Compared to the yawning rooms and halls and cold stone and glass, the new room seemed almost cozy. The ceiling’s cathedral height was the lowest I had seen. The floors, while stone, were covered in thick carpets detailed in bright greens and violets. I couldn’t tell what the walls might have been as they were entirely covered in bookshelves. Small windows interrupted every three or four columns and seemingly random artifacts peppered the shelves, placed in front of, behind and in between books.
Jordan sat in the middle of the room in one of two enormous armchairs arranged artfully in front of a gaping fireplace. He didn’t get up or say anything, just watched me as I made my way to the empty chair. I sat, uncomfortable and unsure of what was coming next.
“I’m glad to finally see you here,” he said after an intolerably long time.
That snapped me out of my insecurity and I remembered my questions. “Where exactly am I?” I asked.
“Here, with me,” he said vaguely, waving his hand to indicate the room.
I frowned. “Yeah, I got that. I mean, is this your Nightmare Town? Or mine? I know it’s not real.”
“Not real to you, perhaps,” he said with a frown of his own. “This isn’t where I dream, this is where I live.”
I tugged up a shoulder of the slippery green dress. “Okay. So, where exactly—geography wise—are we?”
“About the same place you were when you fell asleep.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Really? I don’t remember any big, spooky log cabin castles in Hemlock Bay.”
“We aren’t in Hemlock Bay,” he said, taking an ornate glass with a long stem from the small table between us. He motioned for me to do the same. “You could think of it more as Hemlock Bay being in my backyard.”
I ignored the glass on the table. “So we’re what, a mile, two miles, from my house?”
“You wouldn’t get there by walking,” he said.
“Then we can’t be that close,” I snapped.
He shrugged. “Same land, same moon and stars and all that.”
I tried a different approach. “All right, so how did I get here? Sleep?”
“Partly. But for you, it’s mostly those,” he said, pointing at the bracelets.
My mouth hardened into a thin line. “About those. I really don’t like them. They remind me of … manacles.”
“They aren’t meant to be,” was all he said.
“I want them off,” I insisted.
He frowned. “We made a deal. You promised.”
“Right,” I said, leaning forward. “In a dream I promised a figment of my imagination to answer a few questions and when I woke up, my brother was alive again and I have these on, which I can’t get off.”
His eyes narrowed as he saw the bandage on my right wrist. “You tried to take them off?”
“Of course I did!” I nearly shouted. “In the middle of my best, weirdest day ever I realized I had on pretty handcuffs with little wispy smoke chains that no one else could see!”
He leaned forward and gently took my wrist and unwound the bandages. He made a little tut tut noise, swept a finger over the gouge and sat back. In place of my wound was a thin scar. The bracelet and its chain were still in place.
“They aren’t manacles. Just a way for me to be sure you keep your end of the promise.”
“So … what? If I don’t talk, you’re going to string me up by them?” I asked, not joking. I could imagine a dank dungeon somewhere below us.
“Not at all,” he said with a laugh. “It’s just a way to draw you here, like a tethering, like an anchor. When you fall asleep, now you’ll drift here.”
“Which is not where I live, not Nightmare Town, not a dream for you …?” I trailed off, running out of options as to where I might literally be.
Annoyed, I snatched up the fancy glass and took a swig that I promptly choked on.
“Wine?” I asked, attempting a more polite cough.
“Of course.”
“Well, I’m a little underage and I didn’t bring my fake ID.”
“Ah!” he cried, his face lighting up. “Now we get to what you are here for.”
I scrambled up out of my chair. “Hey, I’m not here for anything like—”
Confusion then amused understanding quickly crossed his face. “No, of course not,” he said, waving me back into my chair. “I meant questions. You’re here to answer questions. That was the agreement, correct?”
Tension flowed out of my body and left my muscles shaky. I nodded.
“So explain. What does underage mean? What is a fake ID?”
“Um, underage means being too young to drink and a fake ID is what people use to try to make people believe that they aren’t.”
“And you have one of those?” He tucked a dark wave of hair behind his ear. I tried not to watch every little move he made but his handsome face and wild hair and strong body were mesmerizing.
My cheeks began to burn and I struggled to remember the question. “Well, I have a real one, a driver’s license.”
“And that’s so you can drink wine?”
My eyebrows furrowed together. “No, it’s so I can drive a car. But it also shows my age so that if I tried to buy wine or whatever, they could see I wasn’t old enough and not sell it to me.”
Now he seemed confused. “Cars, right?”
“I … wait, what?”
“You drive a car? And you can’t do it without your license?”
“Well, I could, but not legally. And if I got caught I’d be in a lot of trouble.”
“Why?”
I took a small breath and looked around the ornate room, smoothed my fancy dress and returned my gaze back to his eerily handsome face.
“This is what you brought me here for? You saved my brother just so you could ask me about wine and cars?”
Jordan was quiet for a long moment, twirling the silver stem of glass between his fingers. He seemed younger and more real than he had in Nightmare Town. I could see the details of each dark wave of his hair, the calluses ringing the palms of his hands. My face began to heat again as I appreciated just how handsome he was.
“Is it so terrible? Being here with me?” he asked, not looking me in the face.
I felt bad. “No, it’s just … you went to all the trouble of saving my brother and getting him back to me just so you could ask me some mundane questions?”
“They aren’t mundane to me.” He had barely shifted in his chair and I was ready to jump out of mine and start pacing the floor.
“Okay, so why don’t you just go there and see for yourself if you’re so interested?”
He was quiet for a moment. “I can’t.”
“Why not?”
Jordan’s eyes narrowed. “You ask a lot of questions for an encyclopedia.”
My temper flared. “Sorry, I’m just trying to figure out what the hell is going on.”
He stood up from his chair. “I gave you your brother back and you are supposed to tell me about where you are from. I thought you would be more grateful. I could have asked for much more.”
I fidgeted with my dress, choosing my next words carefully. “Thank you for helping my brother. You have no idea how grateful I am to have him back. And I will uphold my end of the bargain. It’s just that I have no idea how any of this is possible and you seem to. I just want to know—”
“I think that’s enough questions for now,” he said, setting his glass down.
“I have a couple more,” I tried to say but he shook his head and pointed at a rosy glow coming up the smoke chain.
“I think you’re needed at home. Until next time,” he said with small, sad smile. He hesitated in front of the fireplace as I began to drift off. “I hope we can become friends.”
His face and the sound of the crackling fireplace faded to a rushing, dreamless gray.
Chapter 6