How did I come to be here? Did the nightmare throw me out of the dream world instead of Mom?
“Bailey?”
I follow the voice and see a worried Valerian pointing a gun at me.
“Yitten,” I say dully, and he lowers the gun.
I look back at Mom, the computer that is my brain crashing and rebooting.
“Her heartbeat spiked, setting off the machines,” Valerian says. “But she’s still—”
The gargoyle nurse rushes in and begins adjusting the machines. When the mad beeping stops, she rounds on us. “Whatever you did, don’t do it again until Dr. Xipil is here.”
I’m still too overwhelmed to speak.
“We won’t,” Valerian says. “Thank you.”
With a huff, the nurse leaves, and I lean on Mom’s bed, my knees wobbly.
“Are you okay?” Valerian asks, his voice seeming to come from a distance.
“It wasn’t an accident,” I say hollowly as the horrible realization fully filters in.
“What?” Valerian sounds even farther away.
I don’t know if I can bear to say it out loud, yet the words emerge anyway, as if pulled by a torturer’s pliers. “It was… a suicide.” I swallow thickly, staring at Mom’s ashen face. “She went out of her way to get hit by that car.”
Valerian audibly inhales.
An unbearable pressure builds in my chest, my throat cinching tight. Could I have misunderstood what I saw? Or experienced my own nightmare? No, that doesn’t make sense. I know it was a memory.
Mom’s memory.
Her face blurs in front of my eyes. “It was my fault. I threatened to dreamwalk in her, and she tried to kill herself to prevent it.”
“Bailey.” Valerian sounds worried.
I sway on my feet. My stomach churns. The back of my throat burns. My heart is hammering in my chest so hard that if I were the one hooked up to all the machines, the nurses would be barging in.
Mom killed herself because of me.
My ribcage feels like the subdream vulture is clawing inside it. Before today, I’d felt guilty about the fight. I’d thought I had upset Mom, which had made her careless.
How stupid. How naïve of me. I hadn’t known the true definition of guilt until now. It threatens to drown me, the pressure so crushing I can barely take a shallow breath. Slowly, I sink onto the bed next to Mom, trying to process everything I saw, to make sense of something so incomprehensible.
She’d tried to kill herself.
Because of me.
Is this why she was killing me in her dreams? Because her subconscious knows I’m to blame for her predicament?
Are those nightmares payback for my forcing her to take her own life?
I must make some type of sound—a hysterical laugh or cry—because I suddenly find myself ensconced on a male lap, with strong arms wrapped around me and the pleasant scent of pine teasing my nostrils. “Shh,” Valerian murmurs into my hair. “You didn’t know what she’d do. How could you?”
He’s right, Pom says in my mind. You can’t blame yourself.
Figures. The rare time Pom is awake, and he’s ganging up on me with Valerian. The vulture in my chest claws harder, and the burning sensation in my throat travels higher, concentrating behind my eyelids. Unbidden, a sob escapes, followed by another, and then I’m full-on bawling, the burning tears running down my face, soaking into Valerian’s shirt.
He holds me, letting me cry as he strokes my back, murmuring words of reassurance, of comfort. Pom is in on it too, telling me that none of it is my fault, that it was Mom’s decision to do this.
Eventually, my sobs ease, and I feel myself being carried somewhere.
I open my tear-swollen eyes.
Valerian is laying me down in the seat of his flying car, considerately making sure not to touch my naked skin with any cooties. Catching my gaze, he waves his hand, and the car interior disappears, replaced with a soothing green meadow.
Wearily, I close my eyes, but the meadow doesn’t go away. He’s using his power on me.
Valerian appears on the meadow.
I look away, but he shows up there, and the next place I turn, too.
“For your mother’s sake, you need to pull yourself together.” His voice seems to come from all over the universe. “Once you recover, you’ll use your power to wake her and reassure her you’ll never dreamwalk in her under any circumstances again. Problem solved.”
Exactly, Pom mentally chimes in. Focus on fixing this.
I drag in a shaky breath and open my eyes, wiping at my face with my sleeve.
They’re right. I don’t deserve this self-pity party. Not when I do have a way to undo the damage I’ve wrought.
Sniffling, I sit up. When Valerian deems me capable of dealing with reality, the inside of the flying car shows up again.
“Why did you take me from the hospital?” I ask, looking at him. “Take me back. I want to go back into her dreams.”
He strokes my thigh as if I were a looft on his wrist. “I think it would be best to do as the nurse said.”