𝐖𝐇𝐄𝐍 𝐍𝐈𝐆𝐇𝐓 𝐂𝐎𝐌𝐄𝐒

𝖈𝖍𝖆𝖕𝖙𝖊𝖗 𝖔𝖓𝖊

A gasp broke through your lips as you tumbled back into consciousness. Your fingers were laced tightly around the thin blankets that surrounded you and your collarbone was still damp with sweat. It took you a moment to catch your breath before jackknifing up into a sitting position.

Your head was still swirling with foreign memories when you brought up your hand to clutch your forehead. You'd been having strange dreams lately. Usually, this wasn't a big deal, but they seemed to get worse and worse with every passing sleep. You remembered the first one so vividly from the night you turned seventeen. 

Visions of dark forests and yellow-eyed monsters flooded your mind and no amount of supernatural warding did anything to stop it. Though you could barely remember the specific details of your dreams, you knew that one face remained constant.

It was a woman not much older than you. There was something so familiar about the curve of her face and the way her eyes met seamlessly with the narrow bridge of her nose. It was like looking in a funhouse mirror. You never knew your mother (or your father, for that matter) but oftentimes you could only wonder if it was her who plagued your subconscious. Then again, the chance of it being just a random face cooked up by your brain was equally possible.

A whine broke through the silence of your bedroom and you looked down past your raised mattress to see your dog, Cujo, blinking up at you where he was resting loyally by your feet. Despite being a whopping one-hundred and forty pound Saint Bernard, Cujo had a knack for appearing just as fragile as a toy poodle when he wanted something from you. In this case, it was being let outside.

"Yeah, yeah," you mumbled, rubbing the rest of the sleep out of your eyes before throwing the blankets back and planting your feet firmly on the cold wooden floor. "I'm up."

Your living space was less of a bedroom and more of a glorified hotel room. Aside from the bed tucked against the back wall, there was ample shelving that lined the two walls adjacent to the door that led out into the sandy yard.

Books of all shapes and sizes were stacked dangerously on the edge of your desk which often doubled as a kitchen table when you were too lazy to venture into the main house for late-night snacks. 

Ignoring the mess left behind from long days tending to the horses, you had everything you could ever need in your little A-frame tucked under the trees in the back corner of the Emerson Ranch.

Mr. Emerson was perhaps the kindest old man you ever knew. That being said, he definitely knew how to keep you busy. When you weren't mucking stalls or refilling water troughs, you were holed up in your cottage with an ancient leather-bound book in your lap, memorizing new incantations and long-forgotten Latin phrases. You were a witch if there really were such a thing. And Mr. Emerson taught you everything you knew.

You weren't nearly as superstitious as he was but you didn't let that stop you from sprinkling salt all along your window sills and etching protection sigils under your welcome mat in white chalk. You knew everything there was to know about the occult. 

You were well aware that it wasn't just coyotes that went bump in the night and that twigs snapping in the distance meant more than wandering rabbits. But above all, you knew about vampires. And you knew that Santa Carla was crawling with them.

Mr. E, as you affectionately referred to him, made sure you knew that you were perfectly safe so long as you found yourself on the ranch before nightfall. None of the protective wards you put in place along the property line would be any use if you were on the wrong side of it.

Sure, sometimes you craved the draw of the boardwalk that glimmered like red and gold rhinestones against the pitch-black night. But were buckets of cotton candy and rickety roller coasters worth your life? Absolutely not.