Cage of Dreams, page 3
I’m not afraid, even though my body is tight. It’s not fear, per se. Cy won’t hurt me. I know that. He’s not going to be like “you’re dinner now” or anything.
But the thing is, I’ve fed him before. I offered, once, and it was fine. I was fine.
And now part of me is scared that he’ll take that as invitation to ask again.
The thing is—I don’t think, normally, I’d be bothered if he asked. I might say no. I might say yes. I don’t know. I didn’t mind the experience.
But things changed when I became homeless and moved in here. Now I’m afraid he’ll ask, because I’m afraid of how to answer. Can I reasonably say no, when he’s letting me live here for free? Should I just say yes to pay him back in blood, even if I don’t want to?
And if I did say yes, then would I actually be saying yes because I was okay with it, or because my subconscious wanted to placate the person who has the power to make me homeless?
“We’re going to reschedule to tomorrow, first thing in the evening,” Cy says, interrupting my thoughts.
My muscles loosen. He didn’t ask me. I don’t have to face the awkward choice.
This time.
“You’ll be all right until then?” I ask, just to be sure.
“Of course.”
“Good, good,” I repeat. “I’m exhausted, I think I’m going to go to bed. It’s been a long day. Lots of near death and all that.”
I walk to my closet quickly, trying to mask the weird feelings that have bubbled up.
Cy watches me go, his expression a little sad, and I know I’m not successful. “You’re safe here, Ness. You know that, right?”
“I know,” I tell him gently.
And I do know. Cy will never hurt me.
But the problem is that he can. He has so much power over my life, and if anything, anything at all, goes wrong—I’m screwed. If we get in a fight, I’ll be homeless. If he wants to hurt me, I have no hope of defending myself.
All I wish is that I could be on an equal playing field with him, so that these thoughts would leave. If we were on the same level, then maybe I could trust my feelings more. Maybe I could feel better about acting on them.
As I crawl into my closet bed, I wonder what the world would be like if I were as rich as the Friends, healed as quickly as Cy, or was as brave as Priya.
If I were anyone except myself, small, weak, and powerless in a city filled with monsters.
3
The next week is a series of job interviews, most of which go about as well as I expect.
I show up to the first one to find a disaster well underway. A dragon trapped in a basement is roasting anyone who comes near, and most of the building above it has already succumbed to the flames. Nightmare Defense is trying to shoot it from above, but they’re held at bay by the roaring torrents of fire from both the basement dragon and the building it set on fire.
I double-check the address in my notes, and then pick my way through the rubble of what used to be the building next door, which looks like it was knocked down by the dragon’s swinging tail.
The street numbers are still painted on the sidewalk though, and yep, this was where my interview was.
I cross it off my list.
As I walk past a police auto, a balding, middle-aged man in a charred tuxedo looks out from the bars of the back of the truck, blubbering as he watches the fight.
“I was just trying to feed Gramma,” he pleads. “Newham is overpopulated anyway!”
No one listens to him.
I suspect this was my interviewer.
Like for any job in Newham, I’d done my research before going to the interview. I’d made sure the company did exist—there was a number you could call for that, though it was susceptible to bribes. I’d also checked the paperboy’s weekly scam listings, but they can’t catch everything. There’s just so many of them.
My next interview is at a butcher shop, and when the door opens, a giant tentacled monster with eight mouths and a baby’s face greets me, holding a bloody meat cleaver.
Screaming, I turn and run away.
Obviously, I don’t get the job.
The following interview is much more promising, at a small café in the financial district, and I think my interviewer is about to hire me when he gets shot.
Shot. Right in front of me.
On the street outside the shop, the Mayor rides her pet pterodactyl a couple of stories above the street. The pterodactyl’s iridescent scales reflect the neon lights of the buildings around it, and its long mouth is open wide in a threatening screech. The Mayor carries a machine gun in each hand, her long black hair blowing behind her in a ribbon, a wild grin stretching across her face.
People scream and duck out of the way as she soars down the street, machine gun rat-tat-tatting as she chases a man on a motorcycle. He’s got distinctive face tattoos and a mustache, his face familiar from his mayoral campaign posters all over town.
“Run, run as fast as you can,” croons the Mayor, laughing wildly as she fires at the motorcycle. Her pterodactyl screeches in rage as she tugs the chain around its neck, forcing it to turn and follow the motorcycle down the street and around the corner, out of sight.
She leaves a trail of devastation and people hit by her wild machine gun fire in her wake, and as my interviewer crumples lifelessly to the ground, so do my job prospects at his café.
Covered in blood that could just as easily have been mine if the bullet had been a few inches to the left, I leave the café.
Maybe I should wait until after the mayoral election is over, I think numbly as I walk.
Mayoral elections only come around once every five years. The last time there was an election—my first ever election in Newham—I hadn’t been prepared for the sheer scope of violence in the streets. I’d still been living with my aunt at the time, and she’d insisted I hide inside for the duration of the campaign.
Unfortunately, she hadn’t taken her own advice. She’d still gone to work every day, and ended up trapped in her factory when it collapsed—a strategic financial strike on a candidate to take him out of the running. She’d survived the initial collapse, but inhaling all the toxic shit while trapped in the debris gave her chronic Howling Cough that killed her a year later.
I should take the advice she gave me then. I should hide until it’s over.
Except . . . well, after the election for Mayor, the gangs usually have a big fight. A lot of people die in the elections, and then there’s often power vacuums that need to be filled. So that might take a few weeks.
By the time that’s all cleared up it might be New Year’s, which is of course when annual corporate reviews happen, and companies start taking out rivals so that they look good for their board reviews.
I sigh. I can’t just wait for a safer time to job hunt, because there’s no such thing as a safe time to be in Newham.
I haven’t been paying attention to where I’ve been walking, and I’m surprised when I look up.
I’m at the Friends of the Restful Soul building.
I haven’t been back here since I fled, and the feelings that rise up at the sight of the smooth brick exterior and classic arches are a painful mix of nostalgia and hurt and peace. I spent so much of my life here. I was as happy as I’ve ever been here.
Even if it was evil.
I still remember the first time I came here, like it was just yesterday.
I was eleven, and my aunt held my hand the whole walk there. I’d been living with her for less than two months, two strangers forced together by the brutal death of my father by my sister’s hands—legs? Fangs? I don’t know what they’re called on giant spiders.
My fears had been uncontrollable. My terror of Nightmares was debilitating, my terror of spiders was worse. I wasn’t sleeping, because I was afraid I’d turn into a monster like Ruby and kill my aunt. When I did sleep, it was fitful and panicky, all flailing limbs and screaming sobs. I might not have been able to dream—the drugs saw to that—but even without bad dreams, my sleep was anything but restful.
My aunt didn’t exactly live in the nicest part of Newham, and her apartment was tidied as best she could, but the spiders still got in. I’d flee the apartment, screaming at the sight of a tiny little bug, my mind snapping back to the sound of crunching bones and the image of that massive long hairy leg coming down the hall.
Reason left the building, and so did I.
Literally—I jumped out the window multiple times. I was lucky there was a fire escape outside it and not just empty air.
I, in short, was a mess. My aunt simply wasn’t prepared to cope with a deeply traumatized child.
So she dragged me to the Friends. Their free Nightmare therapy programs were her last resort.
“I’m going to be right there with you,” she told me, her lips pursed, hand tight on mine. “Nothing will happen.”
I’d nodded, numb, not really understanding. Looking back, it’s clear to me that my aunt was skeptical of the Friends and their motives, but she was at the end of her rope. She couldn’t afford a real therapist for me, and something had to be done.
So together, we walked up the steps into the Friends’ building.
I remember thinking it was the most beautiful building in the world.
The classic brick facade and the smooth stone floor gave it a feel of antiquity, of age and wisdom. It was the nicest place I’d seen at that point in my life, and I was in awe. Soft, tranquil music was playing in the background, and a gentle woman with a friendly smile had greeted us at the door. She smiled at my aunt, gave me a candy, and said the magic words.
“You’re safe,” she’d whispered, her expression gentle. “It’s okay. Nothing bad will happen while you’re in here.”
And I’d believed her. I’d believed all of them. I’d believed so much in my safety there that after my aunt died, I’d up and moved in there, joining them as a disciple. Not because I believed in their saints, or any of their doctrine—but because they were the only place I’d ever felt safe since my family died.
What a crock of shit that turned out to be.
But even now, even after learning that everything was a lie, that they were kidnapping people, were planning on doing who knows what to me, when I look at the building, I can’t help but remember all the good times. All the shared laughs with Priya, all the times I curled up in my room, feeling like life was going to be all right.
All my days were structured and ordered. Someone else decided what I’d do for the day, and I did it. Food was provided to me. I never had to hunt for jobs, never had to worry over money, or staying too long on my friend’s charity.
Life there was easy. It was simple. It was comfortable.
I miss it. I miss it so much it hurts. I want that life of structure and safety. I want the security of knowing how each day will go, of not worrying about the future. I hate the chaos of living on my own, the uncertainty of my job, the tenuous nature of my existence, the fact that stray bullets can sweep through my life and ruin everything.
I’d trade anything for that feeling of order and stability I had at the Friends. Anything. Even knowing it was all a lie now.
Sometimes, I wonder if I’d ever have left if they hadn’t been trying to kidnap me. If they’d just been kidnapping other people. If I’d found out the evil they were doing, and it never touched me, would I have just chosen to ignore it so I could keep my safe, ordered life?
I might have.
It’s not something I like to think about, but the truth sits there, nestled in my chest. I’m not a good person. I care more about my own safety than I do about almost anything else. And if I knew I was safe there, even if others weren’t . . . well. The real question is how much evil I’d have committed to stay.
I really don’t want to think about that.
I used to see people come in through the Friends’ doors, people who’d escaped abusive relationships. They’d talk about all the horrors they’d gone through, how they’d finally gained the courage to flee.
But then they’d go back.
I never understood it. How could you go back to something like that? Knowing how awful it was?
Now I do.
They say that absence makes the heart grow fonder. It’s supposed to be a romantic saying, but it’s not, when you think about it. What absence does is wash your memories smooth, polish them like a pebble on a beach. The bad doesn’t seem so bad. And the change, the instability that you’re currently facing—well, that’s not smooth at all. It’s jagged and sharp and present and so very hard.
And so you start to think fondly of the life you once had. It’s not the person themself you miss—it’s the familiarity, the order, the routine. The stability.
I can’t fall into that trap.
I can’t.
I turn away from the building, my fists clenched, pain radiating from somewhere deep in my chest.
I don’t even know what I want anymore. I want things to go back, but not really. I want the Friends not to have turned out to be evil, but that’s not happening. I want them punished for all the pain they caused me and others, but good luck with that. I’d have to do the punishing myself, and I’m no vigilante. I leave that kind of suicidal nonsense to people like the Chaos League, the notorious vigilante group.
So what do I really want?
What I’ve always wanted. Safety.
I want the feeling the Friends gave me, the sense of security and order and protections.
I just need to find it. Somehow.
I lean against the brick wall of the building beside me and look up at a movie poster. It’s a poster for the exact film Cy was complaining about last night. It shows Dracuvlad, an elaborately dressed, much too pale vampire played by a forty-something actor about to sexily bite a swooning girl who can’t be more than sixteen.
I shudder in disgust. I hate those movies—I hate them even more knowing that Cy’s father specifically engineered them to excuse his own abuses of women and make them seem romantic.
But as I stare at the vampire on the fading poster, his fangs bared, I think of Cy’s father.
He didn’t become a vampire through a dream or an attack. No, he sought it out, paying someone to make him into a monster.
And why not? It makes him safe from violence, illness, age. A price his victims have to pay.
But Cy is a vampire too. He’s just as hard to kill—and he doesn’t have victims.
I want to be safe on my own terms. That’s why going back to the Friends could never work, even if they decided to stop being evil. At the end of the day, I’d still be reliant on them. I’d still be using them as a place to hide from the world.
But what if instead of hiding somewhere safe, I became something unkillable?
Maybe I’ve been thinking of safety all wrong. For so long, I’ve been afraid of becoming a Nightmare, turning into a monster that destroys all I love. But now, becoming a Nightmare doesn’t scare me the way it once did.
My sister became a Nightmare because she was weak and she needed to be strong. She dreamed herself into a monster to protect me, to avenge herself, to become something more powerful than the cards life had initially dealt her.
Why can’t I do the same?
How much safer would I feel if I were something less vulnerable? How much of my life could I live then, instead of hiding away?
The idea tickles at me, teasing me in a way that surprises me. For so long, what happened to Ruby made me afraid of Nightmares, afraid of the death of self that I thought came with it.
But now, knowing the truth, knowing she chose to become that monster, there’s a strange appeal to it. Something compelling about knowing that I could become something that is strong and scary and hard to kill.
Not that I’d want to be a giant man-eating spider.
I look up at the noon sky, the hazy smog that hides the sun. The sun that Cy can’t come out and see. Does he miss it? I don’t know that I would. What value do I get out of the sun, really?
Maybe I should ask Cy to turn me into a vampire.
If I became a vampire, I’d have superhealing. I’d have strength and endurance and speed. I’d never have to dodge stray bullets again, never have to be afraid of the random chaos of Newham. I could finally move through the world without fear.
Practicality sets in a moment later. As much as I want Cy’s strength and ability to heal, I don’t really want the problems that come with it.
For example, feeding myself.
Unlike Cy, I’m not rich. I can’t pay for blood. Which means I’d have to become the monster, attacking people on the street. Aside from, you know, not wanting to do that, it would also likely bring me to the attention of Nightmare Defense, professional vampire hunters, and enraged Newhamites, all of whom would try to murder me. That sounds even more dangerous.
No, vampirism isn’t the answer.
But that doesn’t mean that some other kind of Nightmare isn’t.
I just need to find the right one.
4
I finally get a new job.
I initially thought I bombed the interview, if I’m being honest. I mean, not as badly as the interview right before, where I broke the chair I was sitting on over the head of the interviewer’s assistant when he snuck up behind me, but still. It’s a job at a fancy restaurant, and I hadn’t been able to get the blood from the previous interview out of my clothes before this one started. Not the most professional I’ve looked.
But they’d called back and told me I was starting this afternoon, and while I’m tentatively hopeful about the new position, I’m a Newham girl through and through, which means I take any good luck with a large dose of skepticism and a larger bucket of caution.
Which was how I found myself back at the speakeasy several hours before opening, talking to Estelle about backup plans.
“Of course you can come back if you don’t like the new job,” Estelle says agreeably when I finally confess what’s going on. She’s got a mop in one hand, and the water in the bucket is pink from whatever she’s been scrubbing off the floor. “We’re always in need of servers.”
