Dream Eater

by K. Bird Lincoln

  Praise for Dream Eater

  “Lincoln successfully mixes Japanese, Native American, and Middle Eastern mythologies in her modern setting, and Koi’s wry voice gives a new perspective on the problems of paranormal gifts.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “DREAM EATER brings much-needed freshness to the urban fantasy genre with its inspired use of Japanese culture and mythology and its fully-realized setting of Portland, Oregon. I’m eager to follow Koi on more adventures!”

  —Beth Cato, author of The Clockwork Dagger and Breath of Earth

  “Dream Eater is my kind of urban fantasy, fast, engaging, and diverse. Myths from several different cultures come into play, each one distinctly and lovingly drawn. The tensions between them are as real and as fractious as what we face in the real world. A timely book that happens to be a rollicking read. Dream Eater has it all: mythological and social diversity, strong characters, and a tender romance. I can’t wait for the next one.”

  —Keith Yatsuhashi, author of Kojiki and Kokoro

  “I came for the Japanese mythology, and I was not disappointed. Readers who want variety in their urban fantasy beyond the werewolf and vampire staples are advised to pick up Dream Eater.”

  —Laura VanArendonk Baugh, author of The Songweaver’s Vow

  Dream Eater

  Koi Pierce dreams other peoples’ dreams.

  Her whole life she’s avoided other people. Any skin-to-skin contact—a hug from her sister, the hand of a barista at Stumptown coffee—transfers flashes of that person’s most intense dreams. It’s enough to make anyone a hermit.

  But Koi’s getting her act together. No matter what, this time she’s going to finish her degree at Portland Community College and get a real life. Of course it’s not going to be that easy. Her father, increasingly disturbed from Alzheimer’s disease, a dream fragment of a dead girl from the casual brush of a creepy PCC professor’s hand, and a mysterious stranger who speaks the same rare Northern Japanese dialect as Koi’s father will force Koi to learn to trust in the help of others, as well as face the truth about herself.

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  Dream Eater

  A Portland Hafu Novel: Book One

  K. Bird Lincoln

  World Weaver Press

  Copyright Notice

  No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of World Weaver Press.

  DREAM EATER

  Copyright © 2017 Kirsten Lincoln.

  Published by World Weaver Press, LLC.

  Albuquerque, New Mexico

  www.WorldWeaverPress.com

  Editor: Rhonda Parrish

  Cover layout and design by Sarena Ulibarri.

  First edition: April 2017

  Also available in paperback - ISBN-13: 978-0997788860

  ASIN (mobi): B01MS889K4

  B&N ISBN (ePub): 2940154231074

  Kobo ISBN (ePub): 1230001508161

  This is a work of fiction; characters and events are either fictitious or used fictitiously.

  Piracy isn’t a victimless crime. Please respect the author and the hard work she’s put into writing and editing this novel: Do not copy. Do not distribute. Do not post or share online. If you want to share this book with a friend, please consider buying an additional copy.

  DEDICATION

  This one is for all the Portland writerly folks who helped me while I was writing there: the Welorians: Misha, Tina, & Josh and the Wordos. And also for Stumptown Coffee and Dagoba Chocolates—’cause the book wouldn’t exist without them, too.

  Dream Eater

  Chapter One

  The cashier held out my debit card, smiling with too-bright teeth.

  “So terrible,” she said, still turned to her floppy-haired manager. “He hardly had a career, and then on his one, big, movie break…” she let her sentence trail off, sighing.

  I took the card, flinching as her fingers brushed mine. Crap.

  Salty butter taste of popcorn on my tongue. Cheeks flushing with fear and excitement as an actor’s garishly painted face loomed onscreen in a close-up.

  I’d picked up a fragment from her.

  Her Pepsodent smile had fooled me into thinking there was no real depth behind her chatter, but she was genuinely sad. Trying to make it look like something had gotten caught in my eye, I squeezed them shut and breathed in deeply. On the gray static behind my eyelids I pictured a brush dipped in ink. A broad, perpendicular stroke, followed by shorter ones coming together to form the kanji for “five.” The popcorn taste faded—my usual trick had worked its magic.

  I opened my eyes to the fluorescent store-brightness. The tabloids on the rack above the candy shelves headlined the untimely demise of a movie star with acne-scarred cheeks—the source of the blonde cashier’s sorrow. The cashier, along with her manager, was now openly staring at me.

  Marlin owed me for this.

  I should have added one of the register display-bars of Ghirardelli 72% Cacao to Marlin’s bill. Dark chocolate always made fragments go away quicker. All those endorphins and serotonin.

  Too late now.

  I was careful not to brush the clerk’s hand again when I took the plastic bag. The gray-haired lady behind me cleared her throat, loudly. The receipt was waiting for me on the counter. I mumbled an apology, stashed my purchase inside my messenger bag, and swiveled to make a run for the exit.

  Someone’s midsection stepped into my path, I barreled straight into it and felt a warm shock pass through me.

  The midsection was covered in a gray OHSU sweatshirt, but it was definitely hard, and male.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled again, flicking my gaze down from the man’s startled face to the box in his hands.

  Heat rose again on my cheeks.

  Great. My first time outside my personal triangle of apartment, Stumptown, or Portland Community College in two weeks and what do I do? Immediately pick up a fragment from a star-struck cashier and bump into a guy buying condoms.

  I pushed past the man. I had to get out, now. I tore through the candy bar aisle and out the sliding door.

  Pacific Northwest damp gave the air a soggy, thick feeling. Douglas fir loomed over the rain-shiny blacktop of the parking lot, immense and aggressively green.

  A weak fragment like the cashier’s was easily corralled in the nether regions of my brain during daylight. As soon as I fell asleep, though, the emotional charge would rise to the surface, infiltrating my dreams like a dollop of real cream in a perfectly pulled espresso. Feelings would haunt me the next day. I wouldn’t be sure if my reactions were my own or colored by the cashier’s sad fragment.

  Fabulous.

  As if I needed more disturbing dreams. Despite being extra-special careful to keep my elbows in and hands folded since PCC’s spring semester started, for the past few weeks I’d been haunted by a pretty bad one. A fragment I’d picked up somewhere at school. Or maybe Stumptown.

  I’d honed avoidance to a fine art—Amazon Prime was my best friend—but at 9 this morning, Marlin had been on the phone, needling me in that little sisterly way that tripped all my guilt buttons. She needed Sudafed. Or. She. Would. Die.

  Thus my live appearance at Rite-Aid.

  I kicked at a pinecone on the sidewalk, and watched it roll into the soggy bark dust.

&n
bsp; Marlin owed me really, really big.

  Soon, afternoon school buses would disgorge tweens in spaghetti strap shirts and low-slung pants, despite the misty chill, but I managed to make it past the middle school to her condo without encountering more than a few curious glances from the LL Bean chic ladies lurking under the towering Douglas firs bordering the condo parking lot.

  I’d dressed up for Rite-Aid in Nike workout pants Marlin had bought at the employee store when she interned last year, and a pink sweatshirt without any stains. I was presentable. I adjusted my messenger bag strap, heavy with textbooks, to the little hollow between neck and shoulder.

  Marlin’s door had a fish-shaped number plate. I traced the metal points of the sharp fins with my fingers. Mom had given Marlin the nameplate and me the pink sweatshirt, right before she went into the hospital the last time. We’d gone to Uwajimaya to get those sugared senbei she loved so much, but Marlin forced us into the gift shop first.

  With Mom’s chemo buzz cut and the dark circles under her eyes, she looked like a wizened waif. “You are too much like your father,” she said, holding up a sweatshirt with my namesake painted in gold, sparkly scales.

  “Wear this and remember your Pierce side,” she said, apparently ignoring the irony.

  “Mom. You guys gave me your last name, not Dad’s. Besides, this is too flashy for me.”

  Mom whispered my middle name and cupped my cheek with her cold, dry palm. “Flashy? I suppose the metallic scales are more Marlin’s style. But the fish’s spirit, that’s different. You have grown into that name.”

  I shook myself out of the memory, rubbing knuckles at the corner of my eyes. Mom and her marine-biology pop psychology.

  A sharp rap on Marlin’s door made it swing open. Unlocked.

  “Koi?”

  “Brought the Sudafed,” I called out and made my way through the Ikea-furnished living room to the bedroom in the back. Marlin lay ensconced on top of her maroon sateen bedspread, propped up by a dozen cushions in floral and quilted geometric patterns that should have clashed, but didn’t.

  “My savior,” said Marlin. She won the genetic lottery by getting Pierce eyes, amazing limestone-patterned flecks of blue, gray, and green—when she was in commando mode Marlin could bore holes through flesh with those eyes. My flat brown ones, like Dad’s, didn’t have the Pierce bite. Marlin complained they were too secretive.

  We shared our mother’s nondescript brown, wavy hair. Mine was a long and usually tangled mass hanging past my shoulders; easier to cut the split ends off every few months than bear the intimate and fragment-filled touch of a stylist.

  Marlin’s was highlighted with bronze and usually pulled back in a French chignon or ponytail, but today it was as unstyled as mine, loose around her shoulders in a way that softened my righteous indignation at the earliness of the hour.

  “Here,” I said, pulling out the Rite-Aid bag. Dark bags under her eyes gave her a bruised look. Not just a cold prompting her call for help, then.

  “What’s wrong?” I said, sitting on the edge of her bed. I’d picked up enough fragments from Marlin over the years that I could immediately tell when she was flavoring my dreams, but it still gave me TMI creeps seeing what haunted her sleep. Talk about awkward. Some things were never meant to be shared by older sisters, and Marlin’s dream of her prom night date with Southridge High lacrosse player Taizo Kovach was one of those things.

  “We need to put Dad in a home.”

  Oh. This again.

  “We can’t afford it,” I said, picking at a stray blue thread fraying from her embroidered pillow.

  If I would quit school and get a real-person job instead of the online coding gigs I scavenged we could afford it. We’d have enough left from Mom’s life insurance to set Dad up in a memory care unit.

  The whole argument where she very carefully didn’t call me selfish, and I tried to explain that school was the only path out of the hole I’d dug myself into these past years, shambled into the room with us—a looming, unspoken monster. The thread I was wiggling tore away from the pillow, unraveling an intricately embroidered bird shape.

  I just couldn’t face that monster today. Not when I was gearing myself up for a class at PCC.

  But Marlin didn’t pull out her alphabetized file folder of nursing homes, or even the Willamette Weekly’s classified section. She just waited, looking at me with Mom’s eyes.

  When Marlin played quiet and reasonable, I knew I was in big trouble.

  “He disappeared for a whole day. I tried to call you,” she said. I’d promised to pick up if she called me twice in a row.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, showing her my phone. It was set on vibrate.

  “It figures. Look, he’s either snuck out or slipped away from every home helper we’ve hired. This latest one only lasted two weeks! We can’t take him to adult daycare every day and we can’t leave him alone.”

  “He’s fine. Ever since you got that plastic handcuff with his name and address on it, someone’s always called the police—”

  “That’s not fine!”

  I shut my mouth. But instead of the lecture on dire consequences I expected, Marlin collapsed into a fit of coughing. She grabbed a handful of tissues and pressed the whole clump to her face, drying tears and snot at the same time.

  I teased open the Sudafed box with my ragged nail and put a capsule in my open palm. A peace offering.

  “You are who you are,” said Marlin. The bare tone more cutting than her eyes. “You’re my sister and I love you. But. We all deserve a life. Even Dad.” She plucked the capsule and slipped it into her mouth.

  “What do you want me to do?” I said.

  “Take Dad for two weeks.”

  “What? No, I mean, I can’t. What about school?” I sucked in air, floundering. First the memory care monster, and now this? I’d been sucker punched.

  She waved a hand at the mess of tissues and the box of Sudafed. “I have been managing Dad all winter. My clients are booked solid through April and May.”

  “You managed before.”

  “Ha,” she said, “Managed.” The word turned into a dripping sarcasm ball. “Just two weeks, Koi, that’s all I’m asking.”

  “I can’t do it.”

  Marlin looked down at her manicured thumbnail, picking at an appliquéd flower. Loose hair fell forward, covering her face in a glossy curtain. “He doesn’t need me,” she said quietly.

  A bigger monster entered the room. Mom’s reasons for leaving Dad, tangled up with the very careful way our family never, ever talked about the biggest thing I had inherited from him.

  This was the closest we’d come to naming it since Mom died—a thin wisp of connection hovering in the air between us. I could reach out right now and take Marlin’s bare hand, let all those unspoken things spill out of me. A yearning to share this burden, to explain somehow, flickered for an instant. But talking about it with Marlin would ignite her caretaker instincts, and I couldn’t let her fix things for me anymore. I had to figure out my life on my own.

  The moment dissipated. Marlin snuck a sideways peek at me through her hair. I reached out and stroked soft strands, careful not to brush the edge of her ear.

  “And we’ll try to work out some more permanent solution in the meantime,” said Marlin, back to bossy little sister voice.

  Permanent solution? “I was supposed to have spring off for my classes,” I said. She just stared back at me, waiting, sick, concerned, and stubborn as Mom.

  I flexed my fingers, trying to calm the little bursts of unease running up and down my arms. I couldn’t fight this Marlin. She was deadly serious. “Okay. You can bring him by tonight.”

  “Can you just pick him up at Salvation Army at the end of his day program?”

  “I’ve got classes.” Even Marlin could push me only so far.

  “Fine. I’ll bring him. Now, I’ve got some serious binging to do with Leverage on my DVR. If you want to stay and play ‘spot the
downtown landmarks’, that’s fine. If not, you’re dismissed.” She fiddled with the remote. “And thanks for the Sudafed.”

  She kept her eyes on the TV, but I blew an air kiss to her as I left anyway. She drove me crazy, but she was one of the only people in the world since Mom died that I could call mine.

  My smothering, meddling bridge to humanity.

  I let myself out the door, ran down her rickety staircase and whipped around the overgrown pink-budded rhododendrons back toward the sidewalk.

  And barreled headlong into somebody.

  Somebody with a hard midsection covered by an OHSU sweatshirt.

  I looked up, flushing for a third time that morning. “Sorry,” I mumbled.

  It was the guy from Rite-Aid. I hadn’t had a good look at him before, but now there was no convenient escape-path. He had very dark brown eyes, almost black. Under the lack of a pronounced eyelid, his eyes tilted up at the corners. Asian, or possibly part-Asian. Medium-length dark hair, moussed up into tousled spikes at the top of his head.

  He wore the sweatshirt like someone who didn’t care what they put on because they had the body to pull off any look.

  I glanced at his hands. The box of condoms was no longer in sight.

  “This is becoming a habit,” he said.

  I bristled, but his mouth was curved into a relaxed grin, and he held one eyebrow arched up high in a way I’d wished I could emulate ever since I’d watched Spock on old Star Trek reruns.

  “Sorry,” I repeated with great emphasis. I stepped off the path to go around him, but he held out a hand to stop me.

  “I was hoping to talk to you,” he said.

  “What?” I backed away, checking quickly to see if anyone else was nearby. The parking lot mothers had all gone inside. Not a soul was around. Unease prickled.

  I’d touched him. Usually I only got fragments that lasted long enough to turn into dreams from people feeling strong emotion—like the clerk’s sadness. This guy didn’t have a drama aura, and I’d felt nothing at Rite-Aid, but all of a sudden I wasn’t so sure he hadn’t given me a fragment. Were crazy stalker dreams going to haunt me tonight?