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Was that a memory or a deduction? Either way, it was bad news.
I pulled myself higher in the seat, stretched my muscles, and blinked away fatigue. I was not the Avenger of Humanity. No swirling cape for me. Just a girl with a gun, some skills, and the memory of a very old woman who knew how to stick you with a sword...or stitch you with nightmare and turn you into someone who cared nothing about their future.
Like Samuel and Rose.
I’d thought to inherit some amazing skills from the C, but the grocery cart remained half-empty.
Still, the memories were coming—the more I remembered, the more keys I had to unlock. It was like stepping stones, one memory led you to the other.
I decided to follow the trail as far as I could. The two Stitched had worshiped the C...and me. There had to be more to the Cucitrice than living longer than a mummified Elvis and being able to do cross-stitch in people?
Had to be.
The car tires hummed. The soda can in the door compartment rattled. The radio played some unfamiliar tune.
Something stirred in the wilderness of my mind.
Some memories hit like a sledgehammer, some crawled in like dying pets and whimpered. They made you shiver but with dread, not anticipation. This one was the latter.
Beastly Burgers—the name of the shop had been vaguely familiar. It’d been in one of the letters fromhim. At the thought of the SK, every hair on my body prickled upright. The words were imprinted, etched, possibly nailed in place.
We both stopped off to eat at Beastly Burgers today. You really should try them. Mine was a little too bloody, but I ate it anyway.
CHAPTER25
Zara
Listeningto my gut instincts and heading to the burger joint in Wichita might not have been my best idea.
Oh yeah. This looked absolutely promising. As I braked slowly, I peeked out the window at the devastation. The lights were out nearby. The streetlight might have suffered damage in the fire. The two-story building was charred, with black streaks going from ground level up to the roof.
The scent of smoke was strong.
If my world hadn’t turned upside down recently, I would have ignored theTwilight Zonetheme in my head. There was something statistically very odd about this.
In the past, I would have laughed. Now, nightmares were trying to kill me, and I had a pet wolf with two faeries installed in her fur, and I was using a burger wrapper as my guide.
All this really did, kind of, was draw a connection between the surreal nightmare and dream world and my serial killer guy. My SK had been a perverse and evil mystery but never surreal.
I sucked on my bottom lip.Fuckitty.
Hopefully, I was wrong.
He couldn’t be connected. There’d have to be some new, recent event to draw a line between him and the creatures, the C, or the Nightmare King. When Yvaine and I had been friends, none of this insanity had happened yet. Dreams and nightmares had stayed in my head and only bothered me when I slept.
Except that wasn’t quite true, I just hadn’t known it yet.
I glanced in the rear-view mirror and caught a glimpse of red. I didn’t know if my scream was louder than the horn of the car as I jerked and accidentally hit it.
Heart thudding, I peeped again—
Neme was scratching at the seat, circling, and settling into sleep. The two faeries had arrived with her.
I actually sank back into the seat with the relief—wolves materializing in cars was now the baseline for normal. That Neme looked a little faded,thatwas more cause for worry. Val’s theory came to mind.
What would I do if I was blind to them?
I could test that theory safely—with Neme. Wait for her to fade some more and try touching her. And if I could feel but not see? Like walking through a minefield. I needed a fix that didn’t include Val. Fuck. Cross that bridge when I came to it.
