Dreaming Awake (16 page)

Up Is Still Down

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Donny

I
’ve awoken surprised in other people’s beds before. Not a lot, but it has happened. It’s a horrible feeling.

I sat up and looked around, not comprehending anything.

Think, girl.

The last thing I remembered was . . . crap, the cabin. Mike was spewing all sorts of weird stuff about Mara, Amelia had been in some sort of stupor, and then there was a gray fog and a lot of nothing.

So where the hell was I? And where was everyone else?

Okay, start with the obvious. I was on a bed. A nice one too. Big carved pillars of dark wood were posts. I was lying on a velvety duvet in a deep red color, and I could roll over four or five times before I found the other edge of the bed. There were candles lit everywhere—on tables, in sconces—but no electric lights. I looked down at the floor; it was pretty far down there. A really plush fur, hopefully fake, served as a rug. A staircase would have been nice. Why would someone make a bed this high off the ground?

The rest of the room was as opulent as the bedding—lots of velvet- and satin-upholstered furniture by a fireplace. Hundreds of candles did a good job for lighting, but there were some really long shadows. I didn’t care for the shadows. If I was in Under, which I suspected I was, since this room was similar to the one Theia had told me about, then I needed to be very wary of the shaded areas in the room. How did I get here?

I slid off the bed carefully, losing my balance as my feet hit the floor. Something was very wrong. I felt . . . changed, uncoordinated. I looked down and couldn’t see my feet.

Ohmyeffinggod.

My stomach was huge. I cried out. Had I swallowed a beach ball? My shirt rode up over the roundness. I had no belly button—my innie was totally an outie now. I stared at my belly for a long time, too long. I just . . . couldn’t believe it. I didn’t wear the kind of clothes that could accommodate that kind of weight gain.

And then it moved. It felt like a small animal, only I felt it from inside my skin.

Ohmyeffinggod.

There was a baby.

Inside of me.

Oh crap oh crap oh crap. Just how long had I been unconscious?

I was pregnant. The thought paralyzed me. I’m a careful girl. I’ve had sex for the wrong reasons and I’ve made terrible choices, but never, never, never have I had unprotected sex. A baby is the very thing I never wanted. I never wanted to babysit them or hold them. I’d tolerated my little brother, but never actually liked him until he could play without smelling like diaper.

I’d never thought babies were cute and I pretty much believed every teen mom I saw had been hit with the stupid stick for not only getting herself in that position but keeping it besides. I’d been on the pill since I was thirteen, and nobody got near me without a condom
and
spermicide, which I carried in my purse at all times.

And now one of them lived inside of me?

Had I been in Under for so long that I slept through eight months of gestating? And then, as the thing rolled around like it was doing a somersault, my blood ran cold. What if . . . what if it wasn’t a
baby
baby? Like not made the normal way, with assistance from Gabe, who so help me was going to pay for this. Unless it was some kind of demon-possession thing.

I was so not cool with birthing demon spawn.

I needed to find my friends. Hopefully, Ame had snapped out of her trance—I needed her advice in a huge way. She would know what to do, I told myself as I padded across the floor. My center of gravity was all off and I felt wobbly. And a little hungry.

I shuddered. What if it wanted me to eat raw meat or something?

I wanted to cry and scream. This was not fair. My body was mine. I didn’t want to share it and I didn’t want to contemplate how I might have been violated. I never thought I’d be in a position to pray that Gabe had knocked me up, but oh, my God, if it wasn’t Gabe . . . The huge wooden door was locked and immovable. That didn’t surprise me. I paced, awkwardly, trying to get used to my new shape and figure out how to get free.

There were no windows in my room, but there was a huge fireplace blazing, flanked by tall bookshelves on either side. I pulled a few books off the shelves, but none of the words made any sense, so I put them back. What had I been hoping for?
The Secret Way Out of Your Room
? Maybe a copy of
What to Expect When You’re Expecting Satan’s Offspring
?

Tears tried to force their way out of my eyes, but I held them back. I would not cry. I hated crying. Just because I felt helpless didn’t mean I was. I just needed to find Amelia. She would know what to do.

There was a little statue of a pregnant-looking woman on the shelf. I picked it up, thinking that, if nothing else, I could use it to hit someone in the head if they came in.

As soon as I held it up for further inspection, the bookshelf began to swivel. I jumped back as the shelves disappeared and a skeleton sitting against a stone wall took their place.

I screamed.

It screamed back.

I screamed some more, holding my weapon threateningly. Because I could totally kill something already dead, right?

It wasn’t made completely of bones like the skeleton hanging out in the biology lab. That would have been better. Way less creepy. Instead, it had a beefy, normal body, but a skeleton head. No eyes, no skin, no hair . . . just white bone.

Still, even with no tongue or throat or lips, it was able to scream like
I
was the abomination. It got up, and I whimpered and backed away. It didn’t come at me, just stared at my belly. I put one hand over the baby protectively.

Seriously?
I was protecting it?

Yes, yes, I guess I was. “Don’t come near me!” I shouted.
Please wake up, Donny. This is a horrible dream.
“Wherever you just came from, go back.”

It shook its head, rattling its jaw, and pointed at my huge middle. “Donny, what the fuck?” the thing asked.

It felt like someone slammed an icicle into my heart. The
thing
had Gabe’s voice. My Gabe’s voice.

“Where is he?” I screamed, completely losing it. “What have you done with my boyfriend?” Did it eat him?

It tightened its fists the way Gabe sometimes does when he wants to throttle me. And then it ran its normal human hand over its bony head the way Gabe does when he ruffles his hair. “Shit,” he said.

I dropped the statue and stumbled backwards a few steps. I wanted to curl into a ball on the floor but there was no floor. The bottom of my world had fallen out.

That thing had Gabe’s voice, it wore his clothes, it mimicked his mannerisms to perfection, and it was clearly upset about my surprise pregnancy and its own lack of sandy brown, perfectly tousled locks of hair.

“No,” I said, deciding that this was just too much. Maybe it was a trick.

“Donny, I . . . You . . . What the hell?”

“Are you really him?” I asked softly, looking at the thing. He was terrifying. This couldn’t be happening. Please let this be a dream. Was he a demon too? All three of us fell for monsters? Maybe all men were. That would explain a lot.

“It’s me. I swear,” he said.

“How can I be sure? Tell me something only you would know.”

There went his hands to his hair again. And when that frustrated him, he did the fist thing. So far, he was very convincing. “You want trivia right now?”

“Yes!” Why did he always make things so difficult? Add another check to the “He’s probably Gabe” list.

“Like what?”

I had to stop looking at his head. “I don’t know. What tattoo do I have on my left boob?”

“I thought you said to tell you something only I would know.”

I glared at him, right at his empty eye sockets.

“Fine. You have a secret picture of us in your compact thing.”

I tried to put my hand on my hip, but it was all . . . not my usual hip. I had the graceful lines of a rhinoceros; there was no way to pull off my usual haughty stance. “I so do not keep your picture in my makeup compact. It’s a mirror, genius.”

“Yes, you do. I saw it. It’s not the one you use all the time; it’s the brown one in the bottom of your purse. The picture is from the night we had a picnic at the beach, but it rained so we ate in the car. I teased you about the S Club 7 CD you still had in your glove box, and you sang one of the songs to me really badly. Then we took pictures with your cell phone. One of them is in that mirror thing.”

All I could do was blink at him.

“Remember the time you told me I had lettuce in my teeth and to grab a mirror from your purse? I grabbed the wrong mirror first.”

My heart seized a little. He’d never said a word.

Clearly, the thing to do here would be to pass out, but it was a luxury I couldn’t afford. I had to deal.

The fight had gone out of me, though. It was a lot easier to be tough when Ame and Theia had my back. My aching back. I lowered myself onto the couch, holding the small of my back like I’d been practicing being pregnant for a long time.

“Are you okay?” His hollow eyes were trained on my stomach.

“No,” I said. “Are you?”

“How bad do I look?” he asked.

I so didn’t want to tell him. “What happened to you?”

He shrugged his human shoulders. “I dunno. I woke up like this. I don’t remember anything. You?”

“I woke up like this too.”

He sat in a chair across from me. I stared at his feet. The rest of him was too much to contemplate.

“We need to get out of here,” he said finally. Neither one of us wanted to discuss my pregnancy or his . . . condition.

“I couldn’t find a way out,” I said. “Are you a demon like Haden or something?”

“What? No. I’m just me.”

“Gabe, you don’t have a face.”

“Right. I’m pretty sure I’m not a demon, though.” He paused. “What about . . . ?”

He’d gestured at my large tummy. The baby was settling down, not rolling around so much. I wondered if it was sleeping or got more active when I was walking around. I purposely didn’t know much about being pregnant. Did babies sleep in there? What else was there to do?

Gabe was still waiting for an answer. I shrugged. “I just don’t know. Honestly. I’m trying not to think about it too much because I will probably go insane if I do.”

“Were you late? When we were at the cabin and stuff, before we came here, were you late?”

It was tempting to answer with a joke. I knew what he meant, though. I shook my head. “Not that I know of.”

“Would you have told me if you were?”

His words hung on the air like the accusation had nowhere to go except be stuck between us.

I shook my head again. “Probably not.”

“Damn it, Donny. Why can’t you share stuff with me? Am I so awful?” Gabe held up one hand. “Obviously, right now I am. But before I turned into Skeletor.”

“What’s a skeletor?”

“He was He-Man’s archnemesis . . . but that’s not the point. I’m your boyfriend and I’ve tried to be a really great one. Why can’t you ever rely on me? If you were pregnant, you should feel like you can come to me.”

“This conversation is stupid,” I said. Damn those tears trying to make a break for it. “If I was pregnant before we got here, I didn’t know it, so there is no point to be made. Maybe I would have told you—I don’t know. But
what if
and
maybe
aren’t helping us get out of here.”

“Do you think it’s mine?” My eyes must have widened because he quickly covered. “I know you didn’t cheat on me. I’m not asking if it’s another guy’s kid . . . you know what I mean. Do you think . . . ?”

“Do I think this baby is human? I don’t know that either.” I touched my stomach with one finger. I still had a hard time believing what I was seeing was true. “I’m very conflicted. On one hand, I don’t want to be pregnant. On the other, I feel . . . I don’t know . . . responsible? To keep it safe, ya know? It seems pretty innocent.”

“It sounds like you mean you’re feeling maternal.”

I scrunched my nose up. “God, I guess you’re right. I feel kind of maternal.”

I tried the word on and risked a look at his face. God, I missed his eyes. They were always so warm. “Do you feel . . . fathery?”

“I’m not sure. I feel . . . worried about you. Like I need to take care of you more than usual. But I’m not sure I feel anything about the . . .”

“Baby. It’s called a baby.” Oh, fabulous, now I was defending its honor. “Look, it doesn’t matter anyway. It’s not like I expect you to go to childbirth classes or anything.”

“You’re awfully snappy,” he said. I couldn’t disagree with him, but I certainly wasn’t about to
agree
either. “And why can’t you expect me to go to childbirth classes with you? Maybe part of the problem is that you never expect anything from me.”

“Part of what problem? The problems I’m looking at right now have nothing to do with what I count on you or don’t count on you for. We’re trapped in a hell dimension. I’m near the end of gestating a baby of unknown origins, and you have turned into a feature creature of some kind. Childbirth classes are a zillion miles from where we are.”

“Maybe, but like you said. Here we are . . . trapped. We’re in hell, together, and the worst things that can happen to us . . . have.” He held out his arms. “I’m still here, though, Donny.” He pointed to my stomach. “Whether that is my responsibility or not, I’m still here.”

“Where else are you going to go?” Okay, yes, I was being churlish.

But what if this was my life now? What if we were stuck in hell forever and I had to raise this baby with Gabe the skeleton man? What if it came out like some kind of monster too? I didn’t know if I could love a normal baby, but somehow I might have to love some kind of demon? It could come out with scales or vampire fangs. Would Gabe still be around then? Could I stand to look at him every day for eternity the way he was now?

I’m not as shallow as the sneetches, but this was extreme. I like boys a lot. I like the good-looking ones best of all. Gabe was the hottest guy I’d ever been with. I was extremely attracted to him, which is why I put up with all the things I’d never wanted before to be with him.