Dream Keeper

by Amber R. Duell

  “I’ve been wondering.” I pressed my lips together. It wasn’t something I could just say. “When we were shopping and... things happened, why did you tell that girl to wake up?”

  The muscles in his jaw flexed. “She was nodding off before that, so I guess I just assumed.”

  “But to do what she did, she would need to be in REM sleep, and that doesn’t happen until you’ve been asleep about ninety minutes.” The cashier nodded off but was awake minutes before. That fact bothered me since. I refused to let the thought form before now because if I thought about it, I would be forced to think that something else was going on. Something strange and unexplainable. But that’s exactly what was happening.

  He nodded. “I see you’re a sleep expert.”

  “I’ve done a little research,” I said flatly.

  He shrugged, sobering. “I don’t know why I said that to her.”

  What about the back room was on the tip of my tongue, but I wasn’t brave enough to hear him deny the truth outright. First, I had some questions for the Sandman. Mainly, if there was any validity to my thoughts. Then, then, I would corner Ben and ask him what he knew.

  “How was the rest of work?” I asked to change the subject.

  “Did you know there are twenty-seven shades of blue you can order furniture in?”

  I cocked an eyebrow. “That boring, huh?”

  “Of course. You weren’t there,” he bantered, but his expression shuttered. He stared out across the brightly lit area, his gaze hyper-focused as he scanned our surroundings. “How was not working?”

  “Oh, you know.” My hair floated around my face, pieces drifting into Ben’s personal space. I gathered it into one hand and held it to the side, away from him. “Apparently we’re having a sleepover at Emery’s tonight, so the fun never ends.”

  He looked at me then. A look that knew everything I didn’t say out loud. A look that said it was okay that I didn’t mean it when I said it would be fun. One that said it was okay if I needed to break a little bit. And maybe I did, or maybe I had to do the impossible and swallow my pride. If I asked my mother to take me back to a doctor, she would. But for that brief second beside him, it didn’t feel like I was cracking around the edges.

  It drew me closer, the space between us shrinking. I needed that feeling. I needed it like I needed air in my lungs. The outsides of our thighs pressed together. Ben inhaled through parted lips, his eyes glowing as they watched my lips. Before I could think about what I was doing, I stretched up to kiss him. The world exploded in a shower of stars, the Ferris wheel no longer the only thing making me soar. It was everything. Every promise, every hope, every dream.

  Ben’s body stiffened, and I froze. What was I doing? It was my first kiss, and it was with someone I barely knew. It didn’t matter that he felt familiar. He was little more than a stranger. I eased back, but his fingers grazed my jaw. He leaned into me, caressing my lips with his own. A small, almost pained, groan escaped him, and he broke away.

  I gasped at the sudden loss of contact. Something tugged deep in my chest, tightening. My mind scrambled to make sense of what just happened. I kissed him. He kissed me back. It was right and wrong and everything between.

  “Sorry,” I breathed. “I’m an idiot.”

  Ben ran his middle finger over his bottom lip. “Don’t be sorry,” he said, his voice slightly husky.

  I rubbed my face and groaned. There couldn’t be a worse place than a carnival ride for me to make the first move. How much longer would I be trapped?

  “Hey.” He reached out and flicked my side-swept bangs back in place. “I mean it.”

  I scooted as far away from him as the bench allowed. “Sure.”

  We stayed that way—me squished in the corner and Ben staring down at nothing in particular—until the worker unlocked the bar imprisoning us. I bolted off the platform. My friends gaped, and I shoved my way out the exit. “I’m going to find the bathroom,” I shouted, and didn’t stop running until they were out of sight.

  “Nora,” Ben called after me. “Nora, wait! Please.”

  I ducked behind the game tents and gulped the sweet-scented air. “Stupid, stupid, stupid.” I groaned. In all my life, of all the idiotic things I’d done, this was the worst. And Ben... He had no idea what he was getting into with someone like me. Unless he knew exactly what he was getting because he saw the same things I did. The Sandman hadn’t known him but there was no denying what happened earlier today.

  The Sandman. How was I going to tell him about what happened? I couldn’t hide anything from him when he read my dreams. A kiss—my first kiss—would definitely show up. Especially when it was with someone I was maybe into, and when that someone was as hot as Ben was. The Sandman shouldn’t care though. Even if he did, it shouldn’t matter, but guilt nibbled at my insides anyway.

  “Hello, Dream Keeper.”

  The voice froze me in place. It was louder than before, more direct and less frenzied. “You’re not real,” I whispered, swallowing.

  “Of course, I am.” The shadows shifted. A flash of black. A speck of gold. The same thing I saw in the back room. “Don’t play hard to get, my little Sun-Kissed one. Give me what I seek.”

  “You’re. Not. Real,” I insisted. Except Ben heard you too. My eye twitched.

  “There are two people who would beg to differ. Alas, you cannot ask them now, can you?”

  I turned my back to the shadow and stepped toward the crowd. I wasn’t going to stand there and let a bodiless voice twist the knife in my stomach. The deaths weren’t jokes. Those were real, tangible things. It wasn’t a hazy truth like the Sandman. Everyone acknowledged them, their loved ones living with the fresh scars of loss. I blinked against an imagined splatter of red.

  “Your Sandman knows,” the voice continued as if reading my mind. “He knows many things, Dream Keeper. Many things you do not. Dangerous things. Dark things. Things that will make you regret and things that will make you hate. Things you don’t want to know but things you should. Things, things. Many things. Things that tie us together, little Keeper.”

  My head tilted back to watch the shadow from the corner of my eye. My heart threatened to explode from my chest. What did he know? What didn’t I know? And why was he calling me a Dream Keeper?

  “Let’s make a deal, shall we?” The shadow pressed forward into the hazy outline of a man. “If you give me the dream, now, tonight, then I promise not to torment anyone else you’re fond of.”

  I didn’t know who—what—he was, if he was anything, but the offer made my entire body itch. Torment. I cringed. That was exactly what happened in the mall. The terror on the cashier’s face was more real than anything. My stomach bottomed out. The shadowy-figure wasn’t simply recapping the deaths. He was the reason for them. I shook my head to clear away the ridiculous, impossible thoughts, but they refused to go. My pulse throbbed through my body, and I dove back into the masses to find my friends.

  7

  The Sandman

  The pewter-grey sky of the Nightmare Realm cast everything in long, twisting shadows. I tried to ignore the ones that moved and focused instead on the miles of blackness that stretched out before me on the other side of the barrier. The wall gave beneath my hand, wobbling across the entrance to the Day World. A thousand flecks of sand sputtered along the glimmering wall before going dull. Thousands more had already lost their magic while others struggled to hold the line. Only a few patches remained solid and titanium strong, mainly where it clung to the fabric of the Nightmare Realm. I would have thought the edges would fail first—especially since I just fixed this portion two nights ago.

  I drew in a deep breath and squinted at the barrier. If it was fading this quickly, the Weaver was regaining his strength faster than I realized. I would need to double the thickness. Triple it. And I still had to find him. In all the years I’d known him, the Weaver was never this hard to locate.

  Baku paced behind me, his claws clicking on the stony ground. “You kno
w,” I said over my shoulder. “If there are any nightmares lurking nearby, they’re not going to come out if they see you.”

  Baku twisted his head to stare at me and turned for another trek across the wasteland.

  I smirked. “You would probably get a quicker meal if you hid until someone got it in their mind to attack me.”

  Baku brushed against the back of my legs, knocking me forward a step.

  “Fine, fine.” I laughed. “It was just a suggestion.”

  I reached into the leather satchel hanging at my hip and scooped up two handfuls of sand. I blew it out in front of me, and the grains froze in a sheet. Setting my fingertips against it, I pressed it into the existing barrier and smoothed it down with my palms. The magic absorbed it, drinking it in, until the area glowed blue, then faded to nothing but a mere shimmer.

  Inch by inch the barrier shone with new power. I worked my way down, silently grateful Nora was sleeping at her friend’s house tonight. She would be later than usual, if she came at all. It was already past three in the morning so when she finally closed her eyes, she might be too tired to dream.

  Still, my gut twisted at the possibility of not seeing her. She never shut me out on purpose, but what if tonight was different? What if our kiss was too much and she couldn’t stand the thought of seeing me? She ran off so fast I wasn’t sure what to think.

  I paused to rub the back of my hand over my tingling lips. When she kissed me, the cord between us had thrashed greedily. It was impossible she hadn’t felt it too. My only hope was that she hadn’t understood, or had written it off as nerves. A lump formed in my throat.

  Besides, it wasn’t our kiss.

  It was her kiss with Ben. Even if she did sense similarities between Ben and me, she would never believe it. Just like she would never have kissed me as my true self—it was probably my fault. I set up the rules. I lied. I omitted and pretended.

  It was definitely my fault.

  But my world had unfurled on the Ferris wheel. The kiss was everything I never knew I was missing and more. It would be wrong to coax her into talking about it tonight when she thought I was a neutral third party, but damn it, I needed to know where her thoughts were.

  I would have to tell her the truth soon anyway, especially if I planned to continue Day Walking. Truthfully, the best thing to do was to stop going; I wasn’t able to stop the Weaver from killing Randy or the girl in the shop, anyway. He had occupied the shadows at the edge of the carnival, lingering outside the lights too. I wasn’t doing anything but complicating my friendship with the girl that held the key to my enemy’s cage. That’s all she could ever be to me. All that was fair. But it was a crushing reality. A pebble here, a boulder there, building up over the last year, but now it felt like a rock slide, on the brink of an avalanche.

  I sighed and scanned my work again. The barrier was as clear as it was around the beach now and just as sturdy. Nothing was slipping out.

  “That should hold until I recharge,” I said to Baku.

  “Should it?” the Weaver drawled.

  My heart leapt into my throat, and I spun around. Baku was nowhere to be seen but my counterpart stood before me, larger than I remembered. His black hair was smoothed into a tight bun. A long, refined nose ran between his wide brows and below them, his eyes glowed molten gold. The perfect nightmare. Alluring enough to draw someone in, terrifying enough to turn them inside out. And it all but gutted me.

  “You’ve made improvements since I was here last,” he said. “But if you need to recharge after such a menial task...”

  I bared my teeth.

  “Tsk. So hostile.” He scanned the wall behind me. The gold embroidery on his sleeveless black vest shifted on its own. Threads of gold and black ran off his left shoulder, hugging his muscular bicep before snaking down to his wrist, looping into a band. The loose ends strummed above his pulse point as if they shared his heartbeat. “Give me what I want, and I’ll never bother you again.”

  “That’s all you would do, Weaver,” I said, my voice even more weary than I was.

  Every time I turned around, he was testing me. Coming to the beach for no purpose other than to taint my sand, experimenting with his nightmares to find one to inhabit my slumber. Letting nightmares into the Day World was the last straw, but his antics stretched back to the very beginning. If only the playful intent behind it all had stayed the same, maybe then we could’ve avoided this mess.

  I reached into my satchel for more sand and called power from my reserves. It would take more than I had to re-bind him, not to mention that I had none of his threads to use against him. The playing field was even. I could hurt him as easily as he could hurt me, and which one of us left in better condition came down to one thing: determination. Unfortunately, the Weaver loved power as much as I loved Nora.

  “I have thousands of creatures that do my bidding. I have an army. What do you have?” His voice was low, bordering angry, but his muscles were loose, relaxed. “Don’t you miss it?”

  “Miss what?” I snapped.

  The hard edges of him softened. “The way things used to be.”

  My eyes narrowed to slits. “Whose fault is it that they’re different?”

  “Ours,” he said with a defeated sighed. Then his face hardened. “You alone won’t be enough to keep me out after tonight.”

  After tonight. My lungs constricted. “What did you do?”

  He grinned, running his thumb over his nails.

  “Tell me,” I demanded.

  “The Dream Keeper is a pretty little thing,” he said carefully. “I’d hate for anything to happen to her because you refused to cooperate.”

  Liar. I tossed the sand into the air but before it could take shape, he disappeared. I turned my focus inside, reaching for the cord that connected me to Nora. She was fine—alive and already asleep. How had I missed it? My magic was trained to catch her subconscious if I had enough power to spare, but I still felt it. Unless I was so drained tonight, I hadn’t noticed.

  The important thing was that she was safe.

  I loosened a breath and fled the Nightmare Realm before the Weaver had a chance to change his mind about fighting. He was right—he had an army. Hundreds of year’s worth of power prowled his lands and what did I have? A beach full of sand I was too tapped to properly wield? If I was going to beat him a second time, I had to reclaim my strength.

  Nora strolled down the edge of the water. Her arms wrapped around her abdomen, and her lip trembled. She couldn’t see me yet—not behind the secondary barrier I placed to divide my realm in two. One side was mine, the other hers. Separation. Distance. Neutrality. Yet another wasted effort.

  I slid the strap of my satchel over my head and dropped it to the ground. Nora let her head fall back. Her shoulders rose and fell with a deep breath. I tugged on my gloves, flipped my hood low over my face and stepped forward.

  She didn’t see me coming until I was nearly beside her. When she did, she froze and looked at me like I was a stranger. Like the last five years never happened.

  “I’m sorry,” I blurted, my heart seizing. “I didn’t think you would come tonight.”

  “I’m sleeping at Emery’s,” she said, hollow.

  “Are...” I swallowed. “Are you okay?”

  She shook her head. “I need to get some help.”

  “Help with what?” I asked, cautiously.

  “I can’t function like this. Hearing things, seeing you… I can’t focus. It’s like I’m floating out to sea without a paddle and no one cares because I’ve been adrift for years anyway.”

  My breath stuck in my throat. This was worse than the kiss. She meant help with me—to get rid of me. There was nothing the doctors could do to erase my presence, but it hurt all the same. I clenched my jaw until my teeth ached.

  “Of course, people care,” I said. “I care.”

  She choked on a sob. “But you aren’t real, Sandman.”

  “I’ve always been real,” I whispered.

&
nbsp; But she either ignored the comment or didn’t hear it. I was here—really here. No matter how hard she tried to block me out, I was as fixed as the sun. But, maybe that would be best. I could still protect her dreams from the other side of the beach, the side she never saw, and there would be no distractions.

  “Are there other things like you?” she blurted, running her fingers down her arms.

  My back straightened, my hands sweating. “I’m the only Sandman.”

  “That’s not what I meant.” She advanced two steps. “Is there anything else out there? Something that hurts people?”

  “I’m not sure where this is com—”

  “Where this is coming from?” she finished for me, her eyes flashing incredulously. “How about the fog last night for starters? You know more than you’re telling me.”

  I swallowed hard. There were so many things I had to tell her that I didn’t know where to start. If now was even the right time for it. “I...”

  “What’s a Dream Keeper?” she snapped.

  My blood ran cold. “Where did you hear that?”

  “A little birdie told me,” she said carefully from between her teeth.

  “The Weaver?” I asked before I could stop myself. Rage splashed against my insides. I knew he was up to something but talking directly to Nora? I expected him to be subtler than that. The stairwell and back room at Howell’s... Did she hear him then? I thought he was trying to get to me, not her. Maybe if I hadn’t been so busy, if I had taken a few minutes to listen to her that first night the Weaver pushed at the barrier between our worlds, I would have known. “Don’t listen to him, Nora. He’s dangerous.”