Seven
Vivian lay flat on her back in bed, wide awake and staring at the ceiling.
Thank God she had the night off; she was in no condition to work. Her thoughts made her dizzy, alighting on one dilemma only to flitter away to another, forming connections that logic would have considered insane.
She’d finally realized, sitting in A to Zee Books, that all of the science and logic that she’d held to be true was built on false premises. Reality was no more real than dream, perhaps less so. Nothing was as it seemed, and this knowledge had hit her like a ton of bricks. She scarcely remembered making hasty excuses, fleeing from Zee and his dangerous eyes, half-running all the way home.
Maybe she would go back, tomorrow, and apologize to Zee. Maybe she wouldn’t. He was a disturbing and complicated piece of this puzzle, and she didn’t know how far she could trust him. Didn’t know that she could trust anybody.
It had been a restless afternoon and evening, her body at once weary and unable to rest. She’d cleaned and polished and organized, then called Isobel’s family home to check in. No, they still hadn’t heard anything. The police were looking. They would absolutely let her know the second they heard a word.
She called Sacred Heart to check on Brett. Still raving about penguins, still far too cold, still alive. She thought about making a call to find out how her grandfather had died and discovered that she didn’t want to know. She read through the will, carefully, forcing her distracted brain to focus and make sense of the convoluted phrases.
Just in case, she pulled up Google Maps and found directions to the cabin she had inherited. Maybe she should drive up there, maybe even tonight. But cell phone service was likely to be sketchy driving through the pass, and she needed to be available if the police found Isobel. Or if a detective ever called back to talk to her about Mr. Smoot.
At last she’d climbed into bed, hoping to sleep, but her thoughts refused to stop churning.
Beneath the anxiety caused by this sudden intrusion of the ineffable on her attempts to order her life, her worry over her mother and Brett and her failure in losing the globes to Jehenna so stupidly, a secret exultation began to grow. Her childhood belief that there were realities beyond this one, whole unexplored realms of space and time, began to reassert itself, as though all the years of unbelief had been the dream.
Little by little her mind quieted. She felt her body go easy, breathing slow and regular, heart pumping blood on a journey through arteries and arterioles and capillaries, then returning through the network of veins. A constant, smoothly repeating cycle as rhythmic as the movement of stars and planets beyond.
Never had she felt more awake and aware, tuned to a precise focus of attention that included the sounds of her body, the tiny noises made by the apartment at night, the humming of a quiet town outside her windows.
She came to understand that there was another sound. Not new, although she’d never noticed it before. It had always been there, beneath all of the other noise, but she had not been tuned to it. Now it drew her, and she stepped out of bed, slipped into sweatpants and her favorite big shirt, and padded out of her bedroom to investigate.
A stone wall stretched across her living room. High as the ceiling, it reached from wall to wall, intersecting the sofa right down the middle.
Surely this was a dream.
That was her first thought, but she felt too awake for a dream. Her hand sought out the pendant and found it. As she enclosed it in a fist, it pulsed against her fingers. The sound intensified, a low vibration matching the rhythm of the pendant. A rectangular shape appeared in the wall. A door.
Vivian approached, laid her hand against it, and gave a tentative push.
The door swung open. Instead of the rest of her apartment—the other half of the sofa, the computer desk, the window—a dark cavern lay before her. The entrance was illuminated feebly by the electric lights of her apartment, the rest of it an inky blackness into which she couldn’t see.
Behind her, warm light, an ordinary world. An instinct told her that if she turned away now, climbed back into bed and pulled the covers over her head, the wall and the cavern would be gone by morning. There was no need to take a single step into the unknown waiting for her.
Except for this: Isobel missing. Arden burned from the inside out. Brett freezing under the power of something unseen. These things could not be ignored, and neither could the reality of this dark chamber.
Clutching the pendant for courage and luck, Vivian entered the cavern. Her bare feet slid a little on smooth stone. The air smelled of minerals and eons of time. For an instant a whiff of something hot, there and gone. Over her shoulder she caught one more look at her apartment, neat, ordinary, familiar.
The door snapped shut.
Only then was she able to see what had not been visible before: filaments of light, winding about each other in a complex dance, chiming like rung crystal wherever they touched.
Too beautiful. Too intense. A glass must feel like this when the high note strikes it, in the instant before it shatters. It was impossible to move, to think, to do anything other than stand there as the woven symphony of light and sound vibrated through her body.
After a time she became aware that her feet were moving, following the play of light through the darkness.
Summoned.
The thought came to her from somewhere outside herself. This was no accident. This door had always been waiting for her, waiting for the moment when she was able to hear the call. With every step the lights grew brighter and more vibrant, the sound louder. Nothing existed outside the light and sound.
Until there was also heat.
A gentle warmth at first, radiating from ceiling, walls, floor, growing in intensity. And with it, a smell of hot rock, of a clean and smokeless burning, every step hotter and hotter until the heat became as vivid as the light and sound. Her clothing scorched and smoked. Holes appeared in her sweatpants, her shirt, blackened at the edges. The fabric disintegrated and fell away. Naked, she kept moving forward, through the ever-growing light, vibration, and heat. Her skin glowed, tingled, but she felt no pain.
At last, as though she had run into an invisible wall, she stumbled to a stop, both hands pressed over her eyes to shut out the blinding light.
“Hail, Dreamshifter,” a voice said. “Stand up straight. Let me have a look at you.” There was none of the compulsion inherent in Jehenna’s commands, but Vivian found the idea of disobeying improbable and foolhardy.
Her hands fell away from her eyes and she squared her shoulders and stood, naked, at the edge of a high-ceilinged chamber, perfectly round. Beginning at her feet, rising to a peak at the center, a heap of crystal spheres sent tendrils of light and color swirling into the room. These were also the source of the vibration, each one emitting a hum in a different key.
Curled at the top of the pile in a sinuous tangle of legs and tail and wings, an enormous creature—the source of the heat as the globes were the source of light and sound. Crimson, carmine, vermillion, with golden-green eyes so large the pupils were taller than she.
Dragon.
Don’t look at the eyes. A protective voice inside her head, memory maybe, warning.
Laughter from the dragon. “It won’t make a difference, the looking or not looking. You can’t escape me, Dreamshifter. I am your destiny.”
Vivian braced herself against the sensory overload, aware of a mind moving within her own. A silent battle waged between them as she resisted the intrusion, struggled for a way to shield her thoughts. The dragon snorted and spoke directly into her mind, soundless. “You waste your energy. Come—there is no need for words between us. Let me read you.”
“No.” Her voice breathless from the effort, Vivian managed to speak out loud. Something about this small act of defiance closed a shield around her; she could feel the searching intelligence looking for a way in, skimming the surface but unable to dip deeper. Even the vibration and the heat receded, muted by an invisible barrier.
“Hmmph.” The dragon’s eyes narrowed a little, like an offended cat. “So ineffective, the use of words. Imperfect. Imprecise. But if you insist.”
Vivian ignored the comment, ignored the weakness in her knees and the hammering of her heart. “Why have you summoned me?”
The dragon stretched out its long neck, head swinging from side to side. Again the questing mind moved against hers, but the boundary held. “You are a Dreamshifter. It is tradition that you should stand before me, once, at the beginning. How is it you do not know such a simple thing?”
“My grandfather died suddenly. He had no time—”
“Time, time. He had the time of all the worlds. What he wanted you to know, that he has told you.”
This fit with the cryptic notes. What Vivian really wanted to know was why, but she didn’t think that question would get her anywhere. Instead she asked, “What are you?”
Enormous wings unfurled at the question, diaphanous membrane, iridescent. They beat the air, creating a wind that threw Vivian to the floor of the cave, where she clung to the stone until it passed.
“I am the Guardian, mortal. Even this, he did not tell you?”
“I know only that I am now the Dreamshifter.”
The Guardian opened her mouth, and again a gust of wind rushed over Vivian, this time scented with hot rock and steam. The exhalation pushed her backward; the inhale sucked her forward, closer than she wanted to be, scraping her bare skin on the stone floor of the cave.
“Pah. You stink of sorcery.” The voice had a purring quality that sent shudders through Vivian’s body.
“I’m not a sorcerer. Sorceress. Whatever—”
“You’ve been touched by one.”
She opened her mouth to deny this when the realization struck. “Jehenna.”
Again the wings beat the air. “The Dream Weaver of Surmise. What do you know of her?”
“She came to me. She stole the crystals my grandfather gave me—”
At that a spurt of bright flame jetted toward Vivian and she buried her face in her arms, pressing her body flat against the stone as the heat passed over her. The great wings clapped three times in the air, a sound like thunder rolling through the cave. When Vivian dared to look up, she saw that the Guardian’s color had faded to a dark, dull brick. A tear welled up in one great eye and fell onto the heap of globes with a hiss and sizzle.
“Please—what are they?” Vivian asked. “What does it mean?”
“They are dreamspheres. Each one is the seed of a dream. If you hold the seed, you can enter the dream without passing through the Between.”
“So the Sorceress can walk into dreams? What harm can that do?”
“Harm? What harm? She will weave each dream into the Between, make it part of her Kingdom of Surmise. The dreamers will all be drawn into her web. And, Dreamshifter, understand—she can change the dream and twist it. Already she has done great evil, but with these?”
“I still don’t understand. If the globes are dangerous, why did my grandfather have them?”
A jet of blue flame flickered out of the enormous nostrils. “An ancient arrangement, a favor called in. Each new Dreamshifter is given one dream. As a gift, a talisman, a place in which to escape. They have held them over the years, passing them on from one to the next—you must get them back.”
Vivian’s stomach twisted; she tasted acid at the back of her throat. “I don’t even know how to begin. There must be somebody else, someone more powerful, more wise…”
“No one but you.” A heavy weight of finality marked the words. Vivian, always solitary, as both child and adult, had never felt so entirely alone, destined to pursue an impossible task through all the dream worlds and into the Between.
“Please—” she whispered, not even knowing what it was that she begged for.
“I will hold to the agreement—no other help will I give.”
“Tell me this, at least—what key is it that Jehenna seeks? Do you know?”
All color faded from the Guardian as she asked this question, leaving her black as night. “A thing that should have been destroyed.”
“What does it open? How do I stop her?”
“I have answered what I will. These things are not to be spoken.”
“But—”
“Enough!” A blast of fire passed over Vivian’s head.
“But I need your help.”
“I can tell you only this. If you fail in your trust, Wakeworld will go mad. Dreamworld will become a place of torment. As for the Between—” The dragon paused, sucked all of the air in the cavern into her lungs and expelled it in a gust of wind that rattled the crystal globes against each other in a vast chiming.
“Listen carefully. I promised one special boon to the last Dreamshifter. You are not to choose a dream at random—he left one for you. This is all the help I am able to give. Take it and go.”
The serpentine neck unwound and stretched a head the size of a small house toward Vivian, so close she could feel heat radiating from its skin. If the creature so much as snorted now, she would be incinerated. The mouth opened to reveal teeth longer than she was tall, each one glittering diamond bright. And there, lodged in a space between the front fangs, a tiny crystal sphere.
Vivian’s body shook. Her knees buckled, and she almost fell. With an act of will, she caught herself, forced her body forward one step at a time. The teeth loomed, a forest of diamond-tipped spears. Unable to breathe, the darkness beginning to close in around her vision, Vivian stretched her hand out and touched the sphere, trying to grasp it between thumb and forefinger. It was wet with dragon saliva, slippery, and the palsied trembling of her hands didn’t help.
She sensed impatience from the Guardian and willed more strength into her fingers. For an instant, just long enough, they steadied, and she lifted the crystal away from the sharp teeth and closed it into her fist.
“Done!” the Guardian cried out.
All the crystals chimed in one mighty chord.
As though someone had flipped a switch, the light went out. The Guardian and the cave had vanished. Silence was absolute. Stretching away in front of her, as far as her eyes could see, was a narrow high-ceilinged corridor lined with identical green doors, all closed. Behind her, the same corridor, the same doors. Backward or forward, stretching away into infinity. Only this and nothing else.
Her clothes had been incinerated and she stood, naked and shivering, not knowing what to do next. When her hand sought the pendant it was there, warm beneath her fingers. She clung to it as the only familiar thing left.
But even though it comforted her, it told her something else. This was not a dream. And if she wasn’t in Wakeworld or Dreamworld, then this had to be Between.