The Hollow Ball

Chapter 6

Screams echoed in my ears.

My screaming, I realized, as I thrashed against the arms that tried to hold me still, bile and panic shooting up my raw throat. Echoes of the woman's death pressed against my mind, mingling with phantom hands and the invisible force that dragged me to the bottom of the lake. They were the same. Their fingers felt like underwater vines wrapping around my arms. Their skin was too cold, turning my frenzy into a desperate escape. They wanted to hold me beneath the surface. They wanted me dead. Just like her.

"No!" I cried. "No! Get away from me!"

The lake still choked me when I surfaced from my nightmare, the water cold in my nose, down my throat, ready to snuff my life away like a raindrop on a candlewick. The poor woman's agony still burned through me. I heaved a breath and fought against solid hands. Her panic. My panic. How could he have done that to her? Why did I see it?

"Hayley!" The sound of my father's gruff voice forced my attention. "Open your eyes!"

At his command, the last of the nightmare winked away. When I opened my eyes, the world whorled into focus. Dark water turned into lush grasses and early autumn foliage. Cattails turned into street lamps and dark chimneys. Trees and early morning light shone between the wrought iron fence encircling the garden. And the cold—

I was outside. How in the world did I get outside?

My parents stood over me, and when I sat up, I wretched and my thoughts spun in circles. It had been so real. The woman. The forest. The music she loved and the man's arms—his voice. All of it felt so real. It was unlike anything I'd ever experienced before. I couldn't shake the feeling that it wasn't a simple manifestation of the horror I endured over the last week; it felt like a warning.

"It was only a dream," Mother said, her fingers ghosting over my spine from where she knelt beside me in the grass. I shivered beneath my sweat-soaked nightgown, my slick hair falling into my eyes. Father stood on my other side; both were in their night clothes. Behind us, light filtered out of the doors leading to the garden. Not a sound stirred. Not even from the horses in their stables just behind the trees.

"Not a dream," I choked. Looking at my father, a torrent of anger passed through me. "Perhaps a premonition of my demise."

Mother sucked in a breath. "Hayley."

Standing in his silken nightsuit and matching slippers, his skin without many of the lines of a man his age, hair free of silver, my father said nothing. Unlike Mother—whose family settled in Hunting Hollow from the Sidran Empire when she was a girl. It took two generations for Shadows' gifts to be visible in a family line.

"Don't say such things," she said, her voice tight.

Sitting in the grass, my skin crawled as though I were still underwater, and my throat tightened. "You've always told us to be truthful, Mother. I'm merely speaking on what I believe to be true. That my demise is imminent and my dreams are kind enough to confirm it."

Father's glassy brown eyes regarded me with much of the same anger that lashed up my spine—a defining trait of the Castellano line—and he inhaled slowly, determining if this battle was worth fighting so early in the morning. The house staff were just arriving. Others were likely nearby. There was an image to uphold with the First Families.

What would they say if they heard the daughter of Benjamin Castellano accuse her father of damning her? Of condemning her to the same gruesome end he sent his first child to nearly ten years ago?

The memory stuck to the front of my mind like tar: my eldest sister, Gwenyth, twirling in her beautiful ballgown in the parlor, grinning from ear to ear when my parents presented her with a diamond-encrusted mask that was customary for those who were Chosen.