Nightmare

I walked in just as a cool evening breeze blew my hair around, making it all messy and tangled when I got inside.

“Ugh,” I said, trying to run my fingers through my hair to separate the curls.

Nick looked at me, amusement in his eyes. “You look like you went through a tornado,” he said.

“I don’t look that bad!” I shrieked. He just smirked slightly and made his way to the main area. Scarlet was already there.

“Hey,” she said as we dropped into seats.

“Hey,” I said. “Did you find your target?”

Scarlet flexed her fingers. “Found and eliminated.”

“You found an opening that fast?” Nick asked.

Scarlet nodded. “It was easy. He had way too many openings. What about you guys?”

“We just met the guy today,” I said. I looked at Nick. “I want to kill him in some way so secretive that he won’t even know that he’s been hit. I want us to make an extremely strong impression.”

“No problem,” Nick said. “We’ll think of something.”

“Who’s going to cook?” Scarlet asked all of a sudden.

“I believe that is my cue.” Pablo came out of a hallway that led to the kitchen, steaming platters in his hands. I blinked in surprise. Normally, when Pablo would cook, there would be a lot more screams, pots and pans flying everywhere, and occasionally, blood. Judging from Scarlet’s expression and Nick’s lack of expression, they were surprised as well.

We ate our dinner in silence, and suddenly, I couldn’t take it anymore.

“Pablo, when do you want to bury Annie?” I asked. Scarlet’s jaw dropped. Nick continued eating, but the flicker of his eyes told me that I was treading a dangerous path.

However, Pablo didn’t break down crying. “I don’t want to bury her,” he said. “I don’t know what I want to do. But I know that she wouldn’t have wanted to be buried.” I agreed with that. Being cooped up underground was the opposite of Annie.

“Then what do you want to do?” Scarlet asked once she deemed that it was safe to talk about this topic.

“I don’t know,” Pablo said, his shoulders drooping.

“Well, you can’t keep on moping like this,” I said.

Pablo’s head snapped up. “Why not?” He demanded. “The love of my life just died. What would you know about it?” His voice was raising in volume. “What would you know? She meant everything to me, and you just expect me to let her go? You don’t understand how it feels! You don’t understand what it’s like to lose someone you care about!” The last sentence was screamed in my face, but my expression remained neutral.

“I lost a father, mother, and brother,” I said calmly. “Worse, I had to kill them myself.” Pablo looked guilty almost immediately. “Annie wouldn’t have wanted you to continue like this. She loved you for being who you were before this. If nothing else, respect her wishes.”

“But she’s dead,” Pablo said. Nick and Scarlet has remained stony-faced during our exchange. “She’s gone, and I can’t get used to it. Each morning, I expect to be woken up by someone yelling in my ear, not by the buzz of my alarm clock. Now she’s gone, but I don’t want to let her go.”

“She’s not dead,” Nick said suddenly. “A person is dead when they are forgotten. There is a difference between letting go and forgetting. We’re not asking you to forget.”

Pablo took a deep breath. “I understand, but please. I just need more time,” he said.

I nodded. “We can do more time,” I said.

Pablo exhaled. “Thank you,” he said quietly. After dinner, I went off to my room. I attached my phone to the speakers and cranked up the volume. Thank goodness the walls were soundproof. I pulled out my laptop, jumped on my bed and began researching Wolf Ramez. I had to dig extremely deep, and my fingers flew across my keyboard. Eventually, I found a picture of him. It was him when he was much younger, but the resemblance was uncanny. He had been a general, but then he retired. It seemed he had taken some injuries. I sat back in relief, happy I had found the right person. I looked at my clock and did a double take. I had been trying to find this person for hours. Man, my skills were getting rusty. I yawned, shut off my music, and sunk into my pillows, pulling my blankets over me.

 

 

 

My night was plagued by nightmares.

Ever since I had started killing, they had become more and more frequent. The problem was that I couldn’t just wake up in the middle. My mind forced me to watch the whole thing.

That night, I dreamed of my past experiences. Those were the worst. Whenever I dreamed about them, it felt like I was watching them as a bystander, but I couldn’t do anything. I felt like I was a ghost, watching every move I made, but I was still in the mind of the person I was in my dreams. It was a weird feeling.  It started off with the first time I had been discriminated against.

 

 

 

“No! No! Please! I didn’t do anything!” I screamed as I strained against my teacher’s grip.

She just kept on pulling me. “What do you mean? You knocked that boy down!”

“No! He took my markers, and he wouldn’t give them back!” I cried. But of course, the teacher wouldn’t listen. Terrible things always seemed to happen around me, so now everything was my fault. Of course, nothing happened around Pollux.

She dragged me out of the school building and down the street. The teacher was built more like a man than a woman. She took me to a metal box in the middle of the street. As we were walking down, I could hear people whisper.

“That girl again?”

“She’s always getting into trouble.”

“I never knew three-year-olds could be this destructive.”

I grit my teeth, stopped dragging my feet, and began to walk by myself, chin held high. The teacher looked back at me for a second, but then continued walking. I did that often.

She threw me into the box.

“How long am I going to be in here?” I asked. I had already decided that I was going to stay in this box for however long she made me. I would show her that I was strong!

“As long as I feel like!” the teacher roared. She slammed the door shut, and I heard the click of a lock.

My little self crawled into a corner and huddled there. I remember wondering why so many people hated me. My tiny self buried her head in her arms and peacefully fell asleep. It felt like only a second in my dream, but I knew that it was four hours. I woke up, and I clutched at my throat. I saw my eyes briefly turn red, and then I looked panicked. To this day, I remember exactly what it looked like.

In the Cross World, you can see oxygen. It’s what makes the Cross World look red. However, I didn’t see anything. There was barely any red. I was running out of oxygen.

I threw my body against the door, banging on it, screaming and crying, but no one came. I looked into the Cross World again. I knew that I had only a few more minutes before I started to suffocate. I wanted to scream at my other self, but I knew that it was no use. What was going to happen was going to happen anyway. Overcome with fear, I had plunged my hands into the door and was ripping it out. A three-year-old was ripping out a solid steel door.

I burst out onto the streets, and everyone stared at me. There was only silence. Then some woman screamed.

“She’s a monster!”

That one voice changed my life. Ruined it. I was on the run permanently after that. People began to yell abuse at me and throw things at me. I ducked my head and ran. Why? Why were they doing this to me? I just wanted to live! That’s all! Didn’t they see that I didn’t want to hurt them? Were they scared of me just because they didn’t know who, no what, I was?

The scenes began to shift rapidly after that, but every one of them had one thing in common: someone was calling me a monster. That’s what I was to the world now. Not a human, not a mage, not a Zodiac, not a Dragon, but a monster. The person who brought havoc to this world. The one who killed indiscriminately. That was, no is, my life.