Dreamseeker (7 page)

She's watching me.

She's almost at the island, but she's not running any more. She's just standing on the water's surface, her eyes, narrow and dark, fixed on me. The message in them is clear:
how DARE you try to take control of my dream!
Slowly she raises both her hands, like a conductor signaling an orchestra to start, and I know in my gut that something very bad is about to happen. Is she going to try to unmake my land bridge? I prepare to defend it (however on earth you'd do that), but to my surprise, the dream-construct remains steady beneath my feet. That's not her target. The water surrounding me is beginning to move, however, and slowly it draws back from the shoreline, revealing the lake bottom. Fish are flopping helplessly in tiny pools as the receding tide leaves them stranded—

Oh, shit. I've seen too many disaster movies to not know what's happening. Or, more precisely, what's about to happen.

Desperately I look around for high ground. Or something I can climb. Or even something to hang on to, before the great
wave that she's summoning hits me like a giant flyswatter. But there's only the one low hill behind me, and even a small tsunami would sweep right over that.

No trees in sight.

No protection anywhere.

The water in the center of the lake is starting to rise up now, and a foam-capped ridge is taking shape that stretches from horizon to horizon, blocking the girl from my sight. I can't be sure of its position, but I can measure its rise as window after window of the strange citadel is hidden from my sight. The ground beneath my feet has started to tremble, and a cold wind gusts across my face. It's coming fast.

For one brief, crazy instant I want to stand my ground. I want her to see that her dream can't scare me off, no matter how scary she makes it. Maybe she'd respect such an effort and tell me what's going on.

Yeah. Right.

I need to wake myself up. Now.

Turning my attention inward, I reach out with my mind, trying to reconnect to the reality of my sleeping body. Waking up should be easy once that's done. But even as I begin to concentrate, the wave starts to transform. Color bleeds from it, the stormy blue water becomes a dull grey. The foam turns to white mist, then to smoke, then it's carried away on the wind. The wave itself starts to collapse, and row after row of windows become visible again as it falls back into the lake that spawned it.

Stunned, I hesitate.

I can see the girl now, and her expression is one of pure horror. She's staring at a point directly above the collapsed wave, where a wraith-like shadow has suddenly appeared. It's darker than any natural shadow would be, and its presence is so cold that even from where I stand I feel its chill. I sense that it has no substance in the normal meaning of the word, but
rather is a void, a gaping wound in the dreamscape into which all reality is draining.

It's heading straight toward her.

With a cry of terror, the girl begins to run to the island. She's hasn't got far to go, but the shadow-wraith is moving quickly, and in its wake the entire dream world seems to be dissolving. Beams of sunlight fade as if the wraith passes through them, the shining surface of the water grows dull beneath it, color bleeds from the sky and the clouds overhead, and even the sun dims as the wraith passes in front of it, its bright golden surface dulled to a muddy brown, its brilliant light all but extinguished.

I need to leave this nightmare now, before the horrific thing notices me. But hard as I try, I can't seem to wake myself up. That's really frightening. Ever since my visit to the other world I've been able to end my dreams at will, just by shifting my awareness to my sleeping body. The fact that I can't do so now suggests that the rules I've come to take for granted don't operate here.

I turn back the way I came and start running. Hopefully if I can get closer to the arch—closer to my own dreamscape—I'll be able to escape this nightmare.

But as I turn, it seems to notice me. And in that instant, as it pauses in mid-air deciding who to go after, I can sense the full scope of its horrific nature.

It is Death. It is Pain.

And it is hungry.

I flee from the terrible thing as an animal would flee, blind in my panic. All thoughts of exhaustion are gone now, all muscular weakness forgotten. I will run till the last ounce of strength leaves my body and I collapse, rather than let this thing touch me.

It's following me now. I know that because the world is transforming around me, reflecting its horrific nature. I run
through a field of poppies, but all the flowers are dead, motionless insects strewn like black snow across their browning petals. I run through an open meadow, but the grass has been eaten away to stumps, and corpses of fallen birds litter the ground as far as the eye can see. I run into a forest, but the ground is buried in fallen branches and rotting leaves, and the place is so putrid with the stench of decay that I can barely breathe.

The arch must be here somewhere. It must be! I have to find it before that thing catches up with me.

Suddenly my foot catches on something underneath the dead leaves. I'm falling—falling!—and I cry out in fear as I hit the ground. Color is draining out of the whole world now, leaving only shades of murky gray, which means the creature is close, very close. I roll over onto my back so that I can defend myself—but how does one defend against an incarnation of Death?

It's closer than I'd imagined, and though I can see nothing but shadow when I look directly at it, I can sense vast black wings spreading over me, blotting out the last vestiges of sunlight. Instinctively I raise up my arm to guard my eyes, and something sharp and cold rakes across it. The pain is like nothing I have ever felt before. I hear myself crying out in terror, and I try again to wake myself up. No luck. I'm trapped here.

A ghostly voice cries out my name in the distance. My mind is so paralyzed by fear that at first the sound doesn't register. The death-wraith is lunging at me again, and I roll to one side. The frigid claws pass so close to my face my cheek feels numb. What will happen to my waking mind if this thing kills me here? Will I ever wake up again?

Jesse!

This time I recognize the voice, and I feel a spark of hope. I focus myself body and soul on my brother's voice, using it as
a lifeline to connect me to the world of living things. Even as the death-wraith attacks me again I reach out for Tommy with all the strength that is left in my soul, trying to absorb his perspective into myself as he stands over my sleeping body—

“Jesse!”

I awoke gasping. My body was shaking violently, and I was sick from terror. But I was also home again, and that meant the creature was gone. Thank God.

My brother was kneeling on the bed, his hands on my shoulders. He'd been shaking me, trying to wake me up, and not until my eyes were fully open did he stop. “Are you okay?”

For a moment I had no words. I just lay there, drinking in reality. “Yeah,” I rasped at last. “I think so.”

“You were moaning in your sleep. I figured whatever dream was causing that, you'd want to wake up.”

I whispered, “Good instinct.” Then I asked, “Did anyone else hear me?”

He shook his head. “They're all asleep. I wasn't.” He paused. “It wasn't that loud, just . . . damn scary-sounding.”

“Damn right,” I muttered. “Thanks.”

What would have happened to me if my brother hadn't tried to wake me up? Would I have been trapped in that dream forever? I remembered the death-wraith, and I shuddered. At least it lacked the power to follow me here. The waking world was my refuge.

I tried to lever myself up to a sitting position. My muscles were sore, like I'd really been running for hours, and the upper part of my left arm stung fiercely. I winced and used my other arm to push myself upright. The sensations were just echoes of my dream, I knew, and they should fade soon.

“So what scared you so badly?” Tommy asked. “Can you talk about it?”

I sighed. I didn't feel up to telling the whole story right then, but
he deserved at least the bare bones of it. He might well have saved my life. “I ran into the avatar again. This time I followed her through a door, which led me into another dream, not one of mine . . . I think maybe it was her dream. Then a death-wraith appeared and the whole dream fell apart. It was attacking me when you woke me up.” I put my hand on my arm where the claws had torn my flesh—

And I froze.

“Jesse?”

There was pain in that spot. Way too much pain for a mere dream memory. The sleeve of my sleep shirt was warm and wet.

It was a dream,
I told myself.
Just a dream. I probably banged my arm against a bedpost while I was trying to wake up. Or something.

Slowly I pushed my sleeve up my arm, not wanting to see what was under it, but knowing I had to. The source of the blood turned out to be a jagged slash that ran diagonally across my arm. It wasn't deep, but blood was oozing out of it, and the surrounding flesh was red and swollen.

I think I was more afraid in that moment than I had been while the wraith was actually attacking me. Because however frightening that had been, it was just a dream. This . . . this was
real
.

It was my brother who found his voice first, and with it the perfect words for that moment.

“Holy crap,” he
muttered.

B
ERKELEY
S
PRINGS

W
EST
V
IRGINIA

J
ESSE

R
ITA ACCEPTED MY AUNT'S INVITATION
to stay with us a few days, and I was grateful for the company. She and I might come from different backgrounds, and have few interests in common, but once you faced death together those things didn't matter as much. And it was good to have another confidant in the house, who could look at my wound and hear the tale of how I got it, and reassure me that somehow everything would be okay. Yeah, Tommy was doing that, but it helped to hear it in stereo. Devon wasn't able to stay, but we convinced Dr. Tilford that the two of them should come back up for the show, in part by telling him we wouldn't be able to give him the glow lamp until then. Then Aunt Rose talked Dr. Tilford into staying the night, so that we could all watch the fireworks together without his having to drive for hours afterward.

So for a brief time, the world-travelers were reunited.

Rose's gallery was at the north end of town, in a converted 18th century mill. It had a waterwheel on one side, a millstone and grinding mechanism in the center of two open floors, and a vast expanse of parkland outside. According to the tourist pamphlets, the mill had
been grinding wheat back when George Washington came to soak in the town's famous hot springs, and I saw no reason to doubt that. These days there was no grain being processed, of course, but a different kind of harvest was being celebrated, that of local artists and craftsmen. Every weekend they displayed their work in small open spaces which were (for reasons that were a mystery to me) called “booths.” This weekend the place would be packed, every inch of it filled with paintings and pottery and hand-dyed silks and wood carvings . . . and my new painting.

Of course we had argued about who would be in Rose's booth with me, while we waited to see if Seyer would show up. Rita and Devon both wanted to be there for our meeting, and truth be told, it would have steadied my nerves to have them there. But I was afraid that too much of a crowd might scare Seyer off, and I didn't want to take any chances. In the end they had to settle for wandering around the old mill, perusing art displays with poorly feigned interest as they tried to look like legitimate tourists. Probably they wouldn't fool anyone, but at least it gave me room to breathe. As for Tommy, his coming to the show simply wasn't an option. If he really was hearing ghosts, I told him, the last thing he needed was to be in the presence of a Seer, whose job it was to identify kids with interesting powers and kidnap them for Terra Prime. He sulked a bit, but he didn't argue the point. He knew I was right.

My aunt was actually a talented potter, and her impressive work was displayed on wooden bookshelves six feet high, arranged to mark out the periphery of her booth on the second floor. She moved one bookshelf back a bit to make room for my display easel, but it was still a pretty tight fit. I hoped that when Seyer showed up we would be able to talk without Rose listening in on us.

If
Seyer showed up.

What was I going to say to her if she did? I'd tried to anticipate every possible avenue of conversation, as a mental exercise, but things like this never went the way you expected. I was just going to have to wing it.

The mill didn't have central air conditioning, so the exhibit space got warm pretty fast. I'd worn a long sleeved shirt to hide my dream-wound from Rose and Julian, so I was pretty damned uncomfortable. But at least the wound was healing normally. Despite Tommy's fears that I had become infected with death-wraith essence, and would slowly transform into a creature of darkness, that didn't seem to be happening. I joked with him about it—“This isn't
Lord of the Rings
, you know”—but in truth, I was pretty damned relieved.

Then Seyer arrived.

It was noon, and the place was a madhouse; I almost missed her. Devon spotted her first, and he signaled me from across the floor to draw my attention to her. She was dressed in her usual goth black, which was so out of place amidst the frothy summer crowd that once you noticed, she stood out like a sore thumb. My heart pounded as I watched her approach Rose's booth, but she was apparently in no hurry. At every booth she would stop to peruse its offerings, handling every glass necklace and walnut tissue box and raku vase as if it were a precious museum piece, whose every detail had to be studied before she could put it down. It was maddening, and no doubt quite deliberate. She was sending me a message:
Don't think that because I answered your summons, you are the one in control here.
What could I do? I tried to breathe deeply and pretend I didn't care if she came to Rose's booth or not. Let that be my message to her:
You can play whatever games you want, it's not going to shake me.

Finally she arrived at Rose's booth, and of course she studied every piece of pottery before coming to look at my painting. For a while she just stood there, gazing at the dark loops and whorls, and the temptation for me to say something was overwhelming. But I just waited. Let her make the first move.

My painting had two round shapes, one smaller than the other, that were woven together into a single mandala-like composition. Tentacle-like rays splayed out from the larger one, that divided again and again until the whole canvas was filled with tiny curling lines. At first glance the painting appeared more chaotic than my usual work—
no neat fractals in this one—but if you relaxed while viewing it, and didn't try to impose an artificial order upon it, you could sense a greater pattern underlying the chaos. You realized that the dual figure was reaching outward to surround all the other elements on the canvas, as if trying to ensnare them. Disturbingly, the ends of some of the tentacles were unclear, so that you couldn't be sure exactly where they ended, or whether or not they had made contact. A deadly net.

It was a fate portrait of Alia Morgana.

At last Seyer spoke. “It's darker than your previous work.”

I shrugged stiffly. “I've been into some dark stuff lately.”

She looked around the edges of the canvas. “I don't see a price tag. Or a ‘not for sale' notice.” She looked at me. “Does that mean you aren't sure if you want to sell it?”

“For the right buyer, I'd consider it.”

She glanced over at Rose, probably to assess how much privacy we had. But my aunt was busy with her customers at the moment, explaining the intricacies of raku pottery to a pair of tourists in Hawaiian shirts and Bermuda shorts. No one within ten feet was paying any attention to us.

Seyer turned back to me. As always, her thick black eyeliner and Cleopatra-style haircut lent her gaze an Egyptian flavor, like something you would see painted on the wall of a Pharaoh's tomb. “I'm guessing it's not money you're after.” She spoke very quietly.

I nodded. “Good guess.”

“Name your price, then.”

I could feel my hands trembling, and I put them behind my back where she couldn't see them.
Everything rides on this moment,
I thought. From across the room Rita and Devon were watching, having abandoned their pretense of being interested in art. I wondered if Seyer was aware of them.

Finally I said quietly, but with strength: “I want a Healer for my mother.”

Her eyes narrowed slightly. “For the damage she suffered from the fire?”

I kept my voice steady. “Yes.”

She sighed deeply. “I'm afraid you're asking for something I can't give you, Jessica.”

My heart sank. “Why not? I'm sure you have the connections needed to find a Healer. There are probably some on your Guild's payroll. Are you telling me—what?—that they won't Heal someone from my world? Is that it?”

I saw my aunt glance in our direction, and realized that my voice was rising in volume. I nodded reassuringly at her and drew in a deep breath, willing myself to be calm.

“It's not that simple,” Seyer said softly.

“Then explain it to me.”

She glanced at Rose again, then nodded toward the staircase. “Come. Walk outside with me.”

I hesitated, then told Rose I was going to leave for a few minutes to buy some apple fritters from a food truck outdoors. She asked me to bring her back a lemonade, and gave me money for both orders. Then she turned back to regale her customers with glorious tales about raku glazing, and we headed toward the stairs.

“Your mother isn't sick,” Seyer said as we walked. “She's
damaged
. There's a difference. A Healer works in harmony with the body, prompting it to do what it does naturally, only better. Their Gift can make bones knit faster, stimulate bone marrow to produce more blood, or even prompt the immune system to attack a cancerous tumor. Anything that a body has the natural capacity to do, a Healer can improve on. But your mother's brain has been damaged, Jessica. Neurons have died. That kind of cell doesn't regenerate naturally, which means that a Healer can't prompt it to do so.” As we reached the bottom of the staircase she stopped walking and looked at me; there was sympathy in her eyes. “I'm sorry.”

I felt like I'd been struck in the face. “You're lying,” I whispered.

“What reason would I have to do that? You have something that I want to purchase—something
her Grace
wants to purchase. I could bring in a Healer for you, and take your painting home with me in
return, and leave you to discover the truth after I was gone. Consider it a sign of respect that I'm being honest.” There was pity in her eyes now, and I hated her for it. “I'm really sorry, Jessica.”

We were heading outside now, to the area where the food vendors were hawking their wares. The smells of greasy meat, popcorn, and fritters breezed across the lawn. “So what now?” I had to fight to keep my voice steady. “Are you telling me there's no hope? That there's a whole universe full of people with fancy mental Gifts, and not one of them can help my mother?”

“Ah. I didn't say that. In fact there is one Guild that might be able to help you. But they're reclusive, pricey, and don't generally travel to other worlds doing favors for people.”

“Who?”

“We call them Potters. Fleshcrafters. Unlike Healers, they can force living flesh to do things it wouldn't do naturally. Sometimes that allows them to repair things that can't be healed.”

My breath caught in my throat. “They can cure my Mom?”

“
That
I can't promise. Few outside their Guild know exactly how their Gift works, or what its limits are. But I've heard about them taking on cases like this, so let's say . . . it might be possible.”

“Okay.” I nodded. “Okay. Then let's call that my price.”

“For the painting?” She smiled slightly.

“That's right.”

“You do value your work rather highly.”

“No, I don't. But
you
do, or you wouldn't be here.” When she didn't respond I pressed, “Am I wrong?”

She looked at me in silence, taking my measure. I tried to meet her gaze confidently, even though deep inside I felt the opposite of confident. Finally she said, “The Potters don't just hire out for odd jobs, Jessica. And there's nothing you possess that they would value in barter. You would need someone with enough personal influence to call in a favor from them, on your behalf. And given that you're talking about one of them travelling offworld, which they don't like to do, it
would be a significant favor.” She shook her head. “I just don't have that kind of influence. I'm sorry.”

I felt my heart sinking. No. No. I refused to give up. To be so close to an answer and yet have no way to make it happen . . . I refused to accept that. There had to be a way.

Suddenly I realized who could help me. Not that she
would
help me, necessarily. Or that I wanted to ask her for help. In fact, the mere thought of dealing with her made my blood run cold.

Alia Morgana.

She was the one who had ordered Seyer to spy on me. And had put Tommy's life in danger by lying to the Greys about him, telling them he was the Dreamwalker they were looking for. She was the type of person one should do everything possible to avoid. But what if she had the kind influence Seyer was talking about? What if she could help me hire a Fleshcrafter?

It took effort to force out the words. “What about Morgana?”

Seyer raised an eyebrow. “An intriguing suggestion. She's the one who's interested in your art, you know; I'm just her purchasing agent. And I suppose if anyone had enough sway with the Potters to do what you want, she does. But that would have its own price, you know. Apart from your painting.” She nodded back toward the building. “And she's not going to come to Terra Colonna just so you can bargain with her. You would need to go to her.”

Go back to Terra Prime.
I wave of vertigo came over me, like I was standing on the edge of an abyss, gazing down into a bottomless darkness, while the dirt beneath my feet crumbled away. But was the idea truly untenable? Seyer had once referred to me as Morgana's
project,
which suggested that the Guildmistress wanted something from me. I didn't know what it was yet, but maybe if I was face to face with her I could figure it out. Maybe I could leverage it for the favor I needed. Maybe I could do that and get home safely again.

Maybe.

“So,” I said slowly, “if in return for my painting I wanted passage
to and from your Guild headquarters—
safe
passage, door to door, with all the proper documents and clearances—and an audience with your Guildmistress . . . would that be a reasonable price?”

She smiled slightly. “I believe that would be within my budget.”

“And if I wanted to bring someone with me?”

Her expression darkened slightly. “I'll cover expenses for the ones who were with you before. No one else.”