by Vicki Keire
“You look like you want to murder someone and eat their liver raw,” Jack said, one eyebrow raised high. He had snuck up on me.
I wrapped my Shadow-clad arms around my middle, hoping I wouldn’t blast him with one by accident. I ignored his comment, and spun to face him instead.
He crouched behind me in that way of his: a kind of half-kneel that implied openness, but allowed him to spring at any second. His skin glowed a faint blue as it had each time I’d seen him in the Dreamtime. To my surprise, when I looked down at my own hands, they glowed with same soft light.
“Hey!” I said, feeling a grin start in spite of myself. “We match.”
“And I finally get to shed that stupid uniform,” he said with a long-suffering sigh. It was true; Jack wore the same loose pants I was used to seeing him in, and nothing else. His chest was once again bare as were his feet, and I could see the intricate tattoos that decorated his entire torso. If I squinted hard enough, I could just see the edges shift and move.
The same brief pang of tangled emotions washed over me like they did every time I saw Jack shirtless, which was most of the time. “Where are we?” I asked, to distract myself.
“In the ether,” he said, turning to survey our surroundings. “It’s a place in the collective unconscious between falling asleep and actually dreaming. I’m glad I caught you here; it’s much easier to find individual dreamers this way.”
I digested that, even though I didn’t totally understand it. “I’ve been meaning to ask. What is the Dreamtime, anyway? Some kind of parallel dimension?”
“Been reading science fiction lately?” He laughed. “I suppose that’s as good an explanation as any. I just think of the world like a layer cake— the dreamtime and the ether are just one layer that most people can’t see.”
“You know I have no idea what you’re talking about, right?”
He rose from his crouch and shrugged impatiently. “It doesn’t matter. Just know that it works.” He reached for my hand and flipped it palm-up in his own. Shadows still snaked around my hands and arms. “Want me to get rid of these for you?” he asked, idly tracing a circle on my Shadow-swarmed palm with his index finger. He swept his thumb across my pulse. His touch was casual and quick, but it still made me uncomfortably warm.
“No thanks,” I said, pulling my arms back against my middle. “You never know when they might come in handy. They are supposed to be weapons, after all.”
He looked disappointed, but nodded anyway. Then his expression brightened. “Hey, want to see something cool?”
“I want to go to Whitfield,” I said stubbornly.
“We will, of course we will,” he said. “But this is on the way.”
I shrugged my consent, but began to pull away again when Jack snatched up my hand. “Look, I need to be touching you when we actually travel between dreams.” He sounded as if what he was proposing was the most natural thing in the world.
I slipped my hand back in his, and tried to keep up with his easy loping stride.
“What are those lights scattered around?” I asked, wondering if it was possible to trip in the ether. If it was, I was sure it was going to happen to me.
Jack pulled me a little faster. When I squeezed his hand in protest, he reluctantly slowed again.
“Those are what I’m trying to show you,” he said, bright and eager as a seven-year-old at his birthday party. “Those are other people’s dreams. Come on, sometimes you can catch a glimpse from the surface, so you don’t have to actually enter the dream.” He nodded to the patch of light closest to us. “You’ll see,” he promised smugly.
As we drew closer to the glow, I saw that it was more a collection of images than an actual light. I stopped when Jack did, and watched the procession of pictures. A greenish lake shimmered in the setting sun. It vanished, followed quickly by a kindly, smiling old man. He was sitting beside a young boy who couldn’t be more than eight or nine; they were fishing together. It seemed like a sweet dream. “How can we tell which one of them is asleep?” I asked.
“There’s no real way to know without stepping into the dream itself,” he said. “It could be either of them, or it could be someone else entirely. There’s no way to tell for sure, and I doubt you want to spend the time to find out right now.”
“No, I want to get to Whitfield,” I insisted, for what felt like the millionth time that day. Jack began pulling me behind him again.
I noticed something new in the ether, something that could have been easily overlooked. Not far from the bright bubble of the dream we had just seen, hovered what looked like a dark storm cloud. The colors were just a little deeper than the eternal twilight of Belial’s kingdom, and they writhed like living things. “What is that?” I demanded, involuntarily jerking myself free of Jack’s restraining grip.
“Oh.” His face fell. “I was hoping we wouldn’t see one of those. Someone’s having a nightmare.” He squinted. “A bad one, by the looks of it.”
Intrigued, I inched closer. A figure lay huddled along a short bench made of wooden planks. Long hair fell free from the hood of a tightly wrapped cloak; probably a girl. The cloak appeared to be the only blanket she had. The walls dripped with water and slime; a single guttering candle served as the lone light in the room. The candle did nothing for the corners of the room, which writhed with shadows and flickering images. The girl cried out from her bench as one of the shadows formed into a creature almost as tall as the low ceiling. Red eyes pierced the black and fangs dripped with some kind of venom. It stayed confined to the shadows, not venturing near the weak circle of light surrounding the girl, who began crying at its appearance.
It was a pitiful, thin kind of cry like the girl had already had all the tears wrung from her and was struggling to come up with more. She sat up and pushed herself as close to the wall as she could, fixated on the horrible dream monster.
That was when I recognized her.
“Hey!” I said, shock warring with anger. “That’s the girl who brought the Hellhounds. Caroline Bedford! That’s the girl who set me up and maybe burned down my town, too!”
Jack’s reaction surprised me. He stared at the unfolding nightmare. “I wish I could do something to stop it,” he murmured. “God knows she’s suffered enough.”
I said nothing, torn between pity for the child I now recognized as a fellow Nephilim, and anger at her former actions. But even through my anger, I couldn’t stand to see a child tormented. “Why don’t you, then?” I asked softly.
“Because she doesn’t know I can Dreamwalk. Since Belial holds her responsible for everything that went wrong with your capture, she’s been locked away in a cell. She’ll do anything to get out; I can’t take the chance that she’ll tell Belial what I can do.” His answer made sense, but did nothing to quiet my rising rage. So Belial liked to pick on little kids, did he? That just made him even more disgusting to me. As soon as I could, I would see what I could do to help this little girl.
And then it hit me. I could help this girl; Belial had promised to grant me a request. I felt ripped in half as I watched the child’s nightmare unfold. Yes, she had helped capture me and brought Hellhounds to my town. But she was only twelve, and a victim herself.
If I helped her, I wouldn’t be able to wish my way out of Belial’s realm.
Right away, I snorted. Like getting away from a demon was ever going to be that easy. But it sure gave me a lot to think about.
I let Jack pull me away, my mind troubled and my heart aching. We passed other dreams, some light and some dark, but I said nothing as he led me farther and farther into the ether.
Suddenly, solid gray shapes, roughly the size of humans, appeared in the white surrounding us. I squinted to see them better; they appeared to have threads of gold interwoven through the gray. Jack went instantly still. I slammed into his side. “Oof! What the hell…”
“Shh!” Jack pulled me behind him and let go of my hand, dropping into that protective crouch of his. He rubbed his ta
ttoos absently; some of them sparked around the edges at his touch. “Hunters!”
“What does that even mean?” I asked, fear beating out irritation.
Jack’s eyes were very narrow as he squinted into the distance. “It means the other side has found us.”
“But the other side already found me,” I whispered.
Jack merely raised one eyebrow at me and sprang up from his crouch. The gray figures advanced. Jack spun, keeping his back to me. The tattoos along his arms and chest looked like they were boiling; electric blue light increased in intensity around his entire body. As it did, the mist thinned.
“Hurry!” he said, his arms outstretched like an orchestra conductor’s. “Grab onto me. There’s no time to find the right dream. I’ll have to make a portal.”
“But…” I hesitated before gingerly wrapping a hand around his glowing, crackling forearm. “What are Hunters?”
“Angels,” he said, gritting his teeth. “The un-Fallen kind. The kind that like to hunt and kill Nephilim.”
I blanched. “But why…”
The ether around him continued to thin. By looking over his shoulder, I thought I could make out a darkened room. “Because we’re Belial’s weapons now. They don’t care that we didn’t volunteer.”
Great. Now someone new wanted to kill us. I threw my arms around him in a choking embrace. “Get us the hell out of here,” I begged. With me in his arms, Jack stepped backward into what was indeed a darkened room.
A darkened room with white sheets on a queen bed.
A darkened room with Ethan asleep in it.
Ethan. Home.
Or, to be more technically correct, Jack had brought us to Asheroth’s house. A small prickle of alarm spiked in me, knowing we were in the same space as my Fallen mad guardian, but Ethan looked peaceful and unharmed as he slept. I jerked myself free of Jack’s hold and rushed to the side of the bed.
His light eyes were closed, framed by thick lashes. His chest rose and fell slowly beneath the white blanket. I wanted nothing more than to crawl into that bed and curl up next to him, and sleep until all of this went away. But I couldn’t; here in the Dreamtime, I couldn’t even wake him up. That was Jack’s job.
I stared at my Azalene counterpart like Abigail begging for a bite of dinner. “What do I have to do?” I asked. I couldn’t help myself; I drifted even closer until I could almost feel Ethan’s breath on my cheek.
“I have to pull him out of sleep and into the Dreamtime with us,” he said. He reached down and wrapped a hand around Ethan’s. “Watch.”
I could barely tear my eyes away from once-immortal boyfriend, but I obeyed. I watched as Jack gripped Ethan firmly by the hand and began to pull. It was like watching someone peel off a layer of old tape. Ethan’s body continued to sleep, but a faintly blue version of himself separated, bit by bit, from the rest of him. It seemed to take forever. An arm came free, then the other arm, and then, with one mighty pull, all of Ethan’s upper body.
Shrouded in blue and blinking sleepily, Ethan’s Dreamtime self propped up on his elbows. “What the…” he began, but then his eyes lighted on me. Conflicting emotions raced across his face so fast I couldn’t identify them.
And then, with a small shout of what sounded suspiciously like joy, he pulled me into his arms.
For the first time in what seemed like years, I finally felt at home.
ow to describe seeing Ethan again, unharmed, when my imagination had painted such a terrible, terrible picture?
I had thought he might be dead or injured. But now he stood before me, and I couldn’t read all I saw in his eyes. There was too much; it moved too fast, and I had my own feelings I struggled with. They rushed to drown me as surely as the tide, and I couldn’t stop staring. I wrapped my arms tightly around my middle and held on for dear life. I felt off balance, insecure: what if he rejected me? I had lied to him, betrayed them all … and yet here I was, fresh from his brother’s realm, carrying deadly Shadows.
I shouldn’t have worried. Before I could exhale, I was in his embrace after so, so long. Enclosed in a cocoon, I was safe from the world, at last. We were bound together with arms and fingers and lips, Ethan and I, hungry and devouring. His scent overwhelmed me. I gulped it down greedily. I was already used to the air of the Twilight Kingdom, and Ethan smelled like wet earth and grass after a rain. Life. Love. Ethan. I burrowed even deeper into the collar of his soft wrinkled cotton shirt. I realized, to my surprise, that I was crying.
Irises the color of a river in summer looked down at me. Stubbly cheeks and bleary, red-rimmed eyes pointed to a man who wasn’t sleeping well, but to me, he was beautiful. I thought of the sight of him in the mornings in our old apartment, watching as he got ready for his day.
A normal day, full of work and errands and chores. A normal life we shared together. In spite of all the angels and demons and magic that I now knew surrounded us, we had still managed to carve out what passed for a normal life. And I was just realizing how much I missed that, held closely in Ethan’s arms as if I was precious and breakable. It was fitting, too, because I felt so, so brittle right now.
“God, I’ve missed you,” he whispered into my hair. He buried his face in it and gently nuzzled the top of my head. “I’ve been so worried, you can’t imagine…”
“I think I can,” I whispered, pulling back enough so that I could see his face without missing out on the delicious sensation of being held. I threw myself against Ethan’s chest and hugged him for all I was worth.
“Are you all right?” Ethan tucked me into the space between his chin and chest. I fit as perfectly as if that place had been made for me.
I wanted to inhale him, drinking in every detail and burning it into my brain to save for another time. Later, I thought, when I was awake and trying to survive Belial’s Kingdom. That was when I’d take this memory out of my pocket like a folded note, and hold on to it so tightly that even Belial himself wouldn’t be able to shake me.
I dodged the question because I didn’t want to lie to him. I was most definitely not all right as I was currently being held prisoner by a demon that looked just like him. But there was no point telling him that. He already knew.
“I’m unharmed,” I said, forcing out the best truth I had. I was done lying to Ethan; if he wanted me to, I would tell him every sordid detail. But there would be time for that later. “And you?” I asked, leaning into him again.
He took me into his embrace, and the skin between us crackled a soft, but electric blue. Ethan’s eyes were wide as he looked at me in wonder.
“I could never get used to that,” he said, staring at his arm where it curved around my shoulders.
“At least we can meet, thanks to Jack,” I said, realizing that the Shadows hadn’t made an appearance on my arms the whole time I was here. Which only emphasized how safe I felt in Ethan’s presence.
“Don’t thank me just yet,” Jack said, looking like a guilty eavesdropper. “We’re here for a purpose.”
“Aren’t we always?” murmured this man that I loved, his gaze never leaving mine.
“Ethan,” I began, hesitant. “How bad is it? The town?” Suddenly I couldn’t bear to look him in the eyes. “I know what I did was terrible, but you have to believe that I never knew they had Hellhounds! I would never put Whitfield in that much danger, or you, or even…” I lowered my voice to a paranoid whisper. “Or even Asheroth.”
“I know that.” He heaved a sigh. “The town is fine. The Hellhounds couldn’t get past the wards; we pinned them here and were able to call in the rest of the guardians to help with the clean up.” His words were slow and reluctant; he sounded very tired. “They burned down part of the forest, but working together, we were able to save the house. We were lucky to trap them here when we did. If they had gotten loose on the town… well, it wouldn’t have been pretty.”
Even though Ethan had assured me that it wasn’t my fault, guilt still knotted my stomach when I thought about the Hellhounds. It proba
bly would for the rest of my life.
“That’s part of what we’re here to see as charming as this reunion is,” Jack said, stepping closer to us, away from his spot against the wall. He moved lithely in the Dreamtime, his tattoos flickering and his body language leonine.
“What do you mean?” I asked, confused. This was the first I’d heard of an agenda other than getting back into Ethan’s arms.
“I want to see the town,” Jack said, reaching out to grab my hand.
“Hey!” I protested.
“I have my reasons,” he said in a dark growl, and I wondered what they were. Just how well did I know Jack, after all? What could he be keeping from me? And most importantly, why was it essential for him to run around Whitfield in the Dreamtime?
Despite my concerns, I lightly laced my fingers in his. Jack ducked his head, as if embarrassed. “We have to be touching,” he said. Ethan reluctantly let go of my hand to hold on to Jack’s. Now that I thought about it, Ethan seemed less than enthusiastic about going to see the town as well. Was he hiding things from me, too?
Well, I would know soon enough. It was exactly like the last time I Dreamwalked with Jack; the apartment began to waver around us like a bad video feed, and was quickly replaced by another, still wavy, scene. The change was almost instant. One minute we were in Asheroth’s basement bedroom, and the next, we were in the park downtown.
My heart caught in my throat the second I recognized my surroundings. I began to share some of Jack’s alarm. Businesses were closed that were usually open; only about half the lights in the park were on. There were no people except the three of us. That was the way things were in the Dreamtime, Jack had told me. No one came to the Dreamtime unless Jack decided to bring them. But knowing that did nothing to help the feeling of wrongness that permeated the very air around us. I slid up next to Ethan again and rather shakily took his hand.
