Mia seemed rather confused, staring in turn at me and the cushion in her hands, and her breathing was still unsteady. “I’ve been sleepwalking again?” she repeated. “I had such a horrible dream. Liv had a clone, a sneaky creature who wanted to kill her and take her place … but you got away in time, Livvy, and I hid you in my room. All the others thought the clone was the real Liv.” She looked reproachfully at Grayson. “Even you!”
“Er … should I apologize?” said Grayson. Luckily he seemed to be the only one we’d woken. I quickly closed the door so that it would stay that way.
Mia gulped. “Anyway, we had to wait until the false Liv was asleep. Then we came into your room and—” She broke off.
“And tried smothering the false Liv with a cushion,” I went on in her place, shaking my pillow back into shape. “This pillow is lucky you didn’t want to stab it with a knife.…”
“You mean I came into your room in my dream and picked up a cushion to … Oh God!” Mia stared at me, horrified. “That’s terrible!”
“It’s okay. Nothing happened.”
“But if you’d been lying in bed…” Mia’s eyes filled with tears. That happened so seldom—and when it did they were usually tears of rage—that I reached for her hand in alarm.
“Hey, it’s all right, Mia.” I gently pushed her down on the edge of my bed and sat down beside her.
“Nothing’s all right,” said Mia.
Grayson stood there in front of us looking undecided. “She tried to smother you with a cushion?”
“No, she smothered my pillow with a cushion, that’s all.” I darted him a nasty look. Did he have to go on about it now, when Mia was so upset, anyway?
But Grayson wasn’t impressed by my nasty look. He sat down on the bed, too, on Mia’s other side. “Can you remember whose idea it was in your dream for you to smother Liv?”
“She wasn’t trying to smother me—it was my horrible clone, wasn’t it? The one you thought was real,” I said, still trying to meet Grayson’s eyes over the top of Mia’s bowed head, but he wouldn’t look at me. “Anyway, to be honest, who cares? There are some dreams you don’t want to analyze; you just want to forget them as soon as you can.” For instance, dreams when there’s a root growing out of your feet and branches and leaves out of your fingertips. “I suggest we take Mia back to her bed.”
Mia shook her head. “No, I never want to sleep again. I do dreadful things in my sleep.”
“I’ll come to bed with you and keep watch,” I said, glancing at the clock. “We don’t have much of tonight left, anyway.”
“Can I just stay here?” Mia didn’t wait for my answer. She crawled under the duvet and snuggled under it.
“Yes, of course you can do that too,” I said.
Grayson sighed. “Don’t you think this sleepwalking is odd, Liv? And her trying to murder you in your sleep?”
“You’re exaggerating.” I straightened the duvet over Mia. “It was only my clone she was after.”
“I really don’t ever want to sleep again,” murmured Mia, but she had already closed her eyes. “Only for a little while now, because I’m so tired.…” The rest of what she was saying turned into incomprehensible murmurs, and the next second she was breathing deeply and peacefully.
Grayson and I looked at her in silence. Suddenly I felt aware of how close he was, and I wished he’d put a T-shirt on. His bare chest was unsettling me.
“Isn’t this the moment when you ought to leave the room?” I asked, realizing as I spoke that it sounded a little too snide. He hadn’t really done anything except look at me with a disappointed expression, but all the same, I went on. “Or have you forgotten that Mia and I are under the Spencer family curse? No getting up close and personal with girls who murder bushes.”
Grayson reached for my arm and forced me to look at him. “Liv, you have to take this seriously. Suppose Mia didn’t have that dream of her own accord? Suppose there’s someone manipulating her dreams to harm you?”
I swallowed. “That’s…” Out of the question, I’d been going to say. But was it really?
“Think about it. How does Secrecy come to know so much about you?”
Yes, how? All the little hairs stood up on my arms, and Grayson saw it. “Things that only you knew,” he said urgently. “You and Mia.”
And Henry.
“No idea,” I whispered. “Mia for one would never have given them away.”
“Not of her own accord. But couldn’t someone else have slipped into Mia’s dreams at night and found out all those things?” Grayson’s brown eyes looked much darker than usual in the light of my bedside lamp. He seemed to be seriously worried, and so sympathetic that I suddenly wanted to lean against him and have a good cry. I was so exhausted. But of course I didn’t—on the contrary, I moved a little farther away from him.
“You think Secrecy was spying on Mia in her dreams?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “More likely someone who passed what they found out on to Secrecy.”
“And that someone would also make Mia go sleepwalking?” I shook my head and stroked a lock of hair back from my sister’s face. “I sometimes walked in my sleep as a child myself—it runs in our family. We all have vivid dreams.”