The East Gate (Dawnbringer, Book 2)

by Elon Vidal

  “Fisher!” she screamed at him. He couldn’t hear. She ran to the side of the vehicle, searching for a way to get in. But her hands kept slipping right through, she could not grasp the door handle.

  A part of her wished that she could do something to help, but there was nothing she could do. It had already happened and if Fisher couldn’t heal them, then what could she do when she was so inexperienced in magic?

  “Are you coming with us?” someone said behind her.

  Dawn startled and turned around, surprised to see Fisher’s wife and daughter now standing there.

  “Are you talking to me?” she asked in surprise. This was a dream, right?

  The girl tilted her head to the side and seemed to be studying her. “Of course.”

  “Where are you going?” Dawn asked, not quite sure how to react.

  “Home,” the girl replied.

  “You can’t,” Dawn said. “You need to move on.”

  She tried to remember what Maggie had told her about the afterlife but couldn’t get the details straight. All that she knew was that they should have seen some gate or passage to the afterlife by now.

  “We can’t leave dad behind.”

  “You have to, I’m sorry.”

  “Will you walk with us?”

  Dawn looked back at Fisher and hesitated. She had no idea where they were going or the effect it would have on her. Perhaps just a few steps until they were on the right path. Fisher might be evil, but his wife and kid were not. She realized there was nothing she could do to bring them back together. So she nodded and offered a small smile.

  The girl extended her hand towards Dawn and she reached to meet hers. Dawn felt her eyes getting heavier and heavier, her eyelids weighing a ton. She blinked. Then time seemed to stop. She opened her eyes again and the two ghosts were gone in an instant. So was Fisher and everything around her. There was no road, no fuming car, no desperate cries. She let go.

  When Dawn opened her eyes again, she was not where she thought she should be. Definitely not in the comfort of her bed, but a field of grey grass. She looked around but there was nothing as far as her eyes could see, just an endless stretch of green. All these experiences were vivid. They didn’t have the fuzzy nature of a dream, where no matter how real it seems, intuitively she knew that she was actually sleeping. That intuition didn’t kick in. She groaned and shook, but the more she tried to wake up, the more she realized that she was definitely not in control of this dream.

  “Fine!” she screamed, looking at the sky as if that would provide answers.

  She started walking, not caring which direction she was walking towards as long as she didn’t stay in one place. It was getting darker, as if the sun was going down in the strange land she was in.

  “Hello!” she called out, hesitating to walk any further.

  A flock of black birds flew past her as soon as she did, and she heard the unmistakable sound of growling dogs behind her. She turned around slowly, and saw a huge, snarling three-headed beast. An enormous three-headed dog, twice the size of a school bus, with blood-shot eyes and a serpent tail. She screamed when she laid eyes on it.

  No way that this was happening!

  Dawn had no idea where the energy came from to sprint forward, but there was no way that she was staying to find out what the creature behind her would do. Whatever kind of nightmare this was, she wasn’t sure she could get out of it unharmed. She ran to get away from it. She stumbled through the grass at first and through sheer adrenaline picked herself back up. She turned back to see if it was chasing her and recognized that while she was leaving the beast further behind, a Hound had emerged from its underbelly.

  A Hound much like the one she had fought and stabbed in her home. She wasn’t going to wait to find out if she was connected to this one. She could see a large house in the distance and headed towards it to seek shelter.

  The house got bigger as she neared it, until she realized that it was a castle. It took her a second to recognize it, but she had been here before. Many times in fact, a disheveled castle of her Pixie dreams. The stained and ruined white castle walls with vines growing from the cracks were now distinctively familiar to her.

  Luckily the front gate was open, and she ran inside and shut it behind her. It was corrugate iron and she could sway both sides to clasp them in the central lock. She was still in shock but soon realized that nothing was chasing her anymore. The barking and growling were gone. Her panic wasn’t but she was trying to catch her breath.

  She took a second look at the familiar white walls and vines sprawled over them. The aura of the place. She could bet everything she had that if she went into the right rooms, she would see the white flowers too. How she had ended up here, she had no idea. She wondered if she would see the Pixie girl again or be faced with another monster.

  She entered the castle like she had before. Everything looked as she remembered it. The mothball smell and old potions oozed into her nostrils and old text books lined the hallway.

  “There is nothing left,” she heard Fisher’s voice say somewhere close by.

  She froze in her steps as she checked around her. He wasn’t in sight, but his voice had come from the main hall. She had almost walked in front of its entrance. That was the very place she had encountered the Pixie in her dreams. Was this all connected and had this been about Fisher all along? She held her breath and tiptoed as silently as she could to look into the main hall from the entrance. Fisher was kneeling in front of a man.

  The man was tall, taller than anyone she had ever seen before. And his uncovered torso was covered in intricate markings that closely resembled the ones she had seen on Fisher. There were four arrows on his chest, all pointing to the center and that was all she could make out of the strange marks. Most of them looked like a child's doodling, but she knew they had to be some ancient language that no one knew anymore.

  The man was listening as Fisher spoke, his jaw clenched, and his red eyes never blinked. Even though he looked human, with long raven black hair and a chiseled handsome face, there was an aura about him that screamed something else. Something greater. Spikes emerged above his eyes and ran parallel across his forehead. A thick beard concealed bones tied within. He wore a cape with skulls on his shoulders from which leather straps crossed in front of his bare chest and connected to a large demon profile on his buckle. His hair danced straight above him. Instinctively she knew that he was some kind of magical creature she had never encountered before.

  "Are you certain?" the man finally spoke, his voice clear and powerful boomed across the hall.

  Except that had not been what he'd said. Yes, it was what he meant, just not what he had said. Dawn blinked in confusion, had she just understood some strange language right then? She missed what Fisher said as she tried to understand what this all meant.

  "You have been careless," he said, making Fisher bow his head. "You could have killed her."

  Dawn's heartbeat increased as she realized that they might be talking about her.

  "She had no magic; I had no idea that-"

  "Silence! You bore me with your weaknesses."

  The man raised his hand and hit Fisher with the back of his hand.

  "The longer I lie here, the lesser the chances of bringing your family back."

  "Please," Fisher pleaded.

  "The girl, deal with her."

  Fisher nodded and the man looked up with narrowed eyes. His eyes were now a steel grey with a red slit in the middle, reminding her of a cat. Dawn tried to tell herself that this was just a dream, and he couldn't really hurt her in a dream. Could he? She was basically in kindergarten in the whole dream walking thing, and something about the man just screamed danger. She took a step back as he scanned the room, his eyes finally landed on her.

  Yes, he was looking right at her. She could feel it. What else would have caused him to look her way. This felt differently than it had when she was in the car with Fisher’s family.

  Her breath cu
t and she just stood there, frozen in place. The man’s eyes turned brighter red as he focused on her and hissed one word.

  “Eos!”

  TWENTY

  Dawn gasped as she woke up, feeling like she had been holding her breath for a very long time. She looked around her room and recognized the bed sheets and smelled the scented candles. She tapped her face a couple of times and pressed her palms against her eyes as if to reassure herself that she was really awake and back in her house. Her heart raced as she got out of bed and rushed out of the room, not bothering to put on any slippers before going downstairs.

  Ezekiel was in the kitchen with her mother, and they were both holding their hands over something that was glowing on the table.

  “Good morning sweetheart,” her mother said with a smile.

  “Hi mom, good morning Ezekiel.”

  Ezekiel only nodded in response, and she frowned as she looked at their hands. “What are you doing?”

  “Putting a protection spell on an amulet for you,” her mother replied. “You look like you have seen a ghost. Dawn, are you alright?”

  If Maggie had been here, she probably would have taken offense to that, but Dawn didn’t even have the energy to make a joke out of that right now.

  "I somehow started dream walking while I was asleep," Dawn said. "It felt, it seemed…”

  Ezekiel quickly withdrew his hands and looked at her with all of his attention. "What happened?"

  Dawn’s hands started to shake. Her mom stood up to embrace her. Isabel's hands stopped glowing and she came to her daughter's side, helping her to the couch. "Are you okay?”

  "I... I’m not sure, but I think I ended up in Fisher's mind. There was a man with him, mom. I think he saw me."

  “Did he try to hurt you?"

  Dawn shook her head in response. "He looked right at me, mom, he saw me in the dream."

  "He might have been looking at something behind you," Ezekiel suggested.

  Dawn shook her head, "No, I could feel it. He looked right at me and said Eos. And his eyes were all red and-"

  "He said Eos?" Ezekiel interrupted.

  "Yes, like the botany program I applied to."

  Her mother's arms went rigid around her. "He called you that?" she asked. "Are you sure?"

  Dawn nodded. "I was the only person there besides Fisher. Does it mean anything?"

  She had been freaked out that the man had seen her, but it seemed as if her mother was freaked out over a whole different reason. Which meant that her dream was about to get worse than she'd thought it had been.

  “Mom?” she asked when her mother still hadn’t said anything. She and Ezekiel looked at each other.

  “Our magic,” Ezekiel explained, “comes from different gods and other powerful creatures from the beginning of time. They gave us our distinct features. Take your eyes for instance.”

  “What about my eyes?” Dawn asked.

  “In the old days, witches born with different color of eyes or special vision were conduits. They relayed messages from the gods. They could see both in this world and in the afterlife. Wiccans believed that such were ascended beings, and they had a piece of the gods incarnate in them."

  Despite the serious atmosphere, Dawn giggled nervously. “Surely you don’t believe that I’m that, do you? My eyes have never given me any extra advantage over anyone, besides looking cool.”

  “You can see ghosts,” Ezekiel pointed out.

  “So? There must be other people with that gift. What does that have to do with the man in my dream?”

  She turned to her mother who took her hand in hers.

  “Maybe it’s nothing, but when we named you Dawn it was because of Eos, the goddess of dawn.”

  “Are you saying somehow the man knew that?”

  “I am saying that as the personification of dawn, her entire being was light.”

  Dawn looked at her mother trying to figure out if she had taken such an extraordinary leap that turned her from having an unknown magic to somehow having goddess-like power. Might they all be losing her mind? “You think the light is related to her somehow?”

  “When the gods began to fight amongst themselves over the creation of humans, Eos was one of the few that decided to stand with us mortals. Hades, the god of the underworld, wanted to unleash hell on earth, and Eos used her power to seal him in a deep slumber.”

  “Hades, the god of death?” Dawn asked in almost a whisper. “The one with the…” her voice trailed as she realized just what Ezekiel was referring to.

  She might not remember much about her classes at times, but she remembered that much, and it hadn’t crossed her mind in her dream. Not that anything would when you were busy running for your life, but it sure did now.

  “What? What did you see?” Ezekiel asked.

  “A Hound,” Dawn replied. “It chased me in my dream. It came from under a huge three-headed dog with a snake’s tail.”

  “Cerberus,” Ezekiel said, then stood up. “How could we have missed this?”

  Isabel stood up too and Dawn looked at them in confusion.

  “Am I missing something?”

  “I believe Fisher wants to awaken Hades,” Ezekiel said, “and Hades has found a way to communicate with Fisher. If this is the case, then this changes things immensely. We have to go to the Council.”

  Dawn looked at Ezekiel with narrowed eyes. “The same Council that would rather have me die?”

  “If Fisher succeeds in getting the power to wake Hades, there won’t be a Council left.”

  Travelling through a portal with a Council member was much faster than having to wait in the dull room and having an elevator take you to the Council room. With Ezekiel, they were in the middle of the room in seconds, and the rest of the Enlightened soon after.

  “Ezekiel, what is so urgent?” Gael spoke without even bothering to sit down first. “And why is the girl here again? I believe we settled this matter already.”

  “Dawn still has her magic, and she has completed two trials of opening a Gate. I believe it is the Gate of the East.”

  “What!”

  “Exactly what I said,” Ezekiel replied, not appearing the least bit moved by Gael’s explosive tone. “We have no time to waste, she must complete the third trial now. Fisher is trying to awaken Hades.”

  “Hades? But the gods have been asleep for ages, how would Fisher even do that? And how do you know that?”

  Ezekiel explained everything they knew so far, and then added, “If Fisher completes the trials first, he can have the key to awaken Hades.”

  “Can Fisher communicate with Hades? That would mean he is a direct descendant of a god,” Gael said in shock.

  “And I believe that Dawn is a conduit. Eos has been trying to communicate with her all along, she just didn’t understand.”

  Dawn looked at Ezekiel in surprise, was she a conduit now?

  “Simple, we hide the girl and Fisher cannot use her,” one of the members spoke up.

  “Excuse me?” Dawn said without thinking. She was not prepared to live out her life in hiding. No one paid any attention to her, though. Their attention hinged on everything Ezekiel said.

  Ezekiel shook his head, “If we do that, she dies. And we have no way of knowing what Fisher will do to get his hands on her. Our only hope is for her to complete the trials without help, and seal Hades again.”

  Another member chuckled. “You mean to tell me that the fate of all our lives lies in the hands of this girl?”

  “Eos was a girl, too, full of life and without a warrior spirit. Yet it is her power that managed to put down Hades,” the Fae leader said.

  Dawn looked at her hands. She thought back at how light glowed from them. She could hardly believe a goddess had been trying to speak to her and she couldn’t make what it was. A goddess so powerful she had managed to subdue the very god of the Underworld. She felt overwhelmed to grasp her own transition from magicless to divine conduit.

  “When were you planning to t
ell us all of this, Ezekiel?” Gael asked.

  “I was not,” Ezekiel answered without hesitation.

  Dawn was impressed, the old man was pretty good at being rebellious.

  “But that was before this. Now you can deal with me according to how you see fit, after we do our job. It is our fault that we failed to see this in time, and therefore we fix it now.”

  “Do you know what the third trial is?” Gael asked, looking at Dawn.

  She shook her head at first and he narrowed his eyes. She did vaguely recall how Aiken, the djinn, had described the third trial. “We met with the djinn at their library. He mentioned that the last trial to open Pandora’s box was to reveal one’s true self.”

  “We will convene in an hour, after consulting with the djinn,” Gael continued.

  Then one after the other they disappeared, leaving Dawn alone with Ezekiel.

  “Are they already kicking you out of the Council?” she asked, wondering why they had left him behind if they were going to have a Council meeting.

  “No, but they cannot trust me at the moment. Come on, we need to prepare.”

  She dreaded what was to come and did not know what Ezekiel would have in mind. After their first training session though, she knew she could trust him.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Elijah was in the kitchen with Damon when Dawn and Ezekiel portaled into the Enlightened Fae’s home. Dawn really wanted a hug but the look on Elijah’s face told her not to even try it. Damon seemed to read the situation because he smiled and came to her, giving her a fist bump.

  “You look terrible,” he teased.

  “Must be because I haven’t showered,” Dawn said.

  “Now that you mention it…” Damon made a show of moving away from her, which made her smile a little.