Just Breathe (5 page)

Screw it all.

She crawled in bed, rolled to her side, and pulled up the covers. Despite the blanket, she couldn’t get warm.

Being alone sucked.

Beating her wallowing thoughts into silence, Zoe drifted into a restless sleep and fell out of Realis into the Dreaming…

Tonight the parallel world looked different. The beach she usually tumbled into was dark instead of sunny. The air was hot. Stifling. Toxic. She wasn’t sure if the strange shift into night was something she’d subconsciously engineered for this dream or a product of the Dreaming devolving into chaos under the threat of Fyres taking over.

Faraway screams resounded in the distance, full of pain, fear, and panic. Zoe shivered. Without Gavin, she was powerless to stop any Fyres who might taunt innocent dreamers. The best she could do was trust the other Sentinels were on duty and taking care of business. Besides, her job was helping Lily and the Wæters. The quicker their Archelemental rose to power, the sooner Balance would be restored.

Remembering Gavin’s warning to keep a low profile, she looked around for something to conceal herself. Nothing but land, sea, and sky. That was okay. As a lucid dreamer, she’d make do with what she had.

She reached up to the starlit sky, tugged down a corner, and ripped off a piece of night big enough to cover herself. She fashioned a cloak out of the blackness, wrapped it around her shoulders, and pulled the hood over her head. Holding out an arm, she checked her handiwork against the sky. She couldn’t tell where she ended and the stars began. Perfect.

Zoe found a palm tree close to the ocean, sat down, and leaned against its bristly trunk. Whale calls surfaced from offshore. Though she was looking for Lily, another humpback occupied her thoughts and wouldn’t let go: the calf she’d euthanized in Sydney. Had he made it back to his mother?

Sending out a call of her own, she closed her eyes and sorted through the unique voices. Lots of deep-pitched tunes, but she couldn’t pick out the higher squeaks of a baby. She gathered her knees to her chest, folded her arms on top, and laid her cheek there.

Where are you, little one?

No reply.

As she processed the whale calls on autopilot, her heart dragged her attention in the opposite direction of where her brain intended to go.

Gavin. Again.

She loved him, plain and simple. But even if they could get past The Incident, the whole Sentinel-induced dream deprivation thing put a massive crimp in their relationship. Every night she slept beside him was a night she couldn’t dream.

Could they get around it? Sure. They could keep separate houses. Maybe even separate bedrooms in the same house would work…

But partners were meant to be together. She didn’t want a long-distance relationship or to wake up alone every morning. She wanted…Gavin. All of him.

The whale songs got louder.

Zoe’s scalp tingled. She lifted her head and scanned the darkness. Hordes of goose bumps stiffened the hairs across her flesh. She pulled the night cloak tight around her shoulders and stood.

Something she could only classify as an amorphous
force
slammed the undercarriage of her skull and knocked the breath from her lips.

What the
hell
was that?

Zoe…
a ‘voice’ spoke. It
seemed
female, but it didn’t actually have a pitch. More of a
presence
. Definitely not a whale.

Crackles of static filled her mind.

She spun around. A mental harpoon penetrated, hooked, seized her gray matter and electrified it with a jolt of lightning. The buzz stung like a thousand bees—imagined sound, but excruciating pain.

Jesus—

“Please stop. It hurts.” Words eked out in a garbled mess. Zoe fell to her knees. She reached out in vain for a handhold that didn’t exist. Her face crashed to the ground, sending a plume of sand and ashes up around her.

A force with spirit—akin to a powerful Elemental but exponentially larger—ghosted inside her. It coated her skin, saturated her cells, penetrated deep within her bones. The collaboration of millions of neurons lighting up her cerebral cortex at once paralyzed her until pain shocked her limbs into motion. She slapped one hand to her forehead and the other to her ear. Vomit threatened her tight throat with an acidic stranglehold.

The invisible gunner behind the harpoon still embedded in her consciousness yanked the line so hard, she lurched forward. Her limp body skittered ten feet through the ashes.

Dear God, she was going to die in her dream like all those Wyldlings did a few weeks ago.

Without Gavin. Alone.

Her arms and legs reacted in coherent thought’s stead. Desperate to avoid further agony, she got up and stumbled in the direction of the pull, toward a tall, white box in the distance.

“What do you want from me?” she screamed.

The unrelenting leash dragging her by the brain didn’t answer. As her feet brought her closer to the rectangular object, the pain ebbed, but only slightly. Whatever had a hold of her wanted her at that…

…door.

Shit. It looked like the dream door Gavin had conjured before and tried to send her through. The one that also blocked her entry into the Dreaming when she slept beside him. She sucked a deep breath into her lungs and ran for the portal.

The great marble slab looked washed out, translucent. And its markings were different from the ones she’d seen before.

Was this how the Fyres got into the Dreaming? Surely it couldn’t be so simple…

Zoe laid her fingers against the cool surface. The door shimmered like ripples on water, and the throbbing in her head disappeared completely. Thank God. Now she could think.

Voices from the other side snagged her attention. She recognized one of them. Westbrook, a Wæter Elemental she met a few weeks ago in the Dreaming. She pressed her forehead against the semi-transparent stone, cupped hands around her eyes, and peered through.

Four Wæters stood on a nighttime beach. Massive dunes sculpted mini-mountains behind them. Fraser Island. She drove past it on the boat every day. Were they here in the Dreaming with her or standing on the actual island in Realis?

“Lana is by far the better candidate. Most Elementals are human. Why would we want to extol an
animal
to such a powerful position? We can’t even understand them,” one of the males said.

A secret meeting about the Archelemental?

“You’ve seen what the whales can do with Water.” Westbrook’s aqua body shimmered like the stars above. “It doesn’t matter that we can’t verbally communicate. Their ideas will come across through the Element itself. The emotions, the flavors are there. Even Wyldlings sense it on some level. The whales possess invaluable wisdom, a quality every leader needs.”

Westbrook was right. Having spoken with humpbacks at length, Zoe was privy to knowledge that far exceeded humankind’s understanding of communication, culture—hell,
life
as scientists knew it. But she’d been warned not to abuse it. The whales had been the keepers of memory for millennia. A simple language barrier was the only thing preventing Wyldlings from unlocking the secrets of history—of mankind itself.

But there were some secrets humans weren’t ready to know.

“That may be true, but we still have to be able to understand them. Without a voice, they’re useless to us.”

A whale sang in the distance as if to debunk the Elemental’s statement. The rich tone bubbled through the crashing waves and washed onto the sand like an offering of diamonds, sparkling under the moon’s eye.

Should Zoe try to talk to them? Prove the Wæters wrong? The thought had barely punched through her synapses before deafening, incapacitating static stormed her senses. Down she went again, clutching her ears, squeezing her lids tight. A slow decrescendo suffocated the intense crackling, eventually snuffing out its life.

In the ensuing silence, the presence she’d shared her mind with evacuated her headspace, and she was once again alone.

She struggled to her feet.

“Dear Aqua, what was that?” one of the Elementals said.

Zoe pressed her nose to the stone door again. She could still see through it, but it had lost its elasticity. The circle of four faintly blue figures parted.

She pushed off the hood of her cloak and banged on the door. “Hey, can you see me?”

Westbrook’s big blue eyes lit up, and he stepped forward. “Zoe?”

“Yes, it’s me.” She grinned and pushed against the marble. It didn’t budge. No handle or knob to turn. Well, shit. Back to being ornery again.

One of the others shot a condescending smirk through the barrier. “Who are you?”

“Zoe’s all right,” Westbrook said. “She helped me when I was inside the Dreaming.”

They didn’t seem impressed.

Fine. “What are you guys doing out there? I heard you say something about Lana.”

Westbrook reached a hand to her. It disappeared where the door should have been. He pulled back and studied his wiggling fingers. “Can you open this?”

Zoe shook her head. “This door—or one like it—and I have gone several rounds before. Trust me. It’s not happening.” She kicked it for good measure. “But a few moments ago, something got a hold of me and dragged me here. Like a spirit. I think it wanted me to see the door.”

Westbrook’s brows pulled together. Liquid worry lines etched the periphery of his round eyes. “I was called in the same way, but from the Realis side. It was how I got into the Dreaming before you and I met.”

What? Then the summons had to have been from someone who had the power to open the door. But who was it?

Her heart raced. She leaned her shoulder against the barrier and shoved. Still solid as a rock. “Just before the static hit…the door
felt
different. Like it might have opened if I’d thought to try.”

Damn it. She’d had a golden opportunity to let the Wæters inside the Dreaming, but she blew it. Seemed she had a habit of arriving on the scene a few minutes too late.

“Ahem.” Hands on his hips, a tall, thin Wæter stared down his nose, bouncing his gaze back and forth between Zoe and Westbrook. “We have some business to discuss,
Wyldling
. Do you mind?”

Zoe couldn’t have felt smaller if she’d been an amoeba under a microscope.

Westbrook rolled his eyes. “They’re convinced Lana is the right woman for the Archelemental job, but I disagree. I’m pretty sure you do, too.”

Zoe swallowed hard and nodded. “Forgive me for eavesdropping, but I heard you talking. You said you couldn’t understand the whales. But I can. I’m a translator.”

All three Elementals flanking Westbrook exchanged amused glances and laughed.

She quirked a brow. “You don’t believe me?”

Heads wagged back and forth, arms folded across chests, and patronizing grins spread across faces.

Smug bastards. She mirrored their poses. “I’ll prove it.”

The biggest guy gestured to the ocean behind him. “By all means. Call the whale we just heard.”

Zoe straightened her back, and her ponytail swished against her shoulders. She sent her thoughts through the portal, into Realis, to the ocean beyond. A whale’s voice caught her attention.

Hello, friend,
she sang.
I’m Zoe. I have some Wæter Elementals here at the shoreline who don’t believe I can communicate with you. Would you mind helping me out?

The whale’s tune changed to an uplifting lilt.
You’re the one who came for Lily. What have you got to prove?

That she’s the rightful heir to the Archelemental throne.

She is. What would you like for me to do?

Zoe smiled.
Come closer and wave hello.

The Elementals looked expectantly at Zoe. She nodded behind them, and they turned around. A blow clouded the air several hundred meters away. A black back broke the moon-dappled ocean’s surface. The humpback rolled over, the shock of her white belly bright against the darkness. A flipper came up, then crashed hard on the waves three times in succession.

Zoe picked at her nails. “She says hi. Want me to ask her to perform any other tricks?”

The leader smirked. “That was just luck. Tell her to do a headstand.”

A laugh escaped her. “Okay.”

They want you to stand on your head
, she told the humpback.

Silly humans. How about this?
The whale lifted her back end high above the water, flapped her flukes like a fan in the air, then smacked them to the surface with a huge splash.

Zoe shrugged. “Good enough?”

“Ask her what she thinks about Lana,” the female Wæter said, stepping closer to the door.

Zoe returned her attention to the whale.
Do you have any thoughts you’d like to share about Lana?

Something akin to a snicker shot back.
Lana’s Water is strong, but she is impulsive. She lacks the wisdom and restraint that a leader needs to be great. Youth is her biggest enemy. With age, she will cultivate more discerning judgment.

Zoe relayed what the whale said. The comments were greeted with mixed reactions.

A familiar, high-pitched call struggled through the waves further up the shore. The hairs on Zoe’s arms stiffened. The calf.

“I’m sorry. I have to go. I need to escort someone to his mother.” She replaced her hood, smoothed the night fabric down her front, and gathered it tight against her skin. “Think about what this humpback told you. If you’re interested and willing to support the whale candidate, come back here tomorrow night. We can talk more then.”

That would give her a chance to test a theory about the strength of the Veil between Realis and the Dreaming. She slid her hand over the cool marble door. A wall was only as strong as its weakest link.

“I’ll be here.” Westbrook raised his chin, pride beaming from his eyes.

“Me, too,” the female said.

The others maintained guarded expressions, but Zoe caught hints of uncertainty beneath. Every rebellion started with one person. If just one more joined her, together they’d have twice the strength she had before.