“I don’t like this.” Brad folded his arms, watching as I brushed my teeth.
I’d changed into a pair of yoga pants and a baggy T-shirt, and was preparing myself as if for a normal night’s sleep. “I’ll be fine,” I said after I’d rinsed. I tried to project confidence, but he looked sceptical. “I will,” I insisted.
“I’ll be there,” Leander reassured me from the mirror. Really, couldn’t I get a moment’s peace? I gave him the barest nod, not wanting to talk to him and shut Brad out of the conversation. Then I slid past my boyfriend into the hallway.
Mum hovered by my bedroom door, wringing her hands. Everyone’s anxiety was starting to get to me. “Will you … if you see your father…?”
“I won’t,” I told her gently. “Leander said he’s in prison. But I’ll ask after him. I promise.”
“Right. Okay.” She hesitated a moment and then turned, striding up the corridor towards the kitchen. I pretended not to notice the way her shoulders shook.
Jen was sitting on my bed; unlike the others, her face was calm. “We’ll stay with you,” she said, standing to give me a hug. “If you’re gone for too long, I can make sure your body’s looked after.” She waggled her eyebrows and grinned. Though the attempt at humour seemed half-hearted, I appreciated it.
“Do you have access to a drip?”
“Sure.” She grinned. “Though it’s the catheter you ought to be worried about.”
My eyes widened. I wasn’t sure what bothered me more: the idea of my best friend hooking me up to a catheter, or the idea of wetting myself if I was unconscious too long. I put as much determination into my voice as I could. “I’ll make sure I’m back before that’s necessary.”
“Please do.” Jen looked towards the door. “I’ll be back in a minute.” She hustled after Mum.
Brad’s mouth curled down as I climbed under the sheets, settling my head against the pillow. My hair was damp from my shower. “I’ll be fine,” I said again.
He nodded, a sour twist to his lips. “I know you will. It’s like I told you when you went into Daniel’s dream: I just hate feeling useless. I want to be able to help.”
“You’re not useless,” I said. “I need you to stop Jen from intubating me or whatever.” He laughed, but the expression didn’t reach his eyes. “Seriously, Brad, I’ll be okay. I haven’t broken any Oneiroi laws or anything.” That I know of. “He just wants to talk. And then I’ll be able to get your grandfather the help he needs.” I hesitated, and then added, “How about you talk to Jen while I’m out, see whether she’d be interested in an experiment?”
“What experiment?” he said. The fact he didn’t turn my comment into some sort of teasing innuendo showed me more than anything that he wasn’t in a joking mood.
“We’ll see whether I can bring you into another person’s dream, like you suggested. It might be useful.”
He brightened a little. “Okay. Yeah, I’ll ask.”
“Goodnight, Brad,” I said.
He leaned over and kissed my forehead. “Pleasant dreams, Melaina.”
Leander was there before my dream had a chance to coalesce. Mist swirled, parting to give glimpses of a half-formed dream. Sunlight. The rich aroma of coffee. A fragment of birdsong. In the moments it had taken me to fall asleep, the Oneiroi had changed clothes, switching from the dark green armour to something more subdued. It still appeared to be made of a supple, form-fitting leather that allowed him to move, but it was the same dove-grey colour as his wings. By contrast, his honey-coloured skin seemed even warmer and his eyes, gold-flecked green, were like a sun-dappled forest clearing. His hair, shoulder-length and normally free-flowing, was tied back into a short ponytail at the base of his skull. The style strengthened his face somehow, made him seem more … mature.
A teasing comment about his vanity leapt to my lips, but died when I saw the sombre look in his eyes. “Is it that bad?”
“Bad? No. Not exactly.” He looked down at my clothes and raised an eyebrow. My dream self had appeared wearing the clothes in which I’d fallen asleep.
“You got here too fast.” I frowned, transforming the garments into my usual motorcycle leathers, minus the helmet. “Better?”
“Um. Would you consider a—” he saw my scowl and seemed to change what he’d been about to say “—ah, something more formal?”
“You’re wearing armour. Why can’t I?”
“I’m a member of the Morpheus’s Hawks,” Leander said. I raised an eyebrow at the unfamiliar term and he added, “His hunters. It affords me certain luxuries, such as going armed and armoured in his presence. And you’re asking him a favour, remember?”
I eyed Leander; if he was armed, I couldn’t see any hint of the weapon. “Fine,” I said with a sigh. “What does an Oneiroi civilian wear?”
“Whatever they wish; this is the world of dreams, after all.”
“But you just said—”
“Just make it less military. You want to look competent, but not like you’re challenging him.”
I regarded him, turning the thought over in my mind. Respectful, competent and unthreatening? I’d assumed Leander was about to suggest I wear a dress, but I didn’t want to wear something I’d be uncomfortable in, something that would restrict my movement. Also, in a realm where the denizens could fly and gravity was sometimes optional, I didn’t want to risk people being able to look up my skirts.
Smirking to myself as I decided on a compromise, I replaced the jacket with a sleeveless A-line dress that fell to my knees. It was a cobalt blue, the same colour as the streak in my fringe, but was made of the same supple leather as Leander’s armour. To soften it further, I added glittering blue stones around the hem. The leather motorcycle pants became heavy black tights.
At my thought, a thick band of twisted wire snaked around my throat and another encircled each of my wrists. They resembled a collar and cuffs, suitably subservient, but I made them strong enough to blunt the force of strikes against my neck and arms if I got into a fight. Finally, staring down at my feet, I decided to keep the boots unchanged. All the better to stomp you with, my dear. The thought was giddy with nerves.
“Better.” Leander smiled and held out his hand to me. A gemstone glittered on his middle finger: a bright sapphire set in a silver band. Had that been there before, or was he copying my style? “Shall we?”
“Are we going somewhere?” I couldn’t flit between dreams like a true Oneiroi. My access was limited to my own dreams or those of someone in the same room as me. That was the whole reason the Morpheus had needed to come to me in the first place.
“Not exactly,” he said. “But I need to prepare for the court’s arrival, and it’s easier to change your dream if you let me do it.”
“Wait, what?” I took a step backwards, narrowing my eyes at him. “He’s bringing his whole court here? I don’t want lots of Oneiroi in my head. I’m barely comfortable having you here.”
“Melaina…” His hand dropped back to his side.
“I’m serious,” I said with a scowl. “I don’t want dozens or hundreds of spirits invading my dreams. I’ll go mad!”
Leander’s eyes were pleading. “The Morpheus’s court moves from dream to dream all the time, as various dreamers enter and leave Erebus. We don’t drive people mad. If they remember anything at all, it’s that they had a particularly colourful dream, full of butterflies and magic.”
“No.”
“But—”
“No. The difference is that I’d know they were here. I wouldn’t forget about it.” I shuddered. “It’s creepy.”
Leander’s shoulders drooped. Was he simply disappointed, or had I hurt his feelings? Before I could think of a way to ask that wouldn’t make it worse, he nodded. “Alright. How about this—we’ll make a dome on the edge of your dream, something that looks out onto the blackness. Most of the court can stay out there, but they’ll be able to see in.”
“They won’t be able to influence my dream? Read my thoughts?”
“I’m standing right here beside you and I can’t read your thoughts,” Leander said. Then he grinned, stretching in a way I was sure was intended to show off the muscles beneath all that tight-fitting leather. “More’s the pity.”
I refused to be distracted, to let him fluster me. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“They won’t be able to influence your dreams or read your thoughts,” he said. “Even if they could, I wouldn’t let them.”
I regarded him. A few months ago, I wouldn’t have trusted him. But he’d redeemed himself in my eyes, bending the rules and holding off arresting Ollie until after we’d saved Mum. And he seemed earnest. Besides, what choice did I have? I held out my hand, and Leander took it. His fingers curled around my mine, warm and reassuring.
Then he changed my dream.
What the Oneiroi called Erebus had two parts: the shifting dreams, and the formless void in which they floated, tiny glowing suns in the blanket of space. The void was not just blackness, as Leander had called it, but a place where there was no ground or sky, no up or down—a lot like I imagined true space might be if it weren’t freezing and airless. The Oneiroi were nearly powerless in the void … but I was completely powerless. Like them, I couldn’t change it because there was no dream-stuff to manipulate; unlike them, I couldn’t navigate it because I didn’t have true Oneiroi wings. The only way to see it from within a dream was to break my way through the dream’s outer wall. It wasn’t something I normally chose to do. All that looming darkness gave me the willies.
But Leander did it now. The mists swirled around us in one final burst of frenetic activity, and then fell away. Where the fragments of dream had lurked was now a circular room that resembled the top of an observatory, except someone had stripped out all that pesky instrumentation and replaced it with a low-backed throne on a raised dais. The floor was inlaid timber in a spiralling pattern, like the heart of a seashell, and the domed ceiling wasn’t made of arching steel but of translucent glass the colour of ashes. A strip of clear glass ran from the base opposite the throne to the dome’s top, mirroring the opening through which a telescope would peer.
“When have you ever seen an observatory?” I asked, gazing around in wonder at the delicate stonework, the almost hypnotic pattern in the floor.
“I spent a few weeks in an astronomer’s dreams once,” Leander said. “She liked to stargaze.”
“She, eh?”
“Yes,” he said blandly, folding his hands behind his back, beneath the shadow of his wings, and turning to face the throne. “He’s coming.” The words prickled along my skin, and I spun, staring.
The Morpheus didn’t enter through a door or via the huge ceiling above. Instead, the air around the throne shimmered for a moment … and then he was there.
Sometimes I still had nightmares, albeit short-lived ones, about Ikelos, with his Monarch butterfly wings and the thick, dark lines that covered his skin, encircling it like someone had bound him in heavy knots. In my dreams, the tattoos shifted and his eyes burned with flames the colour of the lava that had swallowed him at the end. So the first sight of his brother made me gasp, feeling as if all the oxygen had gone out of the room.
The Morpheus appeared to be in his mid-twenties, though he had to be much older: he’d been the one to send Leander to spy on me when I was a child. He had the same inky black hair as his brother, but his fell down his back in loose, glossy waves. He wore a tunic and pants in a steel blue colour that accentuated those magnificent orange-and-black wings. Bracers in some dull material encircled his wrists, and a simple circlet of the same material sat on his brow. Like Ikelos, he also had tattoos twisting in sleeves down his bare arms and across his bare feet; however, unlike Ikelos’s tattoos, which had been solid black and somehow angular, the corded patterns the Morpheus wore had lighter highlights and were more sinuous. They drew the eye, and I would have continued to stare at them if Leander hadn’t shifted beside me, clearing his throat. I glanced at him and he nodded towards the seated Oneiroi.
“Um.” I bowed awkwardly, the leather of my dress rustling. “Pleased to meet you, your Majesty.”
“Melaina,” the seated man said. I’d expected his voice to be resonant, magical somehow; after all, the Ancient Greeks had believed Morpheus to be not a position but a god, the god of dreams, son of Sleep and nephew of Death. And the Morpheus’s voice was pleasant enough, I supposed, but—like Leander’s—it sounded human. More human than Ikelos’s had, at any rate. The rogue Oneiroi’s voice had penetrated my mother’s dream, crawling into every corner, even when he spoke softly. Did the difference have something to do with the fact the Morpheus hadn’t seized control of my mind? Was he reining in his power out of respect, or so he wouldn’t shatter my little human brain? It seemed wiser not to ask.
“Thank you for agreeing to meet with me,” the Morpheus continued, nodding.
I didn’t have much of a choice. But I kept the observation to myself. Go, me. “You’re welcome. What do you … that is, what can I do for you?”
“You know, I gather, that we have been most curious about you since your Oneiroi abilities manifested when you were a child?”
I nodded, glancing at Leander. He hadn’t moved, and his impassive expression and downturned eyes gave nothing away. Even his wings, usually so expressive, hung still behind him.
“How do you think he did it?” The Morpheus leaned forward. “How did your father manage to create you?”
“He didn’t, not really,” I said.
The Morpheus raised perfectly sculpted eyebrows. He had a strong, elegant face that wouldn’t have been out of place in a fashion magazine if it weren’t for the tattoos coiling around his hairline. “What do you mean?”
I hesitated. The confirmation that Thomas was my biological father was still too fresh, and I didn’t know how I felt about it yet. Still, I had to answer. “I have a human father. He is a normal man, as far as I can tell.”
“Then how do you think you have received the gift of Oneiroi magic? There is the power of dreams in you. I can see the shadow of it.” He gestured with a hand, the motion somehow tracing the shape of my body without seeming sleazy. He regarded me more as a curiosity, a puzzle to be solved; people didn’t have sleazy thoughts about puzzles. Most people, anyway.
“Osmosis,” I said. He raised his eyebrows, seeming to invite further explanation, so I added, “Ollie was in my mother’s dreams while she was pregnant with me.”
The Morpheus narrowed eyes that had the same dusky orange irises as Ikelos’s. They seemed to look right through me, to sense my discomfort. “Oneiroi have gone into the dreams of pregnant women before,” he said. “Many times.”
“Yes,” I said with a nod, “but he was there the entire time she was pregnant with me. He didn’t leave once. I’d wager that’s not something your people usually do.” What was he looking for? I was sure my father—Ollie—would have already told him this.
“And why do you think he did that?” the Morpheus asked.
“He loved her. They wanted to be together.”
“She knew he was there? She wanted him to stay?”
I hesitated, unnerved by the sudden intensity in his voice. Would Ollie be in even more trouble if they thought he’d moved into Mum’s mind against her will? Finally, I nodded again. “Is that significant?”
“It is very unusual for a dreaming human to know that an Oneiroi is in her thoughts. Ollie must have been careless.”
“I’ve always known…”
“You are part Oneiroi,” the Morpheus pointed out, “by osmosis.” Was that a hint of a smile crinkling around his eyes?
“Well, yes, but I’m also a lucid dreamer. So is Mum.”
“Ah.” The man sat back slightly, his butterfly wings flapping gently. “That would explain it. Lucid dreamers have always been harder to deceive.”
“Deceive?”
“To hide from. We aren’t used to being subtle. It’s so rarely necessary, as Erebus is too great a thing for a human mind to comprehend. That is why most of them forget it so quickly, lest they go mad. It is possible you were only able to absorb some part of Ollie’s power by virtue of your mother’s ability.” He cocked his head, his gaze growing distant.
After several heartbeats of silence, I frowned, glancing at Leander. “So if Mum wasn’t a lucid dreamer, Ollie being in her mind for that long might not have affected me?” I asked my friend, keeping my voice quiet.
Beside me, Leander nodded, his gaze remaining on the floor. “Though if she weren’t, he’d have had no reason to hang around for that long,” he murmured.
“He loves her,” I said, affronted on Mum’s behalf.
“Yes, because of who she is. Being a lucid dreamer is part of that. Could you fall in love with someone who forgot you every time she awoke?”
“I…” I nibbled my lip, thinking it over. He had a point. But the entire thing was academic. I didn’t really care about how I’d come to be born. What I wanted to ask was whether the Morpheus would agree to help Brad’s grandfather and where Ollie was, whether he was alright.
The youthful Oneiroi king was regarding me again, a faint frown creasing that perfect forehead. Beside me, Leander’s wings quivered with tension.
A blush heated my cheeks. “Sorry, Your Majesty. Did you say something?”
“Tell me what happened with my brother.”
I took a slow breath, ordering my thoughts. I could get myself into a lot of trouble if I wasn’t careful, and I was all too aware that I didn’t know the rules of this society. “He found out about me,” I said slowly. “He was using the breeder blight in Brad’s grandfather, the one I asked for help with, to make himself an army of blights.” The Morpheus nodded; the news didn’t surprise him. Encouraged, I continued, “He had a human who was working with him, a nurse named Ewan, who had access to the breeder blight. He was deliberately infecting people visiting patients and other visitors to the home. I encountered one of the blights in the dreams of a client of mine, and it figured out I was part Oneiroi when I evicted it. Ikelos then sent a blight-possessed human and some mara to try and kill me.”
The Morpheus’s jaw tightened and I hesitated, my heart in my throat. When he was angry, the Oneiroi king looked a lot like his brother; I recalled the fury on Ikelos’s face as he’d hunted me down in my mother’s hijacked dream. He’d intended to torture me for the secret of how I’d come to be—and, if Ollie and Leander hadn’t distracted him, he would have been successful. Would the Morpheus torture me too, if I displeased him?
The Oneiroi king gestured for me to continue, and I wrapped my hands in the folds of my skirt to hide their trembling. “Ikelos figured out Mum was the key to it all, I guess, because he forced his way into Mum’s dream and threw Ollie out.” I hesitated. “Ollie agreed to surrender to Leander in exchange for his help with saving Mum.” The full story was that Leander had captured Ollie, and then I’d captured Leander. I’d pretty much forced the two to work together … but I didn’t think Leander would thank me for sharing that with his king. I continued quickly, before the Morpheus asked any questions. “Anyway, we figured out how to get into Mum’s dream, which had originally been fortified by Ollie. Ikelos had … done something to Mum. Put her to sleep somehow, so she couldn’t resist him. I found and freed her, and together we, ah…” There was no nice way to say it.
“You threw Ikelos into a lava flow.”
I nodded, raising my chin. I wouldn’t look guilty. I wasn’t a child in the schoolyard, being chastised for being rough with the other kids. “It was self-defence. He’d already hurt Mum, Ollie and Leander, and he was trying to hurt me. He was so powerful. And I don’t think we could’ve reasoned with him.”
“You couldn’t have.” The Morpheus ran a hand through his hair in a surprisingly human gesture of frustration. “Believe me, I’ve tried.”
I blinked, opening my mouth to ask, but Leander inhaled sharply. When I looked at him, he shook his head, glancing towards the arcing pane of clear glass above our heads. I looked up, and my eyes widened as I took in the several dozen Oneiroi who hovered in the void outside, peering in at us. There were both men and women, many of them outlandish, all of them lovely, floating on wings patterned in a manner similar to different species of moth. Don’t embarrass the king in front of his subjects. Right.
“So,” I said instead, “am I in some kind of trouble here, Your Majesty?”
“Trouble? No. What made you think that?”
I gestured from him to me. “You came a long way to talk to me, and I’m sure Leander could have told you everything I did.”
“Ah, but Leander can only tell me what he saw. I needed to hear the truth from your own lips.” He tapped the fingers of one hand against the bracer on the opposite wrist, drawing my gaze. The bracers’ matt grey and white seemed to swirl together. They didn’t look like metal, more like … bone. I shivered. “Thank you for being so forthcoming,” the Morpheus added. “I believe we are done here. I will send a score of Oneiroi to deal with Ikelos’s breeder blight, so it cannot produce more offspring to trouble you.”
“Thanks.” Relief flowed through me. I’d made it through the weirdest interview of my life, even including Nelson’s interrogations of me. Although we weren’t quite done yet. “Can I ask you a question?”
“I can’t free Ollie, if that is what you want to ask me,” the Morpheus said. “He broke our laws and has to serve out the duration of his sentence.”
“What laws did he break?” He raised an eyebrow, and I added quickly, “I’m not trying to be rude. I don’t know your laws.”
“Grievously tampering with a human. Revealing his nature to a human without permission. Refusing a summons by his liege.”
My heart sank. I couldn’t argue with any of those points, not really. Although I hadn’t really suffered as a result of Ollie’s tampering and it had probably been inadvertent, the fact he’d done something to me was obvious. “I don’t suppose the fact Mum’s a lucid dreamer counts as a mitigating circumstance for the second crime, does it? You said they—we—are difficult to deceive.”
“No. He should have tried harder.”
Icy dread slashed through me. I’d revealed myself to Brad and Jen. Best keep that fact to myself, lest the Morpheus try to punish me too. Did he believe I fell under his jurisdiction? Did I? “Okay,” I said. “It’s just that Mum will want me to ask. Is he well? Can I see him?”
“I’m afraid that’s impossible. His prison is on the other side of the world.” The king’s stern expression softened a little. “But he has not been harmed. And thirty years isn’t such a long time. Your mother will see him again one day.”
I released my breath in a slow, trembling gasp. His words reassured me about something I’d been too afraid to ask: they weren’t going to do anything to Mum for knowing about the Oneiroi. Still, I doubted she’d regard thirty years as a short time. She’d be in her seventies by the time Ollie was released.
“We will deal with the breeder blight while we are here,” the Morpheus said, growing indistinct as the dream faded around me. “Farewell, Melaina.”