“You certainly do.” Grayson sighed. “Liv, please tell me honestly—you and Henry are still doing it, aren’t you?”
Oh no, not that again. But Grayson wasn’t letting me get away with just looking at him blankly.
“You’re still roaming around that corridor, right?”
“Well…” This was really difficult. I’d have loved to keep the truth from him, if only to spare myself his disappointed look. “Not … er … necessarily,” I stammered.
And there it was: the disappointed look. Grayson was better at it than anyone else I knew.
“I thought so. I could tell from the dark shadows under your eyes. Somehow I’d have been surprised if you two could leave it alone. Not Henry and not you either. Leaving Arthur out of this entirely…” With another deep sigh, he finally let go of my arm. “I just don’t understand you—it’s so unreasonable, and thoughtless, and … Well, it’s not the way to behave! Dreams are like thoughts: they have to be free, and no one should go spying on them. Certainly not for fun.”
“But … but we’re not doing it, anyway,” I said defensively. “We don’t go slinking into other people’s dreams.” Except in emergencies. When Senator Tod is chasing us and your door happens to be the only way of escape … “We only meet in our own dreams. There’s nothing bad about that.”
“Apart from the fact that you two have no idea how and why this dream thing works, anyway? After all we saw last year?” Grayson’s whisper was so loud now that it could hardly be called a whisper at all.
“I thought we’d agreed last year that demons don’t exist either in general or in particular,” I said.
“That doesn’t change the fact that you don’t know what you’re getting yourselves in for. It’s unpredictable, it’s immoral, it’s unhealthy, it’s—”
“Shh!” I interrupted him. This argument at five on a Friday morning, combined with my inexplicable wish to throw myself in tears on Grayson’s bare chest, was just too much for me at this moment. “You’ll wake Mia again. She needs her sleep. And I need mine.” I pointed to my bed.
“Exactly.” Grayson went to the door—or stomped to the door was more like it. He was angrier than I’d ever seen him before. He turned back again on his way out. “Do you think I haven’t seen the state you’re in? Leaving aside the huge quantities of coffee you put away every morning. How much longer do you think you can go on like this?” He didn’t wait for an answer, just added a distinctly unfriendly “Sleep well,” and closed the door behind him. At least he didn’t slam it.
“Same to you! And kindly put more clothes on next time,” I muttered. Then I switched off the bedside lamp and lay down carefully under my duvet with Mia, feeling terrible.
Of course I couldn’t drop off to sleep again. Instead I thought about what Grayson had said. Suppose someone really was stealing into Mia’s dreams on the sly? But who could have any interest in doing that? Was it someone who wanted to hurt me, as Grayson suspected? The only person who really came to mind was Anabel. Maybe she could make someone start sleepwalking. But she’d have to possess some personal item belonging to Mia to open her dream door. And how could she have laid hands on that when she was in the hospital in Surrey? Or was the real explanation, as Arthur had suggested, that Anabel knew people who had it in for us in the real world? People we might even know ourselves?
Beside me, Mia moved slightly. She still looked totally relaxed. I gave up trying to go to sleep, carefully got out of bed, put on a thick woolen cardigan to keep warm, and sat down on the upholstered window seat, my favorite place for thinking ever since we’d moved in with the Spencers. It had a view of the garden that Ernest tended so lovingly. Not that it was a particularly pretty sight at this season, with its trees and bushes bare of leaves, but you could imagine what it would be like in spring, when the cherry tree and the magnolias were flowering, with a carpet of forget-me-nots spreading under them. Tonight, however, spring seemed to me infinitely far away.
Mia turned on her other side and made a happy sound. At least one of us was sleeping deeply. I sighed. I could just be imagining things, but no way was I going to let someone walk around in my sister’s dreams. Only, how could I keep watch on her door? That was the question on which everything ultimately turned. Would I be able to increase the security precautions on it, or would I have to tell her what seemed to be going on so that she could protect herself?
I hadn’t found an answer to that question by the time my alarm clock rang. The only certainty was that I was going to need an enormous amount of coffee again.
14
EVEN ON THE way downstairs, I could hear the argument going on in the kitchen. Mia was standing in the middle of the staircase, leaning over the banisters. When she saw me, she raised a hand in warning and put her forefinger to her lips.