Chapter 30：Nightmare

That night Hazel experienced her recurring childhood nightmare for the first time in a good while. Unlike the night terrors of her childhood, everything happened in chronological order so the sounds didn't all swirl together like a horrible melody. It was simply a replaying of her memory.

Ever since the night terrors stopped, the dream had changed. Not only did the overlap stop, there was a part of the memory that stuck in her head longer. The way the murderer looked at her after killing her mother.

That look pierced through to her very core. The man smiled at her—actually smiled!—as Hazel clung to her mother's body with blood still dripping off of the knife he used to kill her.

He said something too but she could never remember what. She could see his lips moving over those horribly crooked teeth but could never comprehend what was being said. That was always the point where she woke up in a cold sweat.

Her nights of screaming had long ended. On the rare occasions her nightmare did come back, Hazel always came to in mute horror.

Sitting up in a panic, Hazel couldn't stop shaking. Why did it have to come back now? It had been months. Possibly even a year. Was she ever truly going to be able to move on?

Up until this point, her entire life had been defined by her parents' murder and her subsequent hospitalization. It was why she could never get close to anyone. She felt no attachments to other people because she had lost too much.

First her parents. Then the only person who showed her the tiniest bit of kindness since she lost them. She had thought things would be okay once she was with Billy Lawson but he wasn't even who she was looking for. Truly, she was all alone in the world.

Or was she?

Will—who she had already discovered was a light sleeper—rubbed his eyes as he sat up. "What's wrong, Hazel?" he asked blearily.

She bit her lip guiltily. "I'm sorry for waking you up. I had a nightmare."

His brow furrowed in concern. "Do you have nightmares often?"

"Not anymore. I had them constantly when I was a kid though. They don't affect me nearly as much as they used to."

He wrapped her securely in his embrace. Since she was still shaken from the nightmare, the unexpected contact was nice. Hazel found herself melting into his arms a little bit. After a minute or two of being held, she even managed to stop shaking.

She clutched part of his pajama shirt in her fist and tried to focus on her breathing and slowing her heartrate. She was okay. The murderer had been caught and was rotting away in a federal prison. He couldn't come back for her.

Wanting to know the truth, Hazel had done an internet search on her parents' names. It wasn't hard to find out that Landon and Alison Dixon had been murdered by a serial killer known as the 'Bay Area Blade' since he always used the same, rather distinctive knife.

His real name was Charles Thornton and he had nearly two dozen victims scattered throughout Oakland, San Francisco, Fairfield, San Jose, and other neighboring cities, making him one of the most notorious serial killers the region had ever seen. He tended to target young couples with children and had been apprehended a couple of months after Hazel's parents died.

California didn't practice the death penalty anymore so she had to live with the fact that he still existed. At least he was in the highest security men's prison in the state. He would never see the light of day again. But that knowledge didn't make her memories any less difficult to live with.

"Can you tell me what your nightmare was about?" Will asked after some time had passed where she clung to him a bit desperately.

"No."

Her uncle didn't care either. It was almost as if he was emotionally detached from his sister's death. Or maybe that was how he processed his own grief; who knew?

"That's alright," he said soothingly. "You don't have to tell me. I've got you."

Will held her even tighter and rubbed her back until the tenseness in her shoulders was released and her heartrate was completely back to normal. If someone had held her like this after her night terrors as a child even once her childhood would have been so different.

But there was nobody who cared enough to do that. The nurses had seen her constant screaming as an annoyance. They didn't ever think of trying to comfort the traumatized little girl who woke the whole hospital up with her screams.

"Thanks Will," Hazel whispered.

Now that she had calmed down, she felt oddly safe in his embrace. Normally after nightmares hit she found it nearly impossible to go back to sleep but after being in his arms for a while she felt her eyelids getting heavy again.

She extricated herself from his arms and lay back down on her side of the bed. Instantly all of her sleepiness vanished and her heart thudded against the dark silence of the room. Her anxiety about the nightmare had come back the moment Will's comforting stopped.

"Will?" she asked hesitantly after trying and failing to fall back asleep for more than ten minutes. Hazel wasn't even sure if he was still awake.

"Yeah?"

"I can't fall back asleep. Um…could you possibly hold me again? Don't get the wrong idea—it helped me relax after my nightmare. I think it might help me be able to sleep again."

Asking for such a favor was completely mortifying but he probably wouldn't be against it. He was a fairly touchy-feely person after all. And he had hugged her first without prompting earlier.

Will didn't say anything in response, choosing to simply roll over and press his chest up against her back, draping an arm over her side. His face was so close to her neck that she could feel his warm breath tickling it.

Feeling much more secure, Hazel ended up using his arm as a teddy bear and fell back asleep fairly quickly to the sound of his heartbeat. She was too out of it to hear Will's content sigh or feel him press a kiss to the back of her head.