happened in my dream was burned on my brain. Elizabeth Williams had been dying at the hands of Ariana Osgood. It was all so impossible, but it had seemed so real. I remembered exactly where we had been when Ariana had attacked. Just north of the Billings Chapel, at an untouched clearing in the woods.
I glanced at Ivy’s concerned face as she lowered her bat to the floor.
“It was just a dream,” I said.
She sat down at the foot of my bed. “Not a good one, from the sound of it.”
My heart still pounded fretfully. “Yeah. No.”
“What was it?” Ivy asked, shifting slightly. “Do you remember?”
I chewed on the inside of my cheek, drawing my knees up under my chin. I wanted to tell her about it before the details slipped from my mind. Tell her about the clearing and the spot Elizabeth had indicated. She’d probably tell me it was just a dream—that I was crazy. Which would probably be a good thing. Because would a sane person actually be considering following a dead dream-girl’s orders?
“Ivy, there’s something I need to tell you,” I said seriously. “It’s about the BLS.”
Ivy placed the bat aside, leaning it up against the sliver of wall between the end of my bed and my closet.
“Okay,” she said, matching her tone to my own. “I’m listening.”
Josh had looked at me like I was crazy more than once in our year-and-a-half-long on-and-off relationship, but never for so long, or with such complete conviction. We sat at our private table in the corner of the dining hall, while the rest of Easton Academy laughed and chowed down and checked over homework around us.
“What?” I said finally, turning my spoon upside down to suck strawberry yogurt off of it.
Clearing his throat, Josh shimmied forward on his chair, shoved his tray of half-eaten turkey sandwich aside, rested his elbows on the table, and leveled a dubious stare at me. One dark blond curl fell over his forehead and I smiled slightly, feeling that little tingle I felt whenever something particularly Josh happened—something only I would know was particularly Josh.
“So let me get this straight,” he said. “After everything that’s happened on this campus—the murder, the stalking, the kidnapping—youwant to go up into the woods—by yourself, in the middle of the night, based on something a ghost in a dream told you—and dig a hole?”
Well, when he put it that way …
“Come on. I basically
have
to do it,” I said, placing the spoon and yogurt cup down. “If I don’t, I’ll
always
wonder if there was really something there.”
It was Ivy who had convinced me. That morning, as I’d gotten dressed, I’d railed on about how it was only a dream. And you didn’t see me running around Croton, Pennsylvania, looking for a river made of marshmallow fluff, did you? (That was a recurring dream of mine when I was in kindergarten.) No. You didn’t. Because dreams are complete insanity conjured up by our subconscious, not treasure maps to be followed in the dead of night. Ivy had listened to all of this patiently before saying the magic words—the ones I had just repeated to Josh.
“Yeah, but if you don’t go,” she’d said, her arms crossed over her chest, “you’ll always wonder.”
“Can I ask you something?” Josh said, dusting some cookie crumbs from the corner of his mouth. “What time did you have this little nightmare?”
I narrowed my eyes, wondering why that could possibly matter. “Um … it was this morning. When I woke up the sun was up. Like … six thirty?”
Josh’s green eyes widened. He picked up another cookie. “That is
so
weird.”
“What?” I asked.
“I had a nightmare this morning too, and you were in it,” he said. “I don’t remember what it was about, exactly, but when I woke up I looked at the clock and it was exactly six thirty-two.”
I felt an eerie tingle all down my back and froze with my spoon halfway to my mouth. “Really?”
He smirked and popped the cookie into