Between (19 page)

“Where did you come from?”

He bent to look in the box, which appeared quite ordinary inside. Nothing but the old pink towel, liberally covered in cat hair. No special door, no way in or out other than the lid. Zee set this aside, rather than replace it on the box.

The cat meowed again and padded off, the tip of her tail twitching, to vanish between winding stacks of books. Surely the books had been over there, and the timepieces here. The wire sculpture with the copper balls had held a different shape; the tempo and rhythm of it had been subtly different.

A shiver ran up and down Zee’s spine, but the cat meowed again, imperious, and he turned and wended his way
through the maze of shelves until he found her sitting in the middle of an empty space of floor. Just visible through the dust he could see cracks in the form of a rectangle. Green cat eyes gazed at him, intent, expectant, and Zee knelt, thrust his fingers into a gap, and opened the trap door.

C
old. So very, very cold. Head pounding, scalp stinging. A dull ache, low in her belly and between her legs. The sour taste of fear in her mouth.

Vivian reached for the pendant, found it, but the little penguin was no longer comforting.

Only a dream. If this was Wakeworld, she shouldn’t be feeling physical pain from acts that had occurred in a dream. But then, she also shouldn’t be seeing a penguin, and the unmistakable form of Poe stood beside her, white breast and cheek patches glowing in the dim light, eyes glittering.

Moaning softly, she levered herself up to sitting.

Her stomach heaved.

She would not vomit, would not cry, only a dream, only a dream, only—

In the nick of time she leaned forward and spewed a thin, sour stream of bile between her spread legs, befouling the skirt of the red dress. Tears of weakness and misery slid down her cheeks and dripped off her chin.

Poe pushed his beak against her shoulder, a gentle nudge, and she ran her hand down his back, the feathers soft and faintly oily. Taking comfort from the companionship, no matter how unlikely, she blinked back the rest of her tears and looked around her.

She’d fallen into the entryway of her own apartment, and here, too, everything was wrong.

A wasteland of broken and savaged furniture and belongings spread out around her. Someone or something had raged through here, trampling and destroying everything indiscriminately.

For a minute she considered calling the police. When in trouble, dial 911. This time, though, there was nothing they could do to protect her, them or anybody else. Her eyes went over the slashed couch cushions, the upended drawers. Someone had been looking for something.

Again her hand went to the chain, reassuring herself that the penguin talisman still hung there.

The phone rang.

Vivian stayed where she was, the sodden red gown clinging to her thighs. Talking to somebody, anybody, was out of the question. Each ring jolted through her like a shock of electricity. She thought about searching for the phone and hanging it up, but it was buried beneath a pile of debris and moving was just too hard. The voice mail kicked in.

Jared’s voice.

“Viv—I’m worried. I know you’re probably not there—why would you be, after what happened to the place—but if you come back, call me. Please. We need to talk. Let me help you.” Silence, only his breathing through the machine, and her own—too loud, too fast. “Well, okay. I know you’re not there. Just—I don’t know what else to do…”

A click of disconnect.

Her brain spun, trying to reconcile the concern in his voice with what he had done to her in Dreamworld. She put her face in her hands, winced away from pressure on the cheek where he had struck her.

Too much. Her stomach heaved and her body came unfrozen in a mad dash for the bathroom, where she vomited again, this time mercifully into the toilet. When the paroxysms ended, she stripped out of the gown. It smelled of sex and vomit and Jared’s cologne, and her belly twisted again.
Wadding the accursed thing up into a ball she stuffed it into the trash can, then stepped into the shower.

Standing under a flow of water as hot as she could stand it, she scrubbed all traces of Jared from her skin and hair, letting her mind drift where it would. The Guardian, the key, the advent of Poe, the book—

Oh, God. The book. It had been here in the apartment somewhere. In a few minutes, when the water ran cold and she was forced from the shower, she would look for it in the rubble. She was pretty sure she wouldn’t find it.

And then, at last, the other thing came to her.

The dreamspheres. Jared had taken them. Which meant what? That he had in his possession access to a small and dusty room with nothing in it. She still didn’t like the idea of the dreamspheres in Jared’s hands.

She slammed the water off and climbed out of the shower.

All of the towels had been dragged onto the floor and trampled. Shivering until her teeth chattered, she let her skin air-dry while she dug through the jumbled mess of clothing strewn around her bedroom. She found a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt that were a little rumpled, but clean. A pair of underwear. Socks.

Poe appeared in the bedroom doorway, a slice of bread impaled on his beak. He looked both ridiculous and adorable, and she found herself laughing. It was laughter on the edge of hysteria perhaps, but still she felt the weight of guilt and fear and despair lifting a little.

The penguin waddled across to her, poking at her hand with the breaded beak, and she took it from him, realizing as she did so that it had been long since she had eaten. The nausea had receded, leaving in its place pangs of hunger. Poe cocked his head to one side and peered up at her.

“All right, you’re hungry,” she said.

In answer, he turned around and waddled back toward the kitchen. Vivian followed.

Most of her food had been ground into a broken mess of pottery and glass, but she found a can of tuna, which she
opened for Poe, and another slice of bread and some turkey slices to make herself a dry but edible sandwich.

By the time she got down to the last bite, exhaustion had set in. Even chewing seemed like too much effort, and she knew she wasn’t going to accomplish anything without sleep. The door was locked, for all the good that had done her. She inspected all of the windows: locked, nothing unusual visible outside.

Of course, if a dragon wanted in, or a sorceress, all the locks in the world would make no difference.

With the last of her strength she turned her mattress slashed side down. Sliding her hand down between the head of the bed frame and the wall, she felt for her stiletto. It was gone. She felt a pang of loss. The knife had been with her since she was sixteen, had protected her more than once. The handle was bone, worn smooth with use before it came to her, comfortable and familiar.

Isobel spent six months in the state hospital the year Vivian turned sixteen. Once again she’d been dragged into a foster home for her own good. The parents were kind but clueless, elderly church types who lacked the most basic understanding of the forces shaping the kids under their roof, two girls and a boy. The girls were seeking a fragile sanity in drugs and boys. Their arms were scarred with razor blade cuttings aimed at dulling emotions they couldn’t handle. The boy, Jake, was fifteen, and nothing but rage.

He’d already savaged the other girls, and when he focused his burning gaze on her that very first night at dinner, Vivian thought about a gun. But guns were hard to conceal, especially sharing a room, and the trouble would be endless if she got caught. A knife, on the other hand, an object that could ride easily in her pocket, was another story. She had an uneasy fascination for sharp blades, maybe born of the years of vigilance in which she’d kept all sharp-edged objects away from her mother.

The fascination led her beyond the basic pocketknife she could have secured at the Walmart to an underground
transaction that yielded a stiletto. It cost her the stash of money she’d been stowing away for years, but it paid for itself within the very first week. Jake would bear scars for the rest of his life, but he might think twice before assaulting another woman.

Ah, well. The stiletto wouldn’t be much use against a dragon. Or Jehenna, for that matter. Still, she would have felt safer if it were in its usual place under her pillow. Too tired to stay awake, safe or not, Vivian wrapped herself in a blanket and lay down on the naked mattress, the pendant clutched in one hand. As she fell directly into the sleep of exhaustion, she was wondering how she would begin to look for the key.

D
reamworld.

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.