Read Online Girl of Nightmares by Kendare Blake - Free Book Online

admonishment dancing around her lips. But she’s tired. And she’s worried. So instead she reaches for the popcorn and says she’ll pick up my homework for the next few days.
    “Thanks,” I say. “I might be out part of next week too.”
    “But that’s the last week of classes,” says Thomas.
    “Exactly. What are they going to do? Flunk me? It’d be too big of a pain. They just want to make it to summer like we do.”
    They exchange this look, like they’ve decided I’m hopeless, and Carmel stands up.
    “Are you going to tell us what happened? Why didn’t you wait, like we decided to?”
    There isn’t an answer for that. It was an impulse. More than an impulse, but to them it must seem like a selfish, stupid move. Like I couldn’t be patient. Whatever it was, it’s done. When I confronted that ghost, it was just like before, in the hayloft. Anna came through, and I saw her suffer. I watched her burn.
    “I’ll tell you everything,” I tell them. “But later. When I’m on fewer painkillers.” I smile and rattle the orange bottle. “Want to stick around and watch a movie?”
    Thomas shrugs and plops down, digging his hand into the cheddar corn without a second thought. It takes Carmel an extra minute and a couple of sighs, but she eventually drops her book bag and sits in the rocking chair.
    *   *   *
    For all their horror at the prospect of missing one of the last days of school, curiosity gets the better of them and they show up the next day around eleven thirty, just before lunch period. I thought I was ready for it but it still takes me a few times to get it right, to tell them everything. I’d already said it once, to my mom, before she left to go shopping and drop spells around town. When I’d finished, she looked like she wanted an apology. An I’m sorry, Mom, for almost getting myself killed. Again. But I couldn’t quite manage it. It didn’t seem like the important thing. So she just told me I should have waited for Gideon, and left without looking me in the eye. Now Carmel’s got the same look.
    I manage to croak out, “I’m sorry that I didn’t wait for you guys. I didn’t know I was going to do it. I didn’t plan it.”
    “It took you four hours to drive there. Were you in a trance the whole time?”
    “Can we just focus?” Thomas interjects. He asks it carefully, with a disarming smile. “What’s done is done. Cas is alive. A little crispier than before, but he’s breathing.”
    Breathing and craving a Percocet. The pain in my shoulders is like a living thing, all throbbing and heat.
    “Thomas is right,” I say. “We need to figure out what to do now. We need to figure out how to help her.”
    “How to help her?” Carmel repeats. “We need to figure out what’s going on first. For all we know, the whole thing might be in your head. Or an illusion.”
    “You think I’m making it up? Concocting some kind of fantasy? If that were true, why would it be like this? Why would I imagine her catatonic, throwing herself into a furnace? If I’m making this up, then I need several hours of intense therapy.”
    “I’m not suggesting you’re doing it on purpose,” Carmel says apologetically. “I just wonder if it’s real. And remember what Morfran said.”
    Thomas and I look at each other. All we remember is Morfran spewing a bunch of crazy. I sigh.
    “So what do you want from me? You want me to sit here and wait, when what I saw might be real? What if she’s really in trouble?” The image of her hand, flung up against the furnace door, floats behind my eyes. “I don’t know if I can do that. Not after yesterday.”
    Carmel’s eyes are wide. I wish we hadn’t gone to Morfran, because the things he said only scared her worse. All of his posturing, his forces spinning around the athame, something wicked this way comes B.S. My shoulders tighten and I wince.
    “Okay,” Thomas says. He nods to Carmel and takes her hand. “I mean, I think we’re fooling ourselves