Free Fury by Steven James

gulp, and swallowed the pills.
    Daniel told himself that now things would be different, that the incident last night wasn’t anything to be concerned about. But, as hard as he tried, he couldn’t convince himself that he had carried that knife into his dad’s room without any intention of using it.
    He needed answers and he needed them before tonight when he would go to sleep again, and perhaps have another nightmare—or worse, go sleepwalking.
    And maybe do more than just carry that knife around.
    Maybe use it.
     
    He texted Nicole, asking her to give him a call when she got a chance and only a few minutes later his phone rang.
    “Hey,” she said. “What’s going on?”
    “You’re up already?”
    “Weird dreams. What about you?”
    “I had trouble sleeping. Listen, there’s something I want to check out. Can you meet at the parking lot to the trailhead for the Pine River Trail?”
    “When?”
    “This morning sometime. Ten or so?”
    “Done.”
    “Dress for the weather.”
    “Are you going to tell me what we’re doing?”
    “It’s a surprise, silly.”
    “You got that line from me.” He could almost hear her smiling.
    “That is possible.”
     
    Okay, so ten o’clock gave him a little over an hour to look into things before he needed to leave.
    He’d been planning on searching for information about wolves to follow up on some ideas he’d had about the poaching, but right now, reading up on sleepwalking seemed like more of a priority.
    Last summer he’d heard that there were people who had driven across town in their sleep, had even murdered people while sleeping, and, though it seemed unbelievable, it didn’t take him long to find information online to confirm it.
    He found himself reading account after account of people who’d done strange things while they were asleep: cooking meals, tweeting meaningful messages, swimming across a lake, and yes, even killing people.
    Just the thought that it was possible to murder someone while you were asleep made him never want to go to sleep again.
    How can you fight something like that? How can you control what you do while you’re sleepwalking?
    When he checked the time, he saw that it was already past nine forty and he needed to get moving if he was still going to make it to the Pine River trailhead by ten.
    He texted Nicole that he was on his way, tugged on his winter boots, grabbed his coat, hat and gloves, and took off.

CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
    Though still covered with snow, the trail was flattened out and packed down by people cross-country skiing on it.
    As they hiked, Daniel debated whether or not to tell Nicole about what he’d written in his notebook, or about the girl with the tears of blood, or especially about waking up in his dad’s room holding that deer-gutting knife.
    She already knew about the blurs he’d had last fall so it wasn’t like any of this would be a complete shock to her. But still, the things that’d been happening to him over the past twenty-four hours were getting more and more disturbing and he didn’t want to frighten her or make her worry about him.
    In the end he decided that maybe she would be able to help him sort things out.
    “Nicole, I walked in my sleep last night.”
    “Did you . . . I mean . . .”
    “No. I didn’t try to dig up any dead animals. I ended up in my dad’s bedroom. He woke up while I was standing there. It freaked him out pretty bad.”
    “Yeah, no kidding.”
    She listened quietly as he summarized what’d been going on with the visions of the girl in the white nightgown, the one who’d burned up. For the time being he didn’t mention the knife or the texts from Madeline.
    “I think the blurs are trying to tell me something,” he said. “Like part of my mind is working through things and then trying to . . . Well . . .”
    “Reveal answers to you.”
    “Yes.”
    “Like with Emily last fall.”
    “Exactly.”
    “But answers to what?”
    “That’s the thing—I don’t