Wakeworld (4 page)

“All set? Great. Form a train. Here we go.”

With everybody touching and their eyes covered, it was an easy thing to open both doors and lead them into the Between and then immediately into the Dreamworld. To disguise what he had done, he led them forward about twenty paces, asked them to duck down low and mind their heads for another ten, and then gave permission to remove the blindfolds.

“Great territory here,” he said, gesturing at the subtly changed terrain that lay ahead. “I’ve never once brought somebody in that didn’t find some sort of trophy. Dangerous and strange things, too, so keep your wits about you.”

The horizon was light now, clear and beginning to be blue. In the plains the sun would be rising but not here, where mountains thrust their bulk between land and sky. The landscape was only dimly visible, leached of color like a black-and-white movie. All as it should be, and yet Morgan’s gut churned with an alarm he didn’t understand. Something was off-kilter and wrong.

The dream felt dark.

Despite what his eyes showed him—the normal progression of dawn—he kept expecting to see nothing but black. Every time he blinked he found himself surprised to see light. Here, through the doorway and into dream, all of the extra senses he tried to keep closed down were wide open.

Instability in Dreamworld was dangerous beyond words, but he would need something tangible to call off the trip. Carpenter had paid a couple of grand for this expedition. And the girl was primed—had probably been pumped up for this one hunting expedition since she could talk. Neither of them was going to go back because he had a bad feeling.

Which meant all he could do now was follow, stick tight, stay alert, keep them from straying into some other dream where there were creatures more dangerous than bear and wolves, or into the Between where anything could happen. Nothing he could do, though, if something decided to come through an open door. At least it would be light soon. Most dream creatures didn’t care for the light.

They walked single file, the girl in the lead. She was good, he had to admit. Carpenter had taught her well. Taking her time, scanning the trees, watching for signs, listening, sniffing the air. The old man was on higher alert than he had been with his sons, though, a little more protective. A little less at ease. Maybe he sensed something too, seasoned old hunter that he was.

Jenn led them down into a ravine where the darkness congregated thick and undisturbed, even though the sky was now very nearly blue. A good choice if you were looking for game. Not so great considering the invisible threat. Above, on the higher ground, birds had been rousing, beginning a chorus of tweets and chirps. Breeze in the trees. Racket from a couple of frogs that hadn’t yet dug down into the mud for the winter.

Down here in the ravine it was too quiet. No birds, no frogs. Not even the wind in the trees. Just a dead calm.

Morgan’s unease grew, although in his mind he was still trying to argue it away with logic. It was normal for it to be darker in the ravine. Quieter, too, he reminded himself, because of the dark. Plus, they were shut out from the sounds above.

He stepped on a dry twig and his heart skipped at the sound of its snapping.

At first there was only a whiff of an unpleasant scent, rapidly growing into a solid sensory assault, part skunk, part carrion, that set him to coughing. He recognized it, knew what it was, and his heart hammered a warning. He was aware of the others, watched them cover mouth and nose with their sleeves. An unearthly screeching howl rose up dead ahead, in the direction they’d been going. An answering howl came from the other direction, echoing, bouncing off the rocks, a sound that made his blood congeal, his knees go weak.

Boq, Sasquatch, Bigfoot. So many names, so many jokes. But there was nothing remotely funny about the creatures. The Indians had long known them for their supernatural powers and kept a deep and respectful distance. You couldn’t shoot them, it was said. Guns exploded, bullets went wide. They could shift time, work tricks with water and fire.

Puzzle pieces clicked into place, remembered images flashing one upon the other.
A wounded Sasquatch. The flash of a blade. Blood.

“Up, back to high ground, now!” he shouted, following his own advice without looking around for the others. It was a blind scramble over rocks and loose dirt, sliding, grasping onto branches and roots, and dragging himself up one- handed, still clutching the rifle with the other.

At the top, he paused to look back.

Hell and damnation. They hadn’t followed. He could barely make them out down in the shadows, braced back-to-
back with rifles ready. Down the ravine on either side, branches swayed. A loud banging sound, as of sticks against tree trunks, and then that howling again that turned his bowels to water.

He tried to shout but found he had no voice. He ordered his body to go back down, told himself that he must not abandon his party. Throughout his long life he’d faced down all manner of creatures without fear. Now he stood silently cursing himself, shivering like a rabbit under the paw of a coyote, and watched the hunting party, his hunting party, that he had abandoned and run away from.

Two dark shadows were visible now, emerging from the trees. The offensive stink was almost unbearable, wafting up to him in waves that set him retching.

The beasts were well within range, out of the trees now and visible. They were roughly man-shaped but covered in brown fur, bent forward a little at the hips, with long apelike arms and human hands. As they moved, they banged on tree trunks with sticks, keeping up a constant howling.

Carpenter’s rifle leaped and then exploded in a burst of fire. The man went down with a scream and one of the beasts leaned over him, blocking him from sight. The girl, still self-possessed and externally calm, took aim in turn. Her finger pulled the trigger. The rifle clicked. Nothing happened. She tried again. Another click.

Still the creature advanced toward her.

At last she screamed and broke into a run. One of the man-creatures shambled in pursuit, graceless and awkward, but fast.

Dropping to one knee, trying to steady his shaking hands, Morgan drew a bead on the Sasquatch and fired. It kept running. He fired again. Saw in disbelief a spray of dirt and rock as the shot struck way wide of his target.

But even as he fired again it picked up speed, long legs covering the ground in a shambling stride, caught Jenn around the waist and swung her up over its shoulder. She struggled and fought, beating with her fists on the beast’s back. Her eyes found Morgan and she began to scream, still not in a panicked fear but half plea, half command. “Help me! Morgan—”

Both of the creatures turned then to look up at him. He felt the full force of their burning eyes, a pressure on his brain, a searching.

Revenge.

The girl’s cries twisted in his heart, but Morgan stood transfixed, his hands loose and nerveless on his gun, his feet grown into the dirt and incapable of movement.

And then they turned away. Carpenter’s limp body now dangled over the shoulder of the first creature as it vanished into the trees. The second lumbered into the forest after his mate, dragging the girl. She had stopped screaming. The last glimpse Morgan had of her, she had stretched her arms out toward him, hands reaching as though all of the space between them did not exist, as though she were a child seeking safety. A bitter and desperate hope still animated her face. And then went out. She was not one to go easily into death, however, and she shouted one last word back before she was lost to him in the trees.

“Coward!”

It echoed, bouncing off cliffs and trees and the memories stowed deep beyond his conscious thought.

Coward.

Coward.

Coward.

As the last echo died away he shook himself, released from the spell. It wasn’t the first time that word had been hurled at him by a girl, and goddamn it if this time he’d let it stick.

Z
ee sprawled in one of the armchairs at the back of A to Zee Books, head tilted back, eyes closed. His face looked softer in sleep, the artist again, and not the hardened warrior who took wild joy in slaying dragons. A book lay open in his lap—Joseph Campbell’s
Hero with a Thousand Faces
. His right hand lay on the arm of the chair, relaxed and easy, but his fingertips grazed the hilt of the sword, unsheathed and resting against his thigh.

Vivian had run in through the back entrance, using the fire escape to reach Zee’s upstairs apartment, but it made sense he would be watching for her here. Part of her wanted him awake—she needed to tell him about the lost pendant, to make plans to search for it. On the other hand, she didn’t want to talk about what happened on the beach or any of the hurt that lay between them.

She picked up the book, set the bookmark, and laid it on the coffee table beside an unfinished chess game. He was dreaming, his eyes rolling behind his eyelids, a touch of a smile on his lips. Vivian found herself envying him. Always, dreams had been serious business for her, even before she knew there was such a thing as a Dreamshifter, or a possibility of being lost in a Dreamworld. What must it be like to dream with casual abandon, to have dreams of pizza delivery and flying penguins? This looked like a pleasant dream, and a deep yearning filled her. She feared her own dreams, but maybe it was possible to dip into his.

Poe, standing on the far side of the coffee table, stared at her out of obsidian eyes that radiated disapproval, as if he knew what she was thinking.

“I’m not going to hurt anything,” she whispered. Matching the rhythm of her breath to Zee’s, she laid her hand on his forehead and closed her eyes.

The dream was there, just beneath his skin; she could feel its ebb and flow tugging at her, and she let go of her control and let it pull her in.

Immediately she wished she hadn’t.

He was naked, and he was not alone. He stood with his back against a shelf of old books with leather covers etched with gold-embossed titles. A woman stood on tiptoe, the entire length of her naked body pressed up against his. He was kissing her, eyes closed, as though his lips on her skin were the single most important fact of the universe. His hands were tangled in the fall of her hair, tipping her head back so he could run a line of kisses down the length of her throat.

Vivian felt a twist of jealousy in her gut, a visceral yearning. She wanted him, wanted all of him. What she had denied herself in real life was eminently possible in dream. If she could enter the dream, surely she could also shift it. Put herself in the place of the other woman so that she could experience what she had forbidden herself in the waking world.

Something familiar about the auburn curls stopped her, the line of the back, the swell of the hip, images glimpsed over and over in a mirror. And then she realized: It was her own dream hands caressing the smoothness of skin over muscle, her own breasts and belly straining against him, always wanting more.

Her body heated at the thought that Zee was dreaming of her. She could almost feel his skin against hers and it would be easy now, so easy, to slide into the place of her dreaming self. A breath, a moment of focus, but just as she pushed toward the Dreamworld, an itching of her shoulder blades jolted her back into waking. As she watched in dismay, the Vivian in the dream sprouted wings, her naked white body transforming into a monstrous shape with scales and teeth and the weight of an armored tail.

“Vivian,” Zee cried, his voice loss and despair. At the instant the cry left his lips the dream shifted again and he was dressed in leather and chain mail, the drawn sword in his hand, and his eyes were those of the dragon slayer, not the lover.

Her body trembling with a potent draught of adrenaline, desire, and grief, Vivian slid out of the dream. Zee still slept, restless, and she retreated to a chair on the other side of the coffee table, grabbing the first book in reach along the way. She watched him through a screen of her hair as he stirred and his eyes opened and fixed on her. “How long have you been here?”

“Only a few minutes.”

“You should have wakened me.”

“You needed the sleep.”

“How is she?”

“What is she, you mean.”

He shook his head and rubbed the sleep from his eyes with both hands. “Explain.”

“She’s not really a fragile old woman and she wasn’t injured.”

“Vivian—”

“She stole my pendant and went into the Between.”

“But—”

“No buts. I don’t know what she is, but I’m betting it isn’t human.” Her voice trembled on the edge of tears, her hand automatically groping for the missing pendant. Its absence was palpable, a negative space that felt more solid and real than the book in her lap.

All softness vanished, Zee leaned forward and touched his index finger to the broken skin at her throat. “I should have stayed.” There was a huskiness in his voice. The clear agate eyes searching hers brought the heat to her face, set her heart to beating at a ridiculous rate.

“I—put the Voice on her, Zee. I wasn’t ever going to use it again.”

His big hand cupped her chin and raised it so she was forced to look into those dangerous eyes. “Just maybe—since she was trying to kill you—it was a permissible thing.” And then his face broke into an unexpected grin. “What on earth did you tell the ambulance?”

“And the cops. The fact that we were driving Grandfather’s hippie van didn’t help any. If they didn’t know me, I’d probably be locked up about now.” She dropped her face in her hands, grateful for the ability to hide and regain a measure of composure.

“Hopeless search party has been activated?”

“I told them that she ran out in the street and I hit the brakes but couldn’t stop in time. And that she appeared to be unconscious, woke up, refused to stay still, and ran off. I said I thought she’d gone down the alley across the street.”

“The mud’s frozen and there’s no snow, so no big surprise if they don’t find footprints,” he said. “That will keep them busy for a while.”

“Honestly, I doubt they’ll look too hard. More important things afoot. Nobody cares about an old homeless woman.”

“Are you sure you’re okay? Nothing broken.”

She nodded. “Fine. Except—I’ve never been without the pendant, since I was seven. How do I even know if I’m awake?”

“Welcome to my world. That’s the thing—most of us are always guessing.”

“I don’t like it.” Her voice sounded small to her own ears, childlike. Which, she realized, was how she felt. About five years old, powerless and afraid. And if Zee said one gentle word to her now she was going to dissolve into a quivering mess of hysteria. The warmth of the hand cupping her chin was bad enough.

He withdrew his hand. “You’re not dreaming.”

“How do you know?”

“Because
I’m
not dreaming.”

“And you know this because?”

“You are sitting over there with all of your clothes on and I am not kissing you.”

And with that she was a long way from childhood, her body burning with memory of his dream. She should tell him what she had done, but that would open the door to a conversation that she wasn’t ready for.

“What now?” he asked. “What is the creature after?”

“I don’t know.”

“We need to find the Key, and those missing dreamspheres.”

“And my pendant. So—back into the Between?”

“I was thinking about paying a visit to your old friend Jared.”

Just the mention of the name invoked the sensation of his unwelcome hands on her body. She wrapped her arms around her belly, containing a transitory sense of flying into pieces. A toxic mess of emotions bubbled dangerously near the surface—fear and rage, loss and shame, and other things she couldn’t put words to. Zee would notice, she knew he would notice. And he would ask, and she would fly into a million pieces.

“Do you think he knows what his dream self was up to when he—did what he did?” Her voice sounded far away and foreign to her own ears, as though somebody else were speaking.

“Only one way to find out. By the way, your book is upside down,” Zee said, as though she wasn’t disintegrating before his eyes, as though a nuclear-strength emotional charge wasn’t lying between them. “
The Inbreeding of America: A Photographic Journey.
No wonder you’re having nightmares.”

Intense gratitude welled up in her that he had chosen to sidestep the land mine. She dared not meet his eyes, not yet, but her heart settled back into a regular beat, her body felt like it would hold together after all. One deep breath, another, and she heard her own voice saying, “All right, then. Let’s go pay a visit to Jared.”