The Sleeping Girl

Chapter Seventeen

"Um, okay," she says hesitantly, eyes darting around before settling back on mine. "But actually, you shouldn't be in here. They're saying family only. I'm surprised that my nurse even let you in. Who are you, actually?"

I smile a little at the thought of the grouchy nurse actually letting us in, then bite my lip, nervously. "Chloe, do you have any idea who you actually are? What this mark means?" I pull up my shirt to reveal my glowing mark. It's glowing, twining like never before, yet no pain.

She gasps, eyes widening. "You have it too?" she exclaims, which promptly sends her into a coughing fit. It first I'm going to wait it out, but it doesn't stop. She has to sit up as she keeps coughing and hacking. I'm wondering if I should intervene when she finally stops. "I'm okay," she whispers, before looking at me expectantly.

"Yes, I have the mark. You do too." It's not a question.

"It's right here," she says, nodding at her right shoulder, the one that's outside the hospital blanket. Gently, I push her papery sleeve up to reveal a mark, identical to mine, golden, glowing, and twining around itself on her gaunt shoulder. "But what does it mean?"

"What do you know about magic?" I ask her.

Her eyes go wide as saucers. "So that means it's real?" she asks, sounding awestruck and eager at the same time. "Magic, I mean."

"Of course. But you knew that all along."

"I did. I mean, of course I've always known it's real, but everyone else that I know has always thought that I'm crazy for thinking so. Like, it's not exactly acceptable for a teenage girl to still be believing in fairies, if you know what I mean? But I just know it has to be. I mean, it has to be.Those... those monsters that come into my bedroom at night, that everyone tries to pass off as nightmares, they're real. Nightmares don't leave physical marks on your body when you wake up in the morning. Do you know how much concealer and foundation I've gone through trying to cover all the marks up? And those monsters, they're the same monsters that attacked Isabelle and me at the beach that night. The same ones who have been trying to kill me for as long as I can remember. They're not hallucinations, they're not my imagination, they are real."

I stare at her, slightly open mouthed. To hear her say it so plainly like this... I'm shocked. How could it have been this bad all along and nobody ever knew? "I'm sorry," I say. "I have been attacked at before, but never to that magnitude of which you speak of. I... I cannot relate, and for that and all you've been through, child, I am so, so, sorry."

She shrugs her shoulders, looking sad. "But you never answered my question of who you are. Why do you have that tattoo, the one that I have, and what does even it mean? If you don't tell me who you are, shouldn't I be afraid that you're like a stalker or a serial killer or something? Not that one of those could be any worse than what I've put up with, but still. Oh! Or even worse, what if you're one of them."

"Of course now," I say. "I swear to you that I am not dark. But yes, those things you've seen are real. They're real monsters, creatures of dark magic, of the dark energy that this world is full of. We have a society, a society that the three of us here are part of, that is devoted to fighting the dark magic, so nobody has to put up with what you have, or basically so those things don't take over the world. All the good power and energy that we get is from one girl, one girl who falls asleep for five hundred years without ageing and channels the power and energy from the Earth in her sleep."

"That girl is you," says Chloe, astounding me with her quick understanding of it. But I guess when you've gone through so much in life, it just forces you to grow up and be more mature.