by Hilari Bell
“Exactly,” Raven said. “And you can’t say human farmers wouldn’t make that choice.”
They probably had. Jase didn’t know much about grain silos.
“But we aren’t rats.”
When she’d said “human tools,” Jase had assumed she meant “tools humans use.” Now he wasn’t so sure.
Was Raven using a human tool too? Yet surely this afternoon, there’d been admiration as well as laughter in her eyes.
Jade decided, again, not to tell her about his dreams.
That night, when the old woman stepped out of Jase’s closet, he almost expected it.
“You should close the door behind you,” he said. “It’s rude, leaving it open like that.”
And he didn’t like the idea of an open portal to wherever she came from in his bedroom. Maybe he should put a lock on his closet door. Would that stop her?
“I warned you, boy.”
“Yeah, but since your plan is to kill all the rats, I don’t think I’ve got much to lose.”
The cold anger in her expression was more intimidating than if she’d raved at him. Again, she reminded Jase of his grandfather.
“Rats?” she asked.
“Never mind.”
If she didn’t already think of humanity as expendable vermin, he’d rather not move her thoughts in that direction. Besides, the wisps of darkness swirling in the closet behind her worried Jase more.
“What’s that?”
She smiled. It wasn’t reassuring.
“Your people called it Olmaat. Others have called it other things.”
“The monster in the woods, who eats people?”
“Near enough.”
The wisps of black mist were coalescing.
“But the Olmaat’s just an Ananut version of the bogeyman. A scary story, made up to frighten children.”
Her smile widened, and for some reason that was terrifying. “You think the Boggle Man wasn’t real?”
The darkness in his closet thickened, hardened, as if about to take shape.
“I want to wake up now,” Jase said firmly.
The old woman laughed.
Two long sooty tentacles flowed out of the closet. As they passed her, the faces of otters formed on their tips.
Jase had always thought of otters as cute and friendly. He’d never seen them snarl. Or realized how sharp their teeth were, until one of the heads snapped at him.
Jase flinched back, but it came so close, its whiskers brushed his shoulder, and he felt the warmth of its breath on his chilled skin.
He yelped and rolled out of bed, leaping for the bedroom door. The others’ bodies might be formless darkness, but those teeth looked real. The old woman’s slap had hurt. If this thing caught him . . .
He slammed the bedroom door behind him and ran for his parents’ room—long past caring about how stupid he looked running from a dream. But as he ran, the forest grew out of the walls beside him, and the carpet turned to dirt and pine needles under his feet. He was lost before he’d taken a dozen strides.
“Wake up, wake up,” he chanted under his breath. But his mind didn’t oblige him.
The woods were all too real, stones and broken branches bruising the soles of his bare feet. It had rained here, recently. Cold droplets fell from the branches he shoved aside, and through the fresh scent of rain he could smell the thing behind him; dead fish, dead flesh, and something acrid like the stench of burning plastic.
Jase tripped and fell to his knees. One felt like it hit a rock, and pain lanced up his leg, but he didn’t dare stop. The thrashing sound of something pushing through the trees behind him was getting louder.
He flung himself through the next grove and almost ran into a rock wall before he saw it. Were they changing the terrain, trying to trap him?
Jase scrambled along the base of the rocky abutment—it was about forty feet high, and far too steep to climb. The uneven ground at its base, studded with boulders, slowed him down, but Jase followed the wall. If he could find a place to climb up, maybe it would put him out of the thing’s reach. Maybe.
“Wake up, wake up!”
The problem was, Jase was no longer certain he was dreaming. His breath rasped in his lungs, and blood had glued the fabric of his pajamas to his skinned knee. He didn’t dare to disbelieve.
Running away wasn’t working. He needed a weapon.
Jase started to search for one as he ran. A thick branch, or even a rock. But all the large branches he saw were attached to trees, and all the rocks large enough to use were too big to lift.
He tried once more to wake up, to get back to the world where his real body slept, and felt bed sheets slide over his skin, and a distant jolt, as if he’d fallen out of bed.
He tried to move that body, back in the real world, down the hall to his parents’ room—surely they could wake him.
But while he concentrated on his sleeping body the cliff beside him vanished, leaving him in a maze of trees, and the monster gained on him as he thrashed his way back to the relatively clear space near the rock wall. If it took him in the trees, he wouldn’t stand a chance.
He didn’t stand a chance no matter where it took him, unless he could find something to use as a weapon!
Jase started grabbing the larger branches as he ran past trees, trying to break one off, but the only branches that broke were too flimsy to use as a club.
He was so busy searching for a weapon that he almost missed the narrow gap in the rock, but a faint gleam from deep in the crevice caught his eye, and he stumbled to a stop and turned back to look.
He couldn’t see much in the dim light, but the cavern went back a little way, and the opening was so narrow he could barely squeeze through. It might stop the monster. And even if it didn’t, he couldn’t run forever.
Jase wiggled into the cave more by touch than by sight, moving so fast it left bruises on his back and hips. After the first few feet, it widened into a space that might be the size of a closet, though the ceiling was lower.
The glow that had lured him in came from a spear, thrust tip down into the floor and shimmering with pale blue light.
Jase wrapped his hands around the smooth wooden shaft and pulled. Only after it was in his hands did Excalibur and hope I’m worthy flash through his mind.
Either he was worthy, or the rules were different for spears.
Rock scraped and cracked outside the cave’s entrance, and the husky grunts of the monster’s breath were audible even over the sound of his own gasping.
The spear still glowed, giving just enough light for Jase to see a long, otter-faced arm questing into the cave. Its eyes narrowed when it saw him, and it emitted a snarling hiss. Then it darted right at him.
Jase gripped the spear and sliced at it. He missed by several inches, but the face, on its long snaky neck, zigged up to avoid the point and rapped itself on the low ceiling.
It squeaked and blinked rapidly.
Jase’s giggle was half hysteria and half sheer terror, but the fact that the thing could be hurt steadied him.
The otter face glared and lunged again. This time Jase thrust the spear, not at the weaving head, but at the thick furry arm that was pinned in place by the narrow crevice of the entrance.
The spear sank into flesh, maybe three inches deep.
The monster’s furious roar shattered bits of rock off the ceiling, shattered the darkness, shattered the world.
Jase woke up, sitting in the Tesla, in the dark garage in his own home. Arctic twilight glowed through the windows. Plenty of light. Glorious light. He would never opaque his windows again.
His hands were wrapped around the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles were white. One of his knees was bleeding.
Chapter 7
“Jehoshaphat!” Raven stared at him in astonishment. “You’re a dreamer.”
Jase might be stupid, but he wasn’t that stupid. The first thing he’d done, when he came out of school that afternoon and found Raven waiting by hi
s car, was tell her all about his dreams.
“What does that mean?”
He’d been trying all day to convince himself that he’d picked up the ragged gash on his knee and the bruises on his body sleepwalking down to the garage—but he didn’t believe it. That dream had been too real, too painful, to be only a dream.
“It wasn’t just a dream,” he added. “Was it?” He wished with all his heart that she’d say yes.
“Yes,” said Raven. “But there are different kinds of dreams. This is the part where you really should have paid attention when your grandfather talked about your heritage. You say he’s a shaman. I wonder if the spirit walks too. It can run in families.”
“Spirit walking.” Jase might not have paid attention to his grandfather, but his social studies teacher had done a whole semester on Alaska Native history and traditions two years ago. “You mean the kind of dreams a shaman has, when he walks in the spirit world?”
“Exactly. But what they call the Spirit World is what one of your scientists might call an interdimensional interface.”
“So”—Jase groped for some middle ground between Native spirituality and physics—“so when I’m dreaming, I’m in your world? Your dimension?”
“Not in it,” said Raven. “Your body is, apparently, running around your house tripping on things. And it sounds like you have some sense of it. I’ve heard that human dream walkers could do that, split their consciousness. But while most of your body is in this world, your mind, and at least some part of your physicality, is manifesting in the Spirit World. And it’s not ‘my dimension,’” she added. “That’s not possible for humans. I’m talking about a . . . a between place, where our two realities overlap.”
“How come I can’t exist in your dimension and you can exist in mine?”
“It’s because we’re shifters,” Raven told him. “We can materialize bodies pretty much anywhere our consciousness can go. As much of them, or as little, as we want. When your club went—”
“It was a putter.”
“Whatever it was, it went right through Otter Woman, and then she manifested enough to slap you. That took some very deft manipulation on her part, but there’s no reason she couldn’t do it again, and her allies can do it too. This spirit walking, with the enemies you have, it’s really dangerous.”
“Gee.” Jase cupped one hand around his bandaged knee. The damage was invisible under his jeans, but it still throbbed. “Just because they can hurt me and I can’t even touch them, you think that’s . . . Hey, what about the Olmaat? I hurt him with my spear. I know I did! Is he different from the others?”
“He is different,” said Raven slowly. “But that’s not why you could hurt him. I think that spear is something from your world that you brought into the Spirit World with you.”
“I’ve never seen that spear before in my life,” Jase said. Even if it had been in some museum showcase, the spear had a polished, elegant deadliness he couldn’t have forgotten.
“Oh, it’s not a spear in this world,” said Raven. “It’s something else, which your dreaming mind shaped into a weapon—probably because you needed one so badly.”
“How could I do that? Could I do it with other weapons?”
Jase had never been a gun person, but a pistol would have been very useful in that cave. And if it was a dream weapon, he should be able to reset the DNA trigger lock so he could fire it.
“No, you can’t,” said Raven, crushing his dawning hope that he’d found a way to defend himself. “I’m afraid I’m the one who made that spear possible.”
“You made the spear? How did you know I’d need it?”
“It’s not a spear,” she repeated. “Not here. Think a minute. It’s something that could follow you into the Spirit World. It has to be bound to you on many levels—magically, almost a part of you. A thing that has some aspect that isn’t entirely of this dimension. And it’s something you had to run through the woods and crawl into a cave to reach.”
“I get it.” Jase gazed wonderingly at his car’s control panel. “I got it as soon as you said it had to be bound to me. The spear isn’t Excalibur. It’s my Tesla. But . . . does that mean I have to sleep in the garage from now on?”
There was no way he could sleep in the Tesla’s bucket seats, no matter how comfortably they conformed. And sleeping in the garage would be impossible to explain to his parents.
“A better strategy would be to learn to control your dreams, so you don’t go spirit walking all the time,” said Raven dryly. “Since it doesn’t sound like you’re much good with a spear.”
“So how do I do that?” Jase asked.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “The way humans access the interface, that’s a human thing. You’ll have to deal with it in human ways. But the way you said you were hiding from her search before, I think that means you can do it. And you’d better learn quickly. The others may have lost you, but now, in your dreams, Otter Woman can reach you anywhere you go.”
The thought sent a chill down Jase’s spine—and he was scared enough already.
“Who could teach me how to control my dreams?”
“You know the answer to that,” Raven said. “I’ll meet you in Valdez, after you’ve talked to him, and we can heal the sea then.”
“Gramps won’t even speak to me,” Jase protested. “Not unless I admit that my father was totally wrong and he was right. About everything!”
“Was he?” Raven asked curiously. “Right about everything seems like a lot to ask.”
“How would I know? It’s a complicated issue, and it deals with laws, and stock sales, and all kinds of stuff I don’t care about. I do care about my family. And Gramps is part of it,” he added grimly. “Whether he admits it or not.”
“Tell him that,” Raven suggested. “Maybe he’ll talk to you then. Because until you learn to control them, your dreams are going to be dangerous. And I mean that in a real, physical sense.”
***
Jase did sleep in the garage that night, waiting till his parents had gone to bed and then dragging several flat sofa pillows and a blanket down to cushion the concrete floor. When his alarm dragged him out of sleep, at an absurdly early hour, he had a vague memory of crouching in the cave, his shining spear clutched in his hands.
If anything had troubled him there, he had no memory of it.
***
He picked Mr. Hillyard up at 6 a.m.—grateful, for once, for the early start. If he made very good time after he dropped off his client, Jase could catch the last water shuttle and reach his grandfather’s home by 10 p.m. In winter, by that time, it would have been dark for hours and freezing cold, which might have encouraged his grandfather to let him in. In the slanting brilliant sunlight of the summer nights, with a resort full of rooms a twenty-minute hike away that wasn’t as likely, but it couldn’t hurt to try. In his grandfather’s house, under a shaman’s protection, maybe he could sleep in a real bed tonight—pillows on concrete left a lot to be desired.
Mr. Hillyard looked more relaxed now that his business was done, though he still had his com board out. They’d been driving for several hours before he shut it down, and looked out the window at the meandering, gravel-bedded river and the white-capped peaks beyond.
“I’ll have to come back here sometime for pleasure,” he said. “This isn’t what I expected.”
“What did you expect?” Jase asked. When the client wanted to chat, you chatted.
“I’d heard that the Alcan Highway was nothing but corridors of trees, trees, and more trees.”
“Some of the part that runs through Canada is.” Jase had driven there too, carrying documents that needed a physical signature, and transportation more discreet than a post office staffed by the signer’s brother-in-law.
“But here in Alaska it’s almost all open,” he went on. “There are stretches where all you see are trees, but the view comes back pretty quickly.”
“And then it’s spectacular,” Mr. Hillyard mur
mured.
The taiga’s appearance hadn’t changed, but now that Jase knew how much life seethed through it, it didn’t seem ugly anymore. He could hardly tell Mr. Hillyard that.
“So, ah, was this a good trip for you?”
“Oh, yes. Your father’s an excellent lawyer. I paid more than I wanted to, but not outrageously. And my integrated community will have a lot less environmental impact than the condos my competitor was planning, so it will be better for the planet too.”
“That’s good,” said Jase, with a sincerity he wouldn’t have felt little more than a week ago, when he and Mr. Hillyard had met. “I’m sorry you had to pay more.”
“I’m not,” said Mr. Hillyard. “Oh, I’d like to have paid a bit less. But the price you’re willing to pay is a measure of the value you’re buying. And I value what I bought.”
Jase frowned. “I thought . . . Doesn’t a business always want to pay as little as possible?”
“On one level, yes,” the client said. “But unless you’re being pretty stupid when you research your investments, you get what you pay for—and one way or another, you pay for what you get! When I was just starting out I picked up an old mall, in what I thought was a fantastic deal. I figured I’d just clean it up a bit and turn it around. Make a huge profit. Turns out it had antiquated energy systems, and some of them were leaking. A quarter-million dollars in rebuilding and environmental impact fees. I was lucky to break even on the project.”