The world spun around us—light above, darkness below, and then the reverse. Leander spread his wings with a snap and then screamed as they were torn back. The sound seared my soul.
We crashed into a stand of wattle trees rather than the hard earth or the frozen concrete of the path. Twigs tore at my skin, my hair. Small, spikey leaves pricked me like needles. The air whooshed from my lungs as a branch caught me across the stomach, my body folding around it.
“Leander,” I gasped as soon as I was able, staring around me. The world seemed to tip and slide. I blinked, trying to clear my vision. Above me, the branches clattered in the wind, but I thought I heard my name, a thread of pain running through it. “Leander?”
There, on the other side of the rough-barked trunk. Was that him? A flash of pale grey, a shadow blacker than the dappled light weaving beneath the trees. I slid from my branch, reaching for the earth with my bare toes, and wobbled around the trunk. Moving hurt: I was all bruise, the deep pain accented by the stinging of a dozen cuts.
But when I saw Leander, I forgot about my injuries. He’d hit the same tree, but hadn’t been as fortunate as me. A long branch, stripped of leaves, protruded wetly from his shoulder. One wing was pinned at an awkward angle behind him, calling to mind uncomfortable memories of dead moths on display in glass frames. His other hand clutched at the protruding branch, his fingers stained dark. The tang of blood and the spicy-sweet, true scent of the wattle blooms filled my senses. Bile flooded my throat.
“Ouch.” Leander forced a smile.
“Oh god.” I reached out a trembling hand, brushing his hair back from his clammy face. “We have to get you down from there so I can heal you.”
“No.” Leander shook his head before biting his lip, probably to contain a gasp of pain. “Ikelos is coming. You have to hide until the others get here.”
“I’m not leaving you.”
“But—”
“No!” I reached for the trunk, splaying my fingers against the rough surface. Leander was too heavy for me to lift, but there was another way to get him down. “Help me,” I begged the tree, feeding it a thread of my hoarded energy. The tree quivered in response, and I ignored my dizziness and reached for Leander, steadying him as the branch dipped, lowering him slowly. When his feet touched the ground beside mine, the branch snapped cleanly from the trunk, adding the sticky scent of sap to the iron tang of blood.
Leander sagged against me, and I staggered into the trunk under his weight, adding yet another scrape to my collection. “Steady.” I helped him sit with his uninjured shoulder against the tree. “We need to get that branch out of you.”
Before I could command the dream to help, Leander’s jaw tensed, and then he reached behind his back and yanked. The branch seemed to come away cleanly and with a wet sound, though I couldn’t help but wonder where all those leaves had gone. Were they still inside him? Nausea churned in my belly.
With his face grey, Leander closed his eyes. “Ouch,” he said again; this time the word was barely a whisper. Behind him, the branch thumped to the ground.
I wasn’t sure what would happen if I spent my last store of power healing Leander. Normally, if I ran out of power in someone else’s dream, I was shoved back into my own head until I recuperated. I’d never run out of power in my own dream before. Until today, until Ikelos had moved in and rearranged the furniture, I’d never had to pay to make changes to my dreams. Would I be kicked out of my own mind? Would it give Ikelos free rein to take over everything that I was?
At that moment, seeing Leander bloody and helpless, I didn’t care.
I knelt beside him, placing my hand over the wound. Heal, I told it, pouring what power I had left into his body. As I did so, Leander reached for me, brushing a finger along a stinging cut at my temple.
And a curious thing happened. I felt the energy flow out of me, sensed its absence even as the wound began to close. But, at the same time, Leander’s silvery power flowed back into me. My skin tingled as my cuts healed; the deep bruise at my stomach twinged and then fell silent. I frowned at him and he stared back at me, a tiny smile curving his lips. His fingertips glistened with blood from my cut even as my hand was covered in his blood.
I opened my mouth to swear at him, call him an idiot … but then the energy changed colour, took on a green tint that was Brad’s and a blue tint that was mine. It was the power I’d just poured into him to heal his wounds. It should have been spent, gone forever. But it wasn’t. His eyes widened with realisation as I gave him back that blended mix. We’d created a perfect loop between us, where we could repair our bodies and no energy was spent.
It wasn’t as much power as I was used to, and I doubted I could change the rest of the dream and have the same effect as I was having on him. But it was better than nothing. I took Leander’s bloodstained hand with my own, afraid to let the link be severed in case we couldn’t recreate it. “Come on,” I said, urging him to his feet. “We need to bunker down before—”
The top of the tree we were sheltering beneath exploded, showering us with shards. A huge face peered down: a face with burning eyes and surrounded by wild black hair that danced like Medusa’s snakes. Huge wings flared, almost blocking out the sky—but the light Leander and I had ignited still burned, opalescent, at the edges.
“Oh, shit,” I whispered. Ikelos had clearly been watching monster movies; he was the size of a giant, and just as bad tempered. “Run!”
We set off through the home’s grounds, darting this way and that as Ikelos took swipes with a giant fist, obliterating trees and pounding bath-sized craters into the earth. I hoped he got a splinter. I hoped the seeming randomness of his attacks meant he didn’t know where we were, rather than that we were being herded.
With the circuit of energy flowing like a river between Leander and me, I didn’t grow tired. My breath didn’t ache in my lungs and, when a flying branch scored my arm, the cut healed instantly. But we couldn’t hide forever. We skidded to a stop when we reached the edge of the trees, a wide stretch of grass and path between us and the wall of the nursing home. If we went out there, Ikelos would spot us in an instant.
“We have to fly. We’ll be harder to hit,” Leander urged me, flaring his wings and preparing to scoop me up.
I shook my head, taking a half-step backwards. “No. If we go up there it’s a matter of time till he gets lucky. We don’t have the energy to fight him. We have to hide.”
“Where?”
I looked around. The stand of trees behind us was being rapidly reduced to kindling. We couldn’t get to the nursing home and back into my house without being spotted. Up was out; we’d be swatted like bugs. Again. That left … “How about down the rabbit hole?” I gestured between the snarled roots of a tree, begging my dream to provide us a means of escape.
I staggered against Leander, who also wavered as our mutual reserves were sapped. But, sure enough, light began to glow from between the roots: the steady, dusty yellow light of an old electric bulb. Peering down, I spied a space both familiar and strange—my old dorm room from boarding school, minus the door and window and with a scattering of dirt on the desk beneath us. A neat little burrow with a single bed and a closet full of school uniforms that wouldn’t fit me anymore.
Beyond the trees, the crashing sounds of Ikelos’s tantrum increased in tempo, growing abruptly closer.
“He felt the change to the dream.” Leander’s voice was tight with urgency. “Get down there, quick!”
I turned, sliding along the grassy lip, dislodging another shower of dirt as I slid onto the desk. Tiny stones plinked against the wood varnish and the tops of my feet. Leander leaned down and planted a quick kiss on my upturned face.
“Be safe, love,” he said. And he let go of my hand.
“Leander, no!” I lunged for him, trying to grab his leg, his ankle. To pull him down to hide with me. But he hopped out of reach, past the tree line and into the air. Looking through the grass that was now level with my eyes, I saw him fly up, weaving erratically to dodge a sudden blow from a huge fist. And he wasn’t alone: he held me in his arms, cradling me much as he’d done before. I rubbed my eyes and looked again. Yes, that was my bare foot, my tattered white dress.
He’d projected an illusion of me and was leading Ikelos away. I knew how little energy he had left. He was practically defenceless; the only thing that remained to him was his agility as he darted to and fro, distance rendering him small. His wings were no longer grey but instead reflected the light of the sky above. He looked like a butterfly, like a member of one of the most powerful Oneiroi bloodlines. Like a prince.
“You’re too late,” Ikelos bellowed, his voice so loud that another shower of dirt fell, dusting my feet and calves and staining the hem of my dress. “Another few minutes and these dreams will be mine.”
With my heart in my mouth and my ears ringing from the Oneiroi’s roar, I stared up at the shimmering arch of sky that was the boundary of my mind. It looked as far away as ever … but the top of it was brushing Ikelos’s madly twisting hair. Had it been doing that before?
It hadn’t. I knew it. I had to do something. I wouldn’t die, hiding in a room that had been my sanctuary as a teen but was now a dead end. An oversized coffin. Panic clawed at my throat as I scrabbled at the crumbling lip of grass and dirt, planting my forearms in the soil and heaving myself upwards. My toes clawed at the dorm room’s wall, tearing a shred of paper from a forgotten band poster. My upper body strength sucked.
I was half out of the hole when Ikelos roared, a sound filled with triumph. My heart froze in my chest as I looked up. He’d caught Leander, caging my friend between the fingers of his hands as if Leander really was a butterfly, one he’d snatched out of the air. Slowly, Ikelos brought his palms together, peering between his fingers, presumably to watch as Leander struggled against being crushed.
The howl of fury that followed told me the exact moment that Ikelos realised he didn’t have me trapped too. He smashed his hands together so hard the sound cracked like thunder, echoing off the nursing home wall behind me. The world seemed to tilt sideways and the colours to fade as something limp and grey tumbled from Ikelos’s hands, shaken away with the same indifference as I’d flick drops of water from my fingers after washing up.
“Leander!” I scrambled the rest of the way from my hole, reeling and weeping as I ran across the grass towards the place where Leander had landed, smashing a park bench into shards. I expected a huge foot to stomp down on me at any moment. The ground continued to shake and Ikelos continued to roar, but I made it to Leander’s side unharmed.
The sight of him with a branch spearing through his chest had left me trembling. This was so much worse. His legs, tangled amidst broken planks of wood, were broken, bent at unnatural angles beneath him. His wings were shredded. I fell to my knees, ignoring a stab of pain as a splinter gouged my calf, and grabbed his hands. He lifted one of them to his lips and kissed my palm, leaving a red smear behind.
“Leander,” I sobbed. “You stupid idiot.”
“Th-there’s my girl,” he said, blood bubbling at his lips when he smiled at me.
Smiled… What?
“Look. At Ikel—” He coughed, a wet, painful sound. “Ikelos.”
Wrenching my eyes from Leander’s face, I turned to see what he was talking about.
Behind me, a normal-sized Ikelos spun and cursed in a glowing web of light that was closing in on him. At different points around the web, all around as well as above and below, a dozen moth-winged Oneiroi hovered, slowly rotating and glowing like avenging angels. The reinforcements had come. My heart soared. I might actually make it through this alive and in possession of my own body.
Inside the web, Ikelos shimmered, as if a heat haze had sprung up between us. The Oneiroi rotated faster, something almost frantic in their dance.
Ikelos vanished with a faint pop of displaced air. The Oneiroi let out a collective groan and disappeared too.
Dammit. I turned back to Leander. “He escaped, didn’t he?”
He nodded, wincing.
“They’ll catch him.” I placed my hand on Leander’s ashen cheek, reaching for the reserve of power; with Ikelos gone, my access to it was fully restored. I poured energy into Leander as fast as I could channel it. His eyes opened wide and he shoved my hand away, breaking the contact. “What are you doing?” I snapped. “Heal yourself.”
“You have to wake up,” Leander demanded. “Don’t worry about me; I can take care of myself. You have to wake up now.”
“Why? He’s gone. I—”
“Now!”
He took the reserve of energy I’d given him and used it to kick me out of my own dream.