Dreamwalker. Part 27

But I never find Rita anywhere.

What if the chaos between the worlds has swallowed her whole, so that she can no longer exist in any reality? If so, that's my fault. I brought her to that other world. I led her into the Gate under Shadowcrest, and failed to bring her safely to the other side.

Guilt floods my heart. Mourning suffocates my spirit.

Forgive me, Rita.

The tourist shop at Mystic Caverns looked as if it had been abandoned for decades. The last intact sections of roof had succ.u.mbed to heavy rains following the earthquake, and part of the front wall had collapsed during an aftershock. Sc.r.a.ps of yellow police tape fluttered in the wind like battered carnival pennants, vying for attention with the bright orange condemnation notice nailed to the door. Hey! Don't go in here! Things may collapse on you! We won't be held responsible!

The authorities had wandered around the place for a week before finally accepting that there was no safe way to explore what remained of the caverns. The mystery of who had abducted three Mana.s.sas teens, and why they had done so, would remain unsolved.

I shivered as I looked at the battered building, and wrapped my arms around myself. Devon put an arm around me and squeezed gently.

"T'sokay," he said softly.

But despite the comfort of his touch, it wasn't okay. It would never be okay.

The police had questioned the three of us together, and apart, and in every combination and permutation imaginable. But they had learned nothing. Our memories of captivity were far too hazy and disjointed to reveal anything meaningful. We all remembered that Devon had showed up after the fire to see if everyone was all right, that he had found Tommy and me wandering around in a daze, stunned by our close brush with death, and that he had promised to give us a lift to the hospital. But then there was some kind of carjacking along the way. The details were hazy. Everything after that was just a blur.

We couldn't tell them the truth, of course. Not unless we wanted to spend the rest of our lives in a room where the furniture had padded corners.

Eventually the police deduced that we'd been drugged, probably with something like Rohypnol, the infamous date-rape drug. And since Rohypnol interfered with short term memory creation, there was no further point in questioning us. No big surprise there. We'd watched enough cop shows to know how to fake the right symptoms.

The Rophynol thing was Tommy's idea. Gotta love my little brother.

As soon as he got back online, Tommy launched a fict.i.tious campaign to locate the person who'd been feeding him dream stories for his game designs. He appealed to his friends on Facebook, saying that surely they must have seen her postings somewhere, and he really had to warn her about something, could they please help him find her? He even arranged for a few of his gaming buddies to seed the social networks with comments by other people that confirmed the existence of his made-up dream muse. Yeah, I remember her telling you about those dreams, they were friggin' weird. Haven't seen her recently, though.

Of course that trail led nowhere. But we knew that the Greys had originally discovered Tommy because of his online activity, so it stood to reason that they might be watching there. If he could convince them that he wasn't really the source of the dreams that they were so worked up about, they would have no reason to come after him a second time.

And that was true enough, wasn't it?

A week pa.s.sed before we had a chance to get away from everyone and return to Mystic Caverns. Between Mom's medical needs, the police having a million questions to ask, and the press trolling our home turf like hungry jackals looking for spicy neighborhood interviews, it was really hard to get away.

Truth be told, Mystic Caverns was the last place I wanted to go, but we had unfinished business there.

Standing beside Devon and Tommy, gazing at the ruined tourist attraction, I found it hard to absorb what we'd been through. Hard to accept that any of it had been real.

In silence we walked past the main building, crossed the open field, and then entered the woods beyond. It was a bit of a hike to the spot where we'd hidden our stuff, but we'd known when we did it that people would be searching the grounds pretty thoroughly once we returned home, and there were a few things we didn't want them to find.

They were still where we'd left them, wrapped in plastic that we'd salvaged from the snack bar in the tourist shop, buried at the base of an oak tree. Isaac's glow lamp. Sebastian's letter. The silver stealth ward. All intact. I felt a knot of tension in my shoulders ease when I saw the two fetters lying there. No, we weren't crazy, and this was the proof of it.

The only proof.

Breaking the seal on the letter, I discovered it was one large piece of paper, folded over many times. I spread it out on the ground before us, and Tommy pinned down the corners with rocks. It was a map.

At first glance it looked like North America. But it wasn't the North America I had studied in high school. This one had had no United States of America in it. Instead there was something called The United Colonies of New Britannia, that stretched from Florida up into Canada. Even the states had different borders than in our world, and some of them had different names altogether. And there were a lot fewer Indian names, I noticed. No Roanoke, no Chesapeake, no Shenandoah Valley.

New Britannia extended west as far as the Mississippi. Beyond that were some provinces with French names, and west of those, a large unmarked area called the Badlands. It extended well beyond the region where the actual badlands were located, so the name must have referred to something other than geological makeup.

California was an independent country. Okay, so maybe things weren't so different there after all.

I spent so long studying the unfamiliar political ent.i.ties that I almost missed a tiny note scrawled at the bottom of the paper. The writing was smooth and elegant, in the same cursive form that you see in 18th century doc.u.ments. I smoothed out the paper so I could read the words clearly.

Follow the dreamers.

S. H.

My hand on the paper trembled. Not because of what Sebastian had written. The fact that he had give us the map was a statement in itself; there was only one reason we might ever need such a thing. You will return here, he was saying to us.

I wanted to deny that prediction. I wanted to clench my fists and cry out to the skies that no, I would not ever go back to that terrible place, ever!

But I didn't. Because he was right.

He was right because Rita might still be alive somewhere, and we'd never know peace of mind until we found out what had happened to her. He was right because we'd just destroyed a Gate belonging to a powerful Guildmaster, and if my dreams reflected even a fraction of what had really happened to him as a result of that, Devon and I were the top two names on his s.h.i.t list. He was right because Isaac's Shadow buddies now had Devon's cell phone, which meant they could now access a host of his personal information, as well as the names and numbers of his friends. No one we cared about was safe.

Somewhere on that other world was the woman who had given birth to me and then abandoned me. And she was the only one who could teach me about the Gift that was in my blood.

A Gift so terrible that all those who possessed it were destroyed.

A Gift that drove its users mad.

I stared at the map in silence for a long, long while. I didn't have to look at Devon to know that he'd come to the same conclusion I had. Or that he didn't like it any more than I did.

"Come on," I whispered, gathering up the map. "Let's go home."

Novels by

C. S. Friedman.

available from DAW Books:.

The Dreamwalker Chronicles.

DREAMWALKER.

The Magister Trilogy.

FEAST OF SOULS.

WINGS OF WRATH.

LEGACY OF KINGS.

The Coldfire Trilogy.

BLACK SUN RISING.

WHEN TRUE NIGHT FALLS.

CROWN OF SHADOWS.

THE MADNESS SEASON.

THIS ALIEN Sh.o.r.e.

IN CONQUEST BORN.

THE WILDING.