33

DREAM ME UP, SCOTTY

No, see,” I said. “The plan was that you would try to trace this shadow connection back to whoever is doing this.”

“I tried,” Marisol said. “But whatever is going on with your friend doesn’t feel like the work of the Foolish Man.”

I could practically hear the capital letters. “Who’s this Foolish Man?”

“Whoever’s kicking up a fuss, trying to make my city a better place.”

Huh. “Why is trying to make the city a better place foolish?”

“You can’t make the city anything.” Marisol seemed to think that answer was obvious. Maybe they teach that kind of thing in Fisher King 101.

“We’re improvising, John,” Sarah said. “We need someone who has an emotional connection to Molly to follow her in the Dreamtime. Someone who psychics won’t be able to detect. And it has to be now.”

So I didn’t argue. I didn’t protest about all the things I couldn’t do, or ask Sarah what she expected me to do. I didn’t try to come up with alternatives or accuse them of springing this on me. There was no way I was going to let what had happened to Molly stand, and even if I hadn’t wasted a lot of time making speeches or hitting anything or making a point out of telling everyone how steely and resolved I was, I was all in. If Sarah thought she could help, well, that was what we’d come here for. All I said was “Am I looking for anything in specific when I get there?”

“You won’t have to try to do anything if Marisol has this figured out right.” Sarah took the flask back. “You should be shadowing Molly.”

“Is that a bad pun?” Sig demanded.

Sarah answered her while patting my forearm. “Molly doesn’t have a shadow right now, and nature abhors a vacuum. In the Dreamtime, John is going to be her shadow for her.”

“Oh, God,” I said. “I mean, good. Oh, good.” But I was already assuming the position that Sarah had made me take the last time I’d done this. Bent over. Hands around my ankles. Pants down.

“Whoever’s doing this to Molly might be able to travel the Dreamtime too,” Sarah continued while she smeared some ointment above my upper lip, directly under my nostrils. It smelled like lemongrass. “We don’t want them to know if we find anything out.”

I just nodded.

“Hurry up.” Marisol was already crouched next to Molly. “I’m keeping her tethered, but she’s strong-willed. Her soul knows something’s wrong, and it wants to go into the Dreamtime and find out why.”

So I took Molly’s hand, and light and shadow coalesced around us, enveloping us in a living chiaroscuro of luminescence and darkness until I seemed to be looking at the world around me through some twilight realm.

Okay, that was a total lie. Sorry. We just sat there. Marisol was holding Sarah’s right hand, Sarah was holding Molly’s, and I was holding Molly’s left. Not in a circle—in a line, as if we were trying to ground lightning. But that doesn’t quite convey the tension of the moment, and besides, I’ve always wanted to use the word chiaroscuro.

In actuality, the world didn’t cooperate with giving us a quiet meditation space. I was sore and looked and felt like someone had scrubbed me with a giant Brillo pad, and shutting that out was a bit of a chore. Choo was loudly demanding to know what was going on, and Aubrey was taking stock of the half-fae wounded. The only other fae survivor, Caitlin Flint, had a gut wound, and she wasn’t being quiet about it. But if half-elves don’t regenerate, they’re still a lot more resilient than humans, and they have healers among their kind who can work miracles.

No healers were going to be able to help the half-elf called Darian, though. His body was headless and lying on the ground next to the archway entrance, a fact that I’d noticed but hadn’t really thought about while the battle was still going on. “What happened up there?” I heard Sig ask Aubrey quietly.

Aubrey responded bitterly: “As soon as I got wounded, Mother’s bodyguards began tripping all over each other, trying to put themselves between me and the wolves. I think they wound up putting us all in more danger than if they’d stayed in position. I didn’t ask them to.”

“We know.” It sounded like Sig really did know, too. She has that gift, sometimes.

“This is why I don’t like being around Mother and her followers.” I was trying to focus on entering a meditative state, holding Molly’s hand, matching the rate and depth of my breathing to hers, feeling her pulse, but maybe a part of me was resisting it too, and a few things about Aubrey made more sense to me. Aubrey had always struck me as reckless, oddly reckless for someone who claimed to enjoy living a long life, but if he had spent most of his eternal youth resenting feeling overprotected, I could see how that mentality might have evolved. How sad would it be, to be a couple hundred years old and still have a mother who never let you grow up?

“So, why are you?” Sig asked curiously. “Hanging around them, I mean.”

“I’m in Mother’s debt. You know that.”

The last time I’d seen Aubrey, his mother had helped Sig and me bail Aubrey out of a huge mess. Maybe rebelling against his parent also kept him dependent on her long after he shouldn’t be. It’s weird how it works out that way so often.

“Could you people take it somewhere else?” Sarah snapped with uncharacteristic peevishness.

Then a bigger surprise, one of the werewolves showing up turned out to be my pack leader, Ben Lafontaine. I smelled Ben and peeked. Ben is a solid and craggy Chippewa whose movements are a lot younger and leaner than he is, which is even more evident when he’s naked. The werewolves who’d come with Ben were still busy ripping the giant wolves into pieces—not for dinner but so that the corpses would be easier to drag off into the woods—but Ben stepped away from the frenzy and began to transform in front of our eyes. It wasn’t seamless or pretty, and it jarred me out of my trance again. That was me over there. I did that sometimes. Gross. My body’s muscles and joints twinged sympathetically.

Ben walked up to Sig as soon as he’d shifted, and she took the bloody jacket off Darian’s headless corpse and threw it at Ben. “Tie this around yourself. There’s a minor present.”

Ben obligingly made a loincloth out of the jacket, tying its long sleeves behind his waist. He looked at where Choo was bandaging Sig’s head, then looked at Kasia, his face expressionless. “This is your stalker?” There was a calm contemplation of violence in the question. Ben likes Sig.

“We are past that,” Kasia told him.

“That’s news to me,” Ben said.

It was news to me, too.

“Take it somewhere farther away than that!” Sarah urged. “We’ve only got one chance at this, and you’re distracting John. He has werewolf hearing, you know.”

“One chance at what?” Ben asked, but Sig was already pulling him off.

“John, you’d better come back,” she called as she led the rest of the group away. It sounded more like a threat than an endearment, but not too long before, she wouldn’t have said that much with so many other people with sensitive hearing around.

I wasn’t my body. I was in my body. Following my breathing down into my chest. Staying there while the breathing went away again. I was in my hand, the hand over Molly’s hand, in Molly’s hand, listening to her breathe. Feeling her blood throb against my skin. Molly. I love you, Molly. You’re not going anywhere without me.

Merging. Breathing. Sinking. Blurring.

Suddenly, heavy wet clothes are pulling me down into dark water. I thrash around, upward, frantically. I am in a swimming pool in a backyard, at night. Fifteen feet away from me is the brightly lit family room of a house. My parents are inside it, my friends, the man I am supposed to marry. They are all laughing and enjoying each other’s company.

“I’m out here!” I scream. “Help me.” But they can’t hear me. They’re talking to another Molly standing there in the room. The only me they care to know. I am dragged down into the water by the weight of my outfit, a heavy overcoat. Down, down. My breath is getting tighter in my chest, swelling in my cheeks. My limbs are getting heavier as I try to thrash frantically. NO! I WILL NOT DIE THIS WAY!

The world shatters like a mirror, and I am standing in the middle of a pencil sketch. The drawing of a classroom around me is a thing of straight lines and empty spaces. Pictures of dark black rats and spiders are crawling out of the corners of my sketch world, moving like stop animation, covering the intervening grey shaded spaces between us in blanks. No. This is not where I am.

I walk through them, and the world passes me like a flipping page, leaving a small pencil picture of a restaurant in its wake. The sketch window has figures moving, becoming larger, three of them. No. This is not where I am. I walk through the window and the world flips again

into a sketch of a bridge in the middle of pencil woods. Cartoon wolves begin to emerge from the trees and NO!

I am no longer in a drawing. I am in dark, lightless suburbs surrounding a brightly lit city by water. There are forgotten things moving through silent streets around me, but I ignore them and take a step that goes far farther than a step should.

I am in a lit street in the city between tall buildings, some of them darkened, broken-windowed, in decay.

Another step and I am in front of a tower. It is some kind of corporate building that looks half modern industrial and half medieval; the edifice is tall and has large, long reflective windows, but the foundation is wider than most skyscrapers, and a part of me that is not Molly notes how the building scapes inward every three floors. At each of these plateaus, there are small crenellated walls surrounding the edges—defensible firing positions—and the top levels of the building become circular instead of rectangular, ending in a large dome with a small steeple. I

step into a marble lobby where there are statues. I can feel them watching me. There are wide lobby stairs between two sets of elevators, and I walk up them, past men in dark robes, taking entire staircases at a time. I walk until

I am in a dark room. A short, portly man with curly, receding grey hair and a big beard and seamed skin and too-bright eyes behind big glasses is staring at me in a light that is not light, a book open before him. Behind him is me. I am standing in front of my own open coffin, staring at a body that has no soul, staring at myself staring at myself with insect eyes. I—

—came out of it gasping like I’d been holding my breath for a long time. My God. My God. I was sitting on gravel, just inside the archway. It was dark. Soft rainfall was smacking the ground around me.

“Are you all right?” Sarah asked me.

I didn’t answer her. I wasn’t all right. Not at all. None of us were. I had been to the city in Molly’s dream before.

It wasn’t New York. It was Detroit.