The Dreamwalker's Path

3/ Ybor, Florida

By the time that Cavan arrived at Lia’s house, he regretted having made fun of her to Sebastian. He’d never admit this, of course, because doing that would be like admitting that he’d done something wrong, which Cavan considered to be a highly improbable scenario, but he had seriously contemplated at least doing something to make up for the fact when she opened the door.

If she had been crying, she was a master at hiding it, but there were large bruises across both of her shoulders and she looked like she was about to be ill—possibly for a second or third time.

The worst part was when her greeting consisted only of, “That was fast.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “The nice thing about being a vampire is that I don’t always have to rely on conventional methods of transportation. I might not be able to teleport directly from one place to another, but after a couple of centuries, you learn a few tricks.”

He smiled, expecting something of a smile in return. Instead the witch stepped aside and offered her home to him.

He liked her better when she was angry. At least when she was angry he knew what to say to her.

Lia didn’t offer him any refreshments, didn’t invite him to sit. She’d simply closed the door and turned back to him, wringing her hands. For what seemed like a very long moment, even for him, they stood in her small foyer, looking away from each other solemnly. Then, finally, the girl spoke:

“I couldn’t do anything,” her voice wavered, and Cavan realized with a sort of sinking feeling that she had, in fact, waited for him to get there before she had her crying fit. “You have to believe me; I was there, I was with the little girl, but I couldn’t move. I couldn’t do anything. She wouldn’t...”

Cavan stepped forward and put his arms around her as the first big tear breeched her lower lid and trickled down her face. “All right, sweetheart, all right.” He crooned the words and pressed her cheek to his shoulder and stroked her hair. His long nails sorted out the tangles that her brush hadn’t had a chance to work through yet.

She didn’t wrap her arms around him in return, but she didn’t push him away. Her arms were tucked between their bodies, so he supposed she couldn’t do either even if she’d wanted to. But she stayed still, and so Cavan continued to smooth out the wonderfully tangled, curling mess that was her hair.

After a moment, Cavan took a deep breath and gathered his resolved; readying himself for a fight, he scooped the witch up, cradling her like a child.

“What are you doing?” Now she did push away, croaking her protest as he brought her to the living room.

Cavan looked down at her for a moment, a very tiny smile ticking at the corners of his pierced lips, “Look, sweetheart, I don’t mind if you cry on me, but let’s not stand in the middle of the floor while you do it, all right?” he lowered her onto the couch and sat next to her, one hand returning to her hair, the other wiping away the tears that coated her face.

In a moment of tenderness mixed with instinct, Cavan moved to lick her tears from his fingers, but he stopped short, coming to the conclusion that she’d complain about it either being weird or gross. For some reason, it was socially acceptable for humans to cry in front of each other, but not to lick their tears. Far be it from him to question that.

Instead, the vampire leaned forward and kissed her hair. He liked her scent. There was nothing special about it, nothing to identify her as a witch or a Dreamwalker. In fact, beneath the sadness she currently felt, Lia simply smelled good and wholesome. And a little lonely, he realized. It must have been a long time since she’d been hugged by someone outside of her family.

Simple. Wholesome. Lonely. Just the sort of thing that would drive a man to die for her.

Lia hated that being hugged and coddled was as comforting as she was finding it to be. Especially when the person doing the coddling was the vampiric uncle of the man that she’d gotten killed earlier in the year.

She was glad that he had come when she called- especially glad that he hadn’t made good on his threat to hang up on her and ignore her because she’d waited until things got personal before she put herself in the thick of the situation. But if there was one person out there that Lia could choose to be the person sitting in the seat next to her, it wouldn’t have been Cavan Jaeger. Not even if he hadn’t been a complete jackass to her the last time she’d spoken to him.

Nevertheless, she leaned against him as he settled down on the couch next to her, and she let herself cry for a little while longer.

It wasn’t until he leaned over and pressed his lips to her hair that Lia pulled away. “You’re kind of encroaching on my personal space there, mister.” Her voice still crackled as she began to pull herself together properly. She pushed him away with a firm but gentle pressure, and used the sleeve on her other arm to dry her face properly.

Then, she licked her lips and looked up at the man, but for as close as he was, mere inches separating their noses, she couldn’t see anything in his eyes that told her what he was thinking or what his intension was. She didn’t even get the quirk of a smile that she was expecting.

“You woke me up from my nap with your desperate need to see me,” Cavan murmured, brushing Lia’s hair from her face and watching her, his thoughts and emotions were even concealed in his tone of voice. “One good turn deserves another and all that.”

He pulled a box of tissues from the air and handed them to her. She must have been too distracted to question where they came from, because she took them without a word and wiped her nose.

Moments later, Cavan was a slightly more appropriate distance from her, and she seemed to have gotten most of her hysteria under control or had pushed it back to deal with at another time. Cavan figured that it was the latter. She’d had quite a breakdown after the ordeal with the Alchemist, but it had happened weeks afterward. He wouldn’t be surprised if it was several months before she really began to analyze the situation she currently found herself in.

“You want to start again from the beginning, sweetheart?”

Lia narrowed her eyes slightly. “Only if you stop calling me sweetheart, okay?”

Cavan held up a hand. “I think I can do that for you,” he didn’t promise, but he figured that she wouldn’t know to press him for one.

Lia took a deep breath, working herself up to talking again. “I was sleeping, only I must have been...Not sleeping.”

“You were Walking,” the vampire supplied, gesturing for her to continue.

“I guess. But I wasn’t...It wasn’t like being in Sanctuary. I wasn’t walking around, moving from place to place, I was laying down, and something was watching me.” She shivered. “And I kept thinking about those ghost stories that you see on TV where they interview the victims and how they always feel cold and like they’re being watched, and when I moved to get out of my bed, it wasn’t my bed or my room. It jumped me about the time that I realized I was doing it again,” she ignored Cavan’s interjection that she was ‘Walking,’ “then it was like I couldn’t move. I was scared and screaming, and the woman came in and started screaming too...” Her voice waivered. “I felt the girl’s bones b-breaking and then it went after the woman. There was just nothing that I could do, and nothing that she could do. It was all so fast and I just—there wasn’t anything I could do.” Her words flip-flopped over each other and she turned to Cavan, her expression pleading for some kind of understanding.

“All right,” Cavan reached out and smoothed her hair back again, marveling slightly at how lively her frizzy locks actually were. He almost told her that there was something that she could have done; if she’d been actively Walking dreams the way he’d wanted her to; if she hadn’t been ignoring him because it seemed more convenient than listening; if she’d taken an interest after the ordeal with the Alchemist, she would have been better prepared. She would have had the practice and the understanding to do what she needed to do in order to save the mother and the child. He wanted to tell her, but she looked so upset that he felt it would be unkind to burden her with the weight of her mistake. Better, he thought, that she realize it quietly and on her own than for him to rub it in her face and make her suffer openly.

Plus, if he was the one who told her, he wouldn’t get the satisfaction of hearing her say he was right, and that’s the part he was most interested in.

“So what do we do now?” she reached up and pulled her hair back with a dark band that she had on her wrist. Cavan wasn’t sure if it was because she wanted her hair out of her face or because she wanted him to stop touching her hair, but either way, he felt like he’d just been denied something.

Well that was all right, two could play at that game.

He stood up, slipped his hands in his pockets and moved to the window, busying himself with the small amount of life that liked to show itself during the day.

“We?” He looked over his shoulder at the ballerina and raised an eyebrow. “When did ‘I’ and ‘you’ become ‘we?’”

She faltered. “You’re always telling me that I need to step up and help...I thought that...I don’t know what I thought.”

Cavan knew exactly what she thought, and he was beginning to realize that not saying ‘I told you so,’ would be quite a lot harder than he thought it would be. “You thought that because you Walked onto a killing scene it magically becomes all your business?”

He watched the expressions move one by one across her face. Confusion, surprise, anger, disgust. “You’re the one who kept coming back here and telling me that I should take responsibility and be active in searching for whatever this thing is!”

And so breaks the storm.

“No, what I said to you was,” he pulled out his cigarettes as he spoke, “it’s your responsibility to patrol Dreams to stop this thing from attacking people while they sleep, something that you are clearly unable to do as that little girl and her mother would be alive otherwise.”

Lia popped up from the couch, hands clenched in fists. “What was I supposed to do? I was trapped in that little girl and I couldn’t do anything!”

“What were you doing in the little girl to begin with?” Cavan refused to raise his voice in matters such as these, but he made his displeasure very clear with the low snarl that rode beneath his words. “Why didn’t you step away from her and use your own damn body?”

“I didn’t know what was happening! All of this is new for me, Cavan. You may have had however many bajillion years to figure this shit out, but I was just put in the middle of all of this with no idea what was going on or any training to speak of!”

She faltered, and for a long moment, was silent. When she did look at him again, he made sure that his face didn’t reflect his thoughts.

To his disappointment, however, the words he hoped to hear didn’t come. Instead, Lia slowly pulled herself together, relaxing her shoulders and hands. “I’ll figure things out on my own, if I have to.” And then, taking a deep breath, she added, “But I’d rather work with someone who knows what he’s doing.”

All right, it wasn’t ‘you were right,’ but it was still music to his ears.

He flashed a grin. “Well okay then, if you put it that way.”

She shifted her weight in a way that did nothing to hide how unsure and embarrassed the whole conversation made her. “So what do we do now?” she repeated.

Before she could protest, Cavan was on the other side of the room; he wrapped his hand around her slender wrist. “Now, we go check out the scene.”

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Lia pressed a hand to her stomach and stepped away from Cavan, pushing a few loose strands of hair from her face and slumping slightly. “That was awful.”

“That was shadow-stepping,” The vampire rolled his shoulders and used his tongue to adjust his lip ring. “You’ll get used to it.”

“I think I preferred Sebastian’s way of doing things.”

Cavan made a noncommittal noise, not trusting himself to give a more in-depth reply. He turned his attention instead to the house at the top of the short driveway.

The little brick house sat quietly along the road, just the same as the houses that sat on either side and farther down the street. In the orange light of the sunset, with the sharp shadows of the trees falling on the dark glass of the house’s windows, the little house looked completely at one with the world. No one, Cavan thought, would suspect that a supernaturally derived murder had taken place within those sturdy walls.

He sniffed, cleared his throat, and slipped his hands into his pockets as Lia recovered on the sidewalk next to him. His gaze stayed fixed on the house, but his attention was settled on the Dreamwalker.

When Lia had finally gathered enough of her composure to stand upright at his side again, he canted his head in her direction and gave her a sidelong glance.

“I guess it’s over now,” Lia noted softly.

Cavan quirked an eyebrow—it was as close a gesture to rolling his eyes as he would allow himself. “Well yeah, you’re not psychic, kiddo.” Somehow the statement invoked confusion in the woman, so Cavan sighed and, gathering his patience, reached out to stroke Lia’s hair bound hair lightly. “You see things as they’re happening, darling. It was over before you called me to bring you here.”

Lia tucked her shoulders inward in defeat and sighed. “What is the use of my so called powers if I can’t do anything while I’m there, and it’s over before I get here?”

“You can do stuff, Lia, you just haven’t let anyone train

you so that you can actually learn what and how.”

Again Cavan waited in vain for the admittance that she had been in the wrong.

“Well I guess we should look around now, huh?” She pulled away from him and headed up the drive, her ponytail swinging back and forth in time with her steps, her hands curled into fists at her side.

Well so much for that.

Clearing his throat, Cavan headed up toward the front door. He expected Lia to go into the house ahead of him, but she paused at the door to try to peek through the glass panel along the frame. “It’s dark.”

“Well there isn’t anyone inside, is there? Are you going to open it, or shall I?”

Lia pursed her lips, apparently not impressed with the vampire’s ability to state the obvious, and tried the handle. “It’s locked.”

This time, Cavan only raised his eyebrow at her.

“Oh, shut up,” she mumbled, stepping aside and gesturing, “you open it if you’re so smart.”

But Cavan didn’t open the door. He slipped his hands back into his pockets, removed one to reveal a Jolly Rancher, which he pulled from the wrapping with his teeth before pushing it to the side of his mouth. All the while he watched Lia. “You’re not even going to try, then?”

“Try what, Jaeger? The door’s locked.”

The Jolly Rancher clicked against the vampire’s teeth as he used his tongue to push it from one side of his mouth to the other. “I’m not the only one standing here with supernatural abilities, kiddo; you were just complaining about how your powers can’t help you do anything. Maybe if you tried doing something, then you’d find that you can.”

He watched her think it over for a moment and began to feel the slightest bit of hope when she turned determinedly toward the door and held one hand over the knob.

She was quiet for a heartbeat, and he felt her concentrate all of her efforts on the doorknob. He just barely dared to hold his breath, and then...

“Open sesame!”

…And then, all of his hope withered irreparably.

“Open sesame?” he inquired, not entirely able to hide his disgust. “Did you honestly think that would work? Open sesame?”

It was followed by a lame silence and then an annoyed, “Well what the hell else was I supposed to say?”

Cavan managed to keep his eyes from rolling, but his exasperation, determined to express itself, still managed to manifest in a sigh. “Try focusing on the lock. Imagine that the bolt on the other side is sliding back into the door so that we can open it.”

“You want me to imagine that it’s unlocked,” she was incredulous.

“Just so.”

“But the door is locked.”

This time, his eyeballs did not behave. “Lia,” all of his exasperation pushed itself into the pair of syllables that was her name. “Just open the door.”

“All right, all right.” She rolled up her sleeve and reached for the handle, imagining as hard as she thought she could imagine that the door was already unlocked.

So intently did she imagine it, in fact, that when the door didn’t open, she was already in the process of moving as though she were about to walk through the doorway, and she bumped right into the solid wood. “Ouch; that’s it! I’m done. You open it.”

She held her hands up in defeat and tried to take a step back.

Cavan, determined that she should learn something out of this, grabbed her hand and placed it on the lock under his own.

“You’re a horrible student,” he chided in a soft murmur, “giving up so quickly.” Certain that she had some biting retort at the ready, he continued without giving pause, “Close your eyes, focus on the lock.”

Lia had instinctually shied away from Cavan’s hand, but he had moved to stand behind her, so she didn’t have anywhere to go. Taking on faith that he was actually going to show her how to open the door, she let him press her hand to the doorknob and closed her eyes. “This is stupid. Someone is going to see us and call the cops.”

“No one is going to see us, Lia. Focus on the lock.”

Lia sighed and did her best to focus. For about all of two seconds. “Nothing is happening.”

“Hold your horses, kiddo. I’ll show you how it works.”

She was beginning to like ‘kiddo’ a lot less than she did ‘sweetheart, ’ but took the high road and pursed her lips.

Even if she hadn’t decided to keep her mouth shut, she wasn’t sure she’d have been able to think of something to say in response because, as the vampire spoke, a light tingling passed from his palm into the back of her hand and felt like it settled into her bones.

She grimaced. “Feels like my hand is going to sleep.”

“That’s because I’m pushing the psychic energy through your hand, otherwise it wouldn’t get to the lock,” his voice was a husky murmur and only slightly distracted. “If your hand wasn’t there, it would go directly to the lock, but...I want you to be able to feel the way that you can manipulate the energy to unlock the door...”

Lia wanted to ask him how he planned to have her do that when her hand was numb, but somehow she managed, just the same. Somehow she felt the way that the tingling— the psychic energy, she supposed—shifted the lock.

Cavan smiled, Lia felt his lips brushed against the top of her ear as the expression formed, rather than seeing it. He removed his hand from hers and sent it to smooth her ponytail. “There, you see?”

Lia shivered and shrugged him off. When she turned around, she was frowning.

“All right, Grabby McGrabbyhands, next time keep your paws off me, okay?”

“Next time I shouldn’t have to do anything. You’ll be able to do it yourself.” “Yeah, sure I will.”

Even though the foyer wasn’t lit, there were large windows along the western wall, and the afternoon sun did a good job of lighting the room. A slightly worn down carpet was settled on a small section of tile just on the other side of the threshold, and there was a small shoe stand perched in an alcove just on the other side. Several pairs of women’s shoes were on the top rack, waiting to be chosen for whatever outdoor adventure their owner might embark on. Beneath them were a larger number of little girl’s shoes, placed in no particular order, or missing their tiny mates.

The sight made Lia feel even more uneasy. Somehow it had not occurred to her the house they’d be snooping around in would still have fresh evidence of being lived in. After seeing the shoes, it was difficult to overcome the sudden conviction that the shoes’ owners would, at any moment, happen upon them and call the police.

She made to turn around, to cut Cavan off before he could get into the house, and to tell him that they had no business being there, but it was too late. Cavan was already stepping around her and was closing the door.

He raised an eyebrow at her. “What?”

“We shouldn’t be here; this is wrong.”

“On several different levels,” Cavan agreed. But he was losing interest in the conversation before Lia could properly string it together. He stepped around her, off of the tile and onto the plush blue carpet that lined the rest of the room. “Any of this look familiar to you?”

Lia grimaced. “No,” she said it a little more forcefully than she meant to, so she took a deep breath and started again, “I never left the girl’s bedroom.”

Pushing aside the conviction that she was a terrible person for being in the house, Lia followed Cavan through the dining room and down a hall.

“It looks like the bedrooms would be down this way,” Cavan announced, standing aside and gesturing for her to go first. The door at the end of the hall was open, and she didn’t need to look any farther to see that the dresser and bed were part of an adult’s set. So she focused her attention on the other doors in the hall: a bathroom with pale green tiles and an undersea mural painted on the side of the tub; a room that looked like it had been turned into an arts and crafts room, and then, finally, the little girl’s room.

In the dark of her waking dream, she hadn’t been able to look around the room, but there was no mistaking this room as that of the dead little girl. The worst of the scene had been cleaned up by law enforcement, but evidence of the delicate, everyday chaos of a living little girl still lingered.

Seeing the abandoned shoes had been difficult, but it had been nothing compared to how her heart dropped into the pit of her stomach and shriveled now that she looked at the bedroom.

Lacy, lavender blankets were still thrown back from the bed; stuffed animals were lined neatly along the far wall under a window with curtains that matched the blankets; the closet doors hung open , revealing an assortment of outfits, bespeckled with the cheap satin skirts of various princess costumes, and the mismatched scattering of shoes that finished off the missing sets behind the front door.

It was a long moment before Lia realized that the pressure that had settled in her chest was her lungs striving for air. She inhaled, deeply, and ignored the telltale prickle that manifested in the corners of her eyes.

Clearing her throat, she stepped purposefully into the room and toward the bed, and it was only when she was staring down at the pillows still dented from the little girl’s head that Lia remembered she had no idea what she was looking for. But she didn’t want to talk to Cavan, not yet; she knew that if she did she would end up crying again, and he had already seen her cry more than enough for this life time.

So instead, Lia bent down and ran her hand over the pillow to smooth it out, and tried to remember everything that she could about what happened before she realized that she wasn’t in her own bed.

It had been watching her, she remembered. Probably for a long time before she woke up, because that’s what had caused her to wake up. Her skin crawled at the memory, and as unpleasant as it was, she focused on that feeling, the way that whatever it had been seemed to loom over her waiting.

It had fallen on top of her, had pressed itself into her body with such force that...

She felt bile rise in her throat as her hand came up to her collarbones, still tender with bruises.

What could do something like that to a little girl?

Feeling unclean and on the edge of another panic induced breakdown, Lia tried to pull herself away from her thoughts, but they chased after her, dragged her under with their weight, and it was with a startling sense of clarity and horror that Lia became aware of the chiming of a lullaby.