Wakeworld
Praise for
BETWEEN
“A smart, resilient heroine, a scarred hero, dragons that are all too real and much too close, and myriad doorways that lead from a modern ER into dreams and waking and everything in Between make for a sparkling debut novel. Most enjoyable.”
—Carol Berg, national bestselling author of
The Daemon Prism
“A rich wonder of a fantasy, full of life, death, dreams and nightmares becoming real, and dragons. I was swept away.”
—Robin D. Owens, award-winning author of
Heart Fortune
Hit and run like hell . . .
Vivian tried to break away, but her head was pulled inexorably downward by hands that should not be this strong. The chain bit into the flesh at the back of her neck, forcing her so close to the old woman’s face that hot breath touched her lips like an evil kiss.
“So you’re the special one. Don’t look like much.”
“Let me go.”
A twist of the chain, and then another, cutting across her windpipe, restricting her breath. Vivian clawed at the tormenting hands. Fear and confusion and rage flooded through her. Black spots danced before her eyes.
And then a surge of power burned through her synapses, and without even thinking, with the last of her breath, she gasped in the voice of command, “Release me.”
The pressure on the chain eased and the hand fell away as the old woman’s eyes widened with shock. She snarled with hate and spat a blast of spittle into Vivian’s face. It clung, slimy and malign, blurring her vision, running over her cheeks.
Vivian swiped at her face and eyes with her sleeve. When she was able to see again, there was no broken old body lying on the pavement. Only the van, sideways in the street, and the freezing rain.
BETWEEN
WAKEWORLD
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
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375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014
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WAKEWORLD
An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author
Copyright © 2014 by Kerry Schafer.
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eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-13814-8
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Ace mass-market edition / February 2014
Cover art by Larry Rostant.
Cover design by Judith Lagerman.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
For David, who holds my heart
First and foremost, great love goes to my family, who share my time and attention with the stories in my head without complaint. I am especially fortunate in my Viking, who reads early drafts and dares to give honest opinions. Your willingness to engage in brainstorming, butt-kicking, motivational speeches, and hugs, even when I bite the hand that feeds me, is priceless.
Much love also goes to my agent, Deidre Knight, who frequently steps outside the demands of her job to also serve as counselor, advisor, shoulder to cry on, and friend.
I’m ever grateful to my talented editor, Danielle, who always sees how to make my books stronger, and to Brad in PR, for being so responsive to my requests and so pleasant and lovely to work with.
I also want to thank all of the medical providers who cared for and about me during this sometimes difficult year. Dr. Moline, Dr. Cooper, all of the nurses and scheduling people, and the wonderful tech who nurtured me after my biopsy—bless you. Without your kindness, responsiveness, and skill, my encounter with breast cancer would have been so much more traumatic, and I think I would never have made my deadlines. So I also owe this book to you.
As for my friends—you are many and wonderful, and I can’t begin to thank you all. Julie and Leigh—you have been there through the good and the bad, and I doubt the book would have been born without you. Huge thanks to Jenn and Susan, not only for your friendship but also for quick reads at crucial moments and great feedback. Alex, our sprints and accountability program helped so much in getting my edits done. Thanks to my sisters at the
Debutante Ball
for all of the support and friendship as we went through this debut year together. And the rest of you—both online and off—even though your name isn’t on this page, please know that it is in my heart.
Last, but far from least—my heartfelt thanks to everybody who reads, buys, borrows, loans, or loves books. The whole point of writing stories is to have them read, and without you, publishing this book would be a meaningless endeavor.
I
t was chilly in the old cabin. Vivian tucked her feet up underneath her to escape a draft and wrapped the faded old quilt closer around her shoulders. It smelled, incongruously, of cinnamon. The old gray cat in her lap purred on, undisturbed, but the penguin across the table fixed her with an inscrutable gaze and made no sound at all.
The cat’s name was Schrödinger, but other than that there was nothing more mysterious about her than any other cat. The penguin, on the other hand, did not belong to any recognizable species. He stood a little larger than an Adélie, smaller than a King. His beak was a little too yellow, his breast too perfectly white, except for a crimson splash over his heart. He’d been standing in the same spot for hours, staring in silence, and showed no signs of wandering off to do other things.
And the penguin, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting . . .
Precisely the reason why she had named him Poe.
One dim overhead light illuminated piles of books and documents propped drunkenly against each other on the table in front of her—each one important, each one selected with care from the shelves in her grandfather’s secret room and carried out to the relative normalcy of his kitchen. Dream theory, string theory, alternate realities. Psychosis. Mythology. Anything that looked like it would shed some light on the nature of the Dreamworld and the Between. Some volumes were printed and richly bound in leather with gold embossing; others were nothing more than handwritten notes, loosely tied together with string.
Vivian had taken a leave of absence from work to give her time to study. On the dotted line that asked for a reason, she’d written
executrix of a complicated estate
, which was true enough. Nobody needed to know that being the executrix also meant inheriting the role of Dreamshifter, a task she was woefully unprepared to take on. Her grandfather had taught her absolutely nothing before her initiation in the Cave of Dreams. All sorts of good and valid reason for that, but it didn’t change the fact that she knew next to nothing and was responsible, alone, for monitoring all of the portals between dreaming and waking and that place between, where realities and dreams shifted together. She was the last, he’d said, the only living Dreamshifter, which meant there was nobody on the face of the planet that she could ask for help or advice.
And so she and Zee had taken refuge here in her grandfather’s old cabin, which offered not only safety and concealment but also a treasure trove of information. The first thing she’d waded through was the Code—based on oral tradition and handed down from one Dreamshifter to the next. At some point it had been transcribed in a cramped and difficult hand. Others had crossed things out and added things in, so many voices from the past offering up their point of view on what needed to be done. Instructions for keeping the balance, when to close the doors and when they could be opened. Guidelines for the teaching of the heir. Protecting oneself from danger. A listing of creatures known to roam the Between.
There was a lifetime of information to absorb, and she had so little time. Besides the dream doors to mind, there was the matter of the missing dreamspheres and the Key to the Forever. Not to mention the dragon loose in the forests surrounding Krebston. Vivian kept the police scanner on at all times, monitoring the calls as they came in: something seen flying above the river at night, a UFO with wings. A fire in the Colville National Forest, which witnesses claimed was started by some giant animal breathing flames.
No deaths yet, but it was only a matter of time.
Right now, though, the scanner was quiet and Vivian’s head was stuffed full of lucid dreaming theory, alternate reality continuums, astral projection, and practical theory for locating and walking through doors. Her eyes gritted and stung, blurring the words until she blinked them back into focus. Maybe she should go lie down, close her eyes for just a few minutes.
To sleep, perchance to dream. She feared her dreams—what she might become, or what might materialize. The last time she closed her eyes it had been to a vivid dream where the otherworld self of her ex-lover had beaten her nearly unconscious. She had shifted into a dragon and consumed him. She could still taste blood, could feel the separation of flesh and bone, hear the horrible shrieking sound he had made just before he died. And because of who and what she was, she wasn’t entirely sure that what she dreamed wouldn’t become a reality in the waking world.
Sleep was out of the question. She got up and started a fresh pot of coffee, put eyedrops in her burning eyes, and returned to the table, wearily shuffling through the books and papers, overwhelmed by the staggering volume of print and her own fatigue. Poe hopped down from the chair, knocking over a bamboo cylinder that she had propped against the table. As she bent to pick it up, she noticed that something about it seemed wrong, but it took her a moment to realize that although the cylinder itself looked weathered and scratched, the wax sealing the end was fresh. With the aid of a paring knife fetched from a kitchen drawer, she incised the wax around the top, taking care not to cut into anything that might lie beneath.
The scent of dust and mildew made her sneeze and sneeze again as the wax seal came free. Gingerly, she tipped the cylinder upside down, cupping her palm beneath, and withdrew a scroll so ancient she feared it would disintegrate in her hands.
Wide awake now, all thoughts of other problems pushed out of her mind by the excitement of discovery, she cleared the table, stacking books and documents in uneven piles on the floor, and set the scroll down where she could examine it. The paper was brown and brittle, crumbling at the edges. Stains blotched its surface. Unrolling it would surely cause damage, but the desire to open it outweighed all of her scruples.
Anchoring one end with a book, she began to unroll the scroll, cringing as the paper cracked and flaked in her hands. Using books, she weighted it at regular intervals to minimize the damage. It was handwritten, and not by a single person. At the very top, a heading in a script that looked like it had been written by a medieval monk read,
Chronicle of thee Shyfters of thee Dreame
.
Underneath the heading was written a name,
Taliesin
. Beside it, the legend,
lost in battle at Camlann
.
Vivian touched her finger to the name in wonder. Taliesin, a fascinating mythological character in Celtic and Arthurian legend. At least she’d always thought him mythological, but everything she had once believed was turning out not to be true. She’d encountered him in
Le Morte d’Arthur
, in the
Mabinogion
, had loved him enough to track down
The Book of Taliesin
.
I have been a tear in the air,
I have been the dullest of stars.
I have been a word among letters . . .
Beneath his name several others were written in the same hand, each with the manner of death. Typical medieval things—
a fevere
,
ded in his sleepe
,
by sworde in battle
. After that the writing changed, and with it the ink. And then changed again. And again. Names. Thousands of them. Some of them in languages she couldn’t read—Chinese, Cyrillic, Russian, even what looked suspiciously like Sanskrit.
When the scroll had unfurled as far as the end of the table, the entries had begun to include dates alongside the cause of death. She went back and rerolled it at the top, forcing herself to work slowly and methodically to preserve the fragile paper as much as possible. By the time she reached the bottom of the list her hands were shaking, her heart fluttering at the base of her throat.
The final entries were written in a spiky black script that Vivian knew well as belonging to her grandfather, George Maylor.
Xiaohu, poisoned, 1656
Amrit Nehru, combustion by dragon poison, 1689
Mary Miller, hanged as a witch, 1692
John the Cooper, dead of a wasting disease, 1775
Evan Evans, a dragon took him, 1778
Niklas Kappel, slain by a giant bear, June 1887
Edward Jennings, murdered, 1925
Weston Jennings, missing, 1925
George Maylor, murdered, October 2011
And beneath it, on the last line at the bottom of this long list of people, all long dead,
Vivian Maylor
. No date or cause of death, but her fate seemed to be lurking in the empty space, only lacking the means and the date.
Vivian shivered, this time not from the cold. She retrieved the quilt and pulled it tightly around her anyway, taking some comfort from the warmth and the softness of the old fabric.
“Viv, it’s three
A.M.
” Zee stood in the shadows on the far side of the room, dark hair tangled on bare shoulders, faded jeans riding low on his narrow hips.
“I couldn’t sleep.”
He crossed the room toward her, light-footed as a cat, and tired as she was she smiled at the combination of softness and lethality that was Zee. The hair, those clear agate eyes, bespoke the artist, while the hard muscle of his arms and chest, and above all the still-healing scars that marred his face, brought to mind the warrior.
“You can’t go on like this.” Zee moved behind her, hands warm on the tightness of her shoulders, and she relaxed back against the solid strength of him, letting his hands knead away some of the tension and fear.
“It’s the dream thing, isn’t it?” he asked her. “Sit, this will be more effective.”
Vivian sank into a chair as he directed. Dreams lay at the heart of her, and although she feared her own, she craved them with an intensity that frightened her. Something whispered that she must dream, or she would die.
“Did you dream?” she murmured. “Tell me.”
His strong fingers hesitated, then moved to her neck, working the clenched knots at the base of her skull. “Pizza,” he said.
She snorted, disbelieving. Her dreams, forever and always, had been big dreams—dragons and shadows and the twisting mazes of the Between.
“The rest of us mortals,” he said, moving his hands back onto her shoulders so his thumbs could isolate the muscle just below her shoulder blades, “often dream about silly things. Like pizza. Now, did you want to hear my dream or not?”
“I’m sorry. Tell.”
“We ordered pizza. About three days later it showed up in the U.S. Mail van. The driver tried to fit it into the mailbox but it wouldn’t bend, and then Poe flew out to get it, only he ate it on the way back.”
“You made that up.” But she was laughing, caught out of herself and leaning back into him, her head comfortable against his chest. His hands slowed; she heard the catch in his breath and felt her own heart start to race. Head tilted back, she caught the expression on his face, the question in his eyes.
The kiss hung there between them, ready for the taking.
She pulled away, leaning forward on her elbows and rolling her shoulders experimentally. “That feels better.”
“What did you find?” His voice was a little too casual and she knew she had hurt him, again, and hated herself for it. There was nothing to be said, so she leaned aside so he could see the scroll, argument and conclusion in a list of names and dates of death.
A long moment of silence. When she dared to look at him again, his jaw was clenched, all the softness of sleep wiped away.
“You want to know what I really dreamed?” he said. “I dreamed that a dragon came after you and I killed it. None of those people on that list had me standing guard. Do you understand?”
She did. This was the face of the warrior, scarred and lethal. He would die to protect her, and maybe she was underestimating him. Maybe he loved her enough to encompass all that she was—including sorceress and dragon. Her body and soul yearned for him, to slip into his embrace and be—safe.
There was no safety, though, not now. Not being what she was.
As if to emphasize these thoughts, the scanner let out a burst of static and then the voices came on. A woman’s voice, first. Dispatch:
“Control two eighty-seven, do you read?”
“This is two eighty-seven.”
“I’ve got a report of fireballs at Finger Beach. Two injured. Need ambulance, fire, and all patrol units.”
Zee asked the question with his eyes. Vivian nodded. No need for a word between them. It was time do something about the dragon.