When a nightmare wakes up with you, it's impossible to wake up from the nightmare.
My alarm explodes at 6:45 a.m.
A violent chirp-chirp-chirp, shrill and relentless, like a demon with a caffeine addiction.
I groan, roll over, and slap at it.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
It only gets louder.
"I swear to every god—"
I grab it and fling it across the room.
It hits the wall. Bounces off my dresser. Skids across the floor.
Keeps beeping.
"You win," I rasp. "Fine."
It stops.
Not out of mercy.
Out of fear.
I flop onto my back, hair everywhere, blanket twisted around my legs, soul still very much missing in action. The ceiling stares down at me with the emotional range of drywall.
After last night—the Ker, the vision, the burning, the voice that wasn't Will—sleep never really came back. Bits and pieces of sleep with moments in between of just laying there in the blue-dark, listening to the house breathe, cataloging every creak like it might be a footstep.
I punch my pillow.
It accomplishes nothing.
"Why can't I just be normal?" I demand of the ceiling. "One night. One shower. One—"
I stretch.
Freeze.
Because I am naked.
Not oops-my-shirt-rode-up naked.
Not forgot-my-shorts naked.
Completely. Undeniably. Alarmingly naked.
"Oh, come on," I groan, yanking the blanket up like modesty can reverse time.
Did I sleep-strip?
Did the Ker vaporize my clothes?
Did the mysterious bedtime visitor—
Nope. Not going there. Not before coffee. Possibly not ever.
I scan the room.
Nothing.
No pajamas on the floor. No discarded shirt. No fabric anywhere that suggests my clothes survived last night.
The sheets look like I fought a ghost.
And lost.
"Perfect," I mutter. "This is perfect."
But it's not the nudity that won't let go.
It's the shower.
The heat.
The stone.
The way the air thickened before it broke.
The Ker's breath at my neck.
The pain—not sharp, not dull, but invasive. Like something reaching past muscle and bone and grabbing hold of whatever makes me me.
And then—
The hands lifting me.
Strong. Certain.
The voice.
It will all be right, child.
My heart slams hard enough to hurt.
Did that really happen?
Or did my exhausted brain stitch together a comfort hallucination so I wouldn't fracture into something unrecognizable?
I push the blanket back from my arm.
Stop breathing.
There—faint, red, unmistakable.
Finger marks.
Long. Curved. Too deliberate to be accidental.
Exactly where the Ker grabbed me.
My stomach drops so fast it feels like falling.
I touch the mark.
Pain snaps under my skin—hot, electric, immediate—like whatever touched me is still there, just under the surface, waiting to respond.
"That wasn't a dream," I whisper.
"Dreams don't leave burns."
And they don't tuck you in afterward.
For one humiliating second, I want it to have been Will.
I want to believe it was his hands. His voice. His impossible timing.
But it wasn't.
Will's presence is tension and heat and restraint pulled too tight, like a storm daring the sky to challenge it.
The voice last night was something else.
Ancient.
Measured.
Not asking permission.
It didn't comfort me.
It managed me.
And it definitely wasn't my mother—because if she found me naked and unconscious in the bathroom, the National Guard would've been called and the neighbors would already be organizing casseroles.
I drag a pillow into my lap and scream into it until my throat burns and my ears ring.
When I'm done, I throw it across the room.
"I am losing it," I tell the empty space.
The empty space does not disagree.
Instead, my mind does something worse.
It organizes.
It lines up the last week like cursed flashcards I don't remember agreeing to study.
The forest.
Will's confession.
The sigil burning into my ring finger.
The visions.
The Keres at my window.
The accident.
The shower that wasn't a shower.
Every thread knots around one name.
Enyalios.
I press my palms to my eyes until stars burst behind them, but it doesn't help. Something about him refuses to loosen its grip—not his face, not his touch, not the way he looks at me like he's memorizing me because the world has taught him it might not let him keep me.
He is the only person who might understand what happened last night.
And that terrifies me.
Because he also might be insane.
Or worse—
telling the truth.
"I don't even know which version scares me more," I whisper.
7:00 a.m. clicks over.
The sound is small.
The effect is not.
The air thickens—not visibly, but unmistakably—like the house has leaned closer, like something has noticed I'm awake and adjusted accordingly.
I swing my legs over the bed.
Everything aches.
My skin feels too tight, like I'm wearing myself wrong, like something underneath has shifted and my body hasn't caught up yet.
In the mirror, my reflection looks pale and frayed. Eyes too sharp. Mouth too still.
The red marks stand out violently against my skin.
"This is fine," I lie.
The reflection does not lie back.
I grab a towel and step into the bathroom.
Shower.
Coffee.
Structure.
Denial.
Halfway there, the realization hits me so hard I have to grab the wall.
Today is my birthday.
Twenty-one.
The age people say is supposed to feel like a door opening. Freedom. Choice. Mistakes you're allowed to make on purpose.
I should feel something.
Instead, I feel hollow.
Because last night wasn't just a nightmare.
It wasn't even a vision.
It was a violation.
A boundary crossed.
A memory clawing its way back through skin and bone and time.
And whatever is waking up inside me—whatever the Kere touched, whatever answered in the storm, whatever tucked me into my own bed like it had every right—it isn't going back to sleep.
And I have the terrible, sinking sense
that it woke up on purpose.