Dreamwalker, page 4
She closed her eyes, touching fingertip to thumb and moving her lips without words. “Twenty, maybe more. Time is everything and also nothing. Everything is… fleeting here, but so permanent at the same time. The sounds and sights and the feelings. How does anyone keep track of it all?”
“One day at a time. Focus on the smaller things first. Have you thought of a name?”
She nodded. “Jaqueline. I don’t know where I got it. Just a name, I suppose.”
Ander swallowed. “It is a good name.”
“I don’t know where I got it.” She looked down at her hands, flexing them slowly. She tilted her head, each movement new and alien. “A thousand names. People, demons, stars and wind. It all belongs to her. I don’t know what I am. Everything I was… is her. Ambrosine.”
Ander cringed at the name. “Not anymore.” He placed a hand on Jaqueline’s shoulder, but drew away when she flinched. “You--she was a monster. You are something new. Decide what that means.”
Tears fell from her eyes again as Jaqueline leaned forward and whispered two desperate words. “Help me.”
They helped each other for one winter. Ander taught Jaqueline the careful methods of study and control that he had abandoned so long ago. The demon was still inside her, but it was she who had control now. Ander saw to it that she learned how to keep that control. He burned his old lists and spent evenings mapping out each tattoo on Jaqueline’s skin. After a time, Jaqueline offered to explain the meanings of each mark, each dedicated to the harnessing of some rare power that she now possessed. After the first month she offered demonstrations and lessons of her own. Ander was as eager to study during the long evenings as he was to teach during the day. He learned discovered things about his own powers he had never known. He could not remember when he stopped needing the sleeping draughts, though each night he still dreamed of his wife’s death.
Ander came to realize as the days grew longer that Jaqueline would leave soon. Their lessons had grown fewer and farther between as Jaqueline proved the control was hers now. She spent long hours walking alone in the woods, sometimes as a shadow or a creature of the wilderness. He noticed she liked to change shapes, to shed her human form. He guessed that it helped her distance herself from her time as the demon’s vessel. This was necessary if she was to heal and become whole. She spoke often of the power she held, of the places she had been and the things she had seen, but she never offered to speak about the fact that she had been a prisoner inside herself for her entire life, forced to watch herself carry out unspeakable deeds and endure terrors few could imagine, and Ander did not ask about them. But he could tell she did not feel right being a part of the world and would seek to distance herself from anything that she might become attached to, even him. Sometimes she would not return for days and he wondered if she had gone for good that time, but each time he was wrong.
She confirmed his thoughts on one warm afternoon as they sat together on the hillside that overlooked the valley. “I’m leaving.”
Ander nodded, looking ahead. “I know. You know I’m not keeping you here.”
“Yes. But I was. I needed your strength.” Her words were distant, as they often were. Something about Jaqueline was always elsewhere, wandering. Ander smiled a little.
“You are always welcome here.”
She looked down at her lap. “There is one more thing I must do. I want to give you something.”
Ander raised a brow in question.
Jaqueline turned to him and leaned forward, closer than she had ever allowed him to be. Before he could react she framed his face with her small, delicate hands and kissed him deeply on the lips. Ander closed his eyes and felt himself drift into sleep.
She had been sick. Dying, in fact. Ander knew. Youth and desperation made him believe that he could fix her, that he could set things right. He would drive the sickness from her. All will be well again by morning, he assured her. Just sleep and dream. I won’t let you go. He arranged the ritual in their bedroom, drawing the circle of white runes on the floor at the foot of their bed. He laid her sleeping form in the middle and began shaping the words that would banish her sickness. But he was too young, too new at this. He misspoke.
White lights flashed from nowhere, blinding Ander. An unseen force pushed him on his back. A formless shadow seeped out of nothingness like fresh blood from a wound and descended over his wife. She gasped as her final breath was stolen from her. Her eyes opened one last time to look at him.
Ander felt himself drift again. Now he was in a forest clearing, miles away from anywhere he had ever known. On a stone dais covered in red, glowing runes, a woman was giving birth. She had black hair that clung to her body, which was drenched with sweat. White lights flashed from nowhere. A shadow hovered above her heaving form, but in the instant the child drew its first breath, the demon was gone. It had been summoned elsewhere by some folly, and by that same folly the child had an instant to be her own person. Although that other self was soon stifled as the demon returned and marked her body for its own, she would never have existed otherwise.
Ander opened his eyes and sat up. The moon was high overhead. As he stood he noticed a single set of wolf tracks lead away into the forest that bordered his land. He smiled to himself and went inside for his first dreamless night.
To Be Continued…
Excerpt from Dreamwalker, Part II
By the time the empty vial struck the ground, its contents had already taken effect. Draven fell to his knees, his head lurched back as though he were seizing. Veins bulged black from his neck and along his temple and he released a terrible, animal groan. Ander stepped away as he watched, his body tense with pain as he watched his friend suffer while he, helpless, could only retreat. At last the soldier rose to his feet, his body hunched and his face dripping with sweat. When he looked up Ander saw that his friend’s eyes were black as tar, and when he looked into them he felt the first real sense of fear he had in a long time.
“Kill him.”
The old man’s voice was clear and calm, and Draven responded without hesitation.
Mary Fonvielle, Dreamwalker
