I SAT UPRIGHT WITH a gasp, shoving my hand into my mouth to keep myself from screaming. Elsie would hear me—Elsie always heard me—and come stampeding down the stairs from her room to make sure I was okay. She took her duties as big sister and designated responsible person very seriously.
And of course, when she realized I’d just been having a nightmare, not anything more serious, she’d take her duties as mocker of little brothers and tormenter of the sleepy equally seriously. I didn’t want her coming down. Not when my heart was hammering against my ribs like it wanted to break loose and run away, and not when my eyes were still heavy with exhaustion.
Sarah. I’d been dreaming about Sarah. That wasn’t super weird—I was usually dreaming about Sarah, and sometimes they were good and sometimes they were nightmares, but since she’d been hurt, she’d had a starring role in almost every dream I had. I dreamt she’d never gone away and everything was fine, and I dreamt she’d come back and professed her love to me, and I dreamt she’d died in New York and that I’d never been able to even say goodbye to her, and I dreamt she hadn’t died but hadn’t woken up either, that she was going to sleep the rest of her life away on a machine in the basement of some cryptid hospital.
But Sarah was home now. Sarah had come back to us, come back to me, and she’d finally kissed me, she’d finally let me kiss her, and everything was going to be amazing. Like, really amazing, the kind of amazing I didn’t deserve but had no intention of refusing. So why was I having nightmares now?
The dream was breaking apart in my memory. I remembered a little girl with a bicycle, and something called an “instar.” It was weird. I didn’t like it.
Shaking the fog away, I slipped out of bed and padded across the dark room to my computer. A wiggle of the mouse woke the screen. I pulled up my chat client first; no Sarah. Well, that made sense. It was almost two in the morning, and she’d just come from Ohio. She was probably asleep, safely behind the charms and wards worked into her bedroom walls, so the rest of us wouldn’t wake her accidentally. That was sort of a relief. She didn’t need to share my nightmares.
Being in love with—and admitting I was in love with—a telepath comes with its own list of unique complications. More so now that Sarah had recovered from her accident. She’d never been this sensitive before. When she’d kissed me, it had felt like I could see everything in her mind, and like she could see everything in mine, and that had been okay. That was the sort of worrying part. There were finally no barriers between us, and it didn’t matter.
It was probably supposed to matter. I tried to picture having no boundaries between me and literally anyone else, and the idea was creepy and a little bit upsetting. I like people, but I also like privacy sometimes.
At least I knew it was just because I was totally into her, and not because she’d cuckoo-ed me the way she’d always been afraid she would. I couldn’t whammy her into loving me—or lusting after me, I guess; my pheromones are way more oriented toward getting me laid than getting me cared for and respected—and she couldn’t rewire me into accepting her. We really were perfect for each other.
“Elsie’s never going to let me forget it, either,” I muttered, and opened Wikipedia. When all else fails, ask the Internet.
Typing “instar” into the search box got me a page on insect metamorphosis, and a slow-growing sick feeling in my stomach. I’d sort of hoped it would be a made-up word, something from a comic book or an anime series or whatever. Instead, it meant the stages arthropods went through between molts. They would transform, enter an instar, and then stay there until they were finished growing and could molt again. Which was weird and kind of gross and it didn’t make sense that I’d come up with it in a nightmare about Sarah.
(Not that bugs couldn’t show up in dreams about Sarah. According to Mom, cuckoos are biologically more like really big wasps than they are like monkeys—hominids but not primates, in other words. So, yeah, there was probably an evolutionary stage way back in Sarah’s