Chapter Five: Dreaming Ahead?

I shot bolt upright, my breath coming in gasps. The room around me was dark, but even in the dark, I could tell that I wasn’t at home. I was at Nightrunner Inc., down in the ward where the healers had made their own mini-hospital. I had vague memories of Mum pulling up to the building, her and Kaja being sullenly silent, and myself being ushered into the ward so that a healer could fix up my wrist. After that, however, I don’t remember…well, anything. I must’ve blacked out…either that, or the healers knocked me out.

What woke me up was the fact that my phone was ringing. And boy, was it ringing loud! I’m amazed that Amy Lee’s voice and Ben Moody’s guitar riffs didn’t wake up Mum and Kaja; they were both still in the corner, in those hard plastic hospital chairs, both somehow sound asleep. I checked the time on my cellphone-12:57 A.M. I checked the caller ID-Morrigan. Not sure why she was still up, but she was probably worried or something to that extent…

“There had better be a good reason that you’re calling it this hour…” I grumbled as I answered the phone.

“Daciana! There you are! Thank God! I was about to put out a freaking Amber Alert on you because you told me you were going on a walk at, like, six and then you never turned back up! What the hell happened?!”

“I kind of ran into trouble…”

“Why am I not surprised? What kind of trouble are we talking here?”

“The kind that involves me getting rescued by, of all people, Michael Marken.”

“Wonder-Nerd? Seriously?” Morrigan squawked on the other end of the line.

“Yeah, seriously. Take your time, let the shock work its way in…”

“You’re still in one piece, right? Please tell me a group of healers didn’t have to put your sorry ass back together like a jigsaw puzzle…”

I almost laughed. “I’m fine, don’t worry. I did have to go see the healers, but the only casualty was my wrist.”

“So exactly what kind of trouble were you up against?”

“Werewolf.” A flash of my nightmare swam before my eyes, of that furry beast staring at me, and then the horrible realization that I was said furry beast. “And vampire.” Again, another dream-flash, that of Michael with his eyes glowing that haunting color.

I could picture Morrigan wincing on the other end of the line. “Oooh, double whammy. And yet the only thing that happened was you broke your wrist?”

“Only because the vampires and the werewolves were working together, not fighting against each other.”

For a moment, there was shocked silence, and then, Morrigan launched off into ranting Finnish (her mother was from Finland, and she’d somehow gotten a knack for Finnish), sounding incredibly surprised. I actually had to put my phone down for a moment and massage my temples, her rapid-fire ranting was making my head throb so. But when I picked up my phone again, she had switched back to English.

“-That can’t be possible! Vampires and werewolves hate each other; there’s no way they’d be working together! They’ve been at war for, like, a thousand years, there’s no freaking way! Are you sure you’re not tripping on morphine or something?!”

“No, I promise that there were really two vampires and two werewolves fighting against me, alongside each other,” I said flatly-I hated being called a liar. “Although a morphine trip would describe the freaky nightmare I just had.”

“Freaky nightmare?” she asked. “Care to share?”

“Yeah…but not now,” I told her. “It’s one in the morning. You go to bed, for school tomorrow. We’ll…we’ll hook up tomorrow afternoon. I’ll tell you then.”

***

A day at home, to “rest and recuperate” as the healer put it, was enough to drive me crazy. I really didn’t want to stay home, I wanted to go to school, believe it or not, mostly because I wanted to kick some ass and take some names, broken wrist or not. Plus, I had wanted to talk to Morrigan a little earlier than this afternoon. I felt as though I really needed to get not only the fight, but the dream as well, off of my chest. Even at school-that’s what the girl’s bathroom was for.

But, at the very least, I could get away from Kaja. Or, rather, she could get away from me for a while, since she was going to school. So while she was rushing to get off to school to avoid being extremely late, I was settling on the couch with a good book and an iPod. I had tried to get Mum to go to work, but she insisted on staying here and watching me, in case I needed anything.

Amazing…one broken wrist, and suddenly, I’m an invalid.

At about lunch time, however, a call came in and Mum sprinted off to work, apologizing profusely-never mind that I had no trouble with it. Since I hated quiet houses, I popped a good movie into the DVD player and settled back onto the couch for some more “recuperation”.

I was towards the end of Van Helsing when the doorbell rang. I knew it was Morrigan, so I shouted back, “Door’s open!” Two seconds later, she was strolling into the living room, rubbing her arm.

“All right, you weren’t kidding, that Marken kid is better than he looks at-oooh, Hugh Jackman,” she commented, her eyes wandering to the screen as she ogled Gabriel Van Helsing, aka Hugh Jackman. She stared for a moment, then looked back at me. “Sorry. As I was saying, that Marken kid is…I don’t even know how to describe it! I mean, he’s, like…” Her eyes wandered back to the screen, where a now-werewolf-ed-out Van Helsing was slamming a hell-bat-ed-out Dracula against a stone pillar. “Well, let’s just say he was Van Helsing in this instance and I was Dracula.”

I winced. “Yes, I know how that feels.”

“That’s right, you do, don’t you?”

I nodded, pausing the movie. “Yeah, I do. Now…we got to talk. Seriously.”

Morrigan nodded, sitting down on the couch. “I’m all ears, Daciana. Go ahead…wait, before you start, I really want to know something…what was this about the werewolves and the vampires fighting together?”

“Right, that was one thing I needed to talk to you about: All right, so there was a group, two vampires, two werewolves. They went by Katona, Dulca, Nyilas, and Marek. They were hiding in this alley, and I heard them talking, so I stopped to listen in. Would’ve been just fine if I hadn’t ended up downwind of them…”

“You know, those names sound kind of familiar,” Morrigan said, crossing one leg over the other. “I’ll write them down and we can look into them…”

I nodded. “All right. We’ll figure out why they’re fighting together later. Meanwhile…I had a dream last night.”

“So did I,” Morrigan joked. “And it involved that fine hunk of Aussie hotness-” She gestured to Hugh Jackman. “-Along with some other very sexy men…”

“Okay, dream is the wrong word…I think nightmare was a better term. But…I was fighting Michael Marken again. In the same alley I got whooped in last night. There was something wrong though…it was absolutely painted with blood. Michael said he did it…he was a vampire. And then, when I went to attack him so I could put him down like the beast he was…I turned into a werewolf.”

There was silence for a moment as Morrigan stared at me. She started to mutter in Finnish, making gestures as though she was trying to figure something out. “A ihmissusi? Voi luoja, mikä se on, että ihmissusi unet merkitsi jälleen? Jos on, että kirja, kun sitä tarvitsette? No, jos Michael oli vampyyri, ehkä se tarkoittaa, että tulevaisuudessa torjua välillä Michael ja Daciana ... tämä on outoa…”

“Whoa, care to translate for those of us who don’t speak the language of Tuomas Holopainen?” I asked her. She had a habit of ranting in Finnish when she was surprised or angry, and it was kind of annoying to those of us who weren’t fluent in that language-which was me and pretty much everyone else we knew and called a friend.

“Sorry…” she apologized. “I was just…just trying to analyze it. You know my mom and her dream-reading.” That was Morrigan’s mother’s actual profession, a dream-reader. “Methinks this may just be a näkemästä unelma…”

“ENGLISH!”

“Sorry, sorry!” Morrigan apologized. “It means ‘sight dream’. That’s the technical term for a dream that predicts the future. Although, as a general rule, only clairvoyants receive sight dreams.”

“Are there such things as clairvoyants?”

“Of course. Think of it this way-there are werewolves and vampires, aren’t there? They’re less likely to exist than plain old clairvoyants.”

“Touché.”

“Exactly.”

“Anyways…there’s a possibility that you could have had a sight dream. That could be your future…”

“Are you saying I’m going to turn into a werewolf?” I blurted out, shocked.

“No, no, no, no!” she amended, or, at least, attempted to amend. “No, I’m not saying that! It was just a suggestion…sight dreams are rare unless you’re a clairvoyant.”

“Which I’m not.”

“So I’m thinking it was probably nothing more than a morphine-induced bad dream. There-your diagnosis, straight from the lips of Dr. Morrigan. Feel better now?”

“Meh…kind of,” I said with a shrug. “I’m still not entirely sure. The whole incident last night in the alley with the fight kind of had me thinking…”

Not to mention there was the fact that I thought I saw Michael’s eyes glowing icy blue several times last night…vampire blue. He couldn’t be one of them…could he?

“We’ll look into that, you and I,” she said. “Hell, we could even invite Nikki along! Just like the old times!”

I nodded, forcing a grin-Nickelia would be fun to bring along, not to mention she had a huge knowledge of vampires, werewolves, and all that jazz. “Yeah. You, me, and Nikki. Just like the old times…”