Chapter 1
Addison
The gaudy blue house with its peeling paint and crooked shutters taunted Addison from the driveway. This was the third day she’d come home from work at the Something Fishy Market & Diner to the rental that was big enough for a family.
The slam of her car door trapped her puffy mauve coat and the accompanying sound of fabric ripping from seam to armpit brought a surge of fresh rage to her cheeks. Her coworkers already teased her for wearing a heavy coat in Boston’s spring season while everyone else wore jackets and raincoats.
The front door required a hefty jiggle and a full-body slam just to do its job. The inside of the house was an improvement from the outside, but it was all nauseating to Addison. The lonely house was one big, glaring reminder of her failed relationship - which she’s sure was her fault, and not just because Justin literally told her it was.
It’s true that hindsight is a different pair of glasses. Her view while they were together was rosy and pink, whereas now she looked back to see the rosy red clay coating the lenses was actually a big smear of dung and it was honestly shocking she hadn’t walked right off a cliff to her death. She’d held onto the relationship even after it became one-sided, had comforted herself with his physical nearness while he’d been light years away and growing farther with each breath. It was the idea of being needed that she admired the most about Justin; more than the man himself, she longed to beusefulas much as she dreaded being alone. His many attempts at confrontation had been easily parried with her extensive training in avoidance of conflict, so well deflected that she didn’t even realize what was happening until he texted herI can’t do thisthe day they were meant to move from his one-bedroom apartment to a roomy house.
Memories of her beachside flat and her best friend, Marissa, back in Florida flooded her broken heart as she surveyed the boxes and tubs that littered the floor. Justin’s poor credit obligated Addison to sign the lease, essentially trapping her here for a full year. Anyone who’s gone from renting an apartment to a house knows the transformation comes with a whole lotmore—more cleaning, more pride, more bills, more money, more overwhelming depression when the walls could house an entire loving family, and yet there was no one else there, just Addison, utterly alone. Strategically placed Bluetooth speakers that constantly blared music helped fill the empty space and drown her thoughts, but only as much as they’d helped as a kid with her mom’s shenanigans in the next room.
It was a long day at the fish market and Addison was exhausted, but sleep hadn’t been kind lately. It hadn’t been friendly for most of her life. Her earliest memory of a nightmare went hand in hand with her earliest memory, which featured the rise and fall of her mother’s voice in a boisterous, drunken fight with a boyfriend Addison didn’t recall. The sound of raised voices and shattering glass lodged their way into her dream and shaped the nightmares that followed her from bed to bed, fluidly restructuring to add the horrors that come along with living as she grew up. The night terrors worsened when she was stressed out, depressed, or ate too much chocolate.
With a deep sigh, she tossed her work clothes directly into the washer—admittedly a perk of having the whole house to herself—and headed to the shower. The stench of fish and whatever chemicals her boss used to package and freeze the largemouth bass, black crappie, redbreast sunfish, and many other varieties of slimy, icky, smelly ocean creatures that she wished she didn’t know so much about clung to her clothes every day. If she skipped a shower even once, she was sure the effluvium would burrow its way into her pillow and then rub itself deep into her pores and follicles as she slept, and in the morning she would wake up and see a half-fish humanoid staring at her from the mirror.
After a moderately timed shower—long enough to clean off but quick enough not to be concerning come time to pay bills—Addison plopped down at her fully assembled worktable. Her sanctuary. Neatly spread upon the desk were tarot cards for easy morning readings, a framed photo of the view from her old apartment, her laptop, and a wish jar for manifesting her deepest desires. Oh, and Steve.
“Hey, Stevie.” The anatomical figurine waved back as she flicked his wooden hand to and fro.
Her latest work in progress was already on the screen the moment she opened her laptop, a book cover for her friend’s cozy witch mystery series. This was the second cover in a trilogy for Marissa, whose beautiful covers had the advantage of her entire graphic design degree channeled into one sole project. Thank goodness Addison spent many years and dollars learning to make a handful of covers and a smattering of character art for one client.
Sarcasm aside, the bills in her name obstructed any dreams she may have had for starting up a business venture or building a clientele in a competitive field like graphic design. The move to Boston was solely to be with Justin, and the fish market was the only decent-paying job that she was adequately underqualified for, and it would take all her time busting ass and slinging fish to keep up this stupid family house.
Maybe I’ll get a roommate.The obscene and yet upsettingly logical thought intruded her wandering mind and plunked a fresh stone of anxiety to the spot between her ribs.
Addison didn’t notice she’d fallen asleep until the scene unfolding around her became eerily familiar. Halloween circa thirteen years ago, twelve-year-old Addy and her longtime frenemies planned and coordinated their outfits with the theme ofBeauty and the Beastafter watching the animated film at a sleepover weeks beforehand. Her two closest friends and biggest bullies dressed up as Belle while she’d gone as the beast. The bratty girls had spent all night mercilessly teasing her for picking thewrongcharacter.
“You knew we were going as Belle! You just want to kiss us, don’t you?”
The worst part was, she did have a little crush on one of them. The kind a pubescent girl gets on her friends that could grow into more if nurtured or be stamped out with anti-rhetoric, prejudice, and bullying, until that part of her was so buried she wasn’t sure what to name it.
God, they were so annoying. The part of Addison aware that she was in a nightmare watched, thinking of how she wished she’d dropped them and never spoken to them again after that night. Unfortunately, the awful friendship lasted well through junior year of high school.
Truthfully, she’d gone as the beast because she was utterly taken by him. Every time she watched the movie, she longed to be in Belle’s place, studying the way he reacted to his human love. She often rewound the movie before the ending where he turned back into the prince, preferring to pretend that part never happened.
At a young age, she started showing signs of an active sexuality, which she’d spent a long time feeling ashamed of. But who cares? She admitted it now, proudly:I’d totally bang that manbeast.
But in the nightmare, her mind and body weren’t so progressive yet and her whole being was permeated with shame and guilt. Shewasthat preteen again, hiding her feelings and wishing to beanywhere else, to be relieved from the endless humiliation that is puberty.
Vague awareness dawned on her. The dream had gone on long enough that something really wicked was bound to happen soon. Sure enough, the edges of her foggy vision began to blur. Menacing darkness pooled in the corners of the dreamscape, accumulating in magnitude until a great tsunami wave rose behind her childhood friends. She turned on her heel and tried to run, but every step she took met the ground like a treadmill. A fluffy gray kitten appeared at her feet, rubbing and mewling innocently. Addison snatched the baby into her arms and pushed her legs, but she could not move. Panic froze the breath inside her lungs. She recalled her high school track meets and attempted to scale the insurmountable distance like a hurdle, but that only landed her flat on her face.
Fear blared inside her mind like a surround-sound alarm. She clawed against the sand, but her hands only sank. She could hear the kitten crying somewhere but could not reach it.
Resigned to her fate, she rolled onto her back and faced the wave. It was different now; she could make out warped faces stretched and exaggerated within the writhing crest. The intermingled demons collided and morphed, their bodies made up of both a nebulous black and a sickly boil-covered plague. She braced herself for the wave of pestilence to smother her, to suffocate her and peel off her skin, to leak into every orifice of her body.
Nothing happened.
The dream dissipated unexpectedly. She felt a thump against her chest and was sent sailing down a flight of winding stairs, her knees occasionally bumping into hard stone on the way down. Her surroundings were dark, but nothing lurked in that darkness. It was simply void of light, not a writhing conglomeration of disease and shame. As her dreamland body took the relentless beating, she thought,this is marginally better.
At the bottom of the staircase, she woke with a groan and peeled her face off the keyboard. Still addled with exhaustion, she decided to go to bed and hoped for more of…whatever that nightmare had been. She shed her sweatpants, climbed onto the full-sized mattress she’d purchased with money that should’ve gone to the gas bill, and settled into the oversized comforter.
As she closed her eyes, the last thing she noticed was a little butterfly trapped in her room. Through her sleep-riddled mind, she felt it was a kindred spirit. She drifted into captivity in the land of dreams, content to pretend the pretty insect would keep her safe.
Chapter 2
Traeyr
