Page 29 of Guarded By the Nightmare

I moved it, and then another, and another, and crawled up onto a low dresser, to open the window and look outside.

The chilly night air helped wake me up at once. I was still dizzy if I moved too fast, and my stomach wasn’t sure if its remaining contents wanted to come up or not, but my ability to think was clearing.

Which meant that as soon as I looked around, I realized that jumping two stories down to rescue my friend was an incredibly bad idea.

I pushed my head further out the window though, taking big gulps of fresh air, praying that it would make me smarter—when I turned and saw a trellis covered in heavy ivy to my right.

Was it as old as the rest of the cabin seemed to be and made of the same heavy wood?

Or was it a Home Depot special, likely to peel off the wall and kill me when it fell?

There was only one way to find out. I took off my heels, put their straps in my teeth, reached for it and I?—

22

MINA

The Present

“Mina,”I heard, just as I was about to grab hold of the trellis. I woke up, and I knew Sylas was in the room with me.

“Were you just watching me sleep?”

“It’s not like I have anything better to do,” he confessed. My room was dark now, and I didn’t have any idea where his voice was coming from. “You were having a nightmare again. Do you have them often?”

I frowned. It wasn’t a nightmare . . . yet.

But sometimes, yeah, it was—I’d grab hold of the trellis, ivy and all, and then have to climb up like I was Jack on the Beanstalk, only I’d never, ever get to anywhere.

Other times I’d reach out, climb aboard, and the ivy would just eat me whole.

I could still remember what’d really happened. How I’d gotten splinters as long as my fingernails into the bottoms of my feet and?—

“Mina?” Sylas asked again, sounding concerned.

I turned over, pulling my pillow over my face to shout, “Go away!” at him from beneath it.

He didn’t leave. I could feel his presence.

Waiting.

“I’m not going to tell you anything,” I said, with a muffled sound.

“Fine. Have it your way,” he said. “Just know that I’ll lick the next man’s memories out of his skull before I kill him.”

I removed the pillow and sat up. “What?”

“When people are close to death, their lives become liminal things—like dreams almost. And then I can read them, if I want.” Each phrase of his statement came from different parts of the room, like he was everywhere at the same time—or like he was speaking with different parts of himself. “And when you are dying in my arms,” he went on, “I will be able to read you, too. So you might as well tell me.”

I pulled my knees into my chest. I just had a T-shirt and underwear on so I made sure my sheets were hitched high—then again, Sylas had probably been around since before the invention of bras. “Are you saying you can read my dreams?”

“I am a Nightmare, after all.”

“Then shouldn’t youwantme to have them?” Nothing about this moment with him was making sense.

“No. I only like it whenIam hurting you. But you, my queen, are not allowed to hurt yourself.”

I wiped my hands against my face. “This is like the world’s strangest therapy,” I said, and he laughed—it washed around my bedroom like a tide. “Just let me have a few things to myself, Sylas.”

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