Waking Nightmares

by Christopher Golden

  All he had to do was fight her, and stay alive.

  And the best way to fight chaos was with order. Navalica came at him again, still wielding that entropic sword, edging her way around the hole she had created in the street. Broken sewer pipes gushed water below. Octavian did not bother forging a new blade of his own. Instead, he struck her with a blast of concussive magic that knocked her back several yards. She landed hard, but sprang up instantly, a new confidence glinting in her eyes. Brute force would not destroy her; they both knew that. And he knew she would think he had run out of ideas.

  But even as he had attacked her, Octavian had been crafting another spell. He reached deep within himself for the strength, and into his memories of Hell for the words, for he had learned them from a fellow prisoner, a Chinese sorcerer who subscribed to philosophies of simplicity and synchronicity . . . of Order.

  The air around Navalica shimmered. A round hole appeared in the fabric of the world, and sunlight shone through it. Navalica cried out and turned toward that purity in surprise, but she was no vampire. It would not kill her. Confusion made her blade falter, even as a second circle appeared opposite the first, this one a window into winter night, snow blowing in from another part of the world. A third window opened, and then a fourth, one revealing a spring morning and the other a windy autumn afternoon, leaves dancing on a gust of wind.

  The four seasons of the natural world in perfect symmetry. Order.

  Navalica tried to slip between these openings, but they moved with her. The clean air of a world of order, untouched by her chaos, surrounded her. The goddess screamed in rage and rushed at him, but again the spell kept her boxed by those windows, poisoning her with order. She was already weak; confusion and frustration made her falter anew.

  In the sky above Hawthorne, the storm had diminished enough that the first gleam of sunshine and blue sky broke through the gray and the rain.

  “I told you I didn’t have to kill you,” Octavian reminded her. “Submit now. Your time in this world is over.”

  With a roar, Navalica swung her entropy blade. It struck the autumn window, cleaving the magic in half. The spell deteriorated instantly, unraveling so quickly that the backlash stunned Octavian, hitting him like the scorching blast of an explosion. He threw up his hands to protect himself and his flesh seared anew.

  Weakened and unsteady, he looked up to see that the windows were gone. Navalica seemed withered now, aging, diminishing. The radiant power of a goddess had faded like the storm above.

  “I will not be caged!” she shouted at him.

  The goddess looked around, searching for something. He thought she hoped to find wraiths that would come to her aid, or worshippers still under her control. With the rain now nothing more than a light drizzle and the daylight glowing behind the clouds, filtering through and breaking up the storm, nothing could be hidden in darkness.

  Navalica froze, gaze locked on something off to Octavian’s right. He turned and saw them, standing under the awning half a block away, where he’d left them. Keomany and Charlotte and Amber. A ghost stood with them, wavering in and out of existence.

  Charlotte held the box. Amber and the ghost stood back as Keomany closed the latches, the soul cage no longer in her hands. Navalica’s heart had been returned to the chest where her high priests had trapped it millennia before. All that remained of the ritual was the enchantment that went along with it, the words of which he had implanted in their minds so they could not be forgotten. As he watched, Keomany raised her hands and began to speak.

  Navalica shrieked. She leaped at Octavian. Weak and distracted, he avoided the killing blow of her blade only by throwing himself backward and deflecting her with a hasty defensive shield. But the goddess kept moving, rolling away from his shield and leaping through the air, magic carrying her forty feet or more.

  She came down beside the awning. Amber attacked her, but Navalica threw her aside. The goddess might not be able to control the strange hybrid wraith that Amber had become, but Amber could not stop her.

  Charlotte cried out a warning, tried to move the chest around, to hold it against her with one hand, but she was too late.

  Keomany’s eyes went wide as the entropic blade plunged between her breasts.

  Octavian screamed, running toward them, knowing he was too late.

  Charlotte dropped the iron chest, which struck the pavement and tipped over, but remained latched. Shapeshifting, she grew in the space between heartbeats, becoming an enormous black bear. One paw on Navalica’s head; with the other she tore the goddess’s right arm off. The entropic sword hit the sidewalk, but its magic had vanished without connection to Navalica, and with an acidic hiss it bubbled away to nothing.

  Shifting back to her human form, Charlotte fought the ruined goddess, tearing at her, refusing to let her rise from the ground.

  When Octavian reached Keomany, Amber was already at her side. They knelt on either side of her, but Keomany looked only at him. The hole in her chest had begun to sink inward and her skin wrinkled and sagged. Her hair whitened as entropy took hold.

  “Peter,” Keomany said, wearing a mask of sorrow and embarrassment. “I’m sorry.”

  He knew what she meant. She burned with the same guilt and humiliation he felt for the way Navalica’s magic had made them behave.

  “Nothing to be sorry about,” he said, and found that he meant it. He regretted succumbing to chaos, but not what they had done under that influence.

  Keomany smiled, but it did not erase the sadness in her eyes. She died with that expression on her face, her flesh continuing to wither and flake so rapidly that only half a minute passed before her body crumbled to dust and yellowed bone.

  “Oh, my God,” Amber whispered.

  Octavian looked at her inhuman beauty, saw the ghost standing behind her and recognized Professor Varick, and thought about how much they had all lost to chaos.

  “A little help here?” Charlotte snapped.

  But a glance told him that she didn’t really need help. A fresh wind was blowing the storm away, revealing more of the blue sky. The goddess no longer had the strength to fight them.

  Octavian rose and retrieved the chest. He sat on the sidewalk and held it in his lap and he spoke the words. He could feel the seal on the iron chest tighten, and heard a small shushing noise as it expelled what air had been inside.

  As they watched, the blue faded from the skin of the goddess Navalica. Her burning indigo fire became ordinary hair, thin and gray. Charlotte held the one-armed old woman in her arms, and for the first time, Octavian saw the vampire girl’s eyes turn soft and kind.

  “Gran,” Amber whispered.

  Octavian held the chest tightly and they all watched as the last of the storm cleared away, sunlight glinting off the towers of the church and city hall, the bell and the clock. Against the bright blue sky, he saw sparrows flying in formation.

  Order had been restored. But it felt nothing like victory.

  EPILOGUE

  MILES knew he could not haunt his own house, or remain in his childhood home. As far as the rest of the world knew, he and his mother were both among the eighty-seven people who had died in the chaos storm that had cut Hawthorne off from the rest of the world.

  As far as the world knows? he thought. You are among the dead.

  He had to remind himself of this constantly. It was strange to be aware and awake, to have a sense of reality, to be able—under certain circumstances—to touch the living, solid world, while being neither solid nor alive himself.

  “Miles?”

  He turned to see his mother standing in the entrance to the living room. Miles himself sat—as much as a phantom could be said to sit—on the piano bench where she had taught him how to play. They had shared real joy there, a contentment that parent and child rarely experienced together. In school, Miles had often been called a mama’s boy, but he had never seen any sin in loving his mother, she who had been kinder to him than anyone else in his life. His wife
had broken his heart and then broken their marriage, and though he had returned to Hawthorne with deep regrets, he had never regretted being able to spend more time visiting with his mother.

  Now, though, he had one last regret.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  His mother’s ghost drifted toward him, almost walking, though each stride covered more distance than it ought to have. She settled beside him on the piano bench and played a few notes of “Hit That Jive Jack,” which had always made him laugh.

  “What are you sorry for?” she asked.

  Miles turned to her, felt the vague stirring of hunger inside him and pushed it away. He had sated his hunger with Navalica’s wraiths, but already it had begun to return. When he looked at ghosts—and there were many new ones in Hawthorne, getting their bearings before they moved on to whatever came next—he felt that hunger. But he felt it when he looked at humans, too, and his spectral fangs were sharp indeed when he ran his tongue over them. He felt sure that he could drink blood to satisfy his hunger, just as easily as he could feed off a ghost, and if he had to choose, he would take from the living. The dead had suffered enough.

  “You know we can’t stay here,” he said, running his fingers over the keys and then playing the opening run of “Devil May Care.”

  His mother joined in, her fingers dancing over the keys, but she did not reply.

  Miles stopped playing and turned to her. “The house will be sold. New people will move in. Our things will be removed. I don’t want to see all of that. I don’t want to haunt my own house.”

  “This hasn’t been your house in years,” his mother said, but lightly. They both knew it had always been his home just as much as it had been hers, no matter where he lived.

  “It might be fun,” she added, lifting her hands from the keys and making absurd spooky-ghost noises.

  The joke fell flat and the two of them sat there, side by side at the piano, for what might have been a minute or an hour—Miles had found that it was sometimes difficult to gauge the passage of time now that he was dead.

  “What do you have in mind?” she asked, at last, playing with the keys again, mischief turning into a snatch of Mozart.

  “You don’t have to wait for me.”

  She stopped playing and turned to look at him, anger flaring in her eyes. They had talked about this already. Whatever he was, Miles did not feel the lure of the other side the way other ghosts seemed to. His mother described it as a yearning, but he did not share that yearning. Only hunger. Whatever final rest awaited the soul, he feared that he would never find it. But she could go. She could have that peace.

  “I’m not going anywhere until we know more about what’s happened to you. God will have to drag me screaming to Heaven if he wants me. At least until I can be sure that you’ll be able to follow someday.”

  Miles smiled. It had been worth a try.

  “Plan B, then, I guess,” he said.

  “Which is?”

  “My student, Amber Morrissey—”

  “The purple girl.”

  He nodded. “She’s not . . .” He almost said human. “She’s also been changed. But she’s alive. Octavian—the sorcerer? He’s helping her.”

  “Aren’t her parents ill?” his mother asked.

  Miles thought about that. They had been in the process of being transformed into Reapers before Octavian had frozen time around them. Last night he had woven spells around them that seemed to be slowly restoring their humanity.

  “It looks like they’re getting better,” he said. “Amber has offered to let us live with her.”

  His mother stared at him. “She’s got that demon in her house. The thing that killed us. That caused all of this.”

  Navalica was not a demon, but Miles knew better than to correct her.

  “She’s there, yes. But she’s barely alive. She will never wake up again. Octavian has seen to that. She might as well be dead.”

  “But she isn’t dead. We are.”

  Miles flinched at her bitterness. They fell into silence again, until at last her fingers strayed to the piano yet again. She couldn’t help it.

  “Mom . . .” he began.

  She played through an old Charles Trenet song, singing softly in French. It had always been one of her favorites, one that she played to cheer herself up when she was feeling blue. He watched her translucent fingers moving across the keys and wondered what the new owners of the house might think when the piano began to play by itself in the middle of the night.

  When she had played the final notes of the song, she turned to him.

  “Do they have a piano?” she asked.

  “We could ask Amber to take this one. I’m sure she would move it over there. Maybe even tonight.”

  She considered for a moment and then gave him a nod. Then she nudged him and began to play. Miles joined in, accompanying her, though he would never play as well as she did.

  Not even if he practiced forever.

  OCTAVIAN and Charlotte had both spent the night at Amber’s. He had done all he could for her parents and hoped that time would do the rest, but it remained to be seen if they would ever be completely cleansed of Navalica’s influence. In addition to the ritual they had done to hide the goddess behind the guise of a withered old woman, Octavian had cast further enchantments on the creature Amber would have to pretend was her great-grandmother—spells that would keep Navalica essentially comatose.

  The Morrissey family, as descendants of her ancient Chaldean high priests, had been her caretakers for thousands of years, and Amber vowed to continue to fulfill that duty. Abandoned, the old woman would not die. They could bury her in a hole in the ground and she would continue just as she was, perhaps for eternity, as long as the iron chest remained hidden in the dead, lifeless parallel dimension where Octavian had placed it. But Amber did not like the idea of burying Navalica where she might be forgotten. Someone had to keep watch, to make certain, and she was determined to be that person.

  Octavian had tried to reverse the effects of long-term exposure to Navalica’s anarchic magic on Amber, to make her human again, but whatever she had become, there would be no returning from it. Instead, he had cast a glamour upon her. She would be able to walk among ordinary humans and they would see her as they always had . . . as a pretty college girl, a good daughter, a hard-working student. Only other supernaturals would be able to see through the glamour. But Octavian had no illusions about Amber being able to return to her old life—that time for her was over.

  Amber and Charlotte walked him to his car, the Morrissey house looming quietly behind them. It looked empty, but it would never be empty again. Chaos slept there. Soon ghosts would haunt its halls. Octavian wondered if people passing on the street would quicken their pace without knowing why. Such houses always gave passersby the shivers.

  Amber carried a wine bottle that held what they had managed to collect of Keomany’s ashes. Octavian had wanted something he could seal, and the Santa’s Workshop cookie tin had seemed too disrespectful, though he thought it would have amused Keomany.

  Thoughts of her weighed on him. Her life had been full of lightness and contentment before her home in Vermont had been destroyed by a demon called the Tatterdemalion. A demon that never would have been able to come into this world if the Vatican sorcerers were still alive to continually restore the magic keeping the forces of darkness out. Octavian had helped to destroy them in order to save himself and his kind, but the cost had been so much higher than he could ever have known.

  He had liked Keomany very much, and perhaps he had felt something more for her. But he refused to allow himself to dwell on what might have been, and what should never have been, though he still burned with guilt and embarrassment about what Navalica’s influence had caused them to do.

  Charlotte squirmed as they walked the front path to the street, where his car was parked. She wore a thin, hooded sweatshirt with the hood up, hiding as much of herself from the sun as she could manage. Ob
jectively, she knew it would not burn her, but Cortez—the vampire who had made her—had instilled the vampire traditions in her so deeply that the sun made her profoundly uneasy.

  Octavian set his bags down behind the car.

  “I want to thank you,” Amber said.

  “Nothing to thank me for,” he replied.

  She laughed. “Other than my life, you mean? And my parents’ lives?”

  Such as they are, Octavian thought, but he did not want to cast a pall over the bright spark of her hope.

  He opened the trunk and loaded Keomany’s suitcase and then his own.

  “Just remember you can call me any time,” he said. “And practice that glamour. You’ll need to refresh it at least once a month to keep it from slipping.”

  “It seems weird,” she said. “I’m no magician.”

  Octavian smiled. “I’ve done the hard part. The rest is small magic. You’ll do fine.”

  Amber hesitated a moment, sadness touching her eyes, and then she handed him the wine bottle. The depth of her regret made her new features even more lovely, and Octavian thought he understood for the first time what it meant to say one was tragically beautiful.

  “I prayed for her,” Amber said.

  Octavian took the wine bottle. “She would have liked that.”

  Charlotte shifted, anxious to be out of the sun. “What are you going to do with her? With the ashes, I mean?”

  “I’m taking her back to the orchard where she lived. There are other witches there, her friends. I thought they’d want to scatter her ashes into the soil there, around the roots of the trees. She would have liked that.”

  An awkward moment passed among them as they all realized this was farewell.

  “I want to thank you, too,” Charlotte said. “For giving me a chance.”