Dream Eater

by K. Bird Lincoln

  The drumming rain was stunningly loud in the tense silence. Marlin glared. Ken waited, perfectly still, half-crouched near Dad’s knee.

  What would come out if I dared open my mouth with this frustration roiling around, so strong it crackled in the air?

  The tinkling notes of the Swan Lake theme filled the room. Marlin flipped open her phone one-handed, glanced down and grimaced.

  “Damn. A new client wants to meet in fifteen minutes.” She transferred the grimace to me. “This. Is. Not. Over.” One perfectly manicured nail poked me in the chest. “I mean it.”

  “I know,” I said, trying to make my face less fierce.

  Opening the door let in the damp-mold smell of heavy rain. I handed Marlin an umbrella from the bottom of my closet—a peace offering. She raised an eyebrow at me. Only tourists and Asians ever used umbrellas in Portland. It was a standing joke in our family that we upheld that stereotype.

  “Take care,” said Marlin, hesitating outside my door.

  I breathed in, the wet weighing down my lungs, squinting to see through the downpour. “He’ll be okay,” I said.

  “I didn’t mean just Dad,” she said, and left.

  Chapter Five

  Dad was dead to the world, like our conversation had taken as much out of him as a Portland Hood to Coast marathon; the only sign he still lived was the uneven rise and fall of his chest.

  Ken pulled the quilt up to Dad’s chin, tucking him in with a surprising gentleness. He exuded such a fierce vitality. Every movement sure and strong. Like he had spent years learning a physical discipline like ballet or Tae Kwon Do.

  Or was it a Kitsune thing? Whatever that meant.

  “So?” he said, catching my over-long perusal.

  “So?” I repeated. I would handle this. I could handle this. Whatever this was. Because if I didn’t, I was truly as pathetic as Marlin said.

  “So,” I said again, taking a deep breath. “I’m starved. What do you say to eating?” As soon as the words left my mouth, I realized it was true. I could eat a cow.

  Ken’s gaze flickered over Dad on the couch. “Your fridge is empty.”

  I deflated. “Oh. Well, I guess one of us could walk over to the Black Bear Diner or something.”

  Ken’s eyes flickered over to the window.

  Right. Heavy rain. Okay. I couldn’t even handle getting us food. How the hell was I going to handle whatever Hayk was, whatever it was he wanted?

  Ken sat down on a bar stool in the kitchen, leaning back against the counter, legs bent underneath, arms crossed. Very carefully tucking himself away from my space.

  Were all Kitsune so expressive with their body language?

  “How about a cup of coffee?” he asked.

  I sighed and reached in the cabinet for the Nescafé I kept for emergencies.

  Ken stared at the Nescafé. “I was warned American coffee was horrible, but when I saw you with the latte I had hope.”

  I pushed the Nescafé back into the cabinet and closed the door with more force than I intended. “Fine. Water it is.” I banged open another cabinet door and grabbed a couple of plastic tumblers.

  The hiss of breath drawn through closed teeth; the Japanese male sound of distress. “I don’t agree with how Herai Akihito has kept you in the dark,” Ken said slowly. “You are now upset, but it wasn’t my place to tell you these things.”

  “And now?”

  “It’s still not my place,” he said, brushing a hand through his hair, making it momentarily lift into a messy tangle. “But finding Herai Akihito with that Vishap stone changes everything.”

  Here it came. I would never really be ready for any of this, but pain and trouble would always come. Like Mom said, it’s how you meet and greet it that counted. “Lay it on me,” I said. “Really. I promise to listen with an open mind. No wisecracks.”

  Ken smirked, and then after a beat, his mouth loosened into a comfortable smile. Real this time, not Kitsune illusion.

  “Your father and I, and you, to some unknown extent, are of the Kind.”

  “Yeah, I got that much,” I said, handing him the tumbler of tap-water.

  “No cracks.” He patted the stool next to him, but I went around to the other side of the counter, gripping it so that the cool laminate against my palms would help ground me.

  “What is, are, the Kind?”

  “Have you read Joseph Campbell?”

  I blinked. “The Power of Myth guy?”

  “That makes it easier to explain. If you’ve read Campbell you know about universal myths like the hero quest, vampires, and dragons.”

  “You’re saying the Kind are vampires and dragons?”

  “Not exactly, but in a general way, yes.”

  “Baku aren’t a universal myth.”

  “Morpheus? Ojibwe dream catchers? Incubus? Nocnitsa?”

  “Morpheus is for real?”

  “No,” said Ken, arching an eyebrow in what I was learning to recognize as amusement. “But your father is from a powerful family lineage. He left Japan decades ago due to a disagreement and hid himself away from Kind society.”

  “He didn’t get along with the other Baku?”

  “Baku are rare. In Japan, the Kind are mostly Kitsune and Tengu, with a scattering of Kappa. The disagreement was with the Council.”

  “Which is a what? A Kind United Nations or something?”

  “Something like that. All powerful beings. And your father was one of the last few known active Baku before he left.” Ken was stepping carefully around any talk of Baku.

  “Dad always said he immigrated to the States like 25 years ago.”

  Ken shook his head slowly. “Your father left Japan right before World War II, when Japan invaded China.”

  “But that would make him over 90 years old.”

  “Some Kind age a bit slower than humans.”

  “I see.” But I didn’t. I looked over Ken’s shoulder to the quilt-covered lump on my sofa. How old was Dad? What else had he hidden from us? How much of the father I had known was a lie?

  Anger flared. I glared at Ken. His words had taken my Dad and left some kind of weird changeling I wasn’t sure how to feel about.

  “Why did you come here?” I leaned over the counter, wanting him to feel hounded. Spicy aftershave, like ground, cinnamony kinako powder on the rice cakes at Uwajimaya, warmed the air between us.

  He looked over at Dad’s quiet form. “That’s really not important right now, I promised your father—”

  “It’s important to me!” I said, and slammed a closed fist on the countertop. Water spilled from Ken’s tumbler.

  He covered my hand with a light palm. I wanted to jerk away, but at his touch, all my frustration and anger fled toward the pit of my belly, knotting itself into a heated ball. Electricity charged the air accompanied by the primal drum beat of the rain. Ken leaned in, his fingers smoothing their way up my wrist to the sensitive crease of my inner elbow.

  “You are going to need my help,” he said, deep voice and delicious kinako scent drawing me infinitesimally closer.

  “I need answers. I need truth,” I said, my voice catching a little.

  “You’ve tasted my dreams.” His fingers tugged me gently, pulling me closer to his side of the counter. “You know my truth.”

  The dark irises of his eyes widened, bleeding over into the white, pulling my gaze into his as inexorably as his hands pulled mine to his chest, trapping them there. They throbbed, beating like trapped doves in the cage he made of himself.

  Whoa, hold up. Back away. Press him for answers. The sane voice was small, and far away, as most of my mind was busy trembling on the edge, poised to fall into the intense darkness of his eyes. Ken’s strong, slender fingers caressed mine in slow circles, the rhythmic thud of his heart beating under my palms.

  So warm.

  I had dreamed his fragments—slipping through some primeval forest. Unblemished by ill intent. Safe.

  �
�You, you only dream of running. Under the green trees. I’ve never—” I swallowed something hard-edged and bitter, “—touched a man and felt only that wild rush. Stripped bare. So simple.”

  Ken turned to the side, presenting a sharp profile; tense jaw, aquiline nose. The Kitsune, there, but more, a man using every muscle in his body to hold in something powerful, to surrender nothing of some dark vitality.

  “There is no other dream for me,” he said, finally, a fierce-edged whisper from a bowed head. Hot breath, the harsh scrape of his stubbled chin on the back of my hand.

  With a quick intake of breath, Ken closed the distance between us. His lips grazed mine in a light brush. He pulled back to scan my expression, but then it was my hands tangled in his shirt tugging him back.

  He kissed me more fiercely, the feel of his mouth firm, urging me to let him in. He opened his mouth over my bottom lip, sucking it, using gentle teeth and tongue to tease me open.

  My hands gripped and released his shirt, taking on an urgent rhythm. After a few more minutes, or an eternity, he slipped inside my mouth.

  Earthy kinako and his familiar musk made my heart thud violently against my ribcage. His mouth moved on mine in an insistent pattern, a rhythm of tension and release that gave me no room to slip in a breath.

  I released his shirt so my hands could trail their way up his shoulders to the warm width of his neck. Skin on skin. I gloried in the fearlessness of the touch.

  Ken pulled me halfway across the counter, his hands smoothing up and down my sides.

  Oh god, this is crazy, this is out of control. Kissing him was making my body riot like I’d jumped naked into the Willamette.

  The loner’s danger; touch was so momentous. And his mouth on mine, the feel of his hands on me was too much. I was overloaded with sensation, feeling dizzy. Out of control. Part of me didn’t like this helpless feeling. Like I was trapped on a rocky cliff with an ocean storm swirling around me, threatening to sweep me away.

  The edge of the counter bit into my waist as Ken’s teeth grazed my lip just a bit too sharply. The frenzy drained away, leaving me eyes open, horribly aware I was kissing Ken. He stiffened, paused with his lips at the corner of my mouth and pulled back.

  He held my gaze, not moving, not changing his expression. So goddamn patient. So careful. Like I was a fragile butterfly. I didn’t want concern from him, like he was taking over for Marlin. I slid down the countertop to stand on my own feet, disentangling my hands from his shirt.

  Kinako tickled the back of my throat. I coughed. Ken sighed and ran his hand through his hair. The gesture ended in a curious awkwardness, like he didn’t know where to set his hands afterwards.

  Awkward. God, awkward sucked. Could I run to my bedroom and shut the door on all this?

  No, that was what old Koi would have done. I was the new, stronger, Koi. There was the motionless figure of Dad under the quilt, and then Hayk was somewhere out there, and neither of those things would get resolved by hiding.

  Okay, so deal with the aftermath of kissing a Kitsune. Right. And me with no chocolate stash.

  “So. Pizza delivery?” I said. Maybe this restless, empty feeling would get better if I had food.

  Ken smiled, his hands settling onto the counter, folded calmly. “I have four sisters,” he said.

  “And they all like pizza?” I said.

  Ken shook his head. “And you would think that I would have learned how to deal with women by now.”

  A huff escaped me. “I am not someone you can just…just deal with,” I said.

  “No?” he drawled, the word somehow encompassing everything—Hayk, my sleeping father, the tension that still crackled in the air.

  I glared at him. “Believe me, you will have your hands full trying to deal with a very cranky woman if we don’t get food soon.” I sighed. “And coffee. Preferably a triple latte.”

  “Okay. Don’t think you’ll get to avoid what just happened forever,” said Ken. He leaned forward, the corner of his mouth quirking up when I flinched back. “But we do have other things to worry about, right now.”

  “Like what toppings for our pizza.”

  “Like why Herai-san thinks Hayk is a danger.”

  I rummaged through the drawer where I stuffed the fliers the battling pizza companies hung on my doorknob and held up a finger at Ken as I dialed the number. Ken sat in that perfect, eerie stillness for the few minutes it took me to order. When I put down my phone, he stood up, went to the couch to check on Dad, and then came around to lean on my side of the counter.

  I breathed in deeply, trying to settle my roiling stomach.

  “You dreamed Hayk’s fragments, didn’t you?” he said.

  The breath came out in a rush. “Yes,” I said, crossing my arms in front of me.

  “Tell me.”

  “There were two.” I closed my eyes, trying to hold myself together against the flavor of cardamom, the sickly-sweet smell of blood, the absence in the eyes of the dead girl in the hallway and the boy at the bottom of the hole.

  “They felt different from the usual fragments I get from casual touches. I mean, I’m not sure,” I swallowed down nervousness. Hearing myself talk about this stuff out loud felt like I was careening head first down the 20-foot pink slide at Oaks Park. “But somehow these were more real. Like they were memory-dreams, not just the dreams everyone has, you know, like flying or running, or being naked in class.”

  Ken arched that darn eyebrow, and I felt a flush creep down my neck.

  “What did you see in Hayk’s fragments?”

  “Murder. He murdered two people.” Nausea rose in the back of my throat. I hugged myself tightly. “There was a feeling of completion, of satisfaction in the fragments. Like he’s accomplished some task, and he’s happy.”

  “Did you eat those dreams?”

  “Did I— What?”

  “You’re Baku.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  Ken shook his head, his jaw tight with frustration. “Eater-of-dreams. There’s a reason you’re called that.”

  My hands came up, palms out, pushing away his words.

  He continued. “Baku eat bad dreams and take the power of the dream into themselves.”

  “That’s absolutely crazy. Freakish.”

  “Yes,” said Ken, his voice gentle, but his eyes darkly serious, pinning me against the cupboards. “Not human at all.”

  Flashes of Dad in his black skull cap, filleting salmon into paper-thin slices, the quiet anger trembling in his long limbs during arguments with Mom before he left, the awkward bundle he made on my couch, sleeping.

  Dad ate dreams? Evil nightmares like Hayk’s?

  “My father is not a monster. I am not a monster.”

  “You are not entirely human. The story of why Herai Akihito left Japan, left the Council, is his to tell. But it is no coincidence that he left so soon after Japan invaded Manchuria. Evil accompanies invading other countries.”

  “He left to escape evil?”

  Ken nodded, slowly. “I don’t know that much about dream eater ways, but I do know that many of the Kind believe there must be a balance in all things. And for the Baku, eating innumerable nightmares, taking untold evil into themselves, could upset some balance. It could be dangerous.”

  I shivered, feeling the relentless rain outside somehow creeping into me, like a chill even Ken’s warm presence couldn’t dispel. Dangerous, how? Dangerous like eating away Dad’s memories in a way doctors misdiagnosed as Alzheimer’s?

  “When you say ‘eat’, just what are you talking about?”

  Ken closed his eyes, holding up a finger in blatant imitation of how I’d silenced him earlier. “I am Kitsune. Illusions are my strength. Herai-san is going to have to answer your questions.”

  The doorbell rang. I used frustration to propel myself out of the kitchen to answer, scooping up my checkbook from the black-lacquered side table beside the door.

  A dre
nched young man stood in the hall. He clumsily undid the thermal outer pocket, his fingers slipping on the wet material, and I exchanged a check for a piping hot pizza box. His fingers left wet smudges on the check paper.

  “Wait,” said Ken. He was suddenly beside me, his arms braced in the doorframe. “The rain.”

  “It’s a downpour,” said the pizza guy.

  Ken leaned his head out the door, running his tongue over his lips, slowly, tasting. A flush crept down the back of my neck, my hands tightening on the box, wanting to do something.

  “What the…?” said the pizza man, taking a step backwards.

  “This is no ordinary rain,” said Ken. “Smell it.”

  I took a step into the corridor and stuck my hand out from under the overhang. The rain coated my palm with a warm, syrupy feeling. I snatched back my hand and sniffed.

  Cardamom.

  “Uh, yeah,” said the pizza guy in a careful voice. “Y’all just enjoy your pizza, now.” He lit down the corridor, leaping down the stairs.

  “Hayk,” I said. “It smells like his fragments.”

  “It tastes of power,” said Ken, the tip of his tongue appearing again to touch his bottom lip. “Something of the Kind.”

  “Kitsune? Baku?”

  “Not Japanese. Not the first peoples I’d expect here in the Pacific Northwest. Middle Asian.”

  Ken drew me back inside, closing the door firmly behind us and leaning against it like he could shut out the rain with his body.

  “Hayk sent the rain,” I said.

  “No. Hayk is human. Whatever was in that stone in his office sent it, the rain tastes of what I smelled there.”

  “The Vishap stone?”

  Ken pushed himself away from the door and stood in front of me, too close for casual, his gaze crawling like angry ants over my skin. “What does he want from you?”

  I tossed the pizza onto the counter as I stumbled back to the couch and sunk down next to Dad, still immobile under the quilt. “He wanted translations into Dad’s Herai dialect. Not really sinister, but kind of weird and creepy.”

  Ken shook his head. “A ruse. He knows of the Kind, he knew of the Kitsune. He knows you’re related to the Baku. The rain searches for you. The Vishap stone wants you for something more than translations.”