For Nevermore Season 1

then over to the other man, “How did she wake up?”
    “I don’t know. But don’t worry,” the man curled his long fingers around the icy blue ball as he placed it back into his suit. “She won’t remember a thing.”

    * * * *

CHAPTER TWO

    Sunday
    10:14 a.m.

    Noella woke up feeling as if a hundred hammers were slamming her head.
    She closed her eyes, attempting to wade her way through a thick fog of dreams she couldn’t recall. She could feel the night’s memories at the far edge of her mind, but too far to reach. Noella felt a lot like she had when she awoke in the dentist’s chair after getting her wisdom teeth pulled, but without the woozy, wonderful comfort that followed the painkillers.
    This was the second time in a week that Noella had risen from sleep in such serious pain. She felt like she’d slept with her limbs in a vice and her cheek on a rock, rather than resting on her favorite faux down pillow — the comfy one Josie bought her at Target after Noella finally decided she had fully outgrown her Pillow Pet.
    It must be the pills.
    Dr. Foster had explicitly told Noella to report any side effects of the pills, but if she wasn’t going to tell him about the hallucinations, vivid nightmares, or the mysterious man who raced from her dreams to kill the coffee shop robber, she wasn’t about to complain about her headaches. She would simply add it to the long list of crazy that she would have to keep quiet about.
    Noella curled into her comfy pillow, cuddling it close to her body, raising her knees to her chest, then turning her face toward the wall.
    She wished she could just stay in bed. Josie and Randy were both home, and would be all day. Josie had felt guilty for having to work the day before, one day after Noella’s near murder, so she had called the Sunset and told them that she was staying home today. Noella appreciated the gesture, the reinforcement, and the not having to be home alone with Randy all day by herself, but she didn’t feel like talking to them, or anyone, about what happened at Keefer’s. And she was sick and tired of answering Randy’s suspicious questions, the same ones he kept asking her over and over, as though he couldn’t hear or didn’t like her answers.
    Noella already insisted that she didn’t remember what happened more times than she could count. What more did Randy want her to say? What more could she say? Did he think she somehow killed the robber herself — burned him to a crisp, no less — and then somehow passed out? Probably not, but Randy was a cop, and that meant he was trained to sniff out the stink of lies and buried truths. And Noella was keeping a secret. A big one. She had seen the man who killed the thief. She’d known him — if you could call their dream relationship knowing — for most of her life. How could she tell Randy that Dante stepped out of her dream world and into theirs?
    She couldn’t.
    Not only would he not believe her, Randy would have her committed to Kings Point Psychiatric Hospital by sundown. And Noella could never go back to King’s Point. She’d rather be dead than be in that “hospital.”
    She reached to the nightstand, grabbed her bottle of pills, picked it up, unscrewed the cap, and popped one of the light blue pills into her mouth. She washed it down with the bottle of water she kept on the nightstand, then set the bottle back down. Noella bristled as the pills rattled in the bottle, the normally innocuous sound sending a sudden disquieting chill through her body. It felt like Déjà vu.
    She pulled the covers back over her head, then rolled over, wondering how long she would be able to stay in bed before Josie would come into the room and tell her there were pancakes waiting downstairs. She squeezed her eyes shut, still exhausted and determined to find her way back into at least another hour of sleep. Two would be better, and three might force her killer headache into retreat.
    But sleep didn’t want Noella to find it.
    The moment she closed her eyes, violent images of Katie began to flicker through her mind. Katie was strapped to the chair, dark welts flared on her wrists, screaming from where the rope dug into her flesh. She was gagged, and crying in torment as the unseen killer toyed with her.
    The witness of Katie’s murder: yet one more secret Noella would have to keep to herself. She couldn’t even imagine telling Randy that she’d witnessed a murder while sleeping, saw the impossible truth from