Night Terrors

For as long as Mia Burke has been asking about Flicker Island, the answer has been no.

Her boyfriend comes from there and will not discuss it. His twin sister will not discuss it. And for weeks the two of them have walked her to every class between them, turned up whenever she was alone, and refused to say what they are guarding her from.

Mia is sixteen, she runs the school paper, and she keeps asking.

Then, over the winter break, they stop refusing, and this time they say why. The Cranes need to see who reacts to a mainland girl standing on their beach. Neither twin will call that bait. Mia does, and then she tells them she does not mind, which is not the answer Ian was hoping for.

Flicker Island is a town of a couple of thousand people, most of them entirely ordinary and some of them not. An old woman cuts her lawn from her porch chair without touching it. Most of what Mia sees on the beach that night is illusion, until a boy waves a hand, something gold and three-headed rears out of the sea, and the salt spray is still on her face after it sinks.

The first nightmare comes that night, in a house full of people who have promised to keep her safe. Ian's hands close around her throat, and they are longer and colder than she remembers. His eyes glow red. Blood comes from her nose and her mouth, she cannot get the breath to scream, and she wakes an instant before the end.

She tells nobody. What she cannot explain away is that she has seen his eyes do that while she was awake, when a boy on a skateboard knocked her books out of her hands in a school corridor.

The dream follows her home across the water. It keeps getting worse. And then one morning the cut she takes in the dream is still on her arm when she wakes.

In the dream, Ian tells her it is too late to stop it. He has already become the cold, ruby-eyed thing standing in front of her.

Awake, he has been looking worse every morning and would not say why. What he finally tells her is that those are his hands, that he is in the dream with her, and that he has been trying to stop and cannot.

Somebody has found the one fear Ian Crane has never said out loud, and they are building her nightmares out of it.

She tells him she knows he would never hurt her. He tells her barely trusts himself.