Page 36 of Skalterra By Nightmare (The Skalterra Duology #1)

Jonquil yowled when I stepped on her tail in my hurry to chase after Stanley. Liam shouted my name behind me as I tore through the front door, but I ignored him.

Stanley had a good head start, and after running through Skalterra with an Olympian-Class body all month, I didn’t love how stiff and awkward my real legs felt beneath me. However, I wasn’t the only one trapped in their actual form. As strong, fast, and formidable as “Titus”

was, Stanley was less of an athlete than even me.

He’d barely made it to the corner of Gams’s building by the time I caught him by the back of his button-up.

I spun him around and slammed him into the side of the shop, barring my arm across his chest. I had at least three inches on him. His hair was thinning and his features weren’t as defined as Titus’s were, but there was a definite resemblance there.

“Wren! What the hell?”

Liam stood in the open door of the shop, gawking at us.

“It’s fine!”

I pressed harder against Stanley’s chest.

“Go watch the register. And if you tell my grandmother, it’ll be your missing posters that we put up next.”

I kept my eyes fixed on Stanley’s sweating face and waited until I saw Liam disappear back into the shop after a moment’s hesitation.

“How?”

I demanded. Lucid Nightmares were supposed to be rare, but here we were. Two of us living in nearby towns.

“You know I don’t know.”

He growled the words, but they weren’t nearly as intimidating as I was sure he would’ve liked.

“Why’d you run?”

“Because you killed me last time I saw you.”

“Right. My bad. I promise to let the rotsbane devour your consciousness next time.”

I half-expected Stanley to disappear beneath me.

“Where’s Tamora? Did she go back to Vanderfall yet?”

“Why? So you can set your merry band of thieves on us?”

“Tell Tamora to get over it. We only took two bottles!”

“The guard said he saw you with four.”

I rolled my eyes so hard that Stanley almost wiggled free, but I pushed him against the wall again.

“Fine. I don’t care where Tamora is. How quickly can she get to the Bay of Teeth?”

Stanley wrinkled his nose at me.

“She doesn’t care about the Frozen God anymore.”

“How many days? She owns all the railroads, doesn’t she? How many days for her to get to the Frozen God?”

“They’re called steamtrails,”

he sniffed.

“They’re railroads and trains, Stanley,”

I said through gritted teeth.

“And Tamora needs—”

“Tamora needs to be left alone.”

Stanley relaxed into the wooden siding of the Gams’s shop.

“So tell your pals Ferris and Galavant—”

“Galahad. His name was Galahad.”

My eyes stung with unbidden tears, and I slammed my bandaged hand against the wall next to Stanley’s head.

“And he’s dead. Because Ferrin killed him.”

Stanley’s eyes widened.

“Galahad was your nocturmancer. You can’t go back.”

“Ferrin is going to release the Frozen God,”

I said.

“He’s going to kill my friends to do it. Please. You have to tell Tamora. She has to stop him.”

Stanley shook his head.

“I know you don’t know Tamora well, but she doesn’t do things for others.”

“The Barony will collapse. She won’t control the Skal supply anymore. Ferrin will.”

“She’s clever. She’ll adapt.”

I released Stanley and stepped back. Part of me felt bad for him. The difference between his real appearance and his Nightmare form was horribly telling. Every differing detail signaled what he disliked the most about himself, and there were a lot of differing details.

“You didn’t run from me because I killed you,”

I said.

“You ran because you’re embarrassed.”

“Embarrassed?”

He tried to sneer, but his sallow cheeks turned red, and sweat beaded on his scalp, visible through his thinning hair.

“You don’t like yourself.”

“Says the girl who obviously doesn’t have blue hair in real life.”

“If Ferrin frees the Frozen God and bridges the Rift, what happens to the Nightmares?” I asked.

Stanley’s cheeks turned brighter still.

“There will still be Nightmares.”

“Will there?”

I crossed my arms and flashed him a dubious smirk.

“And if there are, will Tamora still need a Nightmare bodyguard? She’ll have so much Skal. How do you know you won’t become redundant? And then you’ll be stuck like this. Forever.”

“There’s nothing wrong with how I am!”

He raised his voice.

“I didn’t say there was. You did.”

I stood my ground, daring him to tell me I was wrong. Maybe it was cruel to use a man’s insecurities against him this way, but Tamora was my best bet to stop Ferrin, and if psychologically torturing a sad banker was my ticket to saving Fana and Orla, then dammit, I would just have to psychologically torture the sad banker.

“You love Skalterra, but you love being Titus more. So stop Ferrin. Save Titus.”

He sulked, holding himself around his elbows and frowning.

“I’ll see what I can do, but Tamora is stubborn. If she decides not to face Ferrin—”

“Then tell her my name, let her summon me, and I’ll convince her. And then I’ll help her kill Ferrin myself.”

Stanley’s sullen face broke, and he had the audacity to laugh. Not just a chuckle, either, but a full-blown, head-back guffaw, and it was my turn to blush.

“Sure. After everything you just said about me becoming redundant? Why not?”

“I’m trying to help you!”

“You’re trying to help yourself!”

A cruel grin twisted the kind features I’d come to associate with Stanley, and suddenly the resemblance between him and his Nightmare form was much more striking.

“You don’t look much like yourself either. Say what you want about saving your friends, but you want the same thing as me. Now your nocturmancer is dead, and you want mine so you can live out your blue-haired, warrior princess fantasies.”

“No.”

I jammed a finger into his chest.

“Unlike you, I’m happy to admit I hate myself. Unlike you, I know blue hair doesn’t change me, and I will happily die over and over and over again if it means saving the people I do like. My name is Wren Warrender. Tell Tamora. Tell her I can help.”

Stanley pushed my hand away.

“Or what? You’ll grow spikes out of your arms and stab me?”

“Tell Tamora. Ferrin will ruin our world if he gets through.”

“Then I guess it’s a good thing I don’t care much for it to begin with. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get to work.”

I stood defeated as he stepped around me and walked to an old sedan parked outside Gams’s front door. His key fob beeped, and I kept my eyes forward on the peeling, wooden siding of the shop.

“I saved you,”

I reminded him.

“I could’ve let you die in that rotsbane’s mouth.”

“Then maybe you were never cut out for Skalterra to begin with.”

His car door slammed behind me, and he peeled out of the parking spot and up the hill towards the highway.

Liam didn’t try too hard to interrogate me on my interaction with Stanley. Either he knew me well enough by now to know I wouldn’t tell him or he was harboring hurt feelings over my missing posters remark. And yes, I did feel bad about that particular jab, but not enough to distract me from my simmering anger.

Because discovering Titus in my grandmother’s general store was the doomsday-flavored cherry on top of what had already been a terrible twenty-four hours.

Galahad was dead, Orla and Fana would soon follow, the world was about to be overrun with power-hungry Magicians, and there was a chance to stop it if it weren’t for the fragile ego of one mediocre man.

Despite my crappy mood, Liam pulled fresh bandages out of his bag at lunch and silently changed the gauze on my hand as we sat on the back deck, each stewing in our own thoughts and worries. There was an odd comfort to the silence, like neither of us expected the other to break it, and that was okay.

After we closed shop for the day, Liam hung around long enough for dinner. I scrubbed at dirty dishes in the sink while he stood over Gams’s shoulder at the dining table, helping her navigate the internet as she fretted over our train tickets and hotel rooms.

My interview with Von Leer felt so pointless now. By the time Fall Semester started, there might not be a college there anymore thanks to Ferrin. However, the thought of the weekend trip made my heart race for a different reason.

At the end of this week, if all went according to plan, I would be meeting my birth father.

Yes, my plans to figure out what he knew about Skalterra were the priority and more important than ever, but after spending eighteen years secretly searching his name online, I harbored a selfish anxiety at the thought of meeting him at long last.

“I think that one’s clean, dear,”

Gams murmured behind me. I hadn’t realized I’d been violently scrubbing at a single plate.

“How’s this room look, Liam?”

“There’s only one bed,”

Liam said. I whipped around to glare at them, but both their backs were to me as they surveyed hotel rooms on Gams’s computer.

“Though it looks like the couch might be a pull-out.”

“I’m not putting Wren on a pull-out.”

“I’m not either. That’s where I would sleep.”

Liam laughed softly and looked over his shoulder at me. I turned back to the sink, scrubbing harder than before.

“What about that one? It’s got two queens.”

“Sure, sure. Where’d my wallet go?”

Liam came up behind me and took my sponge and plate away.

“Let me,” he said.

“I’m fine,”

I protested, but shifted over to give him room at the sink.

“I don’t want you getting your bandages wet, though they probably need changing anyway.”

I balled my hand into a fist, closing my fingers over the gauze and bandages.

“It’s okay. I can change them,” I said.

Liam’s eyes softened, and he chewed on the inside of his cheek. He glanced back at Gams, and then swallowed whatever words he’d been holding back.

“We’re going to have fun this weekend,”

he said instead. I nodded with a tight-lipped smile, knowing neither of us would be in the mood to have fun.

I passed the next few days on edge. Every ring of the bell above the shop door made me jump. I watched the windows, waiting for Stanley or even Ferrin to pass by. My phone battery puttered out before lunch every day after I subjected my browser to constant refreshes. I wasn’t sure how obvious Ferrin’s arrival in Keldori would be, but there were sure to be signs in the news.

It was hard to know what to look for, however, and more often than not, I ended up back on the video Linsey had posted of Mom. It had surpassed a couple million views, and now that my initial mortification had subsided, there was a strange comfort in watching Mom shatter potted plants.

Apparently book sales had never been better in the wake of the video, and while I wished that meant she could come home from Europe early, I figured this was her summer to make up for all the vacations and opportunities she’d canceled so she could stay home with me.

Still, though. The world had never felt so impossibly big as it did when I wanted nothing more than a hug from my mom.

Not to mention, I was about to betray her. As far as she was concerned, I didn’t have a biological father. I’d simply sprung into existence. Maxwell Brenton was a taboo name under our roof. He had given us nothing, so we would give him nothing, not even a passing thought, in return.

However, Thursday morning, I carried my overnight bag down to the curbside, fully intending to finally meet my father later that day.

It was hard to know which was twisting my gut more—the thought of being face-to-face with the man who had become a sort of forbidden mythology, or that my admissions fate with Von Leer sat with an interview the next morning.

Liam waved at me from Gams’s sedan where he was loading his backpack in the backseat. It was another beautiful summer morning in Keel Watch Harbor. The heat of the sun was cut but the sea breeze, and the smell of fresh bagels wafted down the street from Teddy’s shop. The library glinted on the hill like a bit of glass nestled among the trees and bushes, and children’s feet thundered across the wooden boards of the decks behind the shops.

It was almost a shame to leave it behind.

“Alright, let’s get on with it! I open in thirty minutes.”

Gams bustled out of the shop behind me and shooed us into the car.

“We could walk to the station if you’re worried about opening in time,”

Liam offered, sliding into the passenger seat behind me.

“Up that hill?”

She took the driver’s seat and jammed her hand into the bag of bagels Liam had left on the center console.

“You can if you like, but I have a perfectly capable car.”

I clutched my backpack against my chest and leaned my head against the window as we drove up the hill. Leaving Keel Watch Harbor felt a little bit like leaving my shelter. Nothing changed here, save the occasional disappearance. Every day was like the one before. It was simple and predictable, and the trip to the train station felt like inviting danger.

The train station was across the street from the library, and even though she was just dropping us off at the curb, Gams jumped out of the car and let it idle. She came around the car’s front as I closed the passenger door, and she extended her hands to reveal a blue chicken in each one.

She gave Liam his chicken first before wrapping him in a hug, and then she turned to me.

“For luck,”

she said, pressing the other chicken into my hands.

“I look forward to using a new paint color next week.”

She pulled me in and held me there. I was always so struck by how someone her age could hug so tightly.

“Wren Warrender,”

she pulled away to cup my face in her hands.

“whatever ever happens tomorrow morning, I am so very proud of you.”

“I know.”

I nodded into her hands, and her wrinkled face melted into a soft smile.

“And remember,”

she said coyly.

“the best revenge is to live your best life. Now go make Linsey weep.”