Wakeworld (13 page)

It only took a minute for him to accept the reality and surrender to his invisible bonds. “I knew you were a sorceress.”

“Only sort of. That’s about the extent of my abilities.”

“Bullshit. What about that whole dragon-woman thing?”

“Different scenario. By the way, I’m also a Dreamshifter.”

“Oh dear God. A trifecta. What the hell do you think you need from me?”

“Knowledge. Experience.”

He snorted. “You’re asking the wrong man.”

“Don’t try to tell me you’re not a Dreamshifter. Your raven and your pendant tell me otherwise.”

“Yes, well. I had that foisted on me. The only Dreamworld I’ve ever been in is the one inflicted on me by the Guardian in the infernal Cave of Dreams. And I’ve just thrown that dreamsphere into hell.”

His words cut her to the heart. “But if you can’t help me, it’s all lost.” She widened her eyes against an unwelcome welling of tears, staring straight ahead, biting her lip.
Don’t blink, don’t move, don’t let those tears spill.

“Hell and damnation. You’re going to cry? What kind of sorceress does that?”

Vivian waited until she thought her voice would be steady, not looking at him. “The kind that isn’t a sorceress and has someone she cares about trapped in the Between and no way to get there.”

“You’re a Dreamshifter—”

“Locked out. Somebody locked me out.” All pretense of calm abandoned her and the tears came in a flood. “I thought I was the last of the Dreamshifters; that’s what my grandfather said. He died and left me responsible without teaching me anything. I’m supposed to find the Key, but I don’t even know what it does, or where to find it. And then I found something that made me think you were alive and I started looking but now you’re telling me you can’t help me and you’ve destroyed your dreamsphere and I don’t know what to do.”

It was impossible to weep and keep a hold on the command she’d laid on him. He wriggled out of her control and got to his feet. He glanced over his shoulder at the progress of the destruction he’d created but stayed put. “You’ve lost someone over there? Someone alive? That’s what this is all about?”

Vivian nodded, mopping her face with her sleeve. “That and the Key.”

“What key?”

“The Key to the Forever. Whatever that is—”

“Penance,” he said, interrupting. He sank to the ground and the raven fluttered down onto his shoulder. “That’s what you are. Death would have been too easy, so the fates kindly sent me you.”

“For killing your family, you mean?”

“I didn’t kill them.” His voice was heavy with years and grief.

“But you said you were guilty.”

“I am.”

“So it was your sister, then.”

He just stared at her, his face a mask of misery. “I don’t want to talk about this.”

“Okay, fine. You didn’t kill them, but you are guilty of their deaths. You’ve lived with this for how many years now—why try to kill yourself today?”

His face darkened and his eyes turned back to the flames. “I also lost somebody in the Dreamworld yesterday.”

“You’re locked out too?”

“I never said that.”

“Then—”

“I never said they were still alive.”

Vivian pressed her face into her hands and rubbed her burning eyes. “I don’t suppose you’d tell me what you were doing there in the first place?”

“Hunting.”

“Of course.”

“Look—a rogue Dreamshifter needs some sort of livelihood. When you’re in and out of the Dreamworld and the Between all the time, you tend to find food. If it’s not in the dreams you enter, you can shift it into being. And because you’re so goldarn special, what you eat in dreams actually nourishes you. But if you’re not going into Dreamworld all the time, then you have these basic needs for food, shelter, and cash.”

This time she just looked the question at him, and he went on. “In the early years I also had to avoid the law. Everybody believed I did it. I wasn’t educated, didn’t have a trade, thanks to Father’s persistent and deluded belief that I would give in and become the Dreamshifter someday. All I knew how to do was hunt. There was wildlife in my dream. Wolves, bears, cougar—and other things, a little more exotic. People paid me as a guide.”

His voice trailed off and his face worked, fighting off some strong emotion.

“And the last hunt went badly.”

“You could say that. Two dead—my fault. One was only a child.” He turned to face her directly. “Please. I’m old. I’m miserable. All I ever wanted in this world was a normal life—wife, kids, to die when the time came. All I ever got was shit. Why would you hold me here?”

“Because there are other lives at stake—maybe everybody’s. Not just the people I love.”

“The Key,” he said, bleak, watching the fire.

“What do you know about it?”

“Father mentioned it once or twice. I tried not to listen, but that I remember. He had a book that talked about the Key . . .” His voice trailed off, watching the fire.

“What else was in that book?”

“Mythology, mostly. About the first Dreamshifter and how she betrayed the dragons, or the dragons betrayed her. A bunch of malarchy about giants and sorcerers. The making of the Black Gates and a sort of pirate treasure map of how to find it.”

“A map. There was a map of the Between.”

Weston flushed. “Well, yes. Oh, and some sort of prophecy connected to the Key—when it would be found, who could use it, and how. I think there was some special incantation.”

Vivian felt a strong desire to pick him up and throw him into the fire herself. “And that book was in this house and has just gone up in flames.”

“I don’t think so. There wasn’t anything left in the house. Somebody emptied it.”

“Oh, come on. Your father would have hidden something like that. Secret cubbyhole? Safe? Something.”

“If he did, Grace would have taken it. She knew all the secrets in that house.”

“When did you see her last?”

“That was it. That day—with everybody lying dead and a little sister who needed me, I got swept away into the Cave of Dreams for an initiation I never wanted. I came back to the house, once, to look for her. She didn’t live here anymore.”

“She stayed with friends for a few days and then went to an orphanage.”

“Is she—oh, she’d have to be dead by now.” His face creased and he rubbed the back of his neck. “Poor Gracie. I hope she died easy of a nice old age.”

Mad as she was, still Vivian tried to protect him by keeping the truth out of her face, but he saw it in her eyes. “Tell me how she died. Tell me!”

“Fire. Her house burned down. She’s buried in the family plot.”

“Right next to my father. She’ll love that.” He rubbed both hands over his face. “You should have let me burn. It’s the only justice.”

“Why didn’t you look for her? After the Cave of Dreams, I mean.”

“The law was after me by then. What good would I be to her?”

There was no good answer to this question, so Vivian shifted on to action. “What would she have done with the book, if she had it?” A book could end up in so many places—used bookstore, library, landfill, fire. Trying to find it would be a hopeless task.

But Weston was taking her rhetorical question seriously. “Probably buried with her. That and my father’s dreamspheres. If I know Gracie, she had the funeral all planned out and the coffin bought long before she died.”

Vivian was quiet for a minute, aware of the extent of his pain and what she was about to ask.

“We really need that book, Weston. And if there were dreamspheres—”

“Now you’re insane! Are you proposing what I think you are?”

She waited, keeping silence. It was something she’d learned early in medical school, effective on patients and staff alike. Just wait it out and let their own consciences do the talking.

“Oh, all right!” he said. “What difference does it make? I’ll help you. And then you’ll let me die.”

“Do we need to call somebody about the fire?”

“It’s a little late to salvage anything.”

“I was thinking about fire risk. You know—the forest.”

“No wind to speak of—trees are still well back, ground is damp. Should be okay. Anonymous tip maybe, when we get to town.”

“Here. You might want this.” Vivian held out the pendant.

He stood looking at it for a long moment, and she thought he would refuse. But at length he took it from her and slipped the leather thong over his head. “Guess I really didn’t deserve to be free of it. Not yet anyway.”

Vivian ached for her own pendant but managed a bleak smile. “Great. You’re driving. We’ve got some digging to do.”

W
ishing was for fools and Zee knew it.

Nothing would be accomplished by wishing the winding paths of the labyrinth straight, or by conjuring up soft beds and healing hands and Vivian’s face. Action was all there was, and so he put one foot in front of the other and kept himself moving forward.

He had spent the night lying on the forest floor, sharing the blanket with Jared. About the time the moon rose above the trees, the sick man began raving with delirium. His body burned with fever, and Zee had dribbled all of the water from the canteen into his mouth, reserving only one precious swallow for himself.

When the sun first came up and he’d willed himself to get moving, he’d collected some of the heavy dew from the leaves of the trees. Not enough to slake his thirst, but enough at least to wet his mouth. Knowing he needed energy he’d eaten one of the protein bars, but they were dry and went down hard without water. When he’d offered some to Jared, the sick man turned his head away, gagging.

By means of some serious goading, he’d managed to get Jared crawling, and they’d been lucky enough to come across another path. Or at least it had seemed like luck, until the sun changed from a pleasant source of warmth to a cruel and blazing heat. The trees thinned and vanished until they entered an endless prairie intersected by impassable hedges.

All through the morning Jared had grown weaker, his body heated by fever, his eyes dull. About the time they hit the open fields and the sun was directly overhead, he collapsed, unconscious, and could not be roused.

There was no water, no shelter, nothing Zee could do to help.

He thought about walking away. He had a job to do—find some way to get back to Vivian, find the one who had stolen the Key. Jared was holding him back. Who would blame him if he left the coward to fend for himself? Who would even know?

Bending down, he grasped the wounded man under the arms and tried to haul him up over his shoulder. He failed, the heavy body too much for his own decreased strength and wounded arm. Again he tried. Again he failed. On the third attempt he managed to stagger onto his feet with the unconscious man a dead weight over his shoulder, limp arms flopping, head bobbing.

He’d been walking for only a few minutes when the path he was on came to a dead end; nothing for it but to choose one way or another, which was not easily done. The hedges were tall and blocked his view. There was no rhyme or reason to the maze, and a nagging sense of familiarity prickling beneath his skin was not helpful. It never said,
Take this right and that left and the middle path when the way turns into three.
It just burrowed into his brain like a chigger, a thing he mentally scratched without ever shaking it loose.

At last he settled on a plan—he would take a left alternated by a right at every crossroads. If the way split into three or more, always take the middle. The goal was to go as straight as possible, although he couldn’t say why. Only that he needed some sort of direction.

For the first time in his life he had absolutely no sense of either place or time. His wounds ached, burned, throbbed, and sometimes bled under the weight of the burden slung over his shoulder, inanimate and irksome.

A fly buzzed around his head, lighting on his bleeding arm, then Jared’s leg. Another fly showed up, and then another, until the air around him buzzed with small black bodies. They crawled thick over Zee’s head and shoulders, swarming over the bandage on his arm, buzzing around his side. At first he brushed them off, but they were too many and it took too much energy.

Time ceased to exist. No past, no future, only this step, and then the next. Always, there had been the buzzing of the flies crawling at the edges of his eyes and mouth. The sun had always beat down on the top of his head. There had always been pain, had always been the weight over his shoulder and the endless twists and turns of the paths he followed.

There came a time when he realized he had ceased all forward motion and was standing perfectly still. Not doing anything, not resting, just standing, with his burden still heavy on his shoulders.

He felt that there must be some reason for this.

His eyes sent back a message that the path in front of him was blocked by a hill of dirt, perhaps as high as his knees, reaching from hedge to hedge, with no room to pass on either side. As his attention focused in, he saw that the dirt was moving. Small red crawling things coming and going, in and out of a honeycomb of holes.

Ants.

Zee had a thing about ants. There were too many of them and they moved too fast. He’d read
The Once and Future King
in first grade, and the Wart’s adventures among the ants had instilled a lingering fear of their ruthlessness.

There was a choice to be made. He could turn around and backtrack to the last turning and take a different route. Or he could wade knee deep through a nest of pissed-off ants. The balance of decision was skewed by the promise of shade. Beyond the anthill, not far in the distance, he saw trees. Nice tall, shady weeping willows. And beyond them, a glint of something that might be water.

As he stood in a stupor, unable to act on this simple choice, an ant separated itself from the nest and scurried toward his foot. He observed its single-minded approach. It stopped at the barrier created by his boot, indecisive, and Zee felt a sudden kinship with the tiny creature. To go forward, or to go back?

But the ant didn’t share his problem with decision making, and it was only the matter of a single breath before it climbed up onto the toe of his boot. A tiny tendril of smoke followed behind it, along with a hot smell of burning. Zee watched its progress, mesmerized by the sooty trail it left behind as it explored this new territory. It was just beginning to register on him that if the ant could burn leather it would not be good to have it crawl up his pant leg, when the entire anthill exploded. Flying ants surrounded him, burning his skin wherever they touched. The hedge next to him began to smoke and then burst into flame.

Zee ducked his head low and charged forward, toward the fragile promise of water. Through the swarming ants, through the anthill, pumping his rubbery legs as fast as he could manage. A thousand pinpoints of fire covered his body. His clothes began to smoke. The smell of singed hair rose up around him.

He got clear of the nest, staggering down the open path, aiming for the space of trees and praying under his breath:
Please let there be water.

The ants pursued him in a flying cloud of torment.

As he grew closer to the trees, a thick reek pressed against him, overpowering the smell of burning with a stench of stale water and rotting weeds. What he had hoped was a pond turned out to be a slough stretched between the trees, with a puddle of muddy water at the center. Brown algae floated on top. All around the edges sickly vegetation—grass, leaves, and weeds—fermented in various stages of decay. Something white and dead floated on the surface, a fish, its pale belly turned up to the sky.

Zee did not turn or slow his pace. When it came to flying fire ants, water was water. He reached the edge of the slough. It sucked his feet down into deep muck, slowing his pace. Ants whirred and clicked and burned. The world swam in front of his eyes; the stench of the rotten water overpowered him.

His feet were mired and he couldn’t get them free.

The hem of his shirt burst into flame.

With a last burst of strength he managed a few more steps, which took him to the edge of the filthy water. He flung himself forward, throwing Jared clear as he did so. Zee closed his eyes and held his breath as the water closed over his head.

Cool liquid surrounded him, shutting out the ants, easing his burns. But his body was starving for air and he needed to get Jared’s head above water, so he surfaced, preparing to face the cloud of insects.

The air he sucked in as he broke the surface was cool and sweet. All around him blue water sparkled clear and limpid, reflecting sky and trees fractured by the ripples on the surface. No slough. No algae. No smell of rotting. Just a round, perfect pool with water bubbling up at one side, spilling away into a crystal-clear stream on the other. Dead ants littered the surface, and Zee felt immense relief that the things could be killed. All around lay a space of soft green grass, dotted with wildflowers and overhung with green branches. A bird warbled high above.

A soft breeze touched his dripping face.

He didn’t see Jared and was about to dive down looking for him, when the wounded man surfaced on his own, spouting water and coughing. Zee gave him an arm to support him at the surface. Jared coughed and spewed, eyes streaming. When the paroxysms finally stopped, he gasped, “Are you trying to drown me?”

“Right. That would be why I’m holding you up and letting you get your breath.”

Despite the fact that his eyes were open and he was talking, Jared looked bad. The swellings on his face had turned from green to black, and there were more of the blisters now on his hands and arms.

“We were attacked by fire ants,” Zee explained after a long space.

“The little biting kind?”

“No, the big, flying, light-you-on-fire-if-they-land-on-you kind. You have some burns. The water will be good for that.”

Jared looked down at the swellings on his arm. “Looks like the burns are a minor concern.”

Zee towed him to the edge and settled him with his arms and head resting on the bank, his body still immersed. Then he stripped out of the soaking backpack and his own clothes, noticing a network of burn holes in the clothing, and marks on his skin, as if someone had held him down and pressed lit cigarettes against his flesh. The clothes were near ruined but better than nothing, and he laid them flat on the grass for the sun to dry. As for the backpack, he’d see what could be salvaged later. Taking a deep breath, he ducked beneath the water and stayed as long as his lungs would let him before bursting back up to the surface.

Sunlight touched his upturned face. Already the fountain was clearing, the dirty water spilling over the edge of the basin and away in a small stream. No more floating ants. He could see to the flat stones at the bottom, and his own feet, distorted and ghostly through the water.

It was cold, though, and he had begun to shiver.

Jared was able to help a little when Zee dragged him out. They staggered out of the water and collapsed on the sun-warmed grass.

The wounded man propped himself up to look at his leg. In the course of the mad dash from the ants and the time in the water, Zee’s rough bandage had come off. “That is revolting and disgusting,” Jared said, shuddering. “What a way to die.”

The wound had turned green, not any color that flesh should ever be, and even after the long soak in the spring it stank.

Jared sank down onto his back, eyes closed, asleep or unconscious or pretending to be. Zee knew he needed to do something—about those blisters, about the wounded leg. But he was exhausted and it felt good to just lie still, letting the sun dry the water droplets from his skin. The light was too bright and he let his eyelids close, his body relaxing into the softness of grass. In the distance he heard the low hum of bees. The sun warmed his aching muscles, eased the pain in his wounds. He would allow himself just one more minute. Just. One.