by Jeanne Rose
She’d found all that she’d longed for in her Prince of Air and Darkness, and she had no intention of losing her sense of wonder – or him – ever.
HEART OF DREAMS
Jeanne Rose
SHE MET HIM IN A DREAM
Mara Fitzgerald was haunted by erotic nightmares, images of Luke Naha that left her breathless and wanting. It was the same for Luke, only he knew the danger of their shared dreams and memories of the past.
Copyright © 2011 by Patricia Pinianski & Linda Sweeney
HEART OF DREAMS
was originally print-published by a traditional publishing house
Other digital novels now available from Jeanne Rose
originally print-published
THE PRINCE OF AIR & DARKNESS
GOODNIGHT, MY LOVE
HEART OF DREAMS
Jeanne Rose
PROLOGUE
AN INVASION OF LIGHT made her stir and squeeze her lids tight. She turned her head to the side to deny it power, but the light followed as if it were inside her skull . . . insistent . . . compelling.
Begrudgingly giving up the fight, she opened her eyes. The brilliance of the morning almost blinded her, made her shrink back into herself and pull her covering over her head. A moment passed before she realized what she had seen. Confusion gripped her and she forced herself to peek out from her striped tent.
This was not possible.
She lay on the earthen floor of a large canyon. Stones bit into her back and a howling wind swept over her body, yet she hardly felt either, as if earth and elements were figments of her imagination. An eerie foreboding made her want to swallow and to take a deep breath. Her throat was too parched; her tongue clung to the roof of her dry mouth. She could hardly speak.
“Good Lord, where am I?”
More important, how had she gotten there when she’d fallen asleep in a bed?
A rush of adrenaline sluiced through her as she jumped to her feet. Her head went light and her pulse pounded so hard she thought it might split her in two. The striped bed sheet was the only barrier between her and the environment. Nude beneath the thin material, she wrapped the sheet more tightly around her like a huge enveloping cape and peered out of the narrow slit before her eyes.
In the distance, the sun rising over a mountain top blazed color into the dry earth as if with a fiery paintbrush. Closer by were tangles of chamisa and stark-looking juniper bushes. And midway between the majestic blue peaks and the crimson earth on which she stood, a single thin finger of green meadow pointed to ancient rock formations – deep red cliffs balancing huge boulders.
She tried not to panic.
“Hello!” she shouted. “Is anyone there?”
The words sang along the cliffs where they mutated and returned as unearthly whispers that surrounded her and brushed her insides with an unsettling certainty. Her stomach knotted with panic as the silence grew.
No answer.
She was alone.
Frightened, she drew the sheet closer against the stiff wind that threatened to deprive her of her only protection. The material fluttered in sharp bursts as the air caught and plucked at it like a mischievous child. Her fingers bunched and tightened until they ached.
She scanned the area.
Desolate . . . forbidding . . . ghostly . . . rough cut rocks weathered and wrinkled, successive layers striated in varying shades of red-brown . . . the ends of the earth . . . unfit for human habitation.
But wait. A tiny figure shimmered in the distance, atop a flat, blood-red mesa.
Before she even thought to move, her legs impelled her forward. The hard-packed earth and stones grazed her bare feet, the contact featherlike. Around her, translucent canyon walls zoomed by faster and faster until they were nothing more than a blur. Her heavy breath melded with the wind and resonated through her head. The tiny figure multiplied in size until she could identify a woman sitting cross-legged, face passive as if closed in sleep, wild black hair whipping out around a brightly colored torso. And yet the woman seemed unreal somehow.
Above, the sky shifted. Gray and purple clouds rolled in, swallowing the sun. Followed by the crash of thunder, a flash of lightning struck rock behind the apparition whose bronzed features were clearly Indian and whose dark eyes opened wide, reflecting horror.
“Who are you?” the Indian woman shouted, hollow voice riding on the wind.
Who . . . ?
The question paralyzed her, and yet, somehow, she had already made her way to the top of the mesa. Through the slit in her protective cloak of a sheet, she stared at the woman who seemed real and yet not. Her chest heaved and she tried to speak – to answer – but no words would come.
Hair flying, features distorted, the Indian rushed forward, hands raised in a gesture of self-protection. “Who are you? What is your name?”
She moved her mouth but made no sound.
She couldn’t speak, couldn’t answer.
She did not know.
Lightning split both sky and earth. The wind howled and tried to rip the sheet from her clawed fingers. The woman screeched at her, demanding her name over and over. A sudden terror made her back away from the threatening apparition.
Knowing her name would save her . . . yet having no answer.
Panicked, she turned to run from the banshee, only to be enveloped by a waiting void.
CHAPTER ONE
“A-AH!” MARA FITZGERALD FLEW upward in bed, her limbs tangled in the sheet, her skin covered in a cold sweat. Sunlight spilled into the room. Her heartbeat was frenzied. Another bizarre nightmare, different than the others.
Worse.
Not knowing her own name made her feel as if she were losing her identity.
She clutched the sheet around her and vaulted out of bed as if removal from the scene of her dream would dissipate the fear that was making her pulse thud in jagged strokes. But the eerie images wouldn’t be vanquished. The setting of the nightmare was familiar somehow . . .
Her knees scarcely supporting her, Mara backed out of the bedroom and into the shadows of the hallway. Cool adobe met her bare shoulders, and she tilted her head back against the wall. She forced herself to relax, to breathe normally. Her mouth and throat were dry, as in the dream.
Her eyes adjusting to the dimness, Mara became aware of the painting on the opposite wall. Good Lord, that was it. Frantic to get a better look, she switched on the track lighting.
Lightning Over Red Mesa. Lucas Naha. The piece she’d bought years before while still working in the San Francisco gallery. Though small, the painting and its haunting beauty cast a powerful spell. That’s why she’d hung it here in the narrow hall where she could admire it at will, rather than in a room where she couldn’t avoid it.
Mara took in every detail of the painting from the distant mountains shrouded in gray and purple clouds to the desolate canyon floor. Her eyes were drawn to the streak of lightning that connected the sky to the broad red mesa upon which sat a tiny, barely discernable figure.
Relief flowed through her. This nightmare, at least, had an explanation. Lucas Naha had been making her new job as manager of Sol Goldstein’s Santa Fe gallery difficult. In turn, the problem with the artist had produced her anxiety-ridden dream.
Only one thing still bothered her . . .
Why hadn’t she known who she was?
FEAR CLUTCHED ISABEL Joshevama’s throat as she came out of her self-induced trance. Her sightless eyes opened to a wall of light and shadow, but she could still see her surroundings as vividly as she had viewed them for seven decades before losing her sight. Every stone, every crevice, every shade of red of this mesa was burned into her memory.
She saw every detail when she went dream-seeking. She wasn’t blind in her visions.
Not any more than she was oblivious to danger.
For now the unknown had invaded, menaced, was perhaps endangering what remained of this fragile lifetime. She stirred, fully aware of her own mortality.
“
You are with me?” asked her companion.
Isabel reached out and grabbed Rebecca Harvier’s arm. “I am no longer safe.”
“What did you see?”
“A stranger swathed in striped material.”
“This stranger threatened you?”
“I asked for a name, but the specter was clever and would not answer. It deliberately hid from me, covered itself from head to foot so I could not see its face.” Nor even make out its sex. She tightened her hold on the woman who had become her eyes in her earthbound world. “I demanded that it answer me.” With all the power of a finished person, a wise woman of the pueblo. “But it stayed silent, backed away, then disappeared.” She took a deep breath. “Rebecca, someone has entered my dreaming place, someone with enough power to withstand me.”
“An ancient one?”
“Surely not, or the spirit would have identified itself.”
“Charlie Mahooty?” Rebecca whispered, sounding horrified.
A chill shot through Isabel at the mention of a power-monger who meant their people ill. For once, she could not answer.
MARA ENTERED THE SMALL COURTYARD of Aspen Plaza, named for the old tree at its heart. A warm summer breeze swirled her brown hair around her shoulders as it gave voice to the aspen’s shimmering foliage. The whisper of wind caught and fluttered the leaves’ broad surfaces. She shivered, feeling as if the wind had a message meant for her alone.
A sense of something dark and frightening nudged her awareness. She felt wary and on edge – the after-effects of the dream.
She tried to chase away the unsettling feelings, tried to tell herself she’d fallen under the spell of the dancing ground of the sun, New Mexico, with all the strange beliefs of its three cultures – Anglo, Hispanic and Indian.
Mara drew herself together as she traversed the flagstone path. Back in San Francisco, while first attending art school, then working toward a graduate degree in art therapy, she’d been employed as the owner’s assistant at the Sol Goldstein Gallery. Now, after working six years as an art therapist – a profession that combined art and psychology by using art materials to work with mental patients – she was back in the gallery business, this time as the new manager of Sol’s Santa Fe branch.
The gallery was located on East Palace Avenue, barely a block off the main square. Aspen Plaza was part of a trazo, a Spanish-colonial town pattern of buildings with interior courtyards and common walls which formed a continuous facade along the street. The successful, upscale establishment filled the entire first floor of the north wing.
Mara crossed under the territorial-style portal and left the morning’s warmth for the coolness of the gallery. The central room was bright and inviting with its red tile floor and small seating area around a whitewashed corner kiva fireplace. Paintings and prints graced the walls, and weavings and pottery decorated small tables and several niches built into the adobe.
Strangely enough, the place was deserted. Mara was wondering where Felice Paquin had gone when her exotic-featured assistant, a woman whose heritage included all three cultures, suddenly shot up from behind the reception desk.
Mara jumped and gave a squeak of surprise.
“Hey, I didn’t mean to scare you.” Smiling, Felice tossed her dark hair from her face. “I was checking the phone connection under the desk.”
Feeling foolish, Mara said, “I’m just on edge.”
“Haven’t shut off the hard-driving, big city attitude, huh?”
“I guess. I had a nightmare last night.”
Not one of the terrifying dreams she’d had starting as child and continuing into young adulthood. The vivid chases had made her wake up screaming, had led her to invest herself in a quest for understanding, and eventually had prompted her to seek a profession that combined creative expression with psychology.
Nor had this dream been another macabre nightmare of dead bodies. Those dreams had begun invading her nights after the suicide of a mental patient she’d been treating. Guilt-ridden and devastated, she’d burned out on her job after barely a half dozen years as an art therapist. That’s when she’d gone to Sol to ask for her old gallery job back.
But this morning’s dream had been frightening in its own way, and, for a moment, Mara couldn’t help wondering if she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
She told Felice, “I dreamed I was in one of Lucas Naha’s paintings.”
The pretty brunette snorted. “No wonder, after all the trouble we’ve been having with that dork.”
Mara smiled wryly. Though she was fully aware that some artists were difficult, often because they’d traveled a rough road to success, she did get annoyed when someone got too full of himself. But then, rather than limit art to personal fulfillment and profit, she’d wanted to use art to heal.
Naha’s work was overdue, and his nervous agent hadn’t been able to hurry the man, not even with warnings of a lawsuit or the possibility of his being replaced by another artist as Goldstein’s main draw. The gallery had scheduled and advertised a Lucas Naha opening to take place the following week, now with no assurance of having anything to sell.
Walking back to the storeroom together, the two women passed Sundog, a huge canvas of bigger-than-life New Mexico landscape.
Distant mountains loomed over a small village above which the clouds were split by a sundog – a spray of brilliant light that gave the illusion of drawing water and linked land to the sky.
A land and sky that suddenly seemed familiar, Mara realized, catching her breath as she stopped to stare.
“You’ve heard about the mysticism surrounding Naha’s paintings, haven’t you?” Felice asked.
Chills shot up Mara’s spine. “Mysticism?”
Felice pointed at the tiny figure near the village, the only human in the landscape. “Many collectors believe these small beings have a life of their own. Supposedly, they move around, at times occupying different parts of the canvas.”
And might they also be able to enter one’s dreams? Mara wondered with another thrill.
“The Kisi clan are called ‘the cursed ones’ by other Southwestern Indians,” Felice went on. “And they have a reputation for sorcery like the Yaquis.”
“You mean they’re considered to be evil?”
“Of course not. Sorcery can be either evil or good, depending on the purpose of the person who uses it. And the Kisi are said to be cursed by something that happened in the past.”
Taking a better look at Sundog, Mara noted the little figure was in the same place it always had been. Earthy, yet otherworldly in their near-magical realism, Naha’s paintings never failed to move her, though she’d be damned if she’d allow them to haunt her.
Not any more than she would let a touchy artist make her job more difficult than it was.
Frustration and anxiety had made her abandon her career as an art therapist, a profession in which she’d invested so much of herself. This job could never be so stressful as the last; she’d work things out, even if she personally had to wring a couple more paintings out of Naha.
At least a life wasn’t hanging in the balance. Mara still remembered every detail of the last session she’d had with a suicidal patient. He’d wanted her to enter his dreams and rescue him from a monster. She’d told him to draw or paint the monster to get it out of his system and had assured him no one could enter someone else’s dreams . . .
Again, the chills. Mara didn’t particularly want to believe in mysticism, much less sorcery.
Still. Lucas Naha had created imagery of such power, it had entered her subconscious, could affect her even while she slept. Mara realized how much she deeply longed to meet an artist who could do that. Maybe talking to Naha could give her some insight into her terrible dreams, help her figure out what made her susceptible to them in the first place.
Once more, she played over the details of her nightmare, the Indian woman who had seemed so alive, the landscape that had seemed so familiar . . .
And determined t
o face them while awake.
THE COUNTRY SEVENTY MILES northwest of Santa Fe had a wild and desolate air befitting land that had belonged to Indians for centuries. Mara was instantly drawn to the landscape the same way she had been attracted to Naha’s paintings, almost as if she had some personal connection to the place.
Which confused her. And made her apprehensive.
Or else she was scared of meeting the artist, who had a difficult, anti-social reputation. But as an art therapist in a city hospital in-patient unit, Mara had dealt with difficult administrators, demanding psychiatrists and paranoid schizophrenics who thought they were messiahs destined to lead the earth into Armageddon. Surely a reclusive artist with mystical leanings and restless figures was small potatoes.
She would merely ask Naha a few questions, remind him firmly, if diplomatically, of his contract with the gallery . . . but, mainly, assuage her curiosity and lay her own fears to rest. In the same way that patients overcame anxieties by representing them and talking about them as art, she would face the man whose imagery had played a leading role in her nightmare, recognize him for the talented if ordinary person he had to be, and banish him and his paintings from any further late night horror shows.
Feeling more confident over her impetuous decision to visit the Kisi reservation that very afternoon, Mara flicked on the car’s cruise control, then sat back to survey the scenery. She seemed to be alone on the road that wound its way among stark red foothills. Beyond stood compelling blue-gray mountains, once the home of the ancient Anazasi. The cliff-dwelling Native Americans had built their villages on rocky precipices a thousand years before the Spanish arrived in North America.