Page 6 of Realm of Dreams & Shadows

I mutter a curse, realizing I’d forgotten to bring a hair tie.

Then again, considering I don’t remember how I got to the beach in the first place, forgetting a hair tie is small potatoes.

I stop and turn slowly in a circle, frowning. Not a soul in sight. Weird. I haven’t been to this beach in years. And why would I want to come back without my mom? This was our special place, and just being here makes my throat go thick with tears.

Still, I’m glad I’m here. It feels strangely right to come one last time before I officially start college.

A green beachball bounces across my path and into the water. I look to the left and see a little boy with a mop of dark hair, big brown eyes, and the pudgy cheeks of a toddler. He blinks as he points to the ball, tears clinging to his long lashes.

“I’ll get it,” I tell him, then wade to where the ball is bouncing knee deep in the surf.

I grab it, then walk back and put it in the boy’s outstretched hands. He smiles. One of those sweet, babyish smiles full of innocence and laughter.

Then the smile spreads, wider and wider and wider until he’s all teeth and gums, and it looks as if I could grab the corners of his mouth and peel the skin right off his skull.

For a moment—one tiny, millisecond of a moment—that’s exactly what I see, and I stumble backward, my heart racing. This isn’t right. And yet it’s somehow so damn familiar.

A dream.

I know this dream.

But I can’t wake up.

He takes a step toward me, that perverted mouth now moving as he speaks in a low, gravelly voice that sounds like it was piped straight from hell. “She’s here. The tricky bitch is here.”

“Who?” I have to force the word out past the fear clogging my throat as I look to the sky, vaguely remembering a woman with long, dark hair.

I get no answer. Instead, his chubby baby hands squeeze the sides of the beach ball, causing the top and bottom to bulge, filling with way more air than he could be pushing out of the middle.

I want to run, but the sand has turned to wet cement. My feet are buried up to my ankles. I tug, but I don’t have the strength to pull them free.

The beachball explodes, and I recoil from the sickly-sweet scent of death as a spout of blood and bile paints the sky red.

The little monster boy races past me into the now-boiling ocean, and steam rises as his body jerks and expands, morphing into some sort of prehistoric monster covered in thick scales and a dark gray hide.

I try to yank my feet from the cement-like sand. Not. Happening.

Cold panic sweeps over me, and I hear my own voice—It’s just a dream. Just a dream. Just a dream…

But the words aren’t soothing. How could they be for someone like me who knows the danger that hides in dreams?

“No,” I whisper, then raise my voice to a scream. “No, no, no, no, no!”

Yes, Cora. Yes.

The words appear in my head, spoken in the same gravelly voice. I twist at the waist, feet still stuck fast. The toddler’s now-reptilian body plows through the water as dozens of similar mares rise behind him.

I squat down, frantically shoving at the sand, but it’s futile, and I watch in horror as the creatures creep toward me, pincers twitching, as more and more burst from the sand, and my heart pounds so hard my ribs ache.

The largest monster snarls, teeth bared and eyes glinting like a starving man facing Thanksgiving.

I guess I’m the meal.

I push and punch and wriggle backward, but I have no leverage. I can only watch as the monster’s wide mouth stretches even wider and the sharp teeth gleam in the light of the setting sun.

I’m trapped. Stuck fast. And I haven’t got a clue how to get the hell out of here.

Mother.