Dreams of Shreds and Tatters (2 page)

T
HE PAIN BROUGHT
him back.

Blake blinked, pulling himself free of the haze of shadows and slanting lamplight. Slow and dream-sticky like the edge of waking, but his eyes ached as though he hadn’t slept in days. His hand cramped, the dull ache of old fractures pulsing in his wrist and collarbone. A brush he’d forgotten he held trembled in his grip, the sable tip clotted with yellowish-grey paint, a shade somewhere between ecru and old bones. Numb fingers twitched and the brush fell to the floor, leaving a comma-shaped smear as it bounced against the boards. He let it lie, lifting his gaze to the painting in front of him.

It was finished. The rush of completion drove away the aches and cramps and pins-and-needles fire between his shoulder blades. For an instant the canvas eclipsed everything. A door. A door on the verge of opening. He reached for it, imagining its texture, the loops and whorls of silky stone, the weight of it against his hand. It would open for him, if he could only reach through—

But he couldn’t, not that way; his fingers hit paint and canvas, left tacky smudges in the thick layers of oils. He scrubbed his hand on his jeans. The fingerprints could stay, a subtle sort of signature.

Not just finished—it was perfect. As close as he’d ever come, at least, just for this moment. The flaws would surface later as they always did, the imperfections and imbalances he could never shake. But that was why he’d come here tonight, wasn’t it? To finally escape them.

He dragged a hand through his hair, snagging sticky fingers in the tangles. He usually pulled his hair back to paint, but it was too short for that now, falling in waves around his ears and across his eyes. Seven years of growth gone—seven years of defiance, of spite against his father. A sacrifice or a severed fetter: he wasn’t sure which.

His stool scraped the floorboards as he stood, and a hum of conversation he’d barely noticed faltered and died. Silence pounded in his ears. He stepped back from the easel, caught himself on the stool as his knees buckled. Lamp- and candlelight spun in lazy kaleidoscope swirls through the shadowed room. Terrible light for painting—no wonder his eyes burned so badly. He’d pushed himself too hard and the pharmaceutical daze was wearing off.

Thunder shook the house and he nearly fell again. The echo in his ears wasn’t his own pulse but rain, drumming fierce against the roof and windows. Waves lashed the deck, and the sky was a swirl of darkness veined with lightning. The night had been clear when they’d arrived at the cabin, December-sharp and sweet, the stars a spray of diamonds without the city’s glare to dull them, the light of the waxing moon a pewter glaze across the cove.

“What time is it?” That was what he meant to ask, anyway. His tongue was swollen, mouth parched, and all that came out was a sticky croak. No one answered.

The others watched him, silent as mannequins. Almost like a party, like the night five weeks ago that started this, but stripped of warmth and comfort. Robert and Gemma sat with hands clasped, while Stephen lounged, bored and indolent as a cat. Antja stood apart. Her face was smooth as a mask, but he read the tension in her shoulders, in the tightness of her folded arms. Only Jason and Rae hadn’t been invited, and Blake was just as glad—they were kids. Whatever happened here, he wasn’t sure they needed to see it yet.

Rainer’s cabal. Everyone here tonight had somehow touched the secret things Rainer had shown them. The world that existed below the world Blake knew. But none of them—except Rainer himself— had ever attempted what he meant to do tonight.

None of them had needed to.

Another thunderclap and the lights flickered and dimmed. Blake startled, knocking over the stool. It toppled with a machine gun clatter, and a sliver of pain wedged itself behind his right eye. He’d seen more rain than he could have imagined since coming to Vancouver, but he couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard thunder.

A footstep fell behind him, too close. He spun, fists clenching, but it was only Rainer leaning over his shoulder to stare at the painting. The fascination on his face nearly made up for the intrusion. It was certainly better than the pity and frustration Blake had seen so often in the last few weeks.

Blake nodded. The admiration warmed him; so did the mania lingering in his bloodstream. His senses reeled with the drug. Beneath the stink of linseed and turpentine, the smell of Rainer’s aftershave made his head spin: pine and citrus and mint, and under that the warmer soap and musk of his skin. Blake wanted to lean into that warmth, to rub against him like a cat. He clenched his aching right hand and let the pain ground him.

“Well?” His voice cracked with thirst and fatigue and the insidious doubt he could never be rid of. “Will it work?”

Is it good enough?
But he couldn’t ask that, not for all the magic in the world.

Magic. The idea gnawed like nothing had since he first realized he could capture and change the world on paper, could capture and exorcise himself. But no matter how many times Rainer had tried to teach him even the simplest of tricks, Blake could never reproduce them. Weeks of failure had left him seething with all the bitterness and self-loathing he thought he’d put behind him.

I can’t teach you,
Rainer had finally said.
But there is another way
.

“It will work.” Rainer lifted his hand just as Blake had, but let it fall again.

Blake turned away, searching for Alain. He found him standing alone by the windows. Stormlight gleamed in his blue-streaked hair, rinsing the warm tones from his skin until it was cold as silverpoint. He turned, light sliding across his face, and reached for Blake’s outstretched hand.

“Are you all right?” Alain asked as Blake leaned into him. Blake nodded against his neck, scraping his cheekbone against stubble, breathing in the unnatural sweetness of drugstore shampoo. Beneath layers of shirts and sweaters, Alain’s shoulders were knotted tight. The tension had been building for days. Neither of them had slept well all week, tossing with dreams they didn’t share, burying themselves in work. They hadn’t argued, precisely, but Alain wasn’t so eager for all the wonders Rainer offered.

But he was still here.

“What’s wrong?” Blake asked. “You’re the one brooding now.” He hoped for a smile, a joke, something sarcastic to ease his nerves, but Alain only shrugged.

“I don’t like the storm.”

Rainer cleared his throat. “Do you still want this?”

This: mysteries, marvels, numina. A way to transcend his clumsy aching flesh, the scars and fractures and constant fear. The doubts and demons he could never shake. It had taken him years to learn to live with himself, with the scars carved in flesh and bone and brain. To accept that he would carry them always. He couldn’t go back to that acceptance now, not if there was another way. Alain’s long dark eyes narrowed, but he only squeezed Blake’s hand in silent sympathy.

Blake swallowed and wished for water. He’d come this far. His free hand rose to tug at the ring hanging from a chain around his neck—a nervous habit, and he forced himself to let go again. “Yes.”

“Then it’s yours,” Rainer whispered, moving closer. “You just have to take it.”

“What—” Blake licked his lips and tried again, hating how small his voice sounded. “What do I say?”

“It doesn’t matter. You don’t have to say anything. He’ll know.”

With that, Rainer split the shadows open and filled them with fire, spoke a word that rang in the air like the toll of a cathedral bell.

The world unfolded, dissolved and ran like watered ink, and Blake saw the door. Just as he’d imagined it, slick as soapstone, warm as flesh. Just as he’d painted it. It swung inward and he felt it in his chest, something wrenching inside him. Disintegration: the falling away of drugs or sex or pain.

The door opened and he stood before an angel, beautiful and terrible, scalding his eyes. An arch of wing, pinions dripping flame; robes of smoke and light; a halo like the darkness between stars. He could only stand to see the edges, where its outline burned the world. Any deeper and his blood would boil.

The angel extended its cupped hands, filled with the fire of heaven. Filled with everything Rainer had promised and more. All Blake had to do was accept it, even if it charred him to cinders. The angel spoke inside his head, echoing through every bone.

Before he could answer, the vision fractured.

Thunder crashed and the shriek of splintering glass filled the air. The angel vanished as the windows shattered, taking his fire with him. The electricity, jealous or shamed, vanished too. The storm whipped cold and wet through the room, full of stinging shards. Someone screamed.

Monsters rode the wind. Inky bodies writhed through broken windows, darkness given shape—darkness with wings and claws. Rainer shoved Blake back, away from reaching talons. Everyone was shouting. Candles guttered and died and everything was shadows and lightning and screams. The smell of blood blossomed raw and metal-sweet, mingling with ozone and turpentine. Blake lunged for the painting, desperate to save it from the drenching storm.

Alain grabbed him first, pulling him away from the canvas, away from the monsters, into the teeth of the wind. Glass crunched and slipped under their boots and freezing rain slapped them, soaking to the skin. Lightning split the sky—split a tree in a shower of sparks. Wood groaned, flaming as it fell, and the deck buckled and shrugged them off.

Water hit him like a wall. Blake flailed, breathless and one-armed. Alain’s hand clenched his, a lifeline—the current tossed them, but couldn’t pry them apart. Instead it sucked them both down.

Brine seared his eyes and mouth, stole the heat from his bones. All that was left in the dark and cold was Alain’s hand, and the picture still burning in Blake’s mind. The door. A way out.

The door opened and the current pulled him through. Darkness filled his mouth, pushed down his throat. Coiling, solidifying, dragging him under. Swallowing him.

The last thing he felt was Alain’s hand slipping from his.

T
HREE THOUSAND MILES
away, Liz Drake woke gasping, still aching for breath. Adrenaline left her cold and shaking and she clutched the twisted sheets until the world stopped its seasick tilt and sway. The taste of salt filled her mouth.

Not again.

A week of drowning dreams, of watching Blake vanish into the darkness, unable to reach him. A week of waking breathless in the dead hours before dawn. Finals week, no less.

She sat up, breathing slowly until her heart slowed. The old white house sighed around her, the secret language of wood and plaster spoken only in the dark. December pressed cold and black against the window, stealing through chinks and cracks; the heater rumbled like a sleeping dragon. Alex’s side of the bed was cold.

She wrapped her arms around her chest, goosebumps prickling through the worn-thin cloth of her T-shirt. Twenty-five was too old to be afraid of the dark, afraid of bad dreams, but she felt a fraction of that age, tiny and helpless and alone. It had been a long time since her dreams were so bad.

Fresh panic rose sharp as fishhooks behind her sternum, squeezing her heart and tightening her throat. Sweat slicked her palms and she wiped them on the sheets. It had been a long time since the anxiety was so bad, either. It made her want to call Dr. Matson, though she hadn’t been to therapy in years. Any familiar voice to cling to, to reassure her that she wasn’t alone in the night. That her nightmares were only that, only anxiety and bad brain chemicals and all the normal things that crowded her head.

Your dreams are just dreams, Elizabeth. The human mind excels at finding patterns and correlations, at giving weight to coincidence and hindsight. Magical thinking. You’ve studied that, haven’t you?

But another voice, a wet, rasping voice, whispered back.
You know better than that, Lizzie
.

She did know. Something was wrong, and no reassurances would change that. She was too old for handholding, anyway. But Dr. Matson would also remind her that she wasn’t alone, and that much at least was true.

She swung her legs off the bed, toes curling against the cold floorboards. Light from the hall spilled over stacks of books and papers, cast shadows like toppled pillars across the floor, ruined menhirs of ethnographies and grammars and dictionaries. The corner of a book bit into her instep and she winced—
The Consolation of Philosphy
, one of Alex’s. She nudged it toward the foot of the bed.

The floor creaked as she crossed the room. Light welled up the stairs and the heater’s dry breath gusted over her, but she couldn’t stop shivering. She stared down the hall toward Blake’s old room, still full of the things he hadn’t taken with him, that she never got around to packing. She stopped herself before she opened his door.

He was nine months gone, thousands of miles. Her nightmares couldn’t conjure him home.

The kettle began to whistle as she reached the bottom of the stairwell and the tightness in her chest eased. Sometimes she forgot how echoing and empty the house was without Blake. She should find another roommate, or another house, one that didn’t swallow her up with its shadows and silences. She might ask Alex, but that hatched a whole different unsettled feeling in the pit of her stomach.