Wildfire Phoenix

by Zoe Chant

  “Do not do that,” Blaise said, rather more vehemently than she’d intended. “Seriously.”

  Zephyr’s mouth quirked. “I wasn’t intending to. More to the point, your animal also can’t join you in this place unless you deliberately call it. That’s why I thought you might be more comfortable meeting here.”

  “Huh.” It was easier to look at him now that she couldn’t feel the frustrated flare of her animal every time their eyes met. She could see him, rather than her mate. “You’re right, this is a lot easier. So, what’s on your mind?”

  Zephyr started to speak, then paused, eyebrows drawing together. He looked round, as though he’d just heard someone call his name. “One moment. There’s something rather distracting that wouldn’t take long to fix. Do you mind if we take a walk first?”

  “Sure.” She fell into step with him, though with the lack of any sort of landmark, it felt unnervingly like she wasn’t moving at all. “Uh, where are we going?”

  “I don’t know yet.” In the real world, Zephyr always carried himself with careful tension, as though everything around him was made of glass, but here, in this swirling nothingness, he moved with loose, easy strides. “I don’t normally actively search through dreams, like we did last time. People have a right to privacy, so I try to only go where I’m invited.”

  “People do that?”

  “Well, not me specifically. But when the nightmares close in, most people don’t want to face them alone. I listen out for those calls for help and do what I can to ease their dreams.” He paused mid-step. “Ah. Here we go.”

  The fog drew back like a curtain, revealing an enormous corridor lined with narrow metal lockers. Strip lights buzzed overhead, harsh and unforgiving. A teenage girl—about thirteen or fourteen, Blaise would have guessed—darted from locker to locker, tugging futilely at each door in turn.

  “I can’t find it,” the girl was saying over and over. She sounded on the verge of tears. “I have to find it.”

  “Find what, Tegan?” Zephyr said gently.

  Tegan jumped, whirling round. One of her hands curled around something, holding it to her chest. She saw Zephyr, and her brown eyes widened in recognition.

  “Oh, it’s you,” the girl said, her narrow shoulders dropping. She paid no attention at all to Blaise. “I haven’t seen you for a long time. I thought maybe you’d moved to a different school.”

  “I couldn’t come to see you for a while. But I’m back now.” Zephyr pointed at a locker. “This one is yours, isn’t it?”

  Tegan’s panicked expression shifted to relief. Hurrying over, she spun the dial to unlock the door. Before she could open it, however, Zephyr touched her shoulder.

  “It’s very small and dark in there,” he said. “I don’t think she’ll like it.”

  Tegan bit her lip, looking down at her closed fist. “But I have to hide her. I can’t let anyone find out. They’ll laugh at me.”

  Zephyr nodded gravely, as though that made perfect sense. He took the girl’s other hand. “There’s a better place. Come with me.”

  Blaise trailed behind the pair in bewildered fascination, not daring to ask questions in case it made Tegan notice her presence. Zephyr led the girl down the corridor with confident steps, to an old wooden door. It seemed out of place to Blaise’s eye, but Tegan brightened, a smile breaking across her face.

  “Yes!” she exclaimed. “I didn’t know there was a way to get here from school.”

  Zephyr smiled too. “There’s always a way here.”

  He opened the door, revealing a cozy library with cushions scattered amidst low shelves of books. Soft spring light streamed through high, narrow windows. The air smelled of old paper and lavender.

  Gently, Zephyr took Tegan’s clenched hand, turning it over. “You can let her go now.”

  The girl’s fingers tightened, then slowly opened. A plastic dragon lay curled in her hand. Just a cheap, badly painted toy—but then it stirred, opening luminous eyes. It yawned, showing tiny, perfect teeth, and blew out an orange spark of flame.

  Zephyr stroked the dragon’s jeweled scales. “I think she’s hungry.”

  Tegan flinched, her fingers curling around the dragon. “But if I feed her, she’ll get bigger. I won’t be able to hide her.”

  “That’s true.” With gentle flicks, Zephyr shooed the dragon off the girl’s hand. “But she’d also be strong enough to protect you.”

  The dragon spread rainbow wings, leaping into the air. It circled Tegan’s head, tugging at her hair with minute claws. She giggled, taking a step forward—then hesitated, looking back over her shoulder at Zephyr.

  “It’s hard to find the way here on my own,” she said. “You won’t go away for so long again, will you?”

  “I’ll try not to.” Zephyr gave the girl a gentle push into the library. “Go on now. See where she takes you.”

  Tegan flashed him a smile, then turned away. As the fog rolled in, Blaise caught a last glimpse of the dragon’s bright, gleaming wings. They already looked larger.

  “Is she a dragon shifter?” Blaise asked Zephyr.

  “I don’t know.” Zephyr gazed into the fog as though still watching Tegan walk away. “Possibly. But many people hide a secret soul, without being shifters.”

  “Huh. She seemed to know you.”

  “I’ve visited her many times, though if we passed each other on the street in the waking world, she wouldn’t recognize me. She moved to a new school a while ago, and has been struggling to fit in. I’m glad to be able to catch up with her.” He cocked his head. “Actually, I can sense a number of people I haven’t seen for a while. I’d like to check in with them, if you don’t mind a few further diversions.”

  “Hey, if it’s a choice between a magical mystery tour, or tossing and turning while my brain re-runs my own personal horror movie, sign me up for the dream train. As long as I won’t get in the way?”

  “Not at all. You caught me by surprise, when you joined me in my uncle’s dream that first time. Now that I’m aware, I can keep you hidden.” He held out a hand. “Shall we?”

  Somehow, it was easy to take his hand here. It felt natural to walk like that, his fingers lightly clasping hers with gentle warmth.

  She grew used to the slide from one place to another, though not the dreams themselves. There was always that moment of jarring strangeness; like stepping off a plane into a foreign country, suddenly unable to read any of the signs and notices around you. Other people’s heads, Blaise soon decided, were just weird.

  Zephyr took it all in his stride. No matter how bizarre the situation, he approached each dreamer with quiet calm. At least half the time, nothing they said made a lick of sense to Blaise, yet Zephyr listened with grave attention. He didn’t say much. Just a few words here, a gentle question there. Yet it was like he knew every frightened mind as well as Blaise knew the crew engines; what to tweak, what to oil, to get rattling gears running smoothly once more.

  Some of the dreams, Blaise could understand. She’d had the sweat-soaked anxiety of sprinting for a bus, knowing that you were going to miss the big exam and flunk the whole year. She could have done with Zephyr jogging at her side, asking if she’d checked her pockets for her car keys. (“And if you can drive, you must not be in junior high, so you don’t need to get to school. You could go anywhere…”) And the tooth-falling-out dream was way too familiar, though she wasn’t sure she’d have been soothed by someone suggesting that she collect the endless molars and store them somewhere safe. (“This happens to everyone. See, here’s my box. Let’s make one for you.”)

  Some were just bizarre. Zephyr spent a long time crouched next to an agitated teen boy, solemnly helping him plant shattered bits of circuit board in the ground. One girl had apparently lost her parsnip, and was desperately searching for it in the middle of a dead-on recreation of last year’s Olympics (even Zephyr seemed to struggle a little with that one). But after a while, Blaise realized that all the dreams had one thing in common.

/>   “They’re all kids,” she said, back in the gray place between dreams. “What’s up with that?”

  “Honestly, I’m not sure. Most of the dreamers who reach for me are adolescents. I think their minds are more open.” The corner of Zephyr’s mouth lifted. “Or perhaps I just have a certain affinity for lost teens.”

  Blaise snorted. “You kind of had bigger problems than math tests and girlfriends at that age, though.”

  “All problems are big to the person who has them.” Zephyr started to stroll through the clouds again, at an unhurried pace. “Whatever the reason, I’m glad that these young people reach out to me. I like being able to help them with normal, everyday issues.”

  “Like lost parsnips?”

  Zephyr let out a soft breath of laughter. “I admit, that one was rather enigmatic. But most of the time, it’s fairly easy to see the way their waking worries shape their dreams.”

  “Easy for you, maybe. I couldn’t make sense of any of those weird-ass hallucinations even if I had Google and the complete works of Jung. How did you get so good at this?”

  He shrugged. “I was here for a long time. And I had the Thunderbird to guide me. It is much more than a force of destruction, no matter how it may seem in the waking world. Sometimes it carried me to the deeper levels, below the dreams of sleeping minds, where things get… stranger. I won’t take you there. I don’t think I could, even if I tried.”

  “Yeah, hard pass. This is strange enough for me, thanks. Were you always able to come here? Before the Thunderbird, I mean.”

  “No. That’s why it surprised me, when I discovered I was still able to dream walk even without the Thunderbird. The possibility hadn’t even occurred to me. Perhaps something of the Thunderbird’s power still lingers in my soul. Or maybe it’s just that I was here for so long.”

  “Must have been hard, being stuck here. Especially since you were just a kid yourself.”

  “There… was a learning curve, I admit.” He stared into the clouds. “Things got better, when I learned how to reach into other people’s dreams. I treasured even that small amount of contact with normal life. Especially teenagers. I missed out on most of those years, all that turbulent drama and little rites of passage. Helping them with their problems is the closest I’ll ever get to experiencing those things for myself. Does that sound creepy?”

  “Not creepy at all.” She squeezed his hand. “You sacrificed a lot, to be the Thunderbird.”

  He tilted his head, neither agreeing nor dissenting. “It was necessary. But still… sometimes, when I talk to these teens, I can’t help wondering what might have been, if things had been different. If I had just been awkward, geeky Zephyr, a normal Lakota boy whose biggest problem was plucking up the courage to ask the hot girl from Calculus class out on a date.”

  She nudged him with her shoulder, a friendly push. “Well, apparently in this alternate universe, regular human Blaise faces stiff competition. Exactly who is this hot girl?”

  Zephyr laughed again, all traces of introspection vanishing. “Since we’re reordering the universe to suit ourselves, I’m declaring that ordinary Zephyr managed to land an exchange trip to England. That’s where you went to school, right?”

  “Yep. Well, in that case, ordinary Zephyr already knows that ordinary Blaise is crushing on him. Rory and the other guys would have worked it out in about five nanoseconds, and you already know what they’re like when it comes to staying out of other people’s business.”

  Zephyr’s smile widened. “Ah, but you said you’re not a shifter in this fanfic. No animal to push you in my direction. You wouldn’t have glanced twice at me.”

  “Zeph, have you ever looked in a mirror?”

  He glanced down at his ridiculously well-muscled body, and his grin turned pained. “However you’re picturing me as a teen, you need to remove about half my mass and nine-tenths of the self-confidence. I was, shall we say, a late developer.”

  “Hah. Same here. I think I spent most of my mid-teens buried in a black hoody, wishing I could disappear.”

  Zephyr cocked an eyebrow. “Now that I find difficult to believe.”

  “You’ll have to take my word for it, because I am never showing you any photos of myself taken before the age of nineteen. Maybe it’s just as well we didn’t meet back then.” Something occurred to her, and she gestured at his long hair. “Hey, how come you don’t look exactly the same here as in real life?”

  “This?” He tucked a stray lock back behind his ear. “The hospital staff cut my hair while I was in my coma. I suppose my subconscious hasn’t quite accepted that yet. To an extent, your dream body reflects your self-image. In my case, the other way round, too. When the serum separated me from the Thunderbird, I took on the human form that my mind expected me to have.”

  She eyed his biceps. “Then, if you’ll forgive my bluntness, you have a really inflated ego.”

  God, he had a wonderful laugh. She could never tire of hearing it. “I’ll take that as a compliment. No, this is my real appearance, for better or worse. It worked a little differently for me when I was the Thunderbird. I was here physically, so my dream self matured just as I would have done in the waking world. Thankfully. I would not have cared to wake up as a thirty-year-old mind in a fifteen-year-old body.”

  “Yeah, that would have caused a whole different set of issues,” she agreed fervently. “As it is, I’m not complaining. Though I’m surprised you ended up so buff. I wouldn’t have imagined many teenagers dream about intensive gym workouts.”

  “Not really.” His smile flickered, and just for a moment she glimpsed the long, dark years that lay under his gentle good humor. “But everyone dreams about monsters.”

  “I warn you, if we run into someone dreaming about giant spiders, you’re on your own,” she said, more to restore the spark to his eyes than as a genuine warning. “I hate spiders.”

  To her relief, his mouth crooked up again. “That can’t be true. You picked up that spider in the storeroom yesterday. You even carried it outside in your hat and released it into the grass.”

  “Only because the guys were watching. You’re the first person I’ve ever told, but I really, really don’t like bugs.” She fixed him with a mock-glare. “And you’d better keep that to yourself. I’ve got a reputation to maintain, you know.”

  “Your terrible secret is safe with me.” His dark gaze deepened, resting on her thoughtfully. “You never show any weakness, do you?”

  For the first time that night, her skin prickled with awareness of his proximity. She let go of his hand, opening up more space between them. “Have to. Black woman in a male-dominated industry, and all that. But I don’t think you brought me here to talk about my personal issues with spiders.”

  He hesitated, his hand hovering as though to reach after her. Then he tucked it behind his back, straightening. “Actually, I did. Well, not spiders, but a somewhat related topic. Blaise, this isn’t working.”

  She didn’t need to ask what this was. “Yes it is. I know the training’s hard, but you’ll get there. And you can’t say you aren’t fitting in with the squad. You’re getting on great with everyone—”

  “Everyone,” he interrupted, “except you. We can’t keep on like this. Let’s imagine that your plan does work. The Thunderbird returns, but this time I’m able to shift back to human, freely, whenever it doesn’t need me. I’m still around, most of the time. What happens with you and me then?”

  She’d been trying not to think about that. “Well… then we figure something out. Believe me, that’s a problem I’d be just thrilled to have.”

  “Me too. But we need to talk about it now. I don’t want you to have to keep racing out of the room whenever our eyes meet. I want us to be able to be…” He gestured between the two of them. “Like this. In the waking world, not just here.”

  “We can’t. You know I can’t, Zeph.”

  “I don’t mean mating.” His voice roughened, just a little, something raw breaking through
his careful composure. “Though I admit, I want that too. There’s a great deal that I want, and can’t have, and I know that can’t be changed. But this is killing me, Blaise. To not even be able to joke with you, or share a meal as friends, or just be.”

  She let out a shaky breath. “Yeah. Me too. But there’s nothing we can do about it.”

  “There is.” He raked a hand through his hair, his resolute expression faltering a bit. “Well. Maybe. It might not work. This goes rather a long way beyond anything I’ve ever attempted before. Perhaps it’s a bad idea.”

  “You’re really selling this, Zeph.”

  He made a pained sound. “See, that’s part of the reason I’m having second thoughts. Normally my dreamers aren’t aware that I’m there, or even that they’re dreaming. You are. I’m not sure how that will affect things.”

  “Are you going to spit it out, or am I going to have to come over there and give you a wedgie? If that even works in dreams.”

  He laughed at that, though it was barely a hitch of breath. “I’d rather not find out, thank you. All right. Blaise, when I meet people with reoccurring nightmares, there’s usually some trigger, some imagery, that sets off all that negative emotion. Like, for the sake of argument, a giant spider. It doesn’t do any good to just make the spider go away, because it’ll just come back again. So instead, I take the spider and put it in a different context. One that isn’t threatening.”

  “Like in a cage at a zoo?”

  “Exactly. I don’t force the person to look at it, or insist that it isn’t scary. Because the spider is frightening, to them. But I can make it small, and put it in a glass jar in the corner of their favorite cafe, or some other place where the dreamer feels safe. Somewhere with powerful positive emotions. I can let them sit with that spider, get to know it, little by little. So that eventually, when they see it again, it won’t trigger the same panic and fear.”

  Blaise squinted at him. “Okay, but I don’t see where you’re going with this. Yeah, I have nightmares, but that’s hardly my biggest problem.”

  “I know, but the same principle applies. Changing a dream, in order to treat the underlying cause.” He spread his hands. “Blaise, I’m your spider.”