Dreamwalkers (11 page)

And my mother! I don’t know if it’s worse
that she might have been equally as ignorant, or that she refused
to tell me. Stupid, or cruel? I know Mom didn’t grow up in the Wolf
Point Pack. My father and uncles sought out distant branches of the
family tree, those that had long been apart from the pack, and had
some human blood mixed in. When Uncle Frank was feeling mean, he’d
call Aunt Jenny a mutt.

I walk until the cold doesn’t bother me as
much. I walk past gas stations and trailer parks and long stretches
of empty field or crowded forest. I walk for hours. At first my
brain churns through all the clues I ignored, how stupid I am, then
it moves on to how stupid my mother is, then decide she knew but
kept me ignorant, then I forgive her, because she might not have
known, or maybe she didn’t tell me out of some misguided motherly
love, and then I forgive myself because I’ve been lied to. Then I
go through the whole cycle again. I can’t shake the look of
disbelief and–ugh–pity on Remy’s face. Poor girl, too stupid to
realize what’s actually going on. Poor helpless girl.

My fingers dig into my arms. I want to punch
something.

But eventually, slowly, my resolve
strengthens. I’ll show Remy I’m not some poor, stupid little girl.
I can dreamwalk. I can be a spy.

When I return to the motor lodge, the sun has
turned the sky orange and spectacular. It’s nearly 5 o’clock, and
my stomach is rumbling. At the door to the room I pause, wondering
how Remy will react to my return. Who cares? I tell myself to
think. But I do care. I imagine he thinks I’m being a baby, having
a pout, a tantrum. He probably thinks I’m wasting precious time,
and ruining his plan.

I open the door.

He’s lying on the bed, watching TV.

“Really?” I ask.

He looks at me. “Do you want to order
pizza?”

I suppose this is better than him being angry
or impatient or thinking I’m helpless or stupid.

“As long as it’s meat-lovers pizza.” I plop
myself down on the bed near his feet, facing the television. It
takes all of two seconds to identify what he’s watching. “Judge
Judy?”

“She’s one tough broad,” Remy says, grinning.
He rolls over slightly toward me, and my face heats up, but then he
pulls his cell phone out of his back pocket and returns to his
former position. “Can you get me that menu on the desk?”

I smirk at Remy’s couch potato attitude and
get the menu. It’s a local place, and the menu is stained and
crumpled from its time serving hungry hotel guests.

While Remy places the order, I look at the
maps spread out over the second bed. What it looks like is a circle
around my house, my childhood home a target. But a loose circle. A
circle that covers most of Montana and part of South Dakota.
Looking at the mass of red dots, I have no clue where Geo’s pack
might be headquartered.

“Here’s the deal,” Remy says, sitting up.
“I’m not exactly sure how dreamwalking works, and obviously, we
have only a vague notion of where Geo is. What I’m hoping is that
you can somehow cast out and just try to find one wolf. Any wolf
that is a member of his pack. And hopefully you can get some
information from that dream, that might help you find another wolf
that’s a bit closer to Geo. I don’t think you want to get anywhere
close to Geo. If Geo somehow realizes that you’re dreamwalking in
his head, he’ll be fighting over more than a territory dispute and
some females.”

“You think he’ll feel me dreamwalking?” I
ask.

“I did.”

“Yeah, but I’ve been doing it for a few years
and you’re the first. Everyone else just thinks they’re
dreams.”

“I’m not sure what your mother has told you
about Geo,” Remy starts, and I can read between the lines: my
mother might not have known anything, or might have kept everything
from me. “But Geo is very old. I’m sure he knows about dreamwalking
or has heard of it. Hell, he might be able to do it himself. The
thing is, you don’t want to be on Geo’s radar any more than your
family already is.”

“So Geo… is old?” I say this, and feel that I
am once again missing something. Something like Geo isn’t a senior
citizen, but rather ancient, and werewolves are immortal.

(exactly)

I make quick eye contact with Remy at the
sound of his thoughts in my head, then look down at my hands.
“Werewolves can live forever, then?”

“Not forever, but much longer than humans,”
Remy says. “If we’re careful. Silver bullets and wolfsbane will
kill us, just like any human, and so can regular bullets.
Werewolves are naturally violent, so most actually die earlier than
they might if they were human.”

“So how old is Geo, exactly?”

“Have you ever heard of
La
Bête du Gévaudan?
T
he Beast of
G
é
vaudan?”

I pause, mostly because Remy’s French accent
is so fucking sexy. I am suddenly reminded of how the Loupe family
is of French lineage. “G
é
vaudan,” I try
out, attempting to get my accent the same. What I really want to
say is “Remy,” with a little of that roughness to the “r” and a
lilt on the “y.”

“It’s a fairly well-known case from the late
sixteen hundreds. A beast terrorizing the countryside of France.
Some believed it was a werewolf, and huge hunting parties scoured
the fields and forests looking for it. A wolf was killed with a
silver bullet, and the attacks on humans stopped.” Remy looks at me
and my disbelieving face. “They made a movie about it.”

“It must be true, then,” I say, my eyes wide,
my voice sarcastic.

He smiles. “The rumor is, Geo was the Beast
of G
é
vaudan. A bit of urban legend, if you
will, since no other wolf claims to be that old.”

“Three hundred years old?” It doesn’t seem
possible.

“It’s a rumor.” Remy shrugs. “What I do know
is that Geo is native French, his real name is Georges de Soissons,
and he’s older than any wolf I’ve ever known.”

“What other wolves have you known?” I ask. “I
have no idea, since you haven’t told me anything about your
upbringing. Except that it’s ‘unusual.’” Insert finger quotes.

“The oldest wolf I’ve known was a hundred and
thirty years old.”

“Wow.”

I nearly forgot that I had asked Remy about
his upbringing, that’s how crazy the whole concept was–I could live
to be over a century old? But then Remy keeps talking.

“His name was Nathaniel. He was a lone wolf
traveling through the area where my family lived. My father sensed
him coming and went to keep him away, but Nathaniel was injured and
dying. Apparently some trappers were lacing their steel traps with
poison, on the steel itself and in the meat, and Nathaniel’s body
had healed from the trap, but not from the poison. He told me all
kinds of stories. I was seven and hadn’t met many outsiders. It was
just my dad and me.”

“How did you parents meet?”

Remy hesitates, then shrugs.

I narrow my eyes. He must know how the wolf
bond works, how wolves are exceptionally good at sensing lies. But
when he averts his gaze and continues talking, I understand that
there’s something he doesn’t want to tell me, and that’s why he
isn’t talking. He doesn’t want to lie to me.

“Anyway, Nathaniel was born in 1845. He
fought in the Civil War, and the Spanish-American War, and the
First World War. He really liked being a soldier, I guess. He told
me all kinds of stories about transforming during battles and
freaking out the enemy… but World War I was a totally different
kind of war, and he often had nightmares about men in gas masks and
barbed wire and smoky landscapes filled with corpses…”

“Nice bedtime stories,” I say.

“Yeah, his stories about that war kinda stuck
with me I guess.”

The conversation has trailed off into a dead
end. My stomach growls for food.

I clear my throat and reach for the map.
“Okay, so basically I’m just going to try to fall asleep and dream
my way into someone’s head?”

Before Remy can answer, there’s a knock at
the door. I let Remy answer it and pay for the pizza and sodas,
examining the map.

Like that’s going to help.

I feel wide awake, and I’m sure the tension I
feel with Remy isn’t going to make sleep come any faster. It is
only seven o’clock or so, but still. What are we going to do until
then?

“This is kind of a shit plan,” I say, once
the delivery guy has gone away and I’ve put away two slices.

“I work with what I’ve got.”

“Really? Come on. We should be out there,
fighting. Guerilla warfare.”

“Julie and Jen–I mean, uh, your mom–and your
aunt–”

“It’s fine, just call them what you want,” I
tell him.

“They aren’t too keen on fighting, in case
you haven’t noticed.”

“Seriously, am I wrong, or did they miss the
whole feminist movement?”

Remy chuckles. I like when he smiles; it
brings a nice warmth to the chiseled features of his face. Makes
him look less like an intimidating, romance novel-worthy god.
“Don’t be too hard on them. Geo has a huge pack. And the Northern
Rockies pack is growing as well, and could be a threat if Geo isn’t
here to keep them away.”

“Two packs fighting over us females…” I
muse.

“Most of the packs fight guerilla style,”
Remy says. “So we’d have to be super guerillas, or something.”

This strikes me as funny and I laugh. The
trouble is that I’d been taking a swig of Diet Coke, and now it’s
fizzing up my nose. I struggle not to barf or burp or have soda
spew from my nostrils, which only makes me laugh more, and then
Remy starts laughing, and minutes pass before we can get ourselves
under control.

After that, we polish off the pizza, find a
stupid movie to watch on TV, and slowly we start our bedtime
routines, which for me involves changing into a pair of fleece
pants and a baggy sweatshirt and brushing my teeth, and for Remy
involves crawling under the covers and taking off his pants. We
shut off the lights as another movie starts, the blue glow of the
television lulling my eyes to half-mast, each of us under the
covers in the centers of our beds. My covers are bunched around my
chin; Remy has his arms beneath his head.

As my blinks last longer and longer, I hear
Remy mumble something about “remember the mission” and “good
luck.”

And then I’m fast asleep.

When I open my eyes, I’m still in bed.
There’s a blue glow, but the television is silent. I sit up and
startle when I look over to see Remy also sitting up in bed,
looking back at me.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” he
says.

The mission. Right.

I get out of bed and pick up the map on the
desk. The swarm of red dots seems even more intimidating here in
this dark dreamworld. I zero in on a nearby place: Brockway.

Brockway. I close my eyes. Brockway.

When I open my eyes I am not in Kansas
anymore.

Or in the hotel room, or anywhere near
civilization.

I’m in a crazy jagged wasteland, high atop a
mountain side. Near the edge. I glance around before backing away.
I know I could fly, this being a dream and all, but I feel much
better not having to think about imminent death.

I’m not sure where the hell I am. This isn’t
someplace real. I don’t think I’ve ever entered a dream that was so
far from reality. Or maybe there is a place on earth like here, but
I haven’t seen it. Purple sky. Fog rising up from below, so I can’t
see any kind of landscape.

Not fog. Smoke.

I know somehow that this is Daniel’s
dreamscape I’m walking. I look for him, he must be here. But all I
see is a narrow path, so I follow it, all the while wondering how
this could possibly by Daniel’s dream. He never dreams of anything
so unreal as this, and whenever I walked into his dreams, he was
always right there. We’re linked, and that always made it easy to
find him. Then again, I never dreamwalked into the dreams of
someone I don’t know unless I was nearby physically. And that only
happened a couple of times, when I was on the road looking for
Daniel.

The fog is so thick, Daniel might be right
beside me for all I know. My dream senses must be slow, because now
I inhale and know that this is smoke, not fog. Great clouds of
smoke roiling up from a valley, and faded to a thick mist up here
where I am.

I find Daniel when the trail doubles back on
itself. He is not human. He watches whatever devastation lay below
as a wolf. He stands noble and still, gazing beyond with an
uplifted muzzle.

My mission is to find one of Geo’s wolves,
not Daniel. Part of me wants to go to Daniel and relieve his
sadness. I know he is sad though nothing about his body language
gives it away.

Suddenly he howls, a forlorn cry for
something lost.

As though it is a language I understand, I
realize what lies below in the valley. Our home. The place where we
grew up is gone, burned.

Those responsible are nearby.

Daniel would never have howled in real life,
seeing this destruction. He ran. He avoided the culprits, who are
nearby.

The howl fades into the night, the last note
lingering, and when I look up, Daniel is looking at me.

I close my eyes and focus on finding another
dream nearby in the ether.

I sense the change in the air–the smoke gone,
no longer filling my nose and pressing hot and moist against my
skin–but I keep my eyes closed, because a plethora of other noises
and scents assault my senses.

Shit. That’s a big one assaulting my senses
right now. I gag. Human shit. Animal shit I can handle, but humans
stink.

Grunts fill the air, and little high-pitched
shrieks, and a wet slapping sound. I’m afraid that opening my eyes
will show me two people with a fetish for shit going at it.