Dreams’ Dark Kiss (11 page)

Ciaran’s voice surged forward in ripples of sound made palpable. The sound waves hit the Abominable Snowbitch full force. She vaporized in a rain of pink mist. A fine spray of liquid red coated Ciaran and Evilena. Mortified, Ciaran dropped the newly materialized skillet, which had appeared within her grasp the moment she’d returned to the Dreaming.

The Ice King snarled. He turned in angry, jerky movements, taking in the change in environment, apparently enraged at finding himself back in the dreamscape. He stalked the couple, then paused to sniff the air. Lifting his head, he cackled the call of the banes.

Keoni caught a dreamwave, hung a three-sixty and raced toward Ciaran.

The blood on her skin appeared to seep into her pores, constrictive and suffocating.

Wrong.

So wrong to destroy any creature so utterly. To eradicate a presence to the point death itself could not claim it. Emma, the scared little girl the Abominable Snowbitch had once been, was gone. Not dead. Not anything.

Ciaran ran her hands over her face, succeeding only in spreading the blood around. She glared at the offending limbs. Raphael’s hands had been covered in blood in this same manner when he’d left her. After the beating he had wiped them on her clothes…she tried to do the same to no avail. How could one reconcile such violence as she’d committed? The memories Keoni had shared with her of the child struck full force and she doubled over from the pain.

The gift of voice as a tool for destruction? Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

She’d fight. Oh hells yes, she’d fight, but she would never again betray her blessing. It was commensurate with cooking to poison, loving to destroy. And it wasn’t her.

Evilena the Red grasped Ciaran’s head between furry palms. Here in the dreamscape, the creature would have the ability to flay the mind in the moments it laid unprotected, and one as perverted as Mommy wouldn’t miss the opportunity.

* * *

Keoni dropped between them, knocking Mommy loose. Ciaran fell to her knees, obscured by mist but safer where she lay. Keoni called on the dreamscape to erase the blood from his woman’s skin, never dropping his gaze from the red-cloaked ankou. Ciaran’s pain vibrated within his marrow and his soul ached for the torment her first killing caused her. She shouldn’t have had to kill anything. Not his
manu li’i.
She was comfort and sanctuary not a death bringer. From this point forward he’d be her sword.

He stood, squared off with his opponent and raised an eyebrow. The creature paused. Keoni hurled a mini-tsunami blast straight through the ankou’s stomach. The creature’s body swirled, spiraling in an upright whirlpool. The macabre motion built fantastic torque.
Blam!
It blew and whirled back in the opposite direction, sending limbs flying to the four winds. Mommy’s torso imploded shortly after, disappearing from existence with a soft
ploop
.

Ciaran recovered her skillet and rose with it firmly in hand. Keoni looked to her. She nodded. Good, she could go on.

Hordes of pallid hyena-like banes bounded in, responding to the Ice King’s call, and huge lupine shadows with eyes of burning magma pounced upon the monsters.

The howlers had come.

The obsidian nightmares left prisms and the stench of fear in their wake wherever they shredded bane throats. They exterminated with savage ease, putting an end to their corrupted brethren with expediency enough to put dream guardians to shame.

When all the banes lay dead and fading, Keoni and Ciaran turned from the carnage to face off with the Ice King. The howlers fanned out to encircle the three combatants. Tossing their lupine heads, the howlers turned their backs, one by one, in a domino effect. In a ring, they stood guard against further interference from the outside and awaited the final showdown.

The melody returned full blast, permeating the dreamscape around them. Keoni watched the Ice King but stole glances at Ciaran. Her gaze lingered on the howlers.
“How beautiful. How frightening,”
she thought.

Keoni didn’t disagree. The howlers, beings of nightmare and darkness, were as much the truth as dreams and light. Just as much a form of goodness, they terrified in their perfection.

Alone at the center of the ring, the master ankou swayed in time to his tainted ballad. His straight platinum hair danced about his shoulders as he moved. Slowly, the features of his face softened, flattening in places, protruding in others. His ears and fingers elongated into smooth points, the fingers resembling tentacles, and his fur retreated to leave lacquered, white skin.

He stood before them in a new form, evolved and alien. Fascinating. Not in the same way the howlers were fascinating, but in a deadly sense as duplicitous as the devil.

Keoni winced against the deafening cacophony of the Ice King’s song. Ciaran swayed against him.

One moment, utter stillness. The next the ankou’s fingers shot out in telescopic tentacles, aimed for Ciaran’s mind alone.

“C’mon then,” Ciaran said. “Let’s have at it.”

Keoni grabbed her free hand and squeezed. “Together?”

“Together.” She nodded.

He attacked. She defended.

Keoni’s water blasts melted the tentacled fingers shooting from the Ice King’s hand. They grew back as quickly as he pruned them. Ciaran’s skillet stopped all and any attacks seeking to slip beneath their guard. To no avail. They lost ground the longer they fought. The pair had been battling and loving for what seemed like days. There wasn’t much left they hadn’t already given.

Tentacles enveloped arms and legs, burning frostbitten trenches into flesh. Where they lingered they sucked away life force.

A ferocious snap of the wrist twined the Ice King’s fingers around Keoni’s neck. The creature’s insidious cackle rang across the dreamscape while he delighted in shaking Keoni until he went limp. Redoubling, the tentacles wrapped Keoni’s face and, after reaching his forehead, delved into the inner places of his mind…

* * *

The image of the Ice King split into two figures within Keoni’s mind, a man and a beast. The Beast bowed with flourish and in the manner of a show pony—one paw raised the other held straight before it—the Man did the same. The pair couldn’t resist a show and there were things they wanted the Somnian to see. No. Not see, understand. For they were superior and he should know before they feasted on his soul.

The howlers, and the banes and the ankou after them, knew something mankind had yet to figure out. Fear did not haunt modern man as it had their ancestors. No, the man of social networking and goal-based incentives was hounded by deep wells of unresolved past. The kind psychiatrists and talk-show hosts received exorbitant fees to expose but not quite heal. Modern man ran from his issues.

If faced with a choice between their worst fear and a splashy death off the face of a cliff, the average human would fricassee an alligator or dragon. They’d readily kick Dracula or Sister Grace Anathema’s ruler-wielding ass rather than drop off the cliff. No matter how much they feared any of the above, certain death wouldn’t be an option. But if faced with their darkly guarded issues: the night visit of that uncle who’d never married but had a special affection for children; the perpetual squeak of their cousin’s wheelchair after the accident they’d caused; the guilt of not being there in time. If made to stare these ghosts of their pasts down, most people would take the cliff and thank God for the splat at the end of the ride.

The howlers worked with this in benevolence. The banes exploited it, and the ankou fed upon it.

The Man sneered and the Beast snickered. They knew him now. As a Somnian, and one of the best, Keoni had long since dealt with his fears—call it a prerequisite. Still he was human and all humans had issues. The Ice King, also known as the Man and the Beast, whichever suited, wielded the power to turn issues into agony. They relished it. No. He adored it.

* * *

The boy who would one day become the dream guardian stood in his grandmother’s yard in Kauai. They pounded poi together. He took helping the women seriously. After all, they were only women, and he was the man of the family—the delight of their days, or so they said. Keeping up with the schedule of a supposed man had gotten harder lately. He hadn’t slept in so long, dogged by nightmares he feared might come true as so many of his dreams did.

The rattle of the little white pickup truck drew his attention, the sides speckled with rust like sun-dappled rock exactly as he’d seen it… When? Where had he seen it? He wiped the sweat from his eyes with the back of a hand. Foreboding rose in the pit of his stomach. The truck was the same as it had been… No!

He grabbed the machete at Tutu’s feet and ran. Following the road for a pace, he broke off. Stones cut the soles of his bare feet, but the path he’d chosen was the shortest and he could not falter.

Leilani. Leilani! He stumbled. Falling onto the quiet beach his sister had claimed as her private place. The machete sliced his chin open, and sand filled the cut.

Leilani’s belongings lay strewn across the beach. Her beloved boogie board broken in ragged pieces.

Gone.

It had taken only moments and she was gone.

His big sister, the one who had taught him to smile no matter what, had disappeared just as he’d seen it in his nightmares. He hadn’t run fast enough. Hadn’t been man enough to save her.

The boy—who would never see his sister again—vowed he’d be a boy no longer.

The Ice King cackled and forced the memory to begin again, imprisoning Keoni in a perpetual loop of unresolved past…

* * *

Ciaran cried out Keoni’s name. Worry for him took her concentration away from the fight. The fingers of the ankou’s other hand snaked around the cast-iron pan and entered Ciaran’s third-eye in five points of vapor.

Rollicking through her mind, the Ice King sought a nightmare to cull or some issue to exploit. Instead the mind melding unveiled the dark secret the Ice King had hidden…the man at the core. The man who the Ice King had once been formed his foundation, and Ciaran could read anyone’s dream of the Last Hurrah as easily as the morning paper. She was still a psychopomp and those abilities allowed her to know the Ice King as intimately as he knew her nightmares. Her powers connected to the ankou through the man who had given it an unlife infused with pain.

The love song was the key. The Man had truly loved a woman once, and it had been their song. When his lover rejected him, he couldn’t bear the emotion the melody evoked, yet was compelled to listen to it again and again. He’d tortured himself with the tune and it perverted his mind. He became a stalker, bereft and in paradox, embarrassed. He pinned his entire life and sanity on one more of her kisses. It never came, and he retreated into himself over hundreds of restless nights. A howler was born and unlike any howler before it turned bane the moment it came forth from the mists of the dreamscape. This was the Beast.

Ciaran began to sing unconsciously. Starting with the verse the Man inside the Ice King hated most.

And you can’t force the tears that aren’t falling,

Or the truth that your eyes make a lie.

Eventually the bane had returned to its maker’s dreams and driven him mad with nightmares and the song. Always the song.

It had been easy. The bane knew the man better than anyone, and soon the Beast had eaten through its maker’s heart and entered the Waking World oozing vengeance like pus. Yet love remained woven into the Man’s frame, longing as well, and he wanted a mate—unheard of for an ankou. It sought a partner to fulfill the promise of the love song and its hunger for revenge. When it found Ciaran, it knew its dream would be complete.

“The world will suffer in truth,” the Ice King told her. And suffer because his heart lay broken.

As she fell further into the consciousness of the man inside the Ice King, deeper truths materialized before her. Oh God. Ciaran suddenly understood what Keoni meant by “he’s one of you,” and how the master ankou had been able to extend his arm the length of a hallway.

Brilliant.

The plan worked on so many levels, it blew her mind. Strategy and selective breeding at their finest. The man inside the Ice King did not bear the blood of Cora’Delieye as she did but he was a shifter all the same.

It seemed so obvious now. The man’s girlfriend rejected him because to her he’d been a shape-shifting freak. He’d disgusted her, and through some warped reasoning he’d fixated on Ciaran, a woman who by virtue of species shouldn’t reject him. For the Beast, she was just as perfect. She descended from a bloodline going back to the Mother of Shifting Magicks. Bonus, she possessed psychopomp abilities. The Man and the Beast would be able to take revenge on mankind at the deepest and most intimate level.

Diabolically brilliant. Awful. Twisted and mad.

The tainted love song reached crescendo.

Tears coursed down Ciaran’s cheeks. No one would believe it. The master ankou, who strategized a demon uprising to end the world, had started off as a daydream inspired by a song. All this horror had sprung from heartache. At the same time it was nothing new. How many wars throughout history had been fought under the banner of some twisted sense of love? There had been a face to launch a thousand ships. Would a betrayal to birth a thousand demons be so different?

She wept for the man gone mad, for the futility of it, but she continued to hold the Ice King in her thrall as she sang its song. Imbuing the melody with the original intent, she brought the ankou to its knees.

Hide away so the world, it can’t see me,

’Cause it’s clear now they don’t understand.

She physically beckoned Keoni to find him already at her side. Her mind touched his.
How did you escape the memory?

He shrugged. “I’m your man,
manu.
Think I’d leave you to face this alone?”

She loved him.

All of sudden Ciaran knew she loved the big, goofy Hawaiian. She almost squealed for the joy of it. Would have if the song she sang hadn’t been the only thing between them and being consumed.