranormal weather services, and they have all determined the same thing. This island and Calder Academy are directly in the path of a major, category-five hurricane—one whose current circumference is about two hundred and fifty miles wide. Normally, we would just ride it out and not worry—our safeguards are the best there are. But there is concern that this storm is too powerful for our regular protection spells—or any spells, for that matter.”

A frisson of unease runs through me as the room once again erupts into dozens of side conversations. Category-five hurricanes are bad—really bad. And being sitting ducks on an island in the middle of one usually means a whole lot of destruction.

I hate being here—hate the rules and the regulations, the unfairness of basically being born into a juvenile detention center—but that doesn’t mean I want the whole place to be leveled.

I see genuine panic on more than a few faces. They’re whispering uneasily to each other instead of joking around or gearing up for a fight, as they were a few minutes ago. And like me, they’re staying relatively quiet so they can hear whatever Mom says next before totally and completely freaking out.

This time my mom doesn’t wait for the conversations to die down before continuing. Instead, she plows straight ahead, steely eyed and confident as she spins to face each part of the circle in turn. “Right now, we’re experiencing the outer rainbands of this very large storm, but this is just the beginning. It will move ashore, and it will bring with it what we are afraid are catastrophic rain and wind—as well as some dangerous rogue waves.”

She holds a hand up to stall the inevitable explosion her words are going to cause, and it works. Every student in the room, though tense and on the edge of their seat, holds their tongue. And as the whole room watches her, as close to spellbound as this group gets, I can’t help but feel a tiny spurt of pride.

My mother is impossible in a lot of ways. She is hard to talk to, hard to understand, hard to…well, just hard. There’s very little give in her, and that makes being her daughter exceptionally difficult at times. But it’s that same hardness that has her standing up in the middle of this room, completely calm and in control as she delivers devastating news. And it is that same hardness that keeps everyone in the room calm, because they know that somehow—she’s got this.

More, she’s got us.

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