Page 21 of Nightmare's Dance

I lost track of time, staring at the dark material of Nic’s shirt and impressed that he didn’t seem at all tired from having me in his arms.

“Could you get the door for me, luv?”

Jerking myself out of a daze, I twisted in Nic’s arms and froze. I know that cabin. How…?

“You’re not as light as you seem,” he prompted.

“Sorry.” I grabbed the knob and jiggled it before turning the handle.

Nic sucked in a breath in surprise. “You remember?”

“I guess so,” I murmured.

“I wasn’t sure you would remember anything. We were all so young.”

It was as if his words, combined with the very familiar interior of the cabin, opened a floodgate of memories. Memories I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten.

“Wait,” I whispered. “How is this possible?”

Nic squeezed me gently in his arms before setting me on the ancient couch pushed up against one wall of the tiny one-room cabin. He dissolved almost completely into darkness, as if exhausted from the effort of remaining solid as long as he had. Nic reached out of the cloud of shadow and shut the door before partially reforming and sinking down into one of the surprisingly sturdy chairs at the old table. Four chairs. There had been four children playing at this cabin nearly every afternoon for several years.

The room also had an ancient iron stove I remembered using to pretend to heat our lunches with, and a mirror over a spot that might have held a bed at one time. The only difference from my twenty-some-odd-year-old memories were the cracks and fractures splitting the mirror, and I thought I remembered an ornate frame where this mirror had none.

This same cabin sat in the woods outside my parents’ home. I’d played here as a kid for several years as soon as I’d been old enough to roam away from the immediate area around my house, but I hadn’t visited it since, for whatever reason. I’d never even sketched it, though I’d drawn everything else.

“Nic, I don’t understand.”

He took a deep breath and nodded. “I’ll do my best. You were eight, I believe, when we first met?”

“I think so.”

He chuckled. “You were very insistent that you were eight, and that you were plenty old enough to play in the woods, if I remember correctly.”

Smiling, my cheeks heated. “That sounds like me.”

“My brothers and I had just discovered our first arch that wasn’t heavily guarded.” He gestured toward the mirror, “And we were keen to explore the waking world. Mary was kind enough to let us through.” Nic grinned, looking at the floor as if lost in thought. “All three of us were terrified when you came crashing out of the woods toward us. At first, we thought you were some sort of monster with as much noise as you made. We weren’t much reassured when we realized you were a human child.”

“I think I remember coaxing you, and the other two out of the shadows. Dio, right? Dio loved tag.” I grinned at the memory. “And Baz? I don’t remember him being like this.” That he hated me now was like a punch to the gut. What had happened? “It didn’t take long before we played almost every day, though.”

“No, we were easily convinced to come out and play, and he wasn’t.”

“So, if that’s an arch.” I pointed to the mirror and made a guess. “Can’t we use it to go home?”

Nic leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms, and staring at me. After a moment, he clenched his jaw and shrugged. “All the arches except the one in Nightmare Castle are broken.”

I wrinkled my brow. “Nightmare Castle? Seriously, that’s what it’s called? That’s like something out of an eighties cartoon.”

He shook his head, amusement crinkling the skin at the corners of his eyes. “I believe that’s what you said the first time we told you what our home was called.”

“We need to rescue Geraint and we need to get home,” I said as the reality of my current situation intruded on pleasant memories.

“Geraint?” Nic tilted his head.

“My partner. They took him when they took me.”

“Ahh, your knight.”

A chill crawled icy fingers down my spine. I hunched, holding my stomach. “He knows, doesn’t he?”

---