Page 176 of Skalterra By Nightmare
He rolled his eyes and spun in his chair to rise to his feet.
“Come on, Wren. You can figure the answer to that one out. You’re smart. Nowproveit! This is your admissions interview after all.”
He was playing with me.
“They’re alive,” I said. “You’ve been here too long. You—”
He leaned against his filing cabinet and grinned.
“Yes?”
“You’re a Nightmare,” I realized out loud. “This isn’t your real body.”
He made a show of clapping for me.
“Bravo, Just-Wren. That didn’t take too long at all.”
“But Orla said it’s impossible to project Nightmares on this side of the Rift. She said not even Galahad—”
“And Galahad is dead.” Ferrin shrugged. “He was good at his tricks, but he was stubborn and lacked imagination. Meanwhile, I figured out how to create a Nightmare of myself in Keldori decades ago.”
“When you said you’d met another lucid Nightmare—”
“Surprise!” Ferrin gave me a salute.
“So Orla and Fana are—”
“Alive.” He waved a dismissive hand. “I would love to rush to the Bay of Teeth, free the Frozen God, and open the Rift. Really, I’m impatient. I’m tired of living in Keldori as a sometimes-man. Or, I could do this right. I could figure out where the Rift lets out on this side, so when we free Saergrim, we have him surrounded from both directions and can subdue him before he becomes a problem.”
“Then why are youhere? Working at Von Leer.”
He raised a lazy finger to point at the pin-laden map on the wall next to me.
“It took a while, but I’ve narrowed the Rift location down to somewhere within a five hundred mile radius of here. This is the most prestigious school in the area, so I sit in my office and go through college applications. Any hint of anything strange on an application, and I put them on the waitlist so I can meet them face-to-face and ask more questions.”
“Anything strange?” I repeated.
“Sure.” He shrugged. “It’s not a perfect system, but every once in a while I’ll get a student who started a lucid dreaming club at their high school, or a kid with close family that went missing one day never to be seen again. See,thoseprovide good clues. Not the dream club kids, but the kids with missing family.”
Liam had been waitlisted. He’d mentioned telling his admissions officer about his missing parents. But Liam was just Liam, and while his parents and cousin’s disappearances were tragic, there was nothing supernatural or magick about them.
“You’re wasting your time,” I hissed.
“Am I?” Ferrin put a hand over his heart and leaned back over his desk to scroll on his computer again. “Because it looks like you submitted a finalized transcript after your graduation date, but the address doesn’t match the one you initially listed. And the date, I mean, that lines up pretty dead on for when you showed up in Skalterra perfectly lucid.”
I shook my head. This wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be.
“The town you listed, though, that’s what’s weird to me. It’s the same town the orphan kid was from. Keel Watch Harbor. I remember it because I visited.”
He crossed to his bookshelf and reached for a green chicken. I recognized Gams’s brushstrokes in the paint, and I held my breath.
“It’s a coincidence,” I insisted. Gams had nothing to do with this. Neither did Liam, nor Keel Watch Harbor.
“I picked this up in the shop the kid told me he worked at. The cutest old lady was running the joint, but there was nothing special about it. Except for this.” He turned the chicken in his hands, watching the light from the window bounce off the sheen of the glaze. “I know you aren’t a Magician, so you aren’t sensitive to Skal, but she had an entire shelf of these damn chickens. Each one buzzed with magick. I think it was in the paint, but the energy has long since worn off. Maybe it’s time I went and picked up another one? Unless…”
Ferrin crossed the office in two long strides, and I recoiled with my back pressed against the door. He took my backpack from my hands and reached inside.
“Hey!” I lunged to take my things back, but he pushed me away with inhuman strength. He withdrew his hand from my bag, and the blue chicken Gams had gifted me at the train station gleamed in his palm.
