She’d been planning this. I’d been sick for days—probably her fault, now that I thought about it—and now I was too weak to fight back.

I HUDDLED ON the bed, staring outside through the barred windows. I was still dizzy and a little light-headed, both of which got worse when I started to seriously contemplate what was happening. I’d woken from an unpleasantly deep sleep—I didn’t want nightmares, but some level of awareness was kind of reassuring.

Otherwise it felt too much like death.

Gradually, my adrenaline-fueled energy burst wore away, and my eyelids grew heavy. Even after a full night’s worth, I welcomed sleep—I was exhausted and my mind was so strung out.

But I’d forgotten about the nightmares.

It didn’t take long to remember—to be slipping into unconsciousness and suddenly sense something waiting for me, just on the other side of the knife-edge drop-off into sleep. This day, it was something dark and wet and horrible; it smelled of death and mud and burnt rubber.

Once I realized it was there, I tried to backtrack, to claw my way out of sleep. But it was too late. It had sensed me and sent tendrils of leathery black vines to wrap around my ankles and hold me in place. I felt it coming nearer, a lumbering mass of shadow without details.

It knocked me over and then hovered in the air above my body, savoring my fear, tasting my tears.

I expected it to have teeth, or claws, or scaly skin. But it was worse than that—it was all gray flesh and endless pockets of darkness, and instead of attacking me, it began to slowly lower itself over me, until I could feel its cold, moist flesh pressing down all over my body. Until its face covered my mouth and nose.

In the dream, I tried to scream. But when I opened my mouth, a hundred tiny black tendrils appeared and filled my throat, silencing me.

In real life, that wasn’t an issue. I woke to the sound of myself screaming, and once I had started, I couldn’t stop. I could sense the beast there, stalking me, in this dark and sterile and unfamiliar room.

I screamed and screamed. And then I realized that no one could hear me.

CHAPTER

29

WHEN I WOKE, my eyes fixed on the window, where I could see the rolling green hills through the metal bars, and for a moment I thought, What a pretty view.

Then I stumbled into the awareness of what was actually happening, and I jumped off the bed as if someone else was in the room with me.