Dream Eater

by K. Bird Lincoln

  “Your promise binds you,” said Hayk. “Lead me to the Kind.”

  With a deep breath, I started up the slope. “I met them at the bench in front of the Vietnam Memorial,” I said.

  “Met?” repeated the Ullikemi voice, cardamom seeping into the pine and mulch smell of the arboretum.

  “A neutral place,” I said, warming to the idea. The compulsion wasn’t kicking in, so apparently my promise to “lead him to the Kind” didn’t mind that I wasn’t actually able to lead Hayk directly to Thunderbird. Maybe all that worry was wasted.

  “The thunder god,” said the Ullikemi voice. “I felt his presence, but there was another, too, a lesser servant. Tell me their names.”

  We entered the little plaza with the Vietnam Memorial map and bench. The purple hoodie guy was slouching right in the middle of the bench.

  It somehow didn’t seem like a good idea to tell Hayk about Kwaskwi or to name Thunderbird. “My promise doesn’t cover that,” I said.

  Hayk grabbed my shoulder, swinging me around to face him. His other hand gripped the material at my neckline and twisted, putting uncomfortable pressure on my airway.

  “Tell me,” said the Ullikemi voice, and a feeling like decayed, damp leaves stroked me from head to toe. I shivered, arching away from him, but the dragon’s strength was in Hayk’s hands.

  “Let her go,” said a voice behind me. Hayk stiffened.

  Purple hoodie guy was off the bench, a branch as thick as my wrist gripped in his hands like a baseball bat. Hayk smiled.

  “The Kitsune. I felt you, but couldn’t quite pinpoint where, or should I say who, you were.”

  The guy took a step closer, the edges of his face blurring and indistinct. I blinked. Eyelashes full and curved, pupils a warm, Valrhona brown.“Even dragons are vulnerable to Kitsune illusion,” Ken said.

  Hayk tightened his grip at the base of my throat. I gasped.

  “Vulnerable,” repeated Hayk. “Ironic you should apply that word to me.” A strange, shivering awareness ran down my shoulders through my arms to my hands, where my palms itched fiercely.

  What a fascinating tableau we’d make for tourists coming down the hill. “Where have you been?” I stage whispered.

  “Getting permission to make this my business,” said Ken, and swung the branch.

  Hayk pushed me to the ground, but he couldn’t move fast enough to escape Ken’s blow. It landed on his back with a thwump. I twisted and my hip hit the ground with a jarring thud, pain and surprise taking away what little breath lingered in my lungs.

  The two men circled my prone body. The smell of cardamom thickened, and Hayk’s eyes glowed Ullikemi’s sea green.

  “Don’t interfere, Kitsune,” said Hayk. No. Not the cultured tones of the professor, but the sliding vowels and strange harmonics of Ullikemi. “The dream-eater is not my quarry. It is the thunder god I seek. I am bound.”

  “Your human ally does you shame,” said Ken, hefting the branch.

  With a hissing crunch, the branch collapsed inward. Water-logged bits of rotten wood showered down, flecking my face with grit. Ken grimaced and threw away the remains.

  Ullikemi’s power? Did Hayk do that?

  “You will not stop me,” said Ullikemi, the human vocal cords hoarse and battered underneath those disturbing multi-layered harmonies, like a Balkan men’s choir mashed with a didgeridoo. “The search has been arduous, I long for an ending.”

  I sat up carefully, shivering as my dampened clothes welcomed the chill air. The men did not move, their eyes practically crackled in challenge. Hayk’s face was pale beneath bright spots of red tinting his high cheekbones. Feverish. As if his body was rapidly depleting fuel, burned up from the inside.

  Where are clueless tourists when you need them? Not a soul was around.

  Ken’s presence behind me was comforting warmth, but I couldn’t stay curled on the ground. I slid my feet beneath my bent knees.

  “We are all bound to certain paths,” said Ken. “Yet ever have the Kind chosen how we walk them.”

  Could I sneak off to the side? Hayk’s attention was all on Ken and their battle of over-inflated obviousness. The air between them was thick with tension and the sensation of the dragon’s energy still crawled my face.

  “You speak of choice? What choice? Human myth has enslaved me too long. I don’t remember what came before Ullikemi. Tell me, Kitsune; is it entirely your choice to journey so far from your home island?”

  A rumbling sound, like a growl, came from Ken.

  “Pretend the human myths don’t name you, Kitsune. Pretend the Council isn’t moribund with its own importance. Believe your own illusions. I surrender to the inevitable. I long now only to find the end of the story.”

  Enough with the purple prose. This was worse than the SCA melee battle face-off at a Ren Faire—Ullikemi’s monologuing wasn’t getting us anywhere. Hayk’s gray-trousered knees stared me in the face and an inkling of an idea lit up. Would Ken follow my lead? I swallowed down a lump of something bitter in my throat and before good sense could stop me, rolled a half somersault right into Hayk’s knees. He went over like a falling tower of blocks, his flailing elbows dealing a sharp blow to my head as I scrambled away.

  Ken followed him down, crouching over Hayk’s chest, breathing in short huffs. His face was the sharp-planed, dark-pupiled one I’d seen when he hunted my father across the city. The purple hoodie morphed back into his OHSU sweatshirt as I sat up, brushing slimy dirt and twigs from my jeans.

  The silver knife flashed in Hayk’s free hand, cutting a thin line across his own palm. Ken forced his forearm over Hayk’s smiling mouth a beat too late. Ullikemi’s power thrummed through Hayk’s voice.

  “An instance of total surprise that freezes you,” said Hayk, sub tones, overtones, a harmony of command.

  The chill fear took me, a prisoner inside my own flesh.

  Ken groaned, muscles in his back bunching and releasing. He couldn’t move.

  Hayk pushed him off easily. He stood up, brushing damp pine needles from his arms.

  “Now, you will tell me the names I require.” Hayk gave an impatient cluck of his tongue. He stepped around Ken, who was struggling against frozenness on hands and knees, shaking.

  “The names.” The voice was Hayk, his face close to mine, all clipped syllables and disdain.

  It was such a simple thing: two words. I could say the words and Hayk would unfreeze me, let Ken take me home. I remembered the mesmerizing draw of Thunderbird’s eyes and the menace in Kwaskwi’s too-wide smile. Kwaskwi and Thunderbird wouldn’t hesitate to use me for their own gain. They were powerful enough to take care of themselves.

  Tears welled. Lying to myself wasn’t helping. It wasn’t that simple. Hayk wouldn’t let me go. Conviction settled deep in my chest. Ullikemi wanted Thunderbird, and then he wanted my blood just as Ken had said. Giving Hayk the names would only give away what advantage we had, not set me free.

  “Ms. Pierce, I thought you ever so much cleverer than this. There is no shortage of people around you who can be made to suffer,” he said, brandishing the silver knife at Ken.

  Will this man never stop threatening people I care about?

  Something twinged within me. I’d included Ken in that thought. Someone I cared about.

  He had secrets, but I trusted him. Probably stupid. I’d hidden my whole life. Anything painful, anything real. From friends, from Mom. From Dad’s slow decay. Caring meant watching other people hurt, and then dreaming the depth of their pain in full Technicolor at night.

  If I sat by and watched Hayk slash Ken to ribbons, something irrevocable would break.

  Don’t be a sniffling coward.

  Hayk ran a finger from the corner of my eye down my cheek, gripping my chin like Humphrey Bogart in one of Mom’s black and white movies.

  “Kwaskwi,” I croaked.

  Hayk gave an over exaggerated grimace. “Mortal blood is required for this next part.” Hi
s tone truly apologetic. He grabbed my pony tail at the back of my head, pulling tightly. “Your Herai blood is so much more potent than mine.”

  The silver knife flashed again, and a line of pain burned across my left cheek. Behind him, Ken groaned.

  Blood dripped down my cheek. Hayk watched, the tip of his tongue caught between his teeth, a desire as deep and overwhelming as Ullikemi’s darkening his eyes. He turned from polite professor to something I’d cross to the other side of a street to avoid even in broad daylight.

  Gray static gathered at the corners of my eyes. I’d forgotten to breathe. The chill air turned to frost in my lungs, leaving me gasping like a goldfish out of its bowl. Hayk blinked, my noisy breath startling him from the dark place his desires lived.

  His grimace stretched to a hungry grin, and he put a cupped palm to my cheek, soaking up the slow trickle of blood. When his skin touched mine, I felt something vital drain from me, leaving me trembling and upright in his grip, my limbs aching to collapse.

  Hayk released me abruptly, and I tumbled back to the wet ground. My teeth closed painfully on the side of my tongue, sour melon taste flooding my mouth.

  From the ground, Hayk was out of my line of sight, but I heard him begin a chant in that harsh language he’d spoken to Ullikemi. Grunts and curses told me Ken was still struggling.

  The web of tree branches breaking up the expanse of cloud-soaked sky over my head was limned in brightness, Mount Hood’s peak like ivory shards shredding the green.

  Gray static again threatened to blind me. Consciousness drained away like water through a pour-over filter. I clung to the wavering triangle of Mount Hood with all my might.

  Hayk’s chant rose to a crescendo, one word distinct among the gibberish.

  “Kwaskwi!” he intoned. Ullikemi’s power burst from the harmonics, spilling through the clearing in all directions like an arctic wind.

  Struggling against Hayk-Ullikemi’s power, I managed to shut my eyes.

  Behind my eyelids, Hayk’s cold subsided a bit. Enough for me to realize there was a hard kernel glowing inside, deep in my belly. I tried to move my hand to cover it but Hayk’s frozenness still bound every muscle.

  “Soon, he comes,” said Hayk. “Be patient a bit more.”

  I shut out his voice, the bright pain on my cheek, and the chill damp seeping through my clothes. The kernel was warm.

  It was a fragment. Hayk’s fragment. He’d touched me when he took my blood, and despite the warmth of the kernel, it reeked of an all-consuming desire.

  This fragment felt the same as the murdered woman in the hall, and the boy broken at the bottom of the hole.

  Powerful, sharp-edged desire. Hayk’s.

  I probed at the kernel, felt it inside me like a chancre sore.

  I remembered the feeling of throwing Ken across the room. Not my own strength, but power borrowed from eating a fragment, from eating Hayk’s fragment. I could use that power right now.

  Dream eater.

  Nausea roiled. No, I didn’t want to take Hayk’s deranged passion into myself. But it sure would be handy.

  From somewhere outside my personal darkness I heard the staccato, sharp cries of a blue jay. Kwaskwi.

  He’s coming. With Dad? Or is Dad safe?

  This was my fault. I’d given Hayk Kwaskwi’s name, and it was my blood fueling this summons.

  Chills crept down my spine.

  How did I do it before? It wasn’t like I’d dreamed this fragment. This was different. The fragment hovered just outside my consciousness, darting to and fro like a minnow worrying at some piece of food. Only in this metaphor it was my brain the fragment was dipping into.

  I reached for the taste of painful desire inside me as a blue jay’s shrill cries battered me on all sides. The roiling kernel of Hayk’s dreaming caught, turning to molten metal, burning up my nausea. It traveled up my spine to my head, seething there in an ever-expanding, rhythmic pulse. My skull throbbed. Every muscle in my body flexed, my back arching painfully high off the wet earth.

  Awake, I dreamed the dream.

  Endless sapphire blue and watery emerald all around me, indistinct shadows glimmering out of sight. My body glided, deadly, through the shifting blue-green, muscles twisting along my back and sides in strange, but powerful, configurations.

  Sea salt and murk covered my tongue.

  Thunder cracked overhead—a challenge—and I shot up out of the depths, surfacing to a blinding, brilliant, corona of gold around a fiery ball. An overwhelming want surged through me, shredding my insides. A water dragon’s defiance to the sky’s existence—a devouring hunger for the sun. Water versus air. A challenge that couldn’t be ignored.

  Oh god. Not Hayk’s dream after all.

  I gasped, my eyes flying open. The brightness of the drizzly day stung my vision blurry with tears. After a moment of frantic blinking, I could make out an entire scold of jays—wheeling blue swirls in the gray sky above me.

  I was a sandpaper bag of mixed up bones. A pathetic excuse for a human, let alone Baku, and Ullikemi’s wanting was like knives in my throat, building and building until the feeling I would burst resolved itself into an insistent pressure in my belly.

  But I swallowed. Swallowed. My muscles had obeyed me. Was Ullikemi/Hayk’s magic thawing? I exhaled, low and long.

  The seething, roiling want overflowed through the thin fabric of my skin. It burned, every cell catching fire, as if literal flames bloomed across my body.

  The binding of Hayk’s frozenness sloughed away.

  A cry was torn from me as my limbs tingled with a thousand needles. Tendons stretched, flexed, and cracked into place.

  Tears still streaming, I sat up, though the muscles in my lower back screamed in protest. I pulled myself up like an arthritic centenarian, the blue jays screaming murder overhead.

  Ken hadn’t moved from his position on all fours, but Hayk stood in a wide stance, arms outstretched to the sky, Ullikemi’s green-glass gaze burning in his face.

  “Kwaskwi,” Ullikemi said. “I summoned you here.”

  The scold of jays dropped from the sky like dead weights, straightening out into a jostling line of blue feathers and chattering beaks on top of the same block of marble Thunderbird had perched on a few hours ago.

  At some unseen signal, the birds quieted, going motionless.

  Hayk-Ullikemi was so focused on the jays, he didn’t react at all when I crept closer to Ken. Shaking, jaw clenched tight, he looked so strange, the planes of his face sharpened and odd, more Kitsune than human.

  My hands hovered a few inches from his shoulders.

  Ken was so strong, so sure. Touching him now, when he was powerless, felt like a violation.

  “Playing these tricks is not worthy of the thunder god,” said Hayk-Ullikemi.

  I forced my hands to Ken’s shoulders, and he moaned, a sound low in the back of his throat. I bent over him, pressing my arms and cheek to his back.

  Awful and wonderful. Skin crawled on my neck and back, as vulnerable to Hayk as Ken, but inside the cradle of my arms and chest Ken was warm. Burning up. And I reveled in that warmth.

  There was barely anything left of the kernel—no, the dream-fragment—I’d eaten, but where Ken’s skin rubbed mine, his exhilarating heat burned hotter. I breathed in the smell of sweat and salt, and when I exhaled, our connection flared hot. I jerked back. Pain tightened a vise at my temples and the trees surrounding us went fuzzy around the edges. The ground wouldn’t settle under my hands.

  Ken groaned and stood up, shaking out his long limbs like a dog drying after a dunk in a lake. He slowly backed away from Hayk, grasped me by the wrists, and dragged me after him.

  The jays broke their silence, angry squawks punctuating their mass of agitated wing strokes atop the marble. Hayk held his ground. He gathered in a deep breath and let forth a long stream of harsh syllables. The invective ended on the only word I recognized.

  “Kwaskwi.”

  Jays burst out in all directions
like Hayk had lobbed a grenade into their midst. Ken hunched over me, providing cover from the screeching cloud of scratching feet and sharp beaks.

  One jay remained on the marble. Jabbing its beak toward the sky, it let loose a long, shrill call that set every hair on my body quivering.

  The other birds came to rest in the branches of the surrounding trees, an eerily quiet, intent audience.

  “Finally,” said Ullikemi, “we are met.”

  Chapter Ten

  “Someone’s been telling you fairy tales,” said a voice behind us.

  Ken stiffened. “Stay close,” he whispered in my ear. I nodded carefully. The vise was back, and my head throbbed like bags of screws flowed in my veins instead of blood.

  Kwaskwi, still in plaid shirt and jeans and with hair as spiky as a New York underwear model’s, stepped into the clearing from the parking lot path. Ken’s eyes flickered between the two men.

  Kwaskwi tugged at the stem of a tall strand of wheat grass. It broke off in his hands. He leaned his elbows back on the marble block of vets’ names next to the motionless jay, chewing the ragged end of the grass. Quite the picture of a harmless hick.

  “I’m no thunder god.”

  Hayk’s eyes blazed impossible green. He shook his head. “You do not lie.”

  Kwaskwi spit the stem from his mouth, his lips curling into a slow, wide grin. “Nope.”

  The drizzle had tapered off, but there was enough moisture in the air to hold Ullikemi’s presence, the scent of saltwater and spice.

  “Give me the thunder god’s name,” said Hayk.

  “Why would I do that?” said Kwaskwi. Laughter shrieked from the jays jostling for position in the surrounding pines.

  Ken tugged me back down when I tried to stand. Crazy, alpha-male. Now was the time to run away, far away while these two asshats kept each other busy. Find Dad, make sure Marlin was—

  Ken touched his mouth, and then indicated Hayk.

  Infuriating boy, just has to point out the flaw in my brilliant plan. Hayk could still freeze us with a word.