A SHARP FILTHY blade sliding under flesh, crimson blood-ribbons streaming. Muffled sounds made it through the tiny victim’s gag; the man gasped heavily, breathing damp black contagion as dim light faded at outside edges, a camera shutter closing.
The scene turned fuzzy with mental static; still, the dreaming woman’s trained consciousness remained steady. All Finding was a matter of two things—first, knowing the object was lost; and second, perceiving the difference between its location and hers. To Find a thing, she had to know how its place was unlike her own faraway, breathing body. Whatever was lost in this place cried out, a tongueless imperative rustling like wings.
Where? Show me where you are, give me a clue. A dream-state wasn’t the best for Finding. It was too imprecise, the borders of slumber’s country running like oil on water, no solidity to push against, no thread to follow.
The scene re-formed, a different angle and dappled light against a high, crumbling ceiling. Wet concrete, dripping water, a deep rushing sound. The reek of copper and sharp pungent chlorine drew choking-close. A mattress lay in a forgotten corner, forlorn and violated, its striped cotton surface blotted with crawling darkness the dreamer did not dare gaze too deeply into. It pulsed, and its waves of sick satisfaction spilled along the floor like ground fog.
There was no window, no distinguishing marks, no sense of direction or draw like a lodestone against the dreamer’s bones. There was only the smell, the wet dripping, the mattress.
And the dolls.
Two long shelves held tiny forms both brown and white, slim and round, their glass eyes silent-screaming with terrible knowledge. Their clothes were clumsily sewn with large stitches, scraps of once-bright cloth bearing rusty dry stains.
The dolls drew the dreamer in, mute mouths sewn tight with black thread. Each had a tuft of clotted hair, and each tuft pulsed like an umbilicus, snaky weeds reaching like soft choking fingers. Those tangles would wrap around the dreamer, dragging living breath and beating heart down into fabric bellies and stitched-shut mouths.
Where? She pleaded, mutely, trying to find the path, the thread, the source. Show me where, so I can help you. Let me help you.
There was no answer, just the deadly swaying. She had alerted some dozing evil presence, she realized, and the dream took on a different flavor, a familiar tang.
Nightmare.
BOOM.
A blast of sharpsick white light smashed through the cavern. The dreamer fled like a blue-winged bird, heart pounding as feathers exploded, seeking escape. Each time it was the same, the dolls regarding her with passive pleading, vibrating inside their sackcloth skins, and the nuclear explosion of bright hatred behind her.
She burst into the night sky, winging hard, oily terror thick in her mouth. Behind her there was a cheated howl—the prowling beast who made the dolls, his sticky, cloying reek spreading. Feathers shed in her haste melted as soon as they dropped, leaving nothing behind. Each flight was the same, streaking through dreaming skies, as the thing behind her scream-snarled its lust for death.
Her death.
Greet the Dawn, Night
JORIE CAMDEN sat straight up, gasping, heart pounding, greasy night sweat coating her skin. Her pulse was a hummingbird’s wings, fluttering, and her hair stuck in damp strings to her forehead.
“Jorie,” Rust said softly from the door, not stepping into the room because her aura flared with gold at the edges, its brilliant core pulsing. The light would hurt a Watcher, salt rubbed into an open wound; the tanak was, after all, a Dark creature, and violently allergic to a witch’s glow. “You’re safe. You’re at home.”
“Mouths,” she managed, teeth chattering with cold though her skin was flush with fever. “Mouths and eyes both closed. They’re so little, the little dolls.” Her voice was a dreamer’s hopeless slur heard from another room, and she returned to full consciousness with a jolt.
“You’re at home.” Rust repeated the same words every Watcher used in the middle of her nightmares, chapter and verse, re-orienting a frightened Lightbringer. Every six months, there was a new, big-shouldered man in her spare bedroom, driving her car, roaming her neighborhood at night looking for invisible or quasi-visible predators. “You’re safe. It’s all right.”
Safe. What a word. “Gods . . .” Jorie exhaled hard; her entire body shivered, throwing aside the cold of whatever place she visited to bring back dream-glimpses of the utterly lost. Or, who knew, it could even be a simple nightmare; the gods knew she had no shortage