Dream Eater

by K. Bird Lincoln

  “The stone?”

  “Whatever’s in the stone.”

  My stomach made an embarrassingly loud gurgling noise.

  “I don’t know enough,” said Ken. “They sent me here blind.”

  “These questions aren’t getting us anywhere. Let’s eat and I’ll get my laptop. Maybe the interwebs know what a Vishap stone is.”

  Ken dished out slices onto the green melamine plates Marlin had chosen to “match” my wallpaper.

  I went to check Dad, still snoring gently under the quilt. Too pale, his cheekbones cut too sharply. But still Dad, still human on the outside. Not a monster, I told myself firmly. I brought my laptop to the kitchen counter. Hot oil burned my hand as I folded a piece of pizza so it wouldn’t drip on the keyboard.

  Ken delicately dissected his slice with a knife and fork. He blew on a piece, put it in his mouth neatly, and handed me two napkins.

  When my browser powered up, my Gmail account icon was blinking. It was full of new emails—mostly from Ed. My coding broker. He’d be pissed I wasn’t answering, especially because I had a project due in one week. Maybe he’d give the contracts to Violet or Hopper; neither of them had a life outside of the Portland Perl Mongers.

  I had a life now. Ed would just have to wait.

  “What does Wikipedia say?”

  I gave Ken a startled glance. He arched a brow at me.

  “The Kind are wrapped in myths, but we aren’t clueless noobs,” he said, flashing me a plastic-wrapped bundle he pulled from his pocket. Slowly he peeled back the plastic…er…actually was that a condom? A DoCoMo phone. Encased in a condom. I shook my head. Unique, waterproof way to travel with a phone.

  I thought of how he’d asked me directions to the nearest café. He’d had access to GPS this whole time. Ken stabbed a black olive and chewed, holding my gaze with an eyebrow arched in challenge, daring me to comment.

  I wrenched my eyes back to the screen. A few queries and I was scanning Wikipedia’s entry for “Vishap.”

  “Not much, actually. This article’s a stub. Give me a moment to use my Google-fu.” My napkins were already filthy, so I snagged his napkin to wipe sauce dribbling down my chin. “Okay, here’s something. Looks like some grad student’s seminar project. Armenia has these stones, like the one in Hayk’s office from like prehistoric times. Nobody knows exactly what they were used for. This grad student thinks the bull-shape carved on the top is a thunder god. And the wavy lines surrounding it are meant to represent water, no, actually a water dragon. Ulli, Ullike…”

  “Ullikemi,” said Ken.

  “Yeah, what you said,” I squinted at the screen, licking grease from my fingers. I didn’t even know the Middle East had dragons.

  “Ullikemi was birthed by Aramazd to defeat the thunder god,” said Ken. He stared down at this empty plate.

  “That’s what it says here,” I said. “You know all this already?”

  “I didn’t know about the Vishap Stone. Ullikemi, I have come across before.” His lips cured into a brittle smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “I know all the names of dragon Kind.”

  I blinked at him. Raw anger pulsed behind those words, but he resolutely cut another dainty piece from his slice and chewed.

  Dad had mumbled something about a water dragon. Alzheimer’s raving, I’d thought, but he’d been trying to warn me. I cleared my throat. “Ullikemi rained all over Portland just to find me?”

  Ken put a hand on the pizza box, resting it there as if the debate whether to eat another slice or not was weightier than he could manage. “Yes, you or your father. Not the human myth Ullikemi, of course. Humanity has made up stories to explain the Kind all over the world. We’re not actual gods,” he said, his voice low and gravelly.

  “Oh that’s a relief, then. Not really a god. It’s so much better that some Armenian dragon Kind thingy is looking for me, instead.” I batted Ken’s hand away so I could take another slice.

  My sarcasm worked. The heaviness lightened. He shook his head at me the way Marlin did whenever she dropped by the apartment and discovered I’d been on a hermit streak lasting over a week.

  I prattled on. “Good thing I’m a slave to melted cheese. I’ll just hole up here with Dad and this pizza for a few days. Hayk will get bored and find someone else to pester.”

  Ken slid the barstool back. “It’s not that simple, I’m afraid.”

  “I figured. But denial’s always my first strategy.”

  Standing balanced on the balls of his feet in my kitchen, energy coiled tightly in his limbs, Ken lost the last vestige of amiable-salesman. Feral sharpness lit his face. The heavy scent of musk gathered in the air, along with an electricity that didn’t come from the gathering rainstorm.

  Kitsune, his otherness. That was the reason little hairs stood up along my arms. Yes, definitely it was the Kitsune in him manifesting, not any other reason at all. Not the graceful line of wrist and hand, or the way his sharp cheekbones carved out a strange masculine beauty in the planes of his face.

  I remembered the press of his lips on mine, making me vulnerable and sensitized and aware of each square inch of my body, like I was swelling through my skin.

  “The Vishap Stone is the key.” Ken made a fist. “I’ve heard stories before. A perversion of Kind nature. Someone bound this dragon Kind to the stone.”

  “Wait, we can do that to Kind?” I was trying not to picture Dad going all smoky and being sucked Aladdin-style into a glass bottle.

  “The knowledge to do such a thing has been lost for centuries. It is the worst madness. The dragon Kind would change, become a twisted thing locked into the human story.”

  “Are…are you locked into Kitsune form?” I said.

  “No,” Ken said. “Human Kitsune tales do not limit me. What I am is just easier to explain by using traditional folk tales. A kind of shorthand, if you will. No, Ullikemi is something else. No matter what it was before, Ullikemi now is only what the human myth tells it to be. The dragon is no longer fully Kind.”

  “Ullikemi’s myth,” I said, wanting to turn back to the screen and skim down the rest of the page. I needed to know how the dragon’s story turned out.

  Ken was on a different track. “Hayk is most definitely the stone’s servant, a human doesn’t have the power to enslave a dragon Kind. He knows your father is Baku, and so Ullikemi must be directing him. They aren’t going to just leave you two alone.”

  A tight knot formed in my stomach, like I’d eaten the whole pizza myself. “Out with it,” I said. “Just spit it out, whatever horrible thing you’re not telling me.” Ken leaned over the counter toward me, his eyes dark and cold and hard.

  “The dragon is driven to fulfill its part in the human story of Ullikemi. It needs to defeat the thunder god, whatever it perceives that to be.”

  “I’m not a thunder god.”

  “No, but Ullikemi must be weak bound to that stone. It needs power.”

  “How can it get that?”

  “Power enough to defeat something it perceived as a thunder god could only come from a sudden release of life energy. Birth or death.”

  “It’s after me, right? I’m not pregnant.”

  “You’re human and vulnerable, yet you are an eater of dreams. Your blood would offer a potent mix of mortal and Kind power at death. Ullikemi wields Hayk to take you for a sacrifice, and with the power of your life’s blood, he would defeat the thunder god.”

  Chapter Six

  The red sauce-covered crust on my plate suddenly didn’t look appetizing at all.

  A sacrifice. Like the hawk-nosed girl and the boy in the well? Had Hayk murdered them for some magic compact with Ullikemi?

  “Who is the thunder god?”

  “I don’t know,” said Ken. “We need to find out what Hayk’s been up to.” His fingers curled into claws on the counter.

  “Is there a Kind association you can get in touch with here? A secret society?” I said.

  “The Kind in the United States a
re scattered, self-governing pockets. They did not centralize like we did in Japan and Europe. There are two big populations—in San Francisco and New York. Neither of them will care much what’s going on here.”

  “You mentioned the Council?”

  Ken’s eyes narrowed. “No,” he said. Only that one word and it was like he’d slammed a door.

  “Well then,” I said. “It’ll have to be the old-fashioned way.” I went back to my laptop and searched for Hayk on the PCC website’s faculty list.

  “Mangasar Hayk. Born in Abovyan, Armenia. Surprise, surprise. Professor of Eastern Languages and Linguistics. He’s only been at PCC two years.”

  “Where was he before?”

  I clicked the research agenda link under his bio. “He’s been a busy, busy beaver. University of Mexico, Frankfurt, even Waseda in Tokyo, University of Queensland, and most recently, the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Only a year or two at each location.”

  “He’s searching for something,” said Ken.

  “For disappearing languages, apparently,” I said. “All his papers in the past ten years are on endangered languages. I scrolled through his list of publications. He’s here in Portland working on the Siletz Dee-ni.”

  “What’s ‘Siletz’?” said Ken.

  “One of the Pacific Northwest first nation peoples.”

  “Like the Ainu in Hokkaido,” said Ken, scratching his chin.

  “Wait, there’s a link here for people interested in translating for him,” I said. “He’s got a wish list here for native speakers of certain languages.”

  The list was a mix of active and dead links. Herai and another Tohoku dialect were active, as well as the Siletz and Okanagan links. Mayan and Sahaptin were dead.

  Like the woman in the hall from Hayk’s fragment. She was a piece of this terrible puzzle. If I could just replay that fragment I might know how she fit in.

  Just the idea made my stomach clench. To willingly experience that fragment, dwell in it even on the slight chance some detail could shed light on Hayk’s plan? It would be bathing in evil. If it even worked at all.

  “We need more information. If only I’d thought to search his office,” said Ken.

  I closed my eyes, shutting out the false brightness of the computer screen.

  “I can text a friend back home to see if they know anything about Hayk and Ullikemi, but I think they’ve moved under the radar,” Ken continued. I wasn’t really listening. Ken didn’t need to know what I was doing, especially if I failed.

  You can do this. Stay calm. Breathe.

  The first brushstroke of the kanji character “ichi,” formed itself in my mind. No. I didn’t want to chase away the fragment, I wanted to experience it. Exhaling in a long stream, I made the kanji fade to gray. The gray deepened in color, and prickles danced across my skin. My entire adult life I’d spent trying to repress fragments during my waking hours. So freeing, and oddly familiar, to let it percolate up through my accumulated layers of filters.

  Remember cardamom. Brown-on-black shadows of a darkened hallway. The woman’s pale skin and dark hair, her prominent, hooked nose over a slashed neck still seeping blood. Bloodstained papers like dead leaves scattered on the dirty carpet.

  The fragment settled in eagerly, and it was hard to understand how I’d missed its powerful, unhuman vividness before, despite Hayk himself being human. It was other.

  Cardamom, then copper flooded my mouth. My tongue ached as if I’d bitten down on it. The fragment swelled into my brain, filling up the small spaces between cells, and then overflowed. It spilled down my spine and into my fingertips and toes.

  Buzzing restlessness overwhelmed me, a keen wanting, like the bloated hunger of a ten day fast.

  Swallowing down the urgency, I forced the fragment into focus on one of those scattered pages, like a movie camera swiveling in on a close up.

  Even obscured with bright red blood-drops, I recognized the rounded-shapes-within-squares of the characters printed on the papers. Not Chinese or Egyptian, but similar. Mayan hieroglyphics. A fat hand beneath rope tied around a sun.

  And then in spiky, irregular writing, that could only be Hayk’s; ‘a short time before returning to business.’

  What had Hayk said to me when I agreed to come down to his office after Kaneko-sensei’s class?

  I’m sure you have a-short-time-before-an-important-errand to lend me, he’d said. And then things went fuzzy, and I had agreed to meet him despite how little I wanted to get near a man who dreamed of murder.

  The dead woman was so achingly bright, so clear, I wanted to shut my eyes, but the memory gripped me with ruthlessly tight fingers. She’d been Mayan, I was sure of it. Triumph washed through me, mixing with the buzzing hunger bloating my limbs, strengthening and twisting it into a bitter seething barely contained by my fragile ribcage.

  I gagged, tasting bile that burned like acid. I struggled to swallow it down, and it ripped my throat raw with keen-hot edges. The seething settled into an uneasy lump in the vicinity of my belly.

  Anger. The uneasy lump burned with the heat of my anger. Hayk was awful, evil, and this horrible fragment was inside me. I wanted it gone!

  The lump flared, and a flash of heat went through me, leaving my neck clammy with sweat as it faded.

  Gingerly, I flexed toes and fingers which no longer felt like swollen lumps of flesh. Bitterness leached away, my body slowly returning to me like a battered beach abandoned by a receding tidal wave.

  I opened my eyes. The cardamom, the dead woman, they were all gone and only traces of the fragment, like a faint pencil outline on blurred paper, remained when I closed my eyes.

  Ken’s face hovered very close, his hands, warm and heavy pressed on my clenched fists. Sweat trickled down my spine. Oxygen was having a hard time making it into my lungs despite great gulps of air.

  “He gets native speakers of endangered languages to translate for him, and then he murders them,” I said between gasps.

  “What did you just do?” He spoke in clipped syllables but his anger was such a pale echo of the seething rage I’d felt gripped in Hayk’s fragment that it hardly registered. “You were frozen, but your eyes jerked crazy underneath your eyelids. You gasped and turned ghost pale. What was it? Ullikemi?”

  My insides roiled from the acrid mix of anger and elation still churning inside me from the fragment. This close, awareness of Ken made my skin prickle with a thousand skittering ants. His dark eyes tried to pierce through layers of protection and reach inside me, brow knit with anger. Who does he think he is? Demanding answers like he has any right to tell me what to do?

  “Back off!” I said, pushing him away with a hand splayed across his chest. Ken flew back against the refrigerator with a bang, toppling a half-open box of wild-berry granola over to spill out its contents in a steady stream over his head.

  For a moment, I felt a kind of triumph. That would teach him to crowd me.

  Then, reality sunk in and anger turned to acute embarrassment. “Sorry, sorry,” I said, shaking my head. What was wrong with me?

  Ken brushed granola from his hair and rose to his feet in a move more graceful than a granola-covered man had any right to. “You are upset,” he said in a carefully neutral tone. “I was worried you might be under some kind of attack.”

  “I tried to call up Hayk’s fragment. I think it was a memory dream, of the woman lying murdered in a hallway.”

  “A memory dream?”

  “Memory dreams are stronger, more detailed because they’re based in reality,” I said. A faint flush crept to my cheeks. “The fragment I got from you, running in the forest, that was a different kind of dream, foggy, not true memory.”

  “Hayk’s fragment revealed something about Ullikemi’s plan?” said Ken. He was now completely clear of granola, but a wild berry still clung to his collar.

  I shook my head and reached out to brush the wild berry away. Ken flinched. My mouth went dry. I busied myself swe
eping the spilled cereal. He didn’t flinch from the brush of my fingers when I took the dustpan from him.

  Maybe I’d misread him?

  “I’m sorry,” I said to the closet when I put the broom away.

  “Yes, you said that before.” His mouth was still pressed in a firm line.

  “This time I’m apologizing for throwing you across my kitchen. I didn’t know I could do that. I can’t do that. How did I do that?”

  “I’m not positive,” said Ken. “But you’re Baku. My guess is that by consciously recalling the fragment you took some kind of power into yourself.”

  Oh god. “I ate the dream.”

  “Possibly.”

  Who is the monster, now? I looked over at the sleeping form of Dad on my couch. It was like some mad version of bring-your-daughter-to-work day. Only it wasn’t his sushi business we shared, but this freaky dream-eating thing.

  My head felt hot and buzzed like I’d downed a triple-shot mocha, but nothing else seemed different. Did eating evil just make you seriously cranky or were there other, more invisible, things I should worry about?

  “It wasn’t you,” said Ken. He kept his arms folded, and sat down on the kitchen bar-stool. Keeping himself from towering over me. Purposefully taking up less space in the small area. “That energy that threw me across the room.”

  I spread my palms in front of his face. “Yes it was.”

  “No,” he said. “That wasn’t you, that wasn’t your anger or your power. It smells different. Death power, just the faintest echo of blood. No wonder Hayk is bound to Ullikemi.”

  “So Hayk researches dead languages, kills translators, and keeps his attack-dragon, Ullikemi, bound up in that Vishap stone in his office, trying to get power enough to destroy the thunder god? Whatever that is.”

  “The thunder god is the key to knowing what Hayk will try next. But you’ve got the first part backwards. Hayk is only human. He is Ullikemi’s servant, not the other way around.”

  “The thunder gods around here aren’t likely to be Middle Eastern,” I said. I nudged my laptop back to life. Google gave up nothing for the search terms “thunder god, Portland” other than links to a Swedish death metal band’s gig and a gelato shop’s list of coffee names.