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“A mirror?” Stardust asked dryly.

“No, the dream dust thefts.” Darius’s expression became stony. “There’s been one almost every day around dawn, and the victims are always Dreamers who’ve won the previous Weaving. The Investigations Team has concluded the magic being stolen is the Weaving winner’s earnings.”

Stardust scribbled frantically into her notebook. “This seems to indicate these thefts are a Nightmare’s doing.”

Darius pursed his lips. “That’s the problem.”

I raised my eyebrows at the dark flash in his eyes. “Why do you care? You’re a Nightmare.”

“Nightmare or not, I don’t want the balance to tip,” Darius said. “It’s far too important. We must protect it at all costs.”

I was startled by his passion, but perhaps with what I was coming to learn about him, it wasn’t so surprising after all.

The moment he left, Stardust gave me a rather sulky look. “You know I didn’t abandon you, right? I really did have something important to do.”

“Of course,” I said hurriedly to assure her. I stood and hooked my bag on my shoulder. “Are you going to tell me what you found out?”

Chapter 17

As we soared through the dawn-shrouded sky, Stardust frowned at my dream locket. “You lost again, didn’t you?”

I sighed. “Are you going to torture me with another post-Weaving lecture?”

“Why waste my breath? You never listen.”

“I do listen and can even recite all your main points: create less-complicated dreams, use fewer flowers, practice my stitches.”

“Yet you ignore me because you’re convinced you know better,” she said. “Perhaps I shouldn’t tell you what I discovered during my investigations, considering you don’t value my opinion.”

It’s not as if I hadn’t valued it…I’d just been so determined to prove myself my own way that I hadn’t wanted to listen to anybody—and that pride had only caused me to lose. I sighed. “I’ve admittedly been going about my Weavings the entirely wrong way. I will do my best to better listen in the future. Now will you tell me what you’ve discovered?”

Despite my attempt at humility, she remained silent, which only escalated my curiosity.

“Are you looking for a bribe?” I asked. “Will a bag of moonbits be sufficient?”

Stardust’s lips twitched at the offer and she softened. “After Spiderweb mentioned reading about you in the weaving files, I decided to check them out myself.” She paused mid-flight to pull out a parchment folder. “Not every Dreamer has one, and I wanted to know what information they had about you.”

I eagerly took the folder from her. “How did you get this?”

“That’s not important,” Stardust said, confirming my suspicions that she’d stolen it. “Look at what’s inside.”

The file contained three pieces of parchment. The first was the weaving record Darius had mentioned, which listed the names of the six pairs of Weavers who’d been assigned to me over the years, the length of their assignment—most had only lasted a few nights—and their rank, the last three sets being classified as advanced. Scrawled at the bottom were the words: “Deemed incapable of dreaming; terminate all future assignments,” dated five years ago and signed by both the Head Dreamer and Head Nightmare.

“Darius actually told the truth. I never considered the possibility that I’d ever had any Weavers.”

“I’m not surprised,” Stardust said. “Every Mortal is assigned a Weaving partnership, so you’d have been no exception if the Council believed you to be Mortal. I’m surprised the Council didn’t investigate the reason why you were the only Mortal incapable of dreaming. Look at the next page.”

The second parchment, dated only a few weeks ago, contained a record of my recent activity on Earth—the precise amount of magic detected around me when the dream I’d tried to capture had shattered, the length of time I was in a trance while dream watching, how long I slept, and small interactions between me and the villagers that made it clear I could be seen by them. It was all here, ready to be perused by anyone curious.

“Who recorded all of this?”

Stardust tapped the bottom:Submitted by Nightmare Darius. My fists tightened and crumpled the edges of the file. “Him!” His recent friendliness had made me hope that perhaps he was no longer investigating me, but I’d clearly been mistaken.

“Careful, don’t wrinkle it; we need to leave it exactly the way it was when I borrowed it.” Stardust snatched the file back and smoothed out the crinkled edges. “I hadn’t realized Spiderweb had dug up so much dirt on you. He even included his successful Weaving.”

She pointed to the last item on Darius’s list chronicling my suspicious behavior, which described the nightmare he’d given me in detail and the amount of dream dust it had yielded. “Luckily, he appears to be the only Nightmare investigating you.”

I gritted my teeth to muffle the curses fighting to escape. “One is bad enough.” I reread every bullet point, each worse than the last. Darius had even included the supposedly empty jar he was investigating. Thankfully, he made no mention of my ability to see dreams, or that a broken dream had caused the huge burst of magic he’d detected on Earth. For now those secrets were safe, but for how much longer?