Page 20 of Sweet Nightmares
Jane was, and she tried, but everything felt normal. Because she wasn’t special, she never had been, and she never would be.
“My realm speaks to you, Jane. It sings to you, and sometimes it even bends to your will.” He slid an arm around her waist and pulled her closer to him. “Humans cannot bend a god’s realm.”
Jane gulped because his realm did sing to her.
“Listen. Feel,” he whispered into her hair.
Jane did, and nothing happened until… Vibrations. She felt them first in her hands, warm like firelight. But then she felt them everywhere. The ground, the electricity, the warmth of the god holding her. Everything had a pulse, an energy.
“Good,” his voice was smooth whiskey. “Now pull the string. Absorb the curse’s magic.”
Jane didn’t know what that meant, but instinctively, she felt the pull of a tainted enchantment. She felt its edges and heard its rhymes, and she pulled and pulled and pulled. Unlocking, unshaping, undoing. Absorbing.
The whole time she worked, she also felt him holding her, supporting her.
“Goodbye.” Charlotte’s voice was a faraway ring.
Throughout the process, she kept her eyes closed until the very last moment, when it was too late to stop what she had done.
When she opened her eyes, she saw the white light, the edges of what once was Charlotte, fold into Jane’s skin.
She’d consumed the magic, everything, including the ghost.
“I absorbed her.” Jane jumped back and tried to get to her feet, but she couldn’t get away. Horror licked at her bones. She’d just consumed a soul.
She was a monster.
“Calm down.” Nightmare was on his feet quickly, and he pulled her into a tight embrace, cocooning her body. “You didn’t consume her. You untethered her. You released her soul.”
“Iateit.”
Her body shook uncontrollably.
“No, shhh,” he said into her hair. “You ate the magic. Trust me, witches can’t eat souls.”
The shaking didn’t stop. She wanted to believe Nightmare. She wanted to believe that she wasn’t a monster, but she felt the magic in her veins—pulsing and alive.
Chapter Seven
Age 23.
Nothing felt the same after she ate the ghost. Technically, Jane believed Nightmare when he said she’d only devoured the magic, but she couldn’t unsee or unfeel what had happened that night.
When they returned to his realm, Nightmare took the diary and placed it in the Shadow Wing—the one place she was forbidden to go to—and Jane hadn’t seen it since.
It had been three months since then, and every day, Jane felt stranger and stranger things as if the magic inside of her was stirring and begging for a release, yet nothing had happened. Not until her husband tried to kill her.
The first time she went invisible was when her husband was choking her. His sausage fingers were wrapped around her neck when suddenly her throat wasn’t visible any longer. Unfortunately, one didn’t need to see the person they were strangling to finish the job, but fortunately the incident confused him enough to let go.
Her husband had reached the tipping point where he no longer wanted to share Jane with a Mirror, and if it were up to him, she’d never visit Nightmare again, but it wasn’t up to him, and he knew it. But regrettably, he had figured out that Nightmare wouldn’t come to Jane’s aid, and his abuse was escalating again.
But the one thing that kept him from killing her was the money. His endless supply of wealth would run out if she died, so he kept her around like his little golden goose.
This meant she was forced to endure dinners with him seven days a month.
Dinners like tonight, where he sat inches from her with a possessive hand on her leg.
Jane swallowed and tried to empty her mind because when he got this way, it usually meant he would force her down and painfully take her. Sometimes on the kitchen floor, sometimes on the dining room table, and on good nights, he actually made it to their bed. But when he was in this mood, it was always rough and was always accompanied by excruciating pain. Sometimes, he punched her or slammed her head into things: the table, the wall, once a grandfather clock, anything really. He wasn’t very inventive.
