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childrenofhypnos · 8 years ago

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Chapter 24: Research

The second half of October settled over the Sleeping City in a blanket of dark clouds and cold winds. The sun crept late over the skyline in the mornings, and at night the ever-burning lights of the city seemed far away in the gloom, despite the skyscrapers surrounding the campus on all sides. The great glowing sign—FIND HOME HERE, CHILDREN OF HYPNOS—that overlooked the city became a great white will-o’-the-wisp in the sky, unreadable and untethered from the earth.

In the days following the visit to the Sandman, the hairs on the back of Emery’s neck prickled for every possible reason. Small sounds behind her. Movements in the corner of her eyes. The heater beneath her dorm room window turning off suddenly in the middle of the night, just as it always had. Most of the time she could tell herself she was paranoid, that her doppelgänger—if it was even actually active—would not yet be outside the Dream. But even when she knew that beyond a doubt, she still hurried a little faster to somewhere that she could press her back in a corner.

If her doppelgänger wasn’t active now, it would be after all this. When she wasn’t paranoid, she was wondering if this was part of the reason the Insanity Prime began so soon: because so many dreamhunters feared it. Because they’d grown up fearing it, and it wore on them until it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Wes, on the other hand, had gone about his days as if nothing had changed. He’d always been stone-faced, but this was a new level. He faced their classes, their classmates, and their teachers with the same frown he always had. He had no reason to be paranoid about a doppelgänger, but it was like he wasn’t worried about the other things Klaus had said, either, and whether or not those were true. The dreamkiller coup. The cover-ups. The withholding of information they should be learning. He sat with her and Edgar during breakfast, sometimes joined her and Joel and Jacqueline for lunch, but at dinner she caught him always walking back to Kirkland from the Crossing with a boxed dinner, watching his feet instead of the path ahead, eyebrows furrowed together.

Marcia had returned to teaching classes. She was angrier than ever, and was taking it out on the students by running them into the ground during fitness training and yelling in their ears during weapons work. Emery tried to catch her after class like she had before, to ask how many of Klaus’s claims she believed was real, but Marcia disappeared before Emery had a chance, and every other time Emery saw her, she was in the Crossing, surrounded by too many people to get her alone or to speak privately.

Emery was extra glad now that she’d pushed to include Joel, Jacqueline, Kris, and Lewis in on the research. They were the only ones she could talk to about it now. She hadn’t told Edgar anything new they’d found out; he didn’t need to know, he wouldn’t be able to help, and there was a chance—much bigger now than Emery would have guessed a month or two ago—that he would spill everything to Grandpa Al. The others didn’t have the same allegiance to Grandpa Al, not more than any other student on campus, and all of them knew it was important enough not to tell anyone else.

“We still don’t know how much of what he said is true.” Emery sat on her bed, back in the corner, hugging her pillow, while Joel sat close enough to hold her ankles. Kris sat in her desk chair, Lewis leaned on the desk beside her, and Jacqueline paced the room.

“He sounds like a conspiracy theorist,” Jacqueline said. She was in full Vice President mode, which meant zero nonsense taken and her complete focus set on solving the problem at hand.

“So you don’t believe him?” Lewis said.

“Oh, no.” Jacqueline snapped to a stop, hand raised. “I completely believe him. The dreamkillers lied and feared the possibility of their own powerlessness so much they overthrew an efficient dreamseeker government? Seems legit to me. I have no idea what the dreamseekers might have known about doppelgängers that caused all of this, but I believe it one hundred percent.”

“Jacqueline Fenhallow, conspiracy theorist,” Lewis said.

Kris gently hit his knee. “Jacqueline isn’t a conspiracy theorist.”

“If Jacqueline believes it, I believe it,” Emery added.

Lewis held both hands up. “So do I. Have I ever bet against her?”

“But what about your doppelgänger?” Kris said, her voice small and her eyes huge, and Emery just wanted to hug her. “Will you need help with that?”

“If it’s active, I can’t have help with it. Doppelgängers tear apart people who get between them and their hunter, the same way a normal nightmare will attack someone who gets between them and their dreamer.”

“It’s not supposed to happen until later, though,” Lewis said. “Isn’t this too early?”

“Yep.”

“So you don’t know what’s going on at all.”

“Not really, no.”

“And the plan is…?”

“Try to find what Klaus was talking about with the dreamseeker notes about doppelgängers. See if we can figure out what might have been cut out, then figure out if it has anything to do with why my doppelgänger is active.”

Joel, who had been quiet until then, looked up suddenly. “When?”

“Well…as soon as I told you guys.”

“So we’re helping.” It wasn’t a question; Joel said it with relief.

“Wait.” Lewis looked from Emery to Jacqueline, as if Jacqueline had some other answers for him. “Does this—your doppelgänger isn’t going to come after us for this, right? Because we’re helping you.”

Jacqueline shot him a nasty look.

“No,” Emery said. “At least, I’m pretty sure. Klaus said it hasn’t left the Dream yet, and even if it had, it’s more like…you have to physically put yourself between it and me. I don’t think doppelgängers care if you help me look some stuff up in a library.”

“Oh. Well. Good.”

“Let’s go, then,” Joel said, standing up and pulling Emery’s ankles.

Sliding off the bed, Emery glanced at her phone. “It’s nine thirty. You really want to start researching this late?”

“We’ve already wasted a lot of time,” he said.

Jacqueline was tapping away at her own phone. “I’m telling Ver that I can’t hang out tonight. Already texted Jager to meet us at the library, too. Kris, you’re in charge of snacks.”

“As always,” Kris said, beaming.

“Lewis, you get coffee.”

“As always,” Lewis replied, rolling his eyes.

The three of them marched out the door, not looking back to see if Emery and Joel were following. Joel had stopped tugging on Emery’s ankles, so she gently pulled her legs from his grasp and stood up, too.

“I figured you would help, but I didn’t think you’d be so…eager,” she said.

Joel rubbed the back of his head. “I don’t really care about the cover-ups and whatever happened with the Hypnos State. I mean, it’s interesting, and I want to know the truth, but if I don’t know, it won’t bother me. But I don’t want your doppelgänger to be—I don’t want you to have to—” He groaned. “All I’m trying to say is I always thought I was going to be useless when it came to your doppelgänger, but now I can actually help.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes. Wait, seriously about the helping? Why wouldn’t I be serious about the helping?”

“No, are you serious about always thinking you were going to be useless.”

“What else would I have thought?”

Emery put her head in her hands and laughed. “It wasn’t what you thought. I didn’t know you thought about this at all. I thought the day division students never really thought about Insanity Primes or doppelgängers or anything.”

“Oh.” There was a pause. “You do when you care about someone who has to think about them. You’re my best friend, Em—I want you to be around for a long time. I know you’re awesome and nothing’s ever going to beat you, but if I can keep you safe, I’ll do whatever I have to.”

Order keeps us safe.

Emery hugged him, pressing her face into his shoulder. He put his arms around her immediately.

“You know I love you, right?” she said.

“I had a guess.” Joel trapped her head in the crook of his arm and kissed the side of her head. “I love you too. Let’s go be nerds.”

When they got to the library, Wes was waiting for them inside the front door with Ridley. She was holding an armful of banana nut muffins from the Crossing, carrying a backpack twice the size of her torso, and smiling like they were about to have a sleepover. Emery shot Wes a look; he shrugged and said, “You brought your friends, I brought mine.”

They found a table on the third floor, near the windows, where no one could sneak up on them behind a bookshelf. Kris, Lewis, and Joel had Fenhallow’s databases pulled up on their laptops while Emery, Wes, and Jacqueline amassed a stack of reference books. Ridley flitted between the books and the computers, unable to stay in her seat for more than a few minutes, taking breaks to make sure everyone always had a muffin or one of the sandwiches Kris made, or enough to drink.

“Has anyone found anything yet?” Emery said, head in one hand and a book as thick as her arm open in front of her. “All I’ve got is A History of the Hypnos State, Then and Now, and by ‘Now’ they mean the 1940s and world powers trying to recruit dreamhunters to fight in World War II. Back then everything they knew about doppelgängers was all like, carnival science. Phrenology and stuff.” She pushed the book aside.

“I haven’t found anything beyond what we already know,” Joel said. “Floating hair, bad temper, shows up during the Insanity Prime.”

Emery kicked Wes under the table. “What are you reading all frowny like that?”

Wes lifted the book. The front said Dreamseeking: The Pioneers of the Mind’s Frontier. “The first person to open a gateway was a dreamseeker.” He began to read. “‘One eyewitness reported Guinard holding her hands out, fingers clawed, as if to pry open the air. When she drew her hands apart, the fabric of the waking world followed her fingers, like curtains drawn back, leaving between them a dark entrance flanked by columns identical to those outside the justice building in the square she walked through each morning.’ This was in eighteen seventy-three, in France. According to this, Marie Guinard opening the first gateway was the inspiration for most of Fabian Fenhallow’s teachings. She was the one who taught him how.”

Jacqueline sighed. “I could have told you that.”

“And it doesn’t help us much,” Emery said.

“In class, Professor Lenton said it was a dreamhunter.” Wes flipped through a few more pages of the book. “Jonathan Arrington.”

“So either he lied or he was misinformed.”

Lewis shook his head. “Lenton doesn’t lie about facts. He would have been misinformed.”

“Then he’d have to be misinformed by the Hypnos State.” Wes said. “Why would they lie?”

“You mean besides because he was a dreamhunter, and the whole curriculum here is cherry-picked? Probably because Jonathan Arrington was an aristocratic white guy and Marie Guinard was a black woman and the daughter of slaves.” Jacqueline spit venom at her computer screen, never looking up. “History loves white guys.”

“It’s a start,” Emery said. “What we’re taught doesn’t match up to what we find. I’m surprised they didn’t take that book out of here completely.”

“They have to leave some things here, or else it would look too suspicious,” Wes said.

Kris raised her hand.

Emery said, “Kris, you can just talk, you don’t have to be called on.”

Kris jumped in. “The day division students, especially the ones in sleep research, have to use books like those for essay and project references. The dreamseekers are a big topic because of their immunity to the Dream’s mental pressure. If they removed books like that, we would notice.”

Emery sat up. “Klaus mentioned references! He said there were references in some articles or essays that didn’t lead back to anything, like their sources didn’t exist. He was trying to find more material on doppelgängers and that’s why he couldn’t. Look through the sources on the articles, not the articles themselves. Find the ones that are about doppelgängers or the Dream, or are written by dreamseekers, and try to locate those.”

They went back to work. Emery abandoned the dustier books she’d found for more recent essays and anthologies. Some of them had pages and pages of references, printed close together and in tiny font. Most, thankfully, weren’t by dreamseekers. Emery copied them down anyway, the names of the articles and the names of the authors, handing them over to Joel, Kris, and Lewis so they could try to look up the articles.

After nearly another hour of looking—during which Ridley got out of her seat fourteen times, and Kris and Joel alone made it through the rest of the snacks—Lewis went still, staring at his computer screen.

“I can’t find this one.�� He held up the paper with Wes’s scrawled handwriting and tapped a title near the bottom. Hunting the Hunters: The Origins and Effects of the Manifestations of the Dreamhunter Subconscious. “I’ve looked through the library’s online database and their catalogue of physical copies, and then I went and Googled it just in case it was never in the collection. It didn’t come up at all. Anywhere. The Google results didn’t return anything remotely close to what we needed—it was like they were scrubbed clean.”

Jacqueline took the paper from him. “Gabriel Fenhallow. This was written by my dad.”

Her voice was very small and quiet when she said it, and they all looked at her. Wes glanced at the paper. “I thought he was probably related, but I didn’t know the date on that article.”

Jacqueline nodded, tossing the paper quickly back to Lewis and returning to her book. “Yeah, he was a scholar, or whatever. After they took the school from us he got really into researching the Dream. Well, he was always into researching the Dream, he published things before they took the school, but…” Jacqueline rubbed her forehead. Emery had never heard her ramble so much. Emery had never heard her ramble at all. Jacqueline didn’t ramble. She spoke, and she demanded.

A moment of quiet passed before she seemed to gather herself, and said, “So, this one is missing. One instance doesn’t make a trend.”

Over another hour and a half, they found over a dozen sources that led back to empty space on the internet and a blank library catalogue. All written by dreamseekers, all with titles relating to manifestation of the Dream. The information in the essays and books in which they’d been cited amounted to little; none of it was about doppelgängers, which Emery suspected was the reason those texts themselves hadn’t been pulled. One instance didn’t make a trend, but twelve could.

“I get that we’re students,” Emery said, glancing at Wes, “and most of us aren’t going to amount to much more than cannon fodder, but there’s a lot more going on that they’re not telling us about.”

“Well, yeah.” Ridley stood at the end of the table, paused in the process of picking apart a banana nut muffin. She hadn’t sat down once in the last half hour. Her eyebrows were furrowed, putting her in a surprisingly close imitation of Wes’s natural expression. She’d definitely spoken, though Emery didn’t immediately put the words to her. They weren’t perky enough.

“What does that mean?” Emery said.

“Most governments operate like that. Transparency seems like it’d be nice, but I don’t know…I’m sure there’s a lot of stuff going on that I don’t want or need to know about.”

“You sound like my grandpa. Heirarchy is there for a reason. Order keeps us safe.” Emery mimed her hands up and fingers spread, like a fanatic at a revival. She slumped in her chair. “You’re probably right. If everything knew Klaus had taken the sand, that even one doppelgänger was active before it should be, that the dreamseekers might have known something and the dreamkillers chased them all out…there’d be hysteria.”

Especially if it got out past the Sleeping City. There were so many other Hypnos State training facilities across the world, not to mention the Hypnos Centers in every major city. If there was hysteria, if something happened—if dreamhunters tried to revolt—what would happen to everyone else? What would happen when there were no dreamhunters to hunt dreams?

They all went quiet. It was easy to believe lies were necessary when Emery wasn’t involved, but whatever had happened with the dreamseekers, and the doppelgängers, and the dreamkillers—that affected her life, now. It affected Wes. It affected Jacqueline.

“Everyone doesn’t need to know, but I do.” Emery took a deep breath, trying to still the panicking of her heart in her chest. “I’m going to go find my doppelgänger. I need to know for sure that it’s real, and if it is, I need to kill it. As soon as I learn how to open a gateway.”

“I can help with that,” Jacqueline said. Her eyes were bright, her fists clenched on the table. All that rambling had vanished.

“And we’ll have to find a place to practice that no one will sense what we’re doing. A den mother passing by my dorm room will be able to feel a gateway open inside.”

“I can help with that,” Joel said. “I already have an idea. Just have to check a few things.”

Kris nudged Lewis in the arm. “We can’t do much, but we’re a good cheering squad.”

Ridley kept picking at her muffin.

Emery looked at Wes. He shrugged.

“I’m in,” he said.

It was all she needed to hear.

(Next time on The Children of Hypnos --> The God Of War Comes To Town)

#children of hypnos #nightmare hunters #eliza and her monsters #books #free #ya #yalit #reading #wattpad #francesca zappia #made you up #dreams #nightmares

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childrenofhypnos · 8 years ago

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Chapter 2: Reluctant Deals

The first nightmares arrived with Babylon.

It was the first city in history to reach a population size large enough to thin the veil between the waking world and the Dream. There were only a few sparse records left of the nightmares that appeared during that time, and mentions of only one person who knew how to vanquish them. Every official Hypnos State text called her Iltani, and named her the first dreamhunter.

There was a statue of Iltani at the center of Fenhallow Academy’s campus—accompanied by Fabian Fenhallow, the school’s founder, whom most students forgot about until reminded—her arms raised, wreathed in flame. Emery was eight years old when she stood before the statue the first time, and as she looked into Iltani’s fierce bronzecast face, she began to understand the responsibility she’d been given.

Dreamhunters, forged by exposure to the Dream in the cities they protected, had worked alone and unorganized until the formation of small dreamhunting societies in China, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Middle East. Over time, more societies appeared across the globe, grew, and evolved to their current form: the Hypnos State. A neutral world government that worked outside politics to bring peace to nightmare-riddled cities across the globe, named for the Greek god of sleep.

That was what the textbooks said, anyway. Emery thought it was mostly garbage. The history all sounded good, but nothing as far-reaching as the Hypnos State would be “outside politics.”

Fenhallow had been created to give the Hypnos State a base of operations in the U.S. As the largest training center for future State employees in North America, it was the reason the Sleeping City had been built at all—and the Sleeping City was the only one of its kind. There was a billboard outside the city limits that had never changed and never would; a black background that disappeared against the night sky so the stark white letters, lit from below, hovered over the city:

FIND HOME HERE,

CHILDREN OF HYPNOS

Emery could see the back of the sign far in the distance where she sat on the sidewalk outside the Miller’s home. Her mission had taken her to the suburbs—and on a Saturday night, no less—so it took the cleanup crew forty-five minutes to reach her. By then, Cora was dead asleep in her father’s arms, exhausted by the night’s events, and Emery was ignoring the messages popping up on her wrist cuff and instead typing one out to her boyfriend, Joel, who was not a dreamhunter, and who would most certainly be asleep in his dorm room on Fenhallow’s campus.

Don’t listen to what anyone says tomorrow. 100% owned this mission by myself.

She sent it out and stared for a moment at the dark span of yard between the houses on the other side of the street, trying not to think of how much trouble she was going to be in when she got back to campus. As she stared, something shifted in the shadows, and she realized there was a man standing there, watching her. Only his face was visible, and only barely, and his eyes were covered by goggles.

Then a few members of the cleanup crew passed in front of Emery, and when she looked again, he’d slipped around the back of the house and disappeared. She’d heard from full-time hunters about people in the city who liked to creep on dreamhunters before or after jobs, like fanboys with celebrities, but she’d never seen it for herself.

The Millers had some weird neighbors.

The Hypnos cleanup crew consisted of two teams: one outfitted in gray jumpsuits, the other in jackets and ties. The jumpsuits took in the damage to the house, the broken window and bedroom door, and began calculating the repair costs. The jackets and ties spoke to Cora’s father about what had happened, then to the neighbors who had come from their houses to inspect the commotion.

Sarah Stainer, one of the jackets and ties, approached Emery where she sat on the curb. Stainer had still been in classes when Emery first arrived at Fenhallow; now she was in charge of her own crew out of the Hypnos State dispatch center on Main and Cherry. The crews worked nights, like the dreamhunters, so Stainer’s shirt already bore the scars of several cups of coffee. Still, compared to the sweat gathering under every part of Emery’s dreamform armor, Stainer looked the picture of spring. She loped over with an easy smile, a sheaf of her dark curly hair covering one eye, and her hands in her pockets.

“Really did it this time, huh, Em?” Stainer said.

Emery knew she wasn’t talking about the nightmares. “Hypnos’s eyeballs, Stainer, you could look a little less smug about it.”

“I’m the one who has to clean up your messes, Ashworth. I’ll look smug when I want to look smug.” She nodded her head back toward the car she’d driven to the scene. “Come on, let’s get you back. The dean has words for you.”

“Of course he does.”

The ride into the city felt like it took half the time it should’ve. Stainer remained mercifully silent the whole way to the school, which was Emery’s first clue that she was indeed in deep trouble. She would get the credit for completeing the termination request, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that she’d completed the request alone.

Her dreamhunting class, only recently released to take on real requests, had received their partners earlier that week. They’d been chosen for each other by the North American Ward based on skill and personality tests and the recommendations of their professors, a process that had taken the last several years to complete. No dreamhunter was ever supposed to go without a partner, ever.

It wasn’t Emery’s fault her partner was the most useless stick-in-the-mud ever born.

Stainer scanned her ID at the security station outside the school. Fenhallow’s wide front gates swung open for the car. Towering oaks and wrought-iron lamp posts lined the main road into Fenhallow’s sprawling campus grounds. They first passed the dorms, a picture of Gothic Revival in pale stone, where lights burned bright with students up late into the night. Though they took classes together, the students were split into a day division and a night division. The night division—the dreamhunters-in-training—shared buildings but not rooms with the day division—the students who would become part of the cleanup crews, like Stainer, or security officers, or professors, or researchers for the Hypnos State. Some would go to work in Terminations and Request Fulfillments, that soul-sucking pit in the public Hypnos centers throughout the city.

Farther in, they passed the education buildings. All were dark except for the three main buildings around the quad: Hothram Hall, the athletic center, where dreamhunters trained to keep in peak physical fitness and learned how to use their weapons; the student center, lovingly referred to as the Crossing; and the administration building, three stories tall and stretching toward the sky, where the lights were always on. The three buildings surrounded the center of campus, where Iltani’s statue stood guard.

Stainer parked on the curb in the small roundabout at the foot of the admin building. Sweeping stone steps led the way the double oak doors. On each landing of the steps, a set of bronze plaques had been fixed in the stone, engraved with quotes from famous members of the Hypnos State. Emery had seen these for the first time when she was eight, too, shortly after she’d looked up into Iltani’s face, and she had dreamed of having her own words immortalized into Fenhallow’s very bones. Iltani had made dreamhunting the noblest profession in the world—there could be no greater achievement than inspiring future generations of dreamhunters.

Inside the admin building’s double front doors, the receptionist, David, looked up from the front desk and waved them through the lobby. He gave Emery a pained look and made some vaguely apologetic hand gestures. Emery could hear the laughter threatening to break through Stainer’s carefully pursed lips as they made their way up the staircase past David’s desk.

The whole building smelled of warm carpet and rich wood. Purple velvet covered the stairs. Portraits of past deans of the academy lined the wall, and all of them looked down on Emery with disapproval. At the top of the stairs they took a left down the hallway, and went to the very last room. Carved into the door was the closed eye of Hypnos, like an upside-down sunrise, in front of a blooming poppy. The doorknob was silver covered in a delicate gold filigree, the same as every dreamhunter weapon.

The plaque beside the door—also gold and silver—said Dean of Fenhallow Academy.

Stainer smiled. “Have fun in there.”

Emery sighed.

The Dean of Fenhallow was a dreamkiller: a dreamhunter who had defeated the worst the Dream could throw at him and won the ability to live out the rest of his life in service to the Hypnos State. He hadn’t pulled his weapon in years, and he still moved like a forty-year-old, despite toeing the line of sixty-five. He had a thick head of gray hair, warm hands, and lines around his eyes from a perpetual smile.

Well, near-perpetual.

Perpetual until now.

Emery stood before his desk with her eyes cast down to his teacup, because she couldn’t bear to look him in the face. Not while there were others in the room.

Stainer moved to the left of the desk with another dreamhunter student, still dressed in his t-shirt and sweatpants leisure wear, arms crossed over his barrel chest as he huffed out his indignation.

Wesley Jager.

Wes looked a little like an enraged bull when he got upset. His biceps strained against his sleeves, his nostrils flared, his black eyes narrowed into two glittering pits. He was a uniform brown from head to toe, except for those eyes. His bronze hair stuck up in the back.

“How did the hunting go, Emery?” said the dean. She’d heard him use many voices before. This was not actually his Dean of Fenhallow voice, though she doubted Wes or Stainer would know that.

Emery pressed her hands to her thighs. “I took care of both nightmares without any issues. I received the proper signatures and kept the subject safe. Everything was performed to procedure.” She wanted to scoff. She sounded so dull and formal, and she never talked to him this way.

Wes let out an angry huff.

“Was it?” The dean laced his fingers together. “I didn’t have you brought here for a simple debriefing. There is a reason dreamhunters have partners, and it isn’t so that you can leave them behind when you go on missions. Stainer tells me there was a class four nightmare involved tonight.”

“Class four is a little much. I mean, it was a flying whale, but—”

“When you dispatched that nightmare, what was the resulting dream cloud like?”

Emery coughed. “Big.”

“Mm. I suspect it was a bit difficult to breathe when it came for you. All that Dream essence hitting you at once, the body would go into shock.”

“A bit.”

“If you’d had a partner there,” the dean gestured to Wes, “he might have shared the burden. Not to mention having your back if that big nightmare got the better of you.”

Wes’s black gaze drilled into the side of her head. If he thought he was getting an admission of wrongdoing out of her, he was going to have a very bad night.

“I don’t think he would have.”

She didn’t have to look at Wes to feel him bristle. Stainer put a hand to her forehead. The dean sat up straighter.

“Excuse me?”

“He’s the lowest ranked in our class. I’m the highest. You can’t honestly expect him to keep up with me in the field. He can barely hold his weapon, much less fight something with it. If you wanted me to have a useful partner, I should have been paired with someone on my level.”

The dean’s expression settled into disappointment. Emery couldn’t look away from him, now that she’d met his eye; his gaze was a magnet, and to force herself to avert hers was to incite further disappointment. The dean turned to Stainer and Wes.

“Could I have a moment alone with Emery, please?” he said.

Stainer put a hand on Wes’s shoulder—he was half a head taller than her—and led him from the room. When the door clicked shut behind them, the dean stood from his desk and said, “Em.”

Guilt slammed into her in hot waves.

“Sorry, Grandpa.”

“If you’re sorry,” Grandpa Al said, “why did you do it?”

Emery growled. “Because he gets in the way! We have to climb on the roof to get to a nightmare? I have to make sure Wes isn’t falling off the side. I can shoot something and get rid of it right away? I have to make sure Wes isn’t in my line of sight, swinging that stupid hammer. If I have to have a partner, it should be someone who understands how things work.”

Grandpa Al’s disappointment softened. “Em, I know you don’t want to hear this, but that’s why you’re still considered in training. Right now you’re supposed to learn how to work with your partner. I would have been shocked had you performed perfectly together immediately after being assigned. Did you give him any chance at all?”

“I’ve been in class with him for years. I know what he’s capable of.”

“I’m not going to request the Ward give you a new partner. Wesley deserves a chance.”

Emery took a deep breath and flexed her hands, trying to work out some of the tension. She finally looked away, because more disappointment was better than the soft, appeasing look he was giving her now. The look when he wanted something.

“How much of a chance?” she said.

“One month.” He said it so fast he had to have had it ready, maybe since she’d entered the room, maybe since he’d heard she’d left for the mission without Wes. “Give him one month of missions, and if you still can’t work together at the end of that, I’ll see about doing some rearranging.”

“Just one?”

“Just one.”

When she was thirteen, Grandpa Al had managed to reform her dorm-cleaning habits in an instant by mentioning that every dreamhunter engraved on the Fenhallow steps had been a notorious neat freak. She searched his face for any kind of duplicity now. He raised his hands and his eyebrows, innocent.

“Fine,” Emery said.

“That’s my girl.” He stood from the desk. “You know, Edgar was very worried about you. You should stop by his room so he knows you’re okay.”

Emery groaned. “Who told Edgar?”

“No one. He started checking the request logs religiously to see if you go on missions. He was actually the one who told me.”

Emery growled again and yanked the ponytail out of her hair as she turned for the door.

“Oh, and Em?”

She stopped with her hand on the doorknob.

“Apologize to Wesley. You were speaking your truth, but it was a hurtful truth, and not one he needed to hear that way.”

Emery shouldered the door open.

Apparently, Wes wasn’t going to have as bad a night as she thought.

(Next time on The Children of Hypnos --> Apologies Are Hard)

#children of hypnos #books #ya #yalit

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