The Dreamwalker's Path

3/ Tampa, Florida

Lia’s legs buckled underneath her. She tried to keep herself from sinking to the floor, but the only thing between her and it was the bed, and her subconscious refused to let her land on the bed of a dead little girl. So one moment, Lia was examining bed sheets, the next, her knees bounced off of the mattress box and hit the floor with a carpet-dulled thud.

The pain from hitting the wooden frame of the bed on the way down zinged from knee to hip. She drew her next breath in with an angry hiss and scrambled back up to her feet despite the residual ache. The pain had cleared her head somewhat, but when a large, long nailed hand grasped her upper arm, Lia plunged back into panic. Swinging her fist in a wide arc, the ballerina hit her attacker with all the force that she could manage.

“Whoa, hey there!” another hand intercepted hers—Oh typical, she thought. I can’t even get one good smack in before I’m eviscerated—and something fell to the floor with a surprisingly loud snap.

The lullaby stopped.

Swallowing hard, Lia shifted her gaze up to her would- be attacker and, to her utter chagrin, she found herself face to face with that damned vampire. Her embarrassment flooded her face in a hot rush. She would have ignored it, or done her best to, except that a very faint smile had begun to tug at the vampire’s lips, and she had the awful suspicion that he found the entire situation highly amusing.

And Lia found herself itching to pull that silver ring right out of Cavan’s bottom lip. Then they’d see who was smiling...

“Are you all right?”

Oh sure. Now he’d make her feel bad for having violent thoughts.

“I’m fine.” She pulled away and busied herself with redoing her ponytail, even though it had been just fine the way she’d had it a few moments before.

Wrapping her thick hair around her fingers to turn the tail into a bun, she added, “I thought I heard…well there was music and I thought…I thought it was the Alchemist, that’s all.” Better to tell him that she was going crazy now rather than put it off until after she was too bonkers to be useful.

For a moment, Cavan looked confused, and then a sort of apologetic look passed over his face and he glanced down at the floor a few feet away from where they were standing.

A trail of costume jewelry strewn a path to a white wooden box. A tiny golden peg stuck out of the bottom in a tell-tale sort of fashion.

“It was just a music box, Ophelia.” The hand that still gripped her upper arm now rubbed from shoulder to elbow and back in what was supposed to be a soothing gesture.

Acting out of spite and residual terror, Lia pulled herself away and smacked the man across the face. “You jerk!”

Face alight with first surprise, and then anger, Cavan bared his teeth, giving Lia a good look at the very, thin, very long set of fangs that looked as though they’d unfolded like a snake’s from behind his regular eye teeth.

“I didn’t do it on purpose, witch.” The animosity in his voice surprised Lia enough that she stumbled backward in attempt to put some distance between herself and him. He grabbed at her, though, pinning her arms to her side and holding her in place.

“And Jesus fucking Christ, Ophelia, you’ve got to stop randomly assaulting people this side of reality, because one day you’re going to do it to someone who doesn’t like you, and they will tear you up.” He let her go with a rough shove, thankful that she at least kept her footing this time.

“If you’re that desperate to hit something, go punch a Goddamned wall; at least that won’t kill you in a fit of rage- driven retaliation.”

Lia rubbed her arms. “You’re an asshole.” She glowered at him.

“Well, darling, since you’re a cunt that makes us two peas in a pod.”

Cavan knew even as the words left his mouth that he’d made a horrible mistake; he knew that he’d crossed a line that no one should ever cross, and knew that the words would cut Lia a lot deeper than hers had cut him. But nothing could quite prepare him for how guilty he felt as he watched Lia’s expression falter.

Her gaze fell to the ground, eyebrows pulled together and he felt Lia pull into herself. That by itself he could have dealt with—her body language could have been interpreted in a vast assortment of different ways, shame, embarrassment, remorse, all of which would have suited Cavan fine. But it was when he realized that she was holding her breath and saw the faint working of her throat that he realized that she was going to cry and he felt like the scum of the earth.

Damn it. He hated feeling like the scum of the earth.

“I didn’t mean that.”

“You fucking said it, though.” Her voice cracked and Cavan winced.

Not knowing what he was supposed to do, Cavan put his hands in his pockets and politely fixed his gaze to the ceiling. Toying with the inside of his lip ring with his tongue, Cavan took to counting the plastic glow-in-the-dark stars that covered the ceiling in uneven little clumps. Needing something to think about instead of fixating on the sniffling woman in front of him, the vampire let himself wonder if anyone would notice if he took the stars off the ceiling for Hannah’s daughters. It would, he thought, be a good way for them to learn their constellations.

Better just leave them, he decided. Someone would notice they were gone, and he could always get a couple of packs from somewhere if Hannah—

“Are those glowing?”

It took Lia a couple of moments to realize that he was speaking to her again. She looked up at Cavan and made to ask him what the hell he was talking about, but the first time she tried, nothing came out. So she cleared her throat and wiped her eyes and tried again. “What are you talking about?”

She watched him, bemusement temporarily abating her hurt feelings, as he pulled his bangs out of his bright blue eye and closed it experimentally. He had a thick, ugly scar that ran across the half-hidden side of his face. It roped across the ridge of his brow, his cheekbone, down to his jaw where it disappeared abruptly. The hypertrophic line stood out vividly in the artificial light of the little girl’s bedroom, and the sight of it shocked Lia slightly. Cavan had been immensely careful about displaying the side of his face that had the scar, so she hadn’t seen it for more than a few passing moments at any given time. Now, however, Cavan seemed not to care if she saw the mark.

He was busy pointing at the ceiling. “The stars up there: are they glowing for you?”

Still a bit bemused, Lia turned her face up to the ceiling to look at the assortment of tiny, plastic stars. She remembered them from her dream, of course, but she had forgotten that they were there. What did plastic stars have to do with a little girl and her mother being murdered, after all?

“They aren’t glowing, Cavan,” Lia wrapped her arms around herself and shifted her weight so that she could look between the ceiling and the vampire. “The light’s on.”

Cavan opened his blue eye and closed his green. “Right,” he sounded distracted. “Well something up there is glowing...” Turning his gaze back to her, he motioned to silence her rebuttal, preemptively. “Just, indulge me a minute, Miss Sass.”

Then he moved to the little girl’s closet and looked up at the ceiling again. “There’s an access to the attic,” his voice was muffled by the wall between where he stood and the rest of the bedroom.

“It’s a bit small, though.” Standing on his toes, Cavan reached up and pushed the thin wooden panel out of the opening and considered whether or not he’d be able to get his broad shoulders through.

Not even diagonally, he thought. Then, popping back around the corner of the closet and into the main bedroom, he offered Lia a smile. “Feeling adventurous, ki—Lia?”

He bit his tongue; surely his mouth had gotten him into sufficient trouble today.

“I don’t want to go up in the attic, I want to go home.”

She hadn’t even looked at him, he noted. Instead, she’d busied herself with picking up the jewelry from the floor and putting it back in the music box—careful to cradle the box in her arm so that she could pinch the peg at the bottom to keep it from playing.

“I’ll take you home, but I want to see what’s in the attic first,” he pressed. “I won’t fit through the opening, though.” Technically true. While in a solid, human state, he wouldn’t be able to fit. But he figured that Lia was slowly arriving to her supernatural limit for the day. Turning into a cat and demanding to be thrust through the attic access so he could prowl around the rafters of a murder house very well be the woman’s undoing. “We can find another access, but it would be faster if you could just go up there and take a look for me.”

Lia put the music box back on the dresser. “Cavan,” she sounded tired and exasperated. “I wouldn’t even begin to know what to look for up there. I don’t see anything glowing through the ceiling, and I sure as shit won’t see it in the attic.” She crossed her arms over her chest and raised an eyebrow at him.

Cavan matched her expression. “You’ll be walking home, then?”

Lia tried not to let the man develop too great a sense of satisfaction as she stomped across the bedroom and squeezed passed Cavan so that she could look at the access. He felt her relief as she assessed the opening, and didn’t have to think too hard to listen to her inner monologue as she determined that he might not be able to fit comfortably, but she’d be able to slip through the opening without a problem.

“All right, I’ll do it, but then you’re taking me home, understood?”

Cavan saluted and then squeezed into the closet with her. “Here,” he leaned against the wall and cupped his hands into a makeshift stirrup by his thigh, “I’ll give you a hand up.”

Feeling particularly disgruntled, Lia braced herself by placing her hands on Cavan’s shoulders and placed her foot in his hands. Slowly, he lifted her up toward the ceiling.

“Put your other foot on my shoulder so you aren’t rocking back and forth so much. I’m a vampire, not a circus clown.”

Cavan looked up as Lia’s upper body disappeared through the attic access. He was certain that he heard her mutter something like, “You could have fooled me,” but he was equally certain that it was not something he was supposed to have heard.

He pushed her up the rest of the way and ignored her slightly indignant squawk at the sudden movement.

“Jerk.”

“Do you see anything?”

A pause, and then, “No, it’s too dark. I definitely don’t see anything glowing. By the way, if I sound bitter, I am.”

“You always sound that way.” Cavan leaned against the wall and pulled a Jolly Rancher from his pocket. Reverently, he unwrapped the hard candy as Lia shuffled in the attic above him. “Oh, before I forget: make sure that you only step on the beams otherwise you’ll fall through the ceiling.

“Oh...Fuck you.”

From the attic, Lia could swear she could hear Cavan laughing at her. Well, that was just peachy. She thought about accidentally kicking him on the way out of the attic, but the thought was immediately followed by the warning that he’d just given her.

You’ve got to stop assaulting people...one day you’re going to do it to someone who doesn’t like you...

“Oi,” she murmured softly to herself, gingerly reached through the darkness for the beam she was supposed to be walking on. “Now’s not the time to grow extra feelings, Li—ouch!”

“Everything okay?” Lia heard a slight tap someone just to her left where Cavan was knocking against the ceiling.

“Yeah I just...ran into a big-ass box, is all.”

“Great!” the vampire sounded much too excited for his own good. “That’s about where the glowing was, go ahead and push the box back to the access and we’ll check out what’s inside.”

Lia wanted to argue that there was nothing glowing in the box, which is why she ran into it in the first place, but she felt like she’d argued with him enough for one day. So Lia tugged at the top of the box, pulling it back toward the light of the access. She peeked out of the opening and said, “It’s heavy. I’m not going to be able to lower it down to you.”

Cavan poked his head around the corner and grinned at her, “Darling, I’m a vampire; I have super-human strength, remember?”

Lia rolled her eyes and said with a long-suffering sigh, “How could I ever forget? Here, now, take this dang thing and get me the heck out of here.” She waited for Cavan to hold out his hands before she began to push the bottom of the box through the opening. It barely fit through the access, and there was a brief moment when Lia was left in complete darkness.

And then that feeling returned.

It was the same feeling she’d had when she’d been dreaming. That feeling of being watched, of being petrified to turn around because she knew that if she did…

“You all right up there” A pause and then when she didn’t answer right away, “Hey, Lia?” The light reappeared as Cavan pulled the box out of the access and set it down. “Here, careful when you—oh well all right then.”

Cavan had just enough time to step back and avoid being smacked in the face by Lia’s feet as she clambered out of the access.

“Shut it! Shut it—shut it—shut it now!” She sank to the ground and crawled out of the way so that Cavan could shut the access.

Except he wasn’t. He was standing there with a confused look on his face as he watched Lia clamber to her feet looking as though she’d seen the devil.

“Are you—?”

“Shut the door, Cavan!”

“All right, okay,” he held his hands up and then disappeared back into the closet to shut the access.

Lia heard the panel slide into place, but the feeling of being watched did not subside. “Hurry up, grab the box and let’s go. Come on, chop chop!”

For a moment he looked like he was going to argue with her, or worse, ask her if she was okay again, but thankfully, he didn’t press her any further.

Scooting the large box over to the center of the room where Lia had positioned herself, Cavan held one hand out to Lia and gripped the edge of the box with the other. As soon as he felt her slender fingers wrap securely around his palm, Cavan brought them and the box back to Lia’s living room.

It took a moment for Lia’s stomach to settle after. Apparently teleporting from place to place was worse when you were scared witless. She bent over, bracing her hands on her knees and fought the wave of nausea that had accompanied their arrival.

Cavan’s hand settled on her back between her shoulder blades, and she felt her muscles relax as his nails and fingertips ran circles around her back.

“If I had known you were claustrophobic, I wouldn’t have made you go up there.” The vampire’s voice an apologetic murmur. “Come here, sit down.” He tugged her lightly by the shirt to get her attention and directed her to the couch.

“I’m not claustrophobic,” Lia muttered, taking one of the pillows from the couch and hugging it to her chest. “Something was in the attic with me. It felt just like the thing that attacked me—ah,” she paused and corrected herself, “the girl and the mother, I guess would be more accurate.”

Cavan sat down next to her, his frown showing more in the line at the center of his brow than in his mouth. “I didn’t sense anything,” he tried to make it sound as assuring as possible, if only because he didn’t want her to sit on the couch petrified all evening after he left her. The words were true enough, of course, but Cavan would be the first to admit that there was no way for him to be able to sense everything that could have possibly been lurking in that attic.

Unfortunately, judging by the look that Lia gave him, she knew that just as well as he did. “If it’s a dream-thingy then you might not be able to sense it, though,” she hugged the pillow tighter, “I mean there’s a whole mess of stuff that I could be able to sense that you wouldn’t be able to, right? Things stuck in,” she faltered, “you know...Dreams or whatever.”

She tugged her hair out of her bun and rubbed her temples. Her head had begun to ache.

“Why can’t I just have a normal life?” she mumbled tiredly. “I just want to be normal. To have a normal day job and come home at night and watch T.V., and then maybe one day meet someone, and get married, and have a kid, and grow old, and die. That’s all I want. Why can’t I just have that?”

Cavan made a small sound, something between a chuckle and a scoff. He reached out and stroked her hair lightly. “Because you come from a family of witches, kiddo, and this is what ‘normal’ is supposed to be like for you.”

“Well, that bites.”

“So do ants. But you don’t let that stop you from going on a picnic. Life goes on, Ophelia, despite the challenges we face every day. The world turns, the grass grows, the birds sing, and you carry on.”

There he goes, she thought bitterly, sounding much too cheerful for his own damn good. She sighed and turned her head so she could look sullenly at him. “I don’t like you,” she insisted weakly.

This time when Cavan smiled it wasn’t a snarky or supercilious gesture. It was a real smile that lit his eyes and made him seem almost like he was an average, nice guy. “I know, darling,” he stroked her hair as he reassured her that he had not forgotten. “You’ll learn to, though.”

Lia snorted. “Sure; I’ll keep that in mind.”

Batting his hand away from her hair, Lia took a deep breath to steady herself and set the throw pillow on the couch beside her. “Okay,” resolve renewed, she stood up and circled around the coffee table. “Let’s see what the hell we have in this damned box.”

4/ Eight’s Street, Sanctuary

The Hour of Eight forced his expression into one of speculation as he watched the boy point at the crack in the old brick wall. “This is it?” He asked as the child crouched down and peeked through the crack.

“Yes,” Chapel replied, so sure of himself, despite his youth. “This is the crack that leads to a place not Sanctuary. If you look here at the bottom, you can barely see through.”

Eight sighed softly, and he managed a smile. He had feared that the boy had found a doorway, or some other break in Sanctuary that he had been unaware of, something that might indicate to the other Hours that he had begun to pull himself out of Time’s grasp, taking his sections of the city with him. But this was merely the small passageway of the butterfly from the Alchemist’s collection. It was something that he had already planned to remedy once he was certain that his little friend had taken the girl out of Sanctuary.

If this was all that the boy found, he could easily discredit the child. Then he could block up the hole with some plaster and ease the child’s mind with a bit of the Old Magic of his kind.

As if sensing his thoughts, Chapel added, “That en’t all. Look at this.” He pressed two hands to the wall and pushed lightly, and the section of wall that the child pushed eased backward, making the crack wider—just wide enough, in fact, for a child to get through.

You idiot fool, Eight thought to himself in slight dismay. How did you think that the sprite was going to get the girl out of Sanctuary? Shrink her down?

“It looks real fancy out there, if you ask me,” the boy was saying happily. “I mean, I en’t never seen a building all in the same color of brick before. Anyway, I don’t think that Emelye would have gotten too far so—say, are you all right, there? You look awfully worried about something.”

Realizing that he’d lost control of his emotions, however briefly, Eight fixed his gaze on the boy, striving to think of something, anything really, any excuse that the boy might believe that didn’t involve the other side of that crack being connected to the missing girl. Anything that might keep him from telling…

I’ll have to kill him, Eight realized. And then, almost as quickly, he realized he couldn’t kill the boy. The other Hours knew that the boy had found something. If he went missing, they might suspect…

“Hey, I said: are you okay over there?”

Heaving a frustrated breath, the Hour gestured to the boy, “Step away from the crack, Chapel, I don’t like the look of it.” He pulled his features into a deeply concerned expression. “It doesn’t feel safe. We should close it up and leave it for now. I will tell the other Hours about it when I return to them.”

“And get us our reward?” The bulging eyes of the pixie peeked from under a tuft of the boy’s hair.

“Yes, and that,” Eight hardly knew what he was agreeing to. All he knew for certain was that he wanted Chapel and his pixie away from that crack so that he could take care of it. “But first, let’s bring you somewhere safe, shall we?”

At the boy’s indignant sputtering, Eight added, “Come now, child, don’t argue. This place is very dangerous at present. Anything could happen…”

The boy gave him a very sour look, but, to Eight’s relief, he complied.

“Well!” the pixie, still atop the boy’s head cackled delightedly. “At least we’ll be getting something delicious out of this!”