by Dima Zales
I strain to move, but I can’t so much as twitch a muscle.
With evil grins, Beatrice, Baba Yaga, and the rest of my enemies take out identical, ceremonial-looking daggers and stab the person in front of them.
Mom, Dad, and everyone else I care about die in a horrible instant.
I strain to free myself from the paralysis so hard that a blood vessel bursts in my eye—to no avail.
I can’t move.
All I can do is watch.
The audience starts screaming and running away.
Nero finally notices what happened.
Moving with supernatural speed, he reloads the gun, takes aim, and shoots.
Baba Yaga’s head explodes.
My paralysis goes away just as a new person blurs onto the stage.
It’s Yudo, a.k.a. the usurper—the dragon who killed Nero’s parents.
Clutching a giant sword, the usurper blurs toward Nero.
“Behind you!” I yell as I leap across the stage, but Nero keeps aiming at the bad guys in the second row.
The theater audience stampedes for the emergency exits, and their panicked shrieks must be why Nero doesn’t hear my warnings, or Yudo’s approach.
Nero shoots again.
Woland’s head explodes this time.
I’m halfway across the stage, but I might as well be on the other side of the world.
Yudo slices with his sword, and Nero’s head separates from his body.
Something inside me snaps.
I close the distance between us, grab Nero’s gun, and unload it into Yudo’s head.
The dragon collapses, dead as a doornail.
I grab his sword just as Harper, Beatrice, Darian, Gaius, and Koschei get onto the stage.
“You’ll all pay for what you did,” I hiss at them, and to highlight my words, I disembowel Darian with the sword.
The rest of them step back, so I stalk toward them.
With fear in her eyes, Beatrice shoots multi-colored energy at all the dead, and they begin to reanimate as zombies.
Her moment of distraction gives me a window of opportunity to literally chop her in half.
As she dies, the zombies still.
“You bitch!” Harper screams. “You will—”
I’ll never know what the succubus was going to say because my fist enters her chest and pulls out her still-beating heart—at the same exact time as I behead Gaius with the sword.
As Gaius’s head rolls to the side, I toss Harper’s heart at it with a curse.
Koschei—the only one left alive—grins at me. “You know I’m not so easy to kill. They call me the Immortal for a reason.”
“Good,” I growl and chop off his right leg. “That means I get to enjoy this for as long as I want.”
Koschei screams in pain.
Encouraged, I chop off his other leg.
He screams even louder and tries to crawl away from me.
As I stalk after him, a plan crystalizes in my head. I’m going to torture-kill him over and over, until the pain of losing my family and friends goes away.
Which it never will.
Just like my grief over losing Rose, his earlier victim.
Viciously, I carve him up with the sword until my arms go numb—and that’s a long time when one is a vampire.
I don’t know how many times Koschei dies and comes back before someone new walks out onto the stage.
The newcomer is slow-clapping and grinning like a maniac.
Wiping Koschei’s blood from my eyes, I look at her.
Of course.
It’s Lilith.
She’s beaming at me with maternal pride.
“You.” I clutch my bloody sword tighter. “If you set this up, I’ll kill you slower than him.”
I take a menacing step toward Lilith.
Which is when a figure appears between us—a person it takes me a moment to recognize because we’ve just met.
It’s Bailey Spade.
The dream walker.
Which means—
“That’s right,” Bailey says soothingly. “This is a nightmare.”
“Oh.” Intense relief replaces all the angst. “Of course, this is a dream.”
How could I not see it sooner? Nero would never let me do a bullet catch, let alone “shoot” at me personally.
And Mom and Dad wouldn’t watch a bullet catch so calmly either. Neither would my friends.
More importantly, Baba Yaga and the rest of the baddies are long dead—something I could’ve only forgotten in the dream world.
“I hope you don’t mind that I cut into this dream before you got to matricide,” Bailey says. “If you think that would be therapeutic, I could—”
“A dream,” I mutter. “Just a stupid dream.”
“Yep,” Bailey says. “Now if you don’t mind, I’d like to change the scene.” She looks around at the blood and gore around us, and as soon as I nod, it all disappears.
We’re on a cloud now—but unlike normal clouds that are just water vapor and thus would let us fall through, this cloud feels like a comfy down pillow under my feet.
Below the cloud is a soothing view of a never-ending ocean.
“Please get on the proverbial couch,” Bailey says, and as she does, a couch appears on the surface of the cloud.
I take a seat and notice I’m no longer soaked in the blood of my enemies. Even my clothes are different now. Bailey clearly has control over every detail of what happens in this part of the dream.
“How do you feel?” she asks, perching on a cushy-looking chair that appears under her butt.
“I can’t believe I didn’t realize I was dreaming,” I say. “It now seems so obvious.”
“That’s normal.” Bailey crosses her legs. “Dreamworld is rarely logical. It takes a lot of training to notice the inconsistencies and realize you’re in a dream. But if you learned to do that, you’d be able to do some of the things I can. The technique is called lucid dreaming, and I can teach it to you as part of our sessions.”
She says more, but I get distracted when a fluffy creature appears to the side of Bailey’s chair.
I stare at it.
It’s an animal I’ve never seen before. An animal that seems to be a figment of someone’s imagination.
“Hi,” the creature says to me in a voice as cute as the rest of it, before it turns as white as the cloud below it. “I’m Pom.”
“Pom, I’m working,” Bailey says sternly to the creature. “We talked about this.”
Pom’s color darkens.
Bailey ignores the being and looks at me apologetically. “This is what he looks like in the dreamworld.” She waves her now-naked wrist in the air. “I guess he figured since you have a talking fluffy pet yourself, you wouldn’t mind seeing him.”
“A pet?” Pom asks indignantly, his color growing even darker. “I think you mean a symbiont.”
“Sure,” Bailey says sarcastically. “A symbiont. Not a pet, and especially not a parasite. Can you let me work now?”
“Wait, you mean this is the looft you had on your wrist?” I look at Pom. “The furry wristband?”
“I know.” She grins. “In the dreamworld, he’s pure, weaponized cuteness.”
Pom puffs up, and his color goes back to a lighter hue.
“Don’t you think your cat and even the chinchilla are ugly in comparison?” Bailey says to me with a wink.
“Yeah,” I say, playing along. “Hideous.”
“I like to say that Pom is cuter than your Earth’s koala and panda bears,” Bailey says. “Cuter even than the otters.”
I chuckle. “He reminds me of a Pokémon,” I say, getting into the spirit of this.
“Yeah.” Bailey scratches Pom’s fluffy ear. “It’s like if Jigglypuff and Pikachu had a bastard child.”
I laugh. Now that she said it, I can totally see the resemblance.
“Do I have to leave?” Pom asks petulantly. “I like Sasha. She reminds me of you.”
&nb
sp; “Thanks,” I say. “I think.”
“Oh, it’s a compliment,” Bailey says. “Pomsie thinks the world of me.”
“Flatter yourself much?” the creature mutters.
“So, you want him to go?” Bailey looks at me. “For what it’s worth, even if you don’t see him, he hears and sees everything that happens in the dreamworld.”
“I don’t mind,” I say. “Especially since I don’t even know what’s going to happen.”
“Right.” She steeples her fingers. “Actually, I didn’t plan much for today outside of setting up our connection. That you’re still asleep is rare but gives us a chance to do a little post-nightmare therapy, if you’d like.”
“I guess,” I say. “What does that entail?”
“Well, we can start by you telling me what you think that whole bloody business was about.”
“I don’t know.” I shift my weight on the suddenly uncomfortable couch. “It started with a magic performance, and I can never do those again—so the nightmare could be my subconscious telling me how upset I am about that.” I look at her expectantly, but she takes on an unreadable expression she must’ve stolen from Lucretia. “Or this dream could be more literal,” I continue. “Maybe I’m afraid of losing Nero. Or my parents and my friends.”
Realizing I’m sweating bullets, I stop and take a breath. Somehow—probably due to Bailey—a glass of water shows up floating in the air in front of me. I grab it and gulp down the water greedily.
“Any other theories?” Bailey asks soothingly when the empty cup evaporates from my hands.
“I could just be afraid of becoming a monster, like Lilith.” I glance at Pom. “Or it can all just be random firings of my neurons and mean nothing. You’re the expert, so you tell me.”
Bailey clears her throat. “I like to compare dreams to virtual reality, only instead of it being the work of a team of designers and engineers, it’s your own brain that’s responsible for the experiences.”
“That doesn’t explain much,” I say. “What do you think it all meant?”
“Me?” Bailey absentmindedly pets Pom on his head. “This isn’t about me. It’s your dreams, so you have to make sense of them. Your guesses are pretty insightful—especially for your first time.”
“They are?” I lean back on the couch. “It might be because I do regular therapy with a shrink.”
“Ah.” She pulls her hand away from Pom. “That shows. You should keep doing that in parallel to our sessions.”
“Sessions, as in plural? You mean I’ll have to dream like this again?”
“Only if you want,” she says. “Being a vampire, you don’t need to sleep, and therefore, you’re an unusual client as far as nightmares go. You will not suffer from sleep deprivation on a physical level. Still, dream therapy can help you work on every one of the fears you just mentioned—and your fear of public speaking as well. Assuming that’s what you want.”
I consider it.
Now that she’s mentioned it, it would be great to not get so nervous when I have to speak in public—especially if that means I’d enjoy performing magic on a stage in my dreams.
Not sure I’d like to see people I care about die again, though, even in a nightmare.
“I think I might want some help from you,” I say hesitantly. “But I don’t want to delve into every one of my fears—at least not until after I save the world.”
As soon as I say the words, I want to smack myself for forgetting about Tartarus so completely.
I don’t have time for this.
I never had time for this.
Nero bullied me into this dream therapy, and I shouldn’t have let him.
“Save the world?” Bailey raises an eyebrow.
“It’s a long story,” I mutter. “So what do you say? Can we continue this another time?”
“It’s your boyfriend’s money,” Bailey says. “Besides, you did really well for your first session.”
“Cool. So what now?”
“You wake up.”
“Just like that?”
“Yeah,” she says. “Will it, and it should happen. When you’re ready for another session, just fall asleep again, and I’ll do my best to visit you—though no promises. I have a ton of clients fighting for my attention.”
“And you won’t need to touch me again?” I ask, remembering what Nero said.
“No,” she says. “And since you’re a vampire, this should be easy. If I see you sleeping, I’ll know you’re doing it for therapy. That isn’t the case with all my clients; they sleep because they need to do so.”
“Great,” I say. “How do I will myself to wake up?”
“Like Nike,” Bailey says. “Just do it.”
I stand up from the couch and will myself to wake up.
With a start, I open my eyes in my living room.
Chapter Thirteen
“You okay?” Fluffster asks in my head. “You squeezed me pretty hard in your sleep.”
“I’m fine.” I loosen my grip on my poor domovoi and sit up.
Just like the last time I woke up, I feel zero grogginess.
Must indeed be a vampire thing.
“How was the therapy?” Nero asks, entering the living room with Claudia, who’s still holding Lucifur—and somehow still has all her limbs intact.
“Trippy.” I put Fluffster on the floor and look at Bailey’s furry wristband.
It must be the same Pom as in the dream, but it looks very different here. I wonder if its appearance in the dreamworld is a figment of Bailey’s imagination, like the clouds and all that.
“It was a great start,” Bailey says with an unreadable expression.
“Good.” Nero glances down at his phone. Without looking up, he says, “Set up more sessions and put the bill on my tab in Gomorrah.”
“Deal.” Bailey touches her pet wristband.
“Are Vlad and the others back on Earth?” I ask, tearing my gaze away from the looft.
“Stepped through the gate a few minutes ago,” Nero says. “Eric is going to come get us in a moment.”
“Finally.” I stand up. “Let’s go.”
Claudia puts down the cat, and we all walk Bailey out. When her elevator arrives, I tell her that it was nice to meet her.
“The pleasure was all mine,” she says, then looks at Nero. “Not that there was any pleasure during our session. Everything was strictly platonic.”
The elevator doors close in front of her, and Nero’s phone dings.
He looks at a text, and I realize I haven’t checked my own phone since we got back from the Otherlands—so I do so now.
I have numerous texts from Lucretia for some reason.
As an echo of my nightmare where I lost my newfound half-sister, my heart rate speeds up.
Then I see what the messages say and exhale in relief. Lucretia invited me to her new Mandate Rite. As a vampire, she has to go through that unpleasantness again, and it’s scheduled for today.
A half hour ago, to be precise.
I scroll through all the messages she sent. After the original invitation, her texts got more and more worried about my lack of reply. She even called me a few times.
I call her back, but it goes to voicemail.
I’m fine, sis, I text, grinning at the last part. Sorry I missed your Rite, but maybe I’ll catch you in the castle? I’ll be heading there for a Council meeting in a second. Again, sorry about the delay in reply. I have a good excuse, I promise.
As I look up from my screen, Eric appears in the corridor.
“Ladies first.” Nero nods at his sister and me.
Eric walks up to Claudia and touches her shoulder. They poof out.
Then Eric reappears and grabs me.
I doubt I’ll ever get tired of being teleported. One second, we’re in my building; the next, I find myself on a familiar circular platform with the scent of sage incense tickling my nose.
Kit, Vlad, and the others are already here, standing next to me, dressed
in those ceremonial robes with hoods on their heads.
As is customary, candles are lit up all around us—each of them seemingly floating, giving the place a Hogwarts Great Hall kind of vibe.
The rest of the Council is in their seats, also robed, their faces barely discernible in the gloomy light.
I look around for familiar faces but find none. I wonder if Chester—the probability manipulator who hired Beatrice to kill me, but later helped me and Nero defeat Darian—is back on the Council, as Nero promised.
I don’t see him here, so probably not yet. Which makes sense, as Nero has been busy with his recent conquest.
“Kind of creepy to see them from down here,” Kit whispers to me. “I feel like we’re about to be judged.”
Claudia studies the Council with amusement. She’s clearly never seen Eyes Wide Shut and thus doesn’t find this orgy vibe even slightly unsettling. Her lack of fear makes sense, though. As a dragon, she can probably decimate each and every one of these beings with a single breath.
Eric turns up again, bringing Nero, then disappears just as quickly. I guess he isn’t on the Council.
Next to us, Vlad pulls down his hood, revealing his broody face. “I already gave the Council a brief overview of the threat,” he says. “But we waited for you before discussing the plan of action.”
A person gets up. Even with the hood of his robe, I can see that he’s an elderly man who’s gone bald on top but retained wispy long hair on the sides. Above his thin lips is a huge gray mustache. He reminds me of a mad scientist determined to take over the world—an honor for which he’ll have to fight Tartarus now.
“How do we even know the seer is telling the truth?” He looks down at me with his slightly cross-eyed gaze. “The last time she was here, it was to discuss her TV performance.”
“That’s Easton,” Kit whispers into my ear. “As a dream walker, he’s got something on everyone in the Council, which is why his annoying attitude is tolerated.”
“I say we get proof,” the dream walker says. “I can personally examine her dreams to—”
“Over your cold, dead body,” Nero growls, his limbal rings turning dragony. “The same goes for anyone else who even thinks about touching her.”
He sweeps his gaze across the room, and surprise surprise, no one wants to touch me all of a sudden.
