The volume of nightmares was sprawled in the middle of the floor; I retrieved it, smoothing the pages that had bent. Phelan paused, watching as I walked the tome to his desk and set it down.
“Remember that night you told me that you weren’t kind?” I asked. “Well, in case you failed to notice, neither am I.”
“Anna,” he began, desperate. “You sh—”
“No, listen to me! I have invested too much time, sweat, and blood in you and your streets for you to dismiss me over some family matter you refuse to divulge. I’m not going anywhere, Phelan Vesper.”
I left him to clean the library on his own, but I sat in bed by candlelight, too anxious and angry at him to sleep. I reached for my journal and reread my exposé, eventually turning the page to write what Phelan had said to me earlier: Get far away from me, my family. I stared at those words, and I wondered what had inspired them. I needed to know—his mother must have done something awful—and I shut the journal.
My door was open, as it had been every night, and yet I was still surprised to see him appear, standing on my threshold long past midnight. He had never come to me in the dark as I sometimes did to him, to lie close enough to feel his heat but far enough that we never touched.
We stared at each other for a long, fragile moment. A moment when I wondered if he was about to ask if he could sleep in my bed, and I felt terrible warmth course through me.
“You’re right,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?” I would never be above making him grovel.
“That you had to see my fit, downstairs. That I told you to leave.” He paused, but his eyes shone like gemstones in the firelight. “I need you. And if you had departed as I first wanted, I would have soon come after you.”
I shivered, but I refused to dwell on how his words made me feel, like I was sugar melting in tea. I needed to know what his mother had done to upset him. “You can talk to me, Phelan.”
He was quiet. His gaze dropped for the briefest of moments, down to my throat and the loose neckline of my chemise. “I know. Good night, Anna.”
He left, striding to his bedroom across the hall. I thought it was probably for the best and slid into the safety of my cold sheets.
28
The November new moon arrived, at last. Phelan and I walked the cold, darkened streets with shields on our arms, waiting for the dream to arrive.
The trees were succumbing to bareness, limbs creaking in the wind and leaves gathering on the cobblestones, damp and golden and fragrant beneath my boots. I could see my breath, a steady plume of smoke, and I felt the chill of the air bite my cheeks.
It began to drizzle.
The streetlamps cast hazy circles of light and I shivered as moisture gathered in my hair, beaded on my raiment. A dankness settled into my bones. My shield sat snug on my arm, but the uneven weight of it was agitating my shoulders.
Phelan said nothing as he stood at my side, but he frequently checked his pocket watch. We hadn’t discussed the library dismantling again, or what had driven him to do it. In fact, he had kept me at a polite distance, and I hated to admit that his reserve bothered me.
I could barely see his face in the darkness, but when he looked at me, his eyes were bright, almost feverish.
“This weather is granting us a disadvantage,” he said.
“As long as we stay close together, we should be fine,” I replied. But I couldn’t deny that he was right about the disadvantage: the streets were slick from the drizzle and patches of leaves. We continued to wait as the rain began to fall steadily, soaking through our clothes.
“If something goes amiss,” Phelan began to say, “I want you to retreat to the house and lock the door.”
“I’m not retreating and leaving you.”
He never responded, because the nightmare manifested in the streets with a sudden and fierce gust. It blew us both off our feet. We sprawled on the wet cobblestones, breathless and wide eyed and clumsy with our shields.
“What was that?” I asked, scrambling to my feet, my gaze peeling the darkness.
We both heard a clatter behind us. The sound of something climbing up a trellis, rattling the shutters of a nearby house.
I turned. It looked like a man upon first glance, but then I saw that he was some manner of demon, with pale, scaly skin, sinewy wings, and long talons in place of nails. His eyes were lambent and he hissed when the shutter remained locked against him. He flew to the next window, seeking to unlock it. I was alarmed, to see a figment of a nightmare so intent on breaking into a house.
“Is this a child’s nightmare?” I asked Phelan, because I failed to recognize it.
“Yes. The demon comes and takes the child through the window,” he replied.
We would have to climb after it on the trellis, which would be difficult with our shields. Phelan shed his buckler in the street and I followed suit. Together, we approached the town house.
“Is there anything else that happens?” I asked.
He waded through a bush to reach the base of the trellis, taking hold of the lattice. He glanced at me and said, “No. Just the demon and the kidnapping.”
The demon finally noticed us.
He hissed from his perch on a second-story window ledge before flying to the next house.
“We’ll have to be more discreet.” Phelan headed to the path that wound to the backyard.
But the demon had his eye on us now, watching with a taunting glare.
“Wait, Phelan,” I said. “We need to set a trap for it, or else we’ll be chasing it from town house to town house until dawn.”
Phelan paused. “What sort of trap?”
I was already taking a step back, returning to the street, my eyes on his house.
“Anna?” He hurried after me.
“I’m going to sit in my room with the window open and the shutters unlatched,” I said, breathless. “You need to be in the backyard, prepared in case the demon manages to drag me out the window.”
I waited for him to protest. To my surprise, he didn’t. I slipped in the front door and locked it behind me, and Phelan went to the garden in the back, where he could see my bedroom window.
I hurried to light a candle in my chamber. I opened the window and unlatched the shutters, and I drew a chair up center to it and sat.
The rain continued to fall, a quiet melody. I was frozen to the bone, waiting to hear the demon’s claws rap on my shutters.
It didn’t take long.
The demon burst into my room with needles of rain. He expected to find me in bed, so I had a moment of surprise to cast my magical net. He screeched and flung himself against the wall, attempting to cut through the binds I had draped over him. They held, and I watched for a moment, until the demon had tired himself. I sought the golden key, thinking it should be somewhere on the demon’s body. A place to stab him.
There was no golden weakness.
But from the corner of my eye, there was an alluring gleam.
I turned to my open window, the casement slick with rain. There was a hint of gold at the edges, and I suddenly understood, although it seemed very reckless.
I didn’t give myself another moment to doubt. I called my magical net back to me, felt the corresponding recoil like a whip striking my hand. But I gritted my teeth through the shock of pain and leapt for the demon as he made to flee through the window.