Dreaming Awake (10 page)

CHAPTER TEN

S
unday was another afternoon at the hospital, and I had the joy of dealing with a social worker. Her original plan was to put me in a foster home, but I was able to get through to my father’s assistant, who was able to put the social worker in touch with Father’s own legal counsel.

My father had planned well for many eventualities—just not this one. The social worker was satisfied that Muriel would be a suitable temporary caregiver for me until the doctors had a prognosis. The alternative was unthinkable. Father’s will dictated that I be sent back to England in the event of his death, to be raised by his cousin and her husband. His will didn’t address what should happen to me if he was in a coma of unknown origin when I was almost done with my schooling.

I couldn’t leave Serendipity Falls. Not until I’d put back together all the damage I’d caused.

On Monday morning, Muriel talked me into going to school. I’d assumed I would spend the day at the hospital, willing my father to wake up, but she felt I should try to get back into a normal routine. Donny agreed with her, which is why she was in my bedroom shoving my backpack straps over my arm and pushing me out the door at seven thirty in the morning.

“You have your phone,” she said. “If there is a change in his condition, they will call you. Plus, I bought you a coffee but I left it in the car. You can’t have it unless you get in.”

It wasn’t just that I worried about my father. I worried about running into Haden and I worried about accidentally using the Lure on my classmates and stealing their souls. My life was so out of control, and the more I worried about it the more stressed out I got and the more likely I was to lose containment of my emotions.

But Donny was stubborn.

“All right. You’re so pushy.” I got into the car and waited until she got into the driver’s seat. “Also, your skirt is too short.”

She winked at me.

I sipped at the now-less-than-piping-hot brew. “I saw the newspaper reported that a woman had a psychotic breakdown at the bowling alley. They said her screaming caused a mob effect but everything was fine now.”

“Yeah, I saw that. Everyone is buying it too. They don’t want to see the scary stuff, so they just won’t, I guess.”

The small town whizzed by as Donny drove too fast through the streets. It all looked so cozy and quaint—it was hard to believe that the dark secrets could stay so well hidden. “Do you ever think we should try to make people understand about the dangers of living in Serendipity Falls? Tell them about the things Varnie talks about and Mara . . . and that demons go to their school and various other assorted horrors?”

Donny checked her face in the rearview mirror. “Nope. Nobody would believe us anyway.”

“But don’t they deserve to know?”

“Look, I don’t know all the lore that Varnie refers to, but he says it’s been going on for centuries. If we’re all supposed to know, I’m thinking we would have figured it out by now. Especially with all the collective-unconscious stuff he was rambling about.”

It was a great time to open up to her about my part in that over the weekend, that I had participated in a young girl’s nightmare, but I didn’t. I tried to. I wanted to. But I just couldn’t.

I also didn’t tell her that Haden and I had broken up.

If she could tell that I was hiding something, she didn’t let on. “Besides, Theia, if you started telling people what you know, they would medicate you and lock you up. You can’t help anyone that way.”

I bit the inside of my cheek until it bled.

I didn’t think we were early, but Donny got a prime parking spot. The hallway wasn’t nearly as crowded as it should have been either—and the students that were left seemed . . . tired.

“Something isn’t right.”

“What do you mean?”

We stopped at my locker. “Look around.” She shrugged and waited for me to explain. “It’s the sneetches, mostly. They look . . . sick or something.”

Donny rolled her eyes. “They had a banner weekend. Some of their parents went on a cruise together, so there were parties all weekend. I’m sure their hangovers will be legendary.”

I didn’t tell her that I already knew that because I had been to one of the parties. Instead, I watched Noelle, one of Haden’s admirers and Brittany’s best friend, groggily make her way down the hall. Like Brittany the other day, Noelle looked like she’d rolled out of bed and gone straight to school. No carefully choreographed outfit, no shampoo-commercial hair—it didn’t even look like she’d bothered with a bra.

Other sneetches shuffled along looking more than hungover. The corridor also smelled wrong to me. I couldn’t put my finger on it.

Gabe and Mike joined us, but after he got a look at Donny’s skirt, Gabe stuttered a few times and pushed her towards the janitor closet. Which left Mike and me blushing and awkwardly alone together.

Mike rubbed the back of his neck with one hand, trying to look at ease. “How was your weekend, Theia?” he asked.

My upbringing required me to answer with a polite, pleasant reply. But that was ridiculous, given the circumstances. “It was awful, actually. My father is in the hospital. He’s in a coma.” I left out
And Haden and I broke up, so I went to the underworld and fed nightmares to a child as if they were candy,
and then I found out I have demon powers that I don’t know how to control
.

He seemed shocked by the news of my father. “Wow, sorry. That sucks. Hey, do you want to go do something tonight? Coffee or something?”

“What?” I asked, stunned. Surely I wasn’t using the Lure just then.

“I mean, you know. . . . I just thought . . .”

The muscles between my eyebrows pinched painfully. Was he serious? “No, sorry. I can’t. I have to stay at the hospital with my father.”

He nodded, oblivious. “Maybe some other time.” Then he ducked into class.

I stood there for another moment, trying to figure out what had just happened. Had Mike meant to ask me on a date? Was my use of the Lure that strong? I couldn’t even tell when I was doing it.

“You okay, Thei?” Ame said from behind me.

“Yeah, sure.” I tried to shake it off. I didn’t tell Ame about Mike. There was no point in hurting her feelings. She’d spent years waiting for him to invite her to coffee . . . or anything, really. “I have to get to class. See you later?”

I hadn’t seen Haden yet, and I was grateful. I didn’t want to face how awkward it would be. We had only one class together and he often skipped it.

I was one of the last students to take my chair—but I noticed that Brittany’s seat was still empty. One of her sneetchy “friends” told another one how she wasn’t surprised by her absence—Brittany had really looked awful that weekend. The other girl barely looked up from her phone but made a comment about it not stopping Britt from getting laid Saturday night, which apparently was just gross since Brittany hadn’t even washed her hair.

I didn’t understand their friendships. If one of my friends was sick, we’d be worried, not snarking about how bad she looked. Of course, I had little room to talk about being a good friend. I hadn’t been honest with my friends lately.

The teacher was taking her time starting class. We were so close to the end of the year, it really didn’t matter anyway, so I doodled while trying to listen to the conversations around me without
looking
like I was listening. It wasn’t difficult—my classmates had been ignoring me for years. Once they’d settled down from my reappearance, their interest in me had dwindled back to normal except for the odd moments when I employed the Lure without my knowledge.

I heard snippets about the parties, complaints of feeling groggy still, horror stories about vomiting, and one hushed whisper that Haden Black had looked really good Saturday night.

My stomach flipped.

I felt sick.

The bell rang and I packed up my backpack. A piece of notebook paper was hanging out of the zippered pocket. I pulled it out and had begun to unfold it when a girl I barely knew stopped at my desk.

“You’re holding up really well,” she said.

“Excuse me?” I answered.

She blushed. “I didn’t mean it in a bad way.” Her voice was rushed and the rest of her words tumbled out like a river breaking over a dam. “I just mean, like, I know you and Haden were really tight and it sucks that you guys broke up.” I swallowed hard, trying to find words, so she filled the silence some more. “I was kind of rooting for you. I mean, you kind of gave the rest of us hope. If you could hook a guy like that, then there’s hope for us all, you know? And it wasn’t cool that he moved on to Brittany so quickly after you left on Saturday.”

The world stopped moving. He’d already moved on to Brittany?

“Theia!” Donny charged into the room, grabbing me before I could respond. “We need to talk.” She said something to the girl that made her run off—scurrying like her life depended on it. Donny had that effect on people. She then turned me to face her. “Where’s Haden?”

All I could do was shrug while burning tears threatened. I was upset and I was angry. I forced myself to speak. “I don’t know. We broke up.”

“Yeah, I heard. Thanks for sharing with your best friends.”

My emotions were swirling in a soup of ugliness in my stomach. Kids were filtering back into class for second period. Auras became more pronounced as my emotions became more confused. This couldn’t be a good thing. I really didn’t want to become aware of my unnatural hungers in the middle of a classroom full of students.

Donny didn’t realize my dilemma, though. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

She shone a royal blue color today. It was lovely. I wanted to touch the color and wrap it around—“Earth to Theia,” she said, exasperated, as she waved her hand in front of my face. “So the rumors might be true? Everyone is saying he took a very drunk Brittany home Saturday night and neither of them has been seen since.”

My thoughts began to jumble and my body temperature rose uncomfortably. In between spikes of anger and confusion, pangs of hunger stabbed me from the inside out. I clutched her arm fiercely. “Get me out of here, Donny.”

“Jesus, Theia. Your eyes are black.”

She pulled a pair of sunglasses out of her purse and pushed them haphazardly onto my face. When we got to the hall, the sensory overload was worse. With the sunglasses covering my eyes, the hall seemed so dark, and yet the darkness seemed to move, as if it was gathering into a shadow. Whispers assailed me from every direction, mocking and disorienting me. Some were the kids in the hall, but some—some came from someplace dark and evil, someplace inside me.

“Make them stop,” I whimpered.

“Make who stop?” she asked. “Thei, you’re scaring the crap out of me. Are you about to get all wear-a-hockey-mask-and-kill-my-classmates?”

I was sucking in air, but it wasn’t going to my lungs. People were staring at me—I could feel their eyes on me. I was scaring them—I was scaring Donny too. That much I could smell.

She pulled me down the hall, and people parted to let us through. She was dialing with one hand. “I got one whacked-out demoness on my hands. Meet me at my car. And find Ame,” she said into her phone while I continued to wheeze.

The more I tried not to lose control, the more I felt my grasp on it loosening. “Go faster,” I urged between clenched teeth. The whispers grew louder.
Make them pay. Ease the hunger. Do it.

We skidded around a corner and out the door, but Donny didn’t stop until we got to her car. “Are you going to try to eat me?” she asked. “Because I have to tell you, I’m totally freaked out right now. Your pupils took over most of your eyeballs in there and it’s not an attractive look. Also, I don’t have a problem punching you in the throat if you try to absorb my essence or whatever—just so we’re clear.”

I saw Gabe running towards us, and Donny looked relieved. Was it because she was happy to see him or because she didn’t want to be alone with me?

I inhaled deeply, trying to recover. My whole body hurt as I was racked with tremor after tremor of need. Donny tried to put her arm around me, but I skittered away from her, not trusting myself to touch her.

I concentrated on the repetition of breathing. I tried to bring back that peaceful feeling from the morning after I smelled those beautiful flowers in Under. After what seemed like an eternity, the pangs lessened and the fog in my head began to clear.

“Oh, God,” I said.

They both looked at me as if I’d . . . well, as if I’d just about turned into a demon in front of their eyes.

“Are you . . .”

“I think I’ll be okay,” I said. “But it was a very close thing. I’m losing control, Donny. I’m not sure how much longer I can do this.”

Gabe ran his worried fingers through his wavy hair, making it even more perfect instead of disheveling it. “Ame said take her to Varnie’s and she’ll join us as soon as she can.”

“Not Varnie’s.” I couldn’t chance running into Haden. I was all over the place emotionally and he would put me over the edge.

Donny opened the passenger door for me. “Why not Varnie’s?”

“Haden might be there.”

“So? Then you can confront him about the Brittany rumors.”

My gaze flitted all around the parking lot but wouldn’t settle on any one thing. Like a frightened animal, I sensed danger everywhere. “You don’t understand. It’s not just about Brittany.”

She put her hand on her hip. “Then make me understand, Thei. What is going on with you?”

“I think I need to feed.” It was the first honest thing I’d said all day. “That’s what is wrong with me. It’s worse when I’m upset . . . and frankly the idea of seeing Haden right now . . .” I slid into the car without finishing. I didn’t want to give voice to my thoughts. They were ugly and they made me feel unstable—something I couldn’t afford to be.

She got into the driver’s seat. It seemed like so much time had passed since we’d pulled into the lot.

“Look,” she said, “I know you don’t want to see him, but he’s the only one who knows what you are going through right now. He might be able to help.”

“I can’t. Donny, my control is precarious. Thinking about Haden makes it worse. . . . Seeing him might do me in.”