Before I Wake (36 page)

“He’s my very own dream come true,” Karatos rhapsodized. “Just think of all the fun he and I will have.”

The thought made me sick.

“I know you’re worried about losing him,” the Terror went on, almost sympathetically. “But if it’s any consolation, I’ll fuck you whenever you need that particular itch scratched.”

I sneered at him. “Not freaking likely.”

“Oh, come on. Don’t you remember what it was like with us? I get hard just thinking about it.”

The roiling in my stomach had gotten worse, but I tamped it down. “Aren’t you supposed to kill me, too?”

He moved closer, smiling that seductive and disturbing smile of his. “You could join me. Imagine what we could achieve together.”

I tried to look haughty. “You’d just be a regular mortal. What would I want with you?”

“I know things. Things that your daddy would find very interesting—like who I work for.”

Morpheus would want to know that. Would he give Noah’s life for the information? I wouldn’t. “Let me guess, and all I have to do is side with you, and you’ll tell me who that is?”

“And bring Noah to me.”

“I don’t know how to do that.”

He made a tsking noise. “Just like you took him to see your daddy,” was the drawled reply. “Open a portal and bring him through.”

“How do you know about that?”

He smiled. “I know a lot of things. I know that your mother was wearing a beautiful set of pearls two nights ago, and I know that Morpheus can’t figure out why I always seem to be one step ahead.”

“Christ,” I whispered hoarsely. “You’ve got a spy.”

Karatos’s smile became a full on grin. “And I know that a lot of Dreamkin are scared of Morpheus’s little girl and the things she can do—things even her father can’t do—like bring a human into the Dreaming.”

I swallowed. “Now you’re lying.” My head was reeling. A spy. Karatos had someone inside my father’s house—someone who had Morpheus’s confidence—feeding him information. No wonder we hadn’t been able to find him unless he’d wanted to be found.

The Terror shot me a smug glance. “Don’t you think that if he was physically able to bring your mama into this world, he would have done it by now? You’re a special one, Little Light. People aren’t sure whether to embrace you or destroy you.”

Oh God. Somehow I managed to hold my ground, to keep my feet beneath me and my head high rather than collapsing to the ground like my trembling knees insisted I do. I didn’t want to be destroyed.

I knew better than to take Karatos’s words as absolute truth, but I heard the truth in them all the same. The villagers might not be readying their pitchforks and torches for me, but they were eyeing them. The Dreamkin, after so many centuries of human contact, weren’t that different from mortals after all. And they didn’t like what they didn’t understand. Me.

“You and I could wreak so much havoc together,” Karatos told me, taking a couple of steps closer. “I could help you hide from them, Dawn. Teach you how to use your powers.”

I raised my gaze to his. It creeped me out knowing our eyes looked almost exactly the same. “You don’t know my powers,” I informed him. “No one does, because there’s no one else like me.”

Suddenly, Karatos swooped toward me, his face coming to within just a breath of my own. “That’s right.” He sliced my cheek with his fingernail. I hissed at the pain as blood trickled down my face. Then I felt searing cold just beneath my sternum. I looked down and saw the Terror’s hand buried in my chest just past the wrist.

He shook his head, laughing. “Silly little Nightmare. I’ve been working toward this for years. Did you really think you and your daddy could trick me?”

I opened my mouth, but the smart comment died on my lips as a wave of pain washed over me. I could feel his fingers inside me, feel him claw into my very soul. He seized me—he was going to do to me what he’d done to Noah. I could feel my life draining.

He pulled.

And then he got stuck.

As a strange energy buzzed in my veins, I realized what had happened. I smiled at the Terror—giddily, foolishly.

“Shit out of luck, Karatos. This world is part of me, and you can’t take it away.”

He was trying though. Sweat beaded on his brow as his beautiful face contorted with concentration. He was trying to take my power, and he was succeeding in small degrees. He might not be able to take my dreams, but he could weaken me.

I grabbed his arm, digging my own fingers into his flesh, the hard muscle just below the skin. The buzzing I felt in my veins intensified. I was taking something from him as well.

“What would happen if I stuck my hand in you?” I wondered out loud, and laughed when his eyes actually widened. “Wanna find out?”

Karatos wrenched his hand free.

“Aghh!” I doubled over from the force of the release and the heat flooding back into my body. Christ, it hurt. I gasped for breath as I struggled to stand upright. Tendrils of gray drifted in front of my eyes as my gaze jumped to the Terror.

The mist folded and thickened, closing around him, drawing him in until I wasn’t sure if Karatos had actually vanished or if the fog had swallowed him.

It was closing in on me now as well. I hadn’t done anything to Karatos that the Terror hadn’t done to me, but I was the anomaly here, not he. The mist knew this, and its fear of me evaporated. I could hear it whispering—harsh and low. It would hurt me now if it could—payback for the damage I had done to it earlier.

I didn’t waste any more time waiting to see just what that revenge might be. I was too weak to do anything but run. I raced toward my portal and dove through, the mist nipping at my heels like a rabid spaniel.

One of my feet was actually bleeding when I tumbled into my bedroom. I had to walk on my tiptoes to the bathroom to avoid leaving bloody tracks on my carpet and the floor outside.

I wiped most of the blood from my face and foot with toilet paper, then cleaned both wounds with soap and water with just a touch of witch hazel. With antibiotic cream underneath the bandages on my cheek and my heel, I tottered back to my bedroom and climbed into bed.

I hummed a dee-dee-dee song to help myself go to sleep, to take some of my attention away from the pain in my face and foot.

My body was humming like a cheap harmonica, and I felt strangely good. Like I had kicked some ass and taken names. I wasn’t as easy to destroy as Karatos had originally thought, and that had to be a victory of some kind.

All in all, it was one hell of a way to pass a Friday night.

Just before sunrise, I felt a familiar tug at my dream-self. I had intentionally kept myself from physically entering The Dreaming again, and instead made myself a sweet little paradise beach all of my own. I was lying on a blanket on the sand, soaking up the warm rays of a late-afternoon sun when my mother called.

She had obviously learned from my father how to project across one person’s dreams into another’s. I had been expecting one of them to contact me about my meeting with Karatos, and I was surprised that it was Mom. Did Morpheus suspect that there was a traitor in his own circle? Or had my mother chosen to do this, knowing it would be one time when I couldn’t turn my back on her?

I sat up on the blanket, then rose to my feet. I was wearing a simple blue tankini, and I looked good in it. I always looked good in the dreams I controlled.

I followed the essence of my mother—her “signature” if you will. It was like following the scent of her perfume, catching the briefest of glances, or hearing the softest of whispers all at once. It was faint, but undeniable, and I walked across the beach toward it, the sand silky and warm beneath my feet.

I walked up the boardwalk and opened my mind to another’s dream. The scenery changed as I walked. My ocean-side paradise gave way to a park with wrought-iron benches and well-manicured lawns. It was like one of those old-fashioned botanical gardens, and I recognized it as one my family had visited in Nova Scotia when I was a child.

I changed my clothes so I wouldn’t seem out of place to whoever was dreaming this. Jeans and a blouse were more fitting for the late-spring day that welcomed me with sun and the scent of roses and popcorn. Gulls cried overhead as I passed by a murky pond packed with ducks and a pair of snowy white swans. Gravel crunched beneath my shoes, driving home the contrast between my faux-rural setting and the traffic bustling outside the park’s iron gates.

On a bench on the opposite side of the pond, facing the water, were my mother and my sister Ivy. They had a bag of bread between them and were tossing bits off the chunks in their hands to the ducks quacking greedily in the water before them.

I hadn’t expected her to use Ivy’s dream to draw me in. Was it merely for my benefit, or was she sincere?

She gestured to a path to my right. It led to a couple of large weeping willows that would hide us from Ivy’s view. No sense in letting my sister see me. She often dreamed of Mom, that I didn’t doubt, but she might find it weird to see me and mention it later.

It might stick with her.

I didn’t wait long. I don’t know what my mother said to my sister to excuse her sudden departure, but she said it quickly and joined me within a few minutes, there behind the weeping willows, bowed like grieving driads, their tangled locks of stringy green hair hanging toward the grass.

“I don’t have long,” my mother told me, as a young woman walked by with a child in a stroller. “I told her I was going to get ice cream, but she panics if I’m away too long.”

I bit my tongue, fighting back the response that leaped there so eagerly. Surely my mother had to know why my sister was like that, even in her dreams? It didn’t matter what age you were; you were never too old to have abandonment issues.

“Did you find him?” she asked me, her gaze darting over my face.

“Yeah,” I replied, and I gave her the Reader’s Digest version of what Karatos had said. I left a few things out—like me being able to do things Morpheus couldn’t and the fact that Karatos had tried to do the same thing to me that he had to Noah. I didn’t want to go there right now. Saving Noah—and yes, myself—was much, much higher on my list of priorities.

But most importantly, I told her that there was at least one spy feeding the Terror information. “That’s how Karatos is staying ahead of us. Someone in Morpheus’s inner circle is a traitor.”

My mother’s face took on a stricken expression. I could only imagine how awful this news was. God only knew how many secrets had been betrayed. “The Terror has to be stopped,” she whispered.

“No shit,” I replied snappily, surprising us both. “Finally figured that out, eh?” Okay, it was no secret that I had some bitterness toward my mother, but where the hell had that sudden outburst come from?

We blinked at each other.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and I meant it. “I don’t know why I said that.”

“You’re under a lot of stress.” As big a brat as I’d been to her, she was still making excuses for her baby girl.

“Yeah,” I agreed lamely. I guess it was as good an excuse as any. “I guess. Karatos got away, though. I’m going to have to try again.”

She opened her mouth to protest, but Ivy called out to her. My mother glanced over her shoulder, then back to me. “I’ll pass this on to your father. Don’t do anything until you’ve talked to him.”

I nodded. “Go spend some more time with Ivy.” I didn’t mean for it to come out all judgmental, but it sounded that way to my ears.

My mother, however, didn’t seem to notice. “Be careful,” she whispered, her dark eyes filling with tears. Then she hugged me.

Not a loose hug shared between people parting for a brief time, but the desperate, hard embrace of a mother scared for her child.

My throat tightened, and the back of my eyes burned, but I managed to keep it together.

It was strange, because underneath those burning eyes and the need to hug her back was a little voice telling me that now would be the perfect time to slap her across the face or yank out a handful of her hair. I didn’t know for sure whose voice it was.

But it sounded a helluva lot like mine.

Noah looked like crap. A reminder I didn’t need that time was running out. He arrived at my place at ten o’clock Saturday morning while I was eating toast and drinking my third coffee in an attempt to get out of this crap mood I was in.

“What happened to you?” he demanded as he crossed the threshold into my apartment, his gaze locked on the side of my face where Karatos had left another reminder—a taste of what would happen to me if I crossed him.

I was going to cross the bastard anyway.

“Karatos,” I replied as I closed the door, irked. “Who the hell do you think?”

If Noah heard the snark in my tone, he totally ignored it. He stood close, invading my space as he always did, studying the damage the Terror had done to my face. His hair stood up, his beard was patchy, and his face was pale beneath the flush of rage that bloomed in his cheeks. I thought he was beautiful.

His gaze locked with mine, and it was so hard to hold it. There was no life in his eyes, just anger. It scared me—more than Karatos ever could. And it got rid of my bitchiness in a hurry. “I’m okay, Noah.”

I don’t think he believed me. Frig, I didn’t believe me, but hearing the words seemed to take him down a notch anyway.

Cool fingers touched my cheek, careful to avoid the scabbed and torn flesh higher up. “Does it hurt?”

I closed my eyes, swamped by a rush of emotion I didn’t want to feel—not now. His concern made me want to melt against him, made me want to hide away for a while. It was little more than a scratch in the grand scheme of things—nothing compared to the loss he faced. I wasn’t going to run away. I was stronger than this.

I took his hand in mine and pulled it away from my face, but I kept my fingers tight around his. “I’ll heal it later. There won’t even be a scar.”

His smile was a little smug. “He won’t like that. They never do. Scars and bruises are trophies to fucks like him.”

Goose bumps danced across my back at the darkness in his tone. And I wondered just how many scars Noah had. I hadn’t seen many all the times I’d explored his body, but not all scars were outside. I didn’t have to be a psychologist to know that.