I awoke with a start, staring at my room as if I had never seen it before, my fingers curling around the sheets as I backed up against the headboard. Within seconds the realisation hit me. Another dream. Same people.
Not real.
I brought my knees to my chest and tried to slow my breathing. At first, I hadn’t paid attention to the dreams, but they hadn’t started out so vividly. But soon I realised the dreams were a running series of events involving the same people, and every morning I found it harder and harder to wake in my own reality. Instead, I woke wondering why I couldn’t see the stars, and why there was a stifling, oppressive roof over my head. Every night I became Kali, and every day I felt a little less like me.
Of course, my mind had to play tricks on me when I needed it to stay straight. I figured I had some kind of mental block because I was dreaming about someone else’s life when I should have been suffering from nightmares of my own.
Checking the clock, I groaned. Five a.m. Brilliant.
I pulled on my dressing gown and glanced at my hollow eyes in the mirror—stranger’s eyes—before heading to the one place I knew would make me feel as though I were still in the right body. Kali might have found her constant in the stars, but mine was in a single room.
I shuffled into the kitchen in slippered feet, half expecting to hear Mémère’s voice and smell her perfume, feel the warmth of her protective arms around me. Her soothing words could tell me everything would be okay.
Instead, I found a cold, empty room. She was the light. She was the warmth. The kitchen had always been just a room. Yet it was where I retreated when I wanted to feel her close to me or when I needed to feel as though I still belonged to my family.
No milk in the fridge, so I settled for a relatively stale piece of toast. Chewing had become perfunctory. I didn’t taste food; I didn’t feel sunlight on my skin. In some ways I thought it a sin for the sun to shine when my heart was still mourning.
I sat there alone until Nathan arose, hungry as usual. Werewolves burned away everything they ate. Sometimes Nathan joked around and said hunger caused his stress. I was starting to believe him.
My brother raised a brow at the sight of me, up before him, but I wasn’t planning on telling him I had been sitting there for over two hours. My body didn’t want to move, so I had frozen to the spot, while images of my grandmother’s broken body flashed before my eyes. For the five billionth time, I wished I had been the one to take revenge on the werewolf who killed her. Not some girl who had only known for a couple of weeks that werewolves existed.
But I froze with fear in the face of the creatures that I’d always known existed. I hadn’t moved to help one member of my family, and one had died. The werewolf had come for me, had hunted me, but I had hidden while my grandmother tried to protect me. The wolf murdered her instead.
My family could never forgive me for that.
The aftermath was almost as difficult to deal with as her death had been. My grandfather had run away. My brother was too concerned with his girlfriend’s feelings to worry about me. And my uncle might as well have lived elsewhere, so rarely did I see him. Sometimes… sometimes I wanted to fall back asleep to be in that dream world as Kali, the girl surrounded by people who all paid attention to her. That girl was never forgotten about. Yeah, she had problems, but her family saw her as an asset. Me? I was the liability.
“Up early?” Nathan asked, taking a swig of orange juice straight from the carton. I didn’t have the heart to bitch about that.
“A little.”
“Well, hurry up and get ready. I need to leave.”
Story of my life. Nobody wondered how I was feeling. If I was okay. Everyone thought of themselves and got on with it. Mémère would have thought of me first. Then again, if she were around, everyone would be happy. The silence, the gloom, and the depression would all lift.
But she wasn’t around. And she never would be, thanks to me.
Nathan didn’t speak much on the way to school, not even when his girlfriend, Perdita, sat next to him on the bus. I stared at her from the corner of my eye and noted how tired she seemed, how the strain showed in her face. Her dark blue eyes held constant misery in them these days, even though she had been the hero, the one who’d stepped in and taken action in the face of danger. Yet, she seemed sadder than anyone. I longed to swap places with her. My chest ached as I wished the heroine had been me, and not her. The awe in Nathan’s face after the battle, and the way the entire family had studied Perdita with an air of admiration… I wanted those desperately for myself.