The Last Dream Keeper (6 page)

I should have said this to you twenty years ago, but it just never seemed like we were in a place for it to not be misconstrued: I love you. I always will. You are my soul mate. Now and forever.

Be careful. The Flood is coming . . . no, The Flood is already here. We were all just too stupid to realize.

All my love,

E.

Arrabelle stared at the letter, her brain disbelieving its contents. She reread Evan's words again, trying to process what he was telling her.

Evan was gone? How could that be? Wouldn't she have felt it?

Nothing in the letter made any sense.

Except the part where he told you he loved you,
Arrabelle thought, her throat tight as she fought back tears.
All these years and only when the world is ending, only when he's gone does he say it . . .

She hated him in that moment—but hate was just the flip side of love.

Arrabelle pushed back the wooden bench and got to her feet, her body off balance, legs unsteady. Her heart was
slamming in her chest, banging against her rib cage, begging to be let out. She laid her palms flat on the scarred tabletop, feeling the deep grooves her knives had made in the wood. Her life's work as an herbalist had created those scars, and once upon a time, they would've reassured her. But in light of what she'd just read, she felt untethered . . .
lost
.

Her work meant nothing when her heart was broken and the man she loved wasn't there, standing beside her. All these years she'd lied to her heart, telling the poor hardworking muscle that it was superfluous. She didn't need it. She could choose to be cold and unemotional, tough as nails. That way she'd be safe.

Ha! What a joke. Only in this moment could she see just how big an idiot she'd been.

She needed love just like everyone else.

She wasn't immune.

She wanted Evan.

*   *   *

She pressed
redial
, but the outcome was the same. The number was no longer in service.

“Damn,” Arrabelle muttered, ending the call and setting her cell phone down on the table. It had been so long since she'd spoken to Evan, she didn't know for sure if this number was even his most recent one. She should never have let it go so long between phone calls.

She and Evan would always be connected, no matter the time and space that physically separated them. And even though she'd always felt inextricably drawn to him, she'd been able to stuff those “love” feelings away. Because there were just so few people you met in life who really
got
you, and so when you found one, you held on to them for dear life. Even if that meant you weren't honest with yourself about how they really made you feel.

But now she wasn't sure what to think. Evan was
unreachable,
gone
—as he'd said in his letter—and all that was left of him was a leather-bound book. Whatever information it contained, she knew it would only upset her.

She picked it up, weighing it in her hands. It felt very light. The plain leather cover was dark with dirt and ash, and when she lifted it to her nose, the scent of burnt paper leapt out at her. There was a thin brass hasp where a lock had once been, but it was long gone.

It took Arrabelle a moment to realize this was someone's journal.

All those private thoughts on display and now it's available to anyone who cares to read it,
Arrabelle thought, feeling guilty for even holding the book in her hands.
But Evan wanted me to have it and I trust his judgment.

With a silent apology, Arrabelle flipped open the cover. Inside, someone had written:
Property of Niamh Gunderson.

Arrabelle smiled when she saw the small red heart Niamh had used over the
i
in her given name—but the smile faded when she saw that a number of pages had been ripped out of the beginning of the book, jagged chunks of lined notebook paper left behind in the gluey binding.

“Damn,” Arrabelle murmured, a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. She knew something terrible lurked within these remaining pages.

Arrabelle stared down at Niamh's journal. With trepidation, she began to read from the first intact entry, the girl's halting voice slipping into her head like the beginnings of a dream.

And then Niamh's past became Arrabelle's reality.

T
hey came tonight. This time there were so many I couldn't count them all. The first time they knocked on Yesinia's door, there had only been two—and I had already predicted their arrival with my tarot cards. They identified themselves as belonging to the enforcement arm of the Greater Council, but they didn't give their names.

In retrospect, they never gave their names to us.

At her urging, I opened the door of Yesinia's small cottage, a found-wood structure by the beach she'd built herself over one spring and summer, and there on her driftwood porch stood two people I didn't know. They reminded me of census takers. The man wore his hair so short that I could see the pink of his scalp under his brown hair. He was in his middle age, the paunch of his belly hanging low over the waist of his pants, so that even his black suit could not disguise it. He was so big the suit seemed too small, the buttons straining to stay closed.

“We're looking for Yesinia Arroyo. We're here on official Greater Council business,” the man said. He indicated the woman beside him, who nodded coldly. “May we come in?”

I turned to Yesinia, and she shrugged.

What could we do but let them in?

They sat at the square kitchen table with the yellowed linoleum top, their presence filling the room. I stood in the corner, watching, having quickly scooped up my tarot cards from the tabletop. My instincts had told me to remove the spread—one I'd pulled three times that morning, and the impetus for coming to Yesinia's house—before the man and woman could see it. The World, The Magician, The Hierophant, The Devil, and The Fool . . . the message was clear: The advent of these two was only the harbinger of worse things to come.

Yesinia looked small in comparison to these two strangers. And Yesinia had always been the biggest personality I knew.

“We have a writ from the Council,” the woman said as she spread her stubby, ringless fingers across the tabletop. She lifted her chin and the man took this as his cue, retrieving a folded piece of parchment from the inside of his coat pocket and tossing it at Yesinia.

I watched the woman pick up the paper, a sneer curling her lips. She was a large creature with hungry gray eyes and thick, fleshy lips that bore no sign of ever having seen a tube of lipstick. The off-putting sneer stayed curled in place for the rest of the conversation.

“Read it,” the woman said, greedy to watch—but Yesinia didn't oblige her.

The woman reeked of camphor, as if she'd spread muscle liniment all over her body and then hid her glistening skin underneath her clothing, so no one could see it. Even if they could smell it.

“What kind of business is this you bring to me?” Yesinia asked, looking down at the parchment in her hands.

I knew the clipped cadence of her voice as well as I knew my own. She was born in Guadalajara, and her first language was Spanish. English came to her slowly, her brain forever searching for the correct word or phrase, and often failing.
But she'd found that the slower she spoke, the fewer grammatical errors she made.

“We've been asked to bring you this writ of dissolution,” the woman replied, eyes locked on Yesinia as she answered the question. “We believe your coven has been contaminated. Compromised.”

Neither Yesinia nor I had any idea what they were talking about. No one understood what was happening in our world; that evil had infected the Greater Council. The gossip channels had not begun to speak of the atrocities being enacted upon our sister covens in distant locales. The West was in the dark as to what was happening in poorer countries, places where human beings still feared magic . . . and where it was easy to destroy women like us.

We didn't realize we could be next on the chopping block.

“I don't understand,” Yesinia said as she ran her callused fingers through her thick dark hair.

Even though she was in her late forties, she didn't have a hint of gray in her hair. Her face was unlined, her skin as soft and supple as a child's, her dark eyes always alert and wary. This wariness came from being illegally transported into this country when she was a small child. She knew persecution and fear well, was always aware of what was happening in a room, where any strangers stood, and what they might be thinking.

She was protective of her privacy, and the privacy of our coven. From the rigid set of her shoulders, I could see that her instincts told her there was something very wrong with this man and woman.

“We will give you . . .” The man paused, seeming to enjoy the words as they rolled off his tongue. “Twenty-four hours. Twenty-four hours to dissolve your coven—anything you do that contradicts this edict will be considered a hostile act, and actions will be taken.”

“But that is not at all possible. We cannot—” Yesinia tried to protest, but the woman cut her off.

“It's not a question of whether you can or cannot. It
will
happen. This coven—these blood sisters—will not meet again. It's over.”

The woman's words were well rehearsed. She'd given this speech before—I was certain of it.

“Who are you?” Yesinia asked.

If they were truly from the Greater Council then, I decided, the world had gone insane.

“We're just the messengers,” the woman said, grasping a silver pendant she wore around her neck. It was the image of an ouroboros—a snake eating itself. “Understand. If you do not dissolve this coven of your own doing, it will be dissolved for you. One way or another.”

It was a threat—and not a veiled one.

“We will do no such thing,” Yesinia replied, her face alive with anger.

“Suit yourself,” the man said. “There will be repercussions. You have doomed yourself and your sisters.”

They left Yesinia's house, but a residue of evil remained.

Yesinia called the coven together that night. Laragh, Honey, Evan, and I met there beneath the night sky in our secret spot, a grove of ancient madrone trees only a few feet from the edge of the Salish Sea. For centuries, blood sisters had done their work for the Goddess underneath the watchful eyes of this same moon and these sacred madrones.

We didn't know that this night would be our last.

“We have been threatened,” Yesinia began after we called the protective circle and gave thanks to the Goddess. “Someone or something evil is on our island and they would want to stop us from doing our business here.”

The others—Evan, with his shy smile and curly hair; Honey, the oldest of us, but the most childlike; and Laragh,
my identical twin—were unprepared for Yesinia's words. I alone had divined the coming of the Devil with my spread.

“What can we do to stop it?” Evan asked “Can't we go to the Greater Council ourselves?”

I loved Evan and his logical herbalist's mind—and under different circumstances, he would not be wrong. But the world had spun off its axis and things were not normal anymore. I tried to explain this to the others, but they were bullheaded. Even my own twin, Laragh, our coven's empath—and the one who was usually the most sensitive to change—did not believe something terrible would happen to us if we didn't comply with the man and woman's demands.

“It's the twenty-first century, Niamh. Something as awful as the Salem witch trials could never happen again. Not here. Not in the United States . . .”

Everyone was in agreement. How could something so horrible happen now, in our modern-day world? Well, we didn't have to wait long to learn the answer. It was as if Laragh's words were the catalyst for the beginning of the end. For the evil my spread predicted to become reality.

Like silent beasts birthed from the night, they descended on the madrone grove with only one agenda: to destroy us.

The words had no sooner left Laragh's mouth before I saw the first of them. I couldn't tell if it was man or a woman, its gender swallowed whole by the pitch-black robe it wore. The gray mask tied to its face was like a second, more malevolent skin. Each of them carried an object of dark device: a palely glowing knife with serrated blade, a scythe borne on a stem of green metal, a machete with a blade as long as my arm, a rope coiled like a sleeping snake in its master's hand . . . every item my eyes alighted on cut another wound into my heart.

Without thinking, I bent down and scooped up some smooth pebbles from the ground, slipping them into the pocket of my jeans.

“What the hell—” I heard Evan say as they fell on us, each
member of their ranks armed with weapons of violence while we possessed none.

They streamed out of the woods like ants, their targets prearranged. Yesinia was the master of our coven, and they had decided to subdue her first. Circling her like dancing demons, seven of them stretched out their hands as if she were a bovine animal that needed corralling. She screamed as they attacked, a guttural cry of impotent rage, her face wild. She tried to fight them off with her bare hands, but she was outnumbered. There was little she could do but persist in fighting a losing battle.

At the same time, three of them surrounded Honey, who was so shocked by their arrival that she stood stock-still, eyes wide like a woodland creature caught in a car's glaring headlights. They grabbed her roughly by the arms and forced her to her knees, pinioning her arms behind her back.

I watched as tears trickled down her cheeks, glistening like diamonds in the moonlight—but I could do nothing to help her. I was already dealing with monsters of my own.

Laragh and I stood back to back, our identical faces wearing (I assumed) the same fierce expressions. Dark brown hair worn long and loose, pale green eyes, lashes dark even without makeup, and pale skin. She was me and I was her . . . and neither of us would be taken down without a fight.

“Don't touch us,” I growled through clenched teeth.

Feeling Laragh at my back gave me the confidence to lash out, and lash out I did. I pulled the first pebble from my pocket and found my target, never before so glad to have learned to skip stones as a child. My aim was true, the pebble catching one of the masked creatures square in the face, shattering its nose. It howled in agony and dropped to its knees.

Of course, another one immediately took its place.

“No!” I heard Laragh shriek, the sound coming from a few feet away. I turned and saw my sister being dragged away from the open grove of trees, toward the darker, more thicketlike section of the wood.

It wasn't a decision. I ran toward my twin, pain screaming through my body as one of the robed figures pulled out a serrated knife and slashed Laragh across the back. I saw the blood, a wave of dark liquid soaking the fabric of my sister's cream brocade blouse. I could feel her pain like it was my own and it was as exquisite as the sound of a bow being drawn slowly across the taut surface of a violin string.

I fell to my knees, skinning my hands on the rocky ground.

—Niamh

Laragh was in my head—something that hadn't happened since we were small children.

—Run, Niamh . . . please . . . don't let them . . . get . . .

The words died away. I lifted my head, looking up through wet lashes, but all I could see were the robed figures disappearing into the woods with my sister, her limp body held aloft in their arms.

“Laragh!” I screamed. “Laragh!!”

My throat burned as I called out to her one more time. My only answer was the whoosh of the wind as it whistled through the madrone trees.

My sister was gone. Dead or unconscious . . . I did not know which.

A hand gripped my shoulder and I automatically slammed my elbow into its owner's thigh. I heard a grunt and then:

“Niamh, it's me. It's okay. They're gone.”

Evan stood in the moonlight, holding his leg where I'd elbowed him. He had a bloody nose and a split lip, and he held most of his weight on his left side. A horrific gash—from what horrible instrument of violence I couldn't guess—had split apart the flesh at his waist, soaking the hem of his T-shirt in blood.

“Evan,” I gasped, but he shook his head.

“I'll live.”

I stood up and threw my arms around Evan's shoulders. I was afraid if I didn't hold on to someone, I would lose my mind.

Laragh.

An anguish unlike anything I'd ever known ricocheted through me. I could hardly breathe. My sister was gone and my soul felt as if it had been ripped in two. Evan understood and held me tight. Even though I'm sure with his wound that it was beyond painful for him to do so.

*   *   *

When I was finally calm enough to look around, I saw we were the only ones who had not been taken. Laragh, Honey, and Yesinia were gone . . . and the grove felt empty without their presence. I'd spent so many lovely hours here in this magical place, and now it was destroyed forever.

“Where did they take them?” I asked—even though I knew neither of us possessed the answer. “We have to find them.”