Visioness (5 page)

“It was a shadow,” Larraine
replied, “but not quite, either. It was like it was not only wide and long and
deep, the shadow…but like it had something else to it. Like it was…something
more. I don’t know how to describe it. It was like looking at it and seeing a
hundred million forms, and none at the same time. Like seeing a frequency I was
not meant to. Yet it also looked like a kind of demon, with jagged limbs. It
was still shadowy. Hard to make out a complete and permanent form. Do
you…understand?”

“Not even in the slightest,”
Adabelle replied. She might have to ask some of the professors about that one.
“How did they leash it?”

“I don’t quite understand
how they did it.” She raised her hands in gesture, twisting them around
themselves as she spoke. “They had a kind of shackle they were able to use. It
was a silver hoop of some kind, and they wrapped it around the creature’s
wrist. Three of them, for that matter. It was attached to a leash. I think a
few of them might have used their dream tendrils to contain it too. It’s not
very clear, because a lot was happening. Despite it being in the real world, it
still has ties to the dream frequencies so the dream tendrils affected it like normal.
Shame we don’t have the same powers we have in dreams. Imagine what we could do
then!”

Adabelle nodded. If she
could fly, or grow a million feet tall, or leap buildings in the real world,
she would be a veritable god.

“But that’s not what I
called you here for,” she said. She gazed down as her hands. There, her eyes
stayed for a while. “It was something else I saw in the dream. Your father was
there. And he…said he was coming for you.”

“What?” Adabelle gasped.
“But he’s imprisoned. And it was
just
a dream.”

“But he did this.”

She pulled the shoulder of
her hospital gown down, revealing another cut, this one sharper and deeper, for
it was covered in a red-soaked bandage.

“He had a knife,” she
explained. “He said something to the Sturding Nhyx I didn’t understand, and
then he struck me, which threw me from the dream completely. Everything else
blurs after that. But no dreamer—no dreamer that isn’t a Sturding, that is—can
do that. It’s one of the first rules of Dreaming you learn. Sturdings can only
hurt other Sturdings. This,” she gestured to the bandage, “should not be
possible. Especially on just a regular Dreamer.”

Adabelle didn’t know what to
say to that. She felt her breathing shallow, rattling in her now empty,
paralysis-stricken chest. It was her greatest fear—the form of any Nhyx she’d
ever had to face—and if Larraine was right, then he was back.

“But he was sealed away. The
Oen’Aerei did it themselves! It was completely and utterly done, there was no
reversing it.”

“Well unless Nhyxes can take
two form—which they cannot—he may be back. And he may want you.”

“To kill me?” asked
Adabelle.

“I do not know,” Larraine
said, taking Adabelle’s hand. “But you have to stay safe. We can’t have you
wandering about in the Frequencies anymore. Not while you’re untrained by the
Oen’Aerei. I sensed you last night, only quickly, but the feeling is
unmistakeable.”

Adabelle felt her hand
shivering with Larraine’s, her lip quavering with terror. She fought tears, and
overcame them, but could not hide her fear. She didn’t want to go to the
Oen’Aerei, but neither did she wish to face her father.

“Does he have a precursor?”
she asked. “Do you remember what it was?”

“I can’t remember much,” Larraine
replied, “but the only thing that seemed out of place in the dream was the
scent of a male cologne. I don’t know which one, but it was strong and musky.
Smelled a little like shaving cream, really. Then, he appeared, and it seemed
to quell the Nhyx, too.”

“Right,” she said. If ever
she found herself Dreaming, she would have to keep her nose open for that
scent. It was no certainty, but if she could escape the scent, she could escape
her father.

“Now, I could be wrong…but I
don’t know how,” Larraine said, looking somewhat guilty for having to bear this
news. “But I want you to be careful…I want you to be safe. Promise me you won’t
get into trouble.”

“I promise,” Adabelle said.

She left Larraine by herself
in the hospital wing, the girl smiling as she left.

The matter of the Oen’Aerei
plagued her thoughts for the whole walk to her room, and then for some time
after that. Larraine was an Oen’Aerei, which meant she had received formal
training from the academy run by Lady Morphier. The moment she began there, she
stopped being referred to as a Dreamer, and began her life as an Oen’Aerei. The
difference was slight, more symbolic than anything, but in the eyes of the
Oen’Aerei, it meant the world. An untrained Dreamer, in their mind, could be
incredibly deadly, to their self and to others. Any number of tragic accidents
could occur while drifting about the Frequencies.

She took the afternoon to
wait for Mrs. Abeth to finish her work for the afternoon before bothering her.
She eventually found the caretaker in her office for the afternoon, tending to
cleaning supply accounts. She knocked on the open door of the small office.
Mrs. Abeth looked up from her papers.

Mrs. Abeth was the closes
Adabelle had to a mother. Despite her light skin, and pale brown hair, she
spoke with a rich voice that reminded her distantly of her mother’s. Something
about its depth and rough timbre from years of use gave it an old and friendly
warmth. She had sweet brown eyes, and always walked about with an easy air a
head housekeeper may not normally have.

“Adabelle,” Mrs. Abeth said,
“did you manage to visit your cousin?” Her head tilted to the side, sympathy in
her eyes.

“I did,” she replied. “She’s
doing fine. Much better than I thought she would be.”

“And she spoke to you
about…everything?” Mrs. Abeth’s face darkened with the implication of her
words.

Adabelle stepped deeper into
the room, closing the door behind her. Once the catch clicked, she said,
“That’s actually what I wanted to talk with you about.” She pointed at the
small chair. “Do you mind?”

“Not at all,” Mrs. Abeth
replied. “I’d imagine that you’d want to take a seat after the news.”

“I do.” The seat was
something welcome, a nice moment to feel at ease after following the woman
around the University all afternoon. Something discomforted her about it too.
It was like, while resting, she was placing herself in danger of her father. So
long as she rested, she couldn’t be at peace.

“I’m sorry that I could not
tell you personally,” said Mrs. Abeth, “but I thought Larraine might be better
suited to giving you that. She’d be able to break it to you, more…err…kindly.”

There were only so many
ways, she supposed, to be informed that your life was in mortal peril.

“Well thank you for
considering that.” She didn’t mean to sound sarcastic.

“Now, as I’m sure Larraine
said, there’s no guarantee. I think it’s possible he’s escaped. My suggestion
would be a visit to the Oen’Aerei, were it not for the fact that you fear them
so much.” Apparently her fear of those great white-walled halls was public
knowledge.

“I’m not scared of them,”
Adabelle retorted. “I just…don’t like them very much.”

“You’re scared. You know it.”
That tone reminded her of her mother, a distant, fading memory now.

She was, in all honesty,
quite terrified. She had never liked the Oen’Aerei building itself, for it was
an imposing stone structure, filled with people like her with the power to
enter dreams. They had entirely too much influence on the city, and were too
powerful for her liking. There were Oen’Aerei in the council building, in the
Seat of Parliament, in government espionage jobs.

And her father had been
Oen’Aerei. Who was to say, if he had indeed returned, that he wasn’t waiting
for her, expecting that to be her first move?

The thought gave her chills.

“I don’t know what to do,
really,” she said, folding her arms in her lap. She reflexively grabbed for her
handkerchief, thinking she might need it at some point soon. “I can’t go to the
Oen’Aerei, as they sided with him when my mother was on the run. It might have
only been some rebel Oen’Aerei, but they assisted nonetheless. Only after he
had been sealed away, too did they amend their intentions. I can’t go to
Larraine, because she’s far too shaken and I don’t want her having to deal with
these types of things. And everyone else is at just as much risk of being affected
by him. The only person who’s even slightly safe is Charlotte, and that’s only
because she can’t dream. The moment he reveals himself in the real world—if he
can…I don’t know, and that’s what’s scary—even
she
isn’t safe.”

Mrs. Abeth bit her lip,
pulling her reading glasses off and resting them on the table next to her
teacup. “I wish I could do more, I really do. Maybe speak to one of the
professors. I’m sure Professor Oakley would be interested in these matters. He
spends half his time lost in books about dreams and magic as it is.”

“I suppose it wouldn’t do
any harm to speak to him,” she said. “It’s just a matter of making an
appointment with him.”

“I’ll organise it if you
want,” Mrs. Abeth said. “He’ll probably respond faster to me anyway, and I’ll
let you know how it goes.”

“Thank you,” Adabelle said.
“I appreciate it.”

“It’s the least I can do,
really.”

Mrs. Abeth had been present
on the night of her mother’s disappearance. She had been the one to take
Adabelle in, the one who accepted her, though she knew not whether the mother
would return. Flashes of that night sometimes came to her, though they were
nearly always blurry. She had been so young, and for the longest time she had
tried to repress it. The door had opened, the woman standing there, in rollers
if she remembered correctly—or was that her mind making up details?—and she put
an arm around her and took her in. She remembered her mother’s last embrace.
She didn’t think mother or daughter had expected it to be their last.

Releasing those memories had
been a painful part of her therapy she had gone through as a child. So young to
lose both parents—though she only counted one—she was sure to suffer. Her
sister hadn’t needed to go through the same therapy; she hadn’t been born and
so had never experienced memories with her mother. She had been born and then
her mother whisked away. Mrs. Abeth said, almost as a constant reminder, that
on that night she had made a deal with her father. She had not known the
details, but somehow her mother had ensured Charlotte could be born, and after
she was born, she was gone. Adabelle’s father, too.

In some fantasies, her
mother tricked her father, sealing him away in the dream without her, and they
all lived on together, happy. Better yet, her father had been a kind, loving
man, instead of the cruel monster he had actually been, and they all lived
together. A family.

But that was not her life,
and she could not dwell. That was why she had repressed those thoughts in the
first place. That was why there were places in her memory where things went
foggy.

“So I guess I’m left with a
rather great conundrum,” Adabelle said. “I can either visit the Oen’Aerei and
put myself at risk of them trying to conscript me into their army.”

“Now, now, Adabelle,” Mrs.
Abeth chided. “It’s not an army now is it? It’s a service.”

“They were originally an
army,” Adabelle retorted. “Back long ago.”

“And now they’ve changed
their stance on the world. They work for us, rather than against us. They do a
mighty good amount of work protecting us. Unlike the Dreamless: they’re just a
guild asking for trouble.”

“At least the Dreamless
don’t try to pilfer people from their happy lives to serve as conscripts.”

“Maybe not,” Mrs. Abeth
replied, “but at the very least the Oen’Aerei are not doing any real physical
harm. The way those Dreamless walk around in that forest green uniform of
theirs…” she shivered.

Adabelle nodded, conceding
that fact. “So I can either go to the Oen’Aerei, and seek their help, which
they’ll end up making a bargain for—and we all know what that will result in—or
I can just sit like a insect in the light, and wait for him to strike, if he
has indeed released himself. Either way, I’m not going to be sleeping well.”
She sighed, falling back into her chair.

“Take some comfort in
knowing your sister is completely safe,” Mrs. Abeth said. “She cannot dream and
never will, and so long as your father is contained within the boundaries of
the dream frequencies, she’s safe. And besides, you’re rather a good Dreamer
yourself. I think you’ll be able to protect yourself just fine.”

Adabelle grimaced. “I don’t
like to sit and wait, though,” she replied, “and I’m sure my father is much
better than I am at controlling himself. He has spent most of my life locked in
a dream, after all.”

It was the truth. She saw it
in Mrs. Abeth’s eyes. Adabelle was at a distinct disadvantage.

“Well I think the best way
to stop this from troubling you into restlessness is to keep thinking to
yourself that what Larraine saw was nothing, and that until you see it
yourself, there is no need to worry.”