Wakeworld (3 page)

Greetings, Dreamshifter. Why will you not fly with me?

You must go home, little brother. It is not safe here for you.

I do not choose to go back.

This world is not yours—you do not belong here.

Even so. I have chosen.

Please. I will walk with you a little. The Between is not what it was, now that the Sorceress is dead. There are wide skies on the other side.

He snorted a small puff of bright flame.
I will not go.

There is death for you here.

I don’t fear death.
But there was a question, a wavering. Vivian took a step toward him.

He stretched his wings and clapped them over his back, raising a wind that pushed Vivian back and to her knees.

A single shot rang out. The bullet struck fire from the scales on the dragon’s side and ricocheted away into the sand.

He opened his jaws wide and unleashed a cry of pain and rage, spreading his wings and shooting off a full jet of flame.

“No!” Vivian shouted, her voice lost in the thunder of wings as the dragon lifted off from the sand. “Please,” she cried, stretching her arms toward the sky.

Another shot, this time from where Zee stood, across the beach.

A spike of agony through her eye. Wings drooping, heart quivering. Blackness pouring in.

And then she was fully back in her own body and the pain was gone. A shout of warning. Something heavy struck the earth with enough force to throw her off her feet. She lay still and futile in the sand, hands pressed against her eyes, the cold and damp insinuating itself through the fabric of her jeans and into her skin.

She pushed herself up onto her knees. Less than two arm lengths away a dark ungainly form lay twisted and motionless, wings splayed wide. The dragon’s right eye was a shattered cavern. Black blood steamed in the cold air.

Zee stood over his kill with the gun still in his hand, his scarred face alight with victory.

Vivian watched him, wordless, fighting to draw breath. Silent tears ran down her cheeks.

He saw her trouble and the light went out of his eyes. Kneeling in the sand beside her, he reached out a hand to touch her face. She flinched away, and he let it fall back. “Vivian. It needed killing. You must see that.” A fresh burn on his cheek, etched there by a splash of dragon blood, emphasized his words.

Not his fault, she told herself. Brett had fired the first shot and made it necessary. The dragon had killed before and would have killed again. She knew that, but it did nothing to ease the pain at her heart.

“He didn’t know better, Zee. He was so young . . .” Young and beautiful and alive beyond imagining.

“Don’t cry, Viv. It was just a dragon.”

She laughed, short and bitter, as his words went home. “Blood of my blood,” she said.

Realization dawned in his eyes, too late. “No, you are not one of them, not really—”

“But I am. And you were made to hunt them. What are we to do about that?”

A low whistle broke the moment. “It really was a dragon,” Brett said in a voice filled with awe. “Thought you guys were kidding.”

Sirens wailed in the distance, drawing closer.

“You should go,” Brett said. He spoke into his radio. “Number three seventy-two on scene. All clear.”

Stiffly, Vivian levered herself to her feet. Inside her boots her toes had gone numb, and she stomped her feet to get the blood moving.

“You may have a slight problem explaining that away,” Zee said, eyeing the dead dragon.

Brett shrugged. “I found the creature already dead. I never saw a thing. Not that I’d mind taking credit for killing the murdering son of a bitch.”

“Are you sure?”

He shrugged. “I can’t tell them the truth. It’s the next best. Go.”

Vivian ran up the trail after Zee and they drove unhindered away from the beach, passing two police cruisers and a border patrol pickup on their way to a scene they couldn’t possibly have imagined.

Vivian felt a yawning abyss between herself and Zee. He didn’t know, couldn’t know, how much the dragon encroached already on the integrity of her self. The heat in her blood, the flashes of time where every sensory detail became extraordinary and three-dimensional, the desire to unfold powerful wings and take to the sky. Very small she felt, walled in by unbreakable glass, untouchable and afraid. More than anything she could imagine, she wanted to slide over beside him, feel his arm around her, relax into his strength. Instead, she wrapped her arms around herself and hunched into them, breathing past the pain of unshed tears.

“Cabin?” he asked.

“Too far. And my apartment’s trashed. We’ll have to risk the bookstore.”

He nodded, turning onto Main Street.

Vivian caught a blur of movement darting from the sidewalk to the street.

“Shit.” Zee spun the steering wheel and stomped on the brake. Vivian jolted forward against her seat belt as the van slid sideways and came to a stop, but not before it hit something with a dull thud that reverberated in the pit of her stomach.

An instant of shock, while body and mind caught up with what had just happened, and then she was out of the van, staring down in horror and dismay at the limp body crumpled beneath the tires.

D
ear God,” Zee said. His face in the glare of the headlights looked dead white. “She just stepped out in front of the van.”

An old woman lay on the asphalt, legs splayed, arms flung wide, palms up and open. Gray hair, unkempt and in need of a wash, straggled around a wrinkled face smudged with dirt. Her eyes were closed; her mouth drooped open over broken snags of teeth.

Vivian’s hand went to the pendant that hung at her breast, a penguin caught in a dream web. It was her talisman and served to help her mark the boundaries between one world and the next. In Wakeworld it was always there, warm and comforting. In Dreamworld, it vanished. Now it was all too solid and real. This was no nightmare.

She knelt on the wet pavement, long practice pulling her mind back into a cool assessment of the crisis. “We need to call 911.”

“Haven’t got a phone,” Zee said. “Have you?”

“Lost it, Between. You’ll have to go to the store and call.”

He hesitated.

“Go. We need an ambulance. Also, we need to not have Poe.”

The penguin had followed her out of the van and stood on the other side of the victim. His feathers were ruffled and puffed up, and he hissed once, the way he did when he felt threatened.

“Come on, you,” Zee said, picking up the penguin. “I’ll be right back.”

“No,” Vivian said, assessing her patient. Airway clear, chest rising and falling with a regular breath. Pulse steady. No visible bruising or lacerations.

“No, what?” Zee asked, lingering.

“Don’t come back. I was driving, not you. Understand?”

The old woman’s eyes fluttered open. They were the color of molasses, wide with fear. Pupils equal, neither dilated nor constricted. Her lips quivered. “Don’t hurt me.”

“Easy now. Nobody’s going to hurt you. What’s your name?” Vivian’s hands began, all on their own, to feel for broken bones or bleeding. She glanced up at Zee. “I’ll take care of her. You’re no good to me in jail.”

“It’s not just her I’m worried about.”

“I’ll be fine. You’ve already killed the dragon.” Her tone was harsher than she’d meant, the words hanging between them like living things, winged and dangerous. Too late she tried for softness. “Please.”

She’d hurt him. She saw his eyes shutter, even as he nodded and turned to run down the street toward the store, Poe clasped awkwardly in one arm.

A feeble whimper drew her attention back to the injured old woman. “Where does it hurt?”

The question earned her only a shake of the head and an attempt to scrabble backward and away. “You’re trying to kill me.”

“I’m a doctor. I’m trying to help you.”

“The man drove his land ship right over me. Intent to kill. He hates me.”

“He doesn’t hate you. He doesn’t even know you. Does your head hurt? Is it hard to breathe?”

Spittle ran down the old woman’s chin, slick and shiny. Dirt was embedded in her pores. Foul breath heated Vivian’s cheek, hotter than it ought to have been. She wondered if the old woman had been sick with a fever. Maybe delirium had driven her out into the street in front of the van.

“Where did he go, the killer man?”

“He’s gone to find help.”

“You’re sure he’s gone?”

“I’m sure. Nobody’s going to hurt you.”

The old woman’s eyes went cold, no confusion in them now.

Fast as a striking snake, her gnarled old hand grabbed at the pendant. 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. She felt, more than saw, a closing door in the middle of nowhere, and then she was kneeling in the street alone.

In the distance a siren sounded.

Perfect. What the hell was she supposed to tell the attendants when they showed up?

What happened here, Doc?

Well, Jim, we ran over this frail old lady who attacked me and disappeared into another dimension.

Yep. That was going to fly.

She wished she were still asleep in the van with Zee warm and steady beside her. That there had been no dragon killing today, no old woman who was not what she seemed. That all of this was some horrible dream from which she could wake up. But there would be no waking up from this, not now, not ever. There was no going back to this morning, no do-overs.

Her hand reached for the pendant at her breast.

It was gone, the chain broken. Frantic, she crawled around the site on hands and knees, groping blindly in the shadows, searching. But she knew in her soul that the old woman had taken it, and that whatever it was wanted for was surely nothing good.

M
organ Weathersby slapped at his neck, silencing the whine of a mosquito just a few seconds too late. His hand came away smeared with blood, and a dozen other spots on his body itched already. Damned bloodsuckers. More of them than there ought to be this late in the fall, but it would be cold enough tonight to knock them down a peg. He tossed another chunk of wood on the campfire. A knot of pitch flared and popped, sending sparks up into the dark night, illuminating the faces across from him.

Time had carved its mark on the man he knew as Carpenter. Unlike Morgan, who looked the same now as he had twenty years ago, the old man had aged visibly since they’d last met. His hair remained thick but was nearly white. The line of his jaw was both leaner and softer, and he moved with a slight hesitation, as though not entirely certain the ground would be there when his feet came down. Not surprising, that. It had been damn near twenty years since their last trip.

Carpenter had brought his youngest son that time. The trip was a family ritual by then—a rite of passage, and even though this third son of his had been less than enthusiastic about hunting in general and scornful about this expedition in particular, Morgan had never been one to turn down the solid reality of bills in his wallet.

It was understandable, bringing your sons out to take a beast as a ceremony to mark the transition from boy to man. He admired it. But this trip was different, and he had protested until Carpenter won him over with extra cash. Women had their own rites to mark entrance into adulthood, and they damn well shouldn’t have anything to do with guns and killing.

This was no place for a girl, especially a girl with night-dark hair and eyes of a brown so deep you could barely see the pupils, a girl self-contained and light-footed and too goddamned capable for her thirteen years. She’d kept up easily on the hike yesterday, had carried her own pack, never made a single sound of complaint.

Morgan scowled at her, sitting motionless on an upended chunk of a log, gazing into the fire as though she saw secrets there. Grace had been like that, always looking into the depths of things and keeping what she learned locked behind an impassive face and unreadable eyes.

Grace was not safe to think about.

“We start at first dawn,” he said, needing to get the girl out of his sight. “You might want to turn in.”

Carpenter sniffed the air. “Temperature’s dropping—frost by morning.”

“Good hunting weather,” Jenn said. Her voice was deep for a girl, slow rolling, like a shallow river over stones. She turned to her grandfather. “Which rifle will I carry?”

“The Winchester.”

“I like the AK.”

“The tradition is the Winchester, Jenn. That’s what your dad used.”

“You just want to use the AK yourself.” She smiled at him, a slow smile that made her eyes even darker.

“Your dad got his bear with the Winchester.”

“Lucky shot,” Morgan grunted. “Boy couldn’t aim and was shaking like a junkie.”

Carpenter’s white teeth gleamed in the firelight. “The girl’s a crack shot, Morgan. Takes after her grandpa, not her old man. Wait and see.”

Morgan snorted. “In my experience, the apple don’t fall far from the tree.” It was an insult to Carpenter, but he couldn’t abide the way Jenn occupied her own skin, eyes measuring him up with an expression that bordered on disdain.

Not often he thought about his appearance, but those eyes made him remember that it had been a few years since he’d cut his hair, that his beard was untrimmed and bushy, that the flannel shirt he wore was overdue for a wash. Not that he cared what she thought about anything, her or any human creature.

A sound startled all three of them into stillness, a sharp retort, almost like a gunshot.

Only one thing made that sound in the forest: a tree, breaking under stress, branches cracking and rustling as gravity pulled it down to the earth. But trees didn’t fall randomly on quiet nights. They broke in high winds. Or when something big enough pushed them over.

Morgan picked up his shotgun, chambered a shell. Carpenter was a few seconds behind him, the girl even quicker.

It took a pretty big critter to break a tree. A grizzly might do it, if the trunk was rotten or not too big around. And there were strange creatures out here in this forest, not registered in any
Hunting the Northwest
guidebook.

Twenty beats of his heart, and then a sudden onrush of wind that brought down leaves and set the trees to keening. A shadow blotted out the stars overhead, a sinuous, long-necked shape. And then, as suddenly as it began, the wind was gone, the sky was clear, the normal forest sounds returned.

“What the hell was that?” Carpenter’s useless gun was still trained on the empty sky; might just as well try shooting at the stars.

“Freak burst of wind, I reckon,” Morgan lied. “One of those dust devils. You get some strange weather up here.”

With all of the rules he’d broken over the years, a few things had managed to sneak past him from Dreamworld into Wakeworld. But he was damned sure he would have noticed a dragon. And if there was a dragon here, then something had gone very wrong with the worlds, and this part of the forest was a particularly dangerous place to be.

At least the creature had flown over, had kept on going. Still, a dragon could cover a lot of territory with speed; it might be back. He sat back down by the fire, covering his unease with a casual tone. “Cold tonight. Hope it don’t turn to snow or some such. Get the girl to bed, Carpenter. She’ll be good for nothing in the morning.”

Jenn smiled, that smile that hid what she was really feeling. “Come on, Grandfather. Old men need their sleep.” Carpenter grunted, allowing her to grab his hand and tow him toward the tent.

“Get some sleep yourself, Morgan,” he said. “Good dreams.”

Good dreams. Now there were words to choke on. Morgan would be a happy man if he never needed to dream again; there was no peace for him there. And there would be no sleep for him this night. All through the long hours of the dark, at the mercy of memories that refused to stay contained no matter how many years came between, he listened for the thunder of dragon wings with the loaded shotgun across his lap.

Just before dawn, when the sky began to be visible above the trees, he banked the fire. After lowering his pack from where he’d hung it away from bears, he slapped bacon into the cast-iron pan and put the kettle on for coffee. The girl emerged from the tent first, looking young and vulnerable with her hair tangled and the Dreamworld still fading from her eyes.

“Smells good,” she said, breathing deep, and he couldn’t help approving the fact that she seemed to be referring as much to the scent of frost and evergreen as to the bacon.

She vanished into the trees, off to relieve herself. Despite his fatigue, Morgan remained on high alert. He didn’t like the girl out of sight. His eyes kept scanning the sky, ears straining for any sound out of place. The quiet of the night had done nothing to allay his unease, had intensified it if anything.

Jenn returned unscathed and sat down by the fire. “I dreamed about a dragon,” she offered. “Blacker than night.”

“Dragons aren’t black,” he said automatically, then nearly bit his tongue out for acknowledging that there might be such creatures in the world.

She responded as though it were a rational conversation. “That’s what made the dream so weird. All of the movie and book dragons are green, with maybe purple and red mixed in, or brown. The ones in Pern were bronze and green and gold. Anyway, this black dragon just looked at me, and I thought maybe I shouldn’t look back—all of the books say not to look a dragon in the eye, of course—but I did. And it was like it was talking to me in my head. Which isn’t really so weird, I guess; everything talks in dreams.”

His belly tightened at her words and he looked up at the sky, almost certain a dark shadow had fallen over the world. Nothing different about the darkness, though. The sky continued to lighten in the east. A last lingering planet shone bright just above the tree line.

“What did it say?”

She frowned. “I can’t remember. What if it was important?”

“I doubt it. I’ve got no use for dreams, girl. That’s what comes of marshmallows at bedtime. Wake your grandfather—we need to be moving.”

The three of them ate almost in silence. When they were done, they stowed away food and cooking gear and hoisted the pack up again on a rope between two trees. They checked their guns, packed up ammunition. Morgan extinguished the fire and led them out. Timing was everything, and he guided his little party along at a calculated pace.

He had to get them to precisely the right spot and through into the Dreamworld during that short window of time just past dawn when it was light enough to walk without tripping over their own feet, but still dark enough that they wouldn’t notice a door in the middle of the wilderness.

People tended not to see what was right in front of their eyes if it didn’t fit with what they knew of the world. And the location where he opened the doorway was strategic. A red rock bluff butted directly up against it on the right, a cluster of bushes on the left. If you didn’t happen to look at the air too closely around you, it was easy to pass right through and into the Dreamworld without pause. But he always took precautions, just to be sure.

When he’d first started guiding hunting parties here, he had experienced guilt, easily silenced beneath the weight of his rage. He hated both the Dreamworld and his ability to access it. This dream was a so-called gift from the Guardian, given to him at his initiation in the Cave of Dreams. He wanted no truck with it, but on the other hand, living in Wakeworld required hard cold cash and the Dream was at least good for that. Hunters would pay good money for a shot at something slightly unusual, and this dream was lousy with creatures. Bears and wolves predominated, but stranger beasts had been sighted.

He’d seen one or two of the creatures the Indians named Shunka Warakin, one of which had been shot and ended up in a museum well before his birth, which meant he wasn’t the only one who had played around in this Dreamworld.

Hunters he guided out here all signed an agreement not to tell where they’d been, or who brought them. Sure, they were likely to talk anyway, but he didn’t worry about that overmuch. If the authorities came looking for the place, or the wolves or bears that were taken from here, all just a little “off” from regularly occurring species, they would never find the door. The rare beast that had managed to escape into the forest stayed pretty well hidden.

At the same time, folks were willing to pay extra for the opportunity. He had permitted rumors of Sasquatch sightings to judiciously leak into the community. Bigfoot hunters paid even better than the average sportsman. Truth was, he’d had a few glimpses of the big beasts in the dream landscape, including one too-close encounter that left him wary, but although he saw them often enough, they always slipped out of sight and left him well alone.

Of dragons there had never been a sign. The creatures had powers of their own, and doors were never a barrier to them, but they tended to keep to the Between and he’d never seen one in Wakeworld or Dreamworld before.

He was in the middle of wondering what had drawn a dragon to the forest, when they stumbled onto the kill. It was just light enough to see what they’d almost stepped in. A few feet to left or right, and they would never have noticed. Not that there was much left to see—fur, a few bones, bloodstains on the grass. A black circle surrounded it all, the grass turned to ash. There were footprints too, four craters in the blackened earth, each as big as the girl.

“Holy mother of God,” Carpenter said, surveying the damage.

Jenn walked up to the edge of the black ash, sniffed the air. “Smells a bit like sulfur.”

“You’ve outdone yourself, Morgan—this is a huge and rare beast. How do we track it?” The other man’s voice held a note of awe.

“We don’t. What the hell do you suppose that thing is? You really want to have your granddaughter anywhere near it?”

“Maybe it’s aliens,” Carpenter said. “Spaceship could make a circle like that, landing. Makes more sense than anything else.”

“Whatever it is, it could come back,” the girl said.

Morgan couldn’t help liking the kid. She was matter-of-fact, stayed calm. He felt a sudden need to get her the hell out of here and back to safety. “We should go back,” he heard himself saying. “I’ll refund your money.”

“Buck up, man. Never took you for a coward.” Carpenter strode forward and Morgan ground his teeth together to keep himself from saying anything he’d regret. Get in, let the kid get an animal, get out. Sooner the better.

“Right about here, I think.” Carpenter came to a stop close to the bluff where Morgan always called a halt.

“Yep. Good memory.” He pulled the blindfolds out of his pack. “Put these on, if you would.”

Jenn rolled her eyes. “Are you for real?”

“You go in blindfolded or not at all. That’s the rule.”

“Oh, fine.” She tied the strip of fabric over her eyes and Morgan adjusted it, then checked Carpenter’s.