Page 42 of Skalterra By Nightmare (The Skalterra Duology #1)

Nothing felt real anymore.

Not the trees that towered overhead.

Not the pile of dust in the dirt that had been Liam.

Not the blue sparks dancing on my fingertips.

The only thing I knew for sure existed was the tattered hoodie I clutched against my hammering heart.

However, Keel Watch Harbor, real or not, was in danger, and I needed to warn them. Ferrin would be on his way.

My legs shook beneath me, but I didn’t have time to rest. I didn’t have time to grieve or fall into a shocked stupor, even as reality seemed to strip away around me.

Liam was a Nightmare.

Wonderful, kind Liam who had turned to ash in my hands.

Thoughtful, sweet Liam who had been hunting me across a magic reality all summer.

As horrifying as the revelation was, I clung to it as tightly as I held onto the hoodie.

It meant that Liam wasn’t dead. He’d died gruesomely, but he wasn’t dead.

Had Liam known that he was Ciarán? I curled my fingers around the blue chicken that had fallen from his pocket.

No, he couldn’t have.

He’d worried all summer about Riley. He’d never lost hope.

But Riley was dead, because Riley wasn’t real and never had been. I’d watched Riley die my first night in Skalterra, with Ferrin’s green Skalmagick bursting in his chest.

Except they’d called him Daithi.

Gams had known somehow. That was why she made me take down the posters. That and because she knew there might be someone like Ferrin, watching and waiting.

Which begged the question, who else in Keel Watch Harbor was a Nightmare? And more importantly, who was creating them?

I was halfway across a wooden footbridge that arched over the river when electricity coursed through my stomach and chest.

I cried out and fell to my knees. Fire danced along my every nerve, zipping back and forth across my skin and through my bones. Pain blossomed in my abdomen, and I coughed up blood-stained bile.

I pressed Liam’s hoodie and chicken against my chest and extended my free hand in front of me with my palm facing up.

A tiny skalflame the same shade of blue as my Nightmare hair jumped in my fingers, and the burning in my veins subsided just a little. I didn’t know what had happened to make Skal run hot in my blood, but it was tearing me apart from the inside.

I found Liam’s backpack near the trailhead where he’d apparently discarded it. The train station was visible through the trees, and I stumbled out of the woods with the backpack, ripped hoodie, a torn skirt, and covered in dirt and ash.

Skalmagick continued to eat at my nerves, and I held it back like the sobs that suffocated in my throat. I couldn’t breathe. If I did, everything would explode outwards, so I held my breath, allowing myself intermittent gasps that shook my body.

The tourists outside the train station parted for me as I approached. Someone asked if I was okay, but their voice was distant and garbled. I found the wherewithal to fish my train ticket out of Liam’s bag so I could flash it at the platform officer as I boarded the train. The edges of the paper blackened and curled in my fingers, and I shoved it back into Liam’s bag before the overflowing Skalmagick could light it on fire.

I settled into a window seat.

It would be another several hours before I got to Keel Watch Harbor. I searched Liam’s backpack for his phone and found it near the bottom just as the train rolled away from the station.

I wouldn’t be able to unlock it, but I should still be able to make an emergency call. The screen lit up, showing a wallpaper image of Liam, Riley, and Sabrina all posing for a selfie.

The energy in my hands pulsed, and a metallic pop rang out. The picture disappeared, replaced with a black screen that reflected my haggard face back at me.

“No.”

I hit the power button over and over and over again, until the acrid smell of burnt metal singed my sinuses and smoke started to stream out from under the phone screen.

I dropped it in my lap, and my fingers sparked with more energy. I shoved my hands in my armpits and bent over, trying to hold everything inside.

“Ciarán?”

I whispered into the dark folds of Liam’s hoodie.

“Can you hear me?”

No one answered. I wrapped my hand around the porcelain chicken.

“Liam? Please.”

Silence.

So I hid in the dark of my lap, held my breath and my Skal, and counted the seconds until the train ride was over.

The coastline outside my window looked too normal, like someone had forgotten to tell the sun and sea that the world might be coming to an end. The sun hung bright and high in a cloudless blue sky, and the water was calm and glittering.

I watched harbors and bays blur past in the final minutes of the train ride, bouncing in my seat.

There was a chance I had beat Ferrin to Keel Watch Harbor. I wasn’t sure how his Nightmare abilities worked, but maybe he was unable to project himself directly to Keel Watch. Maybe I’d hit him hard enough with my flail that he needed to rest before he launched any sort of attack on sleepy, oceanside towns.

When the train finally came to a stop at Keel Watch Harbor Station, the platform seemed normal enough. I was alone, but that wasn’t out of the ordinary. It wasn’t a very popular stop on the train route.

But then an unshakeable cold settled over me despite the summer sun bright in the sky where it hung over the bay. Its heat was dull and muted, and I pulled Liam’s filthy hoodie over my blouse to keep warm.

I stepped into the empty street between the station and the library. The train whistled behind me as it pulled away, leaving eerie silence in its wake.

A creaking sound broke the quiet.

The library’s front door hung from its hinges, swinging slowly in the sea breeze.

“No,”

I breathed, and sprinted across the street to burst through the broken door.

“Mr. Lane?”

The library was dark and empty. Mr. Lane wasn’t at the front desk, and when I ran through the shelves, I didn’t see him there either. I barreled around the corner by the printers and stopped at the sight of the two empty armchairs with a stack of magazines piled on the table between them.

My veins burned, but I ignored the fire as I took stumbling steps to the armchairs.

A pile of dust sat on each cushion, and my stomach twisted.

“Gladys?”

I hissed. “Sarah?”

No.

It couldn’t be real. It couldn’t—

I turned heel and ran.

The cold air burned in my lungs as I sprinted down the hill towards the water with Liam’s backpack bouncing against my back.

“Gams!”

I screamed, not caring who heard me. Wind rolled over the tree-lined hill, blowing dirt up in my face. It stuck in my throat, and I doubled over in a blood-flecked coughing fit.

Dust and ash blew across my shoes, and I staggered backwards. It looked horribly similar to the piles of ash that sat in Gladys and Sarah’s favorite library chairs. Horribly similar to the ash that Liam had dissipated into in my arms.

“No,”

I choked.

“No, no, no!”

I flew around the corner onto Main Street. It was a Friday afternoon, and the shops should’ve been alive with tourists. Instead, the street was barren and cold despite the shining sun.

My dress shoes rubbed against the back of my ankles, but I ignored the burning in my heels and the fire in my lungs. I couldn’t get to Gams’s shop fast enough.

I passed through another pile of dust, and I screamed for Gams again, shrieking her name so hard that I tasted blood on the back of my tongue, but there was no one to hear me.

Keel Watch Harbor was empty, nothing more than a town of dust and deserted shops.

“Gams!”

I shouted over the sound of the shop bell ringing out overhead.

“Gams, please!”

She had to be here. She had to be.

The ceramic chickens stared at me from their shelf, and the wave of Skalmagick that rolled off of them, reaching for me, was nauseating.

“Gams?”

I croaked. She wouldn’t leave the shop unattended, but the shelves and the register were abandoned. I closed my eyes, afraid I would see more dust on the floor.

But Gams wasn’t a Nightmare. She couldn’t be a Nightmare, because I was real. This was my real form.

At least I thought it was. Fire burned in my hands. If I was using Skalmagick, then maybe I wasn’t real at all. But then where was my body? Where was the real me?

A scratching sound brought my eyes snapping open, and the blue flames that tickled my fingers snuffed out.

“Gams?”

A yowling meow replied from the stairway to the apartment.

I scrambled behind the register and opened the door. Jonquil streaked across my feet with a puffed-out tail. She bolted for the back wall and disappeared through the open door to Gams’s workshop.

I followed after her, shivering in the unfettered air of Gams’s AC. I crossed my arms, trying to conserve heat inside Liam’s hoodie.

“Jonquil?”

I tiptoed down the wooden steps to the basement and turned the corner at the bottom.

A single ceiling light illuminated the concrete floor and barren walls of the workshop. A shelf of unpainted chickens stood opposite a wall of painting supplies, and the kiln in the corner radiated a meager amount of heat that did nothing to stave off the cold of the AC. A glaze-stained apron draped over a messy work table, as if it had just been dropped there.

“Gams? Are you down here?”

Jonquil meowed again, and lifted onto her hind legs to scratch at a supply closet door with both paws.

“What are you looking for?”

I murmured. She turned her flat face towards me, and for the first time since meeting the cat, she seemed to stare at me with something other than total loathing.

“It’s just a closet—”

I pulled the door open, and a gush of frigid air washed over me, pushing loose strands of hair back from my face.

I was staring into the maw of an ice cavern.

Where there should have been closet walls, there were sheets of ice that arched upwards to form a barrel ceiling. The frozen steps that lay ahead radiated a soft light and spiraled downwards out of view.

I should’ve been shocked. Twenty-four hours ago, I probably would’ve been, but now I only felt something like resolved defeat.

My grandma was hiding an ice cave in her basement. Of course. Why wouldn’t she be?

“Gams,”

I sighed.

“What the hell?”

Jonquil stared up at me, as if looking for reassurance, and then led the way down the frozen steps. I followed her, bracing one hand against the icy wall. The cold air warred with the inferno that had been burning inside me since the forest behind Von Leer, and steam rose off my fingers.

The ice seemed to call out to me, reaching for my heart with invisible fingers of Skal. The electricity inside my veins jumped and sparked the deeper we descended into the mosaic of white and blue. I hugged myself, not just because of the cold, but in an effort to keep myself in one piece.

The stairs leveled off, and the glacial walls encased frozen, swirling patterns of light that got brighter the farther we went.

Muddled voices echoed through the icy tunnel. My breath crystalized in the air in front of me as I hesitated in fear and hope, but Jonquil, with her tail held high, ran ahead.

“Wait!”

I chased after her, sliding on the ice but keeping upright.

The cavern twisted and opened into a bright well. The floor spiraled downwards around the open space, and at the bottom, two figures stood facing a wall.

Jonquil chirped as she raced down the ramp to reach the base of the well, but I froze.

Ferrin looked up at me from below, and his grin caught the green glow of the fiery blade he had held at Gams’s throat.

“I thought you might be joining us soon!”

His tone was casual and light despite the weapon he held against my grandmother.

“Come on down, Just-Wren. I’ve got something to show you.”

“Don’t touch her!”

My words bounced through the cavern and were met by the echoing cackle of Ferrin’s laughter. I held my hands up in surrender as I traced Jonquil’s path down the spiraling ramp.

Something dark and shadowed lurked beneath the ice at Gams and Ferrin’s feet, breaking up the bright glow emitted by the walls and floor.

“Go back, Wren.”

Gams’s voice was stern. “Please.”

“Oh, no,”

Ferrin called.

“Wren’s going to join us.”

Jonquil ran across Ferrin’s feet, but instead of going to Gams, she curled up in the middle of the ice, directly over the shadow, and laid her tail over her nose.

“Leave my grandmother out of this.”

Power pulsed in my palms, and I contracted every muscle I possibly could in an effort to contain it. If Ferrin saw me use magick, if he decided I was a threat, he might hurt Gams.

“I’ll do whatever you want, Ferrin. Just let her go.”

I reached the bottom of the pit. Gams’s frown sat heavy on her face, but she didn’t seem bothered nor shocked by the glowing sword at her neck.

“My love,”

she said.

“how do you know this man? What secrets have you been keeping?”

Ferrin tightened his grip on Gams’s neck.

“What do you want from me?”

I demanded.

“Let her go, and I’ll do whatever it is—”

Ferrin laughed again.

“Stop, if I laugh too hard I might cry, and it’s much too cold for that,”

he guffawed.

“You think she’s the leverage? Against you? No. Your usefulness has regrettably run its course in all but one way. Precious Gams isn’t the collateral. You are.”

“You’ll be okay, Wren,”

Gams assured me.

“I promise. I won’t let him hurt you.”

My grandmother was strong. She had been strong my whole life, filled with fire and bite, and now all five-foot-nothing of her stood taller and stronger than ever.

Gams with her sleepy gift shop and Persian cat.

Gams with her Skal-filled chickens and her town full of Nightmares.

Gams with more secrets than I might’ve ever guessed.

“How long have you known about Skalterra?”

I whispered. Gams’s eyes wavered behind her glasses, and she shook her head.

Ferrin swung his sword away from Gams’s neck to point at the dark shadow in the ice beneath Jonquil.

“How long?”

Ferrin hissed.

“She’s known about Skalterra longer than any of us, Just-Wren. Since its very advent! She was, after all, the one who created it.”