Before the Dawn (6 page)

"Trevor something?" he questioned, and she
suddenly didn’t want to correct her father and tell him it had been
another guy. "You told me about him. And, guess what, lover boy
actually dropped by earlier this afternoon to see you. Also, while
you were sleeping, you missed out on all the joy of giving candy to
hyperactive, demanding children and their prissy parents.
Does
that chocolate bar have nuts? My baby’s allergic to nuts!
"

But Aline was too stunned by the piece of
news he shared a few minutes earlier to be amused by his
impressions of overprotective parents. "Trevor came to see me?!"
she squeaked. "Well, why didn't you wake me up?"

"Because you were sleeping like the dead," he
explained patiently. "He seemed like an okay kid, was worried about
you getting home safely because he said you hadn't been answering
your phone."

"Oh, God! My phone!" She realized she hadn't
even checked it for any missed calls. "I gotta call him back."

"After you're done eating," her dad decreed,
so she gobbled up as much of the pasta as quickly as she could then
made her excuses to go back to her room. Her feet were still
hurting, but she decided to ignore them the best she could for now.
She grabbed her phone and found Trevor's number in the list of
missed calls. And it was a long list. The poor guy must have kept
trying to call her for most of the morning and the early afternoon.
The phone was almost out of power, so she plugged it into its
charger before she redialed Trevor’s number and, after half a ring,
he immediately picked up.

"Aline, are you okay?" were the first words
he said.

"Uhm, yeah," she answered, a bit startled by
his abruptness. "How are you?"

"Fine enough, I guess," he replied. He
sounded troubled. "Listen, I hope you don't think I'm being pushy
or anything, but can I see you? Now? I'll come over if that's
okay."

"Yeah, sure," she said, puzzled by the
strange intensity in his tone. "I'll be wai—" She suddenly realized
he had already hung up. "Weird," she mumbled to herself.

Some minutes later, she opened the front door
to find him standing outside looking quite agitated. His bangs
stuck out on one side like they'd been frozen by a careless breeze
and his clothes were rumpled. But his unkempt appearance wasn't
what alarmed her. He had an expression in his green eyes she had
never seen before. It sort of looked like—and she hoped she was
just imagining things—cold fear.

"Aline!" He stared at her hard, like he was
trying to cut through some sort of illusion that made him unsure if
it was really her. His hand reached out as if to touch her, then
stopped, and she saw him bite his lower lip in sudden
nervousness.

"Trevor," she said with some wariness evident
in her tone. The way he was acting was making her nervous, too.

"Can we talk?" he asked. "Somewhere private,
where your dad can't hear? There are some things," he swallowed,
"about what happened—God, I think I must have been really drunk or
something. Please, just—let's go somewhere and talk." He was
pleading now.

He was scaring her, but she wanted to hear
what he had to say. Maybe he could explain why she couldn't seem to
clearly remember what had happened to her in that ballroom. "There
are chairs out back," she said, "below my old tree house. We could
talk there, I guess."

"Okay." He nodded. "Okay. Let's do that."

"It's this way." She joined him outside and
gestured for him to follow her around the house to the backyard. It
would have been quicker if they had just gone through the kitchen,
but her dad was still there and she didn't want him to see Trevor
and how weird he was acting. When they got to the chairs, she sat
on one, relieved that she didn't have to walk on her aching feet
anymore, and pointed to the other chair across from her so he would
sit there. She wanted some distance between them because she
suddenly had no idea what he might do at any second. "So, you
wanted to talk," she prompted once they were both settled into
their chairs.

He let out a loud breath and buried his face
in his hands for a moment. Then he straightened up and looked at
Aline. "I can't remember things from last night clearly," he
finally confessed.

Those words sent a little chill through her.
"What do you mean?"

"I—I'm confused about whatever happened or
didn't happen last night." His brow furrowed as he tried to make
sense out of his thoughts. "What I remember is going to work and
helping set up the big private room for your party. Then sometime
around eleven, I think, things sort of—get hazy. I remember running
around from table to table bringing in food, and guests started
arriving, though they didn't look like anyone I'd seen in school.
Then that balcony, standing there with you thinking I've never been
out on a balcony in the Ballroom before. I didn't even know we had
one. And then that thin guy with the black hair showed up and
dragged you away. I was going to go after you, but this other guy,
someone blond, stopped me. He said something." Trevor was silent
for several seconds as he tried to remember, but he huffed a bit in
frustration when the right memory didn't come to him. "Then I
thought I saw you, but you were walking towards the woods, and I
thought that was really strange, so I ran after you. And I must
have lost you or knocked myself out or something, because the next
thing I knew, I was waking up just as the sun was rising and I was
in the middle of the woods behind the Ballroom." He then stared
right into her eyes. "I know the whole thing doesn't make much
sense. I can't even be sure if it really happened or not. But
that’s what happened to me." It looked like he was pleading with
her to come up with an explanation that would clear up the
confusion he was feeling.

She said nothing for a long time. Then she
stood up, which sent a sharp bolt of pain from her feet to the rest
of her body. But she couldn't afford to pay attention to it now.
"Wait here, okay? I wanna show you something." He nodded, and Aline
walked as quickly as she could to the back door that led to the
kitchen. "Trevor's in the backyard and I'll talk to you about it
later!" she told her startled dad in a rush as she limped past him
and headed upstairs for her room. She took out the silver leaf from
where she had hidden it and went back out to where Trevor was
seated.

"Here." She held it out to him like an
offering and, curiosity lighting up his eyes, he took it and
studied it carefully.

"What is it?" he asked, so she told him about
the dream she'd had and how she'd woken up and found that a leaf
from a grove of silver trees that shouldn't exist had somehow
hitched a ride with her back to the real world.

He just looked at her in silence for a few
minutes. "You’re not joking." He wasn’t asking her a question.

"Right now, I really, really wish I was." Her
tone was earnest. "But I’ve got strange dreams, a silver leaf that
shouldn’t be here, no clear memory of last night, and injured feet.
I don’t see anything that would make a good joke out of these
things." Then she asked him the question that she was actually
scared to hear him answer. "Do you believe me?"

He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it
again. He was silent for a minute before he finally said, "I don’t
know. This is all just—" He ran a hand through his hair again,
messing it up some more. "What about your friends?" he wondered.
"What do they remember about last night?"

"Damn!" she exhaled. "I haven’t even called
any of them yet. I’ll talk to them later," Aline promised. She
hoped he hadn’t noticed the hurt expression on her face when he
didn’t say he believed her.

He clutched the silver leaf lightly. He
obviously didn’t want to risk getting cut by its thin edges, too.
"Can I keep this for now?" he asked.

"Sure," she shrugged. It didn’t really matter
to her one way or the other.

"Okay." He nodded once and stood up. "I’m
gonna go. I think I’ll pass by the place where I woke up earlier.
See what I can find there, if there’s anything weird. I’ll talk to
you again in school tomorrow." His manner had now changed. His
nervousness was gone and he looked determined, like he was on a
mission.

"Yeah. We’ll talk," she agreed. She watched
him as he walked away, and it struck her just then that there was
something incredibly familiar about him, that he had always seemed
familiar to her somehow. She suddenly wanted to call him back, but
what exactly was she going to say? She had a horrible premonition
that no matter how strange things were right now, they were going
to get even stranger and that she and Trevor were going to be in
the middle of some serious weirdness.

She continued to obsess about the odd stuff
going on as she went back to her room, carefully avoiding her dad
for now, and started calling up her friends. The first person she
was able to reach was Sam, and her friend sounded kind of loopy
when she answered Aline’s call.

"Hey, sorry," Sam said. "Just woke up a few
minutes ago and I’m still really sleepy."

"You slept the whole day?"

"Yeah. And my feet are killing me. I’m never
wearing heels again!" she swore. "That was some party last night,
huh?"

"Yeah, it was," Aline agreed, feeling like a
liar as she said it. "What were the highlights for you? I kinda
lost track of everybody once the dancing started."

"Well," Sam paused, and Aline thought that
she could almost hear her friend’s brain whirring, "uhm, I guess
the dancing was pretty good." She sounded uncertain though, then
she chuckled ruefully. "Oh, God. I think I must have drunk too much
last night ‘cause I don’t really remember much of what happened in
the Ballroom except the dancing. But I think I saw you with some
blond guy and the two of you were pretty much glued to each other
all night. Which was kinda weird. I thought you were going to talk
to Trevor. What happened to that plan?"

"I—we didn’t really get the chance to talk."
For a moment, the face of Aline’s dance partner from last night
became clear in her mind but, before she could focus on it, the
image disappeared again. But the feeling of rightness, of
belonging, stayed with her and she suddenly wanted nothing more
than to see him again, whoever he was. "Hey, I’m gonna hang up
now," she told Sam. "I wanna talk to the others for a bit before I
try to go to sleep." Considering she had slept the day away, she
was fairly sure that it was actually going to be a long, sleepless
night for her instead. Sam then said her goodbyes and Aline
contacted Meran and Cassie next. They basically said the same
things—they slept most of the day, their feet were hurting, and
they couldn’t really remember what happened in the Ballroom—so the
previous night was still a big mystery. She then tried calling
Gracelyn a few times, but the other girl wasn’t answering her
phone, so Aline just left her a message instead.

Then she lay back in bed and tried to make
some sense out of everything she knew for sure and everything that
didn’t quite match up.

One, a silver leaf from a dream had
mysteriously shown up in her room and she had a bad wound that
proved just how real, and sharp, it was. Two, some costumed freaks
had been running around town and pulling pranks that no one else
seemed to notice, and the whole thing may have been just another
dream. Three, Trevor’s incredible story about waking up in the
woods and her friends’ reports of not remembering details about
last night were just too crazy, except that something similar had
happened to her. Four, she was probably going crazy. Yes, that last
thought certainly felt truer compared to everything else.

She sighed and turned on one side to stare
out the window, trying to make her mind as blank as possible so she
wouldn’t have to feel the anxiety that was beginning to overwhelm
her. She actually succeeded in zoning out for a few minutes. But
then, a sound crept up on her hearing, and she gradually realized
that she was listening to soft music coming from outside. It was
lovely, as dark and sweet as the wine she now recalled tasting on
her tongue last night.
He
had given it to her, and he had
made her eat some kind of fruit as well because he promised she
would like it. As the sound steadily grew louder, like it was
coming closer to her house, she started to remember more details.
The feel of his hand on her waist, a flash of his smile, the eyes
that had stared into hers as he asked her to promise—promise
him...

"Yes," she thought she heard herself whisper.
"I promise. I’ll come back."

And then the music took her away.

***

Chapter 7

She opened her eyes and she found herself
staring down at her reflection in a small pool. She was seated on
the grass in a garden where the flowers bloomed in pale,
phosphorescent colors, and the trees rustling in the wind sounded
like they were sighing secrets. The stone castle loomed over her
with its many lighted windows and she could hear the sounds of
stringed instruments being tuned before the unseen orchestra
launched into a gay gypsy melody. The bright moon was concealed
behind her head, so she looked like she had a silver halo while the
stars were arranged in the pattern of a diadem along its curved
edges. But there was something wrong with her face, and she frowned
as she tried to figure out exactly what was off about it. As she
studied the features looking back at her from the dark waters,
another face appeared beside hers.

"You came back," he said, and he looked very
pleased.

She turned away from her reflection and met
his gaze. "I promised."

He shrugged. "You broke your promise before,"
he said gently, without any reproach.

Still, she felt guilty, though she wasn't
sure why she should. But there was something in his tone that let
her know he wasn't lying. She had broken a promise to him before,
and it had wounded him deeply. "I'm sorry," was all she could
say.