Lizbeth

They were in the dreamlands. All the power she’d been imbued with when she’d been hurtling toward her destiny—being the last Dream Keeper, the one who would dream the return of magic—was gone. She no longer felt the souls of the trapped Dream Keepers. They had been released from one prison into another (the second just happened to be Lizbeth’s body) until she finally set them free—but she did find herself missing them just a little and the way they filled her brain and blood with their song. Now there was only Lizbeth—no one else was rattling around in there with her—and she thought that was probably for the best.

She took a deep breath.

She thought she would be okay.

And then she began to cry.

She felt Tem wrap his long arms around her. He pulled her to him as she gulped down air, her sobs so powerful they shook her whole body. All the fear and tension drained out of her as she cried, like her heart had been lanced with a sharpened needle. It was a visceral thing, something she had no control over. So she let the hysteria consume her. Let her brain float away for a little while. Even though the crying made her head feel large and unwieldy, made her temples throb, there was nothing for it.

Temistocles held her as she broke down. He didn’t say a word, only stroked her russet hair and let her cry. He seemed to understand she needed this. That without the tears, there would be no healing of the wound.

She nestled her cheek against the warm hollow of his neck, the soft skin at his throat as inviting as a pillow. She wished she could go to sleep right there in his arms—and if she could’ve managed it, she would’ve. She didn’t care that she was standing up.

“Daniela . . . the others . . . will they be . . . okay? I . . . can’t . . . stop . . . crying,” she whispered. She was having trouble getting the words out because she was gritting her teeth in between the sobs, trying to stop them from chattering.

“I don’t know. And you do what you need to do,” he said, then kissed the top of her head.

“I’ve . . . ruined your shirt.” The thin linen at his throat was wet with her snot and tears.

He laughed, the sound coming from deep in his belly and rolling over her like a wave of joy.

“What?” she demanded, smiling despite herself.

“That’s what’s got you worried?” he said, snorting with more laughter. “After all that . . . after thwarting the bad guys and personally—with your own damn body as the vessel—dragging magic back into your world . . . getting boogers on my shirt’s what gives you pause?”

He squeezed her tight.

“You are a precious jewel. I’d die a hundred more times to get to spend my death with you.”

She pulled away from him, for the first time realizing that though he was warm to the touch, she could hear no heart beating in his chest. She stared up at his face—the long nose, the sad gray eyes that turned down at the corners, the soft pink lips—and her own heart thudded.

“I don’t want you to be dead,” she said, the words coming out in a rasp. Her mouth was dry from crying. “I want you to be alive so we can be together.”

He grinned down at her—as tall as she was, he was even taller.

“I’m stuck in the dreamlands, love. It’s a life, of sorts. I can see you and touch you while you’re here . . .” He trailed off, as if realizing just how lame this sounded.

Thunder cracked across the sky, the sound rolling in percussive bursts toward them. For the first time since she’d left behind the human world, Lizbeth looked at her surroundings. The dreamlands were another dimension from the one she’d been born into. It was where you went in your dreams, and since Lizbeth was a Dream Walker, she’d spent a lot of time there. But the dreamlands were so changeable, so fickle and unpredictable, that even with her experience spending time there, she was often surprised by the new things she discovered.

This trip was no exception. She’d been standing on a monolith of rock in Georgia—the country, not the state—before Tem had spirited her away, and part of her expected to see a similar terrain here in the dreamlands. That happened more often than not when she visited. It would resemble where she’d been in her real life, and then, after a while, it would start to morph and change into something new. The dreamlands were skilled at mirroring whatever was in the dreamer’s mind, whatever the dreamer happened to be thinking about or obsessing over in their waking life. She was pretty sure the dreamlands were crafted from pure thought, making them impermanent and easy to manipulate, if only you knew how to do it.

And she did . . . but this trip was different.

“Where are we?” Lizbeth asked, eyes adjusting to the darkness.

She saw a velvety black sky with a shining globe—the orb as pale as fresh butter—stitched into the fabric above them, and then farther away a sea of angry gray thunderheads fast approaching. They were standing on a surface made entirely of water. It stretched out around them in an unbroken line of liquid for as far as the eye could see. She lifted her foot and felt wetness slosh against her ankles, saw that not only were her feet bare, but so were her legs. She lifted her arms, examining the rest of herself, and discovered that she’d magically shed her cold-weather clothing for a thick white muslin nightshift. She knew she should have been cold standing in four inches of cool water, but the muslin made her feel warm and toasty.

“These are the true dreamlands. Their ‘resting’ shape, if you will, when they’re not molding to whatever they think a dreamer wants to see,” Tem said—he was still in the same long green leather coat he’d worn when she first met him, his black hair in the same tall mohawk. Unlike Lizbeth, he remained unchanged in the dreamlands.

“Why do you look the same, then?” she asked, her eyes not on him but still marveling at the beauty that surrounded them. This place was everything and nothing at the same time. The vastness of what she saw made her feel small, imbued her with the sting of what it meant to be truly alone—except she wasn’t. He was here with her.

“Because I’m dead and you’re alive. I’m trapped here, an echo of what I once was, still moving and thinking and doing, but only because of the power I draw from the dreamlands,” he replied—after a long silence where, he, too, seemed to be contemplating the vastness of the space. “It gives me a little play in your human world, but not for long or with much power. All of your Dream Walkers are like me. Those witches who choose not to move on to the next plane, but to stay behind, as I have, because they still feel the call of life and the needs of the living, the ones whom they left behind in death and sorely miss.”

“Like Eleanora,” Lizbeth said, and Tem nodded his agreement.

“And there are many others,” he said, then added sadly: “And more will be coming.”

“What do you mean?”

“More of your blood sisters will die, Lizbeth,” he replied. “The balance has to shift before it can come back to the middle.”

Lizbeth felt like a tear had opened in her heart.

“I don’t want anyone else to die,” she said—and she heard an edge of hysteria in her voice. “I just want things to be as they were. I want to go back to before all of this happened. Before my coven was split apart. Before I went up on that rock and used my dreaming powers to call magic back into the world . . .”

Tem let her speak, understanding that she needed to exorcise the fear and guilt she was feeling.

“I want to go back to Echo Park. I want Eleanora to be alive again. I want Lyse to never have come home. I want Daniela to be well. I want Weir. I want my mom to be alive . . .” The last word—alive—poured out of her in a pitiful moan, and on its heels came more tears. But this time they sprang from the deepest part of her, from the small child that lay buried in the dark corners of her brain—damaged and inconsolable and full of the basest of emotions: Need.

“But doesn’t this place give you reassurance? That death isn’t the end?” he asked, but she shook her head.

“It’s not that . . .”

“Then what?”

She shook her head, unable to give voice to the feeling. More than anything, it was being in this place. It intensified things. Made her feel with a sharpness that was disconcerting.

No more tears, she thought. They get me nowhere.

She swallowed back the sadness that had invaded her without warning. Fought the lump in her throat, demanding it melt away. After a few moments, she was more composed.

“I just want it all to be like it was,” she said, finally managing to corral her emotions.

Tem smiled down at her, lifting his fingers to her cheek and brushing away the wetness there.

“But, my little dreamer, change is the greatest gift of all. To be alive is to change and grow and accept loss and death. It’s all of it . . . and without those sad and wonderful things that happened to you recently, we wouldn’t be standing here, together, right now.”

“I still don’t like it,” she said.

“Of course not,” he replied. “Because you’re young now. But wait a while and see how you feel then. I guarantee that one day you’ll be so tired of life that you’ll beg death to come. Eventually we all move on, Lizbeth. It’s an inevitability that cannot be changed.”

She grimaced, not liking what he was saying at all.

A flash of bright blue light filled the sky, followed by a rolling crack of thunder. Tem craned his neck, frowning as he looked up at the storm clouds gathering above them. He shook his head as if to clear it, then returned his gaze to Lizbeth.

“I believe that’s our cue to get moving.”

“Where are we going? There’s only . . . this . . .” She pointed at the liquid landscape just as another flash of blue lightning lit up the water, making it shimmer like cut glass.

“The waters of the dreamlands,” Tem said. “They’re whatever or wherever we want them to be.”

As he spoke, a small boat appeared on the water in front of them. It was little more than a dinghy made of weathered slats of pale gray birch wood, but it sat primly on the surface of the water, waiting for them.

“Your chariot awaits,” he said, gesturing to the boat.

“But who sent for a boat?” she asked.

“Neither of us, at least not consciously,” he replied, “but the dreamlands sensed our need and acted accordingly. Now we really do need to shake a leg. A storm is coming.”

He offered her his hand, and she took it, letting him help her into the boat. The dinghy took her weight easily, barely swaying as Tem climbed in beside her. They sat side by side on the little wooden bench seat, their arms and legs touching. It was all very intimate and Lizbeth felt herself blushing as the boat began to glide silently across the top of the water, propelled by absolutely nothing.

“Are you comfortable?” he asked.

She nodded and the dinghy picked up speed, the wind ruffling her long hair. A drop of rain fell on her nose and she wiped it away.

“So what now?” she asked.

“We stay in the dreamlands for as long as we can. It’s safer for you . . . and there are things you can only learn here.”

“Like what?” she asked, the rain beginning in earnest.

It fell in sheets so thick it was hard to believe they were made up of individual raindrops. She shivered, finally feeling cold for the first time since they’d arrived.

“Here,” Tem said, pulling an umbrella from the ether. He opened it, the slick black fabric canopy large enough to cover them both. “And that’s what I meant by learning.”

“Making an umbrella appear out of nowhere?” she asked.

“Exactly.”

As more and more rainwater fell, the water around them began to rise. Lizbeth only knew this because when she looked down past the mini-ripples made by the raindrops, she could see that a vast ocean lay beneath them. There were massive reefs made of red and purple coral and filled with swaying green kelp and multicolored fish. She gasped when she saw the silhouette of a mermaid streak past them.

“It’s so beautiful,” she murmured—then shrieked as a giant bright pink tentacle broke the surface of the water and slammed across their path, narrowly missing the front end of the dinghy.

“And dangerous,” Tem said, taking her hand and giving it a squeeze. “Even for us magicians.”

“You said that before, when we first met.”

“I did,” he agreed.

“What did you mean?”

“My brother, Thomas, and I come from a universe similar to yours, but different in many ways. The darkness that has seeped into your world overtook ours. There were some who fought back, but, in the end, it wasn’t enough.”

He sighed and scratched at his nose with a long, delicate finger.

“Unlike you, we had magic. It hadn’t been hidden away and forgotten, stripped from the very fabric of our existence,” he continued. “Not like in your world. Where I come from, we know that many different universes coexist, vibrating so closely together that they seem to rest on top of one another. For those of us who are born lucky—like Thomas and me—we can travel between the different alternate realities using the dreamlands as a conduit . . . because they connect everything and everyone together.”

“So why is my world different?” Lizbeth asked.

Tem shrugged, then shook his head. He lowered the umbrella, the rain having finally stopped.

“It’s all in the details. Major events occur that cause a divergence—like maybe there was a war and in my world one side was victorious, but in yours the other side won. Whatever happened that made magic disappear from your world? Well, it just didn’t happen in my universe.”

The boat was beginning to slow down now that they’d outrun the storm, and they drifted on the endless sea, no land in sight. There was only a blanket of fog ahead of them, a fine white mist that they seemed to be heading straight toward.

“And what I did? It brought that magic back into my world?”

“It was never wholly gone,” Tem said. “But you’ve unbound it again. You dreamed its return and you can’t put that genie back in a bottle.”

“And now what? That’s the end of The Flood?”

Tem snorted.

“Hardly. The Flood is only a manifestation of the darkness that’s been sweeping across all of the worlds. But for some reason, your universe has become a pivotal holdout. If you fall, I don’t know what will become of everything else.”

“I feel like all I’m doing is asking questions,” Lizbeth murmured, then sighed; she was tired and emotionally wrung out. She wished she could just close her eyes and sleep for a thousand years.

“That’s how you get answers,” Tem said, smiling, as the dinghy bumped into something under the water and came to a stop.

Lizbeth leaned forward, but because of the fog she couldn’t see what they’d hit.

“Well, now, it appears that we have arrived.”

She stared at him.

“Arrived where?”

“The Red Chapel,” he said, his eyes trained on something just over her shoulder.

She turned, following his gaze, and a long sloping beach made of bloodred stones seemed to magically appear out of the fog. The beach led to a rectangular patch of green grass upon which sat a tiny redwood cabin. As more of the fog lifted, it became clear to Lizbeth that this was the extent of the island: one little building on one little piece of land set adrift in the middle of an endless sea.

“We’ll be safe here. For a little while, at least,” Tem said as he hopped out of the boat. He offered her his hand, and she felt a small shock of electricity pass between them as their fingers touched. He blinked but seemed unsurprised by the intensity of the connection.

“Oh . . . okay then . . .” she murmured, blushing for what felt like the thousandth time in his presence. It was hard not to have a crush on him. He was so handsome and kind, charming and funny. He was anything and everything she would’ve wanted in a man . . . except for one niggling little detail.

He was dead.

“Don’t look so maudlin, half-caste,” he said, his voice a purr as he grabbed her other hand and swung her out of the boat.

He made her feel like a delicate flower (even though she knew she was really a gangling beanpole) by lifting her into the air and setting her down on the red stone beach as if she weighed absolutely nothing at all. The pebbles felt warm underneath her toes, smooth and round.

“Thank you,” she said, lowering her eyes, not able to meet his gaze. She may have been safely on dry land, but she felt anything but safe when Tem was nearby.

“My pleasure.” He gave her a low bow and she laughed at the courtliness of the gesture.

He was such a mix of things. Chivalrous and strong, on one hand, but also silly and awkward, too. Handsome, but all gawky elbows and knees. She liked that he was such a hodgepodge of disparate things, liked that the first time she’d met him he’d appeared to her in the guise of a dragon, all fierce and wise.

He really was a magician, really could manipulate the fabric of the dreamlands—like calling up the boat or the umbrella—and she found herself wishing that she could do the same.

“You can and you will,” he said, reading her mind.

This was something they’d been able to do from the moment they’d met. A damaged childhood spent in an institution had rendered Lizbeth mute, and so he’d communicated with her telepathically. It had been unsettling at first, but after a while she’d grown used to it—though she’d been unable to stop herself from thinking inappropriate things about him. Like how cute she thought he was.

Now it was his turn to blush.

“Sorry about that,” she said.

“You’re just stating a truth, half-caste. I am very cute,” he replied, taking her hand and leading her up the slope of the beach.

He called her “half-caste” because he said all Dream Keepers were part human and part his universe. That was why they could travel to the dreamlands and talk to Dream Walkers. It was what set them apart from the rest of their coven blood sisters and made them rare. So rare Lizbeth was the first to be born in almost fifty years—an important secret that had been closely guarded by her fellow witches in the Echo Park coven. They’d done well in protecting her from The Flood, who wanted nothing more than to capture her for her power, harnessing it to further their own ends—which included wiping the witches off the face of the Earth. But Lizbeth knew there was even more to it than that. Once they’d used her powers up, they’d destroy her. There would be no stay of execution.

It all sounded ridiculous when she thought about it, so melodramatic, but it was the truth. And it was why she was here, in the dreamlands, with Tem, safe for now—but who knew how long that would last.

“Mind your step.”

He trod upon the beach, his long legs gracefully finding them a path through the stony shore. The fog was mostly gone now and the night began to recede with it. Still, Lizbeth wasn’t sure if the sun had risen because a hazy sheen of clouds covered the sky, blocking her view of the sun and hiding the landscape in deep shadow. She turned back, expecting to see the dinghy at the edge of the beach, calmly waiting for their return, but it was gone. For some reason unknown to her, they were to stay here on this strange island in the middle of nowhere. At least until Tem magicked up a helicopter or something else ridiculous to help them leave.

“LB!”

Lizbeth’s head whipped around at the sound of the young girl’s voice, her russet hair flying in her face. She dropped Tem’s hand, pushing the hair out of her eyes.

“Ginny . . . ?” She couldn’t keep the shock from her voice as she caught sight of her friend Dev’s younger daughter, arms and legs all akimbo, as she ran toward them—and her heart lurched as she wondered if the girl was dead.

“No need to worry,” Tem said, once again reading her mind. “A living human can be brought here by creatures like you and myself. Our magic is strong enough.”

“Thank God,” she said as Ginny flung herself at Lizbeth.

She caught the small body up in her arms and hugged her tight. Ginny squirmed in the embrace.

“Too tight,” the little girl whispered—and Lizbeth released her, a sheepish smile on her face.

“What are you doing here, Ginny?” she asked, trying to seem calm and more adultlike than she felt.

“Not just me, LB. Marji, too.” Ginny’s long dark hair was loose around her shoulders, the wind catching bits of it as she spoke. The little girl unconsciously reached up and grabbed for a hank, sticking it in her mouth to suck on.

This was something Lizbeth hadn’t seen Ginny do in a long time. At seven, she was far too old for such childish things. Lizbeth realized Ginny was nervous, maybe even scared. Not something she was used to seeing in Ginny. Marji, Dev’s older child, was the more delicate one, always letting her little sister take on the role of fearless leader.

“Where?” Lizbeth asked, taking Ginny’s hand. She threw Tem a worried look.

Had he known Devandra’s daughters were here in the dreamlands?

“I knew Thomas was here,” he said. “But not the girls.”

He seemed apologetic and Lizbeth wondered why.

“C’mon, LB. It’s creepy in the house! And it’s really big inside, too,” Ginny said, getting back some of her usual vim and vigor as she dragged Lizbeth behind her. Maybe now that Lizbeth was here, she felt safer.

But before they could reach the threshold of the entrance, Marji was rushing out the door of the cabin, tears streaking her face.

“They’re all dead,” she sobbed, and threw herself at Lizbeth.

Lizbeth caught the older girl and held her tight, feeling Marji’s skinny shoulders shake with grief.

“Marji, what are you talking about? Who’s dead?” But Lizbeth couldn’t get a word out of the girl.

Instead, Ginny answered the question, looking up at Lizbeth with her solemn brown eyes.

“Oh, Marji means Mama and Gramma and the aunties.”

And then Lizbeth understood.