Dreams of Shreds and Tatters Part 6

Liz wrinkled her nose at him as she carried the bags to the bedroom. She returned coatless and barefoot; the dark blue carpet swallowed her footsteps. "Ritual shopping exercises are a good way to learn about someone." She nudged his legs out of the way and sat down on the couch, tucking her feet beneath her. Second-hand chill soaked into him. Her eyes were brighter than they'd been this morning. Maybe it was only the cold putting color in her cheeks, but he felt a futile jealous pang that someone else had managed to cheer her up.

"And?" he asked, pulling himself upright. He flipped the coin one last time and caught it before reaching for his gla.s.s.

"I'm not sure," she admitted with a shrug. "She was close to Alain, and I think she feels guilty about whatever happened. Rainer is paying Blake's hospital bills, but she doesn't want to talk about that. I can't exactly tie her to a chair and show her the instruments." Her smile faded quickly. "But she's upset. And scared." A familiar sympathetic frown creased her forehead. "I think I need a drink."

"My sentiments exactly."

She filled both their gla.s.ses and settled next to him again. "Now what?"

"We could call the police." It didn't seem a helpful suggestion, especially with their penchant for trespa.s.sing, but it needed to be said.

She paused, gla.s.s half raised, and chewed her lip. "I don't want Blake in any more trouble than he might already be."

He arched an eyebrow. "What if he did something to warrant it?"

Her jaw tightened, and he cursed his absent tact. She rolled her gla.s.s between her palms; the liquor glowed green-gold. "Hurt someone, you mean? Pushed his boyfriend into a lake?"

"Yes."

"He didn't. He wouldn't."

Pressing the subject was a singularly bad idea. But the words welled up when he opened his mouth. "Can you be so certain? A boy is dead, and that's all we really know."

Her agate eyes narrowed. "I know Blake."

There was no arguing with that look on her face. And as much as he wanted to distract her from silence and guilt, he wasn't willing to pick a fight to do it. "Fine," he sighed. "But you might be doing them a disservice by not calling the authorities. What if someone else pushed them into the lake?"

From her sideways glance he thought she knew exactly which someone he meant. "Let's see what happens at the gallery tomorrow. We need more data."

It was hard to argue with that. "Fair enough." Another swallow of Chartreuse lined his throat with warmth. He didn't want to argue. He just wanted to be warm for a while, to not worry. If he drank enough, the gears in his head might stop grinding so furiously. "We can stay up all night worrying about this, or we can watch the monster movie marathon on cable and worry tomorrow."

She gave him a crooked smile and leaned her head against his shoulder. "Monsters it is, then."

He wished he thought she meant it, that more than half of her was in the room with him. But saying anything would only make her feel worse. Sometimes it was better to take what he could get.

6.

Threshold

LIZ DRIFTED OFF curled against Alex's side, tipsy and warm, her brain too crowded with rubber-suited monsters to be afraid of what waited for her on the other side of sleep. Just this, she pleaded as her thoughts slowed and dimmed and stillness closed over her. Just tonight.

But the stillness rolled away again, leaving her standing in a shadowed corridor. Gas lamps hissed along the walls, a ghostly iridescence that gave no warmth. Floorboards creaked as she took a hesitant step. Tulle petticoats rustled against her thighs. She looked down at blue skirts and starched white ap.r.o.n and sighed.

The hall stretched on and on, worn white wainscoting and yellow plaster, the familiar s.p.a.ces of her boarding school dormitory made infinite and strange. Pictures lined the walls, set in alcoves and shadow boxes and gilded frames. Memories, all of them, people and places faded with time: her mother and father standing in front of a ruined jungle wall; Alice and Alis in their school uniforms; the stuffed patchwork cat she'd slept with for eight years, bleeding stuffing through his worn-thin seams. Liz stared at the points of her boots rather than face them.

Something growled in the distance, a dry coughing sound. Only a dream. Not even a true dream, only her subconscious's pasteboard knock-up.

"It's more than that."

Alice's voice didn't make her jump this time, but Liz's shoulders tensed as she turned. Water dripped from the dead girl's hair, puddled under her shoes and seeped in dark lines between the floorboards. Her soaked-shiny dress was red instead of blue, but the ap.r.o.ns were the same.

"It's a liminal s.p.a.ce, a place between true dreams and the normal kind."

"What are you doing here?"

Alice shrugged. "I'm a liminal thing, aren't I? Trapped between death and memory."

"Are you? Trapped?"

The dead girl grinned. "It's your subconscious. Maybe I'm your power animal."

A whisper carried down the hallway. Too faint to understand, but the voice was familiar.

"Blake?"

Liz turned away from Alice. Blake's ring shone fitfully against the gloom. The metal was cold against her skin.

"What will you do if you find him?" Alice asked as Liz started down the hall; she had no answer.

The corridor ended at a stairwell. Her footsteps echoed as she rushed down. Too fast-this wasn't something she should run toward. But that certainty did nothing to slow her pace. Alice followed, silent as any ghost. The ring grew colder with every step, and an answering chill gathered in her stomach.

The stairs ended in another hall, this one lined in doors. Plain white paint and bra.s.s k.n.o.bs, innocuous and identical. Every one she tried was locked. The ring flared brighter, and her hand cramped with the cold. She worried the inside of her lip until she tasted blood.

The last door was locked, too, but this k.n.o.b was as cold as the ring. She yelped as she touched it, half expecting to leave a rime of frozen skin and flesh behind.

"What now?" Liz asked, cradling her numbed hand against her chest. "I need a key."

Alice tapped one foot. "You already have a key."

Liz stared at the ring and the angry red skin beneath it. She clenched her hand. When she opened her fingers again, a silver key glittered on her palm, its teeth twisting in triskell coils.

"See? You're getting the hang of it."

The hall shuddered, a stomach-churning sideways lurch. Liz grabbed the doork.n.o.b as she swayed. The walls were smoother, more liquid, as if they were about to melt.

"I think this rabbit hole is going to collapse," Alice whispered.

"No!" The floor shivered and firmed again. "I've come this far."

She fumbled the key into the lock. It turned with a click while the threshold ran like ice cream in the sun. The door opened.

Into the abyss.

Darkness vast and hollow as a cathedral vault, a place where daylight could never reach. Bottomless. A single step would carry her across the threshold, but it was too great, too black and heavy and she was much too small to face it.

But it had Blake. He hung in front of her, arms outstretched in a dead man's float. His hair writhed around his face in anemone tendrils.

She looked back at Alice, but the ghost shook her head. "That's not my place. I can't follow you there."

With a gasp, Liz lunged through the door as it dissolved.

The drowning was familiar by now-the breathless crush, the searing cold. She stretched and dove and her hand closed on Blake's. His fingers were limp and icy.

This time they weren't alone. Ghostly shapes writhed all around them, pale as gossamer, luminescent as anglerfish lures. They wailed a discordant siren song, a paean to the hungry presence waiting at the bottom. Already she felt it reaching for them, unfurling a tenebrous arm. They were nothing to it, less than nothing, but it would eat them anyway.

Not you, dreamer. Not yet.

No! She opened her mouth to scream and darkness poured in. Blake's hand slipped from hers as the abyss spat her out. The dream spat her out, and she screamed again as she fell.

ALEX COULDN'T SLEEP. One drink too many, and now the alcohol in his blood was insomnious instead of soporific. His brain refused to shut off, tumbling questions end over end, dredging up memories. He tossed and turned on the stiff hotel sheets, listening to the keening wind and watching minutes creep into hours.

Liz's hair rustled on the pillow as she shifted in her sleep, smelling of vanilla shampoo and warm girl. She made a soft kitten noise and her hand tightened against the blue bedspread; Blake's ring glinted dully in the dim light.

It wasn't jealousy that twisted behind his sternum-he wasn't that foolish. More of a morbid curiosity, perhaps. If he were the one in trouble, would she be so fierce?

Probably, Alex decided. He didn't understand her altruism, her willingness-her need-to help everyone before herself. Everyone but herself. It was so far removed from his other relationships-his parents, Samantha-that sometimes she might have been a s.p.a.ce alien.

She stirred again, head tossing, lips shaping a word. A name. Not jealousy, but jealousy might have been simpler.

He threw back the blankets. Already four in the morning, and sleep was no closer.

He sat at the bar, nursing a gla.s.s of tap water and watching city lights shimmer on the clouds-an expressionist blur without his gla.s.ses. One hand rose to toy with the medallion around his neck, the silver warm from his skin. He ran a fingernail over the familiar lines of St. Catherine and her wheel; the patron saint of scholars. Samantha had given it to him when he was accepted to Harvard. It was the only gift of hers he'd kept, a reminder and a warning. And because it annoyed the h.e.l.l out of his father's Protestant sensibilities. Who was the saint of detectives, anyway?

A m.u.f.fled cry came from the bedroom. Alex dropped the medal and very nearly his gla.s.s as he jolted off the barstool.

"No," Liz said, over and over, tossing and clawing at the covers. Tears shimmered down her cheeks, silver in the halflight.

"Liz." She didn't respond, only tossed again. Another broken sound sc.r.a.ped between her lips, too choked to be a scream. He usually let her sleep through her dreams, even if it meant retreating to the couch to avoid stray elbows, but this was worse than he'd ever seen.

"Liz!" He sat on the edge of the bed and touched her shoulder. "Wake up."

She lashed out, clumsy but strong with panic. "No!"

He caught her hands and pinned them at her sides. Her skin was icy and sticky-wet, her pulse beating against his palms like a trapped moth, and she fought so hard he feared he'd bruise her. The air was brackish, bitter with salt and a strange chemical reek. "Liz, wake up. It's me."

Her eyes opened, black in the pallor of her face. The violence of her struggles lessened.

"It's me," he said again. "It's all right. You were dreaming." Letting go of her hands, he reached for the bedside lamp. She flinched away from the light and moaned. "It was just a dream."

She wrapped her arms around his waist with a sob, holding tight enough to hurt his ribs. Her fingers knotted in his shirt. Tears soaked the fabric where she pressed her face against his chest.

"It's all right," he whispered, stroking her damp hair and back. "You're okay." Lies and nonsense-she obviously wasn't. But eventually her sobs eased and her muscles relaxed as she sagged into his lap.

"It ate him," she gasped, breath hitching. "It tried to eat me."

"Nothing's going to hurt you." Her skin warmed slowly. The strange smell had faded, nothing worse than the sour tang of her fear-sweat. Her breathing calmed, but she didn't let go.

"Talk to me," she murmured, breath soft against his thigh.

He shifted surrept.i.tiously, warding off his body's reaction to a warm girl in his lap; it would hardly help matters. "About what?"

"Anything. Nothing. It doesn't matter. Give me something to listen to."

For a moment he couldn't think of anything. He had no voice for lullabies, and fairy tales seemed too cruel.

"Hwaet," he said at last,"w Gr-Dena in ger-dagum odcyninga rym gefrnon, h aeelingas ellen fremedon." Liz made a choked little noise that might have been a laugh, but relaxed her death-grip on his shirt.

"Oft Scyld Scfing-sceaena ratum, monegum maegum-meodo-setla oftah; egsode Eorle, syan aerest wear fasceaft funden..."

By the time Hrothgar built his mead-hall, she was asleep in his arms.

Hours later, rae sat on her bed, safely enclosed in familiar walls. She tilted the vial, watching lamplight gleam against the curve of the gla.s.s and in the golden fluid inside. A little murkier than it should be, like tap water after a storm. What was Stephen cutting it with? a.r.s.enic, maybe, or strychnine-one of the usual poisons.

She needed to slow down, be careful. The side-effects were impossible to ignore. Auras and tracers she could handle, but not these walking, stalking shadows. And if they weren't hallucinations...

She wrapped her arms around her knees, hair falling in long black tendrils around her face. This was too weird, too dangerous. But the stars itched in her blood, calling to her, and it was getting harder and harder to resist.

Her stomach growled, the first hunger pangs she'd felt in days. All they had in the kitchen was ramen, though, and MSG always made her sick.

Chemicals, man-they'll f.u.c.k you up. She laughed softly against her knees.

She needed to get out of here, but she wasn't sure which here she meant. Away from Jason, maybe, but two years weighed like an albatross around her neck. It wasn't really his fault he didn't make her happy anymore. They wanted different things, but that was a stupid line, and she didn't know what she wanted anyway. She could call her sister, but the thought of going home to Fort Charles was nearly worse than the shadow monsters.

After three AM already: Jason would be home any minute. If she was going to do this she should get on with it. Mania's disa.s.sociative effects happened randomly and sometimes not at all. Sitting in the dark talking to colors wasn't what she needed tonight. She needed out. Her body would be safe here in the welllit room. She'd even dragged a lamp in from the living room to keep the shadows out of the corners. If she could only reach the singing stars, all this would be worth it.

She unscrewed the vial and tilted her head back. Hard not to twitch away from the drops, no matter how many times she did this. Cold and sharp, and she shuddered as they spread across her eyes. Bitter chemical tears beaded on her eyelashes when she blinked.

It started slow: a tingle in her fingers and toes, a shiver creeping under her skin. Then came the warmth, slow and rich, filling her veins with liquid sunlight. The constant winter chill faded and Rae sighed. She lay back, floating, watching the plaster twist across the ceiling. Waiting for the moment when she could slough off her too-heavy flesh and fly.

Instead the world opened beneath her and dropped her into the dark.

Falling. Floating. Drifting in freefall until something caught her and spun her into its gravity.

She stood in a hallway lined with doors, watching a hand that wasn't hers reach for a doork.n.o.b.

The door opened and the world exploded.