The Last Dream Keeper (18 page)

“Know what—” Lyse started to say, but then she felt a sense of claustrophobia so strong that it was hard to breathe.

Whatever had tried to sway her emotions before, it was back and this time, it was playing on her fears. She felt an intense urge to escape the confines of the catacombs. To get outside and inhale fresh air again. She hated being in such an enclosed space. She was certain that the tiny burial chamber was far too small to hold all of these people.

She was having trouble focusing. She felt clammy all over, slick sweat breaking out on her upper lip and down her back. She closed her eyes, trying not to hyperventilate. She felt Weir's hand on her arm, his touch tender as his voice sounded in her ear:

“What does he mean? What do you know?”

She shook her head, wanting to explain that she had no idea what the man was talking about, but she was unable to speak. She couldn't open her eyes, couldn't open her mouth . . . couldn't do anything to defend herself from whatever was trying to take her over.

Judas.

It was an old woman's voice and it was full of rage.

“What do you mean?” she heard Weir ask the man.

There was a pause.

“Ask your girlfriend. She knows . . .”

Judas, trying to take the place of the rightful Magician. Now you will die.

In the darkness behind her eyelids, Lyse knew something terrible was about to happen, and that she was helpless to do anything about it. She heard the crack of a pistol firing—one of the Germans was shooting—once, twice, three times, and a spray of blood hit her face. Terror filled the burial chamber as the gunshots deafened her. She held her breath, waiting for the pain to blossom in her chest like a flower . . . but there was nothing, not even a twitch.

She opened her eyes slowly, the buzzing in her head making it hard to hear. Everything muffled, like she was underwater. She looked down at the gun in her hand and then at her body, realizing that she was covered in blood. She twisted her head to the side, not wanting to look, but knowing that she had to.

Lyse screamed, the sound of raw grief exploding out of her as she dropped to her knees. The broken keening that next escaped her lips was inhuman.

And then everything went red.

*   *   *

She didn't remember lifting the gun in her hand. Didn't remember shooting Peach Fuzz in the face. Didn't remember turning and shooting the blond woman in the chest. Didn't remember shooting the one man she'd totally forgotten about, the one Daniela had kicked in the solar plexus—but she'd caught him crouched near one of the burial slabs in a halo of smoke, a shiny black pistol in his hand.

The smoking gun.

The only one standing at the end of it all was the man with the brown eyes—and that was only because Lyse had run out of bullets.

*   *   *

When she came back to reality, she was curled in a fetal position on the floor of the burial chamber. She reached up and touched her face, felt the dried blood caking on her skin, her lips scaly as desiccated bone. She wanted to sit up, but her head was a bowling ball, so heavy she couldn't lift it. She tried to swallow and had trouble with even this simplest of tasks. Her tongue felt hairy and thick against the roof of her mouth, the foul taste of stagnant saliva turning her stomach as she tried to swallow and finally managed it this time.

She blinked, her vision fading in and out of focus, could make out a puddle of blood on the floor by her head. She reached out, hand shaking, and touched the gelatinous pool, her fingers coming back black. She closed her eyes, squeezing her eyelids shut tight, pleading with her mind to ignore the memories as they bombarded her—the flash of a gun muzzle, blood blooming like a rose on the front of Weir's shirt, his hand twitching once and then no more—but still they came, unbidden, and she couldn't stop them.

“No,” she mouthed, mentally pushing the pictures away.

She forced herself to roll over. She took a deep, shuddering breath and opened her eyes again. The images in her mind ceased, replaced now by cold hard reality.

“No,” she moaned in agony. “No . . .”

Weir lay sprawled on the ground, his back to her. When he'd fallen, the bottom of his blue T-shirt had ridden up, revealing a slash of smooth golden skin, the bony ridges of his rib cage, and the thick lines that spiderwebbed together to form the outline of the ghostly pirate ship that adorned his torso like a piece of art. The jewel tones—bright aqua and ruby and jade and banana—filled the inky black webbing with vibrant color,
giving the ship a surreal Salvador Dali quality that Lyse loved. She reached out and touched Weir's back, smearing the blood she'd gotten on her finger onto the prow of the listing ship—but she didn't take her hand away. She continued to trace the ship's outline, surprised at how cold his body felt.

She was afraid to poke him, to try to prod him awake, because she didn't want to know what she already knew. Instead, she lovingly ran her fingers along the curve of his ribs and down the vertebrae of his back, stroking his bones like an instrument. Her flesh crawled as she touched him, her skin so alive it recoiled at the thought of connecting to something dead.

“Weir?” she whispered, still stroking his back.

She got an answer she did not expect.

“Over here.”

She turned her head and saw Weir—or a ghostly approximation of the man—sitting on the edge of one of the rock outcroppings. He looked the same except for a dark stain on the front of his shirt.

“Hi,” he said, and smiled sadly.

“Hi,” Lyse said, swallowing back a sob.

“Don't cry over me,” he said. He patted the rock beside him, indicating she should join him. “It's not like they said it would be, Lyse. Nothing scary about dying. It didn't even hurt.”

“Yeah?” Lyse asked.

He nodded.

“Come sit by me.”

She shook her head and looked over at his body.

“I don't want to leave you alone.”

He nodded sadly.

“I loved you, Lyse. I hope you know that.”

She didn't trust herself not to cry if she opened her mouth, so she shook her head.

“No, you don't know that?” he said, his brow furrowed.

She shook her head again.
No, I didn't know,
she thought.
I'd hoped, but I didn't know.

“You're the funniest thing,” he said. “So strong and determined, but so childlike, too.”

“I love you, too.” She managed to choke out most of the words before the tears came.

A wave of nausea crashed over her, but she fought it off. The tears were another story. They leaked from her eyes at will, trickling across her upper lip, down the side of her face and onto the ground. She could taste them, hot and salty.

“Don't cry,” he said.

He was kneeling beside her now, his hand stroking her long dark hair. She felt him there, the nearness of his warmth and smell making her cry harder.

“It's tough,” she whispered, grief swallowing her words. “So tough.”

“I know,” he said, touching her cheek. “I know.”

She never wanted this time with Weir to end, but nothing lasted forever. He leaned down and kissed Lyse's forehead.

“Take care of LB,” he whispered into her ear. “She needs you. No matter what happens, love and protect her the way I would.”

Time came to a standstill as Lyse's grief ebbed and flowed. How long she lay there on the cold ground, letting the stone leach her body heat away, she didn't know. Weir was gone now and that was all that mattered.

Eventually she pulled her hand back, letting it fall to her side, the fingers extended, so that they did not touch the rest of her.

Dead hands,
she thought, rubbing her bloodstained fingers together, mesmerized by the soft swish of skin on skin.

She wanted to roll Weir over, to see the place where they'd shot him, but she couldn't bear it. Imagining this simple action caused her tears to flow again.

A voice spoke out of the darkness:

“Enough.”

A pair of rough hands slipped between her arms and her torso, lifting her up in the air. She felt weightless, a feather floating in the air, so light it would fly forever.

“Stand up.”

The voice was stern, authoritative, and in her daze, she did what it said. Her feet touched the ground; the stone floor was the only solid thing in the whole world.

“You did this to yourself,” the voice said.

Unseen hands turned her, so that she was face to face with the man in charge, the one with the dark brown, earnest eyes. He shook his head, jaw gritted together so tightly Lyse wondered if his teeth would shatter.

“This was your doing,” he said, driving his words into her like a sword. “Do you understand? You did this.”

He raised his hand in a sweeping arc, pointing to the carnage surrounding them. Five human bodies in their death rictus, blood spray on the walls and floor, a wanton murderess . . . it was a scene fit for the burial chamber of a Roman-era catacomb.

“Screw you,” Lyse said, and spat in his face.

The man pulled a black hood from his pocket and slipped it roughly over Lyse's head. She tried to breathe, but fabric filled her mouth. She fought, kicking and screaming at him, but his grip was too strong. After a while, her body stopped working. Panic turned to acceptance and her brain stopped screaming for oxygen.

Unconsciousness came swiftly.

L
yse began the slow climb to wakefulness.

As if she were trapped in a drugged dream, the languid fingers of oblivion stroked her brain, making it difficult to slip the tether of unconsciousness. She wanted to stay in the darkness, wanted to hide in the emptiness of her own subconscious because it was safer there. No one could reach her where she slumbered. She had no responsibilities, no needs, no wants . . . she was free.

For the moment.

But that didn't mean she was alone.

When you wake up, Lyse, the clock will begin to tick again . . .

The familiar voice—Eleanora's voice—slipped into her fractured mind like an eel, galvanizing her unconscious brain with an electric buzz. As soft as a whisper in her ear, it burrowed its way into the darkest recesses of her subconscious, becoming one with her own inner thoughts.

. . . and once that happens, I cannot help you. We will be fighting the battle on another front—and that will take all of my energy . . .

She was on the cusp of awareness. She couldn't scrabble back
into the darkness, couldn't dig in her heels like a braying donkey and refuse to return to reality. That was the way it was; once her brain woke up, it would not be put back to sleep.

I love you, Lyse. Take that with you. And know that I will see you on the other side.

There was a finality to Eleanora's words that tore at Lyse's heart, rending the muscle into useless bits. The tears came unbidden, wet warmth that trickled down the smooth curve of her cheeks and collected in the hollows of her collarbone. Lyse realized then that she was about to be alone, waking up in a place she knew nothing about, other than that she would be surrounded by the enemy—and with this thought the last of her grandmother's ghostly presence dissolved like a spoonful of honey in a mug of hot water. The essence of the woman who'd raised Lyse—and loved her more than anything or anyone else in the world—was gone now except for a slight melancholy aftertaste.

“Elyse MacAllister, it's a pleasure to finally meet you.”

The man's voice seemed to come from a thousand miles away—the cadence so unlike Eleanora's warm dulcet tones that it made Lyse shiver. She cracked open a blue eye and, as if she were carefully twisting the focus ring of an old film camera, the world slowly slipped into sharpened relief.

The room was cold, not just in temperature, but sterile like an operating theater. A naked lightbulb hung from the ceiling, dangling like an incandescent jewel on the end of a long cord. It dipped into the darkness, a frozen teardrop bathing the rest of the room in deep shadow. There was something wrong with the voltage, and the bulb emitted a low-pitched hum—
phaaar-rooooah, phaaar-rooooah
—that mimicked the song of a lone cicada. This was a sound Lyse was familiar with after years of living in semirural Georgia—and she'd always had pity for the poor bastards . . . alone and awake while all of their brethren were still in the deep throes of hibernation.

Now that she was almost fully awake, the brightness of the
light made her eyes water, but there was nothing she could do about it. Cold stainless-steel restraints cut into the delicate skin of her wrists, and as much as she strained against them, she was unable to do anything to release herself from their bite. They did a good job of keeping her immobilized on her metal chair.

At least she could move her legs—her captors had been kind enough to allow her legs to remain free.

“What do you want from me?” she asked, rage crashing over her like a wave, the rush of blood under her skin making her cheeks flush bright red.

The words slid out of Lyse's mouth without her thinking them. Her lips were dry and cracked, her mouth and tongue parched as a desert—but she didn't have any trouble making herself understood. Anger had a way of cutting through the bullshit.

The man sat across from her, a rectangular aluminum table separating them—but it was a divide that did nothing to ease Lyse's mind. An air of menace permeated the space. As if a grotesquerie of monsters sat locked within the shadowy confines of the room just waiting for the man sitting in front of her to snap his fingers. Would they descend on her in a heartbeat? Rip her limb from limb before sucking the very marrow from her bones?

Even though she knew (she hoped) monsters didn't exist, the train of thought made her shiver.

“What a vague question,” he replied, leaning forward on his elbows, so that he could settle his chin on the tops of his clasped hands. “What do I want from you? Why, merely your company, my dear.”

He did not look at her as he spoke, and his eyes seemed unable to settle on anything for longer than a few seconds before moving elsewhere. At first she assumed this was a sign of weakness, that he was too insecure to look at her directly, but then he smiled and their eyes locked. Now he would not drop her gaze but held it with an unwavering attention, his
pupils dilated an inky black. It made her skin crawl to imagine him trying to breach her mind via her eyes, sending out tendrils of his soul to slip inside her and carry away intimate, personal information.

Eyes are the windows to the soul,
someone had once said, but she'd never taken the sentiment seriously until now.

She wanted to look away, but her inborn stubbornness wouldn't let her. She was determined to force his hand, make him drop his gaze first.

“Why are you doing this?” she asked after a protracted silence, still unwilling to break their impromptu staring contest. “Murdering blood sisters, destroying covens? What're you trying to do here?”

The man's eyes were rheumy, snaking red capillaries crisscrossing the jaundiced sclera. He opened his mouth, then closed it again, compressing thin beige lips into a straight line. The action caused his chin to slip into the crevice between the second and third fingers of his still-clasped hands, and she noticed a tremor in his arms that hadn't been there before.

“You and your kind are in our way—and like a disease, you must be stamped out before you can spread.”

“You murdered my friend,” Lyse said, and the full weight of the words settled over her as she spoke them—
she did not cry, she would not cry
—there'd been too much of that during the past few days and she was done with it. “Your people have killed so many of us and we've done nothing to you.”

It wasn't that she'd made any kind of peace with what had happened back at the catacombs; it was that she could do nothing to change that moment . . . that precious second in time when everything had changed. So she disassociated herself from her feelings, pushed away the pain and grief—even though she knew that once she found her way out of this place, she would be overwhelmed by her emotions and would have to give in to them, or lose her mind.

“Kill or be killed . . . I think you know this old adage
well,” the man said, smiling again, so that the skin around his eyes crinkled in a charming way. “But I don't want to bring up all that nastiness. What can I do to make you feel more comfortable?”

He'd put on an imaginary mask, magically transforming himself into a sweet old man to try to fool her—not that she was buying the act. But she didn't want him to know, so she put on a neutral expression, behaving as if she were unaware that this was all a charade.

Besides, she wanted to buy herself some time. Needed it to think about her next move.

“I want some water.”

“But of course,” he said after a moment, his smile widening to reveal hideously worn-down yellow teeth, the front incisors the only ones still holding their sharpened edge. “I can refuse you nothing.”

He turned his head, breaking the connection between them, and his face disappeared into shadow. Lyse released her breath, her whole body shaking. She hadn't realized how much he'd unnerved her, how rigid and tense her body had become until he was no longer looking in her direction.

“Bring us some cold water, please,” the old man said, speaking to someone Lyse couldn't see. Somewhere in the darkness she heard a heavy door slide open on ungreased tracks. Whoever was in the room with them . . . until now they'd been as quiet as a corpse.

With no eyes upon her, she took the free moment to collect herself and tamp down her unsettled feelings.

Maybe he really does have monsters all over this room,
Lyse thought.
Just another way of trying to unnerve me.

She put those thoughts away, realizing she needed to start thinking logically, to observe more of her surroundings if she were going to form an escape plan. Dropping her chin, she let her eyes scan the dark gray floor, raising a brow at the deep scratches etched into the poured concrete—probably made by
the bottoms of other metal chairs whose occupants tried to escape torture and confinement.

She didn't doubt this place had been privy to some horrible atrocities. Hell, as far as she knew,
no one
had ever made it out of this room alive—then add to that a strange heaviness in the air, a sense that something unseen was pressing down on you, making it hard to breathe.

It was enough to make Lyse wish she'd remained unconscious indefinitely.

Not really an option,
she thought as her skin became clammy and she felt sweat break out under her arms, the stink of her own fear permeating the room.

From her vantage point, Lyse couldn't tell the dimensions of the space, but it had to be huge, bigger even than she'd realized . . . especially if someone had been standing undetected in the shadows watching and waiting to do the old man's bidding.

“You would like to know where you are? Yes?”

The old man was watching her.
Had been
watching her.

She didn't want to look at him but felt compelled to take in his presence, to inspect everything on the surface that she could see: the graying hair a shade too long, curling around the lapels of his black suit jacket and starched white dress shirt. The boxy cut of his jacket swallowed up his gaunt frame, and the incandescent light made his body appear drawn and sallow. He was gripping a cane in his right hand—it must've been leaning against the back of his chair before, but now he was holding on to it for dear life, his fingers white and bloodless where they curled around the silvery head of a thickly maned lion.

“First, I'd like to know why I'm cuffed to this chair, actually,” Lyse said, and swallowed hard, trying to encourage the flow of saliva back into her mouth. “And then, yeah, where I
am
would be nice, too.”

The old man laughed, a phlegmy choked thing that made
Lyse flinch. She'd liked him better before she'd heard the sound.

“Excuse me,” he rasped, then cleared his throat and coughed—the laughter had taken something elemental out of him.

He seemed diminished now.

“One, because I don't want you doing anything you'd regret,” he said, squeezing the head of the cane and drawing it in closer to his torso. She could see the thickened nail beds of his right hand, the striated keratin as yellow as old parchment. “And as for why—that is the important question, Lyse, and so I shall answer it—you are here because of what you are . . . what's in your blood. And also what you will mean to a movement that is only now beginning to grow. I don't need you to martyr yourself for their cause, so we will keep you here for the duration.”

Lyse chose not to roll her eyes at the old man's pompousness.

“What I
am
? What's in my blood? I don't know what any of that means,” she said, her words laced with feigned innocence.

The old man leaned forward in his seat, hazel eyes narrowed.

“Oh, I think you know exactly what it means . . .
witch
.”

He spat the word out as if it were a curse.

“But that's not all you know, now is it?” he continued. “There's so very much for the two of us to discuss—”

He was interrupted by the
click
of a door unlatching, and then the rickety growl of metal casters running on track. The old man did not look up, but Lyse could see something moving in the shadows. She shrank back in her seat, fear and adrenaline coursing through her veins as a tall man in a dark blue suit crossed the threshold from darkness to light, revealing himself.

Lyse gasped as she stared up into the startling ice blue eyes of the first person she'd killed.

Her uncle smiled down at her, bright white teeth as even
and unmarred as if they'd been cast in a dentist's office. He was exactly as she remembered him from the last time they'd met—only this time he was alive, not crushed underneath a stone statue.

His posture was ramrod straight, his long arms held at attention by his sides; the close-cropped silver-gray hair remained the same, as did the tan skin and the gleam of menace behind his eyes. It was as much a part of him as the sneering pull of his upper lip, a feature that made him look mean even when he was trying to play nice.