Between (10 page)
V
ivian was mopping up water and picking up broken glass and flowers when the full implications of Mr. Smoot’s murder finally reached her. On her knees in the middle of the wreckage, the fragrance of the bruised roses filling her senses, it occurred to her that the woman who had so easily walked out of her apartment carrying the box of crystal globes was very likely the same woman who had murdered Mr. Smoot.
Hands shaking so that it was hard to press the buttons, she dialed the phone number listed on the letterhead of her grandfather’s will and was not at all surprised when the secretary denied any knowledge of a Jehenna working for the firm. She called River Valley Family Home and was told there was no news to report. After a long hesitation, she looked up the number for the Spokane Police Department and told a bored-sounding receptionist that she might have information in the Smoot case. The receptionist thanked her for the call, took her number, and said a detective would be calling her back.
Vivian very much doubted this call would be happening anytime soon.
Her insides were shaking, an intolerable sensation that drove her to pacing the apartment, aimlessly picking things
up and putting them down. She considered trying to repair the broken dream catcher, but the hoop was crushed and fractured in a number of places and she set it aside. She turned on the TV and turned it off again. Sat down at her computer and opened Facebook and then closed it. There was nothing she could say and she was not interested in anybody else’s news at the moment.
She found herself wondering how her grandfather had died, and the thought that perhaps he also had been murdered threatened to push her over the edge and into hysterics.
“Get a grip,” she muttered to herself. “Do something useful.”
Her life with Isobel had provided plenty of practice at calming herself during anxiety-provoking moments, and she forced herself to run through the list of the tried-and-true. A few deep breaths. Some intentional muscle relaxation. Intellectual exercise to move her brain away from emotion and worry into the arena of logic and reason. There were new books to be read.
Wrapping a blanket around her shoulders to counteract the chills, she brewed a cup of tea and settled down to leaf through the volumes Zee had insisted on lending her.
A Practical Guide to Lucid Dreaming
was the first. The first few chapters described the practice; the rest of the book offered instructions on how to begin and develop the ability. This one she set aside—the idea of exercising some control was attractive, but her dreams were all too real already. The second was a scholarly tome,
A History of Dreaming
, with articles by psychologists from a variety of different approaches. Opinions ranged from Freud’s belief that all dreams were sexual in nature, to Jung’s theories of the collective unconscious, to the modern belief that dreams were meaningless artifacts of memory and experience. Book number three,
The Door
, was written by a psychic. Precognition, dream interpretation, all appealing topics but not something she could settle into. Not now.
The fourth book set her heart to racing.
The Dragon
Princess
. At first glance it looked like a picture-book fairy tale.
Another look made it clear this book was not for children.
The cover art was a strange and beautiful painting of a creature half woman, half dragon. The wings and tail and sinuous body, twined around the letters that made up the title of the book, were all dragon. The upper body—naked breasts and all—was pure woman, and the face and body were Vivian’s own.
The image jolted something loose that had been locked away deep inside her, a dream that she kept even from herself. No clear memory, only flashes of flight, wings, flames, and danger. A very strong compulsion urged her to get up and toss the book out a window. Instead, she exhaled between her teeth and opened it, to find that the whole book was written in a script now familiar, a spiky black hand that matched a certain note in her pocket.
THE DRAGON PRINCESS
In all the worlds, the Wanderer was alone.
Once there had been others, but one by one they had grown old, or fallen prey to monsters. Some had suffered the failing of the mind that came sometimes from walking through too many dreams. Others grew weary and returned to their homes to die.
His body didn’t change. As long as he kept moving, from dream to dream, the curse of age would not catch up with him. Half a century of adventure, and still he passed for a young man.
A responsibility came to him, now that the others were gone: to choose a mate, to make an heir to carry on. It had been impressed upon him, generation after generation, that he must choose wisely. Perhaps because of this, in one world after another, Dreamworld and Wakeworld and in Between, he had failed to find a woman he could love. Through one
door after another he passed, closing each one behind him with care, until he was drawn at last into Surmise.
Exactly what Surmise was he didn’t know, not then. When he walked through the door on that fateful day, he knew only that he stood upon mountains at sunset. Against a sky ablaze with crimson, the dragons were flying. Something about them spoke to the ache in his heart—the fierce, wild glide, the way each held itself apart, even while flying in formation. Tears glittered cold on his cheeks and he spread his arms wide, as though he, too, could fly.
A voice startled him.
“Good evening, Dreamshifter.”
She sat on a rock in the shadows. Little more than a child, he thought, seeing the thick cloud of auburn hair falling all the way to her waist, a face as open as a flower. Her eyebrows, uptilted slightly over hazel eyes, gave her a quizzical expression at odds with her air of assurance.
“I don’t know what you mean by that,” he’d said, as he was bound to do. There were secrets to be kept.
Sliding off the rock, she glided over to stand beside him and without hesitation slipped her hand into his. It was slightly cold and felt small and defenseless. He tucked both her hand and his into his pocket, wanting to warm it.
“Tell me,” she commanded, tilting her oval chin up to look into his eyes. Hers were extraordinarily clear, seemed to look directly into him and read what was so carefully hidden.
When he didn’t answer, she pulled her hand away. “You mustn’t lie to me. I am a princess.” It felt a loss to him, weary and heartsore as he was, as though her hand had already become a part of his, belonged here, curved inside his fingers.
“I can’t tell you,” he said. “Not now.”
The princess smiled for him, returning her hand to the warmth of his pocket. “You love the dragons, I can see,” she said, and he nodded. Words seemed distant and unreal,
in another world, through an endless series of doors that he could not begin to hope to reach. The dragons blurred before his eyes, doubling, trailing sparks.
After a lapse of time he became aware of her tugging at his arm. “This way. I know a place where you can rest.”
He followed her into a shallow cave. A nest of dry grasses provided a warm soft bed, and at her urging he lay down, allowing her to play with his hair and sing him off to sleep. A dream, it seemed to him, a matter he had not the power to resist. In the middle of the night, with sleep weighing him down, he woke to soft hands caressing his body, and without ever fully waking or opening his eyes he made love to the princess there in the cave.
A dream within a dream, he thought, waking much later to a dim gray light. A dangerous matter, but he had walked through many dreams and his mind had always brought him back, at last, to Wakeworld. Turning to his side, his hand fell onto her tumbled hair, along a rounded arm and onto her naked breast. She stirred and opened her eyes, smiling a slow smile. Her hand reached for him again, stroked his thigh, and he felt his flesh stir at her touch. He had been a long time alone.
“No,” he gasped, trapping the hand in his and holding it away, aghast at the thing that he had done. “I—am older than I look.”
A soft laugh greeted this remark. “I, too, am older than I look. Do you want to know my true age, Wanderer, or shall we keep these things a secret between us?” Before his eyes she changed, a woman grown, young, old, and in between, laughing all the while. “Tell me, if I do this—or this—shall you really tell me no?” And all of his objections were swept away in a rush of passion the like of which he had never known or imagined.
In all the worlds.
And since she knew already what he was, and what he did, bit by bit she coaxed the truth from him. Days later, when he was so far gone his thoughts were barely his own, she murmured into his ear, “Teach me.”
He laughed, and spoke the truth. “There are rules. I can teach only one person—one successor. My child, or my grandchild.”
“You have children then? Where are they?”
“No. I have no child.” Something stirred, a memory of why he had come, and what he was seeking. He put his arms around her and stroked her shining hair. “You might give me one, and I will teach him everything I know.”
She pushed him away, pouting. “Why must it be a matter of blood? I can learn—you know I can.”
It was too late to begin to resist her. He felt the danger, the coil of power she had wrapped around him. In that instant it occurred to him to wonder why she never took him down into the village, never had contact with another living soul. If she was a princess, why did she live in a cave at the top of the mountain, always within sight of the dragons? Where was her castle, her servants, where her kingdom? Dimly he recognized sorcery at work but found himself helpless before it.
“I promise to give you a child when you have taught me.”
When he thought of leaving her, it seemed to him that he must die. And he must have a child. Thus it was that he took her by the hand and led her through the door by which he had come into Surmise. And after that another. And another. He taught her all the ancient secrets, so that he might keep her ever by his side.
She kept her promise. Her belly began to swell as a child grew within. There came a day when she chose not to join him in his wandering. “It is time for the baby to come. I must rest.” He longed to stay with her, but she commanded him and he was not able to resist her will.
And so he went about his tasks alone—maintaining the doorways, as he had been taught, keeping them closed that the reality of one world might not flood into the reality of another.
When he returned to look for her, she was gone. The cave at the top of the mountains was empty. He asked after her in the town of Surmise but each time he asked, he saw
eyes wide with fear, and each and every citizen of that land denied any knowledge of a princess.
At last, an old man, tottering on his feet and with a beard down to his knees, responded to his question. “I have no fear. Am I not about to die? What can she do to me? You speak of the Sorceress, the Dragon Queen. No princess she. Time everlasting she has come and gone, grasping ever for more power. All of Surmise is her weaving.”
That was all. He would say no more.
Things began to go badly for the Wanderer. Doors would not stay closed. Madness spilled into one world after another as the doors to Dreamworld stood open, as one dream flowed into another, became a river of dream that flowed at last into Surmise. As fast as he could run he closed the doors, only to find them open again behind him.
Year followed year, a long and weary time. At long last, after traveling through door after door, always seeking, ever alone, he found her wandering in a meadow, a chain of flowers in her hair. She looked as she had when he first laid eyes on her, ever young, ever beautiful.
“Where is the child?” he asked, keeping a distance between them.
“She is safe.”
“You promised—”
“And I have kept my promise. I bore you a child. One last thing I would ask of you, beloved.” She crossed the distance between them and took one of his hands in hers. “I would see the key to the Forever.”
He pulled away, shaking his head. “No. That is the one thing I cannot show you.”
She kissed his lips, pleaded with her eyes. “You do not love me.”
“I do. More than my own soul, gods help me, and I have broken all the rules for you save this. This one line I will not cross.”
“Tell me then, if you cannot show me. About the key, and where it leads. And then I will take you to your daughter.”
All men sin, at need. The Wanderer was no exception. He was weary and alone and desired greatly to see his child. And so, he told her the thing of which he was never to speak.
The Sorceress smiled then. “She is in Surmise, as she has always been.”
“But I have looked for her there—”
She only smiled, and her smile told him how wrong he had been to tell her, and what he must do to try to set things right.
“There is something I have not yet shown you; come with me.” And she followed him through one dream, and into another, until at last he opened one final door and stepped aside.
“It is empty,” she said. “There is nothing there.”
“Ah, but if you stand at the center, it will be full of the greatest treasure.”
She laughed at his flattery and entered, always seeking to learn new secrets. Behind her back, before she could turn and lay a command on him, he closed the door behind her, and put a seal on it, meant to last for happily ever after.
He left her there and went away to do his work and to find his daughter. As for the Sorceress, she knew two things the Wanderer did not know, not then, though he learned them later to his great sorrow.
One, the blood of dragons ran through her veins, and as everybody knows, the magic of dragons can do what the magic of man does not understand.
Second, and perhaps most important of all, she knew the truth of Happily Ever After: that in all the worlds, no such thing exists, not even in a dream.
Vivian let the book fall closed in her lap, turning it upside down so the disturbing front cover was out of sight. She shivered, letting all of the implications of the story run through her. After a little while she got up and put on her coat. She put the book into the bag and carried it with her out through the door, locking it carefully behind her.