Between (32 page)

“Maybe you need to sit down.” Landon’s voice sounded far away, and she barely felt his hands on her elbows as he maneuvered her across the room. When something touched the backs of her knees she collapsed onto a wooden chair, numb, disbelieving.

Fairy tales and myths. Women who had dragon blood in their veins, who transformed at will into dragons. Fine for a fairy tale. Not so fine for a woman named Vivian looking at an image of herself transforming into a monster. She pressed the heels of both hands against her eyes to shut out both painting and notebook. “I fucking hate dragons,” she muttered.

“That,” said the Prince, “is likely to be a problem.”

“It’s not possible,” Vivian said. “I don’t know what the hell kind of game he was playing at, but this is ridiculous. Where did he get that freaky painting done, I wonder?”

Dream images, long suppressed, spilled over into consciousness. Always there had been the dreams of the dragon pursuing her, but side by side there had been the others—the dreams in which she soared through star-studded night skies on giant wings, the dreams in which fire flamed from her throat.

Getting up from the chair, she moved closer to the painting, scanning all four corners for the artist’s signature. She found it at last, half-hidden by the spiny tip of the dragon’s tail. One angular, stylized letter. Z.

The same hands that had painted the cover of the
Dragon Princess
book. Had caressed her skin through dream after dream, slain dragons on her behalf, carried the crumpled body of a bird.
The same hands, and yet not the same.

Landon stood behind her. “It is said that—she—the Queen—has dragon blood in her veins.”

“What the hell does that have to do with me?”

“You don’t know.” His face registered something part shock, part sympathy. “This complicates things.”

“I don’t know what?”

His eyes were grave. “Je—
she
is Isobel’s mother.”

Vivian stared at him. He waited. And the last fragments of her own carefully created reality dissolved. “My grandfather and Jehenna—” The Dragon Princess fairy tale suddenly made perfect sense—not a fairy tale at all. A knot of pain lodged in her solar plexus. She thought she might disintegrate, the cells that made up her body like so many dandelion seeds drifting through uncountable doors into uncountable dreams.

“Seduction, magic,” Landon said. “She ensnared him. Much harm was done, and in the end he locked her away.”

He taught Jehenna the Dreamshifter lore. He was only allowed to teach it once, and when he tried to give it to Isobel, her mind broke.
Fighting for breath, for something solid to hold on to, Vivian managed to ask, “And then what?”

He shrugged. “Apparently she got free. Some years ago he felt her growing stronger, his own power weakening. That’s when he brought these things here and asked me to tell you all of this if you found your way to me.”

In all the worlds, the Wanderer was alone.
He’d tried to tell her about what he’d done in a story. An attempt to break her in gently, perhaps. But how could you possibly come gently into the knowledge that your grandmother was an evil sorceress, that your destiny was to transform into a dragon?

“I hate dragons,” she said again, tasting bile in the back of her throat, remembering the body of a teenage boy blackened and smoking on an emergency room treatment table. Duncan and the old man skewered on each other’s swords in the stadium. The hideous
thing
that had hunted her through all of her dreams.

Herself.

Breathing around the knot of pain that drew tighter with every beat of her heart, she turned her attention back to the Prince. “What happened—between you and my mother?”

Landon’s voice sounded old and weary. “She dreamed me into life, your mother. That’s how it began. She had the Dreamshifter’s blood in her veins, and some dragon blood as well, and with that the power to make her dreams real. She dreamed me a prince, my kingdom only a garden—roses, and a bench, and a fountain. A small kingdom, but more than enough as long as she was there.”

Vivian closed her eyes against this, fisted her hands until her nails dug into her palms, thinking about just such a fountain, and what had happened to her that night. Knowing that her mother’s dream, like her own with the tree, had been twisted and woven into the fabric of Surmise.

“And then?”

“Your grandfather took your mother away to teach her.”

“And Jehenna dragged you and your fountain into Surmise, made you Prince but never King…”

He shook his head. “Hate her for many things, child, but not for that. It was your grandfather brought me here.”

“That makes him as bad as she is—”

But the Prince shook his head. “No. Jehenna was locked away. Your mother’s mind—broke—with the dream sickness and she could not come back to me. My choices were bleak: spend the rest of my life alone by the fountain or be wiped out of existence as if I had never been. He offered a third—that we bring your mother’s dream, and me, into Surmise. He said I would be needed here. And he opened a way into this room for me—that I might live long enough to do what is needed.”

“I—don’t understand.”

“Child—I have lived for more than a century. Without a special room, I would have been dead years ago.”

She just stared at him.

“But my mother—Jehenna—”

He shrugged. “Nobody knows how old Jehenna is. There
is some magic that keeps her alive. As for your mother—the Dreamshifters are long lived, and she has Jehenna’s blood as well.”

Vivian struggled to accommodate so many new beliefs, thought about Zee, waiting in the bookstore for her to show up so he could hand over the messages George left with him. Zee, who had painted her transforming into a dragon and had still looked at her as though she were desirable. “So you’ve existed here—all these years—so that you could help me when the time came.”

“That, and hoping against hope that Isobel would find her way back to me. She did, one night, come to me in a dream…”

“And my grandfather knew all of this, planned all of this. He knew Jehenna would kill him.”

“He hoped to find a way to destroy her. He didn’t want to involve you, but he said he feared it was your destiny.”

“I don’t believe in destiny—”

The Prince cut her off with a short laugh. “You, of all people, had better believe.”

Vivian was thinking, and not liking what came into her mind. “Why?” she asked, finally. An inadequate question, she realized, even as it left her lips.

“Because of what you are.”

“And what am I?”

“A powerful woman—one with the blood of Dreamshifter, Sorceress—”

“And dragon.” Vivian’s eyes went to the picture. She shuddered, reached for the comfort of the pendant, and then remembered that this room was in Dreamworld.

If anybody had earned her trust, it was Landon. She hoisted up the skirt to reveal the black cylinder strapped to her thigh. “This was in your fountain,” she said. “Inside a fish.”

He drew an audible breath. His hand reached out as though to touch, then drew back. “I don’t know what it is, but I am certain it should be hidden.”

“He said if I were to find it, I must destroy it. I don’t know how.”

Both were silent for a space of several breaths. At last Landon asked, “What will you do now?”

“Whatever I can. I was—directed—to come here. I believe Isobel might be held here in the dungeons.”

“I’m coming with you.” His face had hardened, no longer vague or even good-natured. He looked dangerous, the fairy-tale prince about to confront the dragon in order to save the princess. “My promise to the Wanderer is fulfilled. I would welcome death with open arms, if it meant that Isobel was safe.”

Vivian nodded, feeling a small warmth at her heart to know that she need not be completely alone.

Landon blew out the lantern, plunging the room into darkness. She felt his hand on her arm, let him guide her back into the tunnel.

S
trands of spider silk clung to Vivian’s face, wrapped around her wrists and neck. She thought she could feel spiders in her hair, crawling down her back, over her arms. She heard herself whimpering a little with every breath, wanted to break into a full-out run but it was too dark.

“Three hundred fifty-six paces,” Landon whispered, “and you’ll be clear of them.”

Vivian counted each step in her head. Left, one. Right, two. Left, three. On and on. As the Prince had promised, when she reached three hundred fifty-six, the webs stopped. She stopped, too, scrubbing spiderwebs away with her hands, searching out the spiders she was certain were crawling all over her. She found three, the largest the size of her fist, and flung them away into the darkness. She began to walk again, but still her flesh quivered with the sensation of legs and feet, always crawling, weaving phantom webs into her hair.

Even with company, the darkness pressed in, overwhelming. She began to feel it would never be light again, that she had entered hell and would walk through this darkness for eternity. Her eyes ached with the relentless search for a gleam of light. Her bare feet hurt, heels and toes rubbed raw from constant friction with stone. The voices in her head
muttered endlessly, close to comprehensible but never quite understood.

Once or twice she thought she heard footsteps but could never be sure.

As they moved deeper into the dungeons, the voices began to grow distinct once more. She understood a word here, a phrase there. Strange sensations began to plague her. An itching of her skin, as though it were too tight. A heat in her belly. Her senses sharpened; she became aware of subtle scents—clean sweat from Landon, the earthy smell of the stone, a distant dripping of water.

And definitely now, footsteps somewhere behind them. She looked back but could see nothing in the darkness. Landon seemed unaware.

She kept on walking.

At last they rounded a curve and saw a gleam of light ahead. Vivian’s nostrils flared with a scent of unwashed bodies, a faint contagion of fear. Beneath it the rich, salty heat of blood. Appalled, she felt her mouth flood with saliva, her stomach stir with sudden hunger.

The darkness lightened to a dim gloom, and her eyes began to pick out details. She could make out jagged stone above her head, a widening of the passage. And then, all at once, the corridor opened out into a massive cavern. Roughly carved pillars supported a vaulted stone roof. Hanging lanterns illuminated a path that spiraled downward and inward.

The cavern was enormous and awe-inspiring.

The prisoners were something else entirely.

Barbed-wire fences ten feet high lined the path, and between them and the stone wall behind them, hundreds of people sat, stood, or lay. They didn’t speak, didn’t look up at the sound of approaching footsteps; no curiosity dawned in their faces. They simply watched, or not, with nothing—neither fear nor hope—behind their eyes.

Vivian stopped. Moving forward against the weight of all of that humanity seemed to her in that moment impossible. Her eyes scanned over the throng of faces in horror.
Men, women, children. And even the children sat silent. No cries, no speech, no games.

“What has been done to them?” Vivian’s breath felt harsh and ragged.

Landon’s voice broke when he tried to answer. He swallowed hard, drew a deep breath. “She says it is a kindness to take away all will from them when they come here.”

“Sedated and penned like cattle.” Rage simmered in her belly.

“Cattle is precisely what they are.”

After a moment, without another word spoken, the two of them began to move forward once again. Out of the sea of humanity, a young woman caught Vivian’s eye. She sat cross-legged next to the fence, one hand curled loosely around a strand of wire. Her hair hung in a tangled mass over her shoulders, once flame bright, now dulled by dirt. A bruise purpled her right eye, and her upper lip was puffy and flecked with dried blood. Her left cheek was disfigured and swollen.

Vivian exhaled sharply between her teeth. “Esme.” Pulling away from Landon’s restraining hands, she darted over to the fence. The girl’s eyes remained focused on nothing, empty, not so much as a flicker of recognition. The fingers twitched once and were still.

“Esme. Wake up!” Vivian squeezed the limp hand, trying to pull the girl’s mind back. The bloody lips parted, revealing broken front teeth, and Vivian leaned forward to catch any whispered word, but they closed again, without a sound.

An old woman clicked toothless gums together in a meaningless, arrhythmic sound. A small boy, maybe five years old, dirty and thin, twisted a strip of rag between his fingers, endlessly winding and rewinding. He looked at Vivian but didn’t seem to see her. A woman held a baby in her arms, without affection, and the small creature did not even whimper, its eyes moving without interest or focus in a pinched and dirty face.

“There is nothing we can do here.” Landon tugged at her arm. “Come.”

Vivian heard his words layered over the multitudinous voices, as something far away and without meaning.

“We have to get her out.”

And then, in her mind she felt the dragon stir and wake. Felt the creature’s suppressed rage, her hunger. A new voice spoke directly into her head, this time clear, articulate.