Fifteen
Dreamworld.
Vivian was clear on this. She stood at the center of a garden, bounded on all four sides by an overgrown hedge, ten feet tall and impenetrable. An old maple, scarlet and gold, draped its branches over a wooden bench, half buried in a drift of leaves. Dead, dry flower stalks poked up out of the grass, brown and skeletal. A ray of sun broke through a mass of clouds and warmed her skin and hair, an intense physical pleasure that felt too real for dream. She raised her face to the sky, breathing in the scent of fallen leaves and earth. Poe waddled about, poking his beak into the leaves, exploring.
When the fear came, she felt it as a gradually expanding fracture line, slight at first, but growing. Light and shadow flickered on the hedge, artifacts of a breeze moving the branches of the sheltering tree. A leaf drifted down and landed at her feet. All peaceful, all serene.
But her heart thudded against her ribs with a logic of its own. The penguin stopped exploring and pressed against her leg, feathers puffed and ruffled. Vivian dug in her pockets for the stiletto, then remembered that it was lost.
Something white caught her eye, half-buried in a pile of crimson leaves. Flies buzzed around it; a sweet, cloying stink filled her nostrils. Reluctant, but compelled, she knelt and uncovered the thing. A hand, dead white, bloodless. It lay palm up, the fingers slightly curved, a delicate woman’s hand. On the fourth finger a familiar diamond ring.
Paralyzed, she knelt there in a heap of bloodred leaves, trying to scream and unable to make a sound.
A rustling in the hedge drew her eyes. Branches shivered and shook.
With a supreme effort of will she staggered up onto her feet. A wooden gate, braced with black iron, appeared in the hedge at the far side of the clearing. She tried to run toward it, but her legs felt weighted and the earth softened beneath her, sucking her down. Her right foot sank into deep mud, throwing her forward on her hands and knees. Clammy cold seeped through her jeans into her knees; her fingers scrabbled in loose, wet earth, unable to find purchase.
All the while the thing behind the hedge tried to force its way into the courtyard. She could hear it breathing now, caught a whiff of hot rock and mineral over the odor of leaves and dirt and corruption. Pulling, kicking, digging her fingernails into the sod, she dragged herself forward inch by inch, until her foot pulled free at last with a sucking sound. Half-running, half-crawling, she made it to the gate, curled her fingers around the cold iron, and pulled herself back to her feet.
The iron shifted and changed beneath her fingers, became a wooden door. It was locked.
Overcome by panic, she rattled the knob and beat on it with her fists. She tried again to scream, but still no voice would come. Poe pressed up against her leg. Warmth flowed out of him and into her, and she remembered.
I am the Dreamshifter.
“Open,” she said, trying to infuse some authority into a voice that came out as a barely audible croak. But the lock clicked at the command. She turned the knob and the door swung open.
Behind her the pursuing fear, before her a small clearing, surrounded by old-growth forest, dense and grim. Sun slanted across the tops of the trees, but the ground was all in shadow. She stood there, hesitating, fearing to flee from one danger into another.
Poe darted past her, through the doorway and into the clearing, and that decided it. Vivian followed. When she turned to look behind her, there was no sign of either door or hedge.
Between. She could feel the winding threads of dream and waking even before her hand reached for and found the pendant. Her eyes searched out the pathway that would lead into the inevitable maze and found it on the far side of the clearing.
There would be dragons. Even if she had managed to leave behind the creature that had pursued her through the dream, there would be others. Her back itched, as though eyes were staring from out of the undergrowth, but when she looked she saw nothing more than the trees, dense and old, branches bearded with gray moss. Thorn bushes and foreign plants filled the space between their trunks.
She knelt in the cool grass beside Poe and stroked his feathers. His black eyes fixed on hers. “I don’t suppose you know what we’re meant to do next.” She spoke aloud to bolster her own courage, but her voice sounded very small and vulnerable, and it seemed that the trees were listening.
He cocked his head to one side, staring in silence as he always did.
Vivian sighed. “Great help you are. Well, come on then. Since we’re here, let’s see if we can find Surmise.”
The path was little more than a game trail, rough and narrow. Brambles tore at her jeans, branches slapped at her face, and fallen logs blocked the way, forcing her at times to work her way around through nearly impassable undergrowth. As she’d anticipated, it wound around and twisted in on itself, spinning side trails off into different directions. By the time the sun had traveled across the sky, darkening the forest to a twilight gloom, she knew she would never be able to find her way back to the clearing where she had started.
Once or twice she heard branches cracking in the distance and stopped with her heart in her throat to listen. Nothing but birds, a chirping that must be crickets or frogs, the sound of wind in the treetops. They had moved deeper into the forest, and she began to feel that they would be trapped at the center, imprisoned. The air grew increasingly more oppressive; the trees looked older and stranger. Poe waddled along behind her, ever silent, ever present.
There was no way of judging time or distance, but she guessed they’d been walking for a couple of hours before they came across the stream. Poe flung himself into the water in a belly flop that sent water spraying in all directions. Vivian knelt and splashed cool water over her face. She was thirsty. Her memory insisted on supplying images of bacteria and amoebae as seen through a microscope. Teeny little creatures lurking in the water, just waiting to cause diarrhea and vomiting to anybody stupid enough to drink. Not quite that thirsty yet, although soon she would be.
Leaving Poe to play, and hopefully find himself a frog or a minnow, she sat down on a fallen log to rest. She was bone weary, and it was so quiet. Undisturbed by people, unbothered by time, her mind drifted a little, from trees to birds to fairy tales.
When the first branch cracked in the distance, she thought it just another forest sound. A bird squawked. And then the woods went silent. Poe bellied out of the water, shook himself, and stared off into the trees.
Vivian found she was holding her breath and had risen to her feet without thought or intent.
In the forest, something lurked. Something she could feel in her blood, in the rapid beating of her heart, in every fluttering breath. This is how the mouse feels when the cat is hunting.
Without ever making the decision she found herself running, half blind, crazed with an unreasoning terror. The path became a tunnel, roofed by low-hanging branches; then the tunnel became a funnel, one of those pens built to drive cattle into a pen, to meet the branding iron or the butcher.
She tried to stop her legs, to think, to plan, but she kept running, despite the pain in her chest and her side, the gasping agony of her breath, the aching heaviness of legs pushed past endurance.
Poe.
She looked back over her shoulder. No penguin.
Damn it.
Her legs stopped their frenetic pumping. She turned full around and retraced her steps, hands pressed to her aching sides, sucking in air in great burning gulps. Poe came around a corner at full speed, short legs churning, neck stretched forward, useless wings outspread. When he saw her, he emitted a pitiful little quawrk and ran full tilt into her legs, quivering, feathers ruffled, beak open and gasping.
A new sound now, in the distance. No mere breaking of twigs, but a cracking of branches. Treetops swayed, but there was no wind.
Vivian’s feet were glued to the path, bones turned to jelly. She was doomed to cower here like a frightened rabbit and let the thing get her.
No, you’re not.
Scooping the penguin up into her arms, she got herself moving again. This time she pushed her way off the path, forcing her way through a wall of undergrowth that scratched and tore and resisted her. She came to a barrier that wouldn’t let her through, solid interlaced thorns. Behind her a swath of swaying and falling treetops moved in her direction, a crashing and dragging growing ever closer.
Poe struggled in her arms, pecking at her hand. She released him and he dove forward onto his belly, wriggling through a gap, low in the tangle of thorns. Clumps of feathers caught on the branches, but he vanished from her sight and she flung herself down and followed.
Barbs tore at her shirt and into her back; she felt the sting, the wetness of blood, but she was moving through the barrier, grass and dirt cool beneath her hands, fingers digging down into the soil for traction, elbows pressed close to her sides. It seemed to last forever; wriggle forward, dig with her fingers, pull, push with her toes. Again and again, until her fingernails were bleeding and her back burned and bled.
When she broke through the other side, the wood had changed.
Here the trees were even taller. The tops of them formed a canopy that shut out the sky. As compensation for the gloom, the forest floor was relatively clear. No more thorn bushes, no brambles.
No more maze.
Something was wrong about this. All of her experiences with the Between had involved some sort of winding pathway or tunnel or corridor. But the pendant still hung around her neck, assurance that they hadn’t passed back into a dream, and this sure as hell wasn’t Wakeworld. Uneasy, she turned in a full circle, looking for any signs of danger. So far, there was no sign of a pursuit, nothing visible that was cause for alarm.
Poe huddled at her feet, running his beak through his feathers, nuzzling, preening. A smear of red marked his breast. Vivian knelt beside him. “Let me look,” she said, and he stood still and let her examine the gash in his chest. It was jagged but shallow. Should heal up all right, although she wished she had something to use as a disinfectant.
With no path to follow, Vivian struck out in the direction she hoped led away from their pursuer. The greater the distance they could put between themselves and the dragon, the better. It would have a hard time here, if it was of the size she thought it. Most of the trees were too big to push over, close enough together to hamper its progress. Birds twittered and chirped. A woodpecker pounded away at a nearby tree. Peaceful as it seemed, Vivian kept walking, still driven by a sense of ever-present danger.
At last she felt she couldn’t take another step. Exhausted, she sank down to the earth with her back against a sturdy tree trunk. The scratches ached and throbbed, but she couldn’t reach them, could only tolerate the pain and be grateful she lived to feel it. Poe settled down beside her.
Bees buzzed around a flowering bush. A squirrel scolded off in the distance. Vivian’s nostrils filled with the scent of moss and earth, the bark of the tree. Under these calming influences her breathing slowed and deepened, her mind drifting close to the edges of sleep.
A sound startled her awake.
Not a dragon this time. Male voices, the creak of leather, the cracking of twigs. A horse whickered. Perhaps the voices meant rescue. Or not. It didn’t really matter—there was nowhere left to run.