by Trisha Telep
Hell, for all I knew, that’s why I’d been abandoned on a church doorstep when I was no more than two, by the social worker’s best guess. No one knew my birthday or my real name. For all practical purposes, I was born that afternoon, in social services, to the woman who named me after the heroine in a romance novel and the label on a can of her favorite soup.
But she didn’t keep me. No one kept me for more than a few months at a time. I made them uncomfortable. When I was around, fear floated in the air like dust moats in sunlight. Floorboards creaked louder, goose bumps grew fatter, and the dark felt darker than ever before.
Obviously, I don’t make a lot of friends. But when people go to sleep, I know them better than anyone. I see things they wouldn’t show their best friends. Hear things they wouldn’t whisper to their therapists. Sometimes I know things they don’t even know about themselves. Buried memories. Forgotten trauma. The quiet terror slowly rotting away at their souls.
I gave their terror life. I gave it form and purpose, carefully weaving borrowed images to create a dream tapestry, sticky as spider’s silk and a million times stronger. They struggled pointlessly against my carefully braided dream threads while I rode their fear, gorging on it to nourish my own soul until the hunger ebbed—at least for a while.
In their nightmares, I had power, and for those few moments—precious because they were so brief—I felt sated. Full. In the most hedonistic, pleasure-filled sense of the word.
Just thinking about it made my hunger swell, a cold-blooded beast demanding warmth and nourishment. Tonight, BethAnne would be both.
She sighed beneath my caressing finger, and I laid my palm flat on the side of her face, treasuring her warmth. I slid my hand over her jaw and down her throat to her shoulder. Then I pushed.
BethAnne rolled onto her back with a soft grunt. Her forehead furrowed, but her eyes didn’t open. I pulled the covers back and knelt on one side of the mattress. She was helpless, and practically plump with energy she didn’t even need, while I was cold and starving. It’s not wrong, some stubborn voice in my head insisted. It’s survival. She’ll live, and this way, so will you.
I slid my leg over her stomach and straddled her on the bed. Her tee was soft against my thighs, her skin warm through the material, in contrast to the cold hunger chilling me from the inside.
My eyes closed, and I scooted forward until I felt her rib cage beneath me. Her breath hitched, struggling beneath my weight. But I wasn’t heavy enough to truly suffocate her, and I would only take as much energy as I needed.
I leaned forward and touched her face. Warm cheeks, warmer neck. The physical contact I needed to establish a mental connection.
Then the world shifted, and I saw what she saw. I wasn’t truly in her dream, but I was in firm control of it. The wizard behind the curtain of her subconscious.
BethAnne sat on a beach in the sun, sculpting a sandcastle with the handle of a broken plastic fork. She glanced up and smiled at a man in a folding lawn chair, then carefully scraped sand from the side of a turret. The man had no face, and I’d been in enough dreams to interpret that one—BethAnne had never met her father, but her subconscious hoped he was the kind of man who’d set aside an entire day just to watch her on the beach. To be with her.
So peaceful. So hopeful. So ... completely useless to me. Peace and hope are cute. But fear is my medium. It’s the vibrant paint on the canvas of my life, the only color bright enough to mean anything. To truly feel.
With it, I could paint her dream into a nightmare...
I started with something simple. The next time BethAnne turned to look at her blank-faced father, he was gone. So was his chair. I was proud of that little detail; it said that he hadn’t merely left her—he’d never really been there in the first place.
Next, the sand melted beneath her feet, flattening and hardening into featureless gray concrete, gritty against her bare legs.
BethAnne stood, frightened by the abrupt changes. That’s when I dropped the rest of the nightmare around her, as sudden and disjointed as any natural dream.
I dried up the ocean, giddy with power in my dream-state kingdom. Then, when BethAnne whirled again, bars slammed into the ground in front of her, clanging like a prison cell door. Three more bar walls dropped on her other sides, and she was trapped. Caught. Alone.
BethAnne tried to shake the bars, but they didn’t move. She yelled, but her throat made no sound. She was locked up—cut off from the world. This was the fear she’d shown me. Total isolation. Being gone and forgotten, like she’d never existed in the first place.
She was afraid now—the real BethAnne trembled beneath me on her mattress, so small and scared—but I needed more. There is a well of true terror in everyone’s heart, and she was hiding hers from me instinctively.
No fair holding back. I wanted it all.
The Sleepwalking-me leaned forward and stared down at BethAnne in her bed. Her eyes were squeezed shut, her fists clenching the sheet at her sides.
I closed my eyes again and swiped an eraser over my mental whiteboard. In her dream, the concrete beach disappeared, along with the dry ocean bed. But the bars remained, and BethAnne could see nothing beyond them but a yawning black abyss. I’d left her no sign that the rest of the world still existed.
She opened her mouth for a scream, and I gave back her voice. But the blackness devoured it the moment the sound flowed past the bars. No one would hear her. No one would see her. She could scream and cry and bang on the window all day, but...
Wait. A window?
And that’s when I saw through the cracks and into that well she’d tried to keep from me. I fell into its depths and landed in the middle of her true nightmare—the remembered terror I’d somehow recreated for her with no conscious thought. I was on autopilot, gorging on her fear without noticing the changes until they’d gone too far.
BethAnne whimpered.
A basement, pitch dark, but for the pitiful streetlight shining through a narrow, filthy window at the top of one wall. A child version of BethAnne sat in the stretched rectangle of dirty light, tiny arms hugging her knees. Something skittered in the corner, and BethAnne sobbed. Her empty stomach growled and cramped. Her tongue felt thick and dry. She’d wet herself the day before.
The stairs were lost in darkness, and the door at the top was locked from the outside. With a padlock. BethAnne had gotten out of the house once when her mommy went out, and someone called social services. Mommy wasn’t taking any chances this time. She had to keep her daughter safe from nosy strangers with cell phones. Safe from anything until Mommy came back with food and water, smiling and playing the hero. And when she did, BethAnne would love her and hug her and cling to her shining salvation. So what if her savior was also her jailer?
But what if her mommy didn’t come back this time? What if no one ever heard BethAnne again?
Beneath me, her heart beat faster. Too fast. She was sweating now, and her pulse was irregular.
Too much. Too far. What kind of sick-ass parent would do that to a kid? No wonder BethAnne kept that one buried.
Maybe I was better off without a mom.
I opened my eyes and withdrew from her dream, and without my will to support it, BethAnne’s nightmare collapsed like a house of cards. I was done with her. Just like some restaurants are too dirty to eat at, some fears are too filthy to consume, for fear of planting rot in my own soul.
Her breathing slowed, and I slid off her chest. BethAnne rolled onto her side. She pulled her knees up to her chest and tucked one hand beneath her cheek. Silent tears streaked her face, but she breathed deeply now, without my weight to constrict her lungs. She looked so vulnerable—a larger version of the girl huddling in the basement—and suddenly I wished I’d chosen someone else to feed from on my first night at Holser. Someone a little less damaged.
I was warm and full, nearly glutted, but the meal sat heavy on my soul, like bad fish in my gut. There was nothing left to do but lie awake in my bed and wait
for morning. And try to forget BethAnne’s basement, and the fact that I—a walking Nightmare—had been outplayed by the memory of an ordinary, human nightmare of a mother.
***
Morning couldn’t come fast enough. It never did. You’d think I’d be used to that, after fifteen years of lying awake in bed—I only seem to need three to four hours of sleep—but it never gets easier to fill the empty hours before dawn.
And I’d learned quickly not to ever, ever wake anyone else up.
But by quarter to six in the morning, I’d had all the nighttime I could take. By six fifteen, I was showered, dried, dressed, brushed, and scowling at the locked cafeteria door.
“I don’t serve breakfast until seven thirty,” a voice said from behind me, and I turned to find a blue-eyed woman in khakis and a green button-down shirt. An official laminate ID hung around her neck, reading kate greer. “Most of the girls aren’t even awake this early in the summer.”
“I’m not most of the girls.” But I was starving for actual food, now that my more exotic hunger had been temporarily satisfied.
“Then you must be Sabine,” Greer said, and I nodded. “Well, Sabine, how ’bout this: I’ll let you eat now, if you help me serve breakfast afterward.”
“Yeah, I guess.” First served, plus I wouldn’t have to pretend not to notice the others avoiding me as they ate.
“Great. It’ll fulfill your chore requirement for today too. Follow me.” Greer pulled a pink coiled key chain from her pocket and unlocked the door, then led the way through the dining room into the kitchen, where the combined scents of bacon, butter, and syrup were enough to make my head swim.
“Why is the food ready, if you don’t serve it for another hour?” I asked, staring at the serving line, where steam rose from slits in aluminum foil covered buffet trays.
“Because I feed the day staff before their shift starts.”
“That’s really cool of you.” And probably not a requirement of her position.
“I don’t mind. Help yourself.” She pointed to a stack of plastic trays at one end of the serving line. So I did.
I scarfed pancakes, bacon, and juice while the day-shift techs and staff members wandered in alone or in pairs.
None of them sat near me. A couple smiled—I’d seen them the day before—but when my gaze met theirs, they looked away and hurried past my table. My creepy factor was strongest after a good meal, and I’d fed well the night before.
Kate Greer was the only staff member, so far, who didn’t seem in a hurry to get rid of me. After I ate, she gave me an apron and a pair of tongs. “You do bacon, and I’ll handle the pancakes. If they want seconds, they have to wait until everyone else has eaten. Got it?”
I nodded just as the first residents pushed through the double doors into the cafeteria. But twenty minutes later, when everyone had been served, Greer’s pile of pancakes had dwindled to a single stack of five, but my bacon tray was still full. I’d only served two girls. All the others had passed me by after one glance.
“That’s weird.” Greer frowned as I covered the full tray. “Bacon’s usually a hit. Now what am I going to do with all this?”
I had no answer, so I hung up my apron and crossed the cafeteria in silence, avoiding eye contact while I was still so warm and full—and obviously sending out creepy-vibes—from BethAnne’s nightmare.
It wouldn’t take long for Greer to notice that no one was eating whatever I was dishing out. I’d have to find a more solitary house chore and wait to eat with the general population, no matter how loud my impatient stomach complained.
At least the nighttime self-serve is plentiful.
Or so I thought...
***
I spent most of my second day at Holser House alone in my room, avoiding people so they couldn’t avoid me. That night, I was still pretty full—or at least not starving—from BethAnne’s nightmare, so I decided not to feed, hoping people would find me a little less spooky the next day. It turns out solitude is a lot easier to deal with when foster parents are the only people trying to ignore you. Though I would never have admitted it, being alone in a house full of girls my own age ... well, that kind of sucked.
And it made me miss Nash even more. He and his family were the only ones I’d ever met who didn’t mind me hanging around—probably because they weren’t human either. Knowing why I was creepy had gone a long way toward helping them get over it.
Unfortunately, revealing my species to the rest of Holser wasn’t an option. But skipping one meal wouldn’t kill me, right? I’d gone longer than that plenty of times. So that night, I put in my earbuds and listened to the iPod David had given me while I waited to fall asleep on an empty stomach.
The next day was Saturday. Visiting day. From ten a.m. on, there were strangers everywhere I turned. Or at least, that’s what it felt like, though once I started counting, I realized only about a dozen of the girls had company.
I wasn’t one of them. Not that I’d expected to be. Jenny was pissed that I’d gotten arrested again, and David wouldn’t come see me without her. Not after I’d pulled a no-show on his watch.
So I decided to scout out a suitable meal for that night from among the girls who didn’t have visitors. I tried the common room first, but the only two girls there were talking to parents, one of whom had brought along a kid brother, evidently glued to a PSP.
The cafeteria was the same, only worse. Several more fractured family units were spread out around different tables, alternately talking, arguing, and sitting in uncomfortable silence. Another point in favor of me not having a real family.
My only other option was the backyard. None of the visitors wanted to leave the air-conditioning for the broiling Texas heat, so all three picnic tables were occupied by Holser residents. The only girl I knew by name was Sharise, who sat alone at the shaded end of a concrete picnic table.
I dropped onto the bench across from her. “Hey.”
Sharise looked up from a game of Solitaire and met my gaze, unflinchingly. “Hey.”
She hadn’t picked up her cards and run—definitely a good sign. My growing hunger would make it harder for me to read her fear, but easier for her to tolerate my presence. “No company today?”
“Or any other day.” She flipped over a red five and stacked it on a black six. “No one left to come see me ’cept my sister, and she can’t drive yet. What about you?”
Had she just asked me a personal question? That was new. “Same. Minus the sister.”
Sharise nodded like she understood. “You in foster care?”
Wow. Two questions in a row. That was practically a conversation! “I was.” I shrugged, trying not to look shocked as I squinted into the blinding sun. “Not sure anymore.”
Jenny probably wouldn’t let David take me back. I was pretty sure she’d gone out of town that night to get away from me anyway, even if she didn’t even really understand her own motivation. She hadn’t been sleeping very well lately—plagued with nightmares of one miscarriage after another, caused by the fear that she’d condemned her husband to a childless life. Well, caused by that, and by me.
What she didn’t know was that David’s worst fear was actually being saddled with an infant. He’d been having trouble sleeping lately too...
“So, how long does this family love-fest last?” I asked, glancing around at the other residents who’d chosen the heat over the Visitor’s Day commotion inside.
“Till five. But everyone with enough privilege points gets to check out for dinner.”
Dinner out? Something told me I wouldn’t be so lucky. Fortunately, so far the food at Holser was much better than I’d expected.
I was oddly reluctant to end the unexpected conversation with Sharise, which would definitely happen once I touched her. But my other hunger had to be satisfied too...
