Dream Eater

by K. Bird Lincoln

  A green mist flowed from Hayk’s eyes as if his soul were being drawn out. The twin whorls darkened, shifting into sinuous ropes that spiraled around the mayor encasing him in bands of incandescent, shimmering blue.

  The mayor—no the professor recovered his vocal cords. “You promised me I could use the girl if I gave you the Dream Eater!”

  His voice was bare, stripped to mere mortal timbre. The blue bands tightened, a wave that swept him from head to toe, leaving his limbs dangling at awkward angles, loose and wrong.

  Dad stood up with jerky, fumbling movements, as if a marionette pulled by strings. “Voghjuynner odz,” said Dad, his jaw awkwardly shaping the strange words. “Kpareik’ indz het?”

  Snake, do you dance with me?

  The meaning welled up from within my aching bones, seeping into me. Thunderbird, issuing a challenge in Ullikemi’s native language.

  From Dad’s body.

  Hayk’s mouth contorted into a wide rictus, and Ullikemi’s eerie voice issued from it in that same, strange language, a clashing, teeth-grinding sound no human vocal cord could make.

  “Take the Baku; ride him, as I ride my servant. I will no longer hide in the Vishap stone. Dance with me. Either the sun within you shall feed me or I will devour it this day.”

  In a boneless glide, Hayk moved toward Dad.

  Yelling, Ken jumped in front of Dad. The planes of his face shifted, pared down to the sharp angles and lean, whipcord strength of his true-form.

  Ullikemi ripped a strange, hyper-sonic word from Hayk’s mouth and a rush of salt-chill air swirled around Ken, a mini tornado. Blue bands detached from motionless Hayk and, questing like a snake’s tongue, circled Ken. The bands of mist pulsed, once, and then liquefied. A wave of water crashed over Ken, sending him sprawling against the hard brick of the Mercy Corps building.

  A shriek of metal. The North end of the awning collapsed on top of him.

  Hayk stood directly in front of Dad, reaching for him with hands contorted into trembling claws.

  I lunged for Dad, pulling him against me.

  The sudden movement opened up the knife wound on my chest and fresh blood smeared Dad’s polo shirt. He burned in my arms, and all I could think of was his ink drawing of the tiger elephant Baku above my bed. I hung on to that image, and it kept us afloat in the shimmering sea of power of Thunderbird’s dreaming. Barely.

  Thunderbird’s primeval self-kernel flared, burning both from the kernel inside my belly and from the touch of Dad’s bare skin under my hands. I belonged to this. To dragons and giant eagles. I would burn!

  The dreaming split me wide open, aching bones melting to white-hot agony. Too much, too much. I couldn’t think, could barely see or feel, caught within Thunderbird’s molten heart-of-the-sun. Pain shattered me into pieces, reformed me into impossible configurations, and then shattered me again.

  I cried out, the razor-keen scream of Thunderbird.

  Brilliant, white light. Up, down, all around me, inside me.

  Thunder boomed, splitting hairline cracks though the light surrounding me, revealing a pulsing, emerald green layer far below. The emerald invaded my light with questing tendrils of mist. Ancient, cold-of-the-deeps eating away at my fire. The poisonous mist tried to reach me, draw me down but, wings beating furiously, I lifted myself out of reach, back to the endless sky.

  Someone touched me. My shoulder. I had a shoulder. Body sense returned to me, the outlines of arms, legs, and head familiar but ill-fitting.

  Words carried on the slightest of breaths, Herai Dialect, brushed my ear. “Eat the dream, Koi-chan; or you’ll die.”

  The place inside, where I dreamed myself. Still there buried under white sun-spots and golden feathers. Enough myself to recognize Dad’s voice.

  Dad, awake and aware…

  Pain shattered me again, but this time I forced the pieces around that little Koi-self, still hanging on with a death grip.

  Carefully, keeping that little bit of myself to the side, I reached for Thunderbird’s dreaming. Burn, little kernel, burn.

  Pressure twisted my brain, squeezing me from all sides.

  “Not that way,” said Dad in Herai dialect. “The ancient ones’ dreaming will split you apart. Pull Thunderbird’s dreaming through another fragment.”

  Another fragment? Thunderbird filled me, crowding out all but Hayk’s murderous visions.

  Not those. I would not fill dreams of death with Thunderbird’s power.

  Dad was here, conjoining us in an unwilling bond to Thunderbird, but he had no fragments to give me.

  Nothing else is left, all burned away by white light.

  Nothing.

  Wait.

  Something. A wisp of a memory. Mist of a different kind, real, wet, dew-drop sweetness on my face, stillness like a hushed song in a muffled grove of giant hinoki cypress. Needles shifting beneath sturdy legs.

  Ken’s fragment. His Kitsune-dream.

  Thunder boomed, exploding golden light in the cool darkness. Slipping, slipping, I clutched wildly, felt a sharp sensation in my real, flesh hands. A warm, bittersweet trickle running down my hands and arms. Blood.

  Dad?

  Slipping…

  I pulled with every fiber of my being, strained to the limit, and wrapped myself with the scent of kinako and cypress, and the gentle damp of dew. And then I let go.

  Down, I fell, straight toward the poisonous mist which coalesced into Ullikemi’s enormous dragon coils.

  Pressure swelled again; my insides were too small to contain Thunderbird. My organs shifted aside, skin bubbled out, rearranging. When the agony overshot the sharp-edged boundary of sanity, still I fell.

  Down, up, there was no direction, only white light, and falling.

  Abruptly I crashed. My body felt punched flat like I’d taken a header off a diving board into an empty pool. A pool. That was a Koi thought. I was me. Human. Still alive.

  Breath returned to my lungs with a painful whoosh, and I opened my eyes.

  Ah. I was not in Kansas anymore, or even Ankeny Square. I was in Ken’s forest. Mist obscured the edges of a clearing under a twilight-dark sky. Ullikemi’s serpent-green, enormous coils wound around a soldier-straight hinoki cypress. My hand touched shaggy bark the color of old blood when I reached out to steady myself. I blinked. My fingers glowed.

  My hand, my arm, my whole body, shone, lighting the drifting mist all around me. Thunderbird’s brilliance flowing just underneath my skin like lava under a thin layer of congealed rock.

  Ullikemi unwound from the cypress, gliding over to me. His emerald-glowing eyes and wedge-shaped head supported on a muscular neck weaving in front of me like a Volkswagen-sized cobra dancing for a charmer.

  His passage brought a sharp wave of pine-bitter and smoked paprika.

  “Thunderbird,” he said. “Do you yet deny me the sun?”

  “I am not Thunderbird,” I said, spreading obviously human arms wide, but a strange harmony vibrated my throat, cut across my tongue, and made my teeth ache.

  “Thunderbird rides you as I ride Mangasar Hayk.”

  “Hayk isn’t here.”

  “He is human. I thought you human, too. But you are Kind. And you burn with Thunderbird’s essence.” Baku, dream-eater. I ate the dreams of monsters. Their dreams flowed into me, and I savored them. Even as Thunderbird’s power threatened to burst me like a bubble, there was a fierce joy, of not being vulnerable, of not being in Hayk’s power that gave it a sharp-edged pleasure. I would take care of this. Like I couldn’t take care of Mom when she lay dying in the hospital.

  Needles shifted underneath my feet, releasing their clean tang into the air. This place, this grove of cypress from some primeval Japanese forest, was formed of Ken’s fragment. Given a kind of shape by power drawn from eating Thunderbird’s dream. But it was mine.

  Mine.

  “No matter. Whatever you are, Thunderbird overflows within you. If I consume you I will prevail this day.”

  What is with all this ea
ting? The Kind are just a bunch of over-dramatic, domanoid cannibals. I smiled. Only I would pull up the word ‘domanoid’ when confronting a giant dragon in my boyfriend’s dream-forest. Koi is back, baby.

  Ullikemi cracked open his wide jaws, and lunged.

  I jerked to the side, but not quickly enough. Ullikemi’s snout smashed into my shoulder, sending me sprawling on the ground in a foul cloud of moldering spice.

  Goddammit. That hurt! Then Thunderbird’s power flexed and like a DVD skipping, one moment I was a mass of tangled limbs on the ground, and another moment I was on my feet again, wrapping my arms around the barrel-length of Ullikemi’s neck underneath the massive jaw. Straining, my hands clasped in a death grip on the other side.

  My cheek pressed to freezing scales, blistering with cold, I squeezed.

  Ullikemi went wild. Crashing to and fro, smashing me against the cypress trunk.

  I hung on, consuming more of Thunderbird’s rich, endless-sky dream to keep my hold on the slippery scales.

  Ullikemi scraped me on the ground and reared up to bang on a tree again.

  How much damage could I take in this dream world? Ullikemi would beat my dream body to a pulp.

  “Wait,” I gasped.

  The snake threw itself toward the tree. Pain wracked me with a hundred little cracking sounds as my back forcefully melded with the cypress trunk. I released my grip, hands trembling with weakness.

  This wasn’t me, this death-grip on Ullikemi. Eating Thunderbird’s dream filled me with the eagle’s violent passion, but it wasn’t me.

  This was Thunderbird’s madness. Maybe Thunderbird ached for violence, but I didn’t. If I fought Ullikemi, it would only prove Ken’s Council right, sending an assassin to take care of Dad, take care of me, rather than risk letting loose a Baku drunk on violence.

  Ullikemi unhinged his jaw again, blocking out the green canopy overhead.

  “I’ll feed you the sun,” I said. “That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  Ullikemi paused.

  I tried to sit up, groaning at what felt like shards of broken glass inside me, and scrunched over on my side instead.

  The jaws snapped around air right above my head.

  “Do not think to parlay with me. I have waited, so long, so very long for Mangasar Hayk to find me a thunder god.”

  My memory zeroed in on Kwaskwi as he had looked at the Vietnam memorial, clad in plaid and weathered jeans, the harmless façade hiding a calculating ferocity.

  You gave up my name.

  I quashed a wave of guilt. Kwaskwi had used me. Thunderbird came to the arboretum, trying to snare me in a dream. When that failed, they took Dad instead. I owed them nothing. Certainly not some victory-by-proxy over Ullikemi.

  “I could set you free.”

  The snake wove a frenzied, complex dance over my prone body. Cypress loomed over us, blotting out the sky, Ullikemi’s spice fighting with pine for dominance.

  Ken said Ullikemi was forced by human myth into this dragon shape. I didn’t understand how humans could have that kind of effect on Kind, but Ullikemi clearly wasn’t invested in Hayk as a friend. Hayk played his human, killing hand while Ullikemi siphoned the power from the dead translators back into Hayk’s weird, magical phrases.

  If Ullikemi was freed, Hayk would morph from dangerous, magical megalomaniac serial murderer to merely a human killer.

  “You would give me the sun?” Ullikemi’s sharp-edged harmonics set up an excruciating vibration in my ears.

  “You will break with Mangasar Hayk,” I said. “No more being the magical Energizer-Bunny for his phrases.”

  Pulling on Thunderbird’s dreaming enough to set Ullikemi free might do serious damage. Tough cookies. Pressure was building at the back of my neck, golden brilliance eroded the tree canopy, and Ullikemi would kill me if I didn’t do something.

  “I so swear,” said Ullikemi. Here in this dream-world, the weight of our binding agreement fell like a cobweb mantle over us both.

  “Here,” I said, and lifted my hands, reaching for the snake.

  The great jaw unhinged. Saliva glistened on the fangs.

  “Wait, what are you doing!” I yelled. The snake’s maw closed over me with a snap.

  Frantically I reached for golden sun-fire. Incandescent miasma flowed, igniting every cell in my body. Thunderbird’s unfiltered dreaming, a direct line to the heart-of-the-star called Sol.

  Frantic, I pushed it out in all directions, a thousand lacerations decorating my skin, all weeping gold.

  Agony.

  A long moment where Koi was lost, sundered into motes of light.

  Then, a creeping darkness lessened the light, consumed it. Ullikemi’s wretched, bottomless hunger, gobbling Thunderbird’s dreaming from the edges, inexorably pressing into the center, and then more darkness, and cold and…

  The dreaming slowed. Thunderbird, trying to resist our connection as I consumed his utter depths. But I was Baku, eater of dreams, and resistance was futile.

  Worse than agony, then, to force that connection open, to feel a gleeful, delicious influx of blazing light, reveling in power. Me. Koi-the-Baku, using Thunderbird. Punch-drunk on power, I willed myself to shine like a sunburst.

  Still Ullikemi hungered, relentless, an abyss.

  A great wrenching, then, as if the entire universe turned itself inside out to pour energy into me. A tsunami built and built and built and then broke with a crash that shook the universe; release.

  Something screamed.

  Something else broke away with an ululating cry of joy.

  Spent dregs of dreaming trickled from me in rivulets of shining gold.

  The DVD skipped again. I was back, human Koi, squeezed into a too-small body recently run over by a Mac truck, a mother of a headache pounding my temples.

  Ullikemi disintegrated, the snake faded to a green mist which curled away in eddies of chill, rain-scented air.

  I lay on paving stone, blind. Someone touched my cheek with excruciating gentleness. I flinched.

  “Koi,” said a voice I knew from before I had been consumed, and then blessed, cool, nothingness.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “It’s been a whole night.” Marlin’s voice came from a pitch-black nowhere. “If she doesn’t give us some sign she’s still herself, then I am taking her to St. Vincent’s whether you like it or not—”

  I groaned. Or actually, I groaned inside my own head, but something must have made it to the outside world because suddenly somebody grabbed my hand so hard bones grated together.

  “Koi? Can you hear me?” said Marlin.

  I groaned again. She was mangling my hand into mush which meant I couldn’t squeeze hers in response. Maybe she’d accept eyelid fluttering, instead? Except the muscles in my eyelids weighed a ton.

  “She’s awake,” Dad said in Japanese.

  My insides felt packed with cotton, and every muscle as flimsy as an udon noodle, but still Dad’s voice sent a tiny frisson sparking up my spine.

  He is alive. I am alive. Marlin must be okay, too, or she wouldn’t be permanently maiming my hand.

  A rush of images swept the inside of my eyelids; Ullikemi, Thunderbird’s incandescent dreaming, the final darkness of the snake’s jaws around me.

  Let’s try that groaning one more time. My lips moved, splitting skin and some dried, gummy substance encrusting them.

  “Snake,” I tried to say, in a voice full of throat-shards.

  With Herculean effort, I pried open my eyes to narrow slits.

  I’d been wrong. The gripper wasn’t Marlin. It was Ken, sitting close by my couch in a folding chair with Marlin’s grimacing face hovering over his shoulder.

  “Ullikemi’s gone,” said Ken quietly. Marlin tried to elbow her way in front of him, but he sat still and immovable, the grip on my hand generating warmth that spread up my arm.

  “Dad?”

  “I’m here, Koi-chan,” said Dad from my left. Neck muscles protested, but some of the w
armth from Ken’s grip must have worked magic, because I managed to turn my head.

  Dad. He was as pale as my couch’s fabric and still a bit gaunt around the eyes and hollow-cheeked, but he had no visible wounds or scars and the dark mahogany of his pupils held no trace of fog or confusion. This was Dad. Really Dad. Present in a way he hadn’t been for years and years.

  A thousand words and feelings twisted around in my brain, an insistent pressure in my throat a barrier to all the questions I ached to ask.

  This Baku stuff blew into my life like a tornado, ripping away broken boards and glass shards, and sweeping everything into a twisted mess. Dad was at the center of the storm.

  He was alive, and I was glad, but just looking at his face made heat well up behind my eyes. I turned back to Ken.

  “Hayk?” I said.

  Marlin reached over with a lidded cup and pushed a straw between my lips. I sipped water as Ken ran his free hand through his short hair. He was wearing the sharp-boned face I thought of as “human-normal” without amiable glamour.

  “We should have called the police,” said Marlin.

  Right. Because Officer Bio-fuel totally saved the day at Ankeny Square.

  “He’s beyond the police,” said Ken with a patient emphasis that said he and Marlin weren’t having this conversation for the first time. “I let Kwaskwi and the teeth hag have him.”

  I sipped again. This time the water went down my throat without feeling like glass shards.

  “Why can’t I move?”

  Dad cleared his throat. “It will pass.”

  “How do you know?” said Marlin, still angry.

  “She woke up,” Dad said. “If she’s not completely comatose after taking in Thunderbird’s dreaming, then she’ll heal.”

  “Ullikemi’s gone?” I repeated Ken’s words from before, a whipcord of acid twisted tighter in my belly. I had to know what ‘gone’ meant.

  Ken reached over and smoothed a lock of hair behind my ear. The touch was a mix of warmth and pressure on the edge of pain, as if my skin was hyper-sensitized. “Whatever happened between you and Thunderbird and Ullikemi, it released Hayk. I was a bit busy keeping him contained.” He gave a little grimace and rolled his left shoulder gingerly. Even a ‘contained’ Hayk had managed to injure him.