holli

Chrissie's been running on less sleep than usual, the past few days, and she's afraid it's going to get her killed. She's not as alert as she should be, not as sharp, and she's caught Jamie shooting worried glances her way. But the dreams aren't something she can stop- she has them every night, and there's no way to sleep after she's been thrown into waking by one of them.

She thinks she had the first one the night of her birthday, though it was muddled, not nearly as vivid as the ones that followed. She can't be sure if it was the same kind of dream as the others. The details aren't as fresh in her mind. She remembers a candlelit cavern, a monster, a pool. She remembers drowning, dying, but she dreams worse than that most nights. Sometimes she doesn't die in her dreams, and that's much worse, because that means whoever she dreamed lived to keep killing demons.

She thinks there must be something wrong with her, that she dreams about killing her own kind, and casts herself as the righteous, virginal human girl-warrior. Chrissie's pretty self-aware for her age. It doesn't occur to her that her dreams might be about something more than her own self-hatred, because Chrissie thinks she knows everything there is to know about the supernatural. And it doesn't occur to her that her dreams might make her a person of interest to people in the know.

The dreams have made her slow, sleepy where she should be sharp. So it takes her a while to realize that she's being followed, but she's alert enough to hear the patrollers coming long before her pursuer. She figures she'd best make what she can of a bad situation, and leads the man who's been following her into the part of the people who'd kill her if they caught her.

Chrissie's pretty sure there's irony somewhere in there.

So the patrollers are harassing this guy, asking him why he's skulking around at this hour, fine upstanding citizen like him. They probably figure he's there for one of the brothels-- there are a few in this neighborhood, though from the look of him this guy could probably afford a better class of bordello. His papers are in order, so they let him go for a stern warning and a light bribe. He doesn't look too threatening: a man past middle age, shading towards old, salt-and-pepper hair. He's got an eyepatch-- how dangerous could he be?

Chrissie uses the time to get away. She's just slipped into an alley, made herself invisible from the street, when she realizes the old man wasn't working alone. There's a woman, too, who slips out of the fog so quietly Chrissie doesn't notice her until her hand grips Chrissie's shoulder and spins her around.