The Last Dream Keeper

by Amber Benson

  He was handsome with sharp features, pale skin, and long dark lashes. He had a thin build, but Lyse could see that he was lithe and muscular, too. If he hadn’t been a horrible waste of a human being, she would’ve found him rather attractive. He was still unconscious, had been since Eleanora, Hessika, and a stranger wearing a green leather coat had had their way with him. After that, it hadn’t been too hard for Dev to drag him out to the Mucho Man Cave and tie him up.

  Arrabelle sat across from the man in one of the matching rattan chairs, her dark eyes fixed on him. She looked as if she expected him to jump up from unconsciousness at any moment and attack her. Lyse didn’t want to wager on the man’s chances if that happened. She didn’t recommend crossing Arrabelle. Her friend was ruthless and could do serious damage if she wanted.

  On the other side of the room, Weir and Lizbeth were cozied up at the bar, the two of them huddled together like co-conspirators. An articulated skeleton wearing a blue Hawaiian print shirt, aviator shades, and a straw hat sat on the stool beside Lizbeth. Its bony hand was wrapped around a beer can ensconced in a foam rubber coozie. Someone had placed an unlit cigar in its mouth, and when seen from the right angle, the skeleton kind of looked like it was smiling at you.

  Slightly creepy.

  Lyse and Daniela were sitting by the door, the tiny table between them stopping Daniela from accidentally touching Lyse. She felt bad that they had to be so aware of their proximity to each other, but Daniela’s empathic powers were too erratic.

  “I keep thinking about the future, about what’s coming . . . what Marji said to Dev about needing to circle the wagons and call in reinforcements,” Lyse said, playing with the fringe of her shawl. “That we’d be going away. It’s chilling.”

  Daniela narrowed her eyes.

  “It’s been a long time coming. When my mom—”

  Daniela stopped speaking, the words refusing to come. Lyse wanted to reach out and touch her friend, offer her some solace, but once again it wasn’t an option.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Daniela nodded, jaw set and eyes as steely as flint.

  “It is what it is now. But I know her death wasn’t what it seemed.”

  “Just like Eleanora,” Lyse whispered, her voice so low that Daniela had to lean in close to hear. “I know how you feel.”

  Daniela nodded, sitting up straighter in her chair.

  “You never really told me what happened.”

  Lyse swallowed hard, emotion flooding through her body.

  “He tried to kill me, but Eleanora stopped him. She just appeared. Like this morning. With Dev and the girls? She’s a Dream Walker now.”

  “So what happened to him? Where’s the body?” Daniela asked, eyes on alert. Lyse thought she looked ready to go down to the lake and do battle right then and there.

  “I went back early this morning, and there was nothing there,” Lyse said. “Seriously, it was like it didn’t even happen.”

  Daniela sighed and leaned onto her elbows, dropping her chin into her gloved hands.

  “I don’t know. It’s all so messed up.” She shook her head but kept her eyes fixed on Lyse. After a moment of silence, she changed the subject: “Those two over there are thick as thieves. I just want to see what’s in that damn notebook she found. But she’s not gonna let it out of her sight.”

  “She will,” Lyse said, following Daniela’s gaze to where Lizbeth was sitting, hunched over the bar with Weir. “She knows we need to see it.”

  “And I love Weir, but he was such a mess up there in the park,” Daniela added as if Lyse hadn’t just spoken. “I think it’s too much for him. Some people can’t handle the massive shift in perception that comes from exposing them to our world.”

  Lyse nodded. She’d been thinking the exact same thing.

  But before she could reply, the door to the Mucho Man Cave opened and a shaft of sunlight cut across the darkened bar. Lyse and Daniela looked up at the same time, with an unspoken promise that they would pick up the thread of this conversation later.

  Lyse was surprised by how easy it was to be with her blood sisters. She was growing to rely on them more and more, to the point that they were becoming like the family she’d never really had. After all those years of feeling alone, it was hard for Lyse to give over and be open with other people. Her best friend, Carole, had been the only person she’d ever felt comfortable enough to share her deepest, darkest secrets with.

  But after Eleanora’s death, Lyse had changed.

  She’d allowed Arrabelle and Dev to pick up her slack. They’d arranged for the memorial service at the house and not asked Lyse to do anything other than be present. At the time, that was all Lyse could do. Eleanora’s death, and then the subsequent discovery that Eleanora was actually her grandmother and not her great-aunt, had been difficult for Lyse to process. But her coven mates hadn’t pushed her, hadn’t forced her to deal with things until she was ready.

  It was strange to feel like she’d been given four new sisters out of the blue. With all the good and bad that went along with the gift.

  “Well, the girls are taken care of and my mom and my sister, Delilah, are on their way now,” Dev said, closing the door behind her and shutting out the sunlight. “They’ll be here in the morning.”

  It took Lyse’s eyes a few moments to adjust to the darkness again, but when they did, Lyse saw that the man in the corner had woken up—and he was looking right at her. Their gazes locked and a visceral thrill ran through Lyse’s body. Her fingers gripped the edge of the table and she swallowed hard before dragging her eyes away from his.

  The bizarre connection threw her and she scanned the room, hoping no one else had caught the interaction. To her dismay, the only person who’d noticed was Weir. He refused to meet her gaze, eyes shifting away before she could catch them, a frown on his face.

  Dammit, she thought, mentally chastising herself for even looking in the stranger’s direction.

  “—they’re here in my house. They saved Ginny and Marji from that son of a bitch.”

  Lyse tried to focus on what Dev was saying, but her brain only wanted to think about whether Weir was ever going to talk to her again.

  “Well, we’d planned on doing Eleanora’s releasing spell tonight,” Arrabelle said, eyes still on the man, watching his every move—which consisted of him testing his bonds while making bemused faces at the thoroughness of his bindings. “But maybe that’s not a good idea.”

  “I’m afraid it might be the last ritual we’ll do together as a coven,” Lizbeth said from her perch at the bar, the timbre of her voice smoother than before. Her vocal cords were finally warming up.

  She stood, holding the notebook in her hands.

  “It’s like a Dream Journal, but not,” she said, then turned her attention to Daniela. “It’s from your mother. She didn’t write it, but she dictated it to a Dream Walker on the other side. In the dreamlands.”

  Lyse watched Daniela’s face tighten. She wondered if her friend was jealous that she’d received the notebook, and not her.

  “Dreamland?” Arrabelle asked, raising an eyebrow. “That’s H. P. Lovecraft stuff, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. But it’s where we go when we dream,” Lizbeth said.

  Her eyes slid away from Arrabelle, done with the question.

  Lyse understood that the Lizbeth they were dealing with now was not the Lizbeth from before. The girl she’d first met was shy and withdrawn, frightened of her own shadow. The new Lizbeth was no longer a wilting teenager. She was a strong and assertive woman.

  “Marie-Faith left something for me in Rome. I need to leave tonight, and I want Weir to go with me. The blood moon is coming and I need to be there before—”

  Daniela’s chair slid away from the table and she was up on her feet before Lyse realized what was happening.

  “I d
on’t think so,” Daniela said, striding across the room until she was face to face with Lizbeth. It would have been comical—the tall, willowy girl towering over the petite rainbow-haired pixie—if the air hadn’t been so fraught with tension. “Where you go, I go. No ifs, ands, or buts about it.”

  The old Lizbeth would’ve been intimidated. This one was not.

  “No.”

  Daniela didn’t back down.

  “It’s not up for negotiation. I will be going with you. Get over it.”

  There was a protracted silence and then Arrabelle spoke: “I agree with Daniela. You can’t go alone, and Weir isn’t a member of this coven, or a blood sister; he would be useless in some situations”—she shot Weir an apologetic smile—“sorry, Weir, but one of us should be with you, LB. Probably Lyse or Daniela.”

  “And what about you?” Lyse asked Arrabelle. “Don’t you want to go?”

  Lyse didn’t think Arrabelle was capable of showing intense emotion. She’d spent so long beating her feelings into submission that they’d ceased to exist. Well, Lyse was dead wrong.

  “I . . .” Arrabelle began, and then her eyes filled with tears. “They’re burning witches. I had word from my friend Evan, whose coven is just outside Seattle. They’ve burned them out, destroyed them utterly. I need to go and see if I can help. And then I need to travel, begin spreading the word, letting our world know that we’re at war with something evil. Do this now. Before it’s too late to make a difference.”

  Dev crossed the room and wrapped her arms around Arrabelle—and Lyse was shocked to see Arrabelle not only allow it, but reciprocate. Who was this Evan person and how important was he to Arrabelle? For her to lose her composure like this, Lyse decided he had to be important.

  “I’m so sorry,” Dev said, holding Arrabelle close.

  “It’s . . . it’s not good, Dev,” Arrabelle sighed. “I didn’t want to believe any of this was possible. The world should be long past destroying what it doesn’t understand. It’s the twenty-first century, dammit.”

  Lyse wished this were the case, but time and again, humanity proved to have one foot stuck in the Dark Ages. Being different was no easier in the twenty-first century than in the Stone Age.

  “Why are we doing this in front of him?” Daniela said, her voice a sharpened knife cutting through the emotion in the room. “We’re going to Rome”—she looked at Arrabelle—“and you’re going to Seattle. This guy could escape with that info and then we’re all screwed.”

  At this, the man in the chair perked up. His dark hair was wild and he looked lean from hunger, but when his piercing blue eyes settled on Lyse, her cheeks burned.

  “Why would I go anywhere? I’m bound to this chair, for one—well done on that, by the way,” he said, and grinned at Dev, who glared back at him. “And Temistocles freed me from the spell I was under, so—”

  Lizbeth took off like a shot, her hands on the man’s shoulders, squeezing them tightly.

  “Temistocles. You said Temistocles. Do you know him?”

  She was a teenager again, frantic to get information from the strange man who’d come to do them harm.

  “Of course I know him,” the man said. “He’s my brother.”

  The color drained from Lizbeth’s cheeks.

  “But . . . you’re alive.”

  The man’s face fell and he looked away, miserable under Lizbeth’s intense stare.

  “How do you think I ended up this way?” He kept his eyes on the ground, on the walls, on anything but Lizbeth’s face. “They came. We fought them, and Temistocles was killed. But he chose to stay. Like your friends—”

  He finally looked up, finding Dev’s face.

  “The women. They’re Dream Walkers. Powerful ones. They protected your daughters . . . not that the older girl needed it.”

  Dev frowned.

  “What do you mean?”

  He flicked his gaze to Lyse for a moment before returning to Dev. Lyse took this as an indication that he was going to talk about her like she wasn’t in the room.

  “Your daughter? She’s like that one there”—yep, as Lyse had expected, he was talking about her—“a hybrid. The next evolution, they say. A jack-of-all-trades and a master of none. But that’s not really true. With the power of all five talents—Clairvoyance, Divination, Dream Keeping, Empathy, and Herbalism—the magic evolves, becomes exponentially stronger than when you have one talent alone.”

  Lyse had no idea what the man was talking about, and she didn’t like the looks the rest of the coven were giving her.

  “I’m not a hybrid,” Lyse said, anger spilling out with her words. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Of course it’s not ridiculous,” the stranger said to Lyse. “You’ll see exactly what I’m saying, if you really think about it. You have a talent for each of their disciplines . . .”

  His eyes slid from Arrabelle to Lizbeth to Dev before finally settling on Daniela.

  “Don’t look at me,” Daniela said, glaring at him.

  “Why do you think your powers have been so out of control, empath? I can see you steering clear of everyone, even with your gloves on.”

  Daniela’s glare softened.

  “Oh, yeah?”

  He nodded, then turned his attention back to Lyse.

  “You’re the cause. Deny it or not, it’s merely a truth. And The Flood has been keeping tabs on you. On all of the hybrids, actually . . . even the children . . . in all the worlds. And now they’ve started taking them for their own purposes, using them for the high concentration of magic they possess. This is why Temistocles and I were fighting them . . . once they take the children, it’s all over.”

  This last bit was directed at Dev.

  “What’s your name?” Daniela asked, stepping closer to him. She was the first to accept that the stranger’s words might hold some truth.

  “Of the two of us, I received the more pedestrian name,” he grinned. “Thomas. And I am the doubtingest Thomas of all.”

  His good humor was infectious, and Lyse felt herself smiling back at him against her better judgment. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Weir frown, and she quickly wiped the grin from her face and looked down at her hands. The skin was rough and dry, the nails bitten down to the quick. She was a nervous wreck—all the things she’d been dealing with over the last week had really taken a toll.

  “I’m Daniela, and the hybrid is Lyse—”

  “I don’t think you should—” Arrabelle began, but Daniela held up a hand.

  “Seriously, Arrabelle, the guy isn’t going anywhere, and maybe his information can help us,” Daniela said, frowning. “Because we know that what happened to your friend is happening in other places, in other worlds even, and that means we’re gonna need all the help we can get.”

  Arrabelle looked away, eyes unfocused for a moment as she processed Daniela’s words. Then she nodded slowly.

  “Yes, okay, I see,” she said, her face relaxing. “We need help. Maybe he can help us.”

  “I want your permission to go to someone on the Greater Council. I think they can help us,” Daniela added. “My mother trusted them implicitly and I do, too. We can meet with them now . . . today even.”

  Lyse didn’t know if this was a good idea or not—but because she was the leader of the Echo Park coven, everyone was looking at her.

  “No,” Lizbeth said, shaking her head. “The notebook says the Council can’t be trusted.”

  “Well?” Daniela asked, looking from Lizbeth to Lyse.

  “I think we should hold off for now, okay?” Lyse said.

  “We don’t know how far up this goes,” Dev chimed in, and then she looked at Thomas. “And we don’t know who or what he is, or why he’s here. I don’t believe a word that’s come out of his mouth—and you wouldn’t either if you’d seen what he did to my girls. He stays righ
t where he is, tied up good and tight.”

  It was an impassioned speech from someone who rarely raised her voice.

  “I think we should let him go,” Lizbeth said, coming to stand behind Dev. “I think he’s telling the truth about the hybrids. It makes so much sense when you think about what’s happened since Lyse got back to Echo Park.”

  “I’m sorry about your friend, Arrabelle,” Lyse said. “Go if you need to. We’ll do what we can on this end.”

  She touched Arrabelle’s hand.

  “I have to go and see for myself,” Arrabelle said, nodding, and she didn’t pull her hand away. “I don’t even know if Evan is alive or dead . . . and if he is . . . I want to help what’s left of his coven. Then I want to spread the word. I want our blood sisters to know what’s going on.”

  “You’re like an apostle,” Lyse heard herself say. She had no idea where the words had come from. They’d just slipped out.

  “Doubting Thomas and Bella. The first two,” Thomas chimed in from his spectator’s seat.

  “You’re not in this conversation—” Dev said to him.

  “How do you know that name?” Arrabelle asked, getting upset. “No one else but my mother ever called me that.”

  Thomas shrugged and sat back as far as his bindings would allow. Then he began to wiggle his nose.

  “Itchy nose. Will anyone oblige me?”

  No one moved.

  “Well, I’ll stay out of this then,” he continued in a teasing voice. “Don’t want to upset you, ladies. Any more than you already are.”

  Arrabelle and Dev glared at him, but Daniela laughed.

  “What? He’s funny,” she said and shrugged.

  “He’s not from our world,” Lizbeth said, smiling at Thomas. “His brother said they come from another dimension—”

  “Shh,” Thomas whispered, and Lyse wasn’t sure if he was serious or not. “The Flood isn’t just in your world, it’s in every world. And what it doesn’t kill outright, it absorbs into itself. A prisoner becomes part of the whole and must do its bidding . . . like the hybrids . . . especially the hybrids.”