Dreamonologist

by Gregory Pettit

  I noticed that the monster hunter was barely even bleeding anymore from where the shard of stained glass had been shoved into his guts, and I suddenly wasn’t surprised that he was twice as old as America. Apparently, being nearly five hundred also makes one unable to shut the fuck up in a timely manner because Sloane decided to get in a few more cheap shots, verbally this time. “You know, Gerald, you were asleep when I killed your family, so you missed out on their final moments. So, as a gentleman, I wanted to share them with you. They died like this: ‘Please, please don’t kill my babies, please don’t.’ Then, when I did her the courtesy of shooting her first, so she didn’t have to watch, the spoiled little brats screamed, ‘Mummy, Mummy!’ At least until I slit their throats,” Sloane said, a glint of madness in his eyes.

  Cooper tried to rise, but Sloane kicked him in the face. “They only had to suffer for thirty minutes, but I had to suffer for thirty years in this decrepit, constantly aging body thanks to your noble sacrifice,” the monster hunter added with a sneer. “Of course, I’m not sure that your wife didn’t enjoy some of—” The last taunt was too much, and Cooper, every limb trembling with effort, rose to his knees, snarling, and ripped the bolt out of his back. Sloane laughed at his efforts, adding, “Good-bye, vampire,” and pulled the trigger. The shot was taken from three feet away. Cooper had no chance.

  No chance except me. I was lung shot, bleeding into my chest cavity. It was almost impossible to breathe. But I could still feel my connection to the Dreamscape. I thought of the barrier of mystical energy that I’d put between myself and the boy when the bomb was going off in his dream. I remembered when I’d seen Senior Auditor Brown put that same barrier between me and Olivia, allowing him to carry off my little girl. Her baby-blue eyes had glistened on the other side of a viridian curtain of mystical energy, calling out to me, and I had been able to do nothing. I wouldn’t be helpless this time. I let my anger boil up, feeding my rage into the conjuration to lend it power, focusing on my memories to give it shape, and pushed with my will to warp reality. A sheet of green energy flickered into being between Sloane and Cooper, and the bolt that should have ended the vampire impacted the barrier and flashed away to dust. The look of surprise on Sloane’s face was almost worth the agony in my chest—and then Cooper pounced. He didn’t move with superhuman speed. Hell, he didn’t even move with regular human speed, but he didn’t need to from only a foot away.

  “Noooo! Stop! My blood is still poison to your kind!” Sloane screamed, as the vampire sank his fangs into the side of the monster hunter’s neck, drinking deeply. I remembered how Sloane had killed the previous masters so many years ago. Cooper recoiled, spitting out the ichor like he’d just drunk sulfuric acid, and Sloane tried to reload his crossbow. I watched in horrified fascination. Choosing to die is a funny thing. If you choose to die to avoid pain, that’s suicide, and most religions call that a sin. If you choose to die to save someone else, that’s the noblest kind of self-sacrifice, and most religions call that saintly. I’m no theologian, so I’m not sure about the morality of choosing to die for vengeance. But I smiled a bloody grin to see Cooper make that choice.

  Cooper paused for the barest fraction of a moment. “This ends now, monster!” he yelled, and bore Sloane to the ground, tearing his throat out and slurping greedily over Sloane’s rapidly weakening protests. I just kept bleeding. Time went by, and I realized that I had fallen prone at some point. I glanced over. Both of the other men were lying on the cold marble as well, and the young woman was still unconscious in the corner. The Sigilum had been knocked off the altar and rolled to within a few feet of me, glowing gently and spitting the odd crimson spark. I dragged myself forward, vision swimming, and threw an arm around it, surprised when I felt nothing more than warm wax against my arm.

  “My blood…not agreeing with you…vampire…” Sloane croaked. “Even…in death…I’m still… anathema…to your kind…” he added with a chuckle that sent bubbles of bloody froth out of his mouth. His chest rose, fell, and didn’t rise again. His feet drummed on the ground, he pissed himself, and was still.

  Cooper turned his head, looking at me. He’d aged a hundred years. His lips were black, and dark veins crisscrossed his face and arms. His hair had fallen out, and he had more wrinkles than Gordon Ramsay. Hunger burned in cataract-filmed eyes as he gazed longingly at the crimson liquid pooled around me. “No…this ends now…” he rasped.

  I thought about what he could do. If he took my blood, then maybe he could heal; he’d be able to stop the other vampires that were going to rise in less than an hour. I thought of the little boy with his mother. That could be Olivia.

  “I’m dying. Do it,” I whispered to Cooper, making my own decision.

  “I…can’t…I’m…I’m…sorry…take this…” Cooper replied, but I didn’t really understand him. Something glass, filled with a crimson liquid rolled across the floor toward me.

  My eyelids were so heavy. My hands and feet were cold. I reached out and took the glass thing, and then I closed my eyes, unsure if I’d ever open them again. Just a little nap….

  Chapter 24

  2335, Wednesday, June 22, 2016–0030, Thursday, June 23, 2016

  I opened my eyes. That was a pleasant surprise. Even more pleasant was that a good-looking woman was leaning over me, her long face framed by curly, chestnut hair.

  “Uggh…” I said. I’ve always had a way with the ladies.

  “How are you still alive?” Mia—that’s who it was—said.

  “’Ee won’t be for long if we don’t get ’im to a hospital,” said a deep voice with an East End accent. Jack.

  “Cooper?” I muttered, glancing in his direction and seeing nothing but a pile of bones with paper-thin patches of skin lying on the cold marble floor. I realized I was holding something, and my heart leapt as I realized that it was the sample of Cooper’s blood. He’d planned ahead—had he known that Sloane would kill him? It didn’t matter right now. What was important was that we could still pull off the ritual.

  Mia arched a sculpted eyebrow. “Oh. Bollocks. Is that Cooper? I assumed it was some hundred-year-old corpse that had been disturbed.”

  “Yeah, but he killed Sloane, he’s…shit,” I said, noticing what should have been immediately obvious—Sloane’s body was gone, as well as that of the young woman who had been unconscious. And so was the Sigilum.

  “Yeah, I know Sloane’s shit, but…oh,” the giant of a man said as he put two and two together.

  “No time to go to the hospital. We have to get the Sigilum back.” I huffed.

  Jack held something in front of my face: “Do you mean this Sigilum? It was under your arm. He didn’t take it.” That didn’t make sense, but I couldn’t focus my thoughts enough to really worry about it.

  “Enough talk. We’ll take the damned thing to Dana and dump you at a hospital on the way,” Mia said, her voice wielding the whip crack of authority; Jack had already scooped me up before I could protest. That was a real shame, because as soon as I left the floor, my chest tightened, and I gasped for air as blood rushed into my throat.

  “Mia! What do I do?” Jack yelled, spinning for the door, which felt fantastic.

  “I’m not losing another one. He’ll never make it to the hospital bleeding like that. I have an idea—come,” she ordered, pointing toward the exit. Jack pounded his way down the path, Mia lighting the way. I slipped in and out of consciousness, fighting for breath, as we traveled the six hundred yards back to the gates at the front of the cemetery.

  Breath. Pain.

  Breath. Pain.

  Breath. Pain.

  Can’t breathe. Can’t breathe. Can’t breathe. Need to live. Olivia. Must live. Can’t breathe.

  “Julian. Julian!” Mia yelled in my face to get my attention. Black spots were dancing in front of my eyes. “The veil is thin here. Go to the Dreamscape. Heal yourself. I’ll help.” She leaned down to whisper in my ear, “I need your help to fix this. Live, damn you.”

  There w
as the faint sound of drums, and then I felt a breeze against my face, the wind between the worlds. I’d just used my powers and only passed out for half an hour afterward. A year ago, I’d have been screwed, but I’d been practicing. I reached inside myself, concentrated on a rent forming in the air, picturing a swirling portal of shimmering light—then I pushed.

  Power rushed out of me, and I screamed louder than a twelve-year-old girl at an Ed Sheeran concert. Elvis might be the King of Rock and Roll, but Ed was King of the Gingers.

  “What the hell is he saying?” I heard Jack rumble.

  “He’s delirious, just throw him in,” Mia said from a million miles away.

  I felt myself tumbling, there was a flash of light, and…

  ◆◆◆

  I opened my eyes. I was…somewhere else. Okay, “somewhere else” might have been a bit generous. Presumably, I was in the Dreamscape, but everything except a small circle of light around me was obscured. I looked down; the floor beneath me was an unshaded, smooth gray. I walked for a couple of minutes, but there was no change. Then I realized what was going on and flexed my will.

  A moment later, I was standing in a field, surrounded by wildflowers. Snowcapped mountains shimmered in the distance, and a flock of fist-sized hummingbirds zipped past as golden sunbeams danced playfully across the ground. The scene was an amalgamation of my favorite places. My own dream. The very first one that I had ever had. It was perfect—except for the hole in my chest. I could fix that, though. Luckily, I didn’t actually have to breathe here.

  I concentrated for a moment, my flesh rippled, and I was whole. I took a deep breath, and my whole body tingled as extradimensional energy spread through my system. I felt more alive than I had in weeks. I manifested my gladius and trench coat, did a back flip, and dunked a basketball. Having my own dream was pretty awesome.

  “There’s a price to pay for what you’re doing,” a man’s voice said from behind me.

  I whirled, ducking behind a conveniently summoned rock and drawing my sword. “Who the—” I started.

  A gaunt, lanky, white guy with dark, slicked-down hair was standing in front of me, hands behind his back. He wore a dark wool suit that was cut like something out of a Depression-era movie, and he interrupted me with a smile and a laugh, spreading his hands in a friendly gesture. “I’m Randolph Carter. I’ve been here…well, not here exactly, but in the Dreamlands for a tremendously long time. But I started my existence in your world. In 1874, near Boston, to be precise. You, my friend, are about to take the first step down a road that could lead you to where I am, and I’d like to make sure that you understand what you’re getting yourself into.”

  “I call this the Dreamscape,” I said, falling back on inane detail as my mind reeled at Randolph Carter’s visit. I’d dealt with the Senior Auditor invading people’s dreams, but he’d been a sorcerer and used a spell and Mia’s help to get there. If Carter wasn’t another fake, if he really was a Dreamwalker, then what kinds of answers could he give me after over a hundred years of exercising his abilities? And what would he want for it?

  “I don’t want anything, Mr. Adler. I couldn’t enter the dreams of normal sleepers with you, but now that you’ve finally shown up like this, in your own dream, I could make contact. And I’d like to say just how impressed, how proud I am of what you’ve accomplished. But, as you know, time runs differently here—and you have none to waste,” he said, casually reading my mind and demonstrating one of the abilities that I’d just pondered. “I also need to warn you that if you use the, er—Dreamscape to heal yourself, it’ll become a bigger part of you. Like Persephone in Hades eating a few pomegranate seeds, any sustenance that you take into yourself here will tie you to this place.”

  “I’m dying,” I replied.

  “A choice that you still have and I don’t due to my decisions,” the rangy man from another century said, wagging a finger and giving me a stern but kind look. Like a teacher to a favorite pupil who’d just claimed that A2 + B2 = banana pudding.

  “If I’m not whole, then people are going to die. My child will be…something inhuman. My wife could get murdered. I have to do this,” I insisted, noticing after I’d done so that dark thunderheads were looming on the horizon.

  “I thought that’s what you would say. This won’t be enough to trap you here, this time. However, there will be a price. I can’t tell you exactly how it will manifest, but things won’t be the same for you after this. Now, you’d better get back.”

  “Wait!” I had so many questions, and I didn’t know if I’d ever get this opportunity again. “I’ve been having visions. They’re coming true.”

  “Yes?” Carter cocked his head to the side.

  I paused. I needed to ask the question, but I was terrified of the answer. “Can I change them? I have…choices. If what I’ve seen has to come true, then I think it means that I make a choice that is going to get a lot of people killed. I…I don’t think I can do that…” I trailed off.

  Randolph Carter flashed an incongruously boyish grin and paused a moment, choosing his words. “There have been many dream prophets. Joseph, Edgar Cayce, Nostradamus. Much of what they saw came true, but it was open to interpretation. Imagine a scene. A woman screams in pain, there’s blood. The next scene is a man weeping. One interpretation is that she was murdered, a terrible fate. But isn’t there another way of looking at it?”

  I took a moment to consider how else you could interpret those events. Then I thought of when I’d experienced almost that exact scene—the day that Olivia was born. “Umm…could she have had a baby? The man is crying tears of joy?”

  “Got it in one. The trick isn’t to change what you’ve seen. What you need to do is change the context, the interpretation. Certain things are meant to happen—there are beings with plans that we cannot begin to comprehend. But the why, the how, and the meaning—those you can give to them with your choices, your actions. Now, get going, Dreamonologist, or else you won’t have time to make any choices,” Carter chided before stepping back and fading from sight in one smooth motion.

  I wasn’t sure how blood running in the streets could be misinterpreted. If the vampires weren’t going to be stopped, didn’t that mean that I was fated to use the Sigilum to help Dana and the baby? I couldn’t believe I’d make that choice, and I appreciated the words from my fellow Dreamwalker. Maybe there was a way that my visions could come true, where I didn’t end up seeing a monster when I looked in the mirror.

  And Carter was right. It was time to go back. I’d already made the decision to heal myself, even knowing that it could damn me in the long term. But if I was damning myself, then I figured I’d better be proper God-damned damned, so I sheathed my sword, pulled an AK-47 off my back, and checked the twenty-million-candlepower UV flashlight that I knew was on my hip. I imagined a portal back to the real world opening and stepped through—

  ◆◆◆

  —and I was hit by a freight train. A big, gay, seven-foot-tall freight train. “Get down, Jules!” Jack yelled superfluously as I lay crushed underneath him, gasping for breath.

  “Get off of me, you lardass,” I said. I’d emerged from the Dreamscape uninjured and loaded for bear. From the blood I could taste in my mouth, now I was just loaded for bear.

  “Holy crap, you’re okay! You’re welcome, by the way, for my not letting the Sons of Perseus put any more holes in you,” Jack growled as bullets spanged off of headstones and chewed the dirt around us. “Oh, and it’s hard to exercise with just one hand, thank you very much, Jules,” he added, waving his hook in the air as he rolled off of me.

  “Boys, if you could focus, please,” Mia said, tossing her hair out of her face with a flip of her head. She was taking cover behind a tall oak tree, dark combat fatigues making her hard to spot in the gloom.

  “What the hell is going on?” I asked Jack as Mia snapped off a couple of shots from a pistol.

  “You were gone for nearly twenty-five minutes. The Sons showed up. We managed to h
ide for a while, but there are about thirty agents closing in on us,” he answered.

  “Any attuned?” I asked.

  “Weren’t you paying attention? There’s a purge on. The organization has fallen to the anti-attuned faction, and they’re trying to round all of us up,” Jack said. Oh, so that’s what pogrom meant, I thought.

  “And we’re pinned down?”

  “Yeah,”

  I felt my cheeks flush red with anger. There were over fifty supernatural predators who were imminently going to break free, and the Sons of Perseus were wasting their resources on us? “Not anymore,” I said between clenched teeth, and grabbed the twenty-million-candlepower spotlight that had fallen next to us. “Close your eyes,” I hissed in Mia’s direction, and flipped the switch, shouting, “Let there be light!” A chorus of pained shouts rang out, and even with my eyes closed I could make out the shape of tombstones through my eyelids. Jack hauled me to my feet just as a stray bullet blew out the spotlight, plunging the area back into the gloaming. The three of us barreled toward the fence, branches crunching underfoot. Bullets zipped past, thunking into trees and ricocheting off of monuments, but we scrambled, unharmed, to a spot where a tree straddled a tumbledown section of brickwork.

  I’m lanky, so I was able to hop onto some rubble, shimmy up the tree, and get over the fence in almost no time at all. Apparently being shot at grants a +5 to my dexterity checks. Mia was a few inches shorter, but lithe, and in much better shape than I was, so she didn’t have any problem either. Jack, on the other hand…well, let’s just say he hadn’t gotten appreciably lighter in the past five minutes.