Gypsy Magic - J.R. Rain Page 0,7

from the woman, tried to wake myself up, but no matter how hard I strained, I couldn’t command my sleeping mind. Usually, I was good at this—usually I had control over my dreaming self—I’d mastered the art of lucid dreaming, but tonight that knowledge seemed far away.

I’d show him he wasn’t any better than me! The thoughts continued to rage. And if I didn’t get what I wanted, he would be the one to suffer…

These weren’t my thoughts, and I wanted no part of them. But whatever the unseen force that had tugged my brain into this nightmare scenario, it wasn’t letting me escape so easily. Every time I tried to divorce myself, tried to take control of the dream, and wake myself up, I only managed to find my dream self right back where I just was, joined to this woman.

She tiptoed down a corridor, and I was forced to follow her. More moonlight spilled into the hallway, so bright I had to blink against it. The door at the end of the hallway was slightly ajar, and I could smell the scent of a man’s cologne, heavy and…

Cheap.

The woman kept moving forward in that eerie, ghostlike fashion.

When we reached the room, there was someone else in it. I couldn’t make out the figure ahead of me, though I blinked rapidly, trying to clear my vision. Wind picked up outside and the house shifted and groaned, as restless as I felt. The creak of the wooden floorboards beneath my feet could barely be heard over the racket of the tree branches scraping against the windows and the howling of the wind.

I could just make out the lumpy shapes of a couch and armchair nearby. My hand braced the wall, and awareness dawned on me that this was a living room.

Now things were going to change. Now he was going to realize he didn’t have the final say.

Stop! I told myself, but it was as though my own voice didn’t exist. All I could hear was this woman’s angry and polluted thoughts.

He’d tell me what I wanted to know, or he’d get exactly what he deserved.

I hit the threshold of the door and could go no further. I could only watch from afar as the woman’s body separated from mine and I was no longer her shadow. As she moved forward, she disappeared into the darkness of the room, disappeared into the pitch black.

There was a flash of lightning that illuminated the darkness and in it, I saw a lopsided shadow against the far wall. The shadow was stooped over the couch, where someone sat with his head hanging back, like he’d fallen asleep watching TV. And the shadow was enormous, taking up the majority of the wall, looming over the man like some kind of monster.

“Time to wake up,” the creature grunted in a deep and gravelly voice.

Even though the shadow creature appeared almost like an animal, it stood upright and its limbs trailed to the floor, its arms longer than its legs. Long and spiked shapes jutted, antler-like, from either side of its skull.

The man opened his eyes and let out an ear-splitting shriek.

A shriek I echoed as I bolted upright in bed.

I threw a hand over my mouth to muffle my cry, so I wouldn’t wake Finn who was sound asleep in the bed next to mine.

It was just a dream, I tried to calm myself, but my heart was throwing itself against my ribs and my breathing was coming in quick pants.

It was just…

A figment of your imagination!

True, but…

No, buts…

It’s just… that was the same monster I saw in the graveyard, I finally finished the thought.

I took a deep breath at the memory of the woman walking through the gravestones and then the shadowy creature that appeared moments later.

And then I remembered that monsters weren’t real and that the light of the dying sun had simply been playing tricks on my eyes.

Right and somehow you channeled whatever you thought you saw in the graveyard and it appeared in your dream, owing to your hyperactive imagination.

That made sense.

Magic was real, yes, but no one in my family had ever mentioned monsters and owing to the fact that we possessed magic, if monsters were real, I would have known about them.

The things that did exist—witches, gypsies, ghosts, the fae—they were all, ultimately, human. Ghosts had been people. Witches, fae and gypsies still were human—we just possessed magic.

And monsters weren’t human.

At least, that’s what I told myself as I