The dream began in the desert.
The wind was dry and cold. The sun was weak and bitter. Around me was a sea of sagebrush and there were brown rocky mountains not too far away. I was standing in a flat, open area, in the middle of a lifeless circle of hard dirt about a hundred feet across. The sagebrush grew right up to the edge and then stopped. There were buzzards circling overhead, but none of them would fly over the dead circle.
In the middle of the dead circle was a depression in the dirt. The frozen ground burned under my bare soles as I approached. It was as if the dirt had collapsed, revealing a sinkhole, but as I got closer, I could tell that this was no natural occurrence. Something had dug this place up. Rotten wooden braces shored up the edges of the hole, and a metal ladder, now mostly turned to rust, led down into the darkness.
Then I was at the bottom of the hole. A single shaft of sunlight, swimming with dust, followed me down. The shaft terminated where it was black and deep, and now there was metal beneath my feet. There was a hatch.
It had been sealed for a very long time.
Yet, there was something new. Metal had been exposed through the dust. Scratches. A design had been etched into the metal of the hatch. And as I watched, the scratches began to glow, growing brighter and more vivid in the darkness.
When recognition came, when I realized what the mark was, I bolted awake.
The last thing I remember from the dream was that stale air had come hissing out from around the hatch as the container had unsealed.
Julie found me on the balcony, staring at the gaudy lights of Las Vegas, wondering why I’d had a dream about the evil symbol my father had warned me about last year. She left the sliding glass door open and the air conditioning poured out behind her. Good old Vegas, middle of January and somehow it was eighty outside. She leaned on the balcony next to me and didn’t say anything for a time. Julie knew me too well. “You okay?” One gentle hand stroked my arm.
I glanced over. She was as beautiful as the day I’d met her. The breeze blew her long dark hair into her face, and she absently gathered a bunch of it and stuck it behind one ear. She’d left her glasses inside, which meant that she hadn’t joined me for the view. The city gave her a bit of a neon halo.
“Couldn’t sleep,” I answered simply. “Bad dream.”
“Bad dream…or bad dream?”
That was a fair question. I did have a bit of a history with that sort of thing; dark premonitions, ancient prophecies, other people’s memories, and that sort of thing, all as a result of my peculiar station I held in the order of the universe. It wasn’t exactly a picnic. “Normal kind.” I think. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Worrying comes with the territory when you’re married to someone like you. Can’t blame a girl for asking. So what was it?” she asked. I shook my head. “Come on…”
“There was this thing buried in a desert. Old, not ancient, but way older than us. It had a hatch like a submarine on it. I don’t know…something was living inside, but it was coming out. The mark that Dad drew for me, it had been scratched on there.”
A scowl crossed her perfect face. “You think it’s time?”
A year ago my father had finally told me about his past, about his mission, about the reason he’d been such a harsh taskmaster to his sons. He believed that his time was up a long time ago, his life miraculously returned, all so he could prepare one of his sons for something vital. He’d known something bad was coming for most of his life, the end of the world, he’d called it, and he’d done his best to make us ready. One of us had to die to save the world. The events since I’d joined MHI had confirmed to him that I was the one the mysterious Others had been waiting for. He’d told me that when that certain symbol began to appear, the time had come. The rest of his story was on a letter, sealed in an envelope, and locked in a safe, left there after I’d refused to read it. Dad sincerely believed that once I knew the whole story his life would end.
That was one hell of a burden to put on a son.
“Naw. Probably not. Just me worrying about stuff is all.”
“Your dad has been calling a lot lately.”
“He’s trying to get me to come for a friendly visit. We both know he’s going to ambush me somehow, trying to get me to ‘man up’ so he can get all self-righteous and die a proper martyr. Then I’m supposed to go all kamikaze on something to save the world again. I don’t think so…You know what pisses me off? He got shot in the head once and that makes him the expert? I do this for a living.”
Julie chuckled. “You know, most couples in their first year of marriage are talking about things like whether they should buy a house—”
“Which is why I married a chick who already owned a sweet mansion.”
My attempt at levity failed. “—Or if they should start having kids.”
That was a sad subject for us. I looked back at the city. “Yeah, well…” As long as Julie bore the Guardian’s mark, we were scared to even think about the possibility. We didn’t know exactly what they had done to her, besides keep her alive a few times when she should’ve died, but to what purpose? We knew so little about the Guardian, and the only other person we’d ever met with her same curse, the man that had shared it with her in fact, had been instantly skinned alive by a minor Old One when it had taken that power away. We didn’t dare risk passing that on to a child. “Hell. I don’t know. I just wanted to get some sleep.”
“You’re watching for a mystery symbol so you know when some new asshole intends to start the apocalypse, and I’m trying to learn how to get rid of these,” she rubbed the magical black marks on her neck, too hard. “And worrying about mystical Guardians and magical time-destroying artifacts, and what to do when Mom inevitably tries to murder us again. The most experienced Hunter we’ve got is preoccupied listening for rumors of a red werewolf, and we’re at a conference with the people that shut us down. A little insomnia is understandable.”
I put my arm over her shoulders and pulled Julie in close. “I do love how you always manage to look at the bright side of things.”
We stood there together for a time, me looking at the pretty flashing casino lights and Julie looking at what I could only assume from the strength of her prescription as a bunch of colorful blurs. Regardless of how strange our life was, as long as we had each other, everything was going to be fine. “It’s four o’clock in the morning. I’m going back to bed,” she finally told me. “Registration starts at nine.”
“I don’t think I can fall back to sleep just yet.”
“I said I was going back to bed, not back to sleep.” Julie grabbed a handful of my shirt and pulled me along. “Sleep is for quitters.”