The Last Dream Keeper (5 page)

Whoa,
Lizbeth thought, unprepared for the transformation—and, if she was being honest, for the fact that this man was the handsomest thing she'd ever laid eyes on.

“Mwahahaha!” the Dragon-man crowed, dancing in a circle in front of her, his long arms and legs swinging like a whirling dervish as the long, green leather coat he wore flapped around him. “Tell me what you really think? Handsomest thing ever, eh?”

Lizbeth felt her cheeks flush pink. She had to remember this
thing/creature/man
could read her thoughts. Otherwise she was just going to keep embarrassing herself.

“You're not so bad for a half-caste mute yourself,” the man said, arching one black brow in a charming—and very flirtatious—manner.

Half-caste?
Lizbeth thought, not understanding.
What does that mean?

The man stopped shifting back and forth on the balls of his feet and clasped both hands behind his back.

“Ah,” he said, nodding thoughtfully. “I forget so many of you don't know a thing about your heritage.”

Our heritage?
Lizbeth echoed in her thoughts.

“You call yourselves Dream Walkers/Dream Keepers . . . or something just as silly. That's humans for ya.”

Lizbeth was feeling even more confused now.

I don't understand,
Lizbeth thought.

The man unclasped his hands so he could scratch the tip of his Roman nose, and Lizbeth saw very long and delicate fingers, the kind one often found on a musician—

“Magician, actually,” the man said and grinned down at her. Always the tallest person in a room—except for Weir, whose height made her look demure—Lizbeth was unused to someone towering over her. “And the name is Temistocles—sounds like Tim.”

Temistocles offered her his hand, which was so huge it eclipsed her own.

I'm Lizbeth,
Lizbeth thought.
And explain what you meant before. What's a half-caste?

Temistocles looked up at the sky and frowned. Above them the dark clouds bunched together into a thick mass, their fluffy bodies braided so tightly the sky was almost impossible to see. Lizbeth felt a cold chill start at the nape of her neck and travel down the length of her spine. She decided it had more to do with the malevolent look of the clouds and sky than the actual temperature.

“You can't stay much longer,” Temistocles said, a thread of worry woven through his words. Then he changed his tone and grinned at
her: “Half-caste means one of your parents was a normal Earth human and the other . . . well, the other is like me. A creature from another dimension—”

Are we in another dimension now?
Lizbeth thought, the idea popping into her head without warning.
Is that what dreams are? Other dimensions?

Temistocles smiled at her, seemingly pleased by the way her brain worked.

“You are a clever one, indeed. Dreams are their own dimension,” Temistocles said, eyes still clocking the trajectory of the clouds above them. “Anyone can enter the dreamlands, but the majority of visitors don't remember their time here. Just a little quirk in their wiring, I guess.”

Where do you come from?
Lizbeth thought, curious to discover more about the strange man.

“That's for another conversation. But, suffice it to say, I didn't possess a mastery over the dreamlands—”

A mastery?
she thought.
Over what?

“What I mean is that I didn't have the ability to manipulate things here in the dreamlands until I was dead.”

Lizbeth's heart caught in her throat.

You're dead? But . . . you seem so alive!
she thought.

With an abrupt snort, Temistocles turned away from her, green coat swinging. He was already on the move before Lizbeth realized he was going. When she didn't immediately follow him, he turned around and rolled his eyes at her.

“Come on,” he said, gesturing with a long finger. “I have to give you your present before they get here.”

They?
Lizbeth asked, but Temistocles was even farther away from her now. Afraid to lose him inside the thicket of trees bordering the space where the Dragon rock had once stood, she began to jog after him.

“Pick up the pace!” Temistocles called over his shoulder, his eyes searching out her own. There was a darkness there, in the hollows of his face and behind his pale gray eyes—and all Lizbeth wanted to do was reach out and soothe his worries away.

“Stop trying to mentally mother me, mute child,” Temistocles yelled back at her, but there was an amused tone in his voice.

Lizbeth caught up to him but was now too mortified to look him in the eye. Instead, they traipsed through the darkening woods together, Lizbeth hyperaware of her new friend's nearness but trying desperately to pretend he wasn't there—she didn't need to embarrass herself further.

They were no longer in the dreamlands version of Elysian Park. Somewhere they'd taken an unexpected turn and ended up in a much more wicked place. The trees, tall white birches with peeling gray bark, shot straight up to the heavens. There, they came together in a massive canopy that blocked out any sunlight stupid enough to try and reach the forest floor. The smell of the place was rich and loamy, but with an undertone of decay that tickled the back of Lizbeth's throat.

She'd experienced lots of strange things and places when she was dreaming, but Temistocles and this odd forest were the creepiest of them, by far. Plus, realizing that dreams existed in an alternate universe . . . well, that was a bit creepy, too.

I'm not scared,
Lizbeth thought, her long legs carrying her deeper into the spooky environs of the birch forest.

“You should be,” Temistocles whispered, and then he reached out and took her hand.

She had all of two seconds to register she was being touched—and by whom—before Temistocles threw her to the ground with enough force that she had no option but to comply. She cried out in pain as her ankle twisted beneath her, but Temistocles was already on top of her, covering her mouth with his hand, shushing her. Fear wrapped around Lizbeth like a blanket, smothering her. Her breath, what little of it she could catch with Temistocles's hand over her mouth and his body pressing against her, came in shallow staccato bursts that made her light-headed.

—They're coming. Be bloody quiet.

Temistocles was in her head again, but instead of it feeling like a violation, it was strangely intimate. Like he was bypassing her skull and whispering into the folds of her brain. She shivered, but the heat
and nearness of Temistocles's body was a good antidote to the terror she was feeling.

Who are “they”?
she thought.

—The Flood. The bad guys, as you humans like to say. Always looking to put things in perfect little black-and-white boxes.

There was a tremendous crash above them, and then the rush of running water filled Lizbeth's ears.

What the—
Lizbeth started to think, but then Temistocles removed his hand from her mouth and leaned down, pressing his lips to her ear.

“You'll wake up with the book in your hands. Hold on to it tightly, my little half-caste love,” he whispered before covering her mouth with his lips.

The rush of water, metric tons of the freezing stuff, hit them both at once—that and the kiss taking Lizbeth's breath away.

Temistocles?!
she thought frantically.

—We will meet again. I promise you that.

Lizbeth opened her eyes to find she was underwater. She could see nothing for the moment . . . but then something bone white caught her attention and she screamed, water filling her mouth and lungs.

She was holding on to a skeleton. One clothed in a long, green leather coat.

*   *   *

Lizbeth woke from the nightmare feeling trapped, her mind spinning faster and faster as it tried to come up with a way to escape the lockdown her body had begun in its sleep.

I will not have an episode,
she thought, anger shooting through her.

It was as if there were two parts of her, both acting of their own accord. Her brain was cognizant of everything and wanted to stay engaged in the real world—
save me from the dreamlands, where poor Temistocles is only a skeleton
—while at the first sign of trouble, her body battened down the hatches and went into survival mode.

This problem had started when she was a small child. Not long after her mother died. Now just thinking about the time “before,” when her beautiful young mother had loved and protected her, made her shut down. It was hard to believe, but somehow the good memories were more difficult to handle than the bad ones.

No, you can't hide the past away anymore,
Lizbeth thought.
If you want to stop all of this and break the cycle, then you have to remember. You have to embrace the good times. Own them and break the spell they hold over you.

Remembering was so painful she could hardly stand it. But to remember her mother, and the good life she'd had before the institution, was the most important thing—

This was when reality intruded, and she felt Daniela's bare hand hovering inches above her face.

A
rrabelle woke late, dark dreams dogging her sleep. She felt unrested, her brain lost in a fog, eyes bleary. The last few weeks had been painful for her. So hard to process that she found her dreams doing the bulk of the lifting. Because when it came to rebalancing her emotional state, she just couldn't bear to deal with it in her waking hours.

All her life she'd prided herself on being immune to emotions. Not that she didn't feel them—she did—she just didn't let them control her life or influence how she saw the world. But ever since Eleanora's death, her ability to remain calm in any situation had begun to unravel.

It started with small things. Like burning her hand on her espresso maker and knocking its aluminum pot over in anger, or dropping a carton of milk onto the tiled floor, or stubbing her toe on the leg of the kitchen table and crumpling to the ground in tears.

It was adolescent angst behavior. Not at all appropriate for an adult woman. But she found she couldn't help herself. She was a pot boiling over on the stove, a totally out-of-control
emotional wreck—and the poor sleep she was getting didn't help things.

Still groggy, she pushed the thick brown duvet away from her body and climbed out of the king-sized teak bed. She slid her feet into a pair of soft slippers then pulled on her powder-blue chenille bathrobe, letting the plush fabric enfold her in its warmth. She walked over to the vanity and sat down to stare at her face.

She looked awful. Hungover even. Her usually handsome features were drawn, the ebony skin too taut over the razor-sharp cheekbones she'd inherited from her mother—who was now only a faded memory, having died when Arrabelle was four. Leaving the curious little girl behind so she had been raised by a loving, yet eccentric, physician father and a revolving door of nannies.

“Who are you?” Arrabelle asked the image in the mirror, but if she expected a reply, she was disappointed. The tired-looking woman in the glass did not answer.

She left the vanity and dragged herself to the bathroom, where she brushed her teeth and washed her face, slathering on moisturizer. This was the same ritual she'd performed for years, eschewing makeup and the other accoutrements of femininity because she was just too damn busy doing other things. Worrying about what she looked like did not rate high on her priority list.

The late-morning light filtered through the living room windows as Arrabelle made her way to the kitchen for her morning coffee. Unlike makeup, espresso rated high on that priority list, and she was no good to anyone before she'd had her first shot of the day.

After decades of living among the detritus of her father's folk art collection, Arrabelle had become almost immune to the West African and South Asian ceremonial masks and ornamental sculptures that decorated her living room—but not quite. Somehow these same collectibles seemed apropos to their environment when they resided in her father's dilapidated
old row house in San Francisco, but here in the Southern California sunshine there was something macabre about them.

Their brightly colored faces followed her, eyes ogling her back. Her slippers made no sound on the hard surface of the living room floor, no echoing footfalls to carom off the cathedral post-and-beam ceiling. She'd bought the house for its good bone structure, but she'd ended up redoing the whole space, shaping it into a modernist version of a wooden cabin—large plate-glass windows juxtaposed against the original, more traditional, wooden structure. It was an impressive bit of architecture, something she was proud of creating.

Still, her father's collection felt strange in the space, like a flea-ridden squatter hiding out in the palatial expanses of Versailles. All those faces watching and whispering from their spots on the wall, their gazes malevolent and hostile. Even the benign ones—the smiling masks with wide eyes and grinning mouths, or the animal avatars with their paintwork stripes and spots and fur.

And then there were the vertical-eyed monsters with serrated teeth and pointed tongues, the plain wooden masks that seemed like blank slates ready to take on the emotional state of whatever shaman wore them. For some reason, their expressionless faces terrified Arrabelle the most.

She didn't think of herself as easily upset, but more and more she found she averted her eyes when she had to go through the room.

. . . Bella boo . . .

The words flowed around her as though someone were whispering them inside her head, the imagined fluttering of lips and teeth making Arrabelle shiver.

. . . Bella baby child . . .

Her body went rigid, feet stopping her in place. She felt like a bug trapped in amber in the middle of the living room. All the hair on her body stood on end; the voice—and the words it spoke—was not something she'd heard for a very, very long time.

. . . Bella baby . . .

It was her dead mother's voice, calling out the pet name she'd used when Arrabelle was a small child. After that, no one had ever called her Bella. The truncated version of her given name had been buried along with her mother's bones, never to be resurrected.

Until now.

“Maman?”
Arrabelle called out—the urge to connect to the voice so strong she couldn't control her response.

Tiny pinpricks began to cover her body, starting at her feet and then, in a wave of nerve-tingling sensation, traveling up the length of her firmly muscled body until she was consumed. Her eyeballs burned like coals and she scratched at the searing hot flesh with her nails, trying to rip away the skin as if this action would stop the pain. She flailed around the room, slamming against the edge of the couch and falling forward, her head cracking into the wooden coffee table.

“Maman!”
Arrabelle cried, acid tears scalding her cheeks as they streamed down her face.

. . . Bella baby, beware . . .

“Maman?!”
she screamed, every inch of her body in pain.

The foul stench of charred human flesh filled her nostrils and Arrabelle choked back a scream, terror overloading her brain. She prayed she wasn't smelling her own body cooking, but, of course, she knew that was exactly what was happening. She cracked open a gelatinous eyelid and saw her terror realized: She was roasting like a pig on a spit. Flames leapt from her body and traveled along the couch, engulfing the room and threatening to destroy all the masks and artifacts her father had bequeathed to her upon his death . . .

The burbling of the espresso maker and the smell of percolating coffee replaced the stink of her own fiery death. She shuddered, tension pouring off her in undulating waves, until she felt limp and wrung out.

She was standing in front of the stove, one gas eye lit up in
iridescent blues and oranges, the flames licking along the angular aluminum bulb at the bottom of the espresso pot. She reached out to pluck the pot from the gas burner but thought better of it and pulled her fingers back before she burned them.

No more burning today,
Arrabelle thought, shivering as she remembered how real the lucid dream had been.
What else could it be
but
a lucid dream? Her mother wasn't a ghostly voice in her head, and she wasn't burning to death. Shit like that only happened in dreams.

Arrabelle's Cornish Rex kitten, Curiosity, brushed past her ankles, and Arrabelle could feel the thrum of the kitten's purr against her skin.

“Hey, little one,” she said as she picked up the skinny beast and pulled her close.

Ordinarily, Curiosity didn't care to be held. But she must've sensed Arrabelle needed the closeness and so the kitten allowed it.

“Nothing bad will ever happen to you, baby girl,” Arrabelle said as she gave the kitten one more cuddle, then let her go. “I won't let it.”

But who will protect me?
Arrabelle thought.
Who will protect us all when the end comes?

She shook her head, not liking the words that had just come unbidden into her head. She was not a woman who kowtowed to hysteria, but the strange intensity of the lucid dream had freaked her out. As much as she enjoyed the privacy that came with living alone, at that moment she would've given anything to have someone there to hold her like she'd held the kitten.

Dev is the luckiest. She has those little girls at her feet and that flirtatious scamp of a man in her bed. She's never alone.

She turned the eye of the stove off and poured the sludgy brown liquid into a small ceramic espresso cup. She took an orange from the refrigerator and sliced it into four sections, then cut off a wedge of rind from one of the quarters and
placed it on the saucer next to her cup. She took her coffee and orange sections to the scarred wooden table and sat down at one of the long benches, wishing it were cold enough to set a fire in the stone hearth that took up the entire back wall of the kitchen.

The heady scent of sage and lavender lingered in the air, a remnant from the poultice she and Lizbeth had been working on the day before—but underlying those enticing aromas were other smells: the pungent manure stench of asafoetida or Devil's Dung, the cinnamony heat of betel nut husk, the crisp mint of pennyroyal, the foul-sweetness of valerian root, the spicy warmth of clove, the decaying odor of cuttlefish bone. Usually, the scents infiltrating her kitchen, via the two Chinese apothecary cabinets that housed her herbal collection, put Arrabelle into a Zen state. But as she drank her espresso, she discovered she just couldn't relax; the strange lucid dream permeated her thoughts, making it impossible to calm down.

To try to change the flow of her thinking, she got up and grabbed a stack of mail she'd left lying on the kitchen counter and brought it to the table. There, she found the requisite bills and junk mail clamoring for her attention, but buried underneath the unwieldy pile was a padded manila envelope simply addressed to
Bell
.

The delicate, looping script was immediately familiar to Arrabelle—and its presence was completely unexpected, filling her belly with both excitement and dread.

Evan,
she thought, the name both a blessing and a curse—because the sender of the letter was none other than Evan Underwood, the only man she'd ever loved.

She tore open the envelope, slicing her palm on the metal clasp so that bright red blood smeared across it. A Rorschach of color against the plain beige of the wrapping.

“Stupid,” Arrabelle hissed, annoyed with herself for being so clumsy—and for the way her hands were shaking.

Just the thought of Evan was enough to make her heart start to race. It had always been this way. The calm, cool, collected woman she'd worked so hard to create was instantly washed away by a flood of emotion, and she was left as naïve and vulnerable as she'd been when she was eighteen.

I'm like a golden retriever puppy, so excited, tail wagging, tongue lolling out of my mouth like an ecstatic idiot,
Arrabelle thought as she pressed her palm to her lips, stanching the trickle of blood with her mouth.

She willed her body to chill out, to just take a moment to process the excitement it was feeling and then to calmly put that excitement away.
Compartmentalize
was her mantra where Evan was concerned—otherwise she could get very,
very
hurt by expectations.

It wasn't as if there were anything she could do to change things. As much as she loved him—and always would—they didn't work. Not as a couple, at least. They were like night and day, oil and water . . . all those ridiculous idioms that basically implied she and Evan were polar opposites who did not combine well. But their attraction to one another defied their differences. Arrabelle didn't know another human being who could light up her life the way Evan did. Just his voice set her ablaze, made her feel alive. Her world was cast in grayscale, and his presence turned everything Technicolor.

Just stop it,
she chided herself, inhaling deeply. She held the breath—the lack of oxygen calming her down—then slowly released it through her nostrils in one long exhale.

She slipped her hand into the manila envelope, removing the small leather-bound book that was tucked inside. As she lifted it up from its nest of padding, a folded square of paper fell out and landed on the tabletop. She set the book down and picked up the paper, opening it with shaky hands. A sense of foreboding, so deep she could literally taste its metallic tang, overwhelmed her. She had the bizarre urge to stuff the paper and book back into their envelope and burn them.
Even with the horrible feeling swirling around inside her gut, she knew she would read whatever Evan had sent. Her curiosity was too great.

Dear Bell—

This sounds so trite, but if you are reading this it's because I'm gone, or near to it. Niamh will take this to the general store and post it to you. She's trustworthy—and my last remaining blood sister. She won't let either of us down.

You will know what to do with its contents.