Dream Wars_Domination

by Leia Stone

  Everything happened so fast then that my mind was trying to play catch-up. He was suddenly on the ground, leaning over me predatorily.

  “Kit Steele will die,” he said in that deep, creepy voice. My arms were pinned between us and I was totally dead. There was no way out of this. His mouth started opening, the foul stench of rotting meat hitting me, and I thought I might pass out. Suddenly over his head, I saw a streak of steel, and then a samurai sword plunged into his skull. The sentry’s big gray eyes bulged, and then he slumped over me.

  I winced as his weight came down on my broken rib. With a grunt, Damien rolled the dead sentry off me, and I looked up to see Master Aki pulling his sword out of the sentry’s head and wiping it off on his pants.

  “More coming. Let’s run” was all he said to me before he started jogging away.

  Damn, can’t a girl get a minute to catch her breath?

  Damien lent me a hand and helped me up.

  “Thank you for saving my life,” I yelled to Master Aki’s retreating back.

  He just waved me off.

  I looked in the direction we’d come from and my eyes threatened to bug out of my head.

  There were at least a hundred ghouls making their way to us.

  “Run!” I told the others. Nox dashed out of the building holding a bag of Doritos, and I could see more chips and water peeking out of the duffel bag where he kept his explosives.

  “This puppy is about to blow,” he warned me.

  That was all I needed to know. I took off running, counting heads with my eyes. Maxine was limping but seemed okay. Then came Brisk, Santiago, his crew. We were banged up but alive.

  When we’d run about a hundred yards, Nox stopped and turned back. The front line of the hundred-ghoul march had funneled around the building and was coming right for us.

  “Bye-bye, flesh lovers,” Nox said, and pushed a red button.

  The kaboom that echoed across the Dream Wars was epic. The sight of flying ghoul parts made it even more enjoyable. But it didn’t kill everyone; it had only bought us time.

  Glancing over, I saw Damien was holding his sliced-up arm to his chest.

  “You okay?” I asked him. I was beyond freaking exhausted, and with no coffee or stims, I wasn’t sure I was going to make it much longer.

  He nodded. “I’m fine. Open a portal and let’s get the hell out of here.”

  I nodded.

  Taking a few deep, calming breaths, I allowed myself to find my center; it was getting easier and easier each time. Reaching out with my mind, I felt for the other dimension, the one of my home. Earth. Searching for that heaviness, I thought of it thinning, becoming open. Right before my eyes, I witnessed the air grow thin before a hole opened up. Our big beautiful moon was coming into view, and I nearly wept with relief. Opening the hole wider, my stomach sank as frigid seawater started to flood into the Dream Wars.

  I looked back at Damien, who, for the first time since I’d met him, looked scared.

  “Call Dawn. We can’t go home.”

  I wanted to have a nervous breakdown, but I didn’t have time.

  Seventeen

  I’d closed the portal after getting doused in seawater and realizing we were literally right over the Atlantic Ocean. Now we were running for our lives—limping for our lives, was more like it—until Dawn and some friends could come get us. My rib was pinching with every breath, Maxine had dislocated her hip, and Damien was dealing with a gnarly arm wound.

  “Did she bite you?” I ask him as we jogged. The ghouls were within eyesight of us, but far enough away that we were safe for the time being. Nox’s little explosion had headed them off, apparently.

  Damien shook his head. “Claw marks.”

  I hissed.

  Bitch. Clawing my man is my job.

  The colorful floating blobs in the sky nearly made me weep in relief. Our saviors had come.

  After piling two humans onto each of the five Galadrias, we took to the sky, just in time to see the ghouls grunt and rage below us.

  ‘Thank you, Dawn. Once again you’ve saved our lives.’

  She was quiet. ‘You smell different.’

  Oh. Yeah.

  ‘Well… this isn’t my dream body. It’s my real body.’ How in the world could she smell that?

  ‘How?’ she asked curiously.

  I held on to Damien’s waist. ‘I… opened a portal into the Dream Wars from Earth.’

  She grinned, looking back at me and chuffing. ‘I knew you could do that. I saw it.’

  Right. She and Master Aki were psychics. I’d almost forgotten. And no one decided to tell me.

  ‘Dawn, I’m exhausted and my friends are hurt. Is there any way the council would let us rest at sky home, just for a little while, until we can find out how to get back to Earth?’

  Dawn flew higher. ‘Dawn already asked and yes, Kit and humans are welcome at sky home.’

  Relief poured through me. I’d given Damien a two-minute rundown of sky home after I’d gotten back to Vancouver, but nothing could prepare anyone for the beauty and shock they were about to experience.

  As we popped above the cloud line, I heard the collective gasp from our group as the floating island came into view. After years of coming to the dark and hellish Dream Wars, breaking through the clouds to see sky home was pretty incredible.

  We couldn’t talk much since we were all riding about ten feet from each other, but Maxine met my eyes and I could see tears there.

  Once we started our descent to the island, half a dozen younglings waddled over to me.

  ‘Kit! Kit! Kit!’ they all mentally bombarded me. I slipped off Dawn slowly, trying not to breathe too deeply, and let them rub against my legs.

  “Hey, guys. These are my friends,” I told the colorful and excited younglings. Reaching out to pet each one, I asked them how they were doing.

  ‘We want to learn to fly, but our nurturer says we’re not ready,’ a blue youngling told me.

  I smiled and was going to respond when Damien plopped unconscious next to me. The sound was loud and shook the ground slightly, scaring the younglings off.

  “Damien!” I knelt down to him, feeling his head. He was burning up.

  “He’s got a fever! How can that be?” I shouted to the group, hoping they could help me.

  Dawn reached her muzzle around and sniffed his mangled arm. ‘Did breeder scratch him?’

  ‘Yes. But he wasn’t bitten.’ And bites caused neuropathy, not fevers.

  Dawn’s eyes widened. ‘Breeder nails have poison in them. Smells like this.’

  I wanted to crawl in a corner and rock myself while crying, but there was no time for that shit.

  ‘What can I do?’ I asked her frantically. Ronnie wasn’t there, and I wasn’t sure she would even know what to do with this type of injury anyway. We’d never dealt with a breeder wound before.

  Dawn motioned to the birthing pools. ‘If anything on sky home could help him, it would be the birthing pools. They help repair the nurturers after labor.’

  If that water healed Galadria hoohahs after giving birth, then maybe it could heal his arm. Suck out the poison or something.

  “Brisk, help me get him in the water!” I shouted, as I hooked my hands under Damien’s armpits and hauled him up.

  Brisk grabbed his legs and then we were walking. My ribs were jabbing my lungs with each breath, more so now that I was carrying Damien’s unconscious form, but I pushed through the pain. Once we got to the edge of the pool, I slowly lowered him inside. His back was against my chest, his head lolled over by my neck. The second his arm hit the pool, it started to fizz like soda water. My eyes flicked up to Brisk, but he shrugged.

  Dawn came to the edge of the water with Joan. Her purple coat shimmered in the moonlight as she looked down on me.

  ‘Your human will be okay. The birthing pools transmute impurities.’

  ‘Transmute impurities’ better be fancy language for ‘sucks out poison.’

  I was too
tired to think right then, so I just nodded to her. The fizzing water was a brownish red, I assumed because it was mixed with his blood. I was at a total loss on what to do. My eyelids felt heavy and my right side, where my rib was cracked, was killing me.

  Damien’s head moved then and I sighed in relief. Thank God.

  “What the hell?” he said, looking at the water around him.

  “I’m here. We’re healing your arm. The breeders have poison in their claws, apparently,” I stated from behind him.

  He looked back at me. “The last thing I remember was seeing this floating island and then… blackness. But Kit… I dreamed.”

  At his words, I froze. “What do you mean?”

  He looked misty-eyed. “I dreamed of my parents at our old lake house. They were smiling, and Jeremy was there. I… I dreamed like it was the old days.”

  That must’ve been because his real body was in the Dream Wars, and not a duplicate.

  Incredible. I hadn’t dreamed in ten years.

  “I’m coming in to patch you up, brother,” Brisk said, and we broke our locked gazes as he jumped into the water. I could see the small skin stapler in Brisk’s hand. Ouch.

  Damien’s eyes flicked to the stapler, and I saw the moment he toughened up. He clenched his jaw and stood a bit taller in the water.

  “You think all the poison is out?” I asked Brisk. After Ronnie, he was the next best thing to a medic.

  He inspected Damien’s arm and then pulled it out of the water, smelling it. “I think so, and he’s conscious, so that’s good. I don’t want him to bleed to death though.”

  Umm yeah, I don’t want that either!

  I was no longer supporting Damien in any way; he was standing on his own two feet, and had his forearm held before Brisk.

  “Do you want a one two three?” Brisk asked.

  Damien shook his head. “Just do it.”

  With gloved hands, Brisk pinched the open gash, which caused Damien to take a sharp inhale of breath, and then Brisk gave him three quick staples in rapid succession. After he did the first gash, he moved on to the other two.

  Once they were done, Damien looked white as a sheet but otherwise okay.

  “You need to rest,” he told me, and I realized my eyelids were lowered. I was swaying in the water, I was so tired. I was going to pass out without some coffee or something.

  “Here? Is that safe?” I asked him. I knew we were safe there, but sleeping in the Dream Wars sounded weird. But my body was shutting down, so I nodded.

  I shuffled out of the pool and told the team I was going to get some rest, showing them to my little den. They agreed to keep watch, and when I woke we would fly somewhere that hopefully wasn’t over the Atlantic and go home.

  As I was falling on my knees in my little cave den, I reached out to Ronnie. ‘Don’t freak out, but we’re in the Dream Wars. But we didn’t sleep. I’ll explain later. Everyone is okay.’

  Her reply was immediate. ‘You what!’

  ‘I’m tired Ronnie. Just stay safe I’m going to get some rest.’

  ‘You’re going to sleep in the Dream Wars?’ she shrieked.

  My eyelids were closed, and I was on my side breathing in and out slowly. ‘Yes. We blew up the green stuff. The FBI came and we fled into a portal I made into the Dream Wars. Stay at a hotel just in case. Bye,’ I told her, and then the heaviness of sleep took me.

  I was sucked into the most incredible lucid dream.

  My dad was there, and we were sitting at a park with trees made of cotton candy. I was aware that I was dreaming, and I was telling him I had forgotten what it was like. He was telling me that he missed my smile. Then a T-rex, wearing a stuffed flamingo hat, ran into the park and started eating the cotton candy tree, and I woke up.

  When I peeled my eyes open, I saw Damien and Santiago asleep at the mouth of the cave. It was light out, the sun was high in the sky, and the Galadrias were standing around, staring at the sleeping group of humans, like we were… aliens.

  Wiping the sleep from my eyes, I recognized Dawn in the crowd of her people.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I asked her, gesturing to the spectacle.

  She grinned, her lips peeling away from her teeth. ‘They’ve never seen sleeping humans. They thought you were all dead.’

  I snorted and stood. Some of the Galadrias backed up, as if they’d seen a ghost. ‘This is what we look like on Earth when we sleep,’ I told her.

  She nodded and the others seemed to settle.

  ‘Where’s the rest of my team?’ I asked her.

  She motioned toward where we’d come in, near the bathing pools.

  I heard Brisk shout out in joy and then the loud crashing of water. Frowning, I stepped over the sleeping boys and ran out to see what was going on. Weaving in and out of the trees, and random pregnant Galadrias, that stood around drinking from the feeding pool, I finally made it to where the noises were coming from.

  “Brisk, what are you doing!” I shrieked.

  He’d taken some old scrap of metal and wedged it at the edge of the water going into their birthing pool like a water slide. A little green youngling had flown to the top of it, and Brisk was in the water cheering him on. The council was standing at the edges of the pool, with some nurturers, watching keenly. Master Aki was sitting cross-legged, watching the display with a smile.

  Brisk met my gaze and shrugged. “They showed me the metal, and from what I could gather without being able to communicate, they wanted to know what it was for. They seem really curious about humans.”

  Okay… but it was a scrap of metal from a building, not a waterslide. I swear Brisk was a big kid.

  I looked at Joan and she nodded to me. ‘Human teaches Galadrias to lighten up. Not so serious. Younglings have fun.’

  Relief poured through me that she was okay with Brisk desecrating their serene birthing pond. Brisk counted to three, and then the green youngling whizzed down the slide on his back, chortling the entire way.

  “We gotta find a way home,” I told Brisk.

  He met my eyes and nodded. “After one more run.”

  An hour later, after Brisk, all the younglings, Damien and I had all been down the water slide, we bid the Galadrias farewell. The younglings were pulling at Brisk’s pant legs with their snouts, trying to keep him from leaving. It was utterly adorable. I felt like the humans and the Galadrias would coexist peacefully had they been native animals to our world.

  ‘Long flight,’ Dawn told me.

  I nodded, climbing on her back. We couldn’t go back to the Boston docks for multiple reasons, most of which being the breeders and the FBI, so we decided to fly in a pattern that we thought might get us to Newfoundland, Canada. It was a straight shot up from the Atlantic, in line with Boston. Assuming we were overlaid perfectly, it should work. Dawn had a keen sense of direction, and I had faith.

  ‘Goodbye, and thank you again for everything,’ I told the council.

  They nodded. ‘Peace be with you.’

  I was shocked by the phrase. It was a human one, rooted in Catholicism, if my memory served me well.

  ‘And with you,’ I said.

  Maybe good manners and well wishes crossed all worlds and languages.

  It was a nice thought.

  Eighteen

  We flew for hours, which felt like days in the muggy and dark Dream Wars. We were out of water and food, and I really needed this portal thing to work. If I opened it when we landed and saw water, I was going to cry. We’d gone a little farther than we intended, because we’d seen a giant where we wanted to land. Now we were finally making our descent, and I was trying my hardest to calm my mind and not panic. Damien’s arm looked okay, but the edges of the staples were reddening. I’d feel better once we had him on antibiotics and some painkillers. He wasn’t complaining, but I knew he must’ve been in a ton of pain.

  ‘That spot looks good.’ I pointed to an open area for landing that was surrounded by pod trees. Damien’s tracker wasn’t on him, so w
e’d just have to wing it but from my vantage point, I couldn’t see any ghouls, at least.

  Our troop of Galadrias landed gracefully and we dismounted. I spent time saying goodbye to each one, thanking them for saving us, and for the long flight. Finally, I told Dawn that I would see her soon, and said goodbye to her as well.

  ‘Small man has gift too,’ Dawn said as her eyes flicked to Master Aki.

  How does she know these things? ‘Yeah… he can see things like you do, I guess.’ I rubbed my arms uncomfortably. She nodded as if that now made perfect sense. I stroked the skin along her neck. ‘Thank you for everything, Dawn. You’ve always been there for me, and I appreciate it.’

  She nuzzled my arm, careful of my broken rib. ‘Dawn loves Kit.’

  Emotions tightened in my chest. It was the first time I’d ever heard the Galadrias even speak about love, and the first time Dawn had ever been so affectionate to me. Tears moistened my eyes. ‘Kit loves Dawn as well, and all of the Galadrias.’

  I patted her back and then stepped away from her as she lifted off to the skies with a smile. I was so deeply honored that she trusted me enough to bring me, and my friends, to her sky home.

  “Let’s get home,” Master Aki said from beside me.

  Right.

  Standing with my feet shoulder-width apart, I started taking deep breaths and focusing on the task before me. I was worried about Jeremy and Ronnie, and how the hell we were going to get Jeremy a pet lizard. But I cast all of those fears aside and focused on sensing the dimensions before me, feeling for that separation, that heaviness. Then I tucked my awareness around it.

  ‘Open,’ I thought, and pushed the feeling of something opening, the visualization of it into the space before me. I grinned as a tiny peephole opened into a heavily wooded forest. “Look out!” Nox shouted, and I spun to see a breeder running through the pod trees, coming right for me. Panic gripped me. I did not want to be stuck there.