3. Florencia

3

Florencia

B ut he was. He was so wrong.

With a breath and a prayer, I closed my eyes, touching the lids with the pads of my fingers.

Where was I before this?

I couldn't remember, which meant this was probably a dream. I had simply walked into a very vivid, very bad, very annoying—

"What are you doing?"

My eyes snapped open. He was there, right in front of me, with that horrid scowl on his scarred face. He looked bigger this close, his features terrifying, his size immense with his wings stretched out, nearly tripling his size. Yet, I didn't feel afraid. Not of him.

Was something wrong with me?

Maybe I had walked through too many nightmares before.

But there was something familiar about him.

"What?" he asked, annoyed once again.

"I'm trying to remember what I was doing before this. I can't remember if this is a dream." My panic came out before I could tuck it back into its hiding place in the basement of my mind.

His scowl softened and his eyebrows shot up. "You're a Haxia, and you can't tell the difference?"

"Haxia?" The word rang a familiar tune, deep down in the vaults of my mind, but I couldn't place it, too far buried under the memories of my grandmother's teachings.

"A sorceress of the subconscious, a dream witch, a sandman." The words came plainly from his lips, as if they meant little to him.

He continued his walk through the stone courtyard, the statues of giant wolves shattered over patches of dead dirt where a flowerbed likely once bloomed. The loud grinding of stone against stone behind me brought my hair to stand, the reminder of the freaky, faceless stone guards just a few feet past me forcing my feet to move.

I blurted out a laugh. "First of all, I'm not a man," I said, rushing to his side.

With a slow acknowledgment, he looks me up and down. "I noticed."

"And I can't make people sleep," I said with a roll of my eyes. "I can just walk into their dreams."

His voice was a low warning. "Dreams and nightmares aren't something you just walk into."

"Through it?" I chanced.

"No," he insisted. "I expected more from you."

With my mouth left wide, he once again moved away from me in all his audacity. His gigantic frame and bat wings barely registered anymore when they competed with all that was coming out of his mouth. I pushed to follow him once again up the steps, ignoring my skirt getting dirty along the hem.

I scoffed. "I've been doing this practically my whole life!"

"So why do you barely understand it?" He whipped his head back my way, his flared nostrils more intimidating than the spikes on his wings, which I now could see up close were bone.

I shook my head, outraged. "I know everything there is to know—"

He loomed over me, his eyes burning into mine. I gulped, bracing for whatever would come next, my hands closing in a fist while his black eye danced over my features.

"Nightmares are streams of consciousness twisted into reality. They are humanity's worst fears materialized into one godly territory. You never walked into nightmares, girl." His long fingers curled under my chin, holding me in place. His touch was cold, but I held on, pretending it didn't bother me. "Maybe you were granted permission to see a glimpse of it, but you never fully experienced the nightmare hiding inside every mind."

That offended me. I knew nightmares well—the ones when I dreamt and the ones during the day. "And how can you be so sure?"

His voice was a low growl with his answer. "Because I am it ."

A shrieking noise stole my attention, and I whipped my head to the side. He let me go at once, and I stumbled back right as a swarm of bats exploded where I stood. In the chaos, he was gone.

I was secretly glad, because my cheeks burned from shame. I hated not knowing something, not having all the information. I wanted to shake it off, but the truth was, he was right. Maybe I didn't know everything. I had been thrown into dreams as a child, forced to survive.

There were no books, no certainty, and no single witch with the same kind of power in our entire line that we could trace. How could I possibly have known everything?

I tried to breathe through my racing thoughts, my eyes fixed on a small rock beside my shoes, and then slowly, I lifted my head.

I was still in the castle courtyard. Stone walls crumbled around me, gently running down as some invisible force took them apart. But as they crumbled, they rebuilt again right in front of my eyes. It was a magic of destruction and rebirth.

Everything was moving, the stone like water, never stopping, never conforming.

The grinding shifted my focus back to his guards, who slowly moved toward me, each step nails on a chalkboard. But their talons were still directed at me, palms reaching, with an open eye watching me on each hand.

"Don't touch me." The words were barely a whisper through my lips.

While I didn't want their hands on me, I knew this wasn't where my wishes came true. The reality of what was happening to me was settling in at a rapid pace.

I was lost again.

Its sharp claw pierced through my dress, and with more speed than I thought it capable of, the stone guard lifted me from the ground. That same scream from before colored the air, something alive echoing and vibrating on the crumbling walls of the nightmare castle. A single tear ran down my cheek as I realized who the scream belonged to.

I was the only living thing here.

I yelled once more, feeling my body vibrate with the want and need to break free. But he was too large, impervious to pain, and my attempts were useless. My throat was hoarse, my tears meant nothing, and my fists were too sore from attempting to damage something that could not feel. I went limp in its hold. All the panic was useless.

I was useless too.

It was dark inside, my eyes slow to adjust as I struggled in his grip. We entered the castle, and I tried to make sense of where we were going, but on the tenth turn, we arrived at a row of iron-barred cells, and I knew there was no chance for escape. They threw me in, the door sliding shut with a loud clang. I fell to the ground, a pathetic mess with my skirt pooled at my waist like some sort of damsel in distress.

My eyes spilled, finally unable to hold back the tears, my hands shaking as I felt that familiar panic burning in my chest.

One. Two. Three.

I counted out loud, voice shaky and small while I tapped two fingers to the side of my head, then the other so I could keep the symmetry.

I laughed at that one. If I cracked the knuckles of one hand, I had to crack the other. I always had to put the same amount of moisturizer on both legs. The light switches had to be in the same direction, I could never own things in odd numbers, and if I twitched one nostril, then hell, I had to twitch the other, just to make them even.

Laughable.

Nothing stayed even anyway.

I hummed quietly to myself. It had been a few hours since I was left here alone, and only his faceless guards dared to approach.

I was in trouble, I knew I was, yet I kept telling myself it wasn't that bad. I could just turn around and go back home. I could snap my fingers and find my sisters. I knew the tricks, knew enough to stay in control.

I knew enough.

I repeated the words to myself like a ritual. Being a witch was knowing that words had power. Being a witch with obsessive-compulsive disorder meant being hypervigilant that I didn't put too much power into my words. Because they could send me into a downward spiral even the most powerful couldn't return from.

I was six or so when they first began, the feeling that I could be in charge of my world or my circumstances if only I tried hard enough . The psychiatrists told my father it was a normal reaction to losing my mother at such a young age, so no one interrupted my rituals, realizing how much I needed them to feel some sense of control.

Good night. Sleep tight. Safe sleep. Dream of me, dream of sweets, sweet dreams.

I would say the words to each of my sisters before bed. I had to say them . I had to . I said them every single night; who could guarantee what would happen if I didn't? Surely, they had kept them safe this long, and the risk was far too great to chance.

When my sister Elisa was fourteen, she slept away from home once, and I lost it. Unable to sleep, unable to breathe, I simply rolled from one panic attack into the next until the sun rose above the horizon and my sister returned home to find me a broken-down mess.

She never slept away from home again.

I was far from being in control. I had no idea where I was. It didn't matter how hard I tried, I couldn't remember the events that brought me here.

It was that empty feeling of losing a dream. You float past it, near the edge of awakening, losing the magic that was the promise of the fantasy. Except I was still here, still drenched in dread, with no sign of morning breaking through my consciousness.

No future or past. I was here and I wasn't, the edges of my vision perpetually blurred from the tears I couldn't stop shedding. The longer the minutes rolled by, the less I remembered myself, my sisters, and the home we shared. The only words that stained my mind were the words that reminded me of what I was.

His prisoner.

Haxia.

I lay on the cold floor with my eyes closed.

Could I still dream inside a nightmare?

My mind drifted away, and the heaviness inside eased. Sleep was not a comfort, sleep was not my friend. It was a double-edged necessity. I plummeted through my chest every night to survive. From the first time my sisters shook me awake as a child, sweat dripping from my pores and fear vibrant in my eyes, I hated sleep.

No, not always. There was once a time I looked forward to sleep, before the nightmares took the choice away from me. When I could decide whose dreams to step inside instead of being pulled in like a witness to a crime. When I could hold hands with a friend who loved me instead of enduring a stranger's pain.

The reality was, I had grown to hate sleep. Here I was, though, already in a nightmare. There was something comforting about finding yourself finally facing what you feared the most.

I fell asleep with a smile on my lips.

And it was with a smile that he found me.