The Last Dream Keeper

by Amber Benson

  “I liked that class,” Arrabelle said, gripping her lunch bag tightly in between both hands. She felt a little nervous, something that wasn’t normal for her.

  “Me, too.”

  He took a step back and pressed his shoulder blades against the brick wall of the building.

  “You work here?” He inclined a thumb toward the bookstore.

  She nodded.

  “Yup, I do. For the summer, a compromise with my father.”

  “You guys close?” he asked.

  “Pretty much just him and me,” she found herself saying, divulging more information than she normally did during the course of a first meeting. “So yeah, we’re close.”

  “My parents are okay. Not really close to them, though. They’re a little impenetrable.”

  “How so?” she asked, rocking back and forth on her feet.

  “Can’t get in their heads—probably because there’s nothing in there, I guess.”

  He pulled a book from his back pocket. It was all rolled up, the pages bent into a cone. It was the book he’d been holding when she’d first spied him through the bookshop window, the one he’d read like a puzzle.

  “You like to read?”

  Arrabelle nodded.

  “I do.”

  He nodded, the same thoughtful expression still on his face.

  “My name’s Evan. What’s yours?”

  * * *

  After school, both Arrabelle and Evan had found themselves drawn into a new world, one neither of them had known even existed. They’d been shown their talents and conscripted into the world of the covens, and though it had come as a surprise to them both, each having grown up oblivious to the idea of magic existing, they’d both accepted their strange, symbiotic fates and never looked back.

  This was how Evan had ended up in the Pacific Northwest on an island only reachable from the mainland via ferry, far removed from everything and everyone he’d ever known. It was this separation—Arrabelle hundreds of miles away in Los Angeles, a city she’d never in a million years expected to call home—that had ultimately made it impossible for their friendship to become anything more.

  In her heart, Arrabelle had hoped their relationship might change, that Evan would start to think of her as more than just a friend—not that he’d ever given her a reason to suspect this was even an option. He’d never once let on that he needed or wanted to share his life with anyone.

  The announcement over the loudspeaker letting everyone know the ferry was about to dock broke into her thoughts. Arrabelle stood up, leaving the railing and the gentle sway of the sea behind as she followed the others back to where the cars were parked. She found her rental easily—it was the cleanest car there—and slid into the driver’s seat.

  The camper in front of her started its engine, and Arrabelle did the same. She took the few moments of wait time before they could disembark to program Evan’s address into the GPS. She wasn’t really worried about getting lost. It was a small island and she thought she’d be able to find the house without too much trouble. Still, she liked using the GPS because she appreciated being told where to go.

  She followed the line of cars as they proceeded out onto the dock, turning up the defroster as the windshield began to fog up, obscuring her view. She tried to stay present as she drove, not letting her mind drift into the past as she rolled through the quiet island streets. It was a cute fishing village with rows of clapboard houses. Painted in shades of cream and blue and brown, they’d each seen their share of the powerful storms that seasonally broke across the island.

  She turned right and the downtown stretched out in front of her. It consisted of about fifteen small stores and restaurants, and a gas station—all probably catering more to the tourist trade than the year-round residents. She wished she could pretend to be one of the summer people. No agenda, no responsibility, no stress . . . just vacationing in a beautiful place and enjoying herself. But her reason for coming to the island was the opposite of relaxing. She was here to find Evan and Niamh, the girl whose journal he’d sent her. She needed to see him, to make sure he was okay . . . or not.

  Only then could she get her sanity back.

  The GPS called out directions in its feminine monotone, and Arrabelle did as she was told, turning onto one tiny street after another until the voice announced they’d reached their destination. She pulled the car over and parked on the street but didn’t get out. She needed to collect herself before she went in. She hadn’t seen Evan in so long that the whole thing felt absurd. How could you share so much with another human being and then one day they were gone? Or, at least, they weren’t there for you in the same way anymore.

  There was a knock on the car window and Arrabelle jumped. She turned to find a painfully thin girl with long brown hair standing just beyond the glass. The girl’s pale face was coated in a spackling of light brown freckles. Dark circles bit into the skin beneath her emerald and gold-flecked eyes, her cheekbones sharp as blades. Grief had cut deep hollows into the girl’s face, and her oversized plaid shirt hung from her bony shoulders and fell across a shapeless chest.

  Arrabelle turned the car back on and rolled the window down. The girl shook her head.

  “You’re Bell.”

  It wasn’t a question.

  “Yes.”

  “He said you’d come.” The girl circled around the front of the rental car, eyes searching the woods and houses around them, looking for what, Arrabelle had no idea. “I’ll take you.”

  The girl reached for the door handle, but then her head popped up like a cork, her behavior almost animal-like. She reminded Arrabelle of a doe whose soft brown ears twitched at the first sign of a predator lurking in the shaded woodlands.

  She must’ve heard something, Arrabelle thought, and watched the girl crane her neck warily.

  Arrabelle rolled down the passenger window.

  “Get in, Niamh.”

  The girl stood frozen, hand on the door handle, too keyed up to pay attention to Arrabelle.

  “Niamh, I read your journal. I know it’s you. Get in the car.”

  No response.

  “Please?” Arrabelle added—and this seemed to break the spell. The girl turned back around, eyebrows pinched together.

  “Did you hear—” she began, but at that very moment there was a crash from the tree line.

  Niamh screamed, her fingers scrabbling for the door handle. Arrabelle was out of the car in a shot, racing toward the sound, all thoughts of personal safety forgotten. She crossed into the grass beyond the sidewalk, eyes scanning the trees, but it didn’t take long to discover the source of the sound.

  The man was a giant—and like the humanoid creature that had attacked Arrabelle and her coven the night before, his skin was like melted plastic, burnt shoulders and chest covered in ropy scar tissue that looked even more grotesque in the daylight.

  The creature wore no shirt, just long pants covered in excrement and dirt, their bottoms shredded after roaming the woods like an animal. His face was a ruination—no real features, just a gluey approximation of a human being. She didn’t know how he could see. His eyeballs protruded from the ruined skin around the orbital cavities of his skull like two glassy-white marbles. His gaze flicked back and forth between them before finally settling on Arrabelle, who was closer to him.

  “What do you want?”

  He didn’t respond, but a wicked grin stretched across his face. And then something strange happened. She felt him inside her head, placing his thoughts into her mind:

  —The girl. They want her.

  Arrabelle shuddered as the words slithered around inside her brain.

  “You can’t have her,” Arrabelle said to the creature.

  “What’s happening?” Niamh asked, frightened by the one-sided exchange.

  “He’s a telepath,” Arrabelle murmured,
without looking at her.

  —I don’t have any business with you, blood sister. Go and I will let you live.

  “Let me live?” Arrabelle almost snorted. “Fuck you. You’re the one who better be worried about your life, my friend.”

  The man’s body shook, and Arrabelle realized he was laughing.

  “Get in the car,” Arrabelle said, turning to Niamh.

  “But—”

  “Just do it,” Arrabelle said over the girl’s protests.

  Niamh stood there a moment longer than Arrabelle appreciated, but finally she gave a nod and headed toward the car. Arrabelle heard the door open, the shocks squeaking as the girl climbed into the passenger seat.

  “Close it and lock the doors,” Arrabelle called back to her, glad the windows were still down. “Turn on the car, key’s in the ignition, then roll up the windows. If he kills me, get the hell out of here and go to Los Angeles. My coven will take care of you. You know my address, right? The place where you sent the journal?”

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the girl nod.

  “Good. Now promise me you’ll do it.”

  Niamh nodded.

  “Say it,” Arrabelle demanded, her eyes locked on the creature as he took a step toward her.

  “I’ll do it. I promise,” Niamh called back to her.

  And with the promise extracted from the girl, Arrabelle removed her long down jacket and dropped it in the grass. Steeling herself for a beating, she took a deep breath and ran for the giant.

  Daniela

  “I don’t know,” Daniela said, turning back around in her seat to look at Lyse. “They’re still whispering together like they’re plotting something.”

  Lizbeth had not taken well to being told what to do—and maybe it was true, the old Lizbeth would’ve been bullied into submission without comment, which obviously wasn’t good. But damn if this new and improved Lizbeth wasn’t just a pain in the butt to deal with. It would’ve been easier to handle her confrontational attitude at a time when they didn’t need to work so closely together. When splintering into hostile factions might be the end of them.

  Daniela intimated as much to Lyse, who was sitting beside her. They’d boarded their flight a few minutes earlier, and now they were waiting for the attendant to close the cabin door so they could take off.

  “So, yeah, is it just me, or is she like a different kid now? One that talks back and doesn’t listen?”

  Lyse frowned, her blue eyes serious as she finished strapping on her seat belt. She sat back, resting her head against the foam headrest.

  “Well, I don’t think she’s a kid anymore. Something happened to her back in Elysian Park,” Lyse said. “Whatever it was. She’s stronger now. She’s not locked away inside herself—and I think it’s necessary. For what’s coming next.”

  Daniela had never heard Lyse speak so plainly before. It was refreshing, made her feel for the first time that Eleanora hadn’t been wrong in her choice. That she’d made the right decision to hand the leadership of the coven over to her granddaughter.

  “Okay,” Daniela said, watching one of the hot flight attendants stride past her, leaving the scent of white jasmine in her wake. “I’ll chill out and not take it too personally.”

  “There’s nothing to take personally,” Lyse said, and closed her eyes. “Lizbeth is going to do what Lizbeth wants. It’s the coven’s job to protect her—even when she’s being difficult.”

  “I think I liked her better before she grew a pair of cojones.”

  Lyse laughed, opening one eye to look over at Daniela.

  “You are a truly unique individual.”

  Daniela grinned.

  “What can I say? I try.”

  Lyse smiled at this and closed her eyes again, her face relaxing. Daniela got the message: Lyse was done talking. Leave her alone and let her nap.

  Well, so be it, Daniela thought. She turned around in her seat and looked back at Lizbeth and Weir, who were a few rows behind them. She wished they didn’t look so chummy.

  After the night they’d just had, Daniela was hyperaware of everything and everyone around her. She hated having an opponent she couldn’t see, and it was even harder to wrap her head around a group like The Flood. She had no idea what their goals were. They seemed hell-bent on eradicating the covens and had chosen draconian tactics to do it. Their methods were straight out of the Dark Ages—witch burning, anyone? As far as Daniela was concerned, a real man or woman came at you with both fists up, ready to give as good as they got.

  Too bad there were so many more cowards in the world than stand-up people, she thought as the plane finally taxied and took off.

  She did not feel good about this excursion to Italy.

  She’d been in Rome the last time she saw her mother. Those precious few hours she’d spent with Marie-Faith before she’d died, they’d wandered the streets of the very city to which Daniela was heading. She didn’t know how it would feel to be back there so soon after her mother’s death. It wasn’t a trip she would’ve taken, but duty called. And now with Lizbeth behaving so strangely, she was starting to feel even more uptight about the excursion.

  Daniela closed her eyes and let her mind wander.

  Her thoughts returned to her mother. It was an automatic response, this slippage of time, and it was impossible to control. Given half a second, she would find herself sliding back into childhood, her brain free-falling into the past. There was nothing she could do about it. Ever since she’d learned of her mother’s death, it had become an addiction.

  She opened her eyes again, fighting the urge to disappear down the rabbit hole. She stared at the tiny television screen embedded in the seat in front of her. She turned it on, not bothering to plug in the headphones she’d found in the seatback pocket. It was some reality show with a series of forgettable men trying to date an overplasticized woman who giggled like an idiot at anything/everything they said to her—not that Daniela could hear the woman’s laugh. She could just tell it was terrible by the way the woman’s face and mouth hardly moved an inch.

  Her mind drifted back to Thomas—who, presumably, was still tied up in the Mucho Man Cave. He was right about the hybrids. This was something she and her mother had spoken of, and, afterward, Daniela had been sworn to secrecy on the subject. When she thought back to the days before Lyse’s arrival, her gloves had always been more than sufficient protection—but now she didn’t trust herself around anyone.

  Lyse was definitely the cause of Daniela’s empath problems . . . but she was also the most alluring thing Daniela had encountered in a very long time. It was tough, seeing her with Weir and knowing he would be the winner were there ever to be any question about where Lyse’s affections lay.

  She sighed and looked past Lyse to the window, the scenery slowly beginning to change below her. She didn’t want to do this, didn’t want to play protector to an ungrateful kid. What she wanted was to go back in time to when her mother was still alive and stay there. She never wanted to let Marie-Faith go.

  When Lyse lost Eleanora, it was Daniela who understood her pain the best. She knew what it felt like to be untethered and at loose ends, unsure of who or what you were anymore, or where you belonged. Unlike Daniela, though, Lyse could access her grandmother whenever she wanted because Eleanora had chosen to stay behind and become a Dream Walker.

  Marie-Faith had not made the same choice. Obviously. Or Daniela would’ve encountered her mother again by now. But she did have something that eased her feelings of loss. A secret weapon that kept her from feeling completely alone:

  Desmond Delay.

  * * *

  Desmond requested she not say anything to the others about their meeting. She’d agreed, deciding not to tell him that she’d been forbidden to talk to anyone outside her inner circle.

  After all the craziness of the Releasing Ritual and then
packing for the trip, meeting Desmond before she left meant that Daniela got very little sleep. Instead of resting, she found herself sitting at a sparkly red Naugahyde booth in a twenty-four-hour diner on Sunset, unopened menu on the cracked Formica table in front of her.

  A mug of steaming hot coffee found its way to her, and she loaded it up with cream and sugar, ignoring the raised eyebrow she got from the hipster waiter when he realized she wasn’t going to be taking off her gloves.

  “You’re here early.”

  She looked up and smiled. Desmond Delay took the seat opposite her and set his lion-headed cane against the edge of the booth. He looked more like a kindly old grandfather than a powerful member of the Greater Council, all white hair and craggy face, hazel eyes tired and sad—but he truly was a man to be reckoned with, exhaustion and kind eyes aside.

  Desmond removed his gray fedora and set it on the seat beside him. He smoothed his hair, then rubbed at the salt-and-pepper scruff on his chin, a thoughtful expression on his face.

  “So we’re leaving today.” She opened with the obvious, the thing she knew he would be most curious about.

  “All right,” he replied, ignoring the waiter, who was lurking nearby waiting to take their order. “Tell me more.”

  He pushed the menu away and rested his elbows on the tabletop, giving her another weary smile. Daniela leaned forward, her voice hushed.

  “I think you know who I mean . . .”

  He pursed his lips, then nodded before speaking.

  “Ah, so Marie-Faith sent you here to protect her,” he said, his tone so soft that at first, Daniela wasn’t sure she’d heard him right. “I should’ve realized.”

  “I know that my mother confided everything in you,” Daniela said. “When I saw her in Rome . . . before she died . . . she let me know what I’d be getting into. I wish I’d asked her more, but I didn’t know it was the last time I’d ever see her.”