Dreams of Shreds and Tatters Read online

  But he was still here.

  “What’s wrong?” Blake asked. “You’re the one brooding now.” He hoped for a smile, a joke, something sarcastic to ease his nerves, but Alain only shrugged.

  “I don’t like the storm.”

  Rainer cleared his throat. “Do you still want this?”

  This: mysteries, marvels, numina. A way to transcend his clumsy aching flesh, the scars and fractures and constant fear. The doubts and demons he could never shake. It had taken him years to learn to live with himself, with the scars carved in flesh and bone and brain. To accept that he would carry them always. He couldn’t go back to that acceptance now, not if there was another way. Alain’s long dark eyes narrowed, but he only squeezed Blake’s hand in silent sympathy.

  Blake swallowed and wished for water. He’d come this far. His free hand rose to tug at the ring hanging from a chain around his neck—a nervous habit, and he forced himself to let go again. “Yes.”

  “Then it’s yours,” Rainer whispered, moving closer. “You just have to take it.”

  “What—” Blake licked his lips and tried again, hating how small his voice sounded. “What do I say?”

  “It doesn’t matter. You don’t have to say anything. He’ll know.”

  With that, Rainer split the shadows open and filled them with fire, spoke a word that rang in the air like the toll of a cathedral bell.

  The world unfolded, dissolved and ran like watered ink, and Blake saw the door. Just as he’d imagined it, slick as soapstone, warm as flesh. Just as he’d painted it. It swung inward and he felt it in his chest, something wrenching inside him. Disintegration: the falling away of drugs or sex or pain.

  The door opened and he stood before an angel, beautiful and terrible, scalding his eyes. An arch of wing, pinions dripping flame; robes of smoke and light; a halo like the darkness between stars. He could only stand to see the edges, where its outline burned the world. Any deeper and his blood would boil.

  The angel extended its cupped hands, filled with the fire of heaven. Filled with everything Rainer had promised and more. All Blake had to do was accept it, even if it charred him to cinders. The angel spoke inside his head, echoing through every bone.

  Before he could answer, the vision fractured.

  Thunder crashed and the shriek of splintering glass filled the air. The angel vanished as the windows shattered, taking his fire with him. The electricity, jealous or shamed, vanished too. The storm whipped cold and wet through the room, full of stinging shards. Someone screamed.

  Monsters rode the wind. Inky bodies writhed through broken windows, darkness given shape—darkness with wings and claws. Rainer shoved Blake back, away from reaching talons. Everyone was shouting. Candles guttered and died and everything was shadows and lightning and screams. The smell of blood blossomed raw and metal-sweet, mingling with ozone and turpentine. Blake lunged for the painting, desperate to save it from the drenching storm.

  Alain grabbed him first, pulling him away from the canvas, away from the monsters, into the teeth of the wind. Glass crunched and slipped under their boots and freezing rain slapped them, soaking to the skin. Lightning split the sky—split a tree in a shower of sparks. Wood groaned, flaming as it fell, and the deck buckled and shrugged them off.

  Water hit him like a wall. Blake flailed, breathless and one-armed. Alain’s hand clenched his, a lifeline—the current tossed them, but couldn’t pry them apart. Instead it sucked them both down.

  Brine seared his eyes and mouth, stole the heat from his bones. All that was left in the dark and cold was Alain’s hand, and the picture still burning in Blake’s mind. The door. A way out.

  The door opened and the current pulled him through. Darkness filled his mouth, pushed down his throat. Coiling, solidifying, dragging him under. Swallowing him.

  The last thing he felt was Alain’s hand slipping from his.

  THREE THOUSAND MILES away, Liz Drake woke gasping, still aching for breath. Adrenaline left her cold and shaking and she clutched the twisted sheets until the world stopped its seasick tilt and sway. The taste of salt filled her mouth.

  Not again.

  A week of drowning dreams, of watching Blake vanish into the darkness, unable to reach him. A week of waking breathless in the dead hours before dawn. Finals week, no less.

  She sat up, breathing slowly until her heart slowed. The old white house sighed around her, the secret language of wood and plaster spoken only in the dark. December pressed cold and black against the window, stealing through chinks and cracks; the heater rumbled like a sleeping dragon. Alex’s side of the bed was cold.

  She wrapped her arms around her chest, goosebumps prickling through the worn-thin cloth of her T-shirt. Twenty-five was too old to be afraid of the dark, afraid of bad dreams, but she felt a fraction of that age, tiny and helpless and alone. It had been a long time since her dreams were so bad.

  Fresh panic rose sharp as fishhooks behind her sternum, squeezing her heart and tightening her throat. Sweat slicked her palms and she wiped them on the sheets. It had been a long time since the anxiety was so bad, either. It made her want to call Dr. Matson, though she hadn’t been to therapy in years. Any familiar voice to cling to, to reassure her that she wasn’t alone in the night. That her nightmares were only that, only anxiety and bad brain chemicals and all the normal things that crowded her head.

  Your dreams are just dreams, Elizabeth. The human mind excels at finding patterns and correlations, at giving weight to coincidence and hindsight. Magical thinking. You’ve studied that, haven’t you?

  But another voice, a wet, rasping voice, whispered back. You know better than that, Lizzie.

  She did know. Something was wrong, and no reassurances would change that. She was too old for handholding, anyway. But Dr. Matson would also remind her that she wasn’t alone, and that much at least was true.

  She swung her legs off the bed, toes curling against the cold floorboards. Light from the hall spilled over stacks of books and papers, cast shadows like toppled pillars across the floor, ruined menhirs of ethnographies and grammars and dictionaries. The corner of a book bit into her instep and she winced—The Consolation of Philosphy, one of Alex’s. She nudged it toward the foot of the bed.

  The floor creaked as she crossed the room. Light welled up the stairs and the heater’s dry breath gusted over her, but she couldn’t stop shivering. She stared down the hall toward Blake’s old room, still full of the things he hadn’t taken with him, that she never got around to packing. She stopped herself before she opened his door.

  He was nine months gone, thousands of miles. Her nightmares couldn’t conjure him home.

  The kettle began to whistle as she reached the bottom of the stairwell and the tightness in her chest eased. Sometimes she forgot how echoing and empty the house was without Blake. She should find another roommate, or another house, one that didn’t swallow her up with its shadows and silences. She might ask Alex, but that hatched a whole different unsettled feeling in the pit of her stomach.

  She found him puttering in the kitchen, still in boxers and a T-shirt, his dark blond hair tousled from bed. Steam coiled around one bony wrist as he poured water into two mugs. All elbows and knees and Adam’s apple, but he moved with a lanky, water-bird grace. She paused in the doorway, letting the familiar sight of him take the edge off her nerves.

  This is real, she told herself. Alex, school, friends. A life. This was real—not the dreams.

  Laughter answered inside her head, soft and wet and mocking.

  “Couldn’t sleep?” she asked when Alex set the kettle down. The clock over the stove said it was just after two in the morning. Neither of them had been asleep for long.

  Round glasses flashed white as he looked up. “After repeated application of your knee to my spleen, no.”

  Her cheeks warmed. “I’m sorry.”

  He bent to kiss her forehead. “It’s not a mortal wound. I thought you might like some tea, if you woke up.” Years in the St
ates had worn the crisp edges off his Queen’s English, but his accent was always stronger when he first woke up; he must dream in Received Pronunciation.

  Liz leaned into his warmth, breathing in the smell of his skin— must and grassy sweetness, like tea leaves and used bookstores. The silver saint’s medallion he always wore shone in the hollow of his throat. “Thank you.”

  Blue eyes narrowed as he traced a thumb over her cheekbone, below the bruised circles that branded her eyes. “It’s getting worse, isn’t it? The same dream?”

  “Yes.” She sank into a kitchen chair, pinching her nose against the ache building between her eyes. “But not exactly worse. Just the same.” Every night the same—darkness and cold, water bitter as blood. Blake’s pale face sinking into the depths, always out of reach.

  Outside, branches creaked in the wind, rattling their fingerbones against the walls. Much too quiet for a Saturday night, but with finals over the neighborhood around campus was a ghost town. Even her neighbors had vanished—she hadn’t heard the thump of their bass through the walls in days.

  “Have you called him?” Alex sat beside her and slid a steaming mug across the table. Books and notes and graduate catalogues buried the nicked Ikea veneer, the carnage of another semester past. Only one more until her Master’s and still no plans after that. Maybe that was a good enough reason for falling out of touch with Blake, but it certainly didn’t feel that way now.

  “And emailed. No one answers.” She stared at the cup, at the leaves drifting dark as silt in amber fluid. No symbols to read in their eddy and swirl, no visions in the chamomile fumes.

  “You think something’s happened,” Alex said, not a question. He never dismissed her dreams or hunches or magical thinking outright, but his eyes tightened whenever she mentioned them.

  Liz lifted her cup, but her hands shook and hot tea slopped over her fingers. As she blew on her scalded knuckles, the unhappy chill in her stomach crystallized into something sharp and certain.

  “I do. Something’s wrong. I haven’t heard from him since October.”

  She turned toward the wall beside the table, where framed photographs lined the worn white plaster. Her gaze settled on one of the newest, the three of them on Halloween two years ago—Liz as Alice in a starched apron and witch boots, Blake the Mad Hatter in a red leather straitjacket. Alex had dyed his hair orange and black but resisted all her pleas to be the White Rabbit.

  “Something’s wrong,” she said again. “I need to find out what happened. I have to go.”

  “To Vancouver?” Alex’s eyebrows shot toward his hairline. “In December?”

  The skepticism in his voice woke all her own doubts. The money, the time—where would she go when she got there? What if Blake didn’t want to see her?

  “What if it’s a false alarm?” Alex said, taking up where her secondguessing left off. “A new phone number and he forgot to tell you?”

  “I need to know,” she whispered, to Alex and herself. “Whatever it is, I need to know.”

  She didn’t look at another photograph. Another Halloween, years before. Three Alices in that one, blonde and brunette and ravendark, all their cheeks soft with adolescence. Liz on one end, Alis Park on the other, and Alice Ransom between them. Alice, whom Liz hadn’t been able to help. Alice, whose drowned voice still whispered to her in the dark.

  Her neck ached with the effort of not looking at the dead girl’s shy smiling face. Instead she lifted her mug and took a determined swallow, exhaling steam from burning lips. “I have to go.”

  Alex stared at her for a long moment, thin mouth turned down at the corners, eyes blind and unreadable behind a glaze of light. Finally he sighed and lifted one long hand in a shrug. “It’s been a while since I had a vacation.”

  She swallowed. Her throat had gone dry despite the tea. “You mean—”

  “That I won’t let you fly across the continent chasing another man by yourself?” He smiled wryly. “Yes. If you want me to come, that is.”

  “Of course I do.” She reached out to catch his hand, a quick pressure of fingers. “Let’s start packing.”

  2

  Terminal City

  RAE FLEW.

  Thermals swelled, ruffling black wings. The city sprawled below, a web of glass and steel and concrete, softened along the edges with green, bounded by black water, and all of that enfolded soft and safe by layered clouds. Between those clouds the sun sank toward the sea, trailing veils of color—violet-grey and salmon and sticky marmalade orange. The cracks in the world that let the light in.

  Above the clouds the stars burned. The stars called her and she flew higher, shredding vapor with every wing-stroke. East, where Taurus snorted and heaved himself over the horizon. Her blood itched, driving her farther, faster, closer to the blazing stars, where the Hyades sang wild cradle songs to their wild god. The god who waited for her in the heart of the Bull’s eye.

  Faster, farther, higher than she’d ever flown before, but her wings weren’t meant for the icy void between the stars, for the solar winds that gusted around her. Pinions cracked, wax melted, and she fell screaming, a flurry of black feathers blinding her as she tumbled down.

  Back into the prison of her flesh. Rae moaned, her face buried in a mattress that stank of old sex and sweat, the cloying honey-sweetness of mania filtering through her skin. Human skin, wrapped around clumsy flesh and heavy bone, limbs so much dead weight. Wings clipped again.

  She rolled over and wiped her nose with the back of her hand; three fingers tingled pins-and-needles as feeling returned. The room was black except for a glowing stripe under the door. She blinked watering eyes and turned away until her vision adjusted.

  Shadows wept down the walls, puddled and bubbled on the floor. They whispered. Rae bit her lip to keep from whimpering, to keep from calling out. Only shadows and synesthesia. She pulled a pillow over her face and counted from zero to ten and back again. Only shadows. They couldn’t hurt her.

  Voices from the other room filtered through her frantic thoughts, drowning the whispers. These voices were worse and she hugged the pillow tighter against her ears, but they snaked inside anyway. Jason and Stephen, the conversation a blur of profits and costs that made her head hurt, that dragged her back into the cold, ugly world where one friend was dead and another in the hospital and her boyfriend was selling drugs to pay the rent. As often as she’d wished for Jason to find a decent job, she’d rather go back to busking and waiting tables to support them than have him working for Stephen York.

  Very bad karma, her mother would have said.

  She sat up, wrapping a sweaty sheet around her and waiting for the shadows to stop seething. If she stepped on the floor now they might stick to her feet, or crawl up her legs like spiders, and then she’d definitely freak out.

  A little longer was all she needed. If the mania only lasted another hour, maybe she could reach the singing stars, understand their voices. The drug lingered warm and liquid in her veins, but she wouldn’t fly again tonight. The curtains were pulled tight against the hiss of rain, no clock in the room to tell her how long she’d been out. Her bladder ached and her mouth tasted like old socks.

  When the shadows finally stilled Rae stood by the door, almostclean clothes bundled in her arms, waiting for the voices to stop. The cold floor sent goosebumps crawling over her skin, tightening her nipples around silver hoops. Her desire not to see Stephen overshadowed her need for the bathroom, especially when she was grimy and strung out and mostly naked. She’d nearly started to potty-dance when the front door opened and closed again.

  Hinges creaked as she peeked out of the bedroom and Jason turned, matte-black hair falling over his eyes. “Hey, babe. Finally awake?”

  “Maybe.” She glanced past him, making sure the living room was empty. The curtains gapped here, showing black beyond the rain-fogged glass. Her broken-tailed Kit-Cat clock told her it was a quarter to eleven, which meant she’d been out nearly eight hours.

  Longer and longer
every time. But never long enough.

  Jason crossed the room and bent his head to kiss her. She was still manic enough to see his aura without trying, a faint nimbus of color circling his head and hands. Murkier than usual, dull brown wicking through the blues and greens, but maybe that was just her imagination.

  “You want to go out tonight?” He trailed a thumb over her collarbone and she shuddered as sensation rippled across her skin.

  She shook her head, which made the colors swirl. “I’d rather take it easy. Maybe I’ll busk a little if I’m feeling up to it. We can go out tomorrow.”

  His hands settled on her shoulders, pale against her wintersallow skin. “I’ve got money, babe. You don’t need to do that anymore.”

  She shrugged and smiled. “I like it.” More importantly, she wanted money that Stephen had never touched. She wasn’t hypocrite enough that dealing bothered her, but Stephen’s smiles and generosity made her flesh creep. He was hard and slick as hematite behind the charm, cold as sharkskin.

  Jason frowned but nodded. “Okay. I’ve got some errands to run, if you’re going to go out.”

  “Sure,” she said, forcing a smile she didn’t feel. “We can hang out tomorrow.”

  He leaned in and kissed her neck. “We don’t have to leave right now.”

  Her hands slid down the front of his shirt, skin tingling, craving touch. Worn-soft cotton and cracked paint shivered through her fingertips. And below that, flesh, warm and solid.

  Rae sidestepped even as her stomach tightened with want. “I really gotta pee.” She ducked into the bathroom before Jason could reply, turning the rattling old lock behind her.

  After she flushed, she turned the shower as hot as it would go, until steam clouds roiled through the narrow room. Stinging spray pounded the chill from her flesh. Her limbs grew heavy as the last of the mania wore off, joints aching.