The Dreamwalker's Path

1/New York City, New York

"Well, I think we can safely say that we found shit,” Sebastian muttered as he climbed off the bike behind Dahlia Temperance.

“Sebastian, watch your language.”

“We found shit,” he repeated stubbornly. “We rode all the way up there, I watched you flirt with some OCD swamp monkey, we spent all night in that dinky, under-lit room, only to come away with nothing of use to anyone, least of all to Lia. So much for the best collection this side of the Atlantic.”

Dahlia Temperance waved her hand lightly. “We’ve hardly exhausted our resources, Sebastian, now please stop cursing. How are your eyes?”

It took him a minute to understand her question. When he did, he waved her concern away. “We knew it was going to happen.”

“Is your vision gone completely, then?”

“No, not right now; it comes and goes.” As if to prove his point, he reached out and opened one of the side doors of J & J’s front entrance so that his mother could go through. “It fades out for longer periods of time and when it comes back it’s not quite as distinct, but I can still see. Mostly.” He tried not to sound too bitter. It’s what he’d been waiting for the past six months. To wake up and have lost the one good thing that had come from Ophelia Caglione dropping into Sanctuary.

Well, not the only thing, but he wasn’t going to think about that.

“Miss Jaeger,” the receptionist, Annaliese moved around her desk and approached Dahlia Temperance in a short- strided, little run. “Miss Jaeger,” she fell into stride with them as they approached the elevators, her voice punctuated by the click-click-click of her small heeled shoes, “Mr. Jaeger wanted me to tell you as soon as you came in that he and, uhm,” she paused, clearly unsure of how to proceed; in the end, she must have decided to deliver a slightly altered form of the message, “He told me that he and his guest are waiting for you in his office. She doesn’t look particularly happy, Miss Jaeger—the guest I mean.” She cast a sideways glance at Sebastian and gave him a breathless greeting and a small smile.

Looking at her, Sebastian realized that he had to really concentrate so that he saw her face and not the delicate swirling of her aura.

He half listened as his mother thanked the girl, and then pulled him into the elevator. “What guest did Cavan bring?” he asked distractedly, squinting at the buttons on the panel. In the end he ran his fingers over them to find the button thathad “12” written in brail underneath.

“I shared my vision with Cavan,” Dahlia Temperance told Sebastian neatly, leaning against the back of the elevator. “He didn’t like it either, so he brought Ophelia to New York to keep an eye on her.”

Sebastian felt like his heart had fallen into his stomach. “He what?”

“Oh, Sebastian, don’t—”

“Don’t what? Don’t be upset? You couldn’t have told me before I got into the elevator? It didn’t occur to you that I might not want to see her?”

“I don’t see why you wouldn’t. You liked her well enough

to die for her.”

“I wish people would stop bringing that up.”

“Well it’s the fact of the matter, Sebastian, and right now, even if you’re not interested in her, she’s your uncle’s pet project, and we’re respecting that.”

Sebastian liked that less than he liked the idea that he was moments away from being face to face with the woman that got him killed.

“She’s what?”

“Oh you know. Your uncle gets these ideas in his head...”

“What ideas is he getting about Lia?”

“I don’t see why it matters to you, Sebastian; according to you, you don’t even—”

“I like her, all right? I don’t want to see her, but I definitely don’t want her to be screwed over by Cavan just because he’s trying to prove some fucking point about something.”

The elevator climbed in silence.

Finally, as it rocked to a stop at the twelfth floor, Dahlia Temperance said, “I would suggest talking to your uncle about that, then.”

Lia ran her fingers through her hair and settled herself on the couch in Cavan’s office. She looked anxiously out the window, crossed her legs, un-crossed them, and then re- crossed them in the opposite direction.

“Stop fidgeting,” Cavan muttered, unlocking a drawer from his desk and rifling through it. He picked up a piece of paper, read it over, raised an eyebrow, and then shook his head. Then he threw the paper into the trash and began rummaging through the drawer.

“I don’t think that this is really necessary,” Lia found herself saying. “You said you went back to the house; you didn’t feel anything there, did you?”

“No, I didn’t; but then you also said you had a strange dream after I left.”

“It was only a dream Cavan.”

“And you’re a Dreamwalker; you think that you have regular, un-meaning—fuck.” He closed the drawer and looked at the far corner of the room very intently.

“Lia,” his voice was very serious.

Lia huffed and sank lower in her seat. “Yes, Cavan.”

When he spoke again it was in a low, rushed sort of way. “Lia, I have to tell you something very important, and it’s equally important that you don’t do that thing you tend to do when you don’—”

“What thing?”

“That thing you’re doing right now; shut the fuck up and let me finish.”

“Cavan, you’re about half a step from being punched in the fa—”

“Sebastian’s alive, Lia.” He barely paused for breath, “Been alive for months, didn’t think it was my place to tell you, wanted you two to sorted it out yourselves, but as these things happen, cat’s out of the bag, and he’s just about to walk through the door. Right now, in fact.”

Lia sat frozen on the couch. She felt nothing. Not even anger. It was almost like her brain had turned itself off, refused to work, to process any new information. One minute she was contemplating throwing something at Cavan’s head, the next her mind was completely blank.

And then the door opened.

First came a woman, slender, almost frail looking, her hair cropped in a short, Victoria Beckham styled bob- stacked and choppy in the back with two sleek spans of deep, red-brown hair on either side of her face. Despite the fact that she was about the same size as Lia, she moved with the long, graceful strides of a predator, and Lia’s first impression was that this was not a woman that she wanted to get into a cat fight with.

Or any sort of fight.

The woman perched herself on the edge of Cavan’s desk like she belonged there and fiddled with the letter opener that sat in a basket of paperwork.

“Lia,” Cavan leaned back in his chair and took the letter opener from the woman, eyeing her suspiciously, “This is Dahlia Temperance, Hannah Jaeger’s daughter and Sebastian’s mother.”

Dahlia Temperance poked the mound of paperwork in Cavan’s basket and said something to the effect of “You’ve been busy,” but Lia didn’t know who she was talking to or even if that’s what she said for certain because in that moment, Sebastian walked in.

Cavan had been right when he said that he and Sebastian looked enough alike that the could be mistaken for each other. Both had straight black hair and a darker, Mediterranean complexion, both had well defined cheeks and naturally hard expressions. But Sebastian was slimmer, his lips a little thinner, his nose a little straighter.

His hair was a little messier than she remembered, and he didn’t have the silver stud in his nose that she’d liked so much, but he was still the same handsome man that she’d run into on the street a few blocks from her home.

Her fist connected with his arm before she realized she’d thrown the punch. “YOU WERE DEAD!”

Dahlia Temperance paused mid-sentence and looked toward the doorway, mouth open slightly. Slowly she angled herself away from the door and raised her eyebrow at Cavan.

Cavan, on the other hand, watched with open interest as Lia flung her arm at Sebastian a second time.

“I watched you die!” she shouted. “I watched you turn to dust in my arms!” Her second punch didn’t land. Sebastian had shifted his weight to avoid the blow. Now he was holding his hands up defensively, knocking the girl’s hands away as she moved to hit him again.

“Lia—”

“Don’t you ‘Lia’ me! You were dead! I cried over you! I had nightmares about your death! Do—you—know— how—many—times—I—watched—you—die!?”

She lashed out her fist with every word, and each time he blocked her. And then Lia did something that Sebastian didn’t expect: instead of flinging an arm at him in an uncontrolled fashion, she dove at him with her whole body.

She about knocked the wind out of him on impact, nearly brought them both to the ground, but somehow he kept his feet under him, and as her arms snaked around his waist and gripped him in a fierce hug, he placed his hands under her arms to keep her from falling.

Confused, he looked across the room at Cavan for some sort of cue on how to proceed...

...And then he was immediately dismayed to find that Cavan was pretending to be very busy with the wrapper of a piece of candy.

Any advice that you might have would be great, he directed his thoughts to the swirling dark blues and greens of his uncle’s aura as he strained to keep a hold of the physical form beneath it.

Cavan looked up, looked around in what Sebastian assumed he thought to be a comical way, and then pointed to himself.

Sebastian rolled his eyes and very gently pried Lia off of him. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you; it was all a little unexpected.”

Large brown eyes looked up at him glossy with unshed tears, and Sebastian heaved a small sigh.

It was one of the things he’d been dreading, one of the reasons he’d wanted putting off letting her know he was alive, if he had to tell her at all. He hadn’t wanted to see her. Not if his vision was fading.

He could see the soft pastels of her aura, but if he concentrated, vision was clear enough that he could still see her, close as they were. He didn’t know what he had been expecting, what he thought would happen if he looked at her, saw her the way everyone else got to see her, but now that he had...

It took a moment for him to recognize the emotion that swept through him as relief. Her appearance confirmed everything about her that he was certain he’d known before; he could have, he realized, gone through all of eternity never having seen her. It would not have changed his opinion of her in the slightest. And yet, somehow, seeing her now made all the difference in the world.

“If you love birds are done cooing at each other—”

“Shut up, Cavan,” Lia croaked, pulling away from Sebastian and using the sleeve of her cardigan to wipe her eyes.

“Yeah, yeah, I know: ‘shut up Cavan; no one wants to hear from you, Cavan; keep your snide remarks to yourself, Cavan’—Did the pair of you forget that we have a supernatural murderer on the loose?”

Sniffing, Lia looked over at the other side of the room. Cavan and Dahlia Temperance stood at either side of the desk, arms crossed, each leaning ever so slightly against their corner of the desk, both eyeballing Lia and Sebastian with open interest and—at least on the woman’s part— curiosity.

“And apparently reason to believe that Lia might be the next target.” Sebastian glanced over at Lia as she shifted away from him. For a moment, her aura was all he could see, and then as she slipped down to take her seat on the couch, she regained the form of a woman. She didn’t look too frightened or surprised by the news; good, at least Cavan told her why she had to come to the firm.

“We still don’t even know who or what it is,” Lia muttered, “I can’t imagine that we would know for certain that it’s after me, of all people; it isn’t like I have a sign over my head saying ‘Hey there! I’m a Dreamwalking witch and I’m super tasty!’”

Sebastian looked down at his feet, smiled a little, and rubbed the back of his neck. Leave it to Lia to make a serious situation sound completely ridiculous. Then again, she had a point: they had no idea what this thing was, why it was choosing the victims it was choosing, what it was... doing.

He snapped his head up and looked over at Lia. No aura this time, just her pretty face twisted into a grim, annoyed expression. “Lia, say what you just said again.”

She looked up him with a peculiar expression. “...Why? Are you going to have an epiphany?”

“Possibly. Maybe. You sort of ticked something in my head when you spoke.”

Cavan chuckled. “Sebastian, that’s the feeling of your brain turning o-ouch!” He cast a sidelong glare at Dahlia Temperance who had, somehow, procured the letter opener from Cavan again and poked his arm with it.

Lia looked from the pair by the desk to Sebastian again. Sebastian shook his head slightly and then said, “Please, Ophelia?”

Heaving a small sigh, Lia looked up at the ceiling. “I said something like: it’s not like I have a sign over my head that says ‘I’m a Dreamwalking witch and I’m super tasty.’”

Sebastian rubbed the back of his neck and shook his head. “It’s gone now.”

“Thanks, Cavan,” Lia muttered.

Cavan held his hands out, eyes wide in wordless inquiry.

Dahlia Temperance rubbed her cheek and shook her head slightly. “Well the one thing we can take away from this,” she said in a level murmur, “is that none of us knows anything about what’s out there, and we can’t—”

The phone on Cavan’s desk trilled.

Cavan looked at Dahlia Temperance imploringly.

“Don’t look at me that way, Cavan Jaeger, I’m not going to answer it.”

Cavan’s expression turned childish. He looked like he was going to argue with her, but the phone cut him off. So, rolling his eyes, the vampire reached around Dahlia Temperance and lifted the phone to his ear, “Cavan Jaeger speaking. Uh huh. Oh fun, what channel’s that on? No, Annaliese, I’m not being sarcastic, why would you ask that? No, I don’t know that you should have, but I won’t know until I look at the T.V. what channel is it on? Thank you Annaliese. No Annaliese. I can’t hear you Annaliese. Good bye, Annaliese...”

He hung up the phone. “I knew that was going to turn into hounding me for paperwork,” he grumbled at himself.

Three sets of eyes stared at him. Cavan, in his infinite wisdom, chose to ignore them and instead reached for a small black controller on his desk. He pointed it at the upper corner of the room where a grey T.V. sat.

“That was Annaliese,” he muttered, as though it were all the explanation they needed.

When the announcement wasn’t immediately followed by any particular reaction, aside from quiet confusion, he added, “She said that a couple of triggers have been spreading through the media.”

“Triggers?” Lia shifted in her seat so she could better see the television. It was a dismally small, staticky thing, but as Cavan flipped through the channels to the news station, the picture became a little bit clearer.

“Words that might be associated with the supernatural,” Sebastian explained quietly, easing into the seat next to her and looking up toward the corner. “I thought you said that you were getting the T.V. replaced, Cavan?”

“I did,” he muttered glumly. “Your grandmother took it away when she found the Nephilim and me playing Super Smash Brothers and Grand Theft Auto instead of working. Here we go, this is the channel.”

He sat back in his chair and adjusted the volume. Slowly, the sing-song of a news anchor rose in volume and said:

“The little girl found at the scene claims to have no recollection of what happened to her hostess, or even how she came to be in the house at the time of the murder. In fact, the only thing she is sure of is that she wants to go home to a place she calls ‘Sanctuary.’”