My bed creaked as I stretched out on the narrow foam mattress. The single lightbulb in the ceiling flickered out as the timer clicked over. Dread clenched my stomach as a familiar drug haze pooled in my toes, slithering up my legs, reaching with sickly fingers to clutch my body and drag me into sleep.
Sleep brought fresh horrors – the nightly visitations from the god that wasn’t supposed to exist. And in the morning, I could remember nothing of my dreams except that they filled me with an unsettled horror.
Did my dreams hide answers, or were they more lies?
The fog slithered down my arms, touching my fingers with sickly warmth. It wrapped around my neck, glissading over the planes of my cheeks to dribble through my eye sockets into my mind. I slid into the troubled darkness of my dreams.
But it wasn’t the god who visited me this time.
It was Trey.
He stood outside Derleth Academy, on the grass in front of the gymnasium wall. Behind him, the enormous penis we’d graffitied there in red paint glowed under the moonlight. He ran a hand through his dark hair, and the light streaked it with crimson. His stark beauty drew my breath – the weeks of starvation from the sight of him had made me desperate.
But he wasn’t real – he was only my mind trying to betray me.
“Get out of my dreams.” I folded my arms, wondering as I did with the faint detachment of one who dreams, how I knew I was dreaming, how I thought that I had any control in this place.
I’m dreaming because Trey is here.Not only that, but he was looking at me like he actually gave a fuck. The concern in his icicle eyes made my chest constrict. Even though I knew it wasn’t real, I couldn’t stop faint hope glimmering at the edges of my mind.
“Hazel.” Trey’s eyes swept over me, and the look on his face called me to run to him and throw myself into his arms. It took all my self-control to cement myself in place.
“I’m not supposed to think about you anymore. I can’t get better if I cling to this idea that you and I—”
“Just shut up for a moment and listen. I don’t know how much time we have.” Trey strode toward me, his long, toned legs covering the field between us in a few steps. He didn’t stop until he stood in front of me – dangerously close, his body calling to me with intense heat. “You haven’t exactly been easy to reach.”
“What do you mean?” I said the words carefully, testing them on my tongue. In the dream world, the fog no longer claimed my limbs or my mind. I could move freely, talk freely, but I wasn’t allowed to believe anything that happened here. “Why have you been trying to reach me? I’m nothing to you.”
Trey’s eyes swam with desperate anger. “I don’t know what my father has done to you or where he’s taken you, but we’re working on a plan to bust you out. Can you tell me anything about where you are?”
“No. You’re a figment of my disturbed mind, trying to get me to resist treatment. If I tell you anything, you’ll just twist it all around and make things worse for me, because that’s what my mind does now—”
I yelped as Trey grabbed my wrist. He yanked me forward, dragging me off balance so I staggered against him. His chest pressed against mine and his powerful scent – his fresh blossom and cypress tang touching my tongue like a drug. My heart leaped as the heat of his body seared me through my blazer. His heart raced alongside mine, thudding in my ears. “Doesthisfeel like a figment of your disturbed mind?”
“Yes,” I whispered, my defense slipping. Trey’s eyes burned with a fire that consumed the ice inside him.
“Fuck,” he growled, and his lips met mine with fury and fire. He wrapped his hand around my neck, pressing my face to his, devouring me like he’d walked across a desert and I was the first water.
As we kissed, warmth rose through my body, starting in a deep spot between my legs and flaring through my stomach to dance across my chest. A flame inside me that had been cold and dead leaped to life once more. The flame soared through my limbs, pooling in my palms, building to a fiery force that burst through my skin, soaring across the sky.
And Iknew.
This dreamwasreal.
Somehow, I was really outside the school, kissing Trey Bloomberg. He was speaking to me and touching me through my dream. His strong hands caressed my arms. His lips drew fire across mine with urgent need.
I broke the kiss and pulled away, my eyes wide. A burning grass smell itched my nostrils, and the crackling sound distracted me from the heat in my arms. Trey turned to see what I was looking at. He jumped at the trail of flame that snaked across the grass, moving toward the wall.
“Fuck.” He glared at me. “What have you done?”
I put my hands on my hips. “Don’t blame me. You’re the one in my dream. How is that possible, by the way?”
A smile tugged on the edges of Trey’s hard mouth. He dragged me toward the edge of the field, his fingers digging into my arm. “I’ve been praying.”
“Huh?”
That smile made the fire inside me flicker to life again. “I prayed to the god. I figured it worked so well for Christians and Muslins all these years, it was about time the guy downstairs owed me something for what he’d taken away. I was lying out here under the stars, praying that I could talk to you, that I could know that you were alive. I must’ve fallen asleep, because the next thing I’m kind of floating through all these weird thoughts and visions that weren’t mine. It was all these random faces – Ayaz and Quinn and some black dude and a woman who looked like an older version of you, only she was screaming. And then they all kind of melted together and I was back here and so were you.”
“The god sent you into my dreams.” I still didn’t quite believe it.
