She raised her hands, palms up. “Kitsune, don’t be foolish,” she said.
“Kwaskwi breaks faith?”
Elise gave an alpha cheerleader giggle. “You broke it first.”
The green aura brightened, twisted away from the objects it was outlining to mass together into a glowing blob between me and the folded-open MAX train door.
Ullikemi. Coalescing from the cardamom-scented rain. How had the serpent gotten so powerful? Had Hayk killed again?
I backed up further, bumping into Ken’s immovable mass.
“We just want to bring the girl to her father,” said Mirror-skirt. Oh god. The shiny bits on her skirt weren’t mirrors, but teeth, polished till they shone.
“Don’t come any nearer,” said Ken.
Elise blanched at the command in his voice, taking herself out of the direct line of fire to stand halfway behind one of the brick tables where people played chess on sunnier days.
“But I am so fond of little girls,” said the woman, grinning wide to show a row of pearly whites sharpened to points.
I recoiled.
“Little fish, little carp, so bright and shining.” She pursed her lips, blood red now against death-pale skin and blew.
“Huuuuuuuu,” came her breath. Bone-chill wind through smoky cedars. It curled around me, tempering Ullikemi’s musky spice with smoke and ice-sharp prickles.
A passenger gripping his fold-down bicycle stared at me from the open door of the MAX train, fogged green by Ullikemi’s shifting presence.
Two spots of incandescent verdigris flared in the green fog, and answering spikes of pain drove through my temples. Ken’s arms caught me under the arms just as my knees buckled.
“Ullikemi,” I gasped.
“Don’t be stupid,” growled Ken, “back away now.”
“Huuuuuuuu,” came the woman’s breath again, mixing with the green fog, lightening it. The cardamom faded for a moment, but the woman’s breath sucked warmth from every cell in my body. I collapsed at Ken’s feet in the slimy gutter of Yamhill Street.
“Stupid tourists,” I heard the bike passenger say as the MAX train doors closed, pulling away with a grinding of gears.
White frosted Ken’s features. He snarled, baring canines that rivaled the woman’s in sharpness and put out both hands, fingers tipped with wicked, ivory claws.
The Ducks guys formed a wall behind the shiny mirror woman, all poised to tear Ken apart.
Ullikemi’s mist re-coalesced from the shiny woman’s chilling wind. An intense burst of cardamom assailed my nose and throat. A tendril of green fog shot out from the main mass, questing in the air, finding…searching.
The tendril aimed straight for my face, like an alien probe in a B horror movie. I clamped my mouth shut with both hands while gray fuzz ate away more of my vision.
Cold damp blew at my back, evidence of Ken’s sudden lunge away. Thuds and the sick sound of ripping flesh came from my left.
“Ullikemi,” I gasped again, and the fog tendril dove into my throat. Lightning arced overhead, splitting my head wide open.
Into the breach poured the endless emerald blue of the deeps, muscles twisting and flexing along my sinuous length, straining with all my might to reach for the brilliant gold warmth shining down from the glimmering curtain of the ocean’s surface…
My lungs gasped for air, and for a moment oxygen filled my chest, pushing Ullikemi out of my head. The gray fuzz cleared. I made out Ken standing over the body of the bald Ducks guy, using the second one, his jersey ripped and covered with blood, as a shield. Shiny-skirt woman loomed, looking taller and gaunter.
Then, like the tide sweeping in, Ullikemi came rushing back, filling, ballooning inside me, pressing against my skin like my mortal body could not contain the want, the desire, the need for golden warmth. A warmth tantalizingly just out of reach above me/us as we surged upwards with all our might toward the glittering curtain where water met air. My jaws wide, aching with the strain, I burst from the water with a mighty roar, fangs snapping together on the tail end of a wisp of golden light, a warmth burning pleasure along the side of my mouth and dripping down my throat.
A fragment? No, not exactly a fragment, more like a living vision. I twisted back and forth in the gutter, my hands flexing uselessly. Behind closed eyelids, I tried painting kanji strokes over and over, but black ink bled into deepest green. Ullikemi’s hunger convulsed my throat as he force fed me the overpowering vision. Drowning backwards, back into the vivid blue, back in the sinuous body of a water dragon.
A flapping of gold and crimson wings and the piercing shriek of an eagle cut through the golden warmth. Sharp claws ripped my back. My mouth ached with hollow emptiness as I fell back into the water. The eagle shrieked again, laughing.
Caught by Ullikemi’s vision, the name of our enemy bubbled up from the depths where I’d buried it. See how it taunts me/us, see how Thunderbird keeps me/us from the warmth of the sun!
And then Ullikemi’s voice, jarring harmonics sending my muscles spasming along legs and arms, my teeth chattering like a skeleton’s.
Thunderbird!
Oh god. No.
Ullikemi’s vision released me, streaks of green and unbearable blue fading to normal Portland clouded skies.
What had the dragon-kind done to me? Used Baku dream-vision against me?
“Ullikemi knows Thunderbird’s name,” I said, voice torn from a lacerated throat. “I’ve betrayed him.”
“Kwaskwi will have your little fish,” shiny-skirt woman said to Ken.
I blinked past tears and mucous at the corners of my eyes, bringing my hands up to my face only to find them covered in street slime. I pushed myself to a kneeling position.
Two bald Ducks fans now lay along Yamhill’s soaked pavement, their arms bent in unnatural angles. Ken was still standing, but looked more like Frosty the snowman than a Kitsune, the shiny-skirt woman’s chill breath coating him in layer of sparkling frost. He didn’t move.
A staring half-circle of tourists stood a few feet away, whispering among themselves and snapping pics as if this were a staged street art presentation.
Where are the cops?
Shiny-skirt inched closer.
“She endangers us, Kitsune. She betrayed Kwaskwi and now Thunderbird. The Kwakwaka’wakw, the Coast Salish, the Haida and the Tsimshian will not give up Thunderbird for her!”
Rattling polished teeth and exhaling cold wind, shiny-skirt woman moved to tower over me, impossibly larger than the old woman she had appeared to be, a giant.
“The little Baku’s life will be payment.”
“Don’t touch her,” said Ken, but his voice was human and weak.
Why doesn’t he move?
Panic raced through me. I couldn’t let Kwaskwi’s people take me, I had to reach Skidmore fountain and force Kwaskwi to fulfill his promise to hand over Dad under the original terms of our bargain.
“Little fish, you are mine,” crooned the giantess as she bent down to place clawed hands around my throat and squeezed.
Inside my coat pocket, the opening chords to Beethoven’s fifth symphony pierced the air. Marlin’s ringtone. I wouldn’t fail her. Wouldn’t fail Dad. Couldn’t let this hag choke me to death kneeling in the gutter, covered in slime.
No.
Little fish had a trick up her sleeve. Shiny-skirt dragged me down the pavement by my throat back toward the Starbuck’s.
I reached for her wrists with both hands, and she tensed, cutting off my air. My vision went dark, but instead of trying to drag her hands from my throat as she anticipated, I dug my fingernails into her wrists and held on, tight.
Eater of dreams.
Ken called himself tainted.
What would I become if I ate Shiny-skirt’s fragment? Blood pounded in my ears, a frantic, failing heartbeat.
No choice. I reached for the hag’s fragment which already tingled against my palms.
Snow-dusted cedars,
craggy, jutting mountains, and the unending wail of the wind. Sweet, delicious-bitter taste of blood on my tongue, and the hulking forms of bear brothers glimpsed through moonlit boughs, huffing through creaking underbrush.
Dzunukwa, naked, pale-skinned monster of the Kwakwaka’wakw, eater of children, bestower of wealth.
The kernel of her, the fragment of herself she dreamed over and over every night. The sense of her was as heavy as ten pound bags of Kokuho Rose weighing down my shoulders and chest.
“I know you,” I gasped, and let that kernel sink down, down deep.
Eater of dreams.
The kernel caught, turning to molten metal that burned with a knife-edged pleasure. Muscles spasmed up and down my back. I arched like a bowstring, taut with a thousand fire-hot needles.
Dzunukwa flinched; releasing me and bringing her hands, now smeared red with my blood, to her temples. She screamed, backing away.
I staggered to my feet after her, arms outstretched, growling in a voice like a bear’s.
The kernel burned, a flaring heat journey up each vertebra to the place where the back of my neck joined my spine, an ever-expanding, rhythmic pulse filling my hindbrain. Like before when I’d taken Ullikemi’s fragment to break Hayk’s power, the pressure swelled, threatening to crack my skull.
Dzunukwa let loose another frigid blast of air that turned the air around us into a swirling blizzard of snow. It barely registered on me. This frozen hag was no danger. She cowered on the ground, nothing, just a pathetic bag of bones. I was Dream Eater. I was—
“Ken?” I reeled from suddenly unbearable pressure. What had I done?
“I got you,” said Ken’s voice, and I felt him catch me around the waist. An instant later he released me with a little yelp of pain. “You’re on fire.”
“I can’t—” Like an overinflated balloon, my internal organs pressed into my ribcage. Dzunukwa’s blizzard had melted into floppy, wet flakes and she was hunched over, pale, the tiny polished teeth trembling all over her skirt.
“You drew first blood,” gasped the hag. One clawed hand made a chopping motion in the air, and the swirling snow plopped to the ground, melting into oily-dark puddles. “You took my power, and turned it into death-magic.”
A sharp-edged knife, no a fang as long as my hand, sharpened to a deadly point, appeared in Dzunukwa’s hand. Eyes glittering cruel blue, she glanced up at me, suddenly not as weak as she had appeared.
“Law says I may claim your life.”
“No,” said Ken, pushing me behind him. “She’s not true Kind, she is not bound as we are.”
All this pressure had to go somewhere. Dzunukwa’s fragment wasn’t manageable, not like Hayk’s. Two. I had two Kind fragments in me. Power like nothing I’d ever felt.
But death-magic. Me?
Dzunukwa lunged with her fang. Ken twisted to the side, shoving me out of her path.
The scattering of businessmen and map-wielding tourists had come closer, exclaiming about the snow-puddle but wary. Someone in Sketchers and purple velour broke my fall.
Elise.
“Get off me,” she said, pushing me away. But her fingertips brushed bare skin at my neck.
An endless swath of cedars in a hidden valley, smoke rising from campfires in the shadowed safety of Mt. Rainier.
Another fragment stuffed in on top of Ullikemi and Dzunukwa.
My head burst.
Colors exploded across my vision, and the ground tilted underneath my feet. Every ounce of breath squeezed from my lungs.
In great, painful heaves, I spewed half-digested beans and salsa all over Elise’s shoes.
“Fuck!” She kicked at me.
The sound of cloth ripping. “Behold,” said Ken. He’d ripped open his plaid button-down. My vision was blurred so much I could only see a strange, black marking on his chest. “Do you lecture a Bringer about Kind law?”
“Murderer,” said Dzunukwa. “Kwaskwi won’t allow some Council toady to savage our traditions.”
“This isn’t over, freak,” Elise grated out and kicked me hard in the abdomen. I folded backwards, head banging hard against the brick table. Everything went black. I gasped for air, mouth wide open like a fish flung from its bowl.
A hand on my elbow. I flinched.
“It’s okay, Koi, it’s me,” said Ken.
“What’s happening?”
“The old woman is walking away. They’ve given up for now. We have to get to Skidmore fountain,” he said.
“I can’t, I can’t see,” I said, grasping at his open collar with both hands. My hand brushed the skin of his chest.
I flinched again. No more fragments. I was raw and loose inside thrumming skin. Even Ken’s harmless dreams of forest-running would break the rudimentary bonds holding my fractured cells together.
“It’s okay,” he said. Warm breath tickled my cheek, and then his lips touched my skin at the base of my ear. Prickles raced down my neck, the length of my arms.
“Ken,” I said. “Don’t touch—”
Nothing. There was nothing there. No fragment. No dream of four legs racing through oddly scented evergreens.
Did I burn out? Flip a breaker?
His mouth pulled away, only to be followed by the press of his face against my neck, his arms going around my back to press me forcefully to his chest, slimy clothes and all.
Slowly, I let my hands skim up his shoulders, feeling a stickiness that I tried to ignore. Behind his neck, they curled themselves into a knot on bare skin.
Bare skin. No fragment. No need to brace myself. So warm against me in this shadowy darkness. The world could go screw itself. For the first time in my life I relaxed in the presence of another person, and let the burning tears slide free.
“You’re fine,” he murmured into my throat at the place where my pulse throbbed. “Everything’s going to be okay.”
“Something broke,” I said.
Ken lifted his head, keeping his hands on my back.
“I had to…take something from that hag. Not exactly a dream. Like a waking vision. I think I overloaded. Now I can’t see.”
Air passed in front of my face.
“You really can’t see this?” said Ken.
I shook my head.
“And just now, when we touched, I got no fragment from you.”
The muscles in Ken’s neck stiffened. He released me and covered my interlocked hands with his own, gently disengaging me.
“The Max train is coming,” he said. “We should board.”
My cheeks flushed red. Remind the man you eat his dreams when he’s holding you. Of course he’d stiffen. Not to mention we were both covered in god knows what.
“Here,” said Ken, and a plastic something brushed my lips. Water. I gulped it down and then took some in my mouth, swishing it around and spitting. Something damp wiped at my face and chin. Ken’s wet sleeve?
“You stopped telling me everything’s going to be okay,” I said.
Ken herded me forward, taking the bottle from my nerveless fingers. “Step up here,” he said, guiding me up two metallic steps. The particular gym-socks, metallic-sweet smell of the Max enveloped me.
I heard the swoosh of doors folding closed. The train’s sudden movement made me grasp at Ken.
“It’s not good that you can’t see,” he said.
“No duh,” I said. “Maybe it’s temporary.”
“Probably.” His thumbs traced the arc of my cheekbones, brushing my eyelashes. “There’s no visible damage in the iris or pupil.”
Is he staring into my eyes? I blinked furiously, feeling a flush spread across my cheeks. My hand felt a path to his chest and came to rest, palm directly over the still-open shirt fabric where I’d seen that strange character before.
“What’s this?” I said.
Ken stilled underneath my hands and sighed. “When you are experiencing Ullikemi or the hag’s dream you do not seem like you are aware of what’s going on around you. You a
re seeing visions, yes? Like a person caught in a nightmare. This time you looked like an epileptic caught in a nightmare. But you noticed that part?”
I nodded. “Hard to miss that whole ‘behold’ line. Don’t be offended, but all that Kind language you and Kwaskwi and Ullikemi use is super hokey.”
Silence.
“Are you going to explain the mark?”
“No,” said Ken.
“My Alzheimer’s-addled father, who is really an ancient Japanese dream eater, is being held hostage by a Native American blue jay trickster, and I’m being hunted by a dragon spirit and a crazy professor who wants to slice me up with a knife. Oh yeah, and I’m blind. You already told me about the whole assassin gig. What could be worse?”
The train pulled to a stop. “Mall/4th Street?” said Ken.
“No, we’ve got three more stops to Skidmore. Just tell me. I want—I need to trust you.”
“I’m sorry,” he breathed, “I just can’t—” Ken’s lips slanted across my mouth, firm, demanding, carelessly rough. Caught off guard, I flinched back for an instant. His hands tugged me back, and then I leaned into him.
Ken broke away long enough for a whisper. “I tried to keep away.”
Safety, warmth, said his arms pressed around me. Desire, said the insistent pressure of his lips, the slight rasp of a morning’s growth of whiskers on his chin, sensitizing the corners of my mouth.
Let go, just feel. No need to hold anything back. No tickle of fragment. You can trust him. Trust this.
I did, wallowing in the breathless feeling that had everything to do with his kinako-cinnamon musk smell and how my hands trapped by the press of our bodies felt only supple muscle.
Sensation followed upon sensation, rolling over me in waves that mimicked the rhythm of the press and release of our lips, leaving me light-headed and trembling.
“Koi,” he said, his tone making my chest ache. One hand traced up my side, trailing prickly awareness, until he cupped my head behind my ear, pressing a slow kiss, savoring, at the corner of my mouth away from the still-stinging slice on my cheek.
It was too much.
A tear squeezed from my tightly shut eye. The tip of Ken’s tongue tasted it, followed quickly by his lips slowly caressing my closed eyelids.
Dream Eater Page 17