by Vicki Leigh
After twenty minutes of waiting outside of Bellandi’s, Seth finally appeared. “You are the slowest Catcher I know,” I said.
“Sorry, man. Giovanni caught me before I left and had me shred some papers. Took me five minutes to get the damn thing to work.”
I opened the door to the bar. “Yeah, right. I know you were performing your beauty routine.”
With a playful glare, Seth shoved me inside and then followed.
Bellandi’s was our usual place when we were both in Rome. The bar was the only one I knew that served my favorite British ale, Worthington White Shield, and Seth enjoyed the half-naked women parading around the room, serving the customers. It felt like ages since I’d been in here, and I relished in the familiarity of the place—the hardwood floors and paneling of the brightly-lit room; the drinks cabinet that covered the entire wall behind the black, marble-top bar; the lingering smell of cigarettes and whisky; and the heavy beats of music screaming out of the stereo in the far corner.
Corporeal—if we touched anything while invisible, we’d go right through—we grabbed stools at the bar and watched the current calcio game.
“Samantha’s been waitin’ for you to get back,” Seth said.
I sipped my beer. “Has she?” I’d made the mistake of sleeping with her about twenty years ago after my mentor’s funeral. Even after being a lead for about sixty years by that point, I’d still been extraordinarily close to him, and his death had wrecked me. She’d handled the rejection surprisingly well when I told her the sex had been a mistake—hell, she had to considering I was her mentor—but our relationship was never quite the same after that.
“You should give the girl a chance, Daniel. She’s a great Catcher, your understudy, not to mention beautiful—”
“The fact that she’s my understudy is precisely why I shouldn’t. And I don’t feel for her that way. I’m enough of a gentleman to know she deserves more than that.”
“Whatever, man. You’ve just been different. I don’t like seein’ you all, I don’t know, depressed.”
The bartender replaced my empty beer with another, and I swallowed deep. It was true I’d been different lately, distant. But I wouldn’t say I was depressed. Tired of this afterlife, yes. Did I care if a Nightmare killed me? No. But I wasn’t suicidal.
“Don’t worry about me,” I said.
Seth shook his head and called for a second drink. As the bartender filled the glass, another group of Catchers walked through the door. Ivan, their leader, spotted me and smirked.
In my training, Ivan and I had been at the top of our class. I’d grown up in one of England’s noble families, trained from birth how to fight, and Ivan had been raised in a Russian war family. We were perfectly matched, and at the end of our training period, we’d been the last two standing in the Catchers’ Competition. For hours we’d fought, neither one of us yielding to the other, until finally he’d tired. My stronger stamina had been my saving grace, and I landed the finishing blow after two hours and five minutes. Since then, he and his posse had been relentless in their hatred of me.
“So, I see they’re letting the swine in, too?” Ivan led his group to where Seth and me sat at the bar.
I ignored him and stared straight ahead at the TV. Seth, on the other hand, loved confrontation. He turned around in his stool to face Ivan. “Why don’t you mind your own business?”
“This is my business,” Ivan replied in his thick, Russian accent. “You two are in my bar.”
“Last I checked, this bar belonged to Nico Bellandi.”
I closed my eyes. Seth, shut up.
Ivan grabbed Seth’s shirt collar and tugged him off his stool. “If you don’t get out of my bar, negro, the counter is going to belong to your face.”
Standing up, I smacked his hand off Seth’s collar. “Shove off, Ivan.”
“Don’t touch me, Tinker.”
Ignoring the insult, I dropped cash on the bar and shifted Seth toward the door. “Come on. There’s no point in fighting with him.”
“Yeah,” Seth said, “I guess he can’t help being a prick.”
We hadn’t gone five feet when Ivan spoke. “Ouch, I’m hurt. Did you kiss your mother’s pizda with that mouth?”
Seth stopped in his tracks and turned to face him, his hands balled into fists. “What did you say?”
I jumped in front of him and placed a hand on his chest. “Seth, don’t.”
But he knew as well as I did how to translate Russian. If I didn’t get Seth out of here now, he was going to beat the living shit out of Ivan.
Ivan crossed his arms over his chest and raised his eyebrows, taunting Seth. “You heard me. Tell me—did she beg for it after a while?”
Seth clocked him in the jaw. Damn. Ivan flew backward into his friends, knocking one of them to the ground. They jumped into action. While one went after Seth, another swung at me. Dodging the punch, I grabbed his arm. With one hand on each side of his elbow, I tugged down while bringing my knee up to strike. I heard the snap of his elbow when the joint hit my knee. His arm bent in half and with a cry of pain, he fell away.
Ivan’s elbow caught my nose as I spun around. Swearing, I stumbled into the bar stool behind me, my nose gushing blood. Ivan’s fist came for my face again. I spun out of the way and heard the crack of knuckles when he punched the countertop. Grabbing the back of his head, I smacked his skull into the hard marble.
By now the bartender was yelling at us to cease fighting or get out, but Ivan wasn’t letting up. Our fight escalated into a boxing match. Again he swung at me, but I blocked his fist and backhanded him into a table. The people sitting there had been smart enough to move when the brawl broke out, but their drinks hadn’t. The glasses shattered.
I took a second to glance at Seth who had taken down one of the other Catchers and was now in his own boxing match with the last of Ivan’s posse. His bottom lip was swollen and bloody, but other than that, he didn’t look too bad.
Ivan caught me off guard and picked up the table, throwing it at my head. I ducked just in time and swore when the table soared over the bar into the drinks cabinet, breaking almost every bottle in it. Glass flew everywhere, and I covered my head.
Before I could drop my arms, Ivan body slammed me. Glass cut through the back of my shirt into my skin as we skidded across the floor. I ignored the sharp pain and brought my arms up to block more punches. When I saw my opening, I flipped Ivan off me, and he sailed over my head into the bar.
I jumped up and spun around, ready to block another attack, but Ivan lay limp on the ground. My chest rose and fell as I tried to catch my breath, and my hands shook at my side. Adrenaline coursed through my body. I pressed my fingers to Ivan’s neck. His heartbeat pounded against my fingers.
Thank god. Leaving Seth to fight for himself would’ve been a shitty thing to do, but I still didn’t want to kill the guy.
“Fuori, ora! Chiamo la polizia!” the bartender yelled, threatening to call the police if we didn’t leave now.
“Mi dispiace per il disordine.” I apologized for the mess, throwing a wad of cash at the owner, then grabbed Seth’s arm. We needed to get out of here before the police arrived and accused the man of insanity for talking about people who fought then disappeared. We walked down the road until we were sure no one saw us then evaporated back to the mansion.
fter sleeping for exactly seven hours—as I always did—I showered and dressed in my usual outfit: dark wash jeans, black T-shirt and black boots. Running a comb through my dark blond hair, I winced when the teeth raked tender spots on my skull. Seth and I had gone to the medical wing upon our return to the mansion for a healing serum, but the effects hadn’t quite kicked in yet. I still looked like a raccoon with dark purple bruises surrounding my blue eyes.
Samantha caught me on my trek to the dining hall, her curly, blonde hair bouncing in a ponytail as she jogged to catch up with me. “Hey!”
I pinched the bridge of my nose and turned to greet her. “Hey, Sam.”<
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She crossed her arms over her chest. “Seth tells me your new charge is some psycho. Maybe I should be thanking you for stealing her from me.” Except I could tell she wasn’t thanking me. Her eyes burned with rage.
“Back off. I had a rough night.”
“Yeah, I can see that.”
My jaw twitched. “And you should be thanking me because you’re not ready yet to take something on like this.”
“Oh yeah? How would you know? You look like you ran face-first into a moving train.”
I walked away, unwilling to deal with her shit today, and about flipped when she followed me.
“You’re never here anymore. You have no idea what I’m capable of. You go to funerals and movies and concerts like you’re still some freaking human while I stay here and train with Seth. You have no right telling me what I can and can’t do.”
I stopped and stared at her. Did she not realize I was trying to protect her? “Actually, I do.”
Her hard, chocolate brown eyes stared into mine as she unfolded her arms. “Fine. Have fun with your psycho.” She spun around and stormed away before I had a chance to respond.
Shaking my head, I jogged down the stairs to the first floor and passed beneath the oversized, crystal chandelier in the grand foyer. The morning sun from the mansion’s gigantic front windows bounced off the crystal, casting little rainbows to dance on the gold wallpaper. I entered the carpeted hall on my right and headed for the double-doors at the end. As I reached for the handle, they opened and a blur of waist-high, red hair flew at me.
“Daniel!” Tabitha yelled as she clutched her tiny arms around me.
Tabitha had been recruited the same day as me, and she was one of the only individuals anymore who could put a smile on my face. She had become like my little sister. Her energy, her enthusiasm, and her unyielding compassion warmed my soul every time I saw her. Those traits were what also made her a Dreamweaver.
“Tabbi, what are you doing here? I thought you were training in Canada.” I hugged the forever-twelve-year-old girl gently to my forever-seventeen body, afraid that if I squeezed too tight, her tiny frame would break. She had died of starvation on the streets of Northern Ireland in 1814 after giving her last piece of bread to a little boy who was shivering under blankets. Or at least that’s how she explained it to me.
She stepped back, looked up at me with her gray-blue eyes and replied with a thick, Irish accent. “I’m your Weaver.”
My heart stopped. A loon would be receiving regular visits from the Nightmares. If I didn’t want Sam to be a part of this assignment, I definitely didn’t want Tabbi to be involved. Samantha could at least take care of herself.
I placed my hands on her shoulders and spoke quietly. “I will talk to Giovanni. You shouldn’t be taking on something like this when you haven’t been a lead yet.” Weavers usually trained twice as long as Catchers—forming dreams to fit individual personalities was a hell of a lot harder than fighting creatures that simply acted on instinct. Last I knew, Tabbi hadn’t even taken her trials.
Her eyes glassed over. “But I have. Please don’t talk to Giovanni.”
“You’ve been a lead?”
Tabbi rolled her eyes. “Don’t you read your emails? They gave me this old guy with dementia and made me pull memories from his head. There were, like, none left, but I still managed to find one from his childhood when his dad took him to this bike shop. And then he showed him how to ride the bike, and he was so happy. And when he was dreaming, he had this big smile on his face. Giovanni said I was the best he’d ever seen, that I was the fastest, and I really made the dream come alive with all the colors and everything.”
She was rambling, trying to convince me that she could handle Weaving for Kayla. Although I didn’t like it, if what she was telling me was true, she was wicked good. Dementia was a nasty disease and most Weavers struggled to navigate inside the mind of someone suffering from the illness. Even the ones who’d been leads for a long time.
I sighed and dropped my hands from her shoulders. “All right. Well then, if you’re sure you’re up to this, I would be happy to have you as my partner.”
Tabbi grinned from ear to ear and slipped her hand into mine like a little sister would, and we crossed the dining hall to eat breakfast and go over the details with Seth. We sat at a round, white table covered with silver plates of Italian sausage, scrambled eggs and buttered toast. Around us, a few of the other tables were occupied, and the “hired help”—as Giovanni liked to call them—wandered the room, cleaning up after the Catchers and Weavers. They were the only humans allowed inside our hidden mansion, and they were sworn to secrecy of our existence.
Seth handed us disposable mobile phones and yellow, rubber bracelets. On them was the name of our charge. Giovanni liked to color-code the humans based on how difficult and dangerous they were deemed to be. Most humans fell into the green category, like Eva had been, and about twenty percent were yellow. Red was uncommon, but I’d seen Catchers and Weavers wearing the bracelets several times over the years. The color was usually designated for people like Adolf Hitler or H.H. Holmes. Most of the Protectors on red-level humans didn’t last long, and Catchers always caught in pairs.
Tabbi and I slipped the yellow bracelets round our wrists, marking each other as partners.
“You both read through the file?” Seth asked as he scooped scrambled eggs into his mouth.
Tabbi and I nodded.
“Cool. Well, you guys know what to do. Take the day to get oriented with her, and make sure you perform the ritual so you know when she’s fallin’ asleep. Giovanni’s rented out adjacent apartments at a complex in Columbus. They sound pretty sweet.”
Giovanni liked for us to live in the same city as our charge so our bodies adjusted to the time zone change. It was our souls that were dead and held the powers the Angels gave us. Though we couldn’t age—and we could choose to be invisible—we still needed to eat and sleep like the rest of the living. We could choose to remain in Rome since evaporating was easy, but going that distance often took a toll on a Protector’s body. And the last thing we needed was to protect our charge while exhausted.
Seth handed us a slip of paper with the apartment building’s address and our keys. “If anything weird happens, report to Giovanni immediately, but otherwise, he has you on a weekly report schedule. Mondays, I think. Oh, and because I have to say this or he’ll kill me, remember the oath you swore to serve and protect. And remember our first Law: On penalty of ‘termination,’ under no circumstances will you reveal yourself to your charge.”
One of the nice things about being a Dreamcatcher was that you were a close relative of the spirit world. You could not be seen unless you chose to be. All you had to do was close your eyes and picture where you wanted to go, and when you opened them, you would be there. And anything or anyone you touched, while corporeal, could go invisible or travel with you. So when moving across the world, you were done in about five minutes.
The flats Giovanni had chosen for Tabbi and me were much nicer than I anticipated. The one I had spent eighty years in when I watched over Eva had been a studio piece of shit with beer-stained carpet and a sliding door that didn’t open. My new apartment overlooked McFerson Commons, a beautiful park in central Columbus whose focal point was an ornate, stone arch that reminded me of Rome. The place was a one bed, one bath apartment with a separate living room, dining area and kitchen. Everything was clean and well maintained. The walls were painted a light gray color, and the carpet was spotless and white.
Tabbi decided to “fix” my apartment, so I leaned against a wall and watched as she disappeared and reappeared with rugs, lamps, and other pieces of furniture. By the time she was done re-arranging everything, my flat looked like it could have belonged in a magazine.
“That’s better.” Tabbi plopped down on my sofa with a smile on her face.
“Yes, and now all those stores are without their merchandise. You better hope no one needed that navy
blue rug or… what the heck is that?” Tabbi had hung a picture on the wall above the sofa of what looked like a black and white candy cane—if they had painted on an acid trip.
“It’s a zebra.” She gave me a look that suggested I was an idiot for not being able to understand abstract artwork. Or, at least, that’s how I interpreted her.
“Ah, I see. I can’t imagine anyone wanting that, so you should be safe.” I smiled at her.
“Ha, ha. Very funny.” She stood up. “So, are we going to go visit Kayla?”
Uncrossing my arms, I straightened up. “If you’re done making my place hideous, then sure.”
Tabbi stuck her tongue out at me then made sure the front door was locked. Although the humans couldn’t see us or hear us unless we wanted them to, our furniture was definitely real. We didn’t need anyone breaking in and stealing anything—one reason Giovanni had us burn our charges’ files. Nixon’s Dreamcatcher had left a piece of information out once about that Watergate scandal. It was supposed to be part of the weekly report he sent to Giovanni, but the file had been intercepted. Didn’t play out well for Nixon—or his Catcher.
Tabbi took my hand. Together, we closed our eyes and brought up the image of Kayla in our minds. When we opened them, we stood in her room.
Kayla sat in a rocking chair, staring out her window at the courtyard below, dressed in the white outfit that identified her as a patient. Her dark brown hair fell in waves over her left shoulder, and her full lips were tight in concentration. With pastels, she sketched the profile of one of the patients sitting in the courtyard.
Kayla’s large, hazel eyes flickered over the features of the old man below. She was more attractive than I could’ve imagined, so much more stunning than in the picture Giovanni gave me. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
A knock at the door made her jump. She turned her head as a nurse wearing SpongeBob SquarePants scrubs waltzed in with a glass of water in one hand. The other carried a small paper cup.
