The Last Dream Keeper

by Amber Benson

  The robed figures encircled the pyre like faceless judges. They’d called out their verdict and now they were waiting for punishment to be meted out. The smell of the gasoline melded with the rotting-salt stench of the nearby sea—and I knew I would never be able to separate them again.

  The ground underneath me was cold, my legs cramping as I crouched there, waiting for it to all be over. I don’t know why I felt so helpless, why I didn’t think I could do anything for my blood sisters. A fatal apathy had settled over me and I couldn’t shake it. I stood up, pain shooting from the small of my back down into my legs. As much as my brain told me that staying hidden was my only option, my body was moving me forward, letting me know there was something else I could do.

  I didn’t have a plan, at least not a conscious one, but I sensed a hand guiding me, steering my course through the trees toward the back of the Red Chapel. I stayed clear of any sight lines, following the path that led me along the rocky ground beneath the old-growth shore pines, the ones whose feathery boughs cast long shadows over the grassy clearing. I hadn’t spent much time at the chapel in recent years, but I knew the door was never locked. There was a specific reason for this—a hammered bronze sign nailed above the front entrance that read:

  Deo Oscailte Chun Gach Cé An riachtanas is gá succor Ó An Dark.

  This roughly translated to: Forever Open to All Who Need Succor from the Dark.

  The Dark had built a bonfire near the shoreline in order to murder two people I loved. If anyone needed succor, it was me.

  When I reached the back of the chapel, I paused, realizing I was going to have to cross a stretch of ground lit up by the moonlight. I would be vulnerable for a few moments, completely on view to anyone who happened to look in my direction. There was nothing I could do but take a deep breath, run, and hope for the best.

  Luck was not on my side. As soon as I leapt forward, a robed figure exited the back of the chapel, holding a can of gasoline. Our eyes locked and I did the only thing I could think to do in the situation. I threw myself at the figure. My elbow slammed into its throat, while the weight of my body knocked its feet out from under it. We fell to the ground and I rolled on top, pressing my advantage. I wrapped both hands around the figure’s throat, my fingers digging through layers of black cloth to get to skin. The figure gagged as I straddled it, pinning its arms to its sides. And though it flailed like a dying fish, I did not let go.

  After a few seconds, the brown eyes behind the mask rolled out of sight and I released my grip. I dropped my head, listening for breath, and relaxed when I felt the gentle rise and fall of its chest. With shaking fingers, I removed the mask and was pleased when I didn’t recognize the man’s face. Clean-shaven, tan skin, dark lashes and brows—he was completely unknown to me.

  I left him lying there, unconscious, but I took the gasoline can he’d been holding and tucked it under my arm. With this weapon, I could create a distraction and maybe stop the robed figures from setting my blood sisters on fire. Laragh had been right. It was the twenty-first century. No one needed to be burning any witches.

  Not on my watch.

  I stole the man’s robe and mask, slipping them on so I could move more easily through the crowd. They were large on me, but in the darkness it wouldn’t be noticeable. Besides, I was carrying a full can of gasoline. No one was going to mess with me.

  I reached the pickup truck without much trouble and stood there staring up at the robed leader as he brought the crowd to a frenzy with his aggressive rhetoric. I felt hate burbling inside me, pushing me to do my worst. I closed my eyes and whispered a silent prayer to the mother of the world that I might live through this night. Then I uncapped the can of gasoline and climbed into the bed of the pickup.

  The robed man turned around to stare at me.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he growled, but I didn’t answer him. Instead, I poured the contents of the gas can over his head and went for my Hail Mary pass. I pulled out the Zippo I’d used earlier in the evening to light the coven’s ritual candles and flipped it open. The lighter roared to life.

  “Untie the witches, or I set him on fire!” I screamed at the crowd.

  At first, there was only stunned silence, and I thought I was going to get what I wanted without a fight.

  “You can kill me, but The Flood will still come,” the robed figure said as he stepped toward me, stinking of gasoline.

  He grabbed my wrist and the lighter fell from my fingers. It only took a second for him to go up like a Roman candle. He jumped out of the back of the truck, screaming. There was nothing I could do; he ran right for the pyre. The fumes alone were enough to set it ablaze.

  But he wasn’t finished. He turned and, with what I imagined was the last of his sanity, ran toward the Red Chapel. With all that wood, it never stood a chance, going up like tinder. I stared at the Red Chapel as it was engulfed in flame.

  I was dumbfounded by what I’d become part of.

  And since there was nothing left for me there except death—I ran.

  Devandra

  “I can’t find my butterfly shoes, Mom!”

  Ginny’s voice cut through Devandra’s thoughts, and she set her deck of cards down on the lemon damask tablecloth, letting her mind clear. Instinct kicked in and she was able to quickly search her memory, scanning her mind for the last place she’d seen her seven-year-old’s pink light-up sneakers.

  “They’re in your closet!” Dev yelled back.

  “No, they’re not,” Ginny said as she cleared the doorway leading into the kitchen and frowned down at her mother. With her hair and eyes as shiny and brown as new buttons, it always amazed Dev that this child belonged to her—that any child belonged to her. Let alone two beautiful girls with intelligent, fierce little faces who favored their Filipino father’s exotic coloring.

  “Mom?” Ginny asked, a questioning lilt at the end of the word. She stood on her tippy-toes in the center of the kitchen, hand on hip, bare feet pressing against the thick planks of the hardwood floor. “You went away again.”

  Ginny held a pair of pink pompom socks clutched in her right hand and rolled her eyes at her mother. Long and lean for her age, she was still tan even though it was October and the weather had finally turned wet and chilly.

  Good-bye, Indian summer, Dev thought.

  “And you look funny, too.”

  “Sorry, kiddo, didn’t mean to disappear,” Dev said, smiling affectionately at her younger daughter. “Just thinking.”

  “’Bout the lady?”

  Dev frowned as fine lines crosshatched her pale forehead. Ginny was very observant and extremely blunt. She called it like she saw it, regardless of anyone’s feelings.

  The night before, Dev and the girls had experienced a visitation from beyond: a ghostly apparition that led them to find a letter written by Dev’s great-great-grandmother Lucretia over a hundred years before Dev was born. The letter was hidden inside the frame of the Victorian mourning wreath Lucretia’s daughters had crafted shortly after her death. Dev had always loved the memento mori the women had made to memorialize their mother—five flowers woven from the thick strands of Lucretia’s raven hair and set against a mother-of-pearl disc—but now she felt connected to it on a whole new level. It was a bridge linking Dev and her daughters to the Montrose women of the past.

  She just wished the experience hadn’t scared her older daughter so badly.

  Dev sighed and pushed her spindle-backed chair away from the table. She was glad the previous night’s ghostly encounter hadn’t affected Ginny, but it was worrisome that Dev’s older daughter, Marji, was so frightened she couldn’t go to sleep until the sun came up.

  Marji was her sensitive child. Fragile as an antique china doll, she didn’t like to leave her glass display case unless there was a protector at hand—which usually turned out to be Ginny. It niggled at Dev, the pattern of y
ounger sibling acting as a spokesman for the older one. She worried their relationship might become too symbiotic, too insular—but her partner, Freddy, told her to stop helicopter parenting and just let the girls be.

  “Did you check your closet?”

  Ginny nodded, long hair flying.

  “I already did. Marji looked, too,” she said with a slight lisp. Missing baby teeth were in the process of being replaced by larger, permanent ones. “Can you braid my hair?”

  “I can. And are you telling me that you need a special set of mom eyes to find your shoes?” Dev asked.

  Ginny’s head tipped back and forth on the long stalk of her neck.

  “Yup.”

  She followed Dev out of the warm kitchen, past the antique O’Keefe and Merritt stove, the hanging rack of copper pots and pans, and out into the living room where the staircase led up to the second floor.

  It was an old Victorian house that had belonged to Dev’s family for more than a hundred years—long enough for everyone in the neighborhood to refer to it as the Montrose House—though it hadn’t actually been built in Echo Park. A Montrose woman had won the house in a high-stakes game of poker (a royal flush in a suit of clover) and had relocated the home from Bunker Hill to a plot of land in the wilds of the Elysian Valley.

  This was the very same parcel where the house still stood. And since that time, the house had been passed down to each eldest Montrose daughter upon the arrival of her twenty-first birthday. Dev and Freddy lived there now, but as soon as Marji came of age, she would take possession. She would either invite them to stay on, or they would move out, as Dev’s parents had done.

  With four daughters in as many states—three of whom had children—her mom and dad were more than happy to be homeless, tooling around the country in their truck and Airstream trailer, visiting their various progeny for weeks at a time. Her parents both worked as literary translators (her father was fluent in German, her mother French), so they’d always been free to live and work wherever they chose. They’d both officially retired a few years earlier, but when they were still working, Dev would get postcards from her mom telling her about the translations they were doing while visiting the Grand Canyon, or Café du Monde in the French Quarter, or a sweat lodge in New Mexico.

  She and Freddy had offered to turn the Mucho Man Cave—the garage where Freddy hosted a neighborhood weekend bar—into a guesthouse, but her parents had happily declined. They enjoyed their freedom and the Gypsy lifestyle it afforded them. Dev had a hard time imagining her own life being so rootless. As much as she enjoyed traveling, she liked having a fixed address and a place to display all her things.

  The old wooden staircase creaked as it took Dev’s weight, but Ginny’s footsteps hardly rated a whisper as she trailed along behind her mother. As she trod upon the squeaking thirteenth step, Dev promised herself (for the umpteenth time) that she’d get out the toolbox and fix it. Just a few taps of her hammer and it would stay silent for a couple of weeks, at the least.

  That was the only problem with having stewardship of an older home: You were responsible for all the bits and pieces that needed looking after. Because just when you got the thirteenth step to stop squeaking like a scared mouse, the roof would spring a leak or the water heater would go on the blitz. It was frustrating to be fixed, taped, drilled, and caulked into oblivion. The constant upkeep drove both her and Freddy crazy.

  At the top of the stairs, Dev took a right and headed for the girls’ rooms. Behind her, she could hear the soft shuffle of Ginny’s feet on the wooden plank floor. The long hallway was quite narrow, thick wooden doors branching off into the home’s three upstairs bedrooms, a half bath, and the full bathroom the girls shared.

  The rule of the house was you left it (mostly) as you’d found it, the décor unchanged unless something broke or was destroyed by calamity—then could you make updates or add modern conveniences.

  Like the new low-flow toilet Dev added when one of the water pipes burst, flooding one of the upstairs bathrooms and giving them the opportunity to install a shower, said low-flow toilet, and a double-sink vanity. With no fights over who got to brush their teeth first in the mornings, it made getting the girls ready for school a much easier task. Especially because Marji was notorious for climbing up on the vanity, sticking her feet into a stoppered-up basinful of hot water, and falling asleep—Please, just ten more minutes, Mom!—her face pressed against the mirror.

  Until the arrival of the double vanity, this quirk of Marji’s nature made Ginny, who wanted to brush her teeth in a foot-free sink, absolutely lose her mind with annoyance each and every morning.

  “It’s cold up here,” Ginny said, trailing alongside her mother.

  It was noticeably colder up here than in the rest of the house. Dev shivered and wrapped her soft cotton shawl around her shoulders. The light was dim upstairs, one small porthole window feeding natural light into the space.

  Dev felt Ginny’s small hand grasping at the folds of her purple peasant skirt.

  “I can see my breath, Mommy.”

  This had happened the night before, this sharp and unexpected drop in temperature. It was something Dev associated with the arrival of a ghostly presence.

  “Marji!” Dev called out, her voice high-pitched with worry.

  When there was no reply from her elder daughter, a thin film of sweat broke out on Dev’s upper lip. She quickly wiped it away.

  “Marji!!” she called again. She turned to Ginny, whose face was pinched with uncertainty, and asked, “Where was your sister when you saw her last?”

  “Her room before,” Ginny replied in a tiny voice.

  Dev grabbed Ginny’s hand, and together they made their way toward Marji’s closed bedroom door. Decorated with some of Marji’s favorite poems—handwritten on lined notebook paper in sparkly silver and pink gel pens—the door was a glittery homage to E. E. Cummings, Emily Dickinson, and Shel Silverstein.

  Dev wrapped her fingers around the brass doorknob as a gust of arctic wind blew across the hall. Ginny’s head swiveled like a bird’s, dark eyes wide with worry. She gripped Dev’s hand harder, and Dev could feel the slick sweat of fear in between their entwined fingers.

  “Do you hear the voices, Mama?” Ginny whispered.

  Dev narrowed her eyes and listened hard, trying to catch whatever it was her daughter was hearing. But there was only the soft hiss of the heater turning on downstairs.

  Inching the doorknob to the left, she pushed open the heavy door. Its metal hinges creaked with her effort. A ray of sunshine shot out from inside the room, piercing the gloomy hallway. Dev blinked as the light temporarily blinded her. She didn’t see the man step out of the room, fist raised. She didn’t see his knuckles as they shot toward her face, their aim true and swift. Only the tug on her skirt from Ginny’s tiny hand saved her from taking the hit directly to the bridge of her nose.

  Instinct (and the need to see what Ginny wanted) made her turn her head slightly so the punch landed on her left cheekbone. The pain was jarring, ricocheting through her face and snapping her jaw shut tight, nearly severing her tongue between her teeth. She’d never been hit in the face before and didn’t recognize what was happening to her until the second time the man’s hand connected with her face. This time the pain flared through her and she felt something crack underneath her skin. Tears sprang to her eyes. Everything was happening so quickly she didn’t get a chance to look at her assailant.

  Somewhere outside herself, she heard a child’s scream of utter rage—and it terrified her. As darkness descended like a sheet, she heard a voice whisper inside her head: Don’t worry. I’m here.

  Dev’s heart squeezed at the sound of Eleanora’s voice, and then she fell back into an abyss of black fire.

  * * *

  Dev opened her eyes to find herself standing in exactly the same place, only now everything around her was shimmering like
stardust. She felt a tug at her belly and her eyes dropped to her navel, out of which emerged a long filament of glowing light that coiled down to the ground and disappeared. Dev gasped as her eyes followed its path and she discovered her own body sprawled at her feet, the other end of the glowing cord connected to its navel.

  “Don’t be afraid.”

  She looked up. Where only a few moments earlier there’d been no one, now Eleanora stood at her side, floating a few inches above the floor.

  This was not the Eleanora that Dev had known as an adult. This was a much younger version, hale and hearty and full of life. Dev remembered this incarnation from her childhood, when, as a little kid, she’d seen the former master of the Echo Park coven around the neighborhood. She’d had no idea that when she turned twenty-one, Eleanora would seek her out. That this beautiful, mysterious woman would become her blood sister and induct Dev into the world of the covens.

  “Look,” Eleanora said, pointing to the far end of the hallway. There, by the top of the stairs, Dev saw something terrifying and exhilarating.

  Marji and Ginny stood against the wall, hands linked in an unbreakable bond, their bodies wreathed in a shimmering firestorm of light. Behind them, her body so translucent Dev could see the small brown-and-beige chevrons on the antique wallpaper behind her, stood Hessika, the giantess who’d been the head of the Echo Park coven before Eleanora.

  She did not look nearly as young as her ghostly counterpart.

  In this incarnation, Hessika was late-middle-aged, her hair soft and feathery around her thick-lashed eyes. Her Cupid’s-bow mouth, painted in over her thin lips, was compressed so tightly it resembled a rosebud.

  She kept one hand on each girl’s head, and Dev realized she was the source of the light. Her love and power were blanketing the girls, protecting them so they wouldn’t be scared of the strange man crouching at the top of the stairs, his hair falling in a long sheet across his face.

  Dev watched, transfixed, as the girls lifted their intertwined hands into the air, calling into being a powerful whirlwind that spiraled through the hallway. It sucked up bits of dirt and detritus from the floor, so that it began to take on a visible shape as it barreled toward the man on the stairs. Marji’s ponytail whipped across her face, obscuring her dark eyes just for a moment, but not before Dev saw the look of unbridled joy on her elder daughter’s face.