Taken by storm(35)

Even if she’d gone Rabid.

Even if she was the monster who’d painted those white walls red with blood.

Even if the person she really wanted to tear limb from limb—the reason she wanted vengeance—was me.





CHAPTER EIGHTEEN





THAT NIGHT, I COULDN’T BREATHE INSIDE THE TENT. Couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t think. We still didn’t have a plan, and when exhaustion finally beat back everything else competing for space in my mind, I fell into a nightmare, the kind that followed you seamlessly from one dream to the next.

I was running. Someone was chasing me.

Something.

Hands grabbed my shoulders. Nails that might have been claws dug into my arms, but I couldn’t feel the pain. I couldn’t feel anything.

Suddenly, the forest disappeared, and I was sitting at a wrought-iron table that had been painted white. My hands were folded neatly in my lap. My legs were crossed at the ankles. Stiff, lacy fabric crinkled as I shifted in my seat.

The girl sitting across from me, dressed in a frilly frock identical to my own, was Maddy. She reached forward, and a tiny china teapot materialized. With dainty hands and an expressionless face, she poured my tea and then her own.

The light all around us was bright, almost unbearable, but in the corners of the room, there were shadows, and in the shadows, there were eyes.

Unperturbed, Maddy lifted her teacup upward. With shaking hands, I reached for my own.

“It’s not what you think,” Maddy said.

For a second, I thought she was trying to tell me that I’d misconstrued everything that had happened in the past few days, that she wasn’t the monster we were hunting, and relief washed over my body, pleasant and warm.

A smile cut across Maddy’s features, sharp where they were round. Her teeth gleamed, the exact shade of porcelain as the teacups.

“It’s not what I think,” I said, in a singsong voice that didn’t feel like my own.

“It’s not what you think.”

I brought the teacup to my lips, and that was when I realized—

We weren’t drinking tea. The cup was filled with blood.



I woke with a start, no more capable of screaming than I had been when I was caught in the midst of the dream. This was what came of Jed’s little lessons. Once you let yourself be scared, once you opened up the door to the darkest parts of your psyche—

There it was.

Not wanting to disturb the others, I glanced around the tent. Chase and Lake were missing—no surprise there. They didn’t need shelter of any kind to feel at home in the woods. Jed was snoring on the far side of the tent, and in between us, Caroline was fast asleep.

Her eyes were open.

Somehow, it didn’t surprise me that she was the only person I’d ever met who could bring that particular cliché to life. In sleep, she looked even more doll-like than usual: perfect and petite, with eyes so big and round that her eyelids only covered them halfway.

Given the dream I’d just had, the last thing I wanted to think about was dolls. Ignoring the chill crawling up my spine, I slipped out of my sleeping bag and tiptoed out into the night.

The sky had cleared enough that I could see the stars overhead, like fireflies trapped in glass. I wondered if Maddy could see them, wherever she was. I wondered if there was even a small part of her that was still Maddy, if there was anything left of the girl I’d known at all.

Where are you, Maddy?

I sent the words off into the night, knowing they’d never reach her. Our minds weren’t connected anymore. The phantom I’d seen in my dream was just that—a phantom, the by-product of opening the floodgates and trying in vain to dam them back up, only succeeding halfway.

If I hadn’t severed the pack-bond and withdrawn my mind from Maddy’s, we could have actually shared dreams. I could have seen her, talked to her. I could have asked her why. Instead, I was left with my own twisted subconscious and no way into Maddy’s mind at all.

Lightning struck in the distance, so far away that it was nothing but a dull flash of light on the horizon. I waited for the sound of thunder, but it never came. Instead, a chain reaction went off in my brain, and I remembered the last time nightmares had kept me up at night.

Those nightmares had been real.

And the person who’d orchestrated them?

He’d had a knack for getting under people’s skin and entering their dreams, the way I could sneak peeks at my pack’s. I might not be able to connect with Maddy, but that didn’t mean she was off the grid altogether.

This time, when I went back into the tent, I was able to close my eyes. I was able to sleep. Because the person who’d spent the better part of last fall haunting my nightmares, the one who might have stood a fighting chance at finding Maddy, or at the very least, her dreams—