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Third: accomplishment, for this discovery had not only further developed my powers, but I currently possessed enough inner strength to use them as I saw fit, a personal triumph that made my lips twitch into an almost smile.
Now I only needed to keep this secret from Mother...
* * *
It wasa relief to finally return to my room after several forced viewings of the same nightmare before Mother finally released me. I froze in the doorway. Horror twisted my stomach as I stared at the shelves that used to house my dream jars. Not only had they been restored as if they’d never been hidden at all, but several were missing.
“Finally you’re back,” Stardust said crisply by way of greeting before her gaze darted towards the jars, her observation skills too acute not to have noticed their sudden return.
I didn’t answer, shock trickling over me as I gaped at my shelves. It took me a moment to speak past the trepidation clogging my throat. “Stardust, are you the one who unburied the jars?” But the question was unnecessary, not when I already knew the answer.
“They were like this when I returned from sleuthing.”
I continued to stare, unable to look away from my collection. I silently counted and recounted them, but the number was always the same, always several short. There couldn’t be any jars missing. My anxiety rose and I hurried over and frantically sorted through them, but the missing ones were nowhere to be found.
“What’s wrong?” Stardust watched my panicked combing the shelves with concern.
“Some of my dreams are missing.”
I abandoned the shelf and got down on my hands and knees to peer beneath the bed, where a sleeping Stormy and freshly packed earth greeted me, revealing that someone had found what I’d desperately tried to hide. It likely hadn’t been too difficult—my tendency to frequently unearth the hidden jars to check on them, glean nightmare ideas, or just to be close to a portion of Darius had likely left evidence that made the hiding place easier to find.
My panic grew at the thought. I frantically searched the floor in case the missing jars had rolled under my bed or behind the furniture. Nothing.
Stardust floated to the shelves to study the jars. “Are you sure some are missing?”
“I know exactly how many I’ve bottled and the dream each contains.”
“But they all look the same.”
Even though to everyone else each appeared empty, each jar still possessed a unique size and shape, differences which would allow anyone to easily take a specific one if they remembered what to look for.
My foreboding rising, I perched on my knees and scanned the room for anywhere else my missing jars could possibly be, desperately trying to ignore the suspicion already haunting my thoughts. No, they couldn’t have been taken by whoever had found my jars and rearranged them back on the shelf, as if to taunt me for getting away with their crime, even though logic dictated otherwise; the missing jars justhadto be in this room.
My gaze settled on my desk. Unlikely, but I was desperate. I crawled over and started yanking open drawers. “Don’t just float there making unhelpful commentary. Help me look.”
Stardust sighed but obeyed. After a moment of sifting through piles she grumbled under her breath, “This would be so much easier if you were tidier, Eden.”
I sent her a pointed glare, which she ignored considering she’d morphed herself into a broom and was sweeping all my junk into one big pile. “What are you doing?”
“Using this as an excuse to clean up. How do you know your jars are missing when you can’t see whereanythingis in this chaos?”
“My room isn’tthatmessy.”
She muttered something indiscernible under her breath as she continued sweeping up the room. Meanwhile, the desk drawers yielded no results, but despite how illogical my futile quest was, I refused to give up. I yanked a drawer all the way out and dumped its contents onto the floor.
Stardust glared. “Eden! I just swept up that spot. Why do I even bother helping such an ungrateful owner?”
I ignored her dramatic shriek as I sifted through my pile of junk. Still nothing. Panic clawed at my throat. “Have you found them?”
Stardust—now morphed into a small hand shovel—sighed as she dug through my mountain of stuff. “No.”
I groaned. “Where are they?”
By her apprehension I knew she harbored the same fear I did: that they’d been taken. But like me, she seemed determined to explore every other possibility first, unwilling to face the implications of the truth.
I abandoned the junk on the floor and returned to my shelf to resort my remaining jars, counting and recounting them in case I’d miscounted before or passed over the missing ones. I hadn’t.
“How many are missing?” Stardust asked, her voice muffled from where she was immersed several feet beneath my mountain of stuff.
