Dreamer (25 page)

Chuang Mu interrupted her self-flagellation to say,
“Yes, but it should still reflect my
service. You are my Chosen, and I am proud of you.”

Darting a glance at Chuang Mu's face, seeing a beautiful
Chinese woman of indiscriminate age watching her with a patient, kind
expression. It reminded her of her parents, and she felt a pang of
homesickness. She couldn't wait to share what had happened here with them and
Devon.

Devon...who loved her. Trying to suppress a smile and an
immature giggle, she focused on her outfit and tried to change it, like she
would in her regular dreams. A she imagined the new outfit, she considered that
it would have to be something she could fight in, something that would give her
freedom of movement with a touch of kick-ass. If you looked kick-ass, people
often thought you were kick-ass. She concentrated on the robe and closed her
eyes. Something shorter and easy to move in. Red and black to reflect the
goddess, but in supple leather. Boots that she could run in… and she would need
a weapon.

When she opened her eyes, she grinned down at her red
fishnets and kick-ass black and red leather boots. The weight of a sheathed
sword hung across her back, and the black leather robe with red accents ended
mid-thigh. She kept the long sleeves, but moved them back enough that her hands
were free.

A wave of amusement and exasperation came from Chuang Mu,
but she didn't object. A gilded brass mirror appeared on the wall in front of
her, and Shan stared at her reflection. The beautiful and exotic woman staring
back at her made her breath catch in her throat. She added a touch of elaborate
makeup around her eyes and painted her lips a bright crimson that matched the
red in her outfit. With her hair up in a ponytail, she pulled down the blue
streaks to frame the sides of her face.

Black Chinese characters appeared down the front and on the
hanging arms of the outfit.
“My name
...and the name of your mother.”

“What?” Shan stroked her fingers over the black lettering
and turned away from the distraction of her image. “Who is she?”

The hiss of Chuang Mu's robe moving across the floor blended
in with a trill of birdsong from outside. Averting her eyes from the entrancing
patterns of the night-sky robe, Shan gripped her hands into fists and tried to
be patient. Finally she would know why they’d given her up. Why she wasn't good
enough for them.

“What
do you know about your birth parents?”

With a tight voice, she quickly recited the sum of her
knowledge. “Nothing. I was found outside of my fathers’ temple. They always
wanted a child of their own and adopted me soon after.”

“That
is untrue. Oh, they indeed wanted you, and you were fortunate to be blessed
with such loving fathers, but you were not left on the temple step. Your
parents knew your mother, quite well. They were actually her closest friends.”

“But...why would they lie to me?” The shock sent her pulse
racing. and she felt sick. All these years, all the times they pretended to
help her research her heritage, they’d known. Betrayal sunk its claws into her
belly, and she swallowed hard.

“To
protect you from the knowledge of who your father is.”

“Is? He's still alive?”

“In a
way.”
The goddess actually sounded weary, and outside a cloud
passed over the sun.
“Your father and
mother met when they were in high school. Liu, your mother, and Zachary, your
father, fell in love.”

She was the result of a teenage pregnancy? Is that why
they’d given her up? Shan tried to fill in the blanks and was taken aback when
Chuang Mu said,
“No, you were not an
unwanted love child. I wish it were that easy. Your father began to take a
different path, a path that led him to become a Chosen of Epiales, the Greek
Destruction God of Nightmares.”

“No.” Now Shan did sink to her knees and wrapped her arms
around herself. Destruction, her father was a Destruction Chosen. This was
worse than anything she had ever imagined.

“Yes.
Shortly after they were married, Zachary became a Destruction Chosen. I do not
know why. While I am a goddess, I am not the all-seeing Creator, but Liu stayed
with him. She still prayed to me for protection and blessings, so I don't know
if she knew what he became. I do know that she tried to leave him more than
once but always went back.”

Bile rose in her throat, and she asked in a bitter voice,
“Did he kill my mother?”

“No,
Zachary loved her very much.”
Shan made a sound of disbelief, and
the goddess continued.
“You are now a
Creation Chosen. Do you harbor only feelings and emotions of love and light?”

She shook her head. Right now her heart was filled with pain
and rage. Anger at her parents for lying to her, anger at her unknown father
for choosing Destruction over his family, and anger at herself for hoping that
there would be a happy ending to her tale. Instead of the lost prince and
princess from her childhood fantasies, she had to face the fact that her father
willingly served evil while her mother had been too weak-willed to leave him.
Echoes of her own terrible choices in men resounded through her mind, and she
wondered if she was like her mother. The memory of the way Devon looked at her,
the way he made her feel, helped to press her anxiety back.

“Your
mother's best friend said Liu told her Zachary was increasingly scared and
upset, that he was terribly afraid of something but wouldn't tell her. Not long
after, Liu and Zachary were in a car accident while she was heavily pregnant
with you. Liu managed to hold on long enough to give birth while your father
had a terrible brain injury and slipped into a coma where he remains to this
day.”

Shan absorbed this information and tried to memorize it.
This was the link to a past she had always wanted, and even if it was a bitter
pill, she was going to swallow it all. “Did he know that I was born?”

“No.
Shortly after your birth, Liu's best friends, a Novice of Aphrodite and two
young priests, got together and decided who would get the privilege of raising
you. We were afraid to contact your distant relatives. Afraid the servants of
Destruction would find you.”

The sound of robes hissing across the wooden floor came from
her left, and an unseen door opened to a lush oriental garden. Pulling herself
up from the ground, Shan wiped her nose on the back of sleeve and followed the
goddess outside. They stood on the top of a small bridge and looked down into a
pond full of shimmering goldfish.

“I do
not need to tell you how much your parents wanted you and what a blessing you
were to them. Try to not judge them too harshly for keeping the truth from
you.”

Making a non-committal grunt, Shan shrugged. “My fath—
Zachary is still alive, right?” A warm breeze scented with jasmine blew the
hair across her forehead. She looked around and found they were in an enclosed
garden perched on the edge of a giant, dark gray rock cliff. Far below, mist
whirled through a valley, revealing occasional glimpses of green.

“
Yes.”

With a sinking stomach, she watched unfamiliar black and
white birds swoop and dive on the air currents. “Is he responsible for what's
going on?”

“Yes.”

Shan moved to the other end of the bridge and took a seat on
the cool, green marble bench facing a rioting bush of golden flowers. “And I'm
the only one who can stop him.” Wiping her sweaty palms on her fishnet-clad
legs, she wished Devon were here. The thought of losing herself in the comfort
of his embrace seemed like bliss.

“You
are the only one who will be able to find him. Epiales has hidden him well in
the world of dreams, and we have not been able to locate him. But Epiales cannot
hide him from you now that you are my Chosen. You are blood of his blood and
will be able to track him.”

“What am I supposed to do? Track him down and convince him
to stop? How in the world do I do that?”

“You
will have to find him in the world of dreams.”

Tilting her head to look behind her shoulder, she kept her
gaze on the edge of the goddess's robe. “Why don't you send someone to put a
pillow over his face or something?” Even as she said that, a tiny fragment of
guilt squirmed in her stomach.

“Killing
his body would be the easy part, but it is his soul we must capture. We have to
convince him to release the children, to return their souls to their bodies. If
he dies without giving us that information, all is lost.”

“How am I supposed to convince him? He doesn't even know me.
Heck, he's never even seen me! And I'm pretty sure you did everything you could
to make sure he doesn't know I exist.”

“We
had to protect you from his master. From what Liu's best girlfriend told us,
Liu feared for your life. She said some High Priestess of Epiales kept trying
to talk her into sacrificing you. I don't think your father knew about it, but
it scared your mother enough so that she tried to leave him.”

A cold breeze blew up from the valley and raised a chill
over her arms. Rubbing the goose bumps down on her skin, Shan said, “So he
might have wanted me?”

“Oh,
he wanted you. So much that he's spent all these years trying to find a way to
make the servants of Creation pay for the loss of you and your mother. Who
knows where his soul has traveled, where his spirit has been while his body has
lain in a coma, but this is about his misguided attempt at revenge.”

Her palms grew cold as she realized what the goddess was
talking about. “He's taking away their children like he thinks they took away
his.”

“Exactly,
and he couldn’t be more wrong in his reasoning. You must help him to find
forgiveness, to see past his rage to the truth. Now we must find a way to get
you to him, without the agents of Destruction finding out you exist. And you'll
have to do it in the world of dreams.”

“Great,” Shan muttered and cringed at the divine displeasure
spiking from Chuang Mu. “I mean, yes, my Goddess. Uh, how am I supposed to do
that?”

“You
will go after the daughter of Liu's best friend. She was pregnant the same time
that Liu was, and he must be extremely jealous that she got to keep her baby
while he lost his. The women were looking forward to raising their daughters
together.”

Scrunching her eyebrows together, Shan began to puzzle
things together. Liu's best friend was a Novice of Aphrodite, pregnant with a
daughter, someone who would have done her best to be in her life without being
obvious about it. A daughter that each mother hoped would be the other's best
friend. “Daisy,” she said in a quiet gasp and stumbled up from the bench.

“Yes.
We've managed to keep Daisy's soul out of their grasp so far, but Epiales
himself is now looking for her.”

“How?” A memory of Daisy passionately kissing a man in a
pond made her blush. The rest of the dream started to trickle through. Terrible
hunting beasts, a woman leading them on a chain, and a terrible man in a black
toga. That must have been Epiales!

“I
assigned one of my Chosen living in San Francisco to keep her safe. He's been
harboring her soul in dreams all over the world.”
Amusement colored Chuang Mu's tone as she said,
“I believe he is quite enamored with Aphrodite's favorite.”

“Huh.” Well, that would explain her weird dream about the
make-out session. “Hey, were you there too? Did you pull me out of the dream
before Epiales could find me?”

“Yes.
You were not ready for him, and he would have killed you.”

“You can die in dreams?”

“Of
course you can. People die in their sleep all the time. Sometimes a dream is so
powerful, so terrible, that the dreamer believes it is real and stops breathing
in the real world, believing they are dead. Jian, the man with Daisy, is in one
of my temples in Los Angeles. He is being carefully guarded and his body
sustained by an IV and feeding tube while he hides Daisy.”

She scratched at her back again. Whatever Chuang Mu had done
was itching like crazy. But it was better than the burn. “What do I need to
do?”

“Take
Devon and go to the hospital where Daisy is being kept. Have a bed brought in
next to hers and fall asleep touching her. Devon will guard you with every last
breath in his body. Once you fall asleep, you will be close to her dreams. As
Zachary stalks her, you must stalk him. Find out where he is hiding the
children and free them. He will go back from time to time to check on his
prizes. Once that is done, you will return to the waking world.”

“What happens then?” Shan rubbed her fist against her
cramping stomach. She knew what would happen. She just had to hear Chuang Mu
say it.

“Then
a Creation agent of Death will make sure he dies.”

Pissed at herself for feeling sorrow at the thought of his
passing, she nodded and turned her gaze back to the distant valley. “Okay.” A
moment ago, she would have happily killed the man harming Daisy and all these
children, but now that she knew he was her father, she felt horrible for
planning his demise.