We’re on my porch now. An engine roars to life, and I realize he must have remote-started his truck. With pressure on my arm, he moves me to the passenger side. When he opens the door, I pause because Henry starts barking.
“Henry?” I ask because he sounds far away.
“We’ll come back for him in the morning, sweetheart. You need all my attention right now.”
“No! Henry!” I don’t know why leaving my dog is what’s tipping me over the edge into actual panic. Tom twists my arm and shoves me toward the truck.
“Ada!” he yells in my face. “Get in the fucking truck. He could come back any second, don’t be stupid!” He gestures toward the truck with the gun, and my veins turn to ice. He could—he might—use that on me.
I hiss, flinching away from him to climb into the truck. The door slams shut behindme. When he walks to the other side of the truck, I scrabble at the handle, desperate to leave, but the damn door won’t open.
Tom opens his door and climbs in, shaking his head and smiling. “See, honey? You’re confused. You’re scared, but don’t worry, I’m here to take care of you. I’ll always take care of you. Maybe now you’ll realize that.”
I’m silent the entire drive to Tom’s house… all three minutes of it. Before I know it, we’ve turned off the main road and onto his driveway. He pulls his truck into the garage, shutting it behind us before coming around to let me out. With a vise grip on my arm and the gun in his hand, he pulls me from the truck and drags me inside.
I’ve never been inside his house, but it’s about what I would expect. A large “Don’t Tread On Me” flag decorates the side wall of the dining room we’ve entered, and everything is camo or wood. Long guns hang along the wall next to the flag, like some sort of wild alt-right interior design magazine.
He takes me through the dining room and down a dark hallway, leading me into what appears to be his bedroom. The only illumination is the cold blue light of his computer monitor, which is showing what appears to be a live feed of my house. Through the front window, I can see the curtains swishing back and forth, like Henry is pacing there.
It’s eerie, seeing my house like this, and I shudder, because if I hadn’t closed the blinds, he’d have been able to see intoeverysingle one of my windows. Oddly, they are quite zoomed in, less like he was watching the outside and more like… more like he was watchingme.
“Here,” he says, leading me to the bed and applying pressure to tell me to sit. “Sit here and I’ll rewind it so you can see.” He sits in a slightly fadedblack office chair and sets his gun on the desk next to him. While he navigates around on the PC, he talks to me.
“It’s really not safe for you out here, alone like this. I’ve done my best, sweetheart, but it’s time to face facts. Ladies, especially pretty ladies like you, just aren’t made for rough living alone. Hell, you even needed me to get your groceries! As soon as you see this fucker slinking out of your house, you’ll know.”
The video feed rewinds, and I watch everything happen in reverse. The truck pulls in, he takes me out of it, dragging me back into the house. A few seconds later, I see his shadow walking around in my living room, and then a few more, he’s first tackled—in reverse—by Henry, the door is shut, and then he’s banging. All of the lights turn off, and then he runs backward to his truck and drives away. It’s super sped up, much faster than in real life, but it’s surreal to see all of it played out like that. Objective. Clinical.
That girl on the screen, she looks terrified. And Tom? He looks terrifying. Waving his gun around, pulling me, I can see his fingers digging into my arm. Displayed so blatantly onscreen like this, I know one thing for certain. The second I let him in, he was taking me from that house, willing or not.
“There!” he yells, pointing at the screen, triumphant. “There he is! Itoldyou!”
Frozen on Tom’s computer is the final piece of evidence I needed. My red string leaps onto the board, connecting pins in my brain at the speed of light. It’s honestly a wonder it took me so long. Because there, so obvious in black and white, is a masked man that I know very well.
My nightmare.
My monster.
My… Seth.
CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN
Waiting for Ada to need me in her dreams again is more torturous than praying that she wouldn’t. I want nothing more than to go back to her and make sure she’s okay. What if she doesn’t wake up from her head wound? I don’t know how fragile human bodies are. She could be dying at the moment, and I’d have no way of knowing.
For once, her pain is entirely my fault. No one forced me to go to her home with my delusions of baking her cookies and bringing her cheer. I have no one to blame but myself, and after countless nights of that not being the case, I don’t know how to live with the responsibility for my actions.
I scrub a hand down my mask, wincing at the jolt of pain in my hand. The injury from the knife should’ve vanished the moment I returned to the dream realm, but it’s still there, no longer oozing dark blood, but angry and uncomfortable. Is it even possible to heal now? Or am I stuck for eternity with this stinging reminder of my foolishness?
Hours crawl by as I sit in my home, staring at the gray walls as I wait. The throbbing in my hand keeps time with the sluggish tick of the clock that keeps track of what time it is for Ada. In the dream realm, time is malleable, but it no longerbends to my will. Another sign that I’ve changed too much. That I might not even belong here anymore.
After what feels like an eternity passes, during which I replay every misstep I’ve taken in my efforts to change my fate on a cruel loop in my mind, the tugging begins.
The call to Ada’s dream is more forceful than usual, yanking me with an urgency that has me hurtling from my seat on my couch into the void of her still-forming dream. My surroundings take shape as I spin in place, the blurry lights in the distance focusing into the glow of Ada’s decorated cabin.
It looks so similar to how I decorated it that for a moment I think I’ve somehow ended up in the waking world again. A potent blend of horror and elation floods me in that split-second. Then the tugging in my sternum begins again.
Not real. Still a dream.
