The Dreamwalker's Path

02/ Tampa, Florida

Ophelia Caglione tilted her head backwards, and waved a paper plate at her neck. Even with her eyes closed, the sun’s brightness seemed to bore through her eyelids and promise an exceptionally bright, and dismally hot Spring. Only Mid-April and it was already near stifling.

That was Florida for you: eight days of decent weather, and then the humidity would settle back in.

Lia suspected that if she weren’t so damn hot, she’d remember the cool winter days with a sense of longing. But the sun had zapped her of most of her energy, and so she could spare none of what she had left for wistful thinking. It was already challenging enough for her to stay awake...

“Are you listening to me, Lia?”

Using the paper plate as a visor, Lia opened her eyes and took a peek at her fair haired sister. The plastic checkered table cloth they’d laid out for their picnic crackled against the grass as she lifted her head with what felt like a tremendous effort. Her shoulders stuck uncomfortably to the plastic, and she grimaced slightly. “Hn?”

“I didn’t think you were,” Camille sniffed and gathered her hair into a pony tail. The humidity had made Camille’s usually crisp curls unwind and separate into a frizz that was almost as spectacular as Lia suspected her hair would be if it weren’t wrapped in a tight, well hair-sprayed braid and bun.

“Anyway, what I was saying, before you practically dozed off, is that your boyfriend was over last night. He’s really sweet you know—he gets along with Jamie and Bee really well.”

Now Lia was entirely alert. “I’m sorry, my what was over at your house last night?”

Camille faltered. “Your boyfriend? Tall, dark, tattoos, wears like,” she waved her hand absently, “one of the first pairs of converse ever made, I’m sure. You introduced me to him at the Publix the other day. What was his name? Cameron...Kaden...” She twirled her fingers around each other, looking flummoxed.

“Oh for Chri—” Lia cut herself off mid-curse as Camille’s youngest daughter, Jamie, tottered over to the table cloth holding two fistfuls of grass. With a shriek, the toddler let the handfuls loose over her mother and aunt.

Lia lowered her voice to an annoyed hiss so that she could continue while Camille instructed her daughter to sit down on her blanket and eat the rest of her gummy snacks.

"Cavan is not my boyfriend, Camille; he’s a severely delusional va—witch who likes to talk to me at random, inappropriate intervals of my life. Why would you automatically assume that someone you’ve just met is my boyfriend? Is it because he has a—” she pursed her lips and looked at Jamie, happily chewing away on a tough little gummy. “—because he’s a boy? Because I’ve socialized with boys before.”

Camille, for all the world, looked even more confused.

“Why the hell didn’t you say anything when he was telling me about how he was your boyfriend?”

“I didn’t realize he was, Camille. I had other things on my mind. Like making sure that he wasn’t putting things in my grocery cart, since that’s what had been occupying his time before you wafted down the aisle.”

“Cheese and crackers, Lia, the guy sounds like he’s a nutball! Why didn’t you tell me? What the heck is wrong with you?” Camille reached over and smacked Lia’s arm a number of times.

“Oooooo,” Jamie gapped, her mouth full of gummies, at her mother and aunt. “Aun’ee Eea’s bein’ bad...” She shoved another gummy in her mouth as Lia knocked her sister’s hand away.

“Will you cut that out? It’s not quite as depressingly bad as it sounds. The guy is a magic-user. I met him through a friend who said that he’d be able to help me with my Dreamwalking stuff. He’s a mentor of sorts, he’s just immensely irritating, and he’s got a really strange sense of humor. He likes to fu—” A sideways glance at her niece, “mess with people.”

She wished that she could tell her sister more, but she wasn’t sure how many of Camille’s memories Cavan had altered a few months ago. All he’d said was that he was going to help her forget the scary parts. For all Lia knew, that meant Cavan had just erased the part where Lia went missing and Camille’s older daughter, Bianca had been attacked by the Alchemist. Or, on the flip side, he could have erased everything. The only thing that Lia knew Camille knew for certain was that Lia had discovered her Gift as a Dreamwalker.

That had caused enough issues. Apparently, Lia was the only one in the world who thought that she should be left alone. Camille, like Cavan, did everything in her power to impress upon Lia the supposed importance of getting her new ability “under control.”

Some damn ability. She hadn’t felt heads or tails of it since the Third Hour had dropped her off at her house after the Alchemist had attacked them.

The sun burned her collarbone and shoulders. It was way too hot to have any sort of confrontation with Camille at the moment. “Hand me a water bottle, would you?”

Still looking confused a little bit suspicious, Camille opened the cooler at her hip and fished out an unopened bottle of water.

Lia immediately pressed the bottle to the back of her neck and then rolled it down one bare arm. “You need a pool, Camille.”

“Hubby says maybe by next summer. Look, Lia, back to the point—”

Lia groaned, “I don’t want to talk about it, Cam.”

“Well, all I’m saying is that if he’s not a creep—which, I don’t know, if you say he’s not, I believe you, but he is telling people that you’re dating, and Lia, you better talk to him about that but if he’s not a creep—then he seems nice.”

“That’s great, Cam. I’m glad that you approve provided he’s not a creep, which you now think he is.” Her eyes were closed again and she flopped herself back down in the grass to contemplate just how incredibly bizarre this conversation, and her life in general, actually were.

“What’s he teaching you, this not-boyfriend-not-creep-mentor guy?”

Lia’s exasperation expressed itself in a puff of a sigh. “Not much, Cam. He’s mostly interested in telling me what he thinks it might be possible for me to eventually do. I don’t think he knows much about Dreamwalking—or Weaving, even. Apparently you and I aren’t exactly common grown witches.”

“Oh really?” There was no mistaking the little bubble of pride in her sister’s voice. “Are you telling me we’re special?”

“Yes. We’re super special. We’re freaks among witches.”

“Oh, don’t say that!”

“Well apparently we are. And Cavan’s about as useful as a fat cat on a window sill with a bug stuck up his nose.”

“Oh, stop it. I’m sure he’s plenty useful.”

It amazed her how Camille could go from warning her about the untrustworthy creepiness of the man to defending his honor over the course of a breath.

No wait, it annoyed her.

“He’s not,” she insisted with as much venom as she could muster in the heat. “He’s a bossy, overbearing Cheshire cat of a man who flutters into my life to ask me if I’m ‘practicing’ my magic and then he flutters off again, annoyed when I say I haven’t been.”

“Well why haven’t you?”

“Because there’s just no need to! I haven’t even been dreaming since I found out.”

“Well that’s probably because there are no spooky dream things running around at the moment! Isn’t that why you’d got the dreams before? Because there was a monster lurking in the Dreamscape?”

“Yeah, sort of, but—”

“No, but nothing. Just because you’re not having dreams now doesn’t mean you won’t have them later. And what’s going to happen later? You’ll be up the creek without a paddle and you’ll have no idea what you’re doing because you’ll have spent too much time floating around in La-La Land when you didn’t have a spooky dream thing trying to come after you and you could have been practicing.”

“Mother of God.”

“Lia, your niece is sitting right here!”

Lia opened her eyes. Sure enough, Jamie was still busy chewing the mouthful of gummies. “You forget your auntie said that, okay, Jame?”

Behind her gummies, Jamie said, “Mutter ob Gob!”

Camille made a sound of irritation and glared at Lia. Then, with a heavy sigh, she turned to the toddler and said, “Jamie you’re a complete mess, baby. I think we should go get you cleaned up and leave your bad mouthed aunt alone for a little while.”

Lia listened as Jamie began to fuss about going inside and Camille assured her daughter that they would come back outside in just a few minutes. She breathed a soft sigh of relief when Camille picked the girl up and walked back toward the house.

Camille would probably put Jamie down for a nap, and that meant that, for a little while anyway, Lia was left alone to bake blissfully in the too-hot Florida sun.