Between (4 page)

He took the cup from her and set it down, waiting without comment until the paroxysm eased and then handing her a stack of napkins. Having something to do, a real embarrassment to deal with, eased her nerves a little and gave her time to lecture herself into a state of semicalm.

Neither of them spoke.

Somewhere a clock ticked off seconds in the silent room. No other sound but Vivian’s breathing, and Zee’s.

“That’s a fascinating pendant,” he said at last. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it. Do you mind if I have a closer look?”

Wordless, she held the pendant out and leaned toward him. Zee bent his head down to look. His breath was warm on her cheek. The scent of him—clean soap and wood, and a tang of turpentine—filled her nostrils.

She felt her breath quicken, hoped he couldn’t hear the rapid beating of her heart.

“A penguin in a dream web,” he said. “Where did you get it?”

“My grandfather gave it to me.”

Vivian, her senses flooded with his nearness, with the memory of dream, found herself blurting out whatever came first to her less-than-functional brain. “He said it was my totem animal.”

“You don’t sound exactly happy about that.”

“A totem indicating OCD and conformity? Possibly accurate, but not how I’d like to think of myself.”

“A penguin doesn’t have to mean conformity.”

“The only other thing to think is cute and cuddly. Also not traits I aspire to.”

“Penguins are actually rather fierce. And then there’s the way they fly in water. Unique. I’ve also heard of a penguin
or two that swam north while all the rest were heading south. Kinda blows the whole conform-and-follow-the-leader image.”

“You’re scrambling,” Vivian said, laughing a little. It felt good, small and dry as the laugh was, and a little of the tension drained out of her.

“I’m not. Here, just a minute…” He got up and wandered around the shelves, then came back with a small book, old, the cover water stained, the pages dog-eared.
Spirit Guides and Totems
. He flipped through the pages. “All right. Listen.”

Silence. “Oh, come on. You can’t really believe that stuff.”

“Actually, I do.” His eyes challenged her, and again she looked away, finding a new topic of conversation in the gallery lining the walls. Strange and surreal, those paintings. A flavor of Escher about them, and something else, an unsettling echo of something known but forgotten.

“Are the paintings yours?”

“How did you know?”

“You have paint on your cuticles and you smell a little like oil paint and cleaner. It’s a good smell,” she added quickly, lest he take offense, and then wished she hadn’t. “Where did you get the ideas?”

“Dreams. Ever had the feeling that dreams might be real? Or that we might be dreaming when we think we’re awake?”

This struck too close to home. “Dreams are chemical reactions in our brains. No more, no less.”

“You don’t believe that.”

“It’s what the textbooks say.”

“And what do you say?”

Something about him challenged her for the truth. She hesitated, played with the coffee mug. “I—yes—maybe. But science says—”

“Once we all believed the world was flat. I’ve had dreams I certainly can’t explain. Are you telling me you haven’t?”

She flushed, and then admitted, “All right, yes. I’ve dreamed things before they happened. Dreamed people before I met them. And I’ve felt, sometimes, like what happens in a dream feels more real than what happens when I’m awake. But this makes no sense.”

None of it made sense. Dragons. Agate-eyed warriors who turned out to be bookstore-owning painters.

“Science isn’t right about everything,” Zee went on. We want it to be—everything cut and dried and logical. But think about this—for the entire history of this planet, until the last few years, really—people have believed in dreams. Portents and omens and oracles. The aboriginal peoples and Dreamtime. Even in our culture, people buy dream catchers—”

“Those are decorative.”

“Sure they are. And you really think that’s the only reason? I think underneath all of our carefully acquired logic and rationality, we are afraid that dreams might cause us harm. We fear them. And so even symbolically we like to surround ourselves with things that keep them out.”

He was speaking to the heart of her now, the dilemma that had been with her since childhood. Wakeworld and Dreamworld and Between—worlds her mother talked about incessantly as though they were real. Isobel was crazy, Vivian knew this now, but as a child she had believed and feared. The fear was still with her, bone deep, and at the depths of her psyche it lay side by side with a long-buried
belief that dreams were indeed as real as waking, and maybe even more so.

“But they can’t hurt us, the dreams. It all happens in our heads. I believe they affect us—how could they not? Such an emotional impact might change our decisions or our actions. But to reach out into the real world and touch us…”

Vivian shivered. A deep cold enveloped her. Her mouth had gone so dry that she could hardly swallow, and the room and the man across the table seemed suddenly far away, as though she were looking at them through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars.

“I’ve always remembered something my grandmother told me when I was a little kid. I’d had some nightmare or other, and I was sure the monster had followed me into waking and was hiding under my bed. No way I’d have ever told my parents I was scared of a dream, but Grandmother happened to be visiting. It was like she sensed it. She came into my room where I was hiding under the covers. She said…” He furrowed his brow, remembering. “She said, ‘Don’t be frightened, little one. The Dreamshifter guards the portals of the dreams. The monster can’t get through, as long as he is watching.’”

“Dreamshifter.” The word buzzed around in her head, meaningless but full of import.

Zee touched the back of her hand, his fingers warm against cold skin. “Are you okay? You look pale all of a sudden.”

“Very tired,” she managed. Her lips were numb. “I didn’t sleep last night.”

“Well, you should sleep. You want a ride home?”

She did. With dismay, she discovered that what she wanted was for him to drive her home, and then come into the apartment, make love to her, and hold her while she fell asleep. She shook her head, then levered herself to her feet. “I need the exercise.”

Zee also got to his feet. Taller than she was by a good foot, an intoxicating mix of muscle and gentleness and quiet strength.

Breathing, that was important. That, and getting away, getting home, before she betrayed any more of herself to a man who was a total stranger, no matter how attractive or how often dreamed of.

“Let me lend you some books, before you go. I have some good ones on dreams.”

“I thought this was a store. Where people buy things.”

He laughed. “Well, it is that. But I have a collection of older books that nobody in Krebston is ever going to buy. There is one, at least, on lucid dreaming.”

“I couldn’t—”

“It will give me a reason to see you again. You know—you never even told me your name.”

Her heart was racing beyond all reason; her knees were weak. She fought back a ridiculous urge to push a stray lock of hair back from his face, to run her hand along the strong line of his jaw, touch the hint of a cleft in his chin.

“I’m Vivian,” she heard herself say. “And I’d love to see the books—”

A smile lit up his face, and there was that dimple again. “Maybe we can talk about them when you’ve read them. Hang on a minute; they’re in the back.”

He vanished through a door into the back of the store, returning a moment later with a small stack of books—a large, slim volume, and three that were smaller and fatter. Pulling out a bag from under the counter, he slid the books into it and handed it to her.

There was something new in his eyes, a thing she couldn’t read, as she took the bag from him. “I’ll bring them back soon,” she said.

“I’ll be waiting.”

Z
ee held his breath as he watched her walk away. Night after night, year after year, he had dreamed of this woman and had loved her in those dreams beyond all measure. All of his life, it seemed, he had been waiting for this day. It took the discipline of years not to follow her, to remain standing in the doorway and watch her cross the street with that quick light step. When the cascade of auburn hair vanished around a corner, the world, light-filled an instant ago, seemed to go dark.

Unwilling to deal with customers now, Zee locked the door and put up the
Closed
sign. He needed time to process this event, to think about what to do next. To wonder how she was going to react to one of the books he had given her and to think that perhaps he shouldn’t have followed the old man’s directions quite so precisely.

Ten years ago, almost to the day, Zee had been doing time in county jail on a set of assault charges, stuck with a court-appointed attorney who advocated the guilty plea and a deal for every one of his clients. Which meant no way out of doing time. He was coming to terms with this reality when one of the guards came back to his cell and turned the key in the lock.

“Good news, Arbogast, you made bail.”

“No shit!” his cellmate said. “What about me, Sarge?”

The officer snorted. “Come on—who would bail you out, Nelson?”

“Fuck, man, that’s cold.”

Nelson probably did have somebody somewhere who might bail him out. But the probability of anybody springing Zee? That was as far off the charts as winning the lottery. Even if his parents had any extra money, which they didn’t, they certainly wouldn’t have wasted it on their wayward son. His grandmother was long dead. There was nobody else.

Keeping the questions out of his face and off his lips, he followed the officer out of the cell, down the hall, and into processing in silence. When he walked out the door half an hour later, a free man with an empty wallet in the pocket of his jeans, he looked around for a familiar face.

There wasn’t one.

The only person in sight was a wizened old man—no more than five foot six, and that was stretching it—leaning against a bona fide, sixties-era hippie van. He smiled. “Warlord—I have work for you.”

The words nailed Zee’s feet to the pavement. He knew the shock registered clearly on his face, felt the cracks in his meticulously constructed façade. “Where the hell did you come up with that name?”

“Are you denying it belongs to you?”

In dream, only in dream. Where he carried a sword and killed men and beasts with an abandon of violence that sometimes made him afraid to sleep, and sometimes fueled the brawls that landed him in jail.

“Who are you, and what do you want?”

“Several things. For starters—I want to commission a painting.”

No question of it, the façade had crumbled. Zee gaped stupidly, speechless.

“Oh, come now. I know you are an artist. So—do we have a deal?”

The hot blood rose to his face; desire tingled in his hands.
It had been months since he’d had access to brushes and paints and canvas. He had no idea who this strange little man was or how he knew so many secrets. It didn’t matter. “I haven’t heard any deal yet,” he said, but his throat was dry and tight, and the words were barely more than a whisper. He’d do just about anything for the opportunity to paint.

“I set you up with an apartment and whatever art supplies you need. You get a stipend for clothes and food. You stay out of fights. And you paint.”

“What’s the catch?” There had to be one. Life didn’t hand out freebies. Ever.

“You will paint your dreams for me. I will buy the ones that I want from you.”

A devil’s bargain. Most of his dreams ought not to see the light of day. But Zee felt himself nodding assent. The old man held out his hand and the deal was sealed with a shake.

For the course of an entire year, Zee splashed his dreams onto canvas for the old man. In the beginning he maintained some control, choosing what to paint and what to hold back, but he soon lost himself in the work. Sometimes an entire day would vanish in what seemed minutes, and he would emerge from a fog to look at what he had produced with shock and a touch of awe.

One thing, though, he held back. Night after night he dreamed the same dream; day after day he painted other things. On a dark, cold November morning it broke through his defenses, and he slapped it onto a life-size canvas in brilliant colors.

The old man came to visit at the end of that day and stood looking at the painting for a long time. “I thought so,” he said at last. “Though I hardly dared to hope. I will buy this one.”

“No,” Zee said. “Any one but this.”

“This one. It is the one I was waiting for.” He named a price. Zee blinked, not quite comprehending, and for the first time in that year the old man laughed.