Page 5 of Skalterra By Nightmare
“No!” I threw my hands up in surrender. “I promise, I’m very dumb! I have no idea what you’ve all been saying! I’d be horrible in an interrogation.”
“Galahad,” Ferrin warned. The old man looked at him and shrugged.
“She’s my Nightmare, Ferrin,” he said. “And she’s mine to dispose of as I see fit. Tiernan, Fana’s eyes are closed, yes?”
And the silver blade dug into my chest.
2. Diagnostic Evaluation
Sharp fire in my belly brought me to the waking world, upright and with one arm outstretched in a desperate attempt at self-defense. For a moment, the searing, gut-wrenching pain lingered, but then it dissipated into nothing more than the ghost of a dull ache.
A sleepy hiss issued from the foot of my bed, and I strained against the early morning dark to make out the shapeless form of Jonquil where she curled up in the folds of my quilt.
It had been a dream.
A weird, terrible dream that I couldn’t quite shake but had escaped all the same.
I fell back against my pillow in shaky relief, but jolted up when I found my sheets wet with cool sweat.
Nice. Night sweats. An early sign of leukemia.
“You don’t have leukemia,” I mumbled to myself as one hand fumbled for my phone. I needed to check the internet if obnoxiously vivid dreams about blue hair and Grimguards, whatever a Grimguard might be, were also signs of blood cancer.
My free hand found its familiar resting place on my cheek as I waited for the search results to populate the screen. The feeling of eyelashes between my fingertips usually helped to calm my nerves, but the memory of the long lashes I’d had in my dream stayed my wandering fingers. I knew I’d pulled them out far too many times to ever hope to achieve that kind of length again, but still. I could dream.
After the internet assured me that I was probably okay, I swung my legs over the side of the bed to stretch. It was only just past three AM, but maybe I’d get a head start on chores in the shop. Even if Icouldfall back asleep, I definitely didn’t want to risk falling back into the same nightmare.
Jonquil’s flat face was fixed in what looked like a permanent glare, but the look she gave me when I flicked on the lights was extra icy. The poor thing wasn’t yet used to sharing the guest room above the shop, and she clearly saw being awake before sunrise to be an affront to her Persian nature.
“Can cats smell cancer?” I asked her, pulling my hair into a bun and exposing the undercut at the base of my head. Disguising my neurotic hair pulling habit as a trendy haircut was one of my more recent strokes of genius. “You would tell me if I had cancer, wouldn’t you?”
Jonquil jumped off the bed to hide in the dark shadows beneath it.
“That’s fine,” I called after her. “Let me rot. We both know you want the room to yourself again.”
I tiptoed across uneven floorboards in the hall, trying not to wake Gams. I’d thought getting out of the dusty bedroom might make me feel farther from the dream, but its remnants hung off me. The distant orange glow of the rising sun through the windows that overlooked the street looked too much like the arcing balls of orange that had destroyed the parapet. The dark, narrow staircase that led down to the shop felt too much like the spiraling steps of the turret.
And the light spilling out from under the door to the shop looked too much like I wasn’t the first one awake.
“Gams?” I asked the empty shop aisles as I pushed my way inside. The lights of early morning fishermen twinkled out in the harbor through the massive windows that Gams refused to replace—no matter how much they drove up heating and cooling costs.
Knick-knacks and bare-essential groceries lined the shelves, and as I traipsed through them, I noticed Gams had added to the growing collection of painted ceramic chickens that she kept front and center near the entrance. Near the back of the shop, meanwhile, the glow under the basement door told me she was busy in her workshop, toiling away to bring even more chickens to the shelves.
“Gams?” I asked again, pushing open the basement door.
“Did you sleep in again?” Gams called back. She appeared from around the corner at the base of the wooden staircase. Her silver and gray hair was pulled back, and her massive glasses magnified her eyes. The blue glaze on her hands confirmed she’d been painting more chickens.
“It’s not even four yet,” I laughed.
“Like I said,” she tutted. “Sleeping in. Stay there, I’m coming up.”
I stepped aside as she hurried up the steps with surprising agility for a woman her age. The fly-away hairs from her bun caught the glow of the workshop lights behind her, and she grinned wide, pushing the shoebox she carried into my arms.
“Add those to the shelf, please.”
“All blue?” I stared down at the ceramic chickens in the box, each painted in different shades and patterns of blue.
“Von Leer colors! For luck!” She beamed, going to wash her hands in the sink behind the ice-cream station. “Speaking of, any news yet?”
