The Dreamwalker's Path

3/ The Temple of the Lost, Sanctuary

“I know that we don’t always see eye to eye, Time, but you need to listen to me when I tell you that you’ve been looking in the wrong place.”

Lyriel spoke in a quiet murmur so as not to wake the little girl. It had taken a world of sweet talking and flattery for the angel to convince the child to stay at the Temple of the Lost and Forgotten while he found someone to track Time down and convince her to come to the temple to speak to him.

Apparently, although Lyriel agreed to be Sanctuary’s anchor while Time found another Twelfth Hour, Time was as determined as ever to avoid him. Normally that wouldn’t put a bee in Lyriel’s bonnet, but when a sopping wet little girl suddenly flickers into existence in the one place that no ordinary teleporter should be able to appear, Lyriel found his forbearance considerably lacking.

Three weeks he’d waited for Time to wander into his temple. Three weeks, every day of which he struggled to keep the little girl interested so that she didn’t try to wander off again and get lost in the raveling chaos that made up Time’s ever changing, never altering city.

And of course Time would appear when the child was sleeping—after waiting up as long as Emelye could manage when word finally reached Lyriel that Time had decided to visit the temple.

Time followed the angel’s gaze. “I hear what you’re saying, but I don’t like it,” she didn’t bother to keep her voice low. Lyriel suspected that Time was hoping the child would wake up so that she could speak to the girl and debunk Lyriel’s theory once and for all.

“You don’t like it because she’s human, pure and simple. Not even a witch like the Dreamwalker, just a little girl from regular human parents.”

Time crossed her arms over her chest. She was, Lyriel noted, refusing to take the form of a little girl herself; in fact, she sat stagnate as a middle-aged woman, dried and wilted flowers decorating the long, dull braid that lay along the length of her shoulder and down one arm.

“There’s nothing to say that this child is anything you say she is.”

“Nothing except my eyes, Time.” When she didn’t look convinced, the angel took a different approach. “You don’t like Ophelia Caglione anyway; I would have thought you would be glad to find someone else who could wear the black garb of Twelve.”

“There’s still no way of knowing for certain! I do not sense anything in her.”

“You don’t want to sense anything in her. You’re just being stubborn! The way you always have been.”

The woman-esque figure heaved a frustrated sigh and covered her face with her hands. “Perhaps. Humans are so frail though…”

“Perhaps she won’t be. Perhaps her abilities, when they come to maturity, will give her some measure of resilience.”

She didn’t answer, merely she sat looking at the little girl who clung tightly to her raggedy kitty as she slept.

At long length, Lyriel said, “She’s been looking for you.”

That caught Time’s attention and startled her into shifting from the form of the middle-aged woman into the crone. “Oh?”

“Her parents went missing after the Carter Street Riot; as she’s from the outer village, I don’t doubt that her parents had absolutely nothing to do with the child-gangs. If they disappeared, they were innocent bystanders.

Time tsked softly. “They were either lost when Sebastian closed the fault, or killed by one of the rioters. I cannot bring back the dead.”

“No,” Lyriel agreed. “I would never advocate for that. I didn’t advocate for it. That’s what got me here, you know.” He gave a dry, bitter laugh.

Time said, “I remember,” and they were both silent again.

The only sound was that of the little girl’s breath. Inhale.

Exhale.

Inhale…

The angel stirred, stretched his wings a little. “Well, Time?”

“I need to conference with some of the other Hours,” she said quietly, her gaze still on the little girl. “I would bring some of them here to look at her. If they…Well it’s not their decision, really, but the way some of them have been acting,” she waved her hand lightly. “I would have them feel as though this is their decision.”

It seemed risky to Lyriel. “What if they say no?”

Time looked away from the little girl. Sand-brown eyes regarded the angel carefully for a long moment. “I know my Hours. I know which of them are loyal to me and will accept what I say without question; I know which Hours will not be opposed to the girl, and I know which Hours need to be part of the decision making.” She fell into the form of the cherub-faced, golden-haired little girl and whispered, “Trust me.”

4/Ybor City, Florida

The last thing that Lia wanted to do was open her eyes and look up.

Here in the dark of her room, she could feel it watching her. It was that sort of feeling that you heard people describe at great lengths on ghost shows, the sort that you never believed in until you felt it yourself.

But Lia felt it now, and Lia believed.

Feeling as though she swallowed something cold and slimy, Lia opened her eyes and stared up at a ceiling that had been covered with glow-in-the-dark stars—the sort that parents put on their children’s nursery ceiling to replace nightlights.

But Lia had never had stars on her ceiling, not when

she’d been a little girl, and not now.

She reached out for her new cellphone, which she kept on the pillow next to her only to find that there was no pillow. There wasn’t a bed, either, just empty air. She extended her other hand and found a wall. This was not her bedroom.

Lia flung the blankets off of her body and pushed herself up, but before she could swing her legs off of the bed, something had launched itself from the far corner of the mattress and grabbed her. It pinned her down and opened a gaping mouth with small, sharp teeth, and the scream it let loose dissolved soon after into a fit of cackling. Its breath was overly warm and smelled of squashed stink beetles.

The thing, whatever it was, continued to giggle, but someone was still screaming. Someone with a voice that was much higher and smaller than Lia’s. Someone who was young enough to shout for her mother.

The bedroom door hit the wall with the force that the woman had used to open it. “Sara? Sara!”

Lia felt the chest of the little girl begin to collapse under the weight of the thing that sat on her, and although she realized now that she was dreaming, she couldn’t move. She was trapped in the little girl’s point of view as her bones began to crack.

Sara’s mother grabbed the thing with both hands and pulled it off of her daughter. The creature then turned its full attention on her, extending arms twice as long as its body and knocking the woman to the floor where it clambered on top of her.

Now it was the mother who screamed, and Sara was in too much pain to move.

Lia’s alarm clock pierced the dream, waking her with a

vicious jolt.

She stared at her blank ceiling, lit by a morning sun, and breathed what felt like the first breath of her life.

A trembling hand fumbled for her clock and hit the reset button. Carefully, she lifted back her blankets and climbed out of bed. Her chest and shoulders ached, and when she looked down and rubbed the spot that hurt most, she found a deep bruise had begun to tint her skin.

“Oh, no...”

Feeling sick, Lia crossed the room to the mirrored doors of her closet. She pulled down her sleeve felt a wave of nausea hit her as she stared at the hand shaped bruise that extended from chest to neck across her left shoulder. Its partner decorated her right, sitting only marginally lower on her skin. “Oh, god.”

Lia grabbed her phone and rushed to her living room. The first thing she did was flip the TV channel to the local news station. The second was to go to her kitchen and pull the business card that Cavan had left behind off of her refrigerator.

She hovered in the kitchen, looking at the TV over her breakfast bar as a male reporter delivered the morning news in the hallmark lilt of live news:

“The bodies of Julia LaRoche and her four year old, Sara, were discovered in the little girl’s bedroom by Daniel Wesley, a neighbor who often drives Julia to work each morning. As with the prior local cases, there was no sign of forced entry and both were dead by the time that authorities arrived. As of now, no other details have been released, and we’re still waiting for an official statement from the police.”

Lia dialed the number on the card. It rang to voicemail.

Cursing, Lia dialed again.

One ring.

Two.

Three.

On the forth ring, the white noise changed.

“Let me guess, you and the mother were the bestest

friends.” Cavan’s tone was highly unimpressed.

He blamed her.

It took all of her courage not to hang up. “I was there.” Apparently courage didn’t keep her voice from cracking or tears from welling in her eyes. “I was there with that little girl.” She repeated it two more times before Cavan acknowledged that he heard.

“All right, all right, take a breath and calm down, silly witch. There’s no use having a meltdown when you’re by yourself. Just hang tight and I’ll be there. Don’t move, do you understand me? Don’t go anywhere.”

She nodded, forgetting that he couldn’t see her. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway, though; he’d already hung up.

5/New York City, New York

Sebastian looked up from the hand-held video game that Cavan had shoved into his hands when his cellphone went off. As a general rule, Sebastian did not play video games. He had never used one of the hand-held devices that he was holding now, and if he were being completely honest, had no idea which buttons did what, or where he was supposed to be going.

To be fair, however, his interest lay squarely with the phone call that Cavan had taken.

Cavan hated cellphones and avoided them with the same dedication that Sebastian employed when avoiding video games. There were approximately four people that Sebastian knew of who had Cavan’s cellphone number and needed it to contact him, and he doubted that any of them would merit a “She’s a witch!” sound byte from Monte Python and the Holy Grail.

Well, maybe Selene, but Cavan wouldn’t have looked nearly as annoyed if Selene were calling.

He’d let the sound byte play all the way through without looking at the phone, his attention on his game. When the silence was broken a second time by a chorus of accusations, Cavan thrust the game-thing at him and told him n ot to do anything stupid.

Sebastian watched Cavan leave the room and shut the bedroom door. He closed his eyes and canted his head, but the tiny plinking of the game’s music kept the conversation private.

The little elf thing on the screen had just died what looked like a particularly painful death by spider bite when Cavan came back.

“I killed Legolas,” Sebastian admitted, holding the game out to Cavan.

The man looked from the game to Sebastian in disgust. “Link, kiddo. His name is Link. You were alive when this game was invented, why don’t you know that?” he took the device from his nephew, turned it off and shoved it in his back pocket. “Don’t argue with me, I’m right and your wrong, as usual; accept it and move on. Your girlfriend just called me. She’s on the verge of a righteous meltdown. You want to come with me and watch her cry?”

Sebastian grimaced, biting back both his response to Cavan’s apparent correctness, and to Ophelia being his girlfriend.

“You’re an asshole.” Well, all right, a blanket statement to cover the entire matter. “What the hell did she do to you?”

“As usual when it comes to humans, it’s more what she didn’t do.”

“Humans and vampires.”

“Don’t start, Sebastian.”

“Oh that’s right, I forgot your name is Saint Zosimus.”

Cavan paused, his second boot halfway laced. He looked up at Sebastian. “Don’t push me, kid. And don’t fuckin’ call me that.”

Sebastian rolled his eyes under the guise of looking away from the older vampire “Look, Cavan just be gentle, okay? She’s human. She’s new to this and she’s probably scared. Anyone with half a set of survival instincts would balk at something that could very well put them in life-risking danger every day, especially when that person doesn’t have the cushion of immortality to back them up.”

Cavan rolled his eyes. “I’m aware of that, thank you. In case you’re unaware, I’ve actually spent more time with her in the last few months than you did the entire time you and she were running around after the Alchemist. Speaking of, are you coming or what?”

Sebastian shook his head. “No, I’d rather not.”

Cavan wrapped the strap of a plain black back pack around his hands and hoisted it over his shoulder. “You know, you’ve got to leave the house sometime, kid. A sedentary lifestyle isn’t healthy.”

“Seeing her isn’t healthy, Cavan.”

Cavan tied a knot in his laces and raised his hands. “Whatever you say. Look, I’ll be back when I’m back. Let your grandmother know where I’ve gone if she asks.”

Sebastian raised his hand in acknowledgement, but called his uncle back. “Just so you know,” he put one of his ear buds back in his ear, “if you make her cry, I’ll kill you.”

Cavan snorted. “Yeah, you’ll try.”