Wildblood

Chapter 6

6

When Miya opened her eyes, she was met with the hanging star—the dreamscape’s sun and moon. Rings of amber, marigold, and wisteria pink haloed the luminous white orb, bleeding into the now smoky sky. While Boston was submerged in night, the dreamscape glowed with a pallid fog. Dark, slender shapes like lightning wove through Miya’s vision, and after blinking away her bewilderment, she recognized them as tree branches, stretching overhead. They converged at a massive trunk that grazed the crown of Miya’s head where bark met earth. A thick, solid mass swung from one of the tree’s limbs, and as Miya’s gaze trailed up, her breath snagged in her throat.

A body—feet limp, hands bound, and skirts billowing in the breezeless air. The woman’s head drooped chin to chest, her neck broken where the noose pulled taut. The rope creaked with strain as the body swayed—the only sound in the silence.

Miya remembered then: Ann “Goody” Glover, an Irish woman who spoke Gaelic, was hanged as a witch in 1684 because she couldn’t recite the Lord’s Prayer in English. Apparently, God was monolingual. In the dreamscape, Ann still dangled from the elm, and the ancient tree remained, unbothered by its shadow’s absence in the physical plane. Miya once believed that only the shadows of things resided here, that they endured despite the transience of their tangible counterparts. Over time, she’d reversed her thinking; the whole of the waking world was the shadow to the spectral realm. Ann was dead, but she wasn’t gone.

“Wake up,” came a mirthful chime. “It’s time to dream.”

Miya’s gaze skimmed over the rolling hills peppered with maples and oaks, then settled on a boy no older than twelve. Cropped halfway down his ears, his messy midnight hair resembled plumage, flashing with sapphire iridescence. Waxy cheeks stretched open as jagged teeth filled his smile, and his depthless inky eyes tunneled into her soul.

“Gavran,” Miya sighed, then slowly sat up.

He thrust out his arms, his feathered cloak billowing around him. “In borrowed flesh.”

“Is it really borrowed if you’ve decided to keep it?” Miya asked wryly.

“Pedantry.” Gavran waved a delicate hand, his fingers thin as chicken bones. “The flesh is ash. This is only a facsimile.”

An ageless raven spirit hailing from the dreamscape, Gavran had been a companion to the first Dreamwalker. She’d bestowed him his name, and he in turn imparted guidance. After she died, Gavran lost his tether to the physical world and donned a child’s cadaver to compensate. It was his corporeal form, but with Miya awakened as the new Dreamwalker, he no longer needed a physical vessel. She grounded him, and yet he’d adopted the lost boy’s shape in the ethereal realm too. Miya wondered if he missed his human body.

“I know.” She rubbed the balls of her hands together and surveyed her surroundings. The air was dense and musty, like a noxious smog had descended over the plain. She’d never seen this corner of the dreamscape.

Beneath Ann’s corpse, a weeping redbud kept the towering elm company. Vivid magenta flowers blossomed along its branches, but as the petals broke off and wafted to the ground, they turned sanguine, their velvety skin liquefying into drops of scarlet that soaked into the soil.

“Do you know where we are?” Miya asked.

Gavran clawed at the rusted earth with one finger, staining his skin copper. “As much as a rock knows flight.”

“Right.” Miya huffed as she rose to her feet. “Say no more.”

Gavran shook off his curved claw and mirrored her. “You’re always bigger here than you are there.”

Miya blinked down at him. “Bigger? I don’t feel any different.”

The boy offered her a toothy smile, sharp points clipping his thin gray lips. “Out there, every person is an ant climbing a clump of dirt, yet they each believe they are scaling a mountain. Here, where dreams and shadows reign, things are different. You can bend this world like the sun bends shadows.”

Miya plopped her hand on Gavran’s head. It always felt like touching a doll, yet she knew he was alive under that eerie pickled skinsuit. “I might be stronger here, but I want to make a difference out there. That’s why I’m trying to find this girl. She matters to someone. I want to do for her what no one could do for me.”

The boy frowned. He reached for Miya’s hand, pried it from his head, then plied her fingers this way and that. “I help,” he said quietly, “because they failed you.” His abysmal eyes, wide as the sea, met hers. “I won’t fail you.”

“You never have.” Miya smiled, then took his hand in her own. “Let’s go.”

She squeezed the dream stone with the other, and at her silent command, the pendant floated up and pulsed with life. A lavender glow illuminated the smog, and Miya felt the chain tug at the back of her neck.

“This way,” she said, and Gavran nodded, following by her side.

The stone was a lantern in the haze, revealing just enough for them to make their way. Formless shadows danced in the distance, shapeshifting as the hanging star’s light moved through the vapor. Trees melded into titans with limbs that could bridge skies, and hills capsized into bottomless gullies. The ground undulated beneath their feet, and while Gavran moved as though gliding, Miya tottered unsteadily beside him, unaccustomed to such lively terrain. It seemed hellbent on impeding her, which meant she was closing in on something that didn’t want to be found.

“There,” Gavran hissed, his grip on her hand tightening as his feathery hair stood on end.

Miya squinted through the mist. They’d barely traipsed a dozen yards from the ancient elm. Up ahead, a stone arbor teeming with withered vines framed a barely visible path. Now crumbling with ruin, thorned roses and climbing ivy embraced the hewn granite. Beyond it, the tattered road descended into a pool of onyx-colored water, still as a sheet of ice. It glimmered with starlight, the fog parting around its borders.

“So, this is where it hides.” Gavran’s mouth slithered into a knowing smile.

“ It ?”

“The thing that lives in the lake,” said the boy.

Miya swallowed thickly and scanned the deathly pool, but she saw no disturbances. “Let’s get closer.”

“Careful,” Gavran warned. “Step too close, and it’ll drag you under.”

“Let it try.”

Then, movement behind the gate’s heavy gray walls. Slime and bubbling moss coated the stone as something slunk up the granite. Lumpy claws scraped the top of the arbor, and a long reptilian tail flicked against the vines, tearing some of them loose. Branching horns like rotted wood emerged, followed by a gnarled round face with flaring nostrils, deep set eyes marked by yellow slits, and strings of bilious flesh tethering the creature’s gaping maw. Fly-infested quills spiked from its hunched back, nodules and boils mottling ash-green flesh. It perched atop the arbor, its grotesquely long tongue darting about as it eyed its new prey.

“Welcome, Dreamwalker,” it said, its voice like scraping nails.

“You know me?” Miya halted several feet before the gate.

“Everyone knows you,” came its raspy chuckle. “Or they will.”

“We’ve never met,” she countered.

The toad-like gargoyle tittered. “ Meeting and knowing are not the same.”

“It’s a bukavac.” Gavran smiled widely at the monster. “Makes a lot of noise—the petty thing.”

Those unnerving strings of flesh grew taut as the creature’s mouth unhinged, and it shrieked. “Come closer, raven, and we’ll see who is petty.”

“Let’s not.” Miya raised a hand to broker peace. “I’m only here to ask a question.”

“Nothing is free, Dreamwalker.”

Of course not , Miya thought drolly. “Name your price.”

A wet sound vibrated from the creature, its tongue lashing from side to side. “I yearn to drown something. To hold a life in my hands and feel it thrash against my will. Bring me something to drown—the stronger the better—and I will tell you anything you wish to know.”

Gavran bristled next to her, silently imploring her to choose him.

“Tell me what I want to know, and you can have a go at me ,” she said instead.

Whirling, Gavran gawped at Miya while the monster considered her.

“Think about it.” Miya ignored her companion as he tugged at her hand. “Drowning a goat or a child is not much of a feat. But the Dreamwalker? That must mean something here. As you said, everyone knows me.”

A low growl warbled in the bukavac’s throat. “Fine. I will answer one question.”

Miya nodded, accepting the bargain.

“Are you mad?” Gavran hissed.

She narrowed her eyes at him. “You think I can’t best an overgrown toad with moldy antlers?”

“Well—”

“It still has its tadpole tail!”

“Fine,” Gavran grumbled, pouting.

Worming her hand out of his grasp, Miya ambled closer and peered up at the bukavac. “I want to know if a girl came through here. A human girl.”

The creature raised a clawed hand and stroked its pliant chin. “I have been here a long while…watching, waiting. Sometime recently—perhaps a day, perhaps a decade—I saw a girl slip through. Can’t say if she was human, though. So many things wear human-like costumes.” It tossed Gavran a pointed glance. “Left a tear in the seam, she did. Young thing had no idea how to properly part the curtain between your world and mine. I thought of drowning her, but she was in such a hurry, I hadn’t the time to lure her to my waters.”

Miya’s heart leapt into her throat, her vision blurring with moisture. A girl who tore through the seam of reality. Another who straddled the fault lines between worlds. Even if Caelan wasn’t the Dreamwalker, she was something similar.

The prospect made Miya’s chest swell with a confusing cocktail of dread and hope. She was no longer alone; she had Kai, Ama, Crowbar, and Gavran, but it wasn’t always so. She remembered living like a hangnail in a town where everyone knew their place—or at least pretended to. She remembered the isolation, the terror that gripped her when her abilities burgeoned. What if Caelan Carver was living Emiliya Delathorne’s nightmare?

“Are you finished with your reverie, Dreamwalker?”

The creature lunged, nimble despite its size. The gate crunched under its weight as it launched from its perch, hairline fissures skittering through stone. Its jaw unhinged, the strings of tethered flesh stretching like rubber bands, and it soared toward her, tail whipping in predatory anticipation.

“Shit!” Miya darted out of reach, her figure shimmering as the stone at her breastbone hummed with power. It was more than a compass in an umbral world. It was a weapon, and it yearned to be wielded.

Black and violet smoke spiraled over her limbs, rushed up her spine, and contoured over her skull. A cloak of lustrous feathers cocooned her body like a shield, and a raven-beak mask stretched down her nose, the point curling over her lip. Midnight and amethyst swirled over the ivory in a mesmerizing dance, and as the Dreamwalker straightened, she understood what Gavran meant when he said she was bigger in the dreamscape.

The bukavac was gargantuan, yet what it boasted in size it lacked in mettle. In the dreamscape, physicality did not reign. The shadows of long-dead trees lived as towering guardians because they willed it. Ravens took the form of young boys because they desired it. Gods worshipped themselves into existence simply for the pleasure of it. Every being that traversed the dreamscape made itself in its chosen image, and the Dreamwalker had chosen hers because it terrified those who sought to control her—to corral her into obedience. She refused.

While demons fashioned fear from people’s nightmares, they were a dime a dozen. Only the Dreamwalker was strong enough—fierce enough in presence and conviction—to brandish death to the deathless.

A slimy tail whipped out and coiled around Miya’s body—a vise around her limbs. The creature reeled her in at warp speed, then dove for the inky pond, dragging her into the murk. Her eyes clamped shut, but she could see the faint lavender glow of the dream stone behind her eyelids, illuminating the abyss encasing her. She heard the demon’s gargling laugh—felt its glee vibrating through her bones.

She’d agreed to let the bukavac try to drown her, but she never agreed to die.

Feathers sharpened into spurs, slicing along the bukavac’s supple tail. A muffled shriek reached her ears, and her bonds slackened just enough for her to free an arm. She closed her fingers around the dream stone and tugged. The pendant came free. Purple wisps lashed from her grip, and the fang-shaped labradorite elongated into a dagger that resembled volcanic glass splashed with gold, violet, and verdant light. The bone haft, carved into a raven, solidified in her hand, its beak at the butt of the knife serving as a small but deadly hawkbill.

Her eyes shot open, and she spared a moment to revel in the silver glimmers of the deep. The opaque water was as beautiful as a night sky on a mountain summit. Her lungs began to burn, and she thrust the blade down into the underside of the bukavac’s tail, slitting him open from navel to heart. She felt the rush of viscera against her hand, felt the current as he thrashed to flee. His fear was salt on her tongue—tangible as the cold on her skin. Kicking off him, she threw her arms out and catapulted from the pond. Dark water erupted around her, then plummeted back into the crater in a violent cascade. The bukavac didn’t follow.

Miya landed on the cobbled path.

A bewildered and sopping raven-boy stood beneath the stone gate. “That’s it?” Gavran asked, shaking off his arms.

“That’s it.” Miya shrugged.

“What a soft little frog,” the boy scoffed, and Miya responded with a giggle.

Kai would’ve loved to fight a bukavac. She imagined him leaned against a nearby tree with a bored expression, droning at her to watch her left. He’d twirl his hunting knife around his fingers, sigh regretfully, then gripe that he never gets to stab giant murder toads with sloughing antlers and lizard tails.

Next time they were in peril together, he’d have to call dibs.