Wakeworld (5 page)

J
ared fumbled off the alarm and buried his head under the pillow. The faint light seeping in around the window shades was enough to send a laser beam of agony into his brain. His tongue felt three sizes too big and tasted foul; his stomach gurgled and churned.

Hungover.

On a Monday morning.

He could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he had allowed himself to get drunk, and three of those five occasions were named Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of the week just past. For the moment he couldn’t remember why he’d been drinking, or put together any sort of logical thought.

Aspirin. Water.

The two words lined up beside each other in a way that made some sense, and he crawled out of bed in search of the cure, groaning with every movement. His body felt like it had been trampled by hundreds of pairs of feet. The bathroom, usually pristine, was a disaster. A wet towel lay in the middle of the tile floor on top of a jumble of cast-off clothes; the toilet was foul with vomit.

Mouth-breathing to quell a new surge of nausea, he flushed and turned on the fan to dissipate the stench. A spritz of deodorizer made it worse, the sweetness of flowers blending with bitter putrefaction.

He found aspirin in the medicine cabinet. Ran water into a tumbler. Swallowed. Swallowed again and again to keep it down.

His eyes managed to focus long enough to read the clock. Half past nine. He was going to be late. He was never late. Which meant calling in with some sort of an excuse—stuck in traffic, something. His cell phone was in the pocket of the pants crumpled on the floor. His head pounded with a whole new intensity as he bent to retrieve it. There was another object in the pocket.

Small, square box. Velvet.

Memories swarmed in without restraint, firing every neuron in his brain at once. Vivian had rejected him, turned down a diamond worth ten thousand dollars. After which he had dreamed strange dreams of acts far beyond the reaches of the law, so real they lingered on his skin weeks later. Insanity might start this way. A confusion between the dream and the reality, the two shifting places so that the real became the dream and the other way around. Maybe he had done it after all: had forced himself on the woman he loved, beaten her, been complicit in feeding living humans to dragons.

That thought dragged him back from the rabbit hole. Whatever sort of mumbo jumbo philosophers and physicists might bandy about, there was no way that dragons were real.

Feeling marginally better, he showered and dressed casually in slacks and a sport jacket, skipping the badly needed shave. If TV ads meant anything, the unshaven look was a thing; he’d pretend to have done it on purpose. And when he arrived at the office he would claim illness, make a point of how dutiful it was for him to show up while obviously ravaged by some vicious flu.

Head still throbbing but slightly subdued by the aspirin, he put on his shoes and walked out into the hall, where he froze, taking in the unexpected.

Vivian stood in the middle of his living space. Everything about her was unchanged: the auburn hair curling over her shoulders, the jeans and T-shirt he could never break her of wearing, the serious, listening look on her face that had drawn him to her the first time they met.

Only her eyes were different, glowing amber as if lit with an inner flame, and she was not alone. A tall man leaned against the door frame, watching, waiting. Jared had seen that face before, waking and dreaming. He felt the walls of his own house pressing in, his breath suddenly loud in his throat. He swallowed, hard, finding his voice with difficulty.

“So I was right. You do have a lover.”

Neither one of his guests responded to the barb. They didn’t flush or fidget or look at each other. They just waited. Uneasiness grew; his stomach churned and the pounding in his head intensified. This was not a social call.

Breaking a silence that seemed to span a lifetime, he shifted his gaze to Vivian. “You might have knocked.”

“But I still had a key. This just seemed easier.” She crossed the room to stand facing him, no more than an arm’s length away. Once he would have reached out and touched her; now there might as well have been a million miles between them.

Her eyes were all wrong. They had been gray, a little uncertain, changeable like smoke or mist. Now they were hawk eyes, golden and fierce. He knew full well that it was impossible to read somebody’s mind, and yet he felt that she could see deeply into him, past all the carefully cultivated layers of civility to the inner self that he kept under lock and key. Unable to sustain her gaze he looked down, only to see that the eyes were not the only change. An intricate tattoo marked the skin at the base of her throat and onto her shoulder.

Almost like lace. Or scales. He shivered as he slid into a memory that raised the fine hairs on the back of his neck, tightened his belly, turned his heart into a trip hammer.

Vivian, chained to a stone. She was dressed in a flowing white gown, her hair loose on her shoulders. A dragon stood facing her, its teeth stained red with the blood of other humans recently consumed. And then the unthinkable: Vivian shifted, changed . . .

“Jared. Look at me.”

Vivian’s voice. Vivian here, in his house, and not in some dream where she had turned into a dragon. He obeyed the command. She was very pale, and he saw now that her hands were shaking. Those eyes were a torment, but the words that followed were worse.

“Do you remember what you did to me? Do you know?”

He shook his head in denial, looking away from the disconcerting eyes only to catch the stare of the man who now stood only a pace away. Jared had reason to know that those hands, though they might look easy and relaxed, were capable of swift and lethal violence. He swallowed hard as his stomach rose in rebellion.

“What do you want?” he said, shifting away from both of them. “I need to go to work.”

“You’re not going to work today,” Vivian said. “We need some help.”

Her words loosened his tongue, heating his blood to anger. “Why should I help you with anything?” But even as he said the words, he felt the guilt run through him like a poison. In that dream, where the dragon had been about to consume her, he had been complicit. And there was the other thing that he had done. Still, the jealousy boiled. “If you wanted something from me, you should have come without your boy toy.”

“His name is Zee.”

“We’ve met. I have no idea what you think I can do for you.”

“We’re interested in your dreams,” Zee said. “Maybe you remember something about a Key.”

“I don’t—I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He tried to push past Vivian, but Zee blocked his path.

“You need to leave my house.”

“I think you do know something about the Key, Jared. All you need to do is tell me where it is.”

“I’m calling the cops.” Jared pulled out his cell phone, but Zee knocked it from his hand, casually, like a cat batting at a piece of string, and sent it sailing across the room.

“It doesn’t really look like a key. More like a cylinder, made out of black stone.” Vivian was no longer shaking. The golden eyes burned, for all the world as though there were flames behind them. The pattern on her neck had darkened and spread down her arms and onto the backs of her hands.

Panic built inside him. They were here to kill him. In the dream they were both killers, and now they had come to exact revenge for the crimes he had committed. In a dream.

Vivian put her hand on his arm, her face puckering as though there were something slimy on his sleeve. “Let’s go.”

“Go where?” The panic was alive now, beating at him, and he tried to twist away from her but Zee was right there, blocking him.

A door appeared where no door should be, right in the middle of the sitting room. It was green, with a brass knob. For one thing, he would never have such a plebeian-looking thing in his house. For another, it hung in the middle of the air, not connected to anything.

But Vivian opened it with her free hand, and through it he saw not the couch and the other side of his sitting room, but a thick forest with old-growth trees.

“You’re going to show us what your dream self did with the Key,” Zee said.

Jared wanted to say that he didn’t know what they were talking about but didn’t trust himself to speak, let alone to formulate a believable lie. Because everything they said was true. The minute that strange door opened, the dream memories seemed more real than this scenario playing out in his living room.

And if those dream memories were true, if what he’d written off as nightmare was real, then he was in the sort of trouble from which there would be no coming back.

Z
ee wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting to find on the other side of the door, but it wasn’t this. The part with the trees was all right, even vaguely familiar. What was unexpected was the sudden weight of memory that didn’t belong to him.

He knew full well that he’d never stood in a forest that looked anything like this one, populated by fairy-tale trees older than any tree had a right to be. Vines wrapped around their trunks; sheets of gray-green moss hung down over their branches. The undergrowth was thick and impenetrable, save for one path wending its way between the massive trunks. He caught himself expecting the sudden appearance of Ents.

Jared twisted his arm free of Vivian’s grip and began puking up his guts into some bushes. Zee watched without sympathy, entertaining the image of his sword at the man’s throat. One swift cut and whatever the asshole had done to hurt Vivian was avenged. Except that dead Jared was of absolutely no use to anybody, and it probably wasn’t fair to punish a man for what he’d done in his dreams, asshole or not.

“What is it?” Vivian asked, her hand on his arm, gray eyes wide with concern, and Zee realized that he had forgotten to hide his own distress.

“It feels like I’ve been here before; done things here before. But that isn’t possible.”

“The Warlord,” she said, matter-of-fact. “Your alter ego, as the Chancellor is Jared’s. He could have been here—I don’t think we’re far from Surmise.”

That made sense, and simply understanding the problem eased Zee’s discomfort. The Warlord was dead, so there should be no weird encounter of self with self, and his memories could be valuable.

“Which way do we go?” he asked. Surmise was off to the left, if memory served, but there was no path leading in that direction.

Vivian shook her head. “I don’t know. Paths shift all the time in the Between—every time somebody dreams a new dream, or an old dream dies.”

“Make it stop,” Jared said. “Please.” He looked like he was about to faint, his eyes taking on the dazed look of shock. “Something’s messing with my brain.”

“There is one Dreamworld we all know,” Vivian went on, not even looking at him. Her voice was very quiet, and Zee guessed where this was going with a jolt of apprehension.

When she turned to Jared, he held up both hands as though to ward off an evil. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’ve never been in any Dreamworld . . .”

“You’re lying. But it doesn’t matter. Think of a garden, Jared, one where there is a fountain, and a stone bench.”

He shook his head. “No—”

“If it helps, you can think about a penguin skewered on a sword. Maybe that will make you feel big and powerful and you won’t be so scared. Zee?” She grasped Jared’s limp hand in one of hers and held out the other.

“Got it,” Zee said. He’d expected her hand to be cold, but it burned with heat like fever. The pattern of scales had spread up her neck and touched her jaw. The golden eyes burned.

A sense of loss came over him for the gray-eyed girl who had slipped into his store a few weeks ago, pursued only by the wind, but there was no time, not now.

“Close your eyes,” she said, and it was a quiet command.

Zee waited for Jared to comply. Dreamworld or Wakeworld, he was an unreliable bastard who required watching.

An elbow in his ribs from Vivian reminded him to follow suit.

“Think about that garden, the fountain, whatever brings the place to mind.”

Zee closed his eyes, let himself slide into a memory of a place he had never been.

Darkness, with a red and bloated moon overhead. The garden had a light of its own, though, enough to see the blood on the stone bench, the bruise blossoming on Vivian’s cheek, the penguin lying dead in the grass. And in his own heart a mixture of rage and grief and shame that nearly sent him to his knees with the weight of actions both done and undone.

“Keep your eyes closed. Hold the focus.” A tug on his hand followed the words and he followed, walking blind, holding the image with both mind and soul. He felt the shift as they stepped through the door. Heard the splash of water on water from the fountain, smelled the roses.

Vivian let out a little gasp and her hand tightened convulsively. Zee’s eyes sprang open, all senses on alert.

For a moment everything was a muddled swirl of reality and dream that stole his breath. He knew he stood holding Vivian’s hand. Jared stood on the other side of her, and at their feet was a penguin, alive and well and making a hissing sound like a small steam engine.

In the garden, equally solid and real, lay a dead penguin and a man that looked like Jared, except that he had long hair and was dressed like a prince in a fairy tale. All strange and surreal, but it was the warrior in chain mail who threatened to derail Zee’s sanity. The man’s face, scarred by so many knife cuts it barely looked human, was inhabited by a pair of agate eyes that had looked back at Zee out of the mirror for thirty-five years.

Zee rubbed his eyes. The Warlord was dead. Had taken a knife meant for Vivian’s heart in his own. Even as he entertained this thought, the Warlord began to fade, growing wraithlike and insubstantial so that the fountain showed through him. Then he was gone. The dead penguin dissolved an instant later, but Gareth the Chancellor remained, all too solid, all too real.

Jared was puking again. This time Zee really didn’t blame him. At least with his own dead alter ego out of the way he was able to pull himself together enough to fight if necessary.

The Chancellor looked them all over with a condescending stare. “Well, this is interesting.”

“I hoped to find you here,” Vivian said. “I had no idea whether it would work—whether Jared’s vision of this place would summon you.”

“That’s his name? Jared? What is wrong with him?”

“Seeing you, I suspect. Being hit with memories of all of the things you have done.”

“Why don’t I have memories of the things he has done?”

“You do. Think of your dreams, Gareth.”

The man’s face altered.

Vivian seemed taller. The pattern of scales on her skin had deepened and darkened. Zee could feel waves of heat wafting off her. His nostrils caught a hint of hot, clean stone. Dragon. His heart beat the word with rage and hate. But this was Vivian, who hadn’t asked to be Dragon, or even Dreamshifter. He couldn’t stand by and watch what would follow if she changed; time after time he had seen it in dream, and always it tore the heart out of him.

She took a step toward the Chancellor.

He took a step back, his eyes wide.

“You killed my penguin, right here. You tried to rape me . . .”

“No,” Jared moaned, off to the side. “No, no. I didn’t. I wouldn’t. What is happening? I don’t understand . . .”

“You.” Vivian’s head turned in Jared’s direction, all predator now, even her body posture changing as the scales spread. Only an instant and it would be too late. “You dared—”

Zee stepped between her and the prey, put both hands on her shoulders, forced himself to look deep into eyes now soulless and hungry. “Vivian. Stay with me. Please.”

If she shifted, he would be dead, unless he killed her first. Three full breaths, and then recognition came into her eyes; the scales began to fade.

“Are you back?”

She nodded, laced her fingers with his, and gave Jared a look of pure contempt before turning back to the Chancellor. “Gareth,” she said, as if there had been no interruption, no threat of a dragon emerging from her body, “you helped me, in the end. You said you thought I was right that your counterpart was a better man. Do you remember?”

The Chancellor nodded, wary, keeping his distance.

“I’m offering you another opportunity. We’re looking for something you can help us find.”

“I can’t imagine what that would be.” Color had begun to return to his cheeks; he breathed more easily. His fingers toyed with something in his pocket.

“Of course you do,” Vivian said, her fingers tightening around Zee’s. “Where did you hide them?”

Zee put his free right hand to the sword hilt, ready for either one of the assholes to make a wrong move.

The Chancellor had his hand out of his pocket now, something hidden in the palm.
Dreamsphere.
Zee leaped into a full-scale tackle, his weight bearing the other man to the ground, preventing him from looking into the thing he held in his hand. As they hit the ground he jarred Gareth’s elbow against a stone. The fingers opened and a small crystal sphere rolled onto the grass.

Releasing Gareth, he secured the dreamsphere before it could do any harm, careful not to look at it. The Chancellor was no longer a threat—the blow to his elbow had crippled his right arm, which hung limp at an awkward angle. Through jaws clenched with pain Gareth said, “You can kill me, but I won’t tell you where to look.”

“What about if you tell her?” Zee gestured toward Vivian. “She’s got plenty of reason to hurt you without even thinking about what you’ve got hidden away.”

“I’m guessing this dreamsphere will take us to the general location,” Vivian said, taking the thing from Zee’s hand. “I suggest we start there.” She crossed the clearing and knelt beside Gareth. “Oh bother, you’ve gone and broken his arm.”

“It was an accident—” Zee couldn’t believe he was apologizing for hurting somebody who had done the things Gareth had done. Or that she was even worrying about the bastard’s health and well-being.

“We’ll have to splint it. We can’t drag him off into some Dreamworld with it flopping around like that. Here, hold the dreamsphere. Do not look at it. Understood?”

“If I do, I get sucked away into some dream somewhere?”

“Right. And I’m not sure how to find you.”

Zee tucked the thing into his pocket. He didn’t like the way it vibrated, as though it picked up some sort of signal he couldn’t hear. And he definitely didn’t like the idea of being pulled away into a world from which he might never return.

He watched as Vivian scoured the forest floor for what she needed, and came back with two straight sticks.

“What are you planning on doing?” Beads of sweat stood out on Gareth’s brow. “I don’t trust you . . .”

“She’s a doctor.” Jared spoke for the first time since they’d landed here. His face was pale, and his left hand was holding his own right arm as though it hurt him. “Let her fix it.” He sat down in the grass and let his head fall into both hands.

Still on high alert, Zee watched them all, watched the sky, the forest, the earth. Listened. Reached out with his senses. Something was out there. No sound, no movement, no flash of light or color. He caught a whiff of hot stone on the breeze and glanced at Vivian.

She was engaged in wrapping strips of fabric around the sticks to splint the arm of her enemy. No hint of the dragon there.

“We need to hurry,” he said, sniffing the air again, feeling an unease that could not be defined.

“Dragon,” Vivian said. “I feel it too. Jared, come over here. Zee, grab Poe.”

“Can you talk to it?”

She shook her head. Her eyes were wide and uncertain. “I—it’s blocking me. Join up. Let’s get out of here.”

Jared didn’t argue, probably scared spitless by all this talk of dragons. They all laid hands on Vivian, who was holding the dreamsphere. At the last minute the Chancellor tried to pull away. “I don’t want to do this. And if you make me, I won’t tell you where to look.”

“Maybe we can help you change your mind,” Zee growled. He was out of patience, had wanted nothing more than to give this man a good beating since the moment he’d laid eyes on him. Maybe now he had an excuse.

“It’s all right.” Jared’s voice shook a little, but his face was resolute. “I know where the things are hidden. I’ll show you.”