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Her eyes sprang open. The room swirled into focus.
She blinked rapidly at the artificial light that radiated from her ceiling fixture, her heart thundering in her chest, manic as a captured bird.
“Isobel, wake up. Wake up, baby.”
She gasped, heaving, and swallowed the air in gulps.
Someone patted her cheek. She seized the large, warm hand between both of hers, her attention narrowing on the thick golden band that encircled one finger and the slim dark hairs that poked out from beneath the drooping cuff of a familiar navy fleece robe.
Isobel looked into the face of her father. He stared at her hard, eyes searching, his dark brows knitted together.
She glanced from him to her window. Closed. Against the backdrop of snow and night, her lace curtains hung motionless.
She felt a hand brush her cheek, and she flinched. She turned back to her father, whose eyes strove to make contact with hers.
“Isobel, look at me. You were dreaming, kiddo. Dreaming.”
She heard herself whimper as she scooted to sit up. Her empty stomach churned, and she swallowed in an effort to repress a wave of nausea.
Her dad grasped her by the shoulders, and Isobel collapsed into his arms. She pressed her face into his neck and released one long, choking sob.
“Shhh,” he hushed. “Just a bad dream. That’s all.”
Over his shoulder, she caught sight of her mother hovering close by, her face anxious, etched with delicate lines of worry. She drew near and sank onto the bed next to them, placing a cool palm to Isobel’s brow. That was when Isobel saw Danny standing in the open doorway.
Disheveled and groggy, he wore a pair of baggy black sweatpants. His belly strained against a too-tight Batman T-shirt, while his dark hair stuck up in tufts around his head. He sent a squinting glare around the room.
“Jeez,” he muttered, turning in a slow circle, as though still half expecting to find some evidence of an ax murderer’s presence. “I mean, were you trying to break the sound barrier?”
Isobel quaked in her father’s arms while the adrenaline made its final rounds through her system. Fingers twitching, she curled them into the collar of his robe.
“It’s okay,” her dad said as he rocked her, his voice firm, commanding, as though his saying so held the power to make it true. He stroked her back, and she could feel his hand bumping over the safety pins on Varen’s jacket.
Pretending not to notice the meaning-filled glance shared by her parents, Isobel shut her eyes and tried to slow her breathing, to bring her heart to normal speed and return her mind to reality.
While her father rubbed her back, her mother smoothed her hair, nimble fingertips tucking flyaway strands behind her ears.
All the attention made her feel so small, so helpless, like she’d somehow reverted to being five years old again.
Only now her parents couldn’t tell her that nightmares weren’t real.
Because she knew better.
NO ONE BROUGHT UP THE nightmare the next morning while unwrapping presents. Not even Danny, who Isobel thought would have been the first to launch into an onslaught of questions, wanting to know about blood spillage and body count.
Maybe, Isobel thought, sitting on the couch, wrapped in her pink robe and wearing her fuzzy slippers, no one was saying anything because it was Christmas.
Then again, maybe it was just because her parents were biding their time, waiting for the right moment to confront her about Varen’s jacket and formally announce their decision to send her to a shrink.
As for the dream itself, Isobel knew better than to call it that. It had felt real. It had been real. Whether Pinfeathers’s visit had happened in waking life or within the dreamworld, however, was another question.
But unlike the dream with Varen, the nightmare with Pinfeathers remained fresh and alive in her mind, every horrid detail still sharp and clear. A shudder ratcheted its way up her spine at the memory of the monster’s mouth pressed to hers. And that smile. That horrible, jagged smile.
The Noc’s visit made her wonder about the shadow she had seen inside her bedroom the day before. And later under the bathroom door.
“Hey,” Danny said, calling to her from where he sat on the floor beside the Christmas tree, surrounded by discarded multicolored ribbon curls and box-shaped husks of wrapping paper. “Look alive, space face.”
He chucked something at her. Isobel flinched, catching the small brick-shaped package just before it could smash into her nose. Covered in lumpy red paper and too much tape, the thing looked like it had been wrapped one-handed by a toddler.
