Page 180 of Skalterra By Nightmare
He reached for my face, and frigid fingers brushed my cheeks.
“Liam?” A new panic crept up my throat, and I pressed harder against the wound in his chest. “Liam, why did you call me Blue?”
Hot, painful tears rolled down my cheeks, and my chest heaved as I tried to catch my breath.
“Does he know?” Liam croaked. “Does Ferrin know where we are?”
“How do you know his name?”
“You have to come find us,” he whispered. “If he knows…”
His hand fell away from my face, and his eyes lost focus, staring unseeing back at me. I tore my gaze away to finally look at his chest, but the blood that had bloomed across the front of his hoodie was gone.
I pulled my hand away from the wound and found my palm dirty with ash.
“Liam?” I searched his face, and there, in the half-second before he turned into dust in my hands, I saw him in the shape of his nose and the cut of his cheekbones. And when I was left with nothing but a dirty, torn Von Leer hoodie in my arms, I whispered his other name. “Ciarán?”
Something heavy shifted in the pocket of the tattered hoodie, and a blue chicken fell into my dust-stained lap.
42. Glaciology
Nothing felt real anymore.
Not the trees that towered overhead.
Not the pile of dust in the dirt that had been Liam.
Not the blue sparks dancing on my fingertips.
The only thing I knew for sure existed was the tattered hoodie I clutched against my hammering heart.
However, Keel Watch Harbor, real or not, was in danger, and I needed to warn them. Ferrin would be on his way.
My legs shook beneath me, but I didn’t have time to rest. I didn’t have time to grieve or fall into a shocked stupor, even as reality seemed to strip away around me.
Liam was a Nightmare.
Wonderful, kind Liam who had turned to ash in my hands.
Thoughtful, sweet Liam who had been hunting me across a magic reality all summer.
As horrifying as the revelation was, I clung to it as tightly as I held onto the hoodie.
It meant that Liam wasn’t dead. He’d died gruesomely, but he wasn’tdead.
Had Liam known that he was Ciarán? I curled my fingers around the blue chicken that had fallen from his pocket.
No, he couldn’t have.
He’d worried all summer about Riley. He’d never lost hope.
But Riley was dead, because Riley wasn’t real and never had been. I’d watched Riley die my first night in Skalterra, with Ferrin’s green Skalmagick bursting in his chest.
Except they’d called him Daithi.
Gams had known somehow. That was why she made me take down the posters. That and because she knew there might be someone like Ferrin, watching and waiting.
Which begged the question, who else in Keel Watch Harbor was a Nightmare? And more importantly, who was creating them?
