A blush burned his cheeks. She didn’t seem upset about it at least. “You’re Aiden’s mom?” This was all so weird.
“Yes. I have been searching—”
“Quickly now,” the red-haired woman said. Tiago realized the colors around them had started to fade. “We have but a moment.”
Aiden’s mom—could she really be?—looked at him with pleading eyes the same blue as Aiden’s. “You must tell him to remove the iron from his bed. The dream walker cannot bring me to him unless it is gone.”
“The iron? What are you talking about?” The woods looked like a pale watercolor painting now.
“He will know. Please, you must.” Aiden’s mom grasped his arm. She was sharp and clear compared to the fading world around them. The trees were turning black and white.
“Okay. I’ll tell him.” Aiden had mentioned a few times how he wished he could find his birth parents and his human brother. If Tiago might be able help, he’d do everything he could.
“Thank you, shape-shifter.” She squeezed his arm, and everything went black.
* * *
Tiago was unusually quiet on the ride to school, staring out the window with a thoughtful frown.
“You okay?” Aiden asked.
“Yeah, I just…” Tiago glanced at Dylan before turning to Aiden. “I had a weird dream this morning.”
“Something bad?” Aiden reached over to take his hand. They always rode together in the back now.
“If it’s a sex dream, I don’t want to hear it,” Dylan said from up front.
That got a little laugh out of Tiago. “No, although now I’m tempted to make one up just to watch you squirm. This dream was so real, and I knew I was dreaming. This woman came up to me and… Well, she said she was your mom.”
“What?”
“Not your mom.” Tiago waved a hand. “Your birth mom. The fae one.”
An ache filled Aiden’s chest, just like it did whenever he thought about his other family. It wasn’t real, just a dream. But what an odd thing for Tiago to dream about. Had they been talking about it yesterday?
“Weird, I know. She said to take the iron away from your bed and something about a dream walker.”
A cold bolt of fear went through Aiden. Was it Morgan, playing some kind of trick? Trying to get to him through Tiago?
“Dream walker?” Dylan said, his voice tense. “Isn’t that…?”
Tiago looked between them. “Is that something bad? Is this thing for real? What’s going on?”
“Oh God.” If Morgan was contacting Tiago, they needed to tell him who the dark fae was. But it was Dylan’s secret to protect. Aiden swallowed, torn between keeping Dylan’s secret and protecting his boyfriend. “Dylan, should we tell him?”
“Shit, now you guys are scaring me.” Tiago squeezed Aiden’s hand.
They reached the school parking lot, and Dylan yanked the car into a spot. He turned, leaned over the back of the seat, and studied Tiago for a long moment. He blew out a breath. “I guess I can trust you, Cat Boy.”
“Are you sure?” Aiden wanted to tell Tiago. It was hard keeping such a huge secret from his boyfriend. But he also didn’t want Dylan to regret sharing this.
Dylan took another breath. “Yeah.”
So they told Tiago about Morgan invading their dreams. Aiden let Dylan take the lead on how much they should share, and to his surprise Dylan told Tiago everything. Even the part where he hurt Aiden when Aiden tried to stop him.
Tiago tensed at that. “So the training accident story was a lie?” That was what Aiden had told him to explain how he’d developed panic attacks and a fear of magic. The same story Aiden had told Ms. Yang and the school counselor.
“Yeah,” Dylan said.
“But he apologized.” Aiden put a soothing hand on Tiago’s arm. “He’s really sorry, and he feels super guilty about it.”
“If you want to give me a good punch for it, go ahead.” Dylan didn’t look like he was joking.
“No one is punching anyone.” Aiden worried Tiago might take Dylan up on the offer.
They’d been talking in the parking lot for a good long while. A flicker of guilt that they would all be late for class shot through Aiden, but this was more important. He and Dylan finished the story, with them and Mr. Johnson closing the portal and the warden making them promise him a favor.
Tiago looked between them. “Is that why you’re training to be wardens? Is that the favor?”
“Yeah. Irony, right? Or karma. One of those things,” Dylan said.
“I knew there had to be something more. You hate them.” Tiago shook his head. “Hell of a thing to force you into.”
“My parents don’t believe it either. They don’t know what actually happened or about the deal.” Dylan gripped the headrest, leaning closer. “You can’t tell anyone, Cat Boy. No one.”
Tiago held up his hands. “I swear. I know how to keep secrets.” He flashed a grin at Aiden.
That look could still make his insides flip. “Now you know why we freaked out when you mentioned a dream walker.”
Tiago nodded. “So this Morgan guy is a dark fae, like the one you fought?”
“I think he’s worse.” Aiden didn’t have concrete evidence, only a sense that Morgan was more powerful than the man who’d come after them sophomore year.
“Yeah.” Dylan agreed, which didn’t make Aiden feel any better.
“Crap.” Tiago was quite for a moment. “But the women I saw weren’t this creepy Uncle Morgan guy.” He went over his dream—how real and sharp everything was, what the women had said, what they looked like. “She had your eyes,” Tiago told Aiden.
Aiden’s heart squeezed. What if it was really her? His birth mom, trying to contact him? Aiden had hoped for this since Mr. Johnson showed up and told him he was a changeling.
“This has to be a trick.” Dylan shook his head.
“What if it’s not?” Aiden said. Tiago wrapped an arm around him. “What if I can finally talk to my mom? And my brother and dad?” Ask them why he’d been abandoned in the human world. If she was looking for him, then she hadn’t rejected him. Or maybe she had and now she regretted it. Aiden wanted answers so desperately it hurt.
“You’re really going to move the dagger and leave yourself vulnerable? On a chance?” Dylan asked.
How bad was this idea if Dylan was being the cautious one? “I have to know.”
“Even if she’s really your mom, what if you sleep without the dagger and Morgan gets to you first?”
Fear rolled in Aiden’s guts.
“You don’t have to decide now,” Tiago said gently, rubbing Aiden’s arm. “We can try to come up with some safety precautions.”
“Maybe Mr. Johnson—” Dylan started.
“No!”
They both looked at Aiden in surprise.
“He’ll just tell me not to do it.”
They kept staring at him with worried expressions.
“Guys, it’s my family. I… I have to know.”
“I’ll help you. Anything you need.” Tiago kissed his cheek.
“For once you have the crazy plan.” The corner of Dylan’s mouth turned up. “I’m down with that.”
CHAPTER TEN
“Hey, can we talk in private?” Aiden asked Maggie.
She looked up from her lunch with a frown. “Sure.” Setting down her sandwich, she got up to follow him. “I’ll be back,” she told her friends.
Aiden led her out of the lunchroom, thoughts going back and forth. He really should talk to Mr. Johnson about this. It was such a stupid risk, and there was no way Maggie knew as much as the warden. But Mr. Johnson would tell him not to contact his birth mom at all in case it was a trick.
“So what’s up?”
Aiden shook his head. “Not yet. I don’t want anyone to hear us.” He peeked through the narrow window on a classroom door. The room looked empty, and he ducked his head in to make sure. Nobody was around, so he led Maggie inside.
�
��I hope this is about the LGBTA council, but from the look on your face, I’m guessing that’s not it.” Maggie watched him with concern.
“Dylan said you helped him out with information on dream walkers.”
Maggie held up her hands. “Oh no. The last time this happened you guys almost ended up dead.”
“That dark fae was after us anyway. He would have attacked us even if Dylan hadn’t done anything.” It hadn’t been Morgan, and Morgan had denied returning to Shadow Valley, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t sent the other dark fae.
“Did Dylan talk to him? Was he a dream walker? He never told me.”
Aiden wiped his sweaty palms on his pants, not sure what to say. He didn’t want to tell Maggie everything. The more people he told, the more likely the information would wind up in the wrong hands. Like the wardens’.
“This is… This doesn’t have anything to do with that.” It might not, so that wasn’t a total lie. “My birth mother might be trying to contact me.”
Her eyes widened. “Oh wow. Your birth mom is a dream walker?”
“No, but she’s using one to contact me. Only I can’t be sure it’s really her. Fae like to trick people, right?”
“Except you. You’re really honest.”
His cheeks burned with shame. “Um, yeah.” He was lying and hiding things from her right now. “So I want to know if there are ways to protect myself from a dream walker in case this is a trick.”
“Hmm. But not block one out, because you still want to talk to her?”
“Right.”
“You should really ask someone who knows about this stuff. What about Phoebe?”
That was Aiden’s part-fae tutor. “She’ll just tell me not to take the risk. But I have to know. I just don’t want to go in totally unprotected.”
Maggie pressed her lips together. “Okay. Dylan told you about lucid dreaming, right?”
“Yeah, but he wasn’t very good at explaining it.”
Maggie laughed. “Not a future teacher. Well, start working on that. I’ll send you some good links for lucid dreaming, and you can practice. But until you get good at it, you should block the dream walker. I’ll have to look it up again, but there’s a spell you can put on something iron and keep it under your pillow.”
Should he play dumb or be honest? “Yeah, I know about that. A dagger works best.” At her curious expression, he added, “I looked up protection spells against fae after what happened, and that one came up. So I know how to block a dream walker from my dreams but not how to defend myself if I want to contact one.”
“Okay. What about the information I sent Dylan before?”
“Sorry, he lost those texts.”
“I think I might still have them. I’ll check. Probably easier to send it to you in e-mail anyway. And I can look through my parents’ books again, but I think it’s better if we go to the library.”
“We?”
Maggie sighed, but she also looked amused. “You know you can look this stuff up by yourself.”
“Um, yeah. But I wouldn’t even know where to start.” When he’d first come to Shadow Valley, he’d spent a lot of time doing Internet searches on the various kinds of supernatural creatures, but it was hard to separate fact from fiction. Even when he’d finally gone to the town library, he’d been overwhelmed by all the books. A number of them weren’t even in English.
She smiled and nudged him. “It’s okay. I’m happy to help. Besides”—her eyes twinkled—“I have access to the special collection.”
The library had a locked section in the basement with rare books. “Really?” One of those old books might have exactly the information he needed.
“Uh-huh. The librarians love me.”
“Of course they do.”
Maggie laughed. “Want to go Saturday?” When he made a face, she said, “Oh. Warden training, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Sunday then?”
He wanted to go right then if it meant finding a way to safely contact the person claiming to be his birth mother. “The lucid dreaming will take a while to learn, right?”
“You can’t even be sure it will work. Not everyone can do it. But even if you can manage it right away, you’d need to practice it for at least a few days to make sure you have it down.”
This was already dangerous enough. Rushing into things wasn’t going to help. “Yeah, okay. Sunday.”
* * *
“First up is Dylan, of course.” Ms. Yang shot him an amused glance. Dylan already stood in the middle of the gym, waiting for his opponent. “And he’ll face off against Sakura.”
She jumped up from the bench with a grin. Taking up position in the green circle outlined on the floor, she said, “You better not go easy on me.”
“I know you can take it.” A flare of desire went through Dylan, and he told himself to watch it, otherwise this match might get seriously embarrassing.
“And don’t forget I can give it back.” A faint glow shimmered around her as she called up her magic.
“Ready?” Ms. Yang said, pulling Dylan’s attention back. “Go!”
Dozens of tiny fireballs flew toward Dylan, and he fended them off with fire of his own. Although they pushed each other, having a match against Sakura was so familiar it was almost comforting. He and Sakura—and Izume—had been having matches against each other since junior high. While the other kids in class had been nervous, even begging the teacher not to make them go against Dylan, the fox sisters had never been afraid of him.
Dylan wondered why he’d never reached out to them to strike up a friendship. Too busy wallowing in his status as an outcast probably. Then Aiden had come along and changed everything. Dylan wondered how different things might have been if he’d made an effort to hang out with Sakura and Izume outside of gym. Would he and Sakura have started dating sooner?
He hurled a blast of raw magic at her, and she ducked, rolling to avoid it. Even before the roll ended, she shot streams of fire at him.
When he was younger, Dylan had mostly used aggressive, offensive magic. Practicing with Aiden had helped him improve his defensive spells, and with warden training, Dylan was getting even better at defensive magic.
A shield sprang to life in front of him, absorbing the fire. Unlike gym, the outside world wasn’t protected against magic, so wardens had to prevent collateral damage. Fire bouncing off a magical shield could cause serious damage.
Look at me, all conscientious.
But Sakura had a surprise for him. Using her fire as a cover, she’d sprinted up close to him, and Dylan barely had a second to react as she slammed a hand against the barrier. Instinctively, he dodged as magic flared. His shield fizzled and burst. Bringing his hands up, he summoned a fireball to dodge her next attack.
The air between them was as hot as an oven, but they were both creatures of fire. That was one of the reasons he never had to hold back against either of the fox sisters. The other was that they matched him in skill. Even now, with Dylan taking magical combat training from the wardens, Sakura was able to hold her own.
God, she was amazing. Sakura’s eyes were fierce as she came at him, and a sheen of sweat made her short bangs stick to her forehead. They were fighting nearly hand to hand now, flames filling the short space between them.
Dylan had always admired her, but now he had a new level of appreciation for the beautiful kitsune. Of course he’d noticed her physically before, as any straight dude would notice a hot girl, but he really noticed her now. And he had to remind himself again that they were in class.
She tripped him, and Dylan went down hard, breath rushing out of him. He brought a barrier up just in time to absorb her next attack and rolled to his feet.
“Sure you’re not holding back?” she said between pants.
“Geez, no!” He might be a little bit too focused on the way her body moved, but that wasn’t deliberate. “Maybe I should take my shirt off and distract you with my chest.”
“Then I’d do
the same, and we’ll see who’s more distracted.”
He let out a surprised bark of laughter, then hurried out of the way as a huge fireball roared toward him.
“Okay, stop!” Ms. Yang’s voice rang through the gym.
Dylan sighed in disappointment but dropped his hands. “Why?”
“We need to give someone else a chance. You’ve been at it for half an hour.”
Wow. It hadn’t seemed that long. He and Sakura headed back toward the benches. “Great match,” he told her.
She bumped him with her shoulder. “You too.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“Yeah, this isn’t creepy at all.” Aiden looked around at the basement room full of books. It was poorly lit, and the tall shelves were crammed with books all the way to the ceiling. The room smelled of musty old paper, and he imagined—or did he?—a low whispering that seemed to come from the very back.
“You probably feel the magic. Some of these books are enchanted.”
“And they just… let you come down here alone?”
“Well, my mom had to sign a waiver and stuff, but yeah.” Maggie turned on a lamp that sat on one of the large desks near the door. The light helped to dissipate some of the gloom.
Aiden rubbed at his arms, trying to shake off the chill. “So where do we start looking?” He wanted to get out of there as soon as possible.
Maggie didn’t seem the least bit bothered to be in the spooky room. “I think the information on Faery and the fae is back there.” She pointed toward the back corner where the eerie whispering sound was coming from.
“Of course.”
She laughed. “It’s not that bad.”
Aiden gave her a look.
“Okay, maybe it’s a little creepy, and some of these books contain spells that can kill people—”
“What?” Aiden took a step back. The whole point of this was to make himself safer when he contacted the dream walker, not to die because he picked up the wrong book.
Dragonkin Are from Mars, Changelings Are from Venus Page 4