THIRTY-NINE
Angela stood at the closed door and waited until she felt the last trace of Zarek’s presence leaving the corridor.
Only then did she let out a slow breath.
He’d broken the Accords. Because of her.
Sadly, she didn’t know enough about their laws to understand what that meant.
But she’d seen Gellar’s face. And from her life as a lawyer, she knew how a man looked when he was counting the high costs of something that couldn’t be undone.
“Welcome, Angela Duboise.” A man with long white hair and flowing beard, dressed in white pajamas, bowed to her. “My name is Dremulus.”
“Hi.” She wasn’t sure about any of this anymore. She’d rather be doing a crash course in Paradox law to help Zarek. But she had agreed to do this. “What do you need from me?”
“Please, enter the Dream Circle’s web, where you’ll lie down and make yourself comfortable.” He waved to the middle of the room, while four witches stood by a small table in the far corner full of herbs and crystals, as incense smoke curled towards the ceiling.
She crossed the large room where one side was a wall of glass windows.
Yet, they’d somehow dimmed the sunlight over the pale wooden floorboards, where the flicker of candles was brighter.
There was no furniture, just a large open space, while something hummed low along the edges that she couldn’t quite place.
She stopped before a perfect circle of large feathers and white chalk spread out to create a web. It looked so familiar.
Then it hit her. It was the pattern of a massive dreamcatcher. Just like the one Aunt Claudine had hung above Angela’s bed to help contain her nightmares, back when they’d first started.
Angela stared at its pristine shaping, the feathers, the impossibly straight lines and how soft it all seemed. It was a massive dreamcatcher that Dremulus had called a Dream Circle.
Aunt Claudine would love this.
Missing her aunt killed the smile as Angela entered the circle’s web. In the middle, she lay down on a thin mattress that didn’t look any thicker than a yoga mat. She expected to feel the hard floor, but instead it gave the illusion of floating.
“This is nice.” She hadn’t expected that softness and how it cupped her spine.
“It’s a dream mattress.” With bare feet, Dremulus stepped inside the circle as the three witches spread out equally along the outer perimeter holding assorted bundles, feathers, and smoking incense, including a small bell.
A fourth witch, much younger than the others, remained by the table cluttered with more tools, like an apprentice carefully watching their craft.
“Comfortable?” Dremulus asked.
Angela didn’t need to try too hard because the mattress made it easy to get comfortable.
Pity it did nothing for the thing sitting in her chest that grew into the well-remembered dread of what came after falling asleep—the terror that stopped her breathing, trapping the scream in her throat before she woke.
Every. Single. Time.
It made her hesitate even now, in broad daylight.
“Can you tell me what’s going to happen?” Zarek had given her a brief outline.
“You’ll sleep. The witches in this room will hold the protections of the Dream Circle. The Sworn Exarchs are outside and will join us once you fall asleep to protect you, too.”
You’d think with all that protection, sigils, and whatever smoking incense they were using would make her nerves settle.
“All you’ll hear is my voice as I guide you through the dreamscape.
If you should ever become frightened at any point, just call my name.
Dremulus. And I will be with you, as a dream walker.
You will not be alone in this, I assure you.
And, my dear, you will not be judged,” he said with a soft calming smile as he crouched down beside her in the most comforting bedside manner.
“What happens in the dreamscape stays in the dreamscape.”
“Done this before, have we?” She grinned back at him.
He smiled, tilting his head to share a coy wink. “A few times.”
“Right. Okay, then.” Angela took a deep breath, then laid her head back and closed her fingers around the medallion. “Time to face my fears.”
“Close your eyes. Take deep breaths. And just allow your body to follow.”
She let her eyelids grow heavy, the candles dimming from her view. The low and dreamy music complimented the soft incense. With the accumulated debt of too many sleepless nights, she went under almost immediately.
“Can you hear me, Angela?”
“Yes.” Even with her eyes closed, she knew she was still in the room—but not. The light cleared as she stood. Wow, that was quick.
“Tell me what you see.”
All around her, enormous white clouds spread beneath her feet like a floor. Letting her hand pass through one, it was cool to the touch, like pressing into something that was both there and wasn’t.
She was also in two places at once. Asleep and awake, dreaming and present, with her body on the dream mattress in a room in the Keep, and here… standing in a sky that didn’t hold a horizon.
“It’s nice.” The sky was so rich a blue she could get lost in the color’s depth, it was so close she could touch it, even reaching out to do so.
“Can you see me?” Dremulus sounded close, and yet far away.
The clouds parted to one side and a familiar figure descended as if stepping down some stairs that weren’t there.
Instead of his usual black suit, it had been replaced with a white one, but it was still the same person she’d known for most of her life.
And the last person she’d expected to appear in the clouds.
“Father Michael?” She rushed over to hug him, the way she always did.
With all the changes she’d gone through these past few weeks, this was the hug she needed.
He smelled like clean linen and old books, something that had always meant safety to her, even when she’d grown too old to admit she still needed it.
“What are you doing here?”
“I thought I’d be your dream guide. I think I’d qualify from the practice I endured when you were younger.” Father Michael’s laugh lines deepened with his smile.
“Are you allowed to?”
“This is your dream, Angela. I suspect you chose me.” He then tossed his thumb back toward the void. “Unless you’d prefer the gentleman in the white pajamas.”
“No. You’ll do perfectly.” She hooked her arm around his, and they slowly strolled among the clouds shifting beneath their feet. “I wanted to thank you for our last conversation. What you said about my non-friend.” A conversation that seemed like eons ago.
“Is he still a non-friend?”
She paused. “He’s more than that. Which is a problem, because there are rules in his world that we’ve broken, that I don’t know how to help him.”
“Since when have you cared about rules? I seem to recall a woman who was rather gifted at testing them to suit the argument.”
“This is different. Zarek could be in trouble because of me.” Which explained why Zarek was trying to push her away earlier with his brutal was it them, or was it the Claiming speech? Trying to protect her from what they’d done.
Father Michael was quiet for a moment. “How much do you care about him, Angela?”
She opened her mouth. Closed it. Suddenly finding the cloud formations interesting. “It’s complicated.”
“That wasn’t the question.”
She stopped walking.
“You can say it. It’s your dream. The only one here who’ll judge you is yourself. Here, you have every right to voice what you can’t voice while awake. Consider the dreamscape a space free from the rules of all realms. So, say it.”
“Maybe… love?” The word came out smaller than she intended. “Fine. I said it. Happy now?”
“Immensely.” He playfully nudged her shoulder. “And I assume you haven’t told him.”
“I can’t. There are way too many complications. Besides, I don’t know if it really is love or if it’s this Claiming thing. Then we have the rules of his world, the politics, and whatever that council is—”
“If it is love, then trust that love will find a way. It always does.”
“You’re such an optimist.”
“I’m also someone who knows what it is to truly love something so pure. I understand what a rare and precious gift love is.” He bowed his head, revealing his vulnerability from the loss of that great love. “And I believe in loopholes, little one.”
“Right?” He’d say the oddest things at the oddest times, like he was talking in riddles.
“Right,” he mimicked with a smile. “So, this is your dream quest. Do you know why you’re here?”
“To stop the nightmares and to finally get some sleep.” She hesitated. “Do we have to go through the stages of the nightmare?”
“Do you remember it?”
“It starts the same, but the rest I forget.”
“Tell me what you do remember.”
“It starts—not badly.” The heat rose in her cheeks even here, inside her own dream, in a sky that was nowhere and everywhere. “It starts with Zarek and it’s—Father, it’s a bit—”
“Oh,” he said, with the diplomatic composure of someone who listened to spiritual confessions for a living. “I see.”
“Right. So… Can I ask you something while we’re here?” She needed to change the subject.
“Of course.”
“Who is my father?”
The question surprised her.
She hadn’t thought about it for a decade; more, maybe. Yet, with all that had been going on lately, it may have been playing in her subconscious. She knew her mother was normal, so her magick had to come from her father’s side. “Did my mother say anything to you?”
Father Michael looked at her for a long moment with an expression she couldn’t quite read.
“I think,” he said gently, “you already know the answer to that.” But before she could press for more, he asked, “Tell me, what turns this dream of yours into a nightmare?”
“Zarek tells me to forget him.” But she couldn’t. Not now. “And then the dream—”
There was no warning. One moment she was standing in the sky with her hand in Father Michael’s, the next the clouds fell away and her feet lost the floor, her stomach left miles above as she fell into the darkness.
A hundred feet
Then two hundred.
Three hundred.