Kerry Schafer - Wakeworld

Vivian felt a twist of jealousy in her gut, a visceral yearning. She wanted him, wanted all of him. What she had denied herself in real life was eminently possible in dream. If she could enter the dream, surely she could also shift it. Put herself in the place of the other woman so that she could experience what she had forbidden herself in the waking world.

Something familiar about the auburn curls stopped her, the line of the back, the swell of the hip, images glimpsed over and over in a mirror. And then she realized: It was her own dream hands caressing the smoothness of skin over muscle, her own breasts and belly straining against him, always wanting more.

Her body heated at the thought that Zee was dreaming of her. She could almost feel his skin against hers and it would be easy now, so easy, to slide into the place of her dreaming self. A breath, a moment of focus, but just as she pushed toward the Dreamworld, an itching of her shoulder blades jolted her back into waking. As she watched in dismay, the Vivian in the dream sprouted wings, her naked white body transforming into a monstrous shape with scales and teeth and the weight of an armored tail.

“Vivian,” Zee cried, his voice loss and despair. At the instant the cry left his lips the dream shifted again and he was dressed in leather and chain mail, the drawn sword in his hand, and his eyes were those of the dragon slayer, not the lover.

Her body trembling with a potent draught of adrenaline, desire, and grief, Vivian slid out of the dream. Zee still slept, restless, and she retreated to a chair on the other side of the coffee table, grabbing the first book in reach along the way. She watched him through a screen of her hair as he stirred and his eyes opened and fixed on her. “How long have you been here?”

“Only a few minutes.”

“You should have wakened me.”

“You needed the sleep.”

“How is she?”

“What is she, you mean.”

He shook his head and rubbed the sleep from his eyes with both hands. “Explain.”

“She’s not really a fragile old woman and she wasn’t injured.”

“Vivian—”

“She stole my pendant and went into the Between.”

“But—”

“No buts. I don’t know what she is, but I’m betting it isn’t human.” Her voice trembled on the edge of tears, her hand automatically groping for the missing pendant. Its absence was palpable, a negative space that felt more solid and real than the book in her lap.

All softness vanished, Zee leaned forward and touched his index finger to the broken skin at her throat. “I should have stayed.” There was a huskiness in his voice. The clear agate eyes searching hers brought the heat to her face, set her heart to beating at a ridiculous rate.

“I—put the Voice on her, Zee. I wasn’t ever going to use it again.”

His big hand cupped her chin and raised it so she was forced to look into those dangerous eyes. “Just maybe—since she was trying to kill you—it was a permissible thing.” And then his face broke into an unexpected grin. “What on earth did you tell the ambulance?”

“And the cops. The fact that we were driving Grandfather’s hippie van didn’t help any. If they didn’t know me, I’d probably be locked up about now.” She dropped her face in her hands, grateful for the ability to hide and regain a measure of composure.

“Hopeless search party has been activated?”

“I told them that she ran out in the street and I hit the brakes but couldn’t stop in time. And that she appeared to be unconscious, woke up, refused to stay still, and ran off. I said I thought she’d gone down the alley across the street.”

“The mud’s frozen and there’s no snow, so no big surprise if they don’t find footprints,” he said. “That will keep them busy for a while.”

“Honestly, I doubt they’ll look too hard. More important things afoot. Nobody cares about an old homeless woman.”

“Are you sure you’re okay? Nothing broken.”

She nodded. “Fine. Except—I’ve never been without the pendant, since I was seven. How do I even know if I’m awake?”

“Welcome to my world. That’s the thing—most of us are always guessing.”

“I don’t like it.” Her voice sounded small to her own ears, childlike. Which, she realized, was how she felt. About five years old, powerless and afraid. And if Zee said one gentle word to her now she was going to dissolve into a quivering mess of hysteria. The warmth of the hand cupping her chin was bad enough.

He withdrew his hand. “You’re not dreaming.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’m not dreaming.”

“And you know this because?”

“You are sitting over there with all of your clothes on and I am not kissing you.”

And with that she was a long way from childhood, her body burning with memory of his dream. She should tell him what she had done, but that would open the door to a conversation that she wasn’t ready for.

“What now?” he asked. “What is the creature after?”

“I don’t know.”

“We need to find the Key, and those missing dreamspheres.”

“And my pendant. So—back into the Between?”

“I was thinking about paying a visit to your old friend Jared.”

Just the mention of the name invoked the sensation of his unwelcome hands on her body. She wrapped her arms around her belly, containing a transitory sense of flying into pieces. A toxic mess of emotions bubbled dangerously near the surface—fear and rage, loss and shame, and other things she couldn’t put words to. Zee would notice, she knew he would notice. And he would ask, and she would fly into a million pieces.

“Do you think he knows what his dream self was up to when he—did what he did?” Her voice sounded far away and foreign to her own ears, as though somebody else were speaking.

“Only one way to find out. By the way, your book is upside down,” Zee said, as though she wasn’t disintegrating before his eyes, as though a nuclear-strength emotional charge wasn’t lying between them. “ The Inbreeding of America: A Photographic Journey. No wonder you’re having nightmares.”

Intense gratitude welled up in her that he had chosen to sidestep the land mine. She dared not meet his eyes, not yet, but her heart settled back into a regular beat, her body felt like it would hold together after all. One deep breath, another, and she heard her own voice saying, “All right, then. Let’s go pay a visit to Jared.”

Jared fumbled off the alarm and buried his head under the pillow. The faint light seeping in around the window shades was enough to send a laser beam of agony into his brain. His tongue felt three sizes too big and tasted foul; his stomach gurgled and churned.

Hungover.

On a Monday morning.

He could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he had allowed himself to get drunk, and three of those five occasions were named Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of the week just past. For the moment he couldn’t remember why he’d been drinking, or put together any sort of logical thought.

Aspirin. Water.

The two words lined up beside each other in a way that made some sense, and he crawled out of bed in search of the cure, groaning with every movement. His body felt like it had been trampled by hundreds of pairs of feet. The bathroom, usually pristine, was a disaster. A wet towel lay in the middle of the tile floor on top of a jumble of cast-off clothes; the toilet was foul with vomit.

Mouth-breathing to quell a new surge of nausea, he flushed and turned on the fan to dissipate the stench. A spritz of deodorizer made it worse, the sweetness of flowers blending with bitter putrefaction.