Page 48 of Veil of Night & Flames

I make it to the Science Center with about ninety seconds to spare, then get stalled by the flood of students moving down the stairs that I’m trying to climb. I squeeze past two girls discussing their Friday plans and a guy with an enormous coffee. I manage to duck into Professor Valdez’s classroom just as Steve, her TA, is finishing handing out Pop Quiz packets.

Steve shoves one into my hand right before I slide into my chair. Great.

At the front of the room, Valdez glances at me. Then at the clock. Then at me. “Good morning, Miss Lyte.”

“Morning,” I say, in the voice of a girl who is absolutely on top of things.

“Class, you may begin.”

I break the seal and turn to the first page. And it goes downhill from there. Seriously, the test is a disaster. And not the kind where the answer is on the tip of my tongue, and I’ll find it before time’s up. No, this is the kind of disaster where weeks of schooling have been erased from my brain because all that information got replaced with stuff I saw or learned in a Nightmare Realm.

Which, okay, really isn’t true. But can I really be blamed for not reading the textbook? It’s not as if UPS could have delivered it to Adric’s castle.

Distinguish between NREM parasomnias and REM parasomnias, including which sleep stage each occurs in and the typical age of onset for each.

I should know that.

I mean, I really, really should know that. Two weeks ago, I probably could have answered that question in my sleep. Pun intended. Now my brain is full of dragons and golden-eyed Hunters and silver-eyed kings, and there’s just no room for normal school stuff.

I write something. I don’t know what. I hope it’s in English.

I move to question two. Define hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations.

I stare at it. The words make sense individually. As a sentence, they do not compute.

I tap my pencil for what feels like a year, and then have that beautiful eureka moment. I write, Hypnagogic hallucinations are vivid sensory experiences that occur while falling asleep.

And that’s as good as it gets. For the next forty-five minutes, all I manage to do is fill the pages with words, and I have a hard enough time conjuring those. Maybe I got something right. Maybe. But I’m not holding my breath.

Maybe Adric can give me a note. A note from a king must be worth something.

Valdez collects the tests one by one as the period winds down. When she gets to me, she takes my packet without comment and continues up the row.

When the bell rings, I gather my things and am two steps from freedom when Valdez says, “Miss Lyte. A moment.”

I try to melt into the floor. I fail.

So, yeah. I turn around.

She’s standing at her desk, a test packet in her hand. The other students are filing out around me, and within thirty seconds, it’s just the two of us in the room and the air conditioner ticking on like it always does.

I cross to her desk and see that it’s my test packet she’s holding.

Not really a big surprise…

She studies me over her reading glasses, and I smile politely, but study her right back. I’m guessing mid-fifties, petite, with dark hair streaked with gray, and a quiet authority that she displays regularly in class.

Uncle Finn steered me into this upper-level class as a freshman. Now, I’m thinking that wasn’t such a great idea. Best to just take the easy A classes when your nights are filled with dodging dragons in dreams.

“Not your best work,” she says.

“No, ma’am.”

“You missed last Tuesday’s class.”

“I had a family thing.”

“And the Thursday class.”