Chapter Seventeen

After Tim left, Eliza stayed with Ian and Dave while I went into the bedroom with Carson in tow to help Sheila get ready to dreamwalk. She already made some preparations and now used ashes to draw a circle under the head of her bed where her pillow lay.

“How is everything out there, still civil?” she asked.

“I guess. So, you don’t need quiet to prepare?”

“No. I need to invoke my will before I fall asleep.”

“What are those ashes from?”

She quirked a smile. “The bay leaves and ferns I just burned.”

“Huh. This magic stuff is very particular, isn’t it?”

Sheila continued arranging ashes in a thick circle. “Yes. I’m about out of tricks. I’ve wracked my brain to remember anything else, but these are the only spells I use with any frequency. If I’m going to continue hanging around with Werewolves, I need to study hard when I get home.”

I didn’t want to say the obvious “if any of us get home,” so a moment of quiet took over. Carson chewed on his own fist like it was the best invention ever. Which, come to think of it, is kind of true: opposable thumbs and all—go evolution.

“Granny and I used to dreamwalk all the time,” Sheila continued abruptly. “She’d enter my dreams and we’d have a great time—Unicorns, huge amusement parks, the beach, outer space. When you’re dreamwalking, you can shape the environment, so you can imagine how much fun we had.”

She reached up to rub her eyes. “I am sorry I never told you. It’s a huge relief, talking to you about my craft.”

“Well,” I said after a moment, “I’m still a little mad—or hurt—you didn’t tell me before. But it’s hard to believe, even after everything I’ve seen. Werewolves. Magic. My son changes into a wolf and my best friend casts spells. I probably wouldn’t have believed you. When this is all over and when everyone’s safe, I want to hear more about it, more about your granny Emma, your witchcraft, the other Witches you know. Their libraries. Maybe I can even help you organize your, uh, spellbooks. Help you do some research.”

Sheila nodded, then let out a deep breath. “Thanks, Jules.”

“Anytime, BFF.”

I worried I might step on thin ice, but had to ask anyway. “Sheila, you never watched my dreams, did you?”

Sheila straightened. “No! Never. That is completely unethical, like reading someone’s diary. In a case like this, when Kayleigh’s life is endangered, I have no qualms about finding her dreams. But other than that—and, well, some rather unfortunate and questionable choices with a few high school crushes—I would never watch someone’s dreams without permission. We have our own code of ethics, you know.”

“No, I don’t know. Are Witches as organized as Werewolves?” I groaned and mock-held my temples. “Did you hear that question? Can you believe I just asked that question? Where is my normal life?”

Sheila reached out and squeezed my arm. “This is life, Jules. You’ve been thrown into the deep end of the pool and I think you’re doing well. Treading water at the very least.

“Some Witches work in covens, but, no, we don’t have actual leaders, or a strict code of conduct, other than what’s necessary for self-protection and secrecy. It’s more like schools, various philosophies of witchcraft handed down within family lines or from teacher to student.”

I started to ask another question, but Sheila waved her hands at me. “Can we talk about it later? Right now, I need to focus on Kayleigh.”

“Oh. Right.”

Sheila moved in silence again, carefully spritzing her ash circle with water. I wondered what the cleaning staff would think of all of this, but figured they’d probably seen worse. It was Vegas, after all. She wrapped one of Kayleigh’s blonde hairs around one of her own gold hoop earrings and then placed it in the center of her ash circle. At my glance, she explained gold stood in for fire with this spell—gold and the spark of fiery spirit in the dreamer herself.

When she had everything arranged to her liking, she said, “All right, then. I’m ready. Please make sure everyone stays quiet, okay? I’ll wake myself in about an hour. It will take me a little while to find Kayleigh, since I’ve never dreamwalked to her before. I hope she’s asleep—even if she’s not actively dreaming, I should be able to push her into that state.”

With a hug for good luck and my assurances we wouldn’t disturb her, I left the bedroom as she placed her pillow over the ritual items and lay down.

Later, Sheila described dreamwalking to me. She said, when the spell initiator fell asleep, her consciousness woke up in a dark place, directionless, full of changing colors and an ever-shifting wind. The colors were somehow indicative of dreamscapes, although no direct relationship existed to geographical proximity or anything else tangible. Sheila wasn’t sure what the wind represented and mentioned it only in passing, with a high degree of anxiety: she said her granny had absolutely refused to discuss the wind and forbid her to even speak of it. Anyway, when entering this place, Sheila appeared with the token—in this case, the earring wrapped in Kayleigh’s hair—held tightly in hand. By focusing on the token, she could somehow shift her surroundings until she approached colors that more closely matched the aura around her token, thus indicating her approach to Kayleigh’s sleeping self. If the object of her search were already dreaming, she would see bright flashes of light, echoed in the token. She could focus on the light until it became a specific point, then move closer until she’d fall into it, like a sun or a bright black hole. At that point, she’d find herself in the other person’s dream, able to shape the dream and communicate directly with the dreamer.

Sheila never told me what Kayleigh had been dreaming about. With a flat voice, she said merely it had been a nightmare—a nightmare Sheila quickly resolved into a normal, pleasant scene. Sheila spent some time convincing Kayleigh she was a real person, a dreamwalking Witch, trying to communicate with her. I supposed that made sense: if someone popped into my dream, changed everything, and then sat down to have a conversation, I’d be unlikely to believe she wasn’t just another vivid figment of my dreaming imagination.

After Kayleigh understood Sheila was real and the genuine possibility of rescue existed, Sheila said her relief and gratitude were so intense the entire dreamscape morphed—flowers blooming on carpets and walls and silly stereotypical things like that. Sheila added she felt almost guilty, like she should have stressed the fact we were a ragtag group of untrained rescuers, with the exception of Tim. In the end, she decided Kayleigh needed hope more than anything, so she merely said we were a group of Weres and Witches already in Vegas to track her. Kayleigh didn’t have much to say about her current location. She revealed she’d been jumped right outside her car, ironically next to a police station, and had been knocked out almost immediately with some sort of drug in gauze over her face. Of course, since she was a Were, she metabolized the drug uber-quickly, but had woken to find herself bound with duct tape on the floor in the back of a vehicle. Note to self: even Were-strength struggled against good old duct tape, if enough was used. Who knew?

Kayleigh said she’d only seen one Were and described him as blond with a beard, matching the description Suzy Zhang had given of “Taylor Dunn.” Kayleigh said his first name was Ken and she’d never seen him before. She said a number of other humans were involved—more than she could count—and, after Sheila asked, she agreed with Tim’s assessment they were organized crime. She added in an uncertain voice she’d scented someone or something else, not quite human and not quite Were, during her incarceration.

We learned all of this after Sheila woke up, about two hours after she’d gone to sleep. It took longer than she anticipated, since she’d never dreamwalked to Kayleigh before. When she came into the living room, Eliza and I spoke quietly while the boys watched TV at low volume, some movie about pirates.

“There’s something really weird going on here,” said Sheila. While we gave her our full attention, she explained the basics of what Kayleigh said. Then she continued, “The part I really don’t understand is Kayleigh says there’s some medical aspect to it all. There’s a doctor and he subjected Kayleigh to some sort of procedure with her bone marrow.”

“Bone marrow?” I repeated. I looked at Eliza, but her face appeared blank.

“Yes, they’ve been putting her under and pulling bone marrow from her hip bones, her breast bone, and her shoulder blades. About ten times a day—that’s why she has the IV and that’s why she has the bandages.”

“What the hell? Why would anyone want her bone marrow?”

No one had an answer for me.

“Let’s think about this,” Eliza spoke, the gears of her mind almost visibly turning. “What do any of us know about bone marrow?”

Ian and Dave both shrugged. Sheila shook her head in bewilderment.

“No, seriously. Even the most basic information. What do we know about bone marrow?” Eliza prompted.

“You use it to treat things like leukemia, right?” I hazarded. “Because it has lots of stem cells or something?”

“You have to match to be a donor. Like with blood types, but I think it’s more complicated,” contributed Ian.

“Okay.” Eliza turned to Ian. “You and Dave go to the business center here in the Bellagio and research bone marrow on the internet. That’s your way of being helpful.”

“Okay.” Ian stood up and stretched, then extended a hand to pull Dave to his feet. “We can do that. I’m not sure what we’re looking for, though.”

“Sheila, you get some more rest. You look exhausted, and we may need your talents later,” Eliza said, continuing to direct. “I’ll stay here with the non-Weres and we’ll wait for word from Tim.” She omitted the obvious: Carson and I might need her protection.