In Dreams (11 page)

Annie is beautiful. Drop-dead. Any guy would fall for her—she’s blond and athletic, and she has this creamy olive complexion from her mom’s side of the family. But Henry Wu gazes across the table at her like she’s the most perfect girl in the entire world—this world or the gods and goddesses one.

“Still playing soccer?” he asks. He clears his throat twice and nervously plays with the collar of his shirt.

Annie nods.

“Still volunteering at the camp for kids with cancer?”

Annie wrinkles her nose, perplexed. “Yeah. How did you know? Every summer for two weeks. I love it. But I don’t tell anyone. My mom always taught me that you don’t broadcast your good deeds. You just, you know, do them quietly.”

“You mentioned it once about three years ago—in passing. On June third, when I asked what you were doing for the summer. You were going to be packing that night. You were hoping it would be cooler upstate. We were in the middle of a heat wave. The temperature was ninety-seven that day.”

“Wow, Henry. I’m slightly freaked out by your
memory. But it’s really cool that you remembered.”

She stares at him, and I swear they have an honest-to-God—or as Aphrodite would say, honest-to-Zeus—moment. So I say, “I’m gonna run to the girls’ bathroom. I’ll be back in a few minutes.” I mean, who am I to interfere with a soul-mate match?

I stand up and walk across the cafeteria, dodging a thrown napkin and Billy Kaye from the football team walking backward, not paying attention. When I look back at Henry and Annie, their heads are leaning across the table, and they’re deep in conversation. She’s using her hands when she talks, a sure sign she’s happily excited. I feel my heart sort of go “aww.” They are cute together.

I stroll down the hall to the girls’ bathroom, walking around groups of kids milling near gray-green lockers, and I open the door. Oddly enough, despite it being lunchtime, the bathroom is completely empty. My footsteps echo as I walk across the floor. I look in the weird safety-glass mirror that I always think should be in a carnival funhouse and not a bathroom. As usual, the sinks are a mess, with crumbled brown paper towels on the floor, and wetness in the sinks themselves. The air reeks of cigarette smoke and the staleness of a bathroom with one tiny window that doesn’t really open.

I find an open stall and shut the door. Then I hear someone walk in—actually, more than one someone—sets of heels along the black-and-white ceramic tiles.
Click-click-click. Click-click-click. Click-click-click.

Which is kind of weird, since no one in our school really wears high heels. Except Ms. Peluso, the drama teacher, and Ms. Margarite, the Spanish teacher, who always wears these swirly skirts, very high heels, and black turtlenecks. I think it’s because she’s only four feet ten, and if she doesn’t wear heels, she won’t even be able to see over the kids in the halls.

But I know the heels do not belong to them. I feel it.

Then I hear some kind of hissing sound. Like from my dream last night.

And I get seriously freaked out. I peer through the crack around the edge of my stall door and see three goth-looking girls walking toward me. The three girls from the club. Girls? I mean freaks.

I glance down at the back of my hand again. The stamp is still there. I didn’t wash it off because I needed to look at it today, to reassure myself that the kiss was real. That we have been together.

But if we were together and the kiss was real, then so are they.

I’m trapped. I peek through the crack again and look at them. They are beautiful, in this androgynous, unusual way, but scary-looking with black bobs, whitish foundation over airbrushed-perfect skin, and crimson lips. They have eyeliner drawn in a very dramatic way, extremely heavy, catlike and extended at the outer corners. Their eye makeup is smoky, and they’re wearing some seriously thick false eyelashes beneath plucked high-arched brows. They are each wearing a skintight black leather dress—with a hemline so high that if our principal saw them, he would have a fit, considering our school dress code. Instant detention. “A skirt must reach at least one inch past a girls’ fingertips when she has her hands flat at her sides.” So says the school handbook. And Mr. Bentley stops girls in the hall for skirt patrol.

Only I am pretty sure these three don’t care. And I know that they’re not students. They’re not even of this world. They would
mock
detention.

Or kill and eat everyone in it.

“Irissssssssssssss,” one says, her voice strangely metallic, “come out and play.”

I try to swallow but have no spit. The sound of her voice feels like a cockroach just skittered up my spine. I look up at the ceiling. There’s nowhere for
me to go. I consider crawling
under
my stall walls into the stall next to mine—despite the fact that the bathroom floor of a school restroom is about as repulsive as you can get. But that won’t help me. The window on the wall of the end stall is too small for me to squeeze out of, even if I wanted to try.

My cell phone
. I pull it out of my back pocket. In the upper-left corner, it reads
NO SERVICE
. Our school is in a dead zone. Besides, whom would I call? I wouldn’t want Annie to be in danger. And somehow 911 doesn’t seem quite right. “Excuse me, but three vampires from my dream followed me back to reality.”

I remember Aphrodite’s words. That I’m powerful. I feel anything but. Didn’t my mom say the Keres feast on human flesh? Or blood. Or something.
Think, Iris
. They are daughters of Nyx, so
technically
they’re my aunts, and somehow they’ve been transported into my high school. It’s them versus me. Yes, me, athletically challenged and new to the world of gods and goddesses. I don’t know the rules. And I suspect that even if I did, the Keres don’t play by them.

I wonder for a moment if I can reason with them. I was on the forensics debate team in ninth grade. We won the county championship. Reason with the Keres, though? I doubt it. Epiales didn’t listen to
reason. I’d love to explain to them that I can’t control any of this. When I sleep, I always go to the hallway of many doors. And if they know a cure, I’m open to hearing it. I don’t want this. I don’t want this destiny. I don’t want this birthright. So cure me. But I wonder if their cure is my death.

Click-click-click
. I look up again, hoping for an answer, and I see one of them crawling across the
ceiling
. The
ceiling.
The rules of gravity and physics, the rules of the mortal world don’t apply to them, not in the same way they apply to me, anyway. She stares down at me, her eyes colder than a snake’s. She doesn’t blink. She hisses, and her head skews at an odd angle, the way no human neck can. I silently pray Ms. Cannalloni, our gym teacher, will walk in right now to do one of her bathroom sweeps, looking for smokers. I picture Ms. C. flinging a dodgeball at the Keres on the ceiling.

But no one comes to my rescue.

I have to face them alone.

Find your power
. I try to feel the kind of confidence I think Aphrodite has. Something stirs in the pit of my stomach, but mostly, I think it’s an icy fear. Still.

I take a deep breath and open the stall door anyway, because I can’t think of a single other thing to do.

“What do you want?” I say it with as much force and courage as I can muster while petrified.

They are identical. Triplets. One of them licks her lips. “We wanted to see you for ourselves. The filthy
half-breed
.” The one on the ceiling leaps down, landing directly in front of me. Even if I wanted to make a break for the door, I can’t now. She puts her face inches from mine and growls at me. Her breath smells like blood.

“Look,” I exhale, then take a step backward. “I don’t know
how
to stay out of the Underworld. If I did, I would. I promise you.”

She grabs my wrist so fast, it’s just a blur. Her fingers are icy as a corpse’s. She pulls my wrist to her mouth. I fight her, pulling back.
Please don’t bite me
.

She bares her fangs. The canine tips gleam, their points incredibly sharp.

She licks the inside of my wrist as I struggle to pull my hand away. Her tongue is cold, too. I see frost forming on my inner wrist.

I open my mouth to scream, thinking maybe someone will come.

Then the bathroom door opens and a gaggle of five or six girls walk in. They stop and stare.

As quickly as she grabbed my hand, the Keres
releases it. The three of them glare at me; their pupils open like cats’ eyes. Then they turn on the heels of their six-inch blood-red stilettos, and
click-click-click
their way out of the bathroom.

“Who were
those
freaks?” asks Dari from my English class.

“I have no idea,” I say, and roll my eyes. I walk to the sink, my hands shaking. I turn on the water and splash my face. I’m trying to act nonchalant . . . but inside? I know I was lucky this time. And that I have to learn how to control my dreams soon. Before something from the Underworld kills me.

11

The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.

SIGMUND FREUD

A
nnie and I wait in the reception area of Dr. Koios’s office. It’s Christmas break. I have survived my last exam today. But my dreams? I’m not so sure.

Suddenly, now that my eyes have been opened to gods and goddesses among us, I see the clues. On the shelves of the waiting room are pieces of pottery that I’m sure are ancient shards—authentic pieces from the Byzantine era or something. My mom would go crazy for this stuff. A single black-and-white photograph is framed on the wall opposite the couch where Annie and I are sitting.
Most
doctors would have their degrees matted and behind glass. Instead, his photograph is of the Greek isles, a bleached white
house overlooking a clear sea. A potted palm sits in the corner, and a white-noise machine drones.

The door opens, and he escorts out a patient and then smiles when he sees Annie and me.

“So long, Carol . . .” He waves her off. The woman departs.

“Come on in, girls.”

We walk in, and both of us sit down on his leather couch.

We stare at him.

“Yes, now, ready for your next hypnosis session, Iris?”

“Not so fast,” I say. I unravel my scarf and shake out my black peacoat.

“Oh?” He raises an eyebrow. “You have more questions?”

“You could say that,” Annie offers. Her coat is already draped across her lap.

“We went to see Aphrodite.” I say it aloud and let the words hang in the air between us.

He doesn’t so much answer, more like he exhales an “Oh,” his lips forming a perfect circle.

“So when were you going to tell me?” I ask accusingly.

He sits down behind his desk and spreads his palms
out flat on the wooden surface. He has a bust of a Greek god—I’m guessing Zeus—on the shelf directly behind him. How had I missed the clues?

“So many people end up worshipping their therapist. They view them as superhuman. How does one go about telling a patient that he is, in fact, superhuman?”

His eyes are moist and kindly. I smile because I sense I can trust him in the same way I felt in an instant that I could trust Aphrodite. “Point taken. But now that I know who you really are, can you help me?”

“Why don’t we start with your telling me what’s really going on? I could sense you were holding back from me—
withholding
in therapy lingo.”

“How does one go about telling her therapist that things from her dreams are following her back to real life? If I had told you—before I knew you were a god and all—you would have had me committed.”

“Touché! Can we speak frankly now?”

I nod.

“All right, Iris. From now on no secrets between us. Spill it.”

Annie glances at me. She’s still upset about the Keres—I had told her about them once I returned to
the lunchroom. I look at Dr. Koios. I bite the inside of my cheek. It all feels so huge.