The Last Dream Keeper

by Amber Benson

  The man pulled a black hood from his pocket and slipped it roughly over Lyse’s head. She tried to breathe, but fabric filled her mouth. She fought, kicking and screaming at him, but his grip was too strong. After a while, her body stopped working. Panic turned to acceptance and her brain stopped screaming for oxygen.

  Unconsciousness came swiftly.

  Lyse

  Lyse began the slow climb to wakefulness.

  As if she were trapped in a drugged dream, the languid fingers of oblivion stroked her brain, making it difficult to slip the tether of unconsciousness. She wanted to stay in the darkness, wanted to hide in the emptiness of her own subconscious because it was safer there. No one could reach her where she slumbered. She had no responsibilities, no needs, no wants . . . she was free.

  For the moment.

  But that didn’t mean she was alone.

  When you wake up, Lyse, the clock will begin to tick again . . .

  The familiar voice—Eleanora’s voice—slipped into her fractured mind like an eel, galvanizing her unconscious brain with an electric buzz. As soft as a whisper in her ear, it burrowed its way into the darkest recesses of her subconscious, becoming one with her own inner thoughts.

  . . . and once that happens, I cannot help you. We will be fighting the battle on another front—and that will take all of my energy . . .

  She was on the cusp of awareness. She couldn’t scrabble back into the darkness, couldn’t dig in her heels like a braying donkey and refuse to return to reality. That was the way it was; once her brain woke up, it would not be put back to sleep.

  I love you, Lyse. Take that with you. And know that I will see you on the other side.

  There was a finality to Eleanora’s words that tore at Lyse’s heart, rending the muscle into useless bits. The tears came unbidden, wet warmth that trickled down the smooth curve of her cheeks and collected in the hollows of her collarbone. Lyse realized then that she was about to be alone, waking up in a place she knew nothing about, other than that she would be surrounded by the enemy—and with this thought the last of her grandmother’s ghostly presence dissolved like a spoonful of honey in a mug of hot water. The essence of the woman who’d raised Lyse—and loved her more than anything or anyone else in the world—was gone now except for a slight melancholy aftertaste.

  “Elyse MacAllister, it’s a pleasure to finally meet you.”

  The man’s voice seemed to come from a thousand miles away—the cadence so unlike Eleanora’s warm dulcet tones that it made Lyse shiver. She cracked open a blue eye and, as if she were carefully twisting the focus ring of an old film camera, the world slowly slipped into sharpened relief.

  The room was cold, not just in temperature, but sterile like an operating theater. A naked lightbulb hung from the ceiling, dangling like an incandescent jewel on the end of a long cord. It dipped into the darkness, a frozen teardrop bathing the rest of the room in deep shadow. There was something wrong with the voltage, and the bulb emitted a low-pitched hum—phaaar-rooooah, phaaar-rooooah—that mimicked the song of a lone cicada. This was a sound Lyse was familiar with after years of living in semirural Georgia—and she’d always had pity for the poor bastards . . . alone and awake while all of their brethren were still in the deep throes of hibernation.

  Now that she was almost fully awake, the brightness of the light made her eyes water, but there was nothing she could do about it. Cold stainless-steel restraints cut into the delicate skin of her wrists, and as much as she strained against them, she was unable to do anything to release herself from their bite. They did a good job of keeping her immobilized on her metal chair.

  At least she could move her legs—her captors had been kind enough to allow her legs to remain free.

  “What do you want from me?” she asked, rage crashing over her like a wave, the rush of blood under her skin making her cheeks flush bright red.

  The words slid out of Lyse’s mouth without her thinking them. Her lips were dry and cracked, her mouth and tongue parched as a desert—but she didn’t have any trouble making herself understood. Anger had a way of cutting through the bullshit.

  The man sat across from her, a rectangular aluminum table separating them—but it was a divide that did nothing to ease Lyse’s mind. An air of menace permeated the space. As if a grotesquerie of monsters sat locked within the shadowy confines of the room just waiting for the man sitting in front of her to snap his fingers. Would they descend on her in a heartbeat? Rip her limb from limb before sucking the very marrow from her bones?

  Even though she knew (she hoped) monsters didn’t exist, the train of thought made her shiver.

  “What a vague question,” he replied, leaning forward on his elbows, so that he could settle his chin on the tops of his clasped hands. “What do I want from you? Why, merely your company, my dear.”

  He did not look at her as he spoke, and his eyes seemed unable to settle on anything for longer than a few seconds before moving elsewhere. At first she assumed this was a sign of weakness, that he was too insecure to look at her directly, but then he smiled and their eyes locked. Now he would not drop her gaze but held it with an unwavering attention, his pupils dilated an inky black. It made her skin crawl to imagine him trying to breach her mind via her eyes, sending out tendrils of his soul to slip inside her and carry away intimate, personal information.

  Eyes are the windows to the soul, someone had once said, but she’d never taken the sentiment seriously until now.

  She wanted to look away, but her inborn stubbornness wouldn’t let her. She was determined to force his hand, make him drop his gaze first.

  “Why are you doing this?” she asked after a protracted silence, still unwilling to break their impromptu staring contest. “Murdering blood sisters, destroying covens? What’re you trying to do here?”

  The man’s eyes were rheumy, snaking red capillaries crisscrossing the jaundiced sclera. He opened his mouth, then closed it again, compressing thin beige lips into a straight line. The action caused his chin to slip into the crevice between the second and third fingers of his still-clasped hands, and she noticed a tremor in his arms that hadn’t been there before.

  “You and your kind are in our way—and like a disease, you must be stamped out before you can spread.”

  “You murdered my friend,” Lyse said, and the full weight of the words settled over her as she spoke them—she did not cry, she would not cry—there’d been too much of that during the past few days and she was done with it. “Your people have killed so many of us and we’ve done nothing to you.”

  It wasn’t that she’d made any kind of peace with what had happened back at the catacombs; it was that she could do nothing to change that moment . . . that precious second in time when everything had changed. So she disassociated herself from her feelings, pushed away the pain and grief—even though she knew that once she found her way out of this place, she would be overwhelmed by her emotions and would have to give in to them, or lose her mind.

  “Kill or be killed . . . I think you know this old adage well,” the man said, smiling again, so that the skin around his eyes crinkled in a charming way. “But I don’t want to bring up all that nastiness. What can I do to make you feel more comfortable?”

  He’d put on an imaginary mask, magically transforming himself into a sweet old man to try to fool her—not that she was buying the act. But she didn’t want him to know, so she put on a neutral expression, behaving as if she were unaware that this was all a charade.

  Besides, she wanted to buy herself some time. Needed it to think about her next move.

  “I want some water.”

  “But of course,” he said after a moment, his smile widening to reveal hideously worn-down yellow teeth, the front incisors the only ones still holding their sharpened edge. “I can refuse you nothing.”

  He turned his head, breaking the connection between them, an
d his face disappeared into shadow. Lyse released her breath, her whole body shaking. She hadn’t realized how much he’d unnerved her, how rigid and tense her body had become until he was no longer looking in her direction.

  “Bring us some cold water, please,” the old man said, speaking to someone Lyse couldn’t see. Somewhere in the darkness she heard a heavy door slide open on ungreased tracks. Whoever was in the room with them . . . until now they’d been as quiet as a corpse.

  With no eyes upon her, she took the free moment to collect herself and tamp down her unsettled feelings.

  Maybe he really does have monsters all over this room, Lyse thought. Just another way of trying to unnerve me.

  She put those thoughts away, realizing she needed to start thinking logically, to observe more of her surroundings if she were going to form an escape plan. Dropping her chin, she let her eyes scan the dark gray floor, raising a brow at the deep scratches etched into the poured concrete—probably made by the bottoms of other metal chairs whose occupants tried to escape torture and confinement.

  She didn’t doubt this place had been privy to some horrible atrocities. Hell, as far as she knew, no one had ever made it out of this room alive—then add to that a strange heaviness in the air, a sense that something unseen was pressing down on you, making it hard to breathe.

  It was enough to make Lyse wish she’d remained unconscious indefinitely.

  Not really an option, she thought as her skin became clammy and she felt sweat break out under her arms, the stink of her own fear permeating the room.

  From her vantage point, Lyse couldn’t tell the dimensions of the space, but it had to be huge, bigger even than she’d realized . . . especially if someone had been standing undetected in the shadows watching and waiting to do the old man’s bidding.

  “You would like to know where you are? Yes?”

  The old man was watching her. Had been watching her.

  She didn’t want to look at him but felt compelled to take in his presence, to inspect everything on the surface that she could see: the graying hair a shade too long, curling around the lapels of his black suit jacket and starched white dress shirt. The boxy cut of his jacket swallowed up his gaunt frame, and the incandescent light made his body appear drawn and sallow. He was gripping a cane in his right hand—it must’ve been leaning against the back of his chair before, but now he was holding on to it for dear life, his fingers white and bloodless where they curled around the silvery head of a thickly maned lion.

  “First, I’d like to know why I’m cuffed to this chair, actually,” Lyse said, and swallowed hard, trying to encourage the flow of saliva back into her mouth. “And then, yeah, where I am would be nice, too.”

  The old man laughed, a phlegmy choked thing that made Lyse flinch. She’d liked him better before she’d heard the sound.

  “Excuse me,” he rasped, then cleared his throat and coughed—the laughter had taken something elemental out of him.

  He seemed diminished now.

  “One, because I don’t want you doing anything you’d regret,” he said, squeezing the head of the cane and drawing it in closer to his torso. She could see the thickened nail beds of his right hand, the striated keratin as yellow as old parchment. “And as for why—that is the important question, Lyse, and so I shall answer it—you are here because of what you are . . . what’s in your blood. And also what you will mean to a movement that is only now beginning to grow. I don’t need you to martyr yourself for their cause, so we will keep you here for the duration.”

  Lyse chose not to roll her eyes at the old man’s pompousness.

  “What I am? What’s in my blood? I don’t know what any of that means,” she said, her words laced with feigned innocence.

  The old man leaned forward in his seat, hazel eyes narrowed.

  “Oh, I think you know exactly what it means . . . witch.”

  He spat the word out as if it were a curse.

  “But that’s not all you know, now is it?” he continued. “There’s so very much for the two of us to discuss—”

  He was interrupted by the click of a door unlatching, and then the rickety growl of metal casters running on track. The old man did not look up, but Lyse could see something moving in the shadows. She shrank back in her seat, fear and adrenaline coursing through her veins as a tall man in a dark blue suit crossed the threshold from darkness to light, revealing himself.

  Lyse gasped as she stared up into the startling ice blue eyes of the first person she’d killed.

  Her uncle smiled down at her, bright white teeth as even and unmarred as if they’d been cast in a dentist’s office. He was exactly as she remembered him from the last time they’d met—only this time he was alive, not crushed underneath a stone statue.

  His posture was ramrod straight, his long arms held at attention by his sides; the close-cropped silver-gray hair remained the same, as did the tan skin and the gleam of menace behind his eyes. It was as much a part of him as the sneering pull of his upper lip, a feature that made him look mean even when he was trying to play nice.

  “Hello, Lyse,” he said in a voice as taut as piano wire.

  Fear cascaded through her, and she gritted her teeth to keep him from seeing her lips tremble. The violence of her reaction to him was palpable, and she could smell the raw, feral scent of herself coming off her body in waves: under her armpits, at the small of her back where her flannel shirt hung over the waistband of her black jeans. She wanted to reach up and wipe the moisture from her lip, but she was held in place by her bindings.

  She let her gaze drift to the tan flesh of her uncle’s exposed neck, her eyes focusing in on its smoothness. She would’ve done anything not to have to stare into the dead man’s eyes ever again.

  Not that she regretted killing him.

  He’d kidnapped her from Eleanora’s bungalow on Curran Street in Echo Park and hidden her away in a place where no one would ever have found her body. His intent: to kill her slowly and with as much mortification as possible.

  Yet here he was again, alive and breathing and less than three feet away from her.

  Lyse remembered how crushed and dead he’d looked underneath the ruin of the Lady of the Lake. It just didn’t seem possible for him to have survived—but somehow he had, or at least some incarnation of him. It was as if she’d imagined the whole horrific nightmare . . . and maybe she had.

  Seeing him now made her question her sanity once again.

  There was the clatter of metal on metal and then a small, mousy woman stepped into the light. She held a tray carrying a metal pitcher and two glasses, the pitcher sweating with condensation.

  The woman’s eyebrows pinched together in concentration as she walked, the pitcher clattering against the tray as she slowly maneuvered her misshapen body closer to the table, her gait unsteady as she tried to keep a safe distance between herself and Lyse’s uncle.

  As she approached the table, the woman lifted her gaze to catch Lyse’s own. What Lyse saw there almost turned her stomach. The woman’s once-beautiful face had been transformed by a livid pink scar that ran down the right side of her cheek and cut through her eye, the skin puckered from jaw to brow. The instrument that caused the wound had left behind a milky white iris that was a ghostly twin of the untouched forest-green one that was still intact. Her brown hair was cropped close to her scalp, revealing a small dark hole where what was left of her right ear’s cartilage curlicued around like a nautilus shell. The damage to her face and ear continued down her body, the right side—arm, torso, hip, and leg—gnarled and twisted. The effect was magnified by the thin black cotton dress she wore, the fabric clinging to her deformed frame, enhancing rather than hiding her disability.

  Because of all the scarring, it was hard to tell how old the woman was, but as she set the tray down on the table between Lyse and the old man, Lyse caught a glimpse of the woman’s goo
d left hand—unblemished and smooth, the fingers supple, well-shaped and unlined by age. She realized the woman couldn’t be much older than she was.

  The woman sensed Lyse’s interest. She raised her eyes, dark lashes fluttering.

  —Escape if you can, or they will do the same to you.

  Lyse started as the words came into her brain, unbidden. She forced herself not to look around, but to hold the woman’s gaze.

  —Fire and a knife, the woman said without physically moving her lips. Cut and burned for my supposed “crimes.” And I’m one of the few lucky ones they’ve allowed to come and serve them.

  Lyse wanted to respond, but she didn’t know how. She tried thinking her response, but the woman just stared back at her, unblinking.

  “That’s enough staring,” Lyse’s uncle said, grabbing the woman’s twisted right arm and dragging her away from the table, the sheer violence behind his grasp clear to anyone watching.

  “David—” the old man said, his tone a warning.

  The woman’s face spasmed in pain, but when she opened her mouth to cry out, no sound escaped her lips—and Lyse saw that there was only a nub of fleshy pink skin where her tongue had been brutally cut from her mouth. Despite the pain, the woman caught Lyse’s eye one last time, her telepathic presence returning for a final parting shot:

  —We are here when you need us.

  The words were either a promise or a threat, Lyse did not know which—and then Lyse’s uncle dragged the woman off into the shadows, the darkness swallowing them whole.

  Before she could stop herself, Lyse found herself speaking.

  “What happened to that woman?”

  The old man nodded, as if he had been expecting the question.

  “She was tried as a witch, but she confessed to her crimes and begged for absolution.”

  “That’s absolution?” Lyse asked, incredulous. “Taking someone’s tongue, burning them until they’re half dead?”

  The old man held up his lion-headed walking stick, shaking it at Lyse to emphasize his point: