THE FRIGID PLACE

Andrea gasped awake.

In her bed. In her room. Under her twisted blanket. She ran a clammy hand over her heated forehead, one thought repeating itself over and over again inside her mind:

It was a dream.

Andrea could feel her fingers and wiggle her toes. Relief pulsed through her with each warm surge of blood through her veins. She swung her legs over the side of the bunk and hopped down, wrapping her blue blanket around herself and heading to the door.

That was when she saw it.

It was early autumn. The weather cooling down after a long, hot summer. Winter was on its way, but it hadn’t arrived.

Yet narrow, jagged fingers of frost crawled all the way up her window.

Andrea opened her bedroom door, stumbling backward as chunks of a snowdrift from the hall crumbled into her room.

Don’t stay too long in a nightmare.

Either she had stayed too long or the Sandman had pulled a trick of time. Andrea hadn’t understood what Margaret Grace—or the dream that was Margaret Grace—meant when she said it, but each time she had broken a Reverie rule she had ended up back at home. And this time The Frigid Place had crawled its way out of her head and into her bedroom.

Terror curled inside her as Andrea reached under her bed for her shoes. She felt it in the jolt of nerves running through her veins and the eerie silence throbbing its endless nothing through her ears. There was no telling what she would find downstairs, but Andrea couldn’t stay in her room forever. She needed to find out the boundaries of the nightmare’s reach, if it had claimed more of her home than her bedroom window and hall.

Andrea took a deep breath, exhaling visibly in the polar air, and trudged through the hall and down the stairs, heading straight for the kitchen. Icicles hung from every doorframe and frost crept up the walls, in some places digging deep into newly formed cracks in the plaster.

When she saw the kitchen she stopped: There stood her parents, their bodies unmoving and their faces grayish blue. Andrea forced her way through more snow with fury, pausing in front of her father, whose hand hovered a few inches above the counter and clutched a black pen.

Andrea leaned close to him, sticking a finger under his nostrils, checking to see if he was alive, if he was somehow breathing in this chilled state. But everything was still. His clothes were too stiff to move, and the expression on his face was pulled tight, strained, like he had looked in the weeks after Francis disappeared.

Except for his eyes. The lids were frozen open, but the eyes themselves were wet. Moving. Alive. They followed her as she leaned from side to side, filled with all the pleading he couldn’t get his mouth to speak. Pleading for Andrea to help him.

Andrea’s skin crawled at the sight, guilt once again coursing through her. Here was her dad, silently pleading for her to help him, and she didn’t know how. She pulled back as her own eyes threatened to betray her, building up that hot, burning feeling she worked so hard to hide away.

Beneath his hand rested a piece of paper and handwriting she’d recognize anywhere. As the words went on, they grew jagged, like her father was still trying to write them as his hand began to freeze.

ANDREA, WHERE ARE YOU???

Andrea reached out to touch him, but she might as well have stuck her hand in the ice bin in the freezer.

This was all her fault. She had done this to them. In her eagerness to run away, she’d made her parents fear they had lost not one but two children. She had made their real-life nightmare come true for the second time. And then she had frozen them.

“Dad,” she shook her head and set her jaw. “I’m so sorry. I was only trying to help. I was trying to bring Francis home. But don’t worry, I’m going to fix this.” Andrea’s legs wobbled like they might buckle underneath her at any second. She hoped her voice sounded more confident than her mind and body felt.

Her father was trapped in a nightmare, all because of her. All because she had entered Reverie. Because she wanted one moment in time when she could forget, and then because she wanted to bring Francis home. She was trying to make things better, and all she’d done was make them worse.

But it didn’t make any of the words she spoke now less true. She was going to fix this. She could set all this right. She just had to figure out how.

Andrea’s mother was equally bad. Her eyes at least were frozen closed, mid-blink, but her eyeballs moved behind them, grating against the ice coating her lids. She was bent, hunched over a pot of coffee, an empty cup on the counter beside her.

The entire house groaned around Andrea under the pull of the ice and the weight of the snow, threatening to collapse and crush them. An avalanche made of snow and wood, ice and drywall, frost and shingles, and deadly dreams.

“I . . . I have to go and find help,” she said, hoping her parents could still hear. Andrea slid open the porch door and stepped into the world outside.

For some reason, she had expected the freeze to be contained to her home. To be able to knock on a neighbor’s door whose grass was still green and ask to use their phone. She would call the police and the ambulance and the fire department. Whoever she could think of that would come and help. They would search Reverie for Francis. Then they’d chase the Sandman’s dream circus straight out of town.

But none of it mattered because the entire world outside was frozen, too.

Bare branches glistened in the harsh sun, each encased in a glaze of ice. The houses as far as Andrea could see were all wrapped in the same degree of winter, maybe with people inside them exactly like her parents. Frozen.

Had her mistake somehow turned the entire world to ice?

Andrea hadn’t agreed to this when she entered. She had agreed to escape, not to have nightmares follow her home. There was too much at work here trying to prevent her from learning the identity of the boy she had seen.

There could only be one reason for that: The boy had to be Francis. She was certain now.

She was also certain the Sandman had lied, and that he was going to great lengths to keep them apart.

Andrea let out a scream that echoed throughout the silent, empty air. None of this was okay. None of this was right. She hated feeling trapped. Hated the sting of deception—that there existed a person out there who thought it was okay to trap people inside his awful dreams and lie about knowing her brother. Andrea didn’t understand why he would do it, but whatever his reasons, the Sandman clearly wasn’t a friend like he had claimed to be.

Andrea had to find her brother, no matter how many nightmares she had to walk through to do it and no matter what obstacles the Sandman put in her way. Francis was really still out there, tucked away inside the shimmering gates of Reverie, and if she could free herself from the ice and get back to him, she would finally have her chance to bring her brother back and fix what had broken.

Andrea’s nostrils flared as she marched with long, bold strides back to the path in the forest that would take her to Reverie’s gates, stopping only when her body smacked straight into something firm yet stretchy. It forced her backward, and she landed on her bottom on the snowy ground, as if she had just come up against the side of a giant balloon.

She stood, brushing the snow off her jeans and reaching a hand out toward whatever it was that had sent her back. Sure enough, her fingers pressed into a rubbery barrier of some kind with the images of the forest imprinted upon it. Each branch on each tree looked so detailed and full of dimension, as if it was truly a path instead of a wall. She ran her fingers up, following a slight curve that indicated the shape of a dome rising above her head, where the painted trees gave way to a painted sun and a painted winter sky.

A feeling of relief quickly shifted to frustration that rolled through Andrea like a wave. If this was a dream tent, somehow still a part of the nightmare, or a part of the strangeness that came from staying too long inside one, then a nightmare hadn’t collided with the real world and her parents weren’t really frozen inside.

But if this was a dream, then she was also trapped; there wasn’t an opening or a door anywhere in sight.

Andrea clenched her fists. Even though her entire view of Reverie had flipped upside down in such a short amount of time, she wouldn’t quit now. Penny had said there would always be a door. She just had to find it.

And if this was a balloon, then maybe it could pop.

Andrea ran back to the house, bracing herself against its frozen siding. She pushed off, running with all her might toward the barrier that kept her trapped in a world of ice. She gritted her teeth and pumped her arms, the snow kicking up behind each step as she slammed into the dome with the full force of her strength.

The sharp sound of shattering glass entered Andrea’s ears and ricocheted inside her head as she stumbled out the backside of The Frigid Place tent and landed on the dirt floor of a Reverie lane.

Andrea dusted off her jeans and smiled. She had broken out of the nightmare. Now she had to find her brother.