Page 182 of Skalterra By Nightmare
It couldn’t be real. It couldn’t—
I turned heel and ran.
The cold air burned in my lungs as I sprinted down the hill towards the water with Liam’s backpack bouncing against my back.
“Gams!” I screamed, not caring who heard me. Wind rolled over the tree-lined hill, blowing dirt up in my face. It stuck in my throat, and I doubled over in a blood-flecked coughing fit.
Dust and ash blew across my shoes, and I staggered backwards. It looked horribly similar to the piles of ash that sat in Gladys and Sarah’s favorite library chairs. Horribly similar to the ash that Liam had dissipated into in my arms.
“No,” I choked. “No, no, no!”
I flew around the corner onto Main Street. It was a Friday afternoon, and the shops should’ve been alive with tourists. Instead, the street was barren and cold despite the shining sun.
My dress shoes rubbed against the back of my ankles, but I ignored the burning in my heels and the fire in my lungs. I couldn’t get to Gams’s shop fast enough.
I passed through another pile of dust, and I screamed for Gams again, shrieking her name so hard that I tasted blood on the back of my tongue, but there was no one to hear me.
Keel Watch Harbor was empty, nothing more than a town of dust and deserted shops.
“Gams!” I shouted over the sound of the shop bell ringing out overhead. “Gams, please!”
She had to be here. Shehadto be.
The ceramic chickens stared at me from their shelf, and the wave of Skalmagick that rolled off of them, reaching for me, was nauseating.
“Gams?” I croaked. She wouldn’t leave the shop unattended, but the shelves and the register were abandoned. I closed my eyes, afraid I would see more dust on the floor.
But Gams wasn’t a Nightmare. Shecouldn’tbe a Nightmare, because I was real. This was my real form.
At least I thought it was. Fire burned in my hands. If I was using Skalmagick, then maybe I wasn’t real at all. But then where was my body? Where was the real me?
A scratching sound brought my eyes snapping open, and the blue flames that tickled my fingers snuffed out.
“Gams?”
A yowling meow replied from the stairway to the apartment.
I scrambled behind the register and opened the door. Jonquil streaked across my feet with a puffed-out tail. She bolted for the back wall and disappeared through the open door to Gams’s workshop.
I followed after her, shivering in the unfettered air of Gams’s AC. I crossed my arms, trying to conserve heat inside Liam’s hoodie.
“Jonquil?” I tiptoed down the wooden steps to the basement and turned the corner at the bottom.
A single ceiling light illuminated the concrete floor and barren walls of the workshop. A shelf of unpainted chickens stood opposite a wall of painting supplies, and the kiln in the corner radiated a meager amount of heat that did nothing to stave off the cold of the AC. A glaze-stained apron draped over a messy work table, as if it had just been dropped there.
“Gams? Are you down here?”
Jonquil meowed again, and lifted onto her hind legs to scratch at a supply closet door with both paws.
“What are you looking for?” I murmured. She turned her flat face towards me, and for the first time since meeting the cat, she seemed to stare at me with something other than total loathing. “It’s just a closet—”
I pulled the door open, and a gush of frigid air washed over me, pushing loose strands of hair back from my face.
I was staring into the maw of an ice cavern.
Where there should have been closet walls, there were sheets of ice that arched upwards to form a barrel ceiling. The frozen steps that lay ahead radiated a soft light and spiraled downwards out of view.
I should’ve been shocked. Twenty-four hours ago, I probably would’ve been, but now I only felt something like resolved defeat.
