She cut his clothes off him until his body lay pale and strangely beautiful against the dark rock with that splash of sunlight. The cuts on his stomach looked like lines leaking bright red ink to spill down the sides of his body and onto the floor. She caressed his body where he lay limp and small, too afraid and in too much pain to hide that he didn’t want her, that he didn’t want anyone like this. The video jumped again. His body was covered in old scars, but this time the knife moved down lower; this time she would not stop.
I tried to scream, No, don’t! But it was my hand holding the knife covered in his blood. Nathaniel’s screams woke me.
52
I WASN’T THE only one who had heard Nathaniel’s screams, because Nicky damn near took the door off, before Dev could open it. All the guards tried to be in the room at the same time, but it wasn’t big enough. We finally had to decide who to kick out and who to keep. Nathaniel and I had had a version of the same dream, except that where my dream had switched between Riley scarred and Riley getting the wounds the first time, Nathaniel’s had switched between Riley getting cut up and Nathaniel being the one chained and tortured. There was another knock, and it took us a second to realize the knock came from the closet door. Dev opened the closet door and Damian half fell out into his arms. I thought at first that Damian had shared our nightmare, but he hadn’t dreamed anything. He’d been dead to the world until something about Nathaniel and me freaking out had woken him early.
“I woke in the dark and I didn’t know where I was, but I could feel Nathaniel’s fear and yours, and . . .” He reached out to us through the crowd of too many bodies in too small a space. Nathaniel went to that outstretched hand, and the moment they touched, I couldn’t taste my pulse on my tongue anymore. Even letting Nicky hold me with all that strength hadn’t calmed me this much, so I pushed away from him and went for them. I took Damian’s other hand and was calmer yet, but when Nathaniel’s other hand was in mine so I was touching both of them at the same time, I was almost eerily calm. It was like on the plane flying to Ireland, calm beyond all reason.
“How do they do that for you?” Dev asked.
Nathaniel turned to him. “I can help Damian do this, but I couldn’t help us with Flannery’s aunt and her mind games.”
“We all have our talents,” I said, my voice calm, because with the two men holding me, I was about as calm as I got outside of special circumstances.
“But mine never seem to be exactly what you need,” Dev said.
“Your talents were exactly what I needed in the first pub with the Fey.”
He smiled for me, but not like he believed it. Normally I’d have tried to figure out how to make him feel better, but confusing relationship issues would have to wait. “Riley said that she would kill his sister and mother if she found out what he’d done.”
Nathaniel shook his head. “No, she’s going to cut him again and this time she won’t stop.” Even with the three of us held in that unnatural calm, the fear of that shared nightmare thrilled through us and into Damian. He’d been dead to the world while we dreamed, but now he saw what we’d seen and felt, and it was pretty awful even secondhand.
“She’d never touched Riley when I left, but it’s been five years. I guess he’s old enough for her now,” Damian said, his hands clutching ours so tight, it almost hurt.
“Do you know him personally?” I asked.
“I know most of the Roane around her, at least by sight.”
“Do you have a phone number for Riley? We need to warn him.”
“It was just a nightmare,” Dev said.
“No,” Damian said, “I never had a number for him. He was a teenager, eighteen or nineteen at most. His mother helps take care of the fortress, so Riley was just Isabel’s son.”
“Neither of you does dream magic,” Kaazim said. “Could you both be panicking over a shared nightmare?”
We both shook our heads. “I wish, but no, somehow she was in our dreams, or we were in hers,” I said.
Nathaniel looked at me, his eyes as pale as I’d ever seen them, lavender gray. “She knows that we saw his scars, Anita.”
“Yeah, because when she showed us the nightmare, I wondered where his scars were.”
“I wondered the same thing, Anita. It was like we were remembering him from today, but it was mixed up with her memory of hurting him.”
I nodded. “Yes.”
“We have to warn him,” Nathaniel said.
“How? He has our phone numbers, but we don’t have his.”
“Flannery’s aunt might know how to contact him,” Dev said.
“Do you have a number for his mother?” I asked Damian.
“No, there’s no phone at the castle, and She-Who-Made-Me doesn’t like cell phones. She doesn’t like most of the new technology.”
I realized that I was still nude, so were Nathaniel and Dev, but their nudity didn’t bother me. I squeezed Damian’s and Nathaniel’s hands once more for luck and let go so I could start getting dressed. The calmness that had been keeping my emotions in check faded when I stopped touching them. I’d known it would, but it was still a shock to taste my pulse in my throat again. It was as if the calmness had stopped the panic but not helped me process it. Just one minute calm, and the next I was back to having woken from a gruesome nightmare. The calm that the three of us shared didn’t allow us to skip the bad stuff; it merely delayed us having to deal with it.