Dreamwalker (9 page)

Chapter Sixteen

Dread had hollowed out a home within Prosperidad since her reading with St. Croix. Twin storms gathered strength in two worlds and only she could send out warnings. It was the curse that marred the blessings of her visions, the cloud that wrapped a silver lining.

Prosperidad grew up in the Dominican Republic, which shared the island of Hispaniola with St. Croix's Haiti. The border split the island into two distinct cultures, different as oil and water, the Spanish Dominican Republic and the French Haiti. Stability replaced chaos as lawless Haiti's extreme poverty ended at the invisible line through the mountains.

But the island's mystical traditions crossed the border with ease. Voodoo and witchcraft were as much facts of life on the island's east side as the west. The rhythms of the ancient ways were a more distant drumbeat in the Dominican Republic, a low thrum within the symphony, not the pounding lead solo that played in Haiti.

Prosperidad's first vision came just after her thirteenth birthday. She was visiting her grandmother's mountain home, a simple ranch house perched on the hillside overlooking a lake, an escape from the coast's oppressive summer humidity.

One night, she sat on the edge of her bed in the dark, dressed for sleep in her T-shirt and shorts. She stared out the window and across the lake, consumed with the galloping anxieties puberty summons.

The full moon's reflection flickered in the lake's small ripples. It danced back and forth, waxing and waning. The mesmerizing mirror image calmed and focused her. The more she watched the light shimmer on the water, the harder it was to pull away. Her consciousness drew further into the light, and further from the house, her bed, and her body. The edges of her perception grew hazy, until there was nothing but her and the moon's wavering white dot. All her tangled thoughts, repelled by the light's serenity, scattered for the darker edges. She and the light were all that existed.

For a moment.

Then Prosperidad arrived in the midst of chaos.

She stood in a street in Santo Domingo. Flames leapt from the lower two levels of an apartment building. The bright yellow glow cast lengthy shadows across the street. Sirens wailed like panicked beasts, and the pungent scent of burning plastic enveloped her.

Fire engines scattered the growing crowd of gawkers. Helmeted men in heavy yellow coats snaked hoses from the trucks, though the building appeared doomed. An inferno swept the bottom two floors. Billowing black smoke belched from every window above.

One of the hoses scraped across the street and passed through Prosperidad's feet. She reached out to touch a lamp post and her hand moved through it. She was here, but she wasn't here. Real as all this felt, from the heat of the flames on her face to the sting of the smoke her throat, she was no more a part of these events than an audience member at a movie.

Two pajama-clad boys appeared in a third floor window. The taller one forced his brother's head closer to the opening and under the roiling smoke. Soot caked their faces but didn't conceal their panic.

Prosperidad caught her breath. The pumper trucks' ladders weren't long enough. Flames crept in behind the boys. The children were going to die.

The boys looked back and forth between the street below and the building's interior, weighing which was the lesser of two evils.

The blaze backlit the two boys as it spread to the third floor. Sweat ran down their faces. Tongues of fire lashed from the building's shattered lower windows and promised to sear the boys if they jumped.

The older brother took his sibling's hand and looked him in the eye. He said something that appeared reassuring. The two faced the street. Holding hands, they stepped off the edge.

Prosperidad turned her head. She closed her eyes and waited for the inevitable screams as small bones hit the unyielding sidewalk.

But no screams came.

She opened her eyes and she still sat on her grandmother's bed. Her heart pounded in her chest. She felt weak. Her cheeks were still warm from the heat of the flames. It took hours before she drifted off to a fitful sleep.

The morning proved her experience more than just a nightmare. A headline in the paper stopped breakfast cold.

BROTHERS DIE IN SUSPICIOUS HOUSE FIRE.

Her spoon fell to the floor. A photograph accompanied the story. It was the building in her vision, a building she had never seen before last night. The two pumper trucks were parked outside and firemen sprayed wide fans of water on the flames. Prosperidad did not need to read the story. She already had more details than the reporter could have unearthed.

“Lovely Child, what's the matter?” her grandmother asked.

Prosperidad doubted she could explain what happened without sounding crazy.

“Nothing,” she said.

Her grandmother looked down at the newspaper. A spot of mango juice blotched the house fire story.

“It's the fire, isn't it?” she said.

Prosperidad didn't answer. Her grandmother gave her a penetrating gaze Prosperidad had never seen before, then nodded in recognition. She sat at the table beside Prosperidad, reached out and held her hand. She slid the newspaper closer to her granddaughter.

“This is the second time you've seen the fire, isn't it?”

A confession tumbled out of her.

“Last night,” she said. “I saw it in a dream, but I was still awake.”

Tears formed in the corners of her eyes. Her grandmother brushed them away.

“Don't cry, child,” she said.

“What's wrong with me?” Prosperidad said. “Am I some kind of freak?”

Her grandmother leaned over and gave Prosperidad an intense hug.

“There's nothing to be afraid of, Sweet Prosperidad,” she said, stroking the girl's hair. “You have inherited my gift. I was afraid it died when it skipped your mother, but here it is, alive in you. I'm overjoyed.”

“This happens to you?”

“Ever since I was your age,” her grandmother said. “Today, the day I've longed for, I will teach you of your gift.”

That week, her grandmother taught her how to call forth and control the hypnotic trance that foretold the future. She also taught her the two rules of the gift.

“Rule one,” she said. “While others may pay for your vision, your own future must always be dark.”

Ideas about winning the
lotería
had occurred to her. “But if I have this gift…”

“You were
entrusted
with this gift by the
loa
. They will not take kindly to greed.”

Prosperidad frowned.

“Rule two will make you even more unhappy,” her grandmother said. “What you see must come to pass. Try to re-channel the currents of destiny and they will only sweep you downstream.”

“Even if it meant that small boys died in fires?”

Her grandmother's lined face grew sad. She cupped Prosperidad's chin in her hand.

“Yes, even if small boys die.”

Her return home to the coast set her on her new life course. Puberty had released a torrent of hormones she had only begun to comprehend. Swelling breasts and widening hips made her feel awkward. The added advent of her gift of prophesy turned mild self-consciousness into self-imposed separation. After high school, she left the island for the United States to start over.

But she couldn't run from her gift. Word spread in the community that she had the gift of prophesy, and soon émigrés from the islands came from all over for her insight. She found she could tell them enough to allay their fears of the future. They offered the small fees they could afford. Their company assuaged her homesickness and she made enough to survive.

But St. Croix's readings were a different story. Darkness curdled within him, a hollow man slowly filling with a thick black bile, a bile that absorbed life rather than sustained it. She felt St. Croix's monstrous malevolence before she knew he trafficked drugs. However, St. Croix paid her tenfold what the poor immigrants did. She rationalized that the information she provided was not inherently good or evil. The acts a person committed with the knowledge were what landed on one side or another of the moral divide. Back to Rule Two for her, no interference. Rule Two rinsed away all guilt. Until recently.

The black spirit she felt within St. Croix, his dark alter-ego, grew stronger by the day. Somehow he drew power from the spirit world, probably in league with a
petra loa.
St. Croix had a wicked deed in the works, something that made his current operation pale in comparison. So she had called the Antelope Spirit for help. Not to intervene, as her grandmother warned against, but to deliver a dreamwalker who could. Perhaps that fine distinction could shield Prosperidad from her decision's repercussions.

But repercussions there were. A personal vision showed her the dreamwalker, an innocent, unaware of his potential, and his pivotal role in Atlantic City. He stood in ignorance within St. Croix's crosshairs. St. Croix would smother the spark the boy held before it fanned into a real flame, a flame hot enough to burn St. Croix's operation to the ground.

So her call to the Antelope begat rippled circles in destiny's water. Did she now warn this boy named Pete, who lived over the restaurant blocks away? If not, she had just led a lamb to slaughter. But how much further would this path of intervention stretch out? There would be retribution for playing god with how life should unfold.

Now, in the waning afternoon, she made her decision. If Pete failed, the flood gates that held back a reservoir of vice would surely burst. How could she live with herself then?

She would warn Pete tonight. He had to get outside the city, before St. Croix ferreted him out.

She'd have to manage the consequences.

Chapter Seventeen

DiStephano's dinner rush came on like a juggernaut. By 6:00, customers rolled in through the door as fast as Mama D could seat them. Waitresses flitted between tables like pollinating bees.

In the kitchen, paper tickets spun on the prep table carrousel. Dishes clanked and butter sizzled. The great dishwasher breathed billowed steam that mingled with the smell of baking lasagna. Papa D barked orders and created culinary masterworks on blue-rimmed china.

For Pete, eight hours of non-stop work was an eight hour mental break. In the rhythm of wash, rinse, and stack there was no time to consider crossed palm trees, crossed snakes, or dreamwalkers trapped in palace towers.

Mid-shift, an unseen drama played out past the door to the dining room. The low din of voices rose in recognition, like the swelling roar of the crowd as a champion entered a stadium. A loaded serving tray hit a table with a clatter.

“Tommy!” Mama D's voice called out. The kitchen door swung open. “Papa! It's Tommy!”

The DiStephano's prodigal son had returned from across the Hudson.

Papa broke into a grin and wiped his hands on his apron. Then a pot behind him boiled over. The water seared into steam as it hit the burner's flames. His look soured, he muttered something in Italian, and swung back to the stove. He rearranged pots and adjusted burner temperatures.

The kitchen door swung full open, and Mama D barreled in with her son in tow wearing a pinstripe suit.

“Papa, you don't come out to see your son? What's with you?”

Papa D dropped a huge pot of boiling ziti on the stove with a clang. He turned, saw his son, and let loose a big smile.

Pete realized that Mama D was right. Pete certainly favored her son. Tommy had the same curly black hair as Pete, and while Tommy was a few years older, he matched Pete's height. Facially, they were different, with Tommy sharing his father's distinctive Roman nose and his mother's eyes. No wonder Papa D hired him on the spot. He and Tommy could have passed as brothers.

Tommy walked around the prep table and gave his father a big hug.

“Come home for some real food, no?” Papa D said. He poked Tommy in the ribs. “You get too skinny with your city job.”

“Maybe that lasagna I smell would work,” Tommy said, “but only if you've started listening to Mama and cut back on the garlic a bit.”

He shot a quick wink to his mother, who stifled a laugh with her hand.

Papa feigned outrage and waved a dismissive hand at Mama D.

“She's from Queens,” he said. “What does she know from garlic? You sit and eat.”

Papa turned and spooned a wide corner of a tray of lasagna onto a plate. Tommy caught Pete's eye across the kitchen in the dishwashing nook. He strode over to the stainless steel counter between them.

“Well,” he said. “Who's taken over my old haunt tending this steam-belching monster?”

Pete wiped his hands on his apron and then extended one across the mountain of dirty plates.

“I'm Pete Holm,” he said. “I just started here.”

Tommy gave his hand a firm shake.

“Long enough to know Papa's a slave driver,” Tommy said with a smirk. Tommy looked the dishwashing area up and down. “God help me, but there is a part of working here that I miss sometimes. What's your off night?”

“Tomorrow night,” Pete said.

“Outstanding!” Tommy replied. He turned to his mother. “Mama, I'm filling in for Petey here tomorrow.”

Pete resigned himself to the family's predisposition to calling him “Petey.”

“Oh no, Tommy,” she said, aghast. “You're home for a rest.”

“Are you kidding?” he said. “This'll be fun. Right, Papa?”

Papa D masked his initial elation at the idea with a calculated, stern face.

“You no remember hard work anymore,” he said. “Soft city job spoil you. We work all night tomorrow. We clean grease traps after closing.”

Tommy turned back to his mother.

“See, Mama, nothing but fun.”

Mama D threw up her hands and walked out. Tommy followed, laughing at her frustration.

Pete reached down below the dishwasher and pulled the full trashcan across the wet tile. He groaned. He should have done this an hour ago when it was half-full. He didn't enjoy the cross-parking lot drag followed by the Herculean effort to raise the can over the dumpster's lip. He thought it could qualify as an Olympic event.

He yanked the trashcan out the bag door into the crisp, cool night. He scraped it across the asphalt and launched the can's contents into the dumpster.

“Pete,” said a woman behind him.

He spun around. The empty can hit the ground with a hollow thud. A diminutive black woman wearing dark pants and a calf-length, brown coat stood a foot away. The bright yellow scarf around her head glowed like a halo in the alley's shadows.

“I'm Prosperidad,” she said in a lilting, Caribbean accent.

She seemed hesitant to make even that short an introduction. She shot furtive glances up and down the alley. The hair on the back of Pete's neck stood up.

“How do you know my name?” Pete asked.

“That is not important,” she said. “What is important is that you are in great danger.”

An unwelcome news flash delivered in a dark alley in a bad neighborhood of Atlantic City. He already had enough problems in his sleep.

“From who?” Pete said.

“Jean St. Croix,” Prosperidad said. “He knows you're here somewhere. He'll find you. He has connections everywhere.”

This made no sense. Even his parents didn't know he was here. “Who's St. Croix?”

“Someone you never want to meet,” Prosperidad said. “He controls the city's drug trade. He's not above killing anyone who threatens it.”

Pete spread his damp, food-encrusted apron for better display.

“I wash dishes,” he said. “How much of a threat can I be?”

“Not the threat you are here,” Prosperidad said. She gave her head a quick toss over her shoulder. “It is the threat you are on the other side, dreamwalker.”

Pete took an involuntary step back against the dumpster. The steel side chilled him through his damp shirt.

“How do you know about that?” he demanded.

“I see the hidden things,” she said. “Present, past, and future. What I see in your future, I do not like. I'm not supposed to intervene, but…”

She reached into the pocket of her coat and pulled out a small spool of unsheathed copper wire. It glistened in the restaurant doorway's floodlight.

“For tonight,” she said, “this will protect you. Wrap it around the legs of your bed. Before you close the loop, tie off a steel knife along the wire, point resting on the floor. While you sleep, no evil ones can enter your dreams, unless you seek them out.”

She tossed the spool and Pete caught it with both hands. He looked down at this superstitious woman's claimed salvation. Copper atoms beaten into strands. She might be able to see the future, but she clearly missed physics and chem classes in high school. He tried not to look skeptical.

“Thank you,” he said. It sounded more like a question.

“Then tomorrow,” Prosperidad said. Her eyes had the intensity of the true believer. “Get away from here. The city will never be safe.”

“You know about the other side. Tell me, in Twin Moon City— ”

Prosperidad cocked her ear to one side, like Cinderella as the clock struck midnight.

“No time,” she said. “If you can, leave tonight.”

Her coat swirled as she turned and skittered off into the darkness.

Prosperidad's weird warning rang with just enough truth that Pete couldn't dismiss it. But he couldn't leave Atlantic City. The strange summons to be here had been specific, the path made clear at every turn. The city held a mission he had to complete. And his connection to Rayna had never been stronger than since his arrival. Coincidence or not, he would not risk breaking that.

Pete stuffed the spool of copper wire into his pocket and grabbed the slimy handle of the empty garbage can. He slung it up and over his shoulder. He mounted the steps and pulled open the restaurant's back door.

Warm air rushed out against the chill night. Bright kitchen lights illuminated the stained concrete path to the dumpster. The sweet smell of bubbling marinara overwhelmed the stink of the outdoor trash. Pete passed through the too porous barrier that separated the gray world of Tyrone, Prosperidad, and illicit drugs from the DiStephano family's vibrant niche.

Prosperidad hurried back home. She scanned right and left, wary of some Island Cab shadowing her. If St. Croix didn't buy her feigned ignorance of the dreamwalker's identity, he would surely have her tailed.

The street was clear. She breathed a sigh of relief. Perhaps she could be more than a passive observer of her visions.

She turned left at the corner. The sea breeze caressed her face. It smelled of salt and home. Everything was going to be okay.

In the shadows of the alley across from DiStephano's, the dim light of a cell phone lit Stoner's face as he dialed. Prosperidad was a block away, well out of earshot. He put the phone to his ear. One ring.

“Well?” St. Croix demanded.

A laughing couple entered the bright, lively Italian restaurant across the street.

“No problem, Boss,” Stoner said. “I found him.”