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I froze.

One bedroom.

I peered around the doorway.

One bed.

A small single bed.

I’d read those books before, but there wasno way—

“I’m kidding.” He chuckled darkly. “Oh, don’t look at me like that, bookworm. I prefer to sleep outdoors. That bed is for you.”

Without looking back, I made a rude gesture at him over my shoulder and strode into the room, slamming the door shut on his howling laughter behind me.

Chapter twelve

Little Pink Pills

Sleep was waiting forme in Faerie.

Like it had known that I was coming.

It welcomed me in an all-consuming embrace as my head hit the pillow, kicking my shoes off at the same time as I yanked the blanket out from under me, and I was unconscious before my boots clattered to the floor.

Lucid dreaming, my psychiatrist had said, would occur when the person became aware they were having a dream. Sometimes, it included an element of control. My dreams had been so vivid that they felt real, despite knowing that I was not within the bounds of my normal reality, and they had continued to plague my thoughts even during the day.

She had given me a sedative to start with—which didn’t work—and encouraged me to talk about the dreams.

I explained to her that I couldn’t, not that I didn’twantto, and I told her that they were less like dreams and more likevisionsinstead.

She didn’t believe me.

Nobody believed me.

Everyone was worried and caring, but nobody believed me. They thought the dreams were so wrong and twisted that I was ashamed to admit to their contents. When I realised, I couldn’t cope anymore.

I had a breakdown.

I snapped. I screamed, cried, and shattered a vase the day I told the psychiatrist that Iwantedto tell her about the dreams, but I was notallowedto tell her. Or anyone.

She’d asked me who had said that, and I’d fallen to my knees on her office floor and spit onto her carpet and shrieked as a searing heat burned my tongue.

At the end of the session, she’d handed me a prescription for an antipsychotic medication.

I filled it.

I swallowed the pill every morning.

Four weeks later, on the night before my twenty-first birthday, I had woken screaming at midnight from my very last nightmare.

After that, the dreams just stopped. Like they had never happened.

But I hadn’t taken one of those little pink pills in days.

And on my first night in Faerie, I remembered what the dreams had been about.

The glass wall rising up before me, shimmering with my own reflection—the gateway into the Court of Light. The mysterious, sentient woodland with diamond lights—the Forest of Eyes and Ears. And then the dungeon—where my prisonerwas tortured every single night as he had been for three long months, left scarred, beaten, and burned.