Dreamseeker Page 14

  The ritual was over at last. The circle was breaking up, Shadowlords coming up to the woman in red to congratulate her on a successful Binding. With a start, Isaac realized that his father was approaching him. As always, he could hear the moaning of spirits that surrounded the man, just as he could hear the voices of every other Shadowlord’s retinue. Now, for the first time in his life, he understood what prompted those sounds, and it sickened him. How many people had his father murdered, tormenting them to the edge of insanity so their ghosts could be dominated more easily? How many of the hundreds of spirits in this room had been initiated into servitude in the same way?

  Bile rose up in the back of Isaac’s throat as he looked at his father. Surely the Shadowlord had known about him and Jacob. Surely he knew that forcing him to watch the death of someone he knew would be like twisting a knife in his gut. That was why he’d invited him here. To test him. To torment him. To force him to be strong, in the way that only a madman should be strong.

  I don’t belong here, Isaac thought bitterly. I never will.

  A cold hand settled on his shoulder. “You did well, my son.”

  He bit his lip to keep from responding in anger. “I know what’s expected of me.”

  His father’s finger touched the underside of his chin, turning his head until their eyes met. Isaac gazed into the black eyes of his undead father—haunted eyes, chilling eyes—and tried not to shudder.

  You were human once, he thought. When did that change? If I continue in this training, will human compassion drain from me slowly, like the blood did from that boy? Or does First Communion cut it out of you suddenly, like a surgeon’s scalpel excising a malignant growth?

  “I’d like to go home now,” Isaac muttered. “Unless you have more to show me.”

  His father stepped back, clearing a path between him and the exit. Isaac headed toward it. He walked past the journeymen, who were chattering about how much they looked forward to mastering the mysteries of life and death. Past the Shadowlords and their retinues of wraiths. Whispers of pain surrounded him, soft moaning, an occasional cry of anguish . . . now he understood why the dead sounded like that. Now he knew what it really meant to be a Shadowlord.

  He managed to find a private spot, away from all the others, before he threw up.

  11

  BLACKWATER MOUNTAINS

  VIRGINIA PRIME

  JESSE

  THE LEAVES ON THE TREES were green.

  The underbrush was scraggly.

  The soil was brown.

  It was, on the whole, the most mundane, uninteresting stretch of woodland I’d ever seen.

  “So let me make sure I’ve got this right,” Rita said. “Morgana wants you to go to a creepy place and take a nap, and if something creepy happens to you during that nap, you tell her about it. Then we get to go home?”

  “Well, except for the fact that this place doesn’t seem very creepy . . . and we’re supposed to bring back whatever is causing the creepiness . . . yeah, that’s pretty much it.”

  “Okay. Just so we’re clear on the goal here.”

  I wasn’t sure what I’d expected to see at the site of an ancient Indian burial ground. Gravestones? Symbols carved into the ground? Restless spirits haunting the place, half-visible in the forest shadows? Whatever had been here in the past was long gone now, and had left no visible sign for tourists like us to discover.

  I sighed and thought, This isn’t going to be easy.

  We’d left Seyer behind at the last small town we’d passed through, a few miles back. She hadn’t wanted to split up, but I was resolute. There was no way I was going to test the limits of my dreaming Gift with a Seer watching me. In the end she’d reluctantly agreed, and gave me a fetter that would allow me to signal her when we were ready to leave. Which meant that Morgana had anticipated my request all along.

  Damn her.

  I had a pretty good sense of how to handle myself in the woods, the result of growing up with a regional forest in my backyard. And Morgana had given us a map of local landmarks, including a long mountain ridge that we could follow back to civilization if we had to, so I wasn’t worried about getting lost. Now, after a brisk morning hike, we were here, alone in the woods, able to do whatever we needed to do to search for Morgana’s mysterious object without being observed . . . with no clue how to start.

  “Let’s set up camp,” Rita suggested.

  So we did that, and since neither of us were experienced woodsmen (woodspeople?), it took a while. Then we searched the shallow again, looking for anything out of the ordinary. But there was nothing. Finally we gave up and came back to the camp to light a fire and break out the rations Morgana had given us.

  “Too bad Sebastian’s not here,” Rita said. “I bet he’d know all about shallows.”

  I bet he wouldn’t want to go near one, I thought. A place where he might hear echoes from his birthworld, near enough to be audible but forever out of reach. It would be torture.

  When it finally got dark I lay down on my bedroll and tried to go to sleep, but it was still too early for that, as far as my body was concerned. Fine by me. The fact that I’d agreed to open my mind to whatever powers were active here didn’t mean I was comfortable with the concept. Morgana wouldn’t have agreed to our price if she thought this task would be painless. Or safe.

  So I watched as stars crept slowly across the heavens and a slender moon appeared in the east, rising up against the black dome of the sky with agonizing reluctance. And I struggled to ignore the feeling of dread that was slowly consuming me, until finally—just when I thought I would go crazy if I had to stay awake one more minute—my body surrendered to the inevitable.

  I slept.

  The dreamscape is calm tonight, but ominously so. I can sense destructive energy seething behind it, masked by an illusion of peace.

  I envision the design that Morgana showed me, forcing my mind’s eye to see it in lines of gold against the black ground. I sense that it should connect to something—that it wants to connect to something—but the thing it seeks is not to be found here. The longer I study the pattern, the more I’m sure.

  We’re in the wrong place.

  I let the pattern fade from my mind and look around me, to see if the avatar girl is present. But she’s nowhere to be seen. Maybe I frightened her so badly when I took control of her dream that she won’t ever come back. Or maybe the dream-wraiths got to her after I left. My blood runs cold at the mere memory of them, and the wound on my arm starts to twitch. Whatever those horrific creatures are, they’re not subject to the normal limits of dreaming, and I pray I’ll never have to see one of them again. Especially now, when I’m trapped in a foreign world, with no brother to wake me up if things go bad.

  A wave of homesickness suddenly comes over me. The distance between me and my loved ones is so vast it might as well be infinite. My tie to my family, such a strong anchor during my first visit here, has been robbed of its power by my knowledge that in my current reality they don’t exist. Yes, somewhere in this vast ocean of probability there is a world where Tommy and Evelyn Drake are going about their daily lives, waiting for me to come home. But in this world, right here, right now, they are unreachable. My heart aches to connect with them, if only for a moment—

  Suddenly I’m standing in front of an archway, with no memory of how I got there. I sense that it’s meaningful, but I don’t know why. I put my hand on the arch, feeling its sharp crystal spines prick my fingertips. The doors in my dreams are usually impassable; only when I tackled the avatar girl was I able to cross through one of them. Could I enter this one, if I wanted to? It would be a dangerous thing to do, when I have no idea how or why I was summoned here, but I have to try, if only to learn more about how my Gift works.

  Warily I extend a hand into the arch, bracing myself for the moment when a metaphysical barrier will stop me. But nothing does. T
rembling slightly, I extend my arm full length and wiggle my fingers a bit. My hand feels cool and my fingers look misty and insubstantial, as if viewed through frosted glass. Have I reached into another world? Am I now half in one dream, half in another? Or is there some less exotic explanation for what I’m seeing?

  There’s only one way to find out.

  I concentrate long enough to manifest a large hunting knife. The weapon feels comfortable in my hand, reassuring. I manifest a gun as well, modeled on one of Uncle Julian’s pistols, but I leave it holstered for now. I’m not that sure I could hit a moving target, but I figure it’s good to have it with me just in case.

  Looking around one last time to make sure I’m still alone, I step forward.

  There’s no sense of transition; one moment I’m standing on the black plain, and the next, I’m on a windswept path running along the edge of a deep ravine. The sky overhead is a blue so intense it’s unreal, like the cobalt glow of a PC error message. In the distance I can see clouds gathering, and even as I watch lightning flashes suddenly, flooding the entire sky with blinding light. Thunder follows in its wake, rumbling overhead like angry surf. However far away the storm is, it’s a powerful one.

  As the afterimage of the lightning slowly fades, I can see that there’s a figure riding toward me, mounted on a white horse. Nervously, I glance back to make sure the arch is right behind me, just in case I need to make a run for it. It is. I can sense the same otherness in the rider that I did in the avatar girl, and I know instinctively that he is not part of my dreamscape, but from some place outside it. As he comes closer I can see that he’s a massive creature, heavily armored, with a sword as tall as a man harnessed across his back and an oversized crossbow clipped to his saddle. His mount isn’t a horse at all, but some kind of animal with two spiral horns jutting out of its head and glowing red embers in the place of eyes. If there’s a stable in Hell, this is what the Devil’s horses surely look like.

  As the monster warrior approaches me he draws his greatsword from its sheath, raising it high overhead, preparing to strike. Its edge flares molten white as lightning strikes again, and the long hair that flows out from underneath his helmet is white as well, unnaturally glossy.

  I should flee this place. Now. Every cell in my body is screaming for me to do that. But I find myself mesmerized, frozen in place by raw curiosity. In dreams I’ve looked in on hundreds of different worlds—thousands, perhaps—but all of them were similar to my own universe. Even the avatar’s dream-world started off looking normal. This place, on the other hand, is truly alien. I’ve never seen anything like it before.

  I want to understand where I am.

  I need to understand where I am.

  But suddenly he’s coming within striking range and my fascination gives way to pure survival instinct. I start back toward the portal—

  And he pulls up short. His mount squeals in frustration (definitely not an equine sound) and some gravel that was knocked loose by its hooves plummets down into the ravine. It falls for several long seconds before hitting bottom. Then there’s silence. My heart is pounding so hard the knife in my hand shakes, but I stand my ground. Waiting.

  One second. Two.

  The rider pushes up his visor. His face is pure white, unnaturally translucent, as if carved from alabaster. In the place of his eyes are glowing red embers, like those of his mount. There’s no way to read that inhuman expression.

  He stares at me for a moment, then says, “Jesse?”

  I open my mouth, but find that I’m speechless. Because the voice coming out of that ember-eyed demon is my little brother’s. That alabaster hulk is Tommy.

  “What’s going on?” he asks. “You don’t play this game.”

  Is it possible I’m really in my brother’s dream? True, I entered the avatar’s dream once—or at least I think I did—but that was different. I’d followed her from the black plain and used her to cross into her world. The concept that I might wind up in someone else’s dream without meaning to—and without someone leading me there—is both exhilarating and terrifying.

  This may not really be Tommy, I remind myself. I might just be dreaming that he’s in front of me.

  Whatever he is, he’s staring at me, waiting for my answer. He thinks this whole scene is real, I realize. I’ve gotten so used to lucid dreaming that I take it for granted. How do I get him to see that this setting isn’t real, and that he can control it? If you tell someone in a dream that he’s dreaming, is that enough to make him self-aware? It’s worth a try.

  “We’re in a dream,” I tell him.

  His eyes widen. “Seriously?”

  “Seriously.”

  “You mean, like, I’m really asleep in bed? Just making crap up in my head?”

  I nod. “That’s the idea.”

  “So, did I make you up, too? Or are you really here?”

  Isn’t that the question? Can Tommy and I really occupy the same dreamscape? Our bodies are in different worlds, and supposedly nothing can cross between the worlds but ghosts and Shadows—

  And dreams.

  Was it Isaac who talked about that, or Sebastian? Which one of them described to me how dreams can bleed from one world into the next, giving a sleeper access to sounds and images from another universe? Does that mean that in this dream state I can contact people in another world? The concept is dizzying in its implications. But how can you test such a thing? I shut my eyes for a moment, struggling to come up with an idea. Maybe if I share information with Tommy that he couldn’t possibly know otherwise, he can confirm it when he wakes up and know that our meeting was real. It won’t help me verify things at my end, but it’s a start. “You remember the flowered chair in the front room?” I ask him. “The one with the high back?”

  “Yeah. What about it?”

  “Go there when you wake up. Reach under the cushion, all the way to the back. There’s a crowbar I stashed there. No one else knows about it.”

  The glowing eyes blink. “Why on earth would you hide a crowbar under the chair?”

  “In case we need to break into Uncle Julian’s gun cabinet, of course.” I shrug, smiling slightly. “I figured something could happen where we might not have time to ask him for the key.”

  Suddenly I catch sight of something odd in the sky behind him. A small patch of blue is losing its color, turning from a bright shade to muddy grey. Like something is sucking the color right out of the sky.

  Panic floods my world. Everything else is forgotten.

  “You need to wake up!” Surely he can hear the fear in my voice and will do what I say. “RIGHT NOW! Don’t argue, don’t question me, just trust me and do it.”

  How far away is the dream-wraith? How fast can it move? I don’t want to stay here long enough to find out, but I can’t leave until I know Tommy is safe.

  He twists around in his saddle and looks at the grey patch in the sky. “Shit,” he mutters. “That’s not good.”

  The patch is getting closer now. The wraith is moving fast.

  He turns back to face me. The glowing embers are gone now; my brother’s eyes stare out at me, very human and very scared.

  “Your first aid kit,” he says. “Look in it when you wake up.”

  And then he’s gone.

  At which point his dream vanishes.

  And so do I.

  When I first awoke I was so disoriented I didn’t know where I was. I watched the sky in terror for what seemed like an eternity, waiting for the wraith to show up, but it never came. Slowly, very slowly, my heart quieted, and my breathing steadied. I remembered where I was, and I knew that I was awake and safe. At least for the moment.

  I got up as quietly as I could, not wanting to wake Rita. Crossing the campsite, I retrieved my backpack and moved off into the woods a bit, so I’d be less likely to wake her when I rummaged through it. When I looked back at h
er for the last time she was snoring gently, her eyelids twitching as she explored some dream of her own.

  The first aid kit was in the bottom of the bag, a small plastic box with a snap lid. My hand trembled as I took it out and popped it open. From fear? From excitement? My emotions were so mixed up at that moment I wasn’t sure what I was feeling.

  Under the bandages, next to the tube of antibiotic cream, was a flat item in a plastic wrapper. I held my breath as I pulled it out. Even in the near darkness I knew what it was: A toaster strudel.

  There was a note fastened to it with a rubber band. I didn’t have enough light to read by, so I took out the small flashlight from Dr. Tilford that we had charged earlier and turned my back to Rita so its bright beam wouldn’t wake her up. The last thing I wanted to deal with right now was her questions.

  I turned on the flashlight, unfolded the note and read it.

  I thought if you had to open this kit you might need some cheering up.

  Be strong.

  Tommy

  For a long, long time I just stared at that toaster strudel. Couldn’t think clearly. Just stared at it.

  I talked to him. I really talked to him. Across the worlds.

  The concept was so stunning that I had to reach out to a nearby tree to steady myself. I was shaking like a leaf and had to fumble to turn the flashlight off, so its beam would stop jerking all over the place.

  Everything in Terra Prime revolved around the fact that no one could communicate between worlds. Even the spirits of the dead, who crossed freely back and forth to carry messages, couldn’t exist in one reality and converse with ghosts in another. It just wasn’t possible. And the power of the Guild of Shadows was rooted in that fact, because they controlled the passage of messengers. The power of the Greys derived from theirs. Other Guilds were rooted in that system as well, all of them networking together to exploit that scientific fact for their advantage.