Broken Illusions: A Midnight Dragonfly Novel (16 page)

I glanced at Victoria, who’d insisted on coming with me to Horizons the second I told her what I was doing. Chase was supposed to be here, too.

But wasn’t.

“It’s a mystery as old as time,” Julian said as Victoria nudged me and widened her eyes. “Where do we go when we sleep? What happens? What does it mean?”

Inside me everything quickened. “That’s what I need to know.”

“Dreams are as natural as breathing,” he said, picking up a long amethyst and lifting it toward a black light. “But not everyone remembers. Fewer understand.”

With dark, shoulder-length hair pulled behind his neck and wide cheekbones, deep-set eyes, he looked like he belonged in some big-budget Hollywood action flick, where by day he did something benign like … run a New Age shop, and by night he mowed down terrorists. There was an energy to him, a perpetual awareness as if he knew my every secret just by looking at me.

“We live most of our lives in a trancelike state,” he said, replacing the crystal among the others and moving toward a display of essential oils. “Most people never fully experience the reality of each moment. We dwell on what is already done and worry about what may never happen. It’s rare that we take in all that’s present at any given moment.”

That was something I was working on.

“Think of it as static,” he said. “A bad cell signal. As long as there’s interference, you’re not going to see.”

“So, like, when we wake up from a dream,” Victoria said, “but don’t remember anything, it’s like a dropped call?”

Julian smiled—this time it was indulgent. “In a way.”

Her eyes sparkled. “Cool.”

Dreams as cell signals. I’d never thought of it like that. “So how do I keep the calls from dropping? How do I call back?”

Julian removed a cork from a vial of dark glass and lifted it to his face. “You try harder,” he said. “You realize that your body is just a vessel, or shell. A vehicle. You are what’s inside.” Eyes on mine, he stepped toward me. “And when you go to sleep, you leave the shell behind.”

“What does that have to do with cell phones?” Victoria asked.

Julian crossed to us, offering the vial.

I took it and inhaled, inhaled again, would have sworn I’d smelled the scent before. “Cinnamon,” I murmured.

“And lemongrass,” he said. “With a little bay leaf.”

Victoria leaned in for a whiff, and frowned. “Ewww.”

“So where do we go?” I asked, lifting the vial to my face again, “if we leave our bodies behind?”

“Not if,” Julian said. “When.”

Victoria wandered off, toward a display of Mardi Gras–themed voodoo dolls. The vendor had come in to Fleurish!, too, but Aunt Sara had refused to even look at them.

“It’s called the astral plane,” Julian said, and the strangest gleam came into his eyes. “It’s a different dimension, a higher dimension where physical bodies aren’t necessary. It’s where we go every night when we sleep—and when we die.”

I felt myself go very, very still.

“It’s where our dreams come from,” he said. “And, I think, your visions.”

A lifetime of images flickered through me, dreams and visions, of my dog Sunshine and my grandmother, my parents in a field of waving green, Jessica and the dirty room, of darkness and water, the sensation of falling, drowning. Of strong arms closing around me and dragging me back, of screaming and shouting …

“While we dream,” he explained, “messages are sent from our psyche in the astral, here, to our physical body.”

Answers. All I’d had to do was walk across the street.

“You and your friend Grace. You can’t speak here, in this dimension. You’re separated. But in the astral, if you’re there at the same time, communication is possible.”

“That’s wild,” I whispered.

“And yet,” he said very, very quietly, “you know what I say is true, because you have experienced it.”

I closed my eyes, and breathed again of lemongrass and cinnamon.

I had. I’d experienced what he described so many times, and not just with Grace, either.

“Wherever your friend is,” he said, “she knows how to find you. How to reach you. She knows it’s her only chance.”

I opened my eyes, and felt something fast and sharp rush through me. “So you think it’s possible that’s she’s trying to communicate with me—through the Ouija board, and my dreams?”

“Grace, or someone else.”

“Like my mother?” I asked. “I … dreamed of her last night—that she was at my high school graduation, hugging me.”

His eyes narrowed. “Have you been thinking about her?”

That was easy. “All the time.”

“Then maybe she’s trying to tell you that even if you can’t see her, she’s still with you,” he said. “Or maybe it was just a dream.”

But from his voice, the look in his eyes, I could tell he didn’t think so.

“Jessica said she could feel Trinity,” Victoria said. With hair falling like pale silk against her face, she jabbed a needle between the legs of a voodoo doll—and grinned.
“Take that,”
she murmured. Then: “She said she felt like you were there, right, Trinity? That she …
prayed
to you?”

Even now, twenty-four hours later, the word bothered me. No one should be praying to me.

“She was receiving messages from the astral,” Julian said, looking out the window, toward my aunt’s shop. “She could have encountered you there, and fixated on you—or maybe some spiritual being was projecting to her.”

“Like a movie?” Victoria asked.

Julian turned back toward us. “It happens every night. But most people are too distracted by the illusions of their own lives, their dramas, to hear or see what’s being shared. If you can’t get rid of the interference, you can’t hear.”

“Wicked,”
she muttered.

“What intrigues me are the buildings.” He moved to flip the sign on the door to
CLOSED
. “Long hallways with doors is a classic subconscious structure, but it’s not as common in dreams.” He turned back toward me. “That’s where we need to start.”

My heart kicked.

“And the dragonfly,” he murmured more to himself. “It could be a symbol, or maybe an image placed by someone for you to see, to communicate something.”

“Like the boots?” Victoria asked.

Julian smiled at her before shifting his attention to me. “Or maybe you were actually seeing the night in Grace’s apartment. Events happen in the astral before they reach us here.”

It was a lot to process. “So … if I see things there, before they happen here, there’s time to change them, right? Like I did with Chase?”

Now it was Julian who stilled. “How do you know you changed something? How do you know you weren’t always supposed to get there just in time?”

I opened my mouth, clamped it back shut.

“So tell me,” he said, watching me very closely. “Do you want to try?”

My breath caught.
“Try?”

“To return to your dreams,” he said. “To look around and see what else there is?”

The hum started low but spread fast, vibrating out through my arms and legs. Yes. Yes! “But Aunt Sara said—”

“You’re safe with me,” Julian said. “Far safer than if you start experimenting without me.”

Slowly I looked from him to the window, where across the street, the
FLEURISH!
sign glowed. Aunt Sara had taken the afternoon off, to pack for her trip.

“I don’t know, Trin,” Victoria said, and when I turned to her, she looked more than a little spooked. “After what happened with the Ouija board, maybe you should, like, sleep on it or something.”

I shook my head. “No, but … can we wait for Chase?”

Julian frowned. “I have another appointment in an hour. We can try again tomorrow—”

“No, no.” Too much could happen between now and then. “I want to try.”

“Good.” With one last look at Fleurish!, Julian turned toward the back of his shop, motioning for us to come, too. We followed him through a series of doors with multiple locks, to a narrow staircase.

The second floor.

FIFTEEN

I’d always wondered.

There’d been so many stories about flashing lights and screams in the middle of the night, limousines pulling up after midnight, even an account of someone running from Horizons wearing only a white gown.

But none of that, not the rumors or my imagination, prepared me for what was behind the closed door at the end of the narrow hall.

Everywhere I looked, white glowed. White walls, white floors, white ceiling. A white shade pulled over the window, bracketed by white curtains. White candles with white light. White crystals. White robes hanging from white hooks.

And in the middle of the room, centered beneath a low-hanging white light, a white cot.

“Make yourself comfortable,” Julian said to me and Victoria as he crossed to a tall armoire. White, of course. His black pants and shirt created a stark contrast. “That’s key.”

Breathe. That’s all I could think about. Breathe in, breathe out. Slow, steady.

But I was so ready to get started.

“What we’re going to do is very simple,” he said, rolling a gleaming silver cart from inside the cabinet with no shelves. On it, silver instruments glimmered. “You’ll close your eyes and drift off, leaving your body behind.”

Victoria grabbed my hand—her skin was like ice. “Trinity—”

“How, exactly, does that work?” I asked.

He pulled a small white box from somewhere unseen and set it next to a gauge. “A lot like hypnosis.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad,” I whispered to Victoria, but, secretly, my heart raced.

“Well … like, what if she gets lost or something?” Victoria asked. “What if she can’t get back into her body?”

Julian’s smile was oddly gentle. “It doesn’t work like that, Victoria. Trinity won’t get lost.”

Still holding my hand, she made a funny face. “But … could anyone else get into her body while she’s gone?”

“No,” Julian said. “That’s not likely.”

I jumped on that. “Not likely? What does
that
mean?”

“Theoretically, it is possible. But nothing you need to worry about. It’s very rare.”

Victoria didn’t look so sure. “What about bad dreams?” she surprised me by asking. “Could she slip into one of those instead of the ghost town?”

“She’ll go where she needs to go.” Julian’s voice was matter-of-fact. “Bad dreams are typically nothing more than manifestations of stress or fear, anger … violence even. We live in a world where we are so bombarded by negative energy, we come to crave the adrenaline rush, even in our dreams. Just think of how popular fairground rides are—”

“I’ve dreamed of a roller coaster,” I whispered, and he smiled. It had been huge and wooden, hulking sinisterly against a bloodred sky.

“Then maybe you will again today—if that’s where the message is.”

I stared at the cart, the cords and monitors and syringes lined in neat little rows.

“Are you ready?”

Slowly I looked up, and nodded.

“Excellent,” he said, gliding the cart to me. Then he extended his hand. “Follow me.”

I put my palm to his, and felt the warmth seep deep, deep within me. He urged me to follow him toward the cot, and I did.

But we walked right past it.

“I’m afraid you’ll need to wait here,” he said when Victoria started to follow.

I twisted toward her, and saw how big her eyes were—and how dark. “It’s okay,” I said. “Really.”

And then Julian was lifting his hand to the side of the armoire, and the huge piece of furniture glided to the left, revealing a secret room on the other side. Still white, but smaller. More intimate.

Here music drifted, soft, transcendent. And here the scent of vanilla and lavender flirted with the trickle of a tabletop fountain.

“Make yourself comfortable,” he instructed, gesturing toward a heavily cushioned sofa.

Somewhere in the back of my mind the bizarreness of it all registered, but I could no more have turned back than I could live without breathing.

“Drink this,” he said as I approached, handing me a cup of what looked like tea, and for a fraction of a second, I was back in Dylan’s—

Bed.

I pushed aside that thought the second it formed. I knew better than going back to that night, even the mere memory. Finally, after all these months, what had gone down between us no longer seemed real.

“It’s chamomile,” Julian said before I could ask. “It’ll help you relax.”

I sunk against the sofa, wrapping my hands against the warm mug. Then, slowly, I sipped just as Dylan had—

Not Dylan, I corrected, tugging my thoughts back to the moment. Julian. I sipped as
Julian
instructed.

“Try to relax.” He was across the room now, at a switch I’d not noticed before, dimming the overhead light until only the glimmer of the candles remained.

“What’s going to happen?” I asked.

“I’m going to ask you some questions, guide you to the place you told me about.”

“Then I’m going to look around—and explore?”

Just the thought had my heart beating really fast.

“Exactly.” Back by the sofa, he kneeled to secure a white cuff around my upper arm. “Just remember that in the astral, the laws that govern here no longer apply. You can fly or walk through walls, objects.”

Like I’d done before.

“As a precaution, I’ll be monitoring your vitals while you’re gone.”

Gone? Vitals?

“If anything veers out of normal ranges I’ll bring you back.”

I blinked at him. Already my eyes felt heavy, my tongue thick. “Why … What do you mean? It’s only a dream, right?”

His expression tightened—I had no idea if it was a smile, or a frown. “There’s no such thing as only a dream, Trinity. What we experience there is as real as what’s happening right now.”

The room shifted. It was slight, subtle, like a flash of vertigo, over the second I realized it had happened.

“If your mind experiences fear, your body experiences fear,” he murmured soothingly. “If you run, your heart rate accelerates.”

I tried to hold my eyes open.

“Don’t be afraid.” He took my hand and squeezed. “I’m here and I’m not going anywhere.”