Dream Dark by Kami García Read Free Book Online

people felt safer with their windows closed, but I knew a closed window couldn’t protect me from the things I was afraid of. It couldn’t keep out a Dark Caster or a Blood Incubus.
    I wasn’t sure anything could.
    But if there was a way, Macon seemed determined to find it. I hadn’t seen much of him since we came back from the Great Barrier. He was always in the Tunnels anyway, or working on some kind of protective Cast to Bind Ravenwood. Lena’s house had become the Fortress of Solitude since the Seventeenth Moon, when the Order of Things—
    the delicate balance that regulated the Caster world
    —was broken. Amma was creating her own Fortress of Solitude here at Wate’s Landing—or Fortress of Superstition, as Link cal ed it. Amma would’ve cal ed it “taking preventative measures.” She had lined every windowsil with salt and used my dad’s rickety stepladder to hang cracked glass bottles upside down on every branch of our crepe myrtle tree. In Wader’s Creek, bottle trees were as common as cypresses. Now whenever I saw Link’s mom at the Stop & Steal, Mrs. Lincoln said the same thing
    —“Caught any evil spirits in those old bottles yet?”
    I wish we could catch yours. That’s what I wanted to say. Mrs. Lincoln stuffed in a dusty brown Coke

    to say. Mrs. Lincoln stuffed in a dusty brown Coke bottle. I wasn’t sure any bottle tree could handle that.
    Right now, I just wanted to catch a breeze. The heat rol ed over me as I leaned against my old wooden bed frame. It was thick and suffocating, a blanket you couldn’t kick off. The relentless South Carolina sun usual y let up a little by September, but not this year.
    I rubbed the lump on my forehead and stumbled to the shower. I turned on the cold water. I let it run for a minute, but it stil came out warm.
    Five in a row. I had fal en out of bed five straight mornings, and I was afraid to tel Amma about the nightmares. Who knew what she would hang on our old crepe myrtle next? After everything that happened this summer, Amma had closed in on me like a mother hawk protecting her nest. Every time I stepped out of the house, I could almost feel her shadowing me like my own personal Sheer, a ghost I couldn’t escape.
    And I couldn’t stand it. I needed to believe that sometimes a nightmare was just a nightmare.
    I smel ed the bacon frying, and turned up the water. It final y went cold. It wasn’t until I was drying off that I noticed the window had closed without me.
    “Hurry up, Sleepin’ Beauty. I’m ready to hit the books.” I heard Link before I saw him, but I almost wouldn’t have recognized his voice. It was deeper, and he sounded more like a man and less like a guy who specialized in banging on the drums and writing bad songs.
    “Yeah, you’re ready to hit something, but I’m pretty sure it’s not the books.” I slid into the chair next to his spot at our chipped kitchen table. Link had bulked up so much that it looked like he was sitting in one of those tiny plastic chairs from elementary school.
    “Since when do you show up on time for school?”
    At the stove, Amma sniffed, one hand on her hip, the other pushing at scrambled eggs with the One-Eyed Menace, her wooden spoon of justice.
    “Morning, Amma.” I could tel I was about to get an earful, from the way she had one hip cocked up higher than the other. Kind of like a loaded pistol.
    “Feels more like afternoon to me. ’Bout time you decided to join us.” Standing at a hot stove on an even hotter day, she didn’t break a sweat. It would take more than the weather to force Amma to budge an inch out of her way of doing things. The look in her eye reminded me of that as she sent a whole henhouse’s worth of eggs tumbling across my blue and white Dragonware plate. The bigger the breakfast, the bigger the day, in Amma’s mind. At this rate, by the time I graduated I’d be one giant biscuit floating in a bathtub ful of pancake batter. A dozen scrambled eggs on my plate meant