Page 23 of Never Been Witched (Starfall Point #3)

Collin

In his dream, Collin was running…in high heels.

This wasn’t the sort of dream in which he was in a situation so out of the ordinary that it was obvious he was dreaming. He felt like a passenger in this body. He was living out someone else’s memory.

Collin ran down the hall of the hotel’s north service wing.

He knew these walls, but they were different, covered in a sickly yellow paint he didn’t recognize.

The wooden floors felt alien against his feet.

Looking down, he realized that he was wearing old-fashioned shin-high lady shoes.

His hand, small and dainty, was tangled in the skirt of a long sky-blue dress with lacy cuffs at the wrists, holding it up so he could run.

On a chain around his neck, he saw the ring Alice found in Tremont’s.

What in the hell…

The thoughts of the body he was occupying crashed against his own like rogue marbles, making his head a noisy mess.

Why was he running down a dark hallway in the Duchess at night inside this smaller, shorter body?

And he was afraid. It wasn’t a feeling he was accustomed to, and he didn’t like it.

He dropped his skirts and turned. He didn’t know why he was running, but a woman in this sort of dress didn’t run down dark hallways at night for fun.

“Victoria!” A shadow fell across the end of the hallway, tall and thin, but somehow so intimidating, even in that slim silhouette.

Collin bolted away, but toward what? The nearest exit was the back garden, down two short flights of stairs, and he was in heels he couldn’t take off without special equipment. He was lucky he hadn’t tripped and fallen on his face already.

No. He knew this hotel better than anybody, and that Slenderman motherfucker wasn’t about to take him on his home turf.

That thought, Collin knew, was his own.

He didn’t bother rattling the doorknobs of the storage rooms around him.

He didn’t want to hide inside a room and wait for whoever was behind him to bust through the door.

He wanted to be outside. There were no people to scream for.

He could feel the thunder of footsteps on the floor behind him as he reached the stairs, and then—

Agony seized the base of his skull and exploded into a shower of stars behind his eyes.

He’d never had long hair before. The pain of having it pulled from behind by angry hands was blinding.

His body was thrown back onto the wooden floor, the breath stolen from his lungs as the boards seemed to punch him in the back.

Everything hurt . He could barely think.

He was powerless, helpless. He’d never been so frightened. He couldn’t even move .

Long legs clad in dark tailored pants emerged from the darkness, standing over him. He opened his mouth to scream.

Collin awoke mid-shout, standing in the hallway of the north wing. He looked down and saw that he was wearing sweatpants and a Dartmouth T-shirt—and no shoes at all.

He whirled around, half-expecting the tall shadow figure to be lurking somewhere, but all he could see were orange walls lit by the red emergency-exit lights—which was honestly creepy enough on its own.

The hallway was empty, as were the guest rooms upstairs.

The last of the guests had left earlier this week during the shutdown process for the season, and construction.

In the dark, Collin stumbled over to a bench and collapsed. He propped his elbows against his knees and forced air into his lungs. He was himself again. He was OK. He supposed that he should be grateful he didn’t sleep naked.

He was just one door away from the guesthouse.

Desperately, he wanted to go to Alice, to tell her what had just happened to him, but she had enough on her plate.

In addition to some magical powers he still didn’t fully understand, she was dealing with her grandparents and their epic assholery.

He’d never seen two grown people treat someone they were supposed to love the way the Proctors had treated Alice.

What was wrong with the two of them? Even Cynthia and Lawrence never had the nerve to openly berate him in front of other people.

And with all that, Alice shouldn’t have to prop up a frantic grown man at—he glanced at the clock on the wall— argh, two a.m. because he had a nightmare.

Collin had never been a sleepwalker—to his knowledge.

Had he done this before, wandering around the hotel in his sleep?

He was pretty sure that was the sort of thing guests would complain about.

He padded down the hall toward the exit that Victoria had been running for in the dream.

Had she known her way around the hotel like he did?

Or were those his own thoughts entirely?

He’d never felt fear like that before—like a freezing, frantic living thing burrowing in his chest, taking up space—but he supposed that was normal, having never been a woman walking around a public space in the dark.

He stood, shaking his head. No, that wasn’t right.

Victoria had been scared, but not for herself—at least, not at first. She’d been scared for someone else.

And somehow, she’d felt familiar. Had he occupied the ghost of the woman who’d screamed at him and Alice in Shaddow House?

He’d been wearing that ring on a chain, and it seemed like too much of a coincidence that he’d been wearing a blue dress and was called “Victoria.”

Then again, the whole thing could have been a dream.

Maybe sleepwalking was some new symptom of unprocessed trauma, which was being triggered by returning to his family’s space after all these years.

Not to mention the shocking realization that ghosts were real.

It felt like his whole brain had changed somehow.

In the days following the revelation at Shaddow House, he was seeing not full-form apparitions around the hotel, but shadows seemed to be more meaningful.

He could see shapes out of the corners of his eyes, there and then suddenly not.

There was a particularly dark presence that he could feel near the entrance of his second-floor office—a place where he had always felt content as a kid.

Shouldn’t he have felt something then, if there was something to be afraid of?

He thought kids were supposed to be more sensitive to this sort of thing.

He stopped, his head still slightly fuzzy from sleep. He could swear he heard footsteps at the far end of the hall. Small, hurried feet were striking hardwood floors that were no longer there.

Collin murmured, “What the…”

A shadow separated from the tangerine depths of the hallway. It was a small feminine outline in a long dress, hair piled on top of her head. She was running, looking behind her as she was being chased.

Collin froze.

Another shadow formed behind the first, a long-limbed male silhouette, shoulders set in angry lines.

In his head, Collin could hear the rumble of an angry voice, but not actual words.

Maybe Collin wasn’t ready to hear it yet?

The smaller shadow person ran toward him, becoming more and more solid the closer she got. He could hear her breathing.

“Victoria, wait!” Collin yelled.

But instead of turning toward his voice, the figure kept running, as if she didn’t even register him there. He felt a cold draft as she passed him. The taller figure stormed closer, arm outstretched, and Collin’s head ached in the moment that the man’s ghostly hand caught her around the hair.

“Stop!” Collin yelled.

The man yanked her backward, and the two shadows faded back into the orange recesses of the stairway. Unlike the ghosts at Shaddow House, they hadn’t interacted with him at all.

Collin breathed shakily. “What the hell?”

If he sat back down, he wasn’t sure he would ever get up again.

He had to keep moving. He shuffled toward the stairs and realized he was walking toward the “guesthouse” portion of the hotel, where Alice was staying.

Was that where Victoria had been heading?

Who was she? Had she worked in the hotel?

Her clothes seemed to be from a time just after the hotel opened. Anything was possible.

It would be so easy for him to walk into the guesthouse and knock on Alice’s door, tell her all about this.

No. He slowly and deliberately aimed his footsteps away from Alice and toward the staff exit nearest Forsythia Manor.

Unfortunately, Sleepwalking Collin had not thought to put on shoes, so he walked along the stony beach path barefoot.

Alice was going through enough. And he’d already blurred the employee-employer boundaries enough by moving her within the hotel’s walls. And then kissing her.

He tried to muster up some guilt about kissing Alice, but he couldn’t feel bad about it. Was it unprofessional, potentially unethical, and a huge legal liability? Yes. But she’d kissed him back. Enthusiastically.

The cool air blowing in from the lake helped wake him up, forced some sense into his head.

He hadn’t been in a relationship in… He wasn’t sure he’d had a real relationship since Paige.

He’d met some lovely women. He’d dated. But he hadn’t allowed himself to get truly close to anyone—not because he didn’t trust them, but because he didn’t trust himself.

And Alice had trusted him with possibly the biggest secret in the known universe.

Sure, it hadn’t been entirely intentional, considering he’d stormed into Shaddow House uninvited like a big idiot.

But once he knew, she hadn’t panicked, and there was a kindness in that.

He was confident that he hadn’t been offered that kind of trust so casually… probably ever.