"And once you choose a vampire, the rest will ignore you. After all, they haven't spent much time with you after Zane stepped in, have they?"
I blinked. I didn't want to agree with that, but he wasn't totally wrong. Wei had showed up, but apparently only because he was guarding me, not because he actually wanted to be with me.
"They-well-I..." I stammered, unable to put together a full sentence.
He tsked again, and the bed seemed to disappear. For a moment, I was falling into a great white nothingness, my pajamas fluttering around my body. I could feel that weightless feeling in my belly, and I gotta admit that I was in no way a fan.
I really wished I was Supergirl or Wonder Woman. Supergirl could fly, and Wonder Woman had an invisible jet and, barring that, could jump really well. Yeah, I really would rather be Wonder Woman; she was cool.
Wait a minute. This was my dream. I'd been Diana, Princess of Themyscira before. I'd had some pretty epic dream battles and made out with one of several versions of Clark Kent. Why not now?
The next thing I knew, I was wearing the outfit. I don't mean the new dark DC universe one; I mean the old school one piece bathing suit style with the star spangled underoos and the red and gold top. I had a sword on one hip, a lasso on the other and I could fly.
Wonder Woman couldn't, but this was my dream, dangit; if I wanted to be Wonder Woman and fly, I was going to do it.
And while we were thinking about Paradise Island…
The world shifted beneath me, and suddenly, Markus and I were standing on a beach. I could smell the salty air whip my ash brown curls around the golden tiara that sat on my forehead. He did not look happy with me.
"How did you do that?" he demanded.
"Dude, this is my head. You wanna screw around with my dreams, you are going to have to get on my level."
He snarled and shifted. At first, I thought he was going to be a dog, maybe even the creepy dog with the sharp teeth that followed my half-sister around. Then, he grew to be roughly the size of my grandmother's house, and added a couple of heads. His fur was black as pitch and his eyes like cheap rubies. I didn't need all those comics to recognize Cerberus.
"You wanna play this way? You could let me go."
His response was a trio of howls that reverberated in the ears.
"Okay."
There was a part of me that knew it would come to this. That I would have to fight him. That it was only going to be one of us leaving this dream. I really wanted it to be me.
I launched myself at him, my own battle scream pouring out of my throat. It was much better than my attempt at a giggle, probably because I was actually fearing for my life.
I don't know if it was all the comics I had read, my martial arts training, or the fact that this was a dream, but I moved really fast and I struck really hard. My sword disappeared into his side, but there was no blood, just a shadowy sort of smoke.
"That's not fair," I said, slamming my sword in again.
One of the heads dipped and snapped around my middle; he shook me hard, hard enough that I saw spots behind my eyes. When my vision was going gray, I was pretty sure I saw Jenny and Reikah staring down at me, but when I blinked, they were gone.
"Okay, no more nice girl."
The three-headed beast tossed his head as I whirled on him. The dreamscape had changed yet again. Rather than a glorious sun-swept island with crystalline sand beaches and water like liquid sapphires, I was in a layer of hell. Or, I thought as I looked at the massive three-headed dog, more like a section of Hades.
It was like some big underground cave with a hundred stalactites and stalagmites interrupting a clear line of sight. Small basins of boiling hot water pushed thick clouds of steam into the air, causing yet another problem for my vision. The steam collected in big pockets of the rock ceiling, and then dripped down to collect on the floor. My bright red boots, while totally stylish, were traitorously slick.
Damn.
I tried to change my outfit again. It resisted, or rather the dream did. In my own place, the surrealistic version of my grandmother's bedroom, everything had been as easy to sculpt as wet clay. Here and now, it was like chiseling away at marble: possible, but harder to do.
"I won’t let you escape," a strange trio of voices called out through the murky dark.
"You watch too many bad movies," I snapped back.
"You want to unleash magic."
I sighed. Hadn't I already had this conversation before? Pretty sure I had. "Listen, why don't you ask your girlfriend, or even your daughter, about my views on that? Okay?"
After finally managing to give myself some sensible shoes in this god forsaken dreamscape, I began trying to navigate through the hellish dimension. Even with my new shoes, every step was traitorous. I kept my sword in one hand and a shield in the other, lasso bouncing on my hip. Dressing up as my favorite super hero was nice and all, but I wasn't sure how much help it was going to be. Why had my sword just gone through the beast like it was made out of smoke?
"If I could wake up, I would."
That had me stopping in my path.
"Wait, what?"
I shifted my body between two pieces of rock, watching as the massive beast swayed back and forth in what looked like a large cavern. The black fur was slick with the humid heat of the cave.
"Don't you remember what your little boyfriend did?"
Wei was neither little nor my boyfriend, but it seemed kind of stupid to grump about that right that moment. Instead, I shifted my body in an effort to hide until I could figure out what I ought to do.
"I remember," he continued, clearly willing to go on a villainous rant about everything that was making him a bitter creep. That was fine. He could monologue all he wanted. I needed time to think. "In a misguided effort to rescue you from a comfortable custody, he and that little group of miscreants attacked me."
Man, did this dude take bad guy monologues one-oh-one? I was guessing so. Only mustache-twirling villains used words like miscreants. And what was this about comfortable custody? Pretty sure he meant forced isolation, or some other word for imprisonment, because that's exactly what had happened.
"We fought, and I would have had him if it weren't for you."
I couldn't help myself. "And you would have gotten away with it too if it weren't for us rotten kids."
His head snapped in my direction, all six bright red eyes narrowed at me. I went as absolutely still as I could imagine, wishing suddenly that I could turn to rock. Then, I felt the slow shift of magic, and when I was brave enough to open my eyes, my body had shifted to look like my surroundings.
Hmm, I thought to myself, more Mystique than Wonder Woman, but I'd totally take it. My sword and shield were gone, but if all I was going to do was sneak around and hide, I didn't need weapons. Besides, a sword hadn't done me a whole lot of good. But why? I thought that hurting a body in a dreamscape should have some kind of response. Then again, my grasp of dream magic was tenuous at best.
Okay, Lorena, think. I hunkered down behind another large rock and pieced together what I knew about my enemy and the world we were in.
Lucid dreaming was the short-lived time period between the point when a person was in the deep sleep where dreams happened, and the lighter sleep where they didn't. In this place, dreams were malleable, changeable. A practiced dream walker could stay in a lucid dream for a lot longer than the average person. They could even, with some skill, enter another person's dreams. Every entrance was easier than the one before it, and after a while, a dream walker could start to fiddle around with someone's dreams.
Somniamancers were especially good at it. Okay, fine. Markus, leader of the Order of the Loyal Hermit, was a Somniamancer. He could, with very little effort, create a dream world, or dreamscape, to trap a person in. Like, I thought as sweat dripped down my back, you know, a Hades-infused dimension of humid-laden hell. They could mess with a person's heads, and therefore bodies, with their particular brand of magic.
&nbs
p; Something was niggling at me, though. He was pretty pissed about Wei stabbing him. I couldn't blame him for that. There weren't a whole lot of people who liked getting stabbed in the gut. But it had been a pretty lethal shot. How was Markus even alive?
My train of thought was interrupted as the shape of Cerberus swiped out suddenly. Its huge paws swept out, each head gnashed in a trio of directions. Even that long canine tail swept dangerously around, making a circle of carnage that barely missed me, but hit a whole lot of rock.
The world began to quake. My footing was even less sure as rock crumbled around me. I lunged and dodged as fast as I could, trying my best to think quick thoughts. The safest place, I decided, was closer to the beast.
I tumbled into the large egg-shaped cavern and beneath the massive paws of the dog.
"He stabbed me, while infused with your power." Cerberus snarled in Markus' voice.
Had he? I had to think about it. That part of my memory wasn't as clear. I remember pushing power into Zane to get him moving again. Then...oh right. I had. I had been so overwhelmed with my own budding power that I connected with all of the vampires. Alan, Dmitri, Zane, and Wei had been connected to me for just a moment. I managed to give them all a little boost against the evil villain.
"I can still feel it, your death magic, swimming in my veins."
Was that a thing? I didn't know. Heck, I knew pretty much jack about necromancy outside of what happened in video games. Necromancy was death magic, or at least the manipulation of life. It probably wasn't so comfortable to have it, as he said, swimming in the veins. Was that it, I wondered, was he hovering somewhere on the edge of death? Did that explain the smoke? Or how he always managed to be asleep when I was? Because it was a little weird that he was messing with pretty much all of my dreams. And maybe having my magic inside of him gave him some kind of link.
I didn't know, but it was all I had to work with.
The dog swung its heads this way and that, turning in a tight circle as if trying to zero in on something. Me, I assumed. I flattened myself against the ground and wondered exactly what I was going to do with my newfound knowledge.
"I must be rid of you."
I rolled my shoulders, and thought about that.
If my magic was inside of him, couldn't I do something about that? I had to. But what?
I didn't have the time to think about it as a large, black paw slammed down around me. I'd been hurt before, but it was nothing like this. Getting hit by a practice weapon, or falling on the cold hard ground after a practice session with Wei did not, in any way, compare to this all-over sensation of being crushed. The weight pushed the air out of my lungs, and then it kept pushing down. I was aware of my bones grinding against one another, the blood pumping through my body. He was squashing me like a grape, and I had absolutely no interest in being juice.
He ripped his paw suddenly to the side, and I flopped around like a rag doll. Claws, half as long as my forearm, swept across my body. It didn't matter that I looked like a rock; I certainly didn't feel like it. I was just flesh and blood and bone, and all of it was battered.
Blood puddled beneath me, sticky and hot. That couldn't be good, could it? Nope. Not at all.
He swiped me with the other paw, sending me flying across the floor, scraping up my shoulders, my face, my arm. I was in so much pain from everything else that I barely felt it. That did not strike me as a good sign. My vision was blurry, and my arms felt too heavy to move. I was pretty sure I was dying, and there was some distant part of me that was totally okay with that.
"Not yet," a voice, male and kind, whispered down at me. "You must fight, Lorena."
"Dad?" I asked.
"Shhhh. It's your dream. Take control."
Magic slithered through me, warm and familiar and smelling deeply of herbs. I felt better for it, more energized. I managed to sit up, coppery blood still clinging to my arms, but I could move them again. That was good.
"Why won’t you die?"
With great effort, I lifted my head. I could still see the beast prowling towards me, but it was a shadow of itself, flickering around the image of a man. I didn't know Markus well enough to pick him out at the distance of a dream, but I made a leap of logic.
"You first," I snapped back.
I don't know when the Wonder Woman gear came back, but there it was, all blue and yellow and red. I dove at the beast, and knew in the way that you know in dreams, that he wasn't real. The only thing that was real in this whole blasted place was the man in the center of the creature. I dove for him, and when I got there, I slammed against a globe of protective magic, bouncing off of it with all the elegance of a bug against a windshield.
Hell disappeared, and we stood facing each other against a vast, empty nothingness. It was neither black nor white but a soft smoky gray. I wore my pajamas, and he was wearing what looked like a medical nightgown, the kind that had the ties to keep it shut in the back. He didn't look as unimposingly attractive as I had remembered; he looked withered. If I was a squashed grape, then he was a raisin. His skin was crumpled around his body. His eyes had large sagging dark circles around them, and the muscles that had been firm and fit just a few weeks ago were withered.
"What the heck happened?"
His eyes lit up with the frothing anger of the vengeful and obsessed. "You happened, you pathetic little witch! Your corruption."
"Well, that's a bit harsh." I responded.
"You did this!" He reached one hand out towards me Vader style, and I felt a surge of magic hit me. It was hard enough that I decided I would rather have been stepped on by a mythological dog all over again. "You infested me."
"I didn't mean to," I managed to say between fits of choking coughs. It was the truth, but even as I said it, I knew that it was a weak excuse. I hadn't meant to do this. I had only meant to get free. How was I supposed to know that it would twist him this way?
"You think that matters?" he snarled. His wrinkled face contorted monstrously. The lips were too wide, the eyes too large. Everything was just enough out of proportion to be unsettling. "What you meant to do doesn't matter. This is what you did. This is the corruption that will unleash itself on the world. Do you really think a woman filled with death can ever create life? You will bring nothing but desecration to this world."
I said the only thing I could. "I'm sorry."
He howled in rage. "I don't want your apology. I want your death."
He pounced on me then. Despite his decrepitude, he moved like a lash. He slammed into me, toppling me to the ground. Out of reflex, I used a martial arts move to send him flying past me. He wasn't deterred. He flung himself at me again. I didn't correct myself fast enough, and he slammed into me with all the power that hate and anger could give a person.
His fingers were like slender branches, twirling around my throat, growing ever tighter. I grabbed at them, ripped at them, but it didn't seem to matter. He shoved me against the unrelenting nothingness and snarled at me.
"I want you to die."
He was dying. I could see it behind all that rage. My magic was slithering through him, wrapping around his essence. I'd done this before with vampires; it empowered them, invigorated them. Apparently, my magic did not have the same influence on the living. Oops.
I could take it back. I knew that I could. I'd done that too. It wouldn't be all that different from twining a ball of string, but I certainly couldn’t do it while he was suffocating me.
"Just die! I need you to die!"
"Well, that's just too bad," I said as he struggled to wrap his hands tighter around my throat. "I don't feel like dying."
I bucked my hips up, dislodging him from me. Had he been heavier, it wouldn't have worked, but in my dreamscape, he didn't weigh anything at all. I slammed my hand into his throat, and sent the other into his face. It was fast and vicious.
"I...I can...take it back," I coughed as he rolled back.
"Liar!"
I could. I wasn't lying. I reached my h
and out to try, to prove it, but he threw up that invisible bubble of protection again, shielding himself behind his own power. It wasn't as strong. He was dying, and it showed in his magic.
"Stay back, witch!"
So much hate. I could understand him being upset. I had inadvertently hurt him, but I could also heal him, or at least take back what I had done. Sure, he was my enemy, and he had completely different views on the way magic ought to be practiced, but this slow and steady corruption wasn't really a cool way to go. But it was clear that he didn't want my hands anywhere near him. He didn't want my help.
"I can help you!"
"You will destroy the world!"
House Of Vampires 2 (The Lorena Quinn Trilogy) Page 15