Kedar, Joaquin, and all of the rest of the scene blurred. Soon, all that remained in focus for Sadie was Nijah and a small sphere of the restaurant. Being forced from outside observer back into her own perspective jarred the younger woman's sense of self, but after some struggle to piece everything together, she stared Nijah down.

With a swallow to force down her hesitation, Sadie said, "This isn't real. You aren't really here. This is just part of my dream."

"The ability to infiltrate dreams is under-represented among modern depictions of jinn," Nijah said. "But I assure you, it is real." She shrugged. "But its usefulness is extremely situational." As Sadie raised her fists, Nijah balked, then laughed. "You're no fighter, girl. I'm not afraid of you. And I don't want to fight you anyway."

Sadie lowered and clenched her left hand. When nothing happened on the first attempt, she twitched her fingers again, still nothing. She was really hoping if she believed hard enough, she could spontaneously generate a sword or a gun or a keyblade or something.

Nijah leaned her head over to look at the blur outside the café. "It's not playing out when you're not watching. Which is a shame. Joaquin has told me what he did to that horrible mother of his, but I think it would have been fun to watch him rip her apart." She turned and looked down toward Sadie's hand. In one twitch, she showed enough of her palm to give Nijah a look at the stigmata. "The icon is bound to your being then? I don't think any of us knew it could do that, not in the intermediary phase."

Whatever Nijah was talking about sounded like sounded like it could be useful information, but Sadie didn't want to reveal how little she knew yet. With her fingers still grasping in the hope she could spawn something, Sadie sized up the woman opposite her. "So, this is just you guy's thing, huh? Monster blood somewhere in your DNA, a grudge against your parents..." she paused. "I guess that thing wasn't really Benjie's mom, but still."

"It's not all grudges," Nijah said. "I loved my family, and I punished the ones responsible for what happened to them."

"Well, I haven't made it over to you yet," Sadie said.

Nijah rose and continued to study Sadie as she slowly stalked around her in a circle. Everything besides the two remained frozen in time, as if they were all that existed.

"The presence of the monstrous in our blood is something we all have in common. But beyond that are our goals, something that blood has made us acutely aware we must carry out."

Sadie clenched her forehead to put on a judgmental face. "Your goals?"

"I don't mind telling you because I think if you understand better, you might just agree with us. I think I nearly made it through to your lover."

"Cassie would never take your side." As Sadie spoke the café began to fade away.

"I think she might, and I think you might. Because I think you see something of yourself in these visions, don't you?"

Sadie stiffened as the faded background restructured itself. "I don't know what you're talking about. And you aren't welcome here, get out of my head."

"All this assumes I'm actually an outsider here at all." Nijah smirked. "What if you're projecting me yourself? What if I'm actually—"

With her right hand shut into a fist, Sadie ran and pulled back her arm for a punch. As Nijah already observed, Sadie wasn't a fighter. Nijah sidestepped the hit, grabbed Sadie by a shoulder, and drove her gut into a raised knee. Sadie gasped in pain, lost her balance, and crumbled to her knees.

"Have you ever even been in a fight, girl?" Nijah encircled the grounded Sadie as she spoke. "Have you ever had to protect yourself from anything?"

The space around them reformed. As Sadie pushed upward, a spray of something yellow and acidic blew into her face. She shouted and wiped at the stinging in her eyes. She tasted a little of it on her breath: pineapple soda. Gross enough on its own, but it made a rush of other, bitter memories come back to the forefront of her mind. With a squint she looked first down at the floor, which was suddenly rendered in a brown and beige checkerboard tile patter. And when she looked up, Nijah no longer stood alone. Four faceless figures, like mannequins in gym clothes, stood two on each side of Nijah. In one hand they each clutched a soda can, and with the other they pointed at her.

Cracks crossed the center of their blank faces to form crude, laughing mouths, and each took another drink before they spat it up on her face and hair again.

"Is this supposed to be your trauma?" Nijah said. "I hope you appreciate how well off life has been for you. Why pineapple soda anyway—"

Sadie shoved herself off the ground and threw a shoulder check into Nijah's gut. Fast and hard, Sadie closed her hands together, caught Nijah in an uppercut, then smashed the closed fists into the back of her head. Nijah shouted when she hit the floor, and as she did the locker room dissipated into a white void. With hard, heavy breaths, Sadie said, "You don't need to get that reference. They were just being cruel." She raised and brought her clasped hands down as Nijah started to push up.

Nijah rose, caught her hands, and pulled them apart. "If you think this is cruel, wait until the icon shows you what I went through." With an iron-hard grip, she twisted Sadie's wrists.

Tears started to well up in Sadie's eyes as she turned, jerked, and freed her hands. She struggled to shake the pain out of her burning, twisted wrists as she and Nijah faced one another again.

"And what about your time at home?" Nijah said. "Did you also come from monsters?"

Sadie whipped her hands up and took a boxer's stance. "That's none of your business."

But even as she said it, the area around them reformulated itself again. The four walls of a small bedroom soon surrounded the two of them. Video game cover slips hung sloppily taped to one wall beside a Linkin Park poster. An array of abstract, half-finished quarter canvasses sat in an opposite corner. Sadie's body started to shake as she glared at Nijah, who stood opposite her with an unmade twin bed between them. "Get out. Get out, now."

"You've lost whatever control you had left over this dream," Nijah said. "Including over me."

The door on the other side of the room flung open and then slammed shut. A girl barely more than a teenager dressed in the cardigan and striped skirt of a school uniform rushed past Sadie, threw her face onto the bed, and held a pillow over her head.

A metallic jiggle sounded from the other side of the slammed door. "You don't lock the door in my house!" The voice from beyond the door distorted into a throaty screech. "Open it, now!"

"Leave me alone, Mom!" The girl on the bed fought to get the words out through tears and a lump in her throat.

Half of Sadie wanted to reach over to her, half of her wanted, again, to scream at Nijah to get out. But the image, her time-displaced mirror image, held and froze her.

"I pay hundreds of dollars a semester for you to go to that school, and I get a call from the vice-principal going on about suspending you for indecency."

"We weren't even at the school when it happened." The girl said through a blubber.

Sadie's body tightened. That really was what she'd said? Not, "Who cares if I tried kissing Renee?" or, "Why should I have to hide it?" No, the equivalent of, "I'm sorry I got caught."

The door jiggled again. It didn't have a proper keyhole, but there was a tiny opening on the other side that would give with enough bobby pin poking. "This isn't what we raised you for— do you know what it cost us to even conceive you? We didn't spend all that time, all that money, and have all those failed attempts so we could have a dyke for a daughter."

"Mom, just leave me alone, I feel bad enough already." The younger Sadie on the bed sounded like she was choking on her words. "I'll— I'll never do it again. I've learned my lesson. I promise, I'll—"

The door started to open with a creak. In a snap to clarity, Sadie found strength enough to turn to it and scream, "Get out!"

Every bit of the illusion around them shattered. Again, she and Nijah stood alone in the abyss. With fists clenched. Sadie sniffled and fought with the hot tears that welled up in her eyes.

"I was right," Nijah said. "You had a monster at home too."

Sadie whipped around, screamed, and threw her fist at the other woman. But her rage left her sloppy: Nijah blocked the attack, grabbed ahold of her arm, and smashed a vertical elbow against her horizontal one. Sadie perceived an explosive shatter down the center of the limb and tried to scream again, but all in an instant her throat felt completely dry and the agonized shout caught in the middle. With a thrust to her chest, Nijah knocked her to the ground.

The space refit itself again as Sadie convulsed in anguish on the ground. Some kind of stone material took shape below her and rose off the ground like a surgical table. The room went dingy like the center of a windowless warehouse, the stained glass on the wall illuminated by lightbulbs set up behind them. Bile rose in Sadie's throat as she turned away from Nijah and beheld another crowd of faceless mannequin people as they beat their feet on the floor. They had no lips to speak with, but something impossible to decipher still echoed out of them. And even if she couldn't recall their words, the meaning remained unforgettable.

"Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!"

That night was months since she'd last been on a date. At most, they maybe saw that dumb, Hot Topic button she used to keep on her school backpack. The one that said, "My parents said I could be anything, so I became a lesbian," that she could take off when she went home. So, there was her short hair, maybe her taste in wannabe biker gear, and maybe a button on her backpack. That was all those psychopaths needed to see to decide she deserved to die.

A rough hand clenched over her throat. Sadie turned, and an enormous figure in crusader armor and a helmet with decorate wings over the eyes towered over her. At his side, invisible to him, Nijah looked on, arms crossed, face downturned in disgust.

"Well, here's something interesting. You stared down the Seraphim, did you? He and his ilk are no friends to use."

Sadie kicked and struggled on the altar. She tried to shout, but the hand on her throat kept it down. This wasn't how he went—she remembered how it really happened—but this was how it always was when it came back up in her nightmares. She had no reason to think otherwise—he was going to kill her.

"We don't want to hurt you," Nijah said. "We just want to save you."

In spite of the grip that threatened to crush her windpipe, when Sadie opened her mouth again she forced out a scream. The Seraphim held her down tighter, as if to cut her off. Nijah went on speaking as her words started to lose meaning.

But somewhere, echoing in the distance, came something else. A call of, "Sadie? Sadie? Sadie!" And as the voice reverberated, everything else began to fade away.

-000-

Sadie thrashed in bed and screamed as Cassandra shook her and pled, "Wake up, please wake up." Between two of the cries, Sadie's eyes opened wide in a state of pure panic then slipped back shut. Cassandra squeezed her hand and said, "Don't—"

"Keep me up!" Sadie looked to be using every ounce of strength in her body to keep her eyes open. "Don't let me go back—she's in there—he's in there!"

Cassandra pulled her up to a sitting position and hugged her close. Sadie's skin was cold and clammy with sweat and her body twitched as Cassandra held her. After a few seconds of hyperventilating, Cassandra's tight hold slowly helped bring her back to earth.

"It was bad—" Sadie almost choked on the words. "It was so bad—I was so scared and—and—and she was there—"

After just a moment to loosen her grip, Cassandra asked, "It's okay now. What happened? Who?"

Before Sadie could say anything, they heard a brief struggle outside the door to the barrack, then it swung open. Tim and Stephanie were off to the side as if they'd just been shoved out of the way, and Brother Alexander, looking smug and disdainful as ever, glared into the room.

"What's all this noise? And what are you both doing in here, you're not supposed to be—"

The last of Sadie's rage that she hadn't already let out exploded to the surface. "Get out! Get out right now you—you—you self-righteous bastard!" Something, either the incendiary word choice or the burning indignation she said them with, silenced the monk for a moment. Sadie pressed on. "I just had trauma nightmares, that bitch from the train was stalking me, I think I'm gonna throw up—get out! Get the hell out!"

Alexander paled and, for the first time she'd said it all night, someone actually turned around. "… I'm not going far. And when this is resolved I'll—"

Cassandra was next to command, "Out!" The monk acquiesced. Once he was gone, Cassandra turned all of her attention back to Sadie, one arm holding her close, the other running through her hair. "Going to be okay now."

Between her rapid breaths and hiccups that just came on, Sadie struggled to say, "I can't go back to sleep. I won't. I—she—I—"

"Okay." Cassandra didn't understand all of what was going on, but she didn't need to. "Okay. You can stay up. We'll be with you. And we'll keep you safe."