Page 41 of Skalterra By Nightmare (The Skalterra Duology #1)

Orla and Fana were dead.

They had to be if Ferrin was here.

My legs shook, but I braced for an attack. Running was still an option, but I wasn’t sure what good that would do if Ferrin had already broken through the Rift. I didn’t have my Nightmare powers here, but that didn’t mean I was going to let him take me down without a fight.

“Please, take a seat.”

He gestured at the chair across from his, but I stayed standing.

“You.”

He looked up at me in surprise, his eyebrows disappearing into shadows beneath his coiffed hair.

“Yes, sorry again. You were supposed to meet with my colleague today, but she called out sick. Please.”

He pointed at the chair again.

He didn’t recognize me. I hadn’t thought my Nightmare form looked much different than my actual self, but maybe the blue hair had been pulling more attention from my face than I’d realized.

“You’re an admissions officer.”

I thought he’d wanted the unlimited power allowed by our vast stores of Skal and all the creature comforts our advanced technology allowed, not a nine-to-five. It didn’t make sense.

Who went through all that trouble, killing their own family and betraying everyone who had ever trusted them, just to live out their dreams in an office job?

I was missing a piece of the puzzle, but I wasn’t sure what I was looking for.

“I am indeed an admissions officer.”

The chuckle in his voice set my teeth on edge.

“There’s no need to be nervous. I promise, if you’ve made it this far in the admissions process, there’s a good chance this day ends well for you.”

He leaned back in his desk chair and winked.

“Don’t do that,”

I whispered.

“Don’t wink at me.”

His smile faltered, and he cleared his throat.

“Right. On to the interview then. Did you bring a copy of your transcripts?”

“You’ve been here a while.”

I looked around his office. It was lived in. The knick-knacks on the shelves had a light layer of dust. There was a pin-adorned map of the coast on his wall next to the door.

“At Von Leer?”

he clarified.

“A few years, yes. But this is your interview, not mine.”

I’d been wearing a Von Leer hoodie the night Orla and I had saved Ciarán in Vanderfall. When Ferrin had seen me, he’d been taken aback by it. I thought it was because he’d never seen a hoodie before. Now I wasn’t so sure.

“A few years,”

I repeated.

He’d still been trapped in Skalterra just a week ago.

“It’s a good school. Good place to work. Ah! There’s your transcripts. The email just came through.”

He leaned in towards his computer screen, clicking and scrolling.

“Again, I know we’re a bit disorganized today. Sorry about that, Miss—”

He froze with his mouth slightly agape, and his eyes widened ever so slightly before he raised them to me. His look of shock slowly melted into one of cruel delight, and every instinct screamed at me to run.

“Miss Wren Warrender.”

He finished with a smile.

“Did you kill them?” I choked.

“You don’t look like how I imagined you would. Your Nightmare was so…”

He paused as his eyes roved over me.

“So vivid. But this?”

“Are Orla and Fana dead?”

I asked more forcefully this time.

He rolled his eyes and spun in his chair to rise to his feet.

“Come on, Wren. You can figure the answer to that one out. You’re smart. Now prove it! This is your admissions interview after all.”

He was playing with me.

“They’re alive,”

I said.

“You’ve been here too long. You—”

He leaned against his filing cabinet and grinned.

“Yes?”

“You’re a Nightmare,”

I realized out loud.

“This isn’t your real body.”

He made a show of clapping for me.

“Bravo, Just-Wren. That didn’t take too long at all.”

“But Orla said it’s impossible to project Nightmares on this side of the Rift. She said not even Galahad—”

“And Galahad is dead.”

Ferrin shrugged.

“He was good at his tricks, but he was stubborn and lacked imagination. Meanwhile, I figured out how to create a Nightmare of myself in Keldori decades ago.”

“When you said you’d met another lucid Nightmare—”

“Surprise!”

Ferrin gave me a salute.

“So Orla and Fana are—”

“Alive.”

He waved a dismissive hand.

“I would love to rush to the Bay of Teeth, free the Frozen God, and open the Rift. Really, I’m impatient. I’m tired of living in Keldori as a sometimes-man. Or, I could do this right. I could figure out where the Rift lets out on this side, so when we free Saergrim, we have him surrounded from both directions and can subdue him before he becomes a problem.”

“Then why are you here? Working at Von Leer.”

He raised a lazy finger to point at the pin-laden map on the wall next to me.

“It took a while, but I’ve narrowed the Rift location down to somewhere within a five hundred mile radius of here. This is the most prestigious school in the area, so I sit in my office and go through college applications. Any hint of anything strange on an application, and I put them on the waitlist so I can meet them face-to-face and ask more questions.”

“Anything strange?”

I repeated.

“Sure.”

He shrugged.

“It’s not a perfect system, but every once in a while I’ll get a student who started a lucid dreaming club at their high school, or a kid with close family that went missing one day never to be seen again. See, those provide good clues. Not the dream club kids, but the kids with missing family.”

Liam had been waitlisted. He’d mentioned telling his admissions officer about his missing parents. But Liam was just Liam, and while his parents and cousin’s disappearances were tragic, there was nothing supernatural or magick about them.

“You’re wasting your time,” I hissed.

“Am I?”

Ferrin put a hand over his heart and leaned back over his desk to scroll on his computer again.

“Because it looks like you submitted a finalized transcript after your graduation date, but the address doesn’t match the one you initially listed. And the date, I mean, that lines up pretty dead on for when you showed up in Skalterra perfectly lucid.”

I shook my head. This wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be.

“The town you listed, though, that’s what’s weird to me. It’s the same town the orphan kid was from. Keel Watch Harbor. I remember it because I visited.”

He crossed to his bookshelf and reached for a green chicken. I recognized Gams’s brushstrokes in the paint, and I held my breath.

“It’s a coincidence,”

I insisted. Gams had nothing to do with this. Neither did Liam, nor Keel Watch Harbor.

“I picked this up in the shop the kid told me he worked at. The cutest old lady was running the joint, but there was nothing special about it. Except for this.”

He turned the chicken in his hands, watching the light from the window bounce off the sheen of the glaze.

“I know you aren’t a Magician, so you aren’t sensitive to Skal, but she had an entire shelf of these damn chickens. Each one buzzed with magick. I think it was in the paint, but the energy has long since worn off. Maybe it’s time I went and picked up another one? Unless…”

Ferrin crossed the office in two long strides, and I recoiled with my back pressed against the door. He took my backpack from my hands and reached inside.

“Hey!”

I lunged to take my things back, but he pushed me away with inhuman strength. He withdrew his hand from my bag, and the blue chicken Gams had gifted me at the train station gleamed in his palm.

“Skal,”

he hissed.

“But it doesn’t glow!”

I didn’t mean for the words to sound so hysterical.

“Because Keldori is full of Skal. It’s the same reason you can’t see the stars during the day. Everything else is too damn bright.”

He crushed the chicken in his hand, and porcelain dust rained down onto the low carpet.

“Shame. Guess I’ll have to go buy another one. I’ve been meaning to go back ever since I found this in the town just north of there.”

He slipped his hand inside his filing cabinet, and my breath hitched when he withdrew one of Riley’s posters.

Ferrin grinned at the look on my face.

“Keel Watch Harbor has an issue with disappearances it seems. I’d ask if you’d believe that this kid is the cousin of the orphan boy, but looking at your face, I think you might already know.”

I shook my head.

“You’re wrong,”

I whispered. He had to be. And if Keel Watch Harbor did have a connection to Skalterra and the Rift, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that Ferrin would hurt Gams if he knew she was my grandmother.

“Tell you what, Miss Warrender. I’ll let you into Von Leer if you tell me everything you know about Keel Watch Harbor, the orphan boy, and those funny, little chickens.”

I lunged for my bag again, but he held it out of reach.

“You are going to stay away from my home,”

I growled, taking up a stance in front of his office door.

“You’re going to fight a Nightmare?”

He grinned.

“I’ve been studying your tricks this last month, and I have to admit, I’m excited for the opportunity to try them out for myself.”

His arm lengthened into a mantis-like spear, and I ripped the door open and ducked out just as I heard the thunk of Ferrin embedding his pointed arm in the wood.

The waiting room had filled with more students, and they stared at me as I sprinted for the exit and careened into the hall. The woman at the desk shouted something after me, but I couldn’t make it out over the thundering of blood in my ears and the haggard breaths that worked their way out of my chest like sobs.

I ditched my blazer on the top step of the College Hall entrance. Even in the shade of the building, the July sun was hot, but I would not let it slow me down.

I was racing against Ferrin. He would hurt Gams and Liam and Orla and Fana.

I would not let him. I could not let him.

And I didn’t know how Gams’s chickens had become full of Skal, but I knew she couldn’t have been who put it there.

As for Liam and his missing family, that was a coincidence. A bunch of random details were leading Ferrin in the wrong direction, and Keel Watch Harbor would pay the price for it.

My legs were painfully slow compared to those of my Nightmare form, but I forced them to sprint across campus. My pencil skirt ripped with the force of my strides. I needed to get to Liam. I needed to warn everyone.

My phone was in my bag with Ferrin, but Liam had a cellphone too. We could call Gams. We could tell her that Ferrin was coming. He was too powerful to physically stop, but if everyone got out in time—

I looked back over my shoulder. Ferrin was walking across the grounds after me, as if on a leisurely stroll. Up ahead, the forest whispered in the wind.

It was the most direct route to the train station.

My stomach clenched, and I watched my feet as I ran, unable to bear the view of the trees looming overhead. My shallow breath had nothing to do with the physical effort of running.

I forced my eyes upwards to find one of the trailheads I’d seen when we’d first come to campus. A breathless sob worked its way out of my chest as I sprinted past the wooden sign that marked the trail, and let the trees swallow me.

“Liam!”

I cried. He wouldn’t be able to hear me from here, but I couldn’t help calling out. The trees towered overhead. The low vegetation made it difficult to see any farther than the trail allowed. Panic roiled in my chest.

But it should be a straight shot. A train whistled in the distance, hastening me forwards.

Something heavy collided with my side, and I hit the dirt rolling. I landed splayed out and flat on my back as Ferrin stood over me rubbing the wrist of the hand he’d hit me with.

“You can’t outrun me, Wren,”

he tutted.

“And quite frankly, it’s embarrassing that you even tried.”

“I won’t let you hurt them.”

I spat dirt out of my mouth.

“Forgive me for not taking you seriously. I’ve heard that line from you before, and it lost its punch after I killed Galahad.”

His arm morphed back into his mantis-spear.

“Sorry about this. Honestly, I thought you would’ve died with Galahad, but if you insist on getting in my way, then this’ll do just fine.”

He drew his elbow back, preparing to drive his spear through my chest, but I grabbed dirt in both my hands and threw it upwards into his face.

He cried out and blindly jabbed, and I was able to roll out of the way and scramble back to my feet.

“You’ll regret that!”

Ferrin roared after me.

“I was nothing but kind to you in Skalterra, Wren! I took care of you when no one else did, and this is how you repay me?”

I risked a glance backwards, and felt my face drain of warmth despite the hot air.

Ferrin had doubled in size and held two mantis-arms aloft, ready to strike, as he charged after me on beastly hind legs. His face elongated into a snout, and crocodile scales ran up his chest and neck.

I staggered to a stop, frozen in horror at the monster Ferrin had become. Was that how I had looked in Skalterra when I fought?

Part of my brain screamed to keep running, but the other, more rational part told me this couldn’t be real. This was a bad dream, and if Ferrin killed me, I’d wake up in the hotel room, still curled in Liam’s arms.

And if that were the case, then maybe I should get it over with and let him do it.

“Wren, don’t stop!”

A hand wrapped around my wrist and yanked me down the path. Liam, in his blue Von Leer hoodie, dragged me after him.

“Liam!”

“Just run!”

Liam’s face reflected my own horror back at me as we sprinted hand in hand.

“How— why are you here?” I panted.

Liam shook his head.

“You called my name. Do you wanna tell me what the hell that thing is?”

Ferrin crashed through foliage behind us, and I bit back a terrified whimper.

“I told you,”

I breathed.

“I have really bad nightmares.”

I wasn’t sure how he’d heard me call for help, but he’d come. Even though I’d betrayed him. Even though he was mad.

He was here, running from a monster with me.

I truly did not deserve him.

He looked back over our shoulders, and his eyes widened.

“Don’t look back. Wren, keep running. Promise me you’ll keep going.”

“Liam?”

“Don’t stop, Wren!”

His voice, panicked and pleading, cut off in a scream of pain.

Blood sprayed across my face, and Liam’s hand ripped away from mine. The forest tilted around me when I tried to stop too fast, and Liam’s name tore at the back of my throat as I shrieked for him.

Of all the unreal, fantastical things I’d seen in the last month, the image of the bloodied spike driven through Liam’s chest was the least believable.

Because he was Liam. He was constant, and kind, and wonderful, and brave, and Ferrin couldn’t kill him.

“I said,”

Liam gasped, blood spilling from his mouth and down his chin.

“keep running.”

Ferrin threw Liam’s body to the dirt path, pinning him to the earth. Liam twitched in the dust with his head lolled to the side like a broken doll.

Warm, wonderful Liam, now pale and lifeless.

“He didn’t have to die.”

Ferrin’s growl was inhuman.

“You killed him when you refused to comply, the same way you killed Galahad.”

“No!”

I didn’t sound human either.

“You can’t beat me, Wren!”

Ferrin roared.

“I have given everything to make it this far, and I’ll take everything you have too, if I must!”

My fingertips burned with a familiar, impossible feeling, and even though I knew I didn’t stand a chance against this version of Ferrin while I was trapped as this version of me, I charged at him.

His lips drew back in a grinning snarl, but then his eyes widened, and heat burst in my arm.

A familiar handle took shape in my hand, and I brought my flail of Skal swinging upwards in an arc of dazzling blue.

My weapon hit Ferrin square beneath his chin, and it erupted in an array of blue sparks. His head jerked back, and a bone-crunching crack echoed through the forest as his spine broke in his neck with the force of my attack.

Ferrin, and all his monstrousness, disintegrated, falling down around me in a cloud of ash that clung to the tears tracing my cheeks.

Magick. I’d done Skalmagick. In Keldori.

And I’d killed Ferrin’s Nightmare with it.

And Liam—

“Wren…”

Liam’s voice was a weak rattle.

“Liam!”

I cried out as I fell at his side. Against all odds, he was still alive. Blood seeped into his hoodie through the gaping hole in his chest that I tried not to look too hard at, but he was alive. I just had to keep him that way.

“Liam, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Hold on.”

I pressed a hand over the wound in his chest and leaned over him.

“It’s okay,”

he breathed.

“No, it’s not.”

I shook my head.

“But it’s going to be.”

“Did you…do magic?”

“I- maybe.”

Blue light sparked off my fingertips as I said it.

He stared past my face at the leafy canopy overhead. His eyes focused and unfocused, and a light sheen of sweat broke out across his forehead. I needed to get help, but I still didn’t have my phone. I could yell, but who would hear me? My hand against Liam’s chest was hot with residual Skalmagick and the heat of his blood.

“Riley…”

“That’s right.”

I nodded.

“We’re going to find him, okay? But you have to stay with me, you have to—”

“He’s dead.”

“He’s not, he’s—”

“I saw his body. I only just remembered.”

He turned his head to look at me through eyes that fought to flutter shut.

“You were there too, remember? On the night we met.”

“No.”

I pressed my hand harder against the hole in his chest, refusing to look away from his face, refusing to see the hot blood I could feel soaking into his hoodie.

“You met me in the morning, not at night. Riley is fine. You are fine. You have to be. You-you can’t—”

If Ferrin took Liam away from me, I wouldn’t stop at him and Caitria. I wouldn’t stop until all of Skalterra had been reduced to Skal dust for rotsbane to sniff at.

Liam placed his hand over mine where I tried to stem the flow of blood.

“Don’t worry about me,”

he rasped.

“Blue, it’s okay.”

“No, I—”

The forest froze and quieted, muted by the blood rushing in my ears. My head turned light, and my fingers shook against Liam’s chest.

“What did you call me?”

He reached for my face, and frigid fingers brushed my cheeks.

“Liam?”

A new panic crept up my throat, and I pressed harder against the wound in his chest.

“Liam, why did you call me Blue?”

Hot, painful tears rolled down my cheeks, and my chest heaved as I tried to catch my breath.

“Does he know?”

Liam croaked.

“Does Ferrin know where we are?”

“How do you know his name?”

“You have to come find us,”

he whispered.

“If he knows…”

His hand fell away from my face, and his eyes lost focus, staring unseeing back at me. I tore my gaze away to finally look at his chest, but the blood that had bloomed across the front of his hoodie was gone.

I pulled my hand away from the wound and found my palm dirty with ash.

“Liam?”

I searched his face, and there, in the half-second before he turned into dust in my hands, I saw him in the shape of his nose and the cut of his cheekbones. And when I was left with nothing but a dirty, torn Von Leer hoodie in my arms, I whispered his other name. “Ciarán?”

Something heavy shifted in the pocket of the tattered hoodie, and a blue chicken fell into my dust-stained lap.