The Last Dream Keeper

by Amber Benson

  She was loving this.

  Ginny, too, seemed to thrill at the power they held between them. Her long hair eddied around her face in curlicues, her eyes shining in their sockets like living flame. Together, they lifted their hands higher, and the whirlwind grew stronger, now threaded with the same glowing luminescence Hessika was using to protect the girls.

  The man grabbed the stair railing, using it to hold himself in place as the wind screamed in a furious maelstrom of magic. The sheet of hair was blown away from his face, and Dev found an emptiness there that was horrible to behold. Even in the middle of the frenzy, he appeared calm and collected, the human version of the eye of a hurricane. With his high cheekbones and long dark hair, he should’ve been very handsome—but his pale blue eyes bore the ugliness of evil, ruining the picture. Flat and empty, they held a promise of terrible things to come.

  And then, as if someone had turned off a light switch, the man was no longer floundering, no longer fighting to remain upright as he gripped the railing. Instead, the winds appeared to break around him. Like an invisible barrier was now protecting him from the girls’ power. The man opened his mouth, lips stretching wide to emit a cloud of pitch-black sulfur. Dev gagged, covering her mouth and nose with the heel of her palm.

  The cloud swirled around the man’s head like a whirling dervish, and those dead blue eyes locked on her daughters, eyeballs skittering back and forth in their orbital sockets, trying to memorize every curve of their faces.

  “No!” Dev screamed just as the foul cloud gathered itself into a ball and shot toward the girls.

  The glittering light surrounding her daughters took the hit, swallowing the dark energy.

  The man growled, eyeballs popping out of his head. His face began to change, the pale skin rippling as if something alive moved underneath the flesh. Dark purple marks gouged themselves into his skin, creating elongated bruises that ran across the length of his cheekbones.

  Or maybe, Dev thought, the scratches are being made from the inside out, fingers trying to tear their way into our world.

  This idea terrified her, but she couldn’t tear her eyes from the sight. The marks began to fade, disappearing as quickly as they’d been made and leaving no trace of themselves behind.

  The man drew in a deep breath and exhaled another dark cloud of foul-smelling sulfur even bigger than the last. Dev knew exactly what he meant to do with it.

  “Leave them alone!” she screamed.

  She ran forward, wanting to protect her daughters from the man, but the glowing filament connecting her to her unconscious body (the real, living one) snapped her backward. Without thinking, she grabbed the cord with both hands, meaning to yank it from her belly.

  “Stop, or you’ll be lost here forever, Devandra.”

  Dev froze, having forgotten Eleanora was still beside her. She shook her head, her stern expression chiseled from granite. A New Englander by birth, Eleanora was as tough and implacable as the land she hailed from and never shy with her opinion.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” Eleanora said.

  “But my babies need me,” Dev cried.

  As though Eleanora had timed it this way, a high-pitched scream tore through the air, drawing Dev’s attention. Heart in her throat, she was certain it had come from one of her girls—but her ears had deceived her: The girlish scream belonged to the strange man at the top of the stairs. Apparently, while Eleanora had kept Dev otherwise engaged, the man had sent over his dark cloud and it had proved no match for Hessika and the girls.

  The man’s face twisted, and he broke out in the same dark bruises as before, the thing inside him lashing out in fury. Dev could sense its rage, its utter disbelief that the man it possessed was unable to touch Marji and Ginny.

  The man let loose another earsplitting scream and ran at the girls, hands outstretched. It looked like he was going to scoop them up and steal away with them into the shadows.

  “No!” Dev screamed. There was no way she was going to let this abomination touch her children.

  But before she could take a step forward, destroying the delicate link between her spirit and her body, a tall figure in a long green coat swept up the stairs. Moving with the grace of a dancer, the figure leapt up the last step and threw himself at the evil man, grabbing him around the middle and pulling him away from Hessika and the girls. The evil man was caught unawares, and the figure in the green coat used this to his advantage, wrapping an arm around the evil man’s throat and yanking him back toward the stairs.

  The evil man’s body began to writhe, fighting for oxygen as the figure in the green coat looped his arm into a choke hold. The purple bruises across the evil man’s face became raised and swollen. Whatever was inside him was still struggling to get out, but after a few minutes, the evil man’s energy was tapped and he lost steam. The will to fight ebbed out of him until he went limp and stopped moving.

  The figure in the green coat seemed to relax, eyes full of sadness at what he was being forced to do. Then the evil man opened his eyes, a sly gleam flickering behind lowered lashes. Dev realized it was all a ruse.

  “He’s faking it!” Dev cried, trying to warn the figure in the green coat.

  Too late.

  With a guttural grunt, the evil man twisted away, throwing his weight into the figure in the green coat. The two of them fell backward off the top of the landing, and Dev watched in horror as they disappeared into the darkness.

  She just wished she could blot out the sound of flesh and bone cracking against the wooden stairs.

  “It’s okay, Mama.”

  Marji’s voice drew Dev’s attention away from the empty stairs.

  “Mama?”

  Marji spoke the term of endearment again, her dark eyes uncertain—and Dev realized her daughter wasn’t looking at the inert body on the floor but at Dev’s spirit self.

  “You can see me?” Dev asked, astonished.

  Marji nodded, her usually tan face pale.

  “Mama can’t hear you,” Ginny said, looking up at her older sister. “She’s sleeping.”

  But Marji shook her head.

  “Mama’s right there by Auntie E.”

  Auntie E was what the girls had always called Eleanora, and Dev saw her ghostly friend smile at the use of the nickname.

  “Where?” Ginny asked, looking around the hallway, obviously seeing nothing.

  “There,” Marji said, pointing at spirit Dev—but Dev knew Ginny couldn’t see her by the confused expression on her younger daughter’s face.

  “Don’t you see?” Marji continued as she looked back at Hessika, who stood behind them. “Why can’t anyone else see you guys?”

  “No one else can see the Dream Walkers, ma belle,” Hessika said, her lisping Southern-inflected voice soothing to Dev’s ear. “Not unless we choose to exert our energy and show ourselves to them, that is. But you’re special. You have the gift of second sight. To see what others cannot.”

  Marji looked sad.

  “Not even Ginny?”

  “Not even me, what?” Ginny asked, as Hessika smiled and rested an unseen hand on Ginny’s head.

  “Don’t worry about your sister, sweetness. She has plenty of other gifts,” Hessika said, her voice laced with a glorious sugary slowness that drew out each individual word like taffy.

  Dev found herself transfixed by the woman, wanting to stay in this half-alive/half-dream state purely so she could observe Hessika’s movements, languish in the sibilant sound of the giantess’s voice.

  “And you, ma belle,” Hessika continued, her focus shifting to Dev. “It’s time for you to wake up.”

  Dev felt Eleanora’s hands on her shoulders, pressing down into and through her noncorporeal flesh—

  —and then she opened her eyes.

  Above her the hammered tin ceiling slowly came into focus, illuminated by the weak s
unlight filtering in through the porthole window above the stairs. She felt like a cockroach flipped onto its back, and quickly remedied this by rolling onto her side. A dull pain radiated from her cheek and mouth. When she pressed a hand to her lips, her fingers came away bloody.

  “Mama!”

  Marji’s skinny arms wrapped themselves around her neck, squeezing hard. She felt Ginny squirm up on her other side, pressing the top of her dark head into the crook of Dev’s neck.

  “It’s okay, babies,” she whispered, her busted lower lip making her words sound funny.

  She sat up and pulled her daughters in tight.

  “Mama,” Ginny said, brows furrowed. “The man’s still downstairs and he’s not moving.”

  Marji nodded, her skinny shoulders almost up to her ears. Dev could feel the tension rolling off her older daughter in waves.

  “Stay here,” Dev said, and crawled over to the stairs, using the curved wooden banister to pull herself to her feet.

  She looked back at the girls, but neither seemed to have any intention of disobeying her. Instead they huddled together like two frightened animals, shivering despite the warm air circulating around them from the downstairs heater.

  “I’ll be right back.”

  She checked the hallway, looking for any signs that Hessika and Eleanora were still there. She decided that if they were, she was blind to their presence. Slowly, she followed the stairway down, taking each step with the utmost caution. Her head pounded in time with her heartbeat, and she knew she was going to have to take some ibuprofen sooner rather than later.

  When she reached the bottom step, she stood there, unwilling to leave the safety of the stairs. The evil man was on his back, unconscious or dead—she didn’t know which—his long hair splayed around his head like a charcoal crown. His eyes were closed, and his chest remained stubbornly flat. No telltale rise and fall to let her know he was still breathing.

  She looked for the figure in the green coat, but he was gone. Or maybe he was never here at all, she thought.

  “Marji!” Dev called, not bothering to turn her head. “Did you see the man in the green coat?”

  She heard the sound of scurrying feet on slippery wood and realized the girls had taken that as a cue to come downstairs. She didn’t want them to see this man laid out on their living room floor, so she called back up at them: “Stay at the top of the stairs!”

  The pounding of feet stopped just short of the top step, and Dev turned to see both girls on the landing, watching her with wide eyes.

  “I didn’t see a green—” Ginny started to say, but Dev shushed her.

  “Let Marji answer first, please.” Her tone brooked no argument from her younger daughter.

  At first, Marji only nodded.

  “Tell me,” Dev said.

  “He came up the stairs and got the evil man,” Marji said, finally finding her tongue.

  Dev nodded, encouraging her daughter to continue.

  “And then, after they fell, he came back up to tell you something, Mama, but you were asleep again. You weren’t there for him to talk to.”

  “What did he say?” Dev asked, trying to keep her voice light.

  She knew putting pressure on Marji would only cause her to clam up.

  “I didn’t see any man in a green coat,” Ginny chimed in, not liking that she was being left out of the conversation.

  “Ginny, please,” Dev said, her exasperation making Ginny pout.

  “It’s not fair. I never get to see anything and Marji sees everything—”

  “He said to tell you,” Marji began, and Ginny instantly quieted down, letting her sister speak, “that Temistocles sends LB his love. I think he meant Lizbeth.”

  “That’s all he said?” Dev asked, confused by the man’s words.

  Marji shook her head.

  “He said that you need to call Grandma and our aunts,” her daughter intoned, the words spilling from her lips in a rush. “That they need to come and stay. That the others are going to have to go away and it won’t be—it’s already not safe anymore.”

  With the entirety of the message fully revealed, Marji began to cry.

  Lizbeth

  “Don’t!” Lizbeth cried, her voice hoarse from years of disuse.

  She rolled away from Daniela’s outstretched hand, narrowly avoiding being touched. She wasn’t sure how she knew this, but if Daniela’s hands ever came into contact with Lizbeth’s skin, it would most likely be the end of her.

  “Holy shit, you just said something!” Daniela said from her seat in the dirt. She’d landed there when Lizbeth rolled away, and her surprise had kept her there.

  Lizbeth climbed onto her knees, clutching a tattered notebook in her hands. She stared down at it, unable to believe something real and solid had come through with her from a dream . . . the other side . . . wherever she’d been with Temistocles.

  Temistocles.

  Her heart beat faster at the mere thought of his name. It startled her because she’d never experienced a feeling like it before. No one had ever brought out that part of her. She’d thought she was immune, maybe even asexual. That she was incapable of feeling attracted to another person.

  “Why are you crying?”

  She looked up and saw Lyse standing nearby, a worried expression in her blue eyes. Weir was with her, but he didn’t look scared like Lyse, or surprised like Daniela. He looked angry.

  “You can’t just go off like that—” he began, in a booming voice.

  Lyse put a hand on his shoulder in an attempt to calm him down.

  “She’s clearly upset,” Lyse said. “You don’t need to yell at her—”

  Daniela scooched toward Lizbeth, trying to slip her gloves back on her hands at the same time.

  “Wait—she was talking. Did neither of you hear that?” Daniela demanded.

  Weir’s face was getting red.

  “—anything could’ve happened to her—”

  Lyse spoke with the voice of reason:

  “—please, just let her have a minute—”

  Daniela was climbing to her feet, brushing the dirt off of her pants:

  “—uhm, hello, guys, she’s talking—”

  It was all too much for Lizbeth. She was used to silence, to whispers, to the quiet of her own internal world. She felt herself shutting down; the gates in her brain—the ones that protected her when she became overwhelmed—began to slam tight.

  No, she thought. I won’t let it happen. I won’t. The past is past.

  Of course, this was all so much easier said than done. Lizbeth had no experience telling her body no. Just as she had zero experience with being kissed by someone.

  When she was a little girl, Lizbeth’s mother would sing her Korean lullabies as she rocked her to sleep. Her mother had died when she was still pretty young, so her memories were kind of blurry and dreamlike. She had a vague recollection of a slight, dark-haired woman with soulful brown eyes holding her, and pushing her on a swing, making her eggs for breakfast . . . and then her mother got sick and Lizbeth hardly saw her after that.

  But she remembered her mother’s singing voice: the husky half-whispered lyrics and the loving way she sang them, her lips right next to Lizbeth’s ear. Lizbeth had been so young, her world so insular and small, that those murmured words made more of an impression on her than anything else about her mother.

  They were, those songs, the thing that came to her mind when she was gasping for breath. When she couldn’t keep her head above water and was terrified she’d sink into the abyss of her own mind. She needed to learn how to stay present—and her mother’s warm contralto and the sugary smell of her mother’s skin . . . these memories were what Lizbeth held on to, what gave her the strength to remain above the murky surface of the water.

  “LB?”

  She opened her eyes
. Hadn’t even been aware that she’d closed them. Saw Weir’s handsome face, worried now, and only inches from her own.

  “You didn’t . . .” He stopped, suddenly choked up. “You didn’t shut down.”

  She frowned, reaching out to place a slender hand on his cheek. Strange how she described her hand as slender. Until that very moment, she’d always thought of her hands as comically huge, too big and bony for a girl. Now she stared at them, surprised by how graceful they looked.

  It appeared as though something inside her had broken irretrievably and there would be no going back. She didn’t know what Temistocles—what that kiss—had done to her, but she was not the same person she’d been when she’d lain down on top of the head of the Dragon.

  “No, I didn’t,” she said, pleased by the sound of her voice. It was husky and melodic just as Bit-na’s voice had been.

  Bit-na.

  Her mother.

  She wished Bit-na were with her now, still alive and smiling. She’d have been so proud of Lizbeth.

  “What happened?” Weir asked. He crawled closer, his knees buried in the dirt.

  “I don’t know.”

  She was distracted by her mother’s voice. It still lingered in her head but was slowly fading away even as she tried to hold on to it. She wished Weir could hear it, too. He’d loved Lizbeth’s mother, had confessed to Lizbeth once that he wished his stepmother had been his real mother. Especially because his own mother—the Nordic Ice Queen, as he liked to call her—had very little to do with him when he was growing up, preferring to spend her time abroad, acting like she didn’t even have a kid.

  Lizbeth suspected his love for Bit-na colored how he felt about Lizbeth. That he loved her more, felt more protective of her because of a debt he thought he owed her mom for being there for him when his own mother was not. Why else would he have saved her from the horrific institution their shared father had dumped her into after her mother died? He was not the responsible party. He received no financial compensation for taking care of her—the opposite, actually—but still he’d come for her. Plucked her out of hell and brought her back to Echo Park, and for that she would be eternally grateful.