Authors: Shirin Dubbin
Dreams’ Dark Kiss
Dreams’ Dark Kiss
By Shirin Dubbin
They’ll come for her tonight…
The
ankou.
A legion of nightmares, fugitive from the Dreaming, have set their sights on Ciaran Letang. She is the key to their darkest purpose. But Ciaran has been used before, and she
won’t
let it happen again.
Keoni Maka patrols the dreamscape, keeping humankind safe. When he senses Ciaran’s distress, he offers to fight by her side—forever. She accepts, but she has vowed not to let a man invade her heart, not even this one.
Together they must use their powers to stop the
ankou
pack leaders before they take dominion over the waking world. But will Keoni’s own dream of saving tainted souls lead them right into a trap?
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This book belongs to my British cousins—the ladies. I may not always show how much I love you but I do (in a ferocious way) and I miss you with equal fervor between visits. Cheers to your dreams—the best and the best for you—coming true!
And to my Hawaiian braddahs and sistahs: please forgive me for any dialect or cultural missteps.
Special thanks to Kassia Krozser who made me believe I may actually be a writer, and through her insights inspired the Man and the Beast, Keoni’s journey and the Libros Arcanum to take shape within my imagination.
A round of applause for Emmy Ellis who helped me prepare the original version of this story for submission. I don’t think it would have gotten past anyone’s inbox without you.
To Kym Hinton for being so gracious. You’re a very cool lady. I can’t find the words to tell you what that meant and means to me.
And finally to Andrea Kerr, my editor, for putting up with my various neuroses (hey, at least I’m funny; I’m not Woody Allen or anything but, you know, mildly amusing…right?), for giving me the giggles via track changes, teaching me, and in the process making this a book I’m excited to share.
Cheers to you, Andrea!
With much appreciation,
Shirin
“Demons do not dream, my chile, but dare not close ya eyes. For while they dinna tarry sleep, from dreams they may yet rise.”
- Cora’Delieye, Mad Mother of Shifting Magicks
“Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the Dreaming…” Ciaran sighed, pressed the clutch and shifted the astral car into fourth gear. Time to go to work. The Otherside had beckoned, and she had responded by phasing through her dreams and into
psychopomp-dreaming
. In other words, soul-conductor duty called.
She couldn’t complain. At least now she understood the process of ferrying a soul into the afterlife. When she was ten things had been different. The uncertainty of where her dreams would lead had frightened her younger self into super-secret bedtime-coffee-drinking rituals—no easy feat for a little girl born in the land of high tea.
Nowadays she’d reached pro status, able to discern which direction her night would turn a blink before closing her eyes. This skill helped her prepare for the task ahead, and one had to be in the right frame of mind in her profession. The Otherside—neighbor to the dreamscape—where psychopomps punched the clock, exuded a realness that separated it from the subconscious, a sense of danger making it…ominous? Right. Just call her Charon. She only lacked a River Styx.
The man beside her was having the time of his life—irony duly noted. Her enthusiasm matched his, despite her businesslike pretense otherwise. After so many years on the job, she’d cultivated compassion without allowing herself to feel the soul’s passing too deeply. This mission was different. It felt amazing, speeding down the road in a little red convertible, top down, the breeze whipping through their hair like freedom. Tonight she rode with Wallace Flint. The Wallace Flint. Ciaran suppressed a squeal, twisting her lips to hide her glee.
How many times had she watched his classic American TV show? Too many. The show’s legions of international fans had elevated the character he’d played into a pop culture immortal. The four, almost five, decades since the final episode hadn’t changed a thing. Rockin’ Wally Flint would be missed.
A hill rose into view on the road ahead. She could just make out train tracks running along the ridge to outline the horizon. They’d cross over them shortly, transitioning from the dreamscape to the Otherside in the process. Psychopomp-dreaming always contained two things: something red and something to cross over; for one person, there’d be a crimson boat and passing beneath a bridge; for the celebrity beside her, a vermilion convertible and driving across train tracks—final bits of poetry to transition a life from living dreams to the perpetual dream of hereafter.
Wallace Flint whistled in exclamation. Ciaran sighed. His trademark grin, lopsided but dazzling, transported her back to childhood, and the reality of his death saddened her until she remembered the bliss awaiting him in the afterlife. Joy pierced the melancholy. He would be happy on the Otherside; she had no reason to doubt. She’d felt peace emanating from every soul she’d ferried across the realms.
Ciaran blew out a breath and echoed his smile. He laughed into the wind in return. The crisp current drew happy tears from his eyes.
“Think we should floor it?” she asked with a devilish arch to her brow.
More delighted laughter framed by his killer smile. Perfect teeth and dimples. No wonder he’d continued to make
People Magazine
’s “50 Most Beautiful People” list well past the age of sixty-five.
Ciaran mashed the accelerator into the floorboard. They became a red bullet, locked and loaded. No real car moved so fast.
“Huzzah!” the man yelled as the car hit the base of the hill and went airborne. It sailed over the train tracks
Thelma & Louise
-style and landed, smooth as butter, on the Otherside. The TV star was gone. No need to check the empty passenger seat beside her. She’d done the job long enough to know.
Downshifting, she slowly released the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. Rockin’ Wally Flint would take the final leg of his journey alone.
Soul-conductor mission complete.
A familiar sense of elation enveloped her, soothing away the sorrow of bidding yet another life good-bye. The job was done. Time to wake. She waited but remained in the Dreaming.
Something’s wrong.
The Otherside shifted beneath her, giving way to the Wastelands under, yet between it and the dreamscape. No. She shouldn’t be stuck in the Dreaming, and she definitely shouldn’t be here—no soul, living or dead, should walk the Wastelands. Psychopomps traveled directly from the dreamscape to the Otherside and back, never to this place. This wasn’t right.
Ciaran watched as jagged red peaks jutted upward from the fabric of the dreamscape, cutting into a bleak expanse of sky, and whorls of dust resembling powdered blood stirred on stale winds. She seriously needed to wake up; only creatures who devoured death and nightmares prowled the in-between places. While she understood the purpose of the Wastelands—they had to exist as surely as the Otherside, the dreamscape and the totality of the Dreaming; it was the nature of balance—she still wasn’t delusional enough to believe her presence here was natural. Just the flip side, actually. Being here felt as natural as dancing butt-ass naked down the middle of a cobra’s nest. Not good.
The convertible came to a stop, it also fading now its reason for being, the soul of Wallace Flint, had departed. Trust her to run out of petrol in a place where none should be required. Ciaran sighed, opened the ephemeral remnants of the car door and stepped out to search for a getaway. A repetitive thud reverberated across empty peaks.
She turned slowly round, scanning the landscape for a swatch of Otherside to escape into. Some part of it had to be nearb—
There!
Ciaran sprung into a headlong roll, hurling her body toward a fleeting bit of Otherside at the edge of her vision.
Thank God! Soon she’d phase back through dreams and land in bed as she should have after Wallace Flint’s crossing. Instead she landed backside in the sanguineous dust. A cloud of it puffed around her, the metallic taste coating her tongue and filling her nose.
She’d missed.
Shit.
The Otherside had no real geography. It would best be termed amorphous. Isles of it drifted through the Dreaming, appearing where they would.
Similarly, the Wastelands couldn’t be quantified by the rules of the Waking World. They were the border between the dreamscape and the Otherside in a wrong-side-up and inside-out sort of way. A kind of chasm, the Wastelands could most often be crossed as easily as a crack in the pavement. But the chasm could also split open and rise up, or swallow a traveler down—a dream turned nightmare before the dreamer could awaken.
Ciaran had learned the Dreaming didn’t have to make sense. It existed because consciousness existed and was without rules because the sleeping mind knew no boundaries. She’d also come to believe the Wastelands were the negative visions of death a soul shed before entering the Otherside—all the world’s imaginings of hell so to speak. This was not a Wonderland to wander through.
Time to wake up.
She nervously tapped the rhythm of the words against her thigh.
Time. To. Wake. Up.
She couldn’t remember ever remaining on this side so long after a night’s work, and she’d never been to this place. The thudding ratcheted to unbearable before she recognized her own heartbeat echoing in her ears. She’d never been afraid in the Dreaming either. Trips to the Otherside and trailing the path of a dead soul across the dreamscape had always been safe. But the Wastelands were… They bore the air of a killing field.
Calm down.
She couldn’t. At the periphery of her vision, a darker-than-obsidian shadow took shape. The black dog! Renewed hope welled in her chest. She’d been afraid one of the pale flickers that had dogged her recent soul-conductor journeys had found her again. Those loosely animal-shaped specters put creepy in proper perspective, but the black dog wasn’t one of them. Ciaran knew the animal well and trusted it completely. She spun round to find the dog again. Nothing. A glimpse of its tail fueled one final spin.
“Oh God.”
Some other creature, not the dog, hit her smack in the chest and slammed her into the dirt.
It’s only a dream, it’s only a dream, it’s only a dream,
her frantic mind chanted as a sulfurous stink assaulted her nose. She squeezed her eyes shut, praying the monster’s scary levels would max out at
Alice in Wonderland
. Then an image of the Jabberwock—“The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!”—hit her, and she began praying for other things.
The monster remained a silent weight on her chest, its breath blowing dank menace against her cheek.
Calm down.
After long moments, she convinced herself it was nothing more than a nightmare seeping into the spaces between dreams and the Otherside. Yes. Um. No, she hadn’t somehow shifted into the Wastelands. This was only a delusion, and she actually lay safe in bed right now, suffering from a fever dream. Yeah, that was it.
Ciaran slowly opened her eyes. Focusing, she bit down a scream. Never in all her mad imaginings had she envisioned anything so twisted, so intrinsically wicked.
Why couldn’t she wake the hell up?
The monster tilted its shaggy head to regard her with the face of a hyena gone terribly wrong. Strips of coarse white fur framed its jowls and continued down either side of its body. Its darker maw, closer to gray, housed yellowed fangs ripping through vivid pink gums.
All this led to scared-shitless territory, but the monster’s gaze did the most damage. Its too-blue eyes were large, cruel and…human—not the eyes of an animal at all, but those of a psychopath.
Where the hell was your story’s hero when you needed him?
A millisecond passed before she scrambled from beneath it, turning her body to get on all fours with hopes of making a run for safety. Big mistake. Clawed paws grasped her belly, dragging her back to her knees. She peered over her shoulder. A smirk spread across the maw. A mocking cackle followed. It’d wanted her down on all fours.
Using one paw to hold her, it tore at the thick belt keeping her jeans in place. Fang and claw lacerated the leather but left the skin unbroken as images of bestial sex assaulted her inner vision.
Wait just one tick
. It wasn’t actually hurting her. It—oh God—it was stripping her and being gentle about it. No. Gentleness wasn’t likely when a battering ram of tumescent flesh prodded her upper thigh. Ick. Even for a nightmare that took things too far.
She’d seen enough of the National Geographic Channel to recognize a mating attempt, and while many a fictional heroine got off on shagging werewolves, she wasn’t up for an interspecies love fest—especially not with the bad dream at her back. If the monster thought she’d be up for becoming Mrs. Fuctup Nightmare, it had another think coming.
Ciaran struggled to beat the monster back, using elbows, feet and gnashing teeth, but couldn’t dissuade the courtship attempt or break free. Her mind wailed for help. Granted, she had never seen another soul conductor on this side. They tended to work the Dreaming alone. More likely to bump into one another at a shop in the Waking World than on the job, but surely one of her counterparts would come to her aid. When the need was great enough, didn’t help always come? Brilliant. She’d started making up new rules to delude herself. Next stop: madness.
The monster made quick work of the leather belt and soon denim would be the only barrier between her and nastily ever after.
Her prayers traveled on pleading sobs. Ciaran pushed her awareness toward her body in the Waking World, but something sealed off her retreat to reality. Whatever the monster had done, it blanketed her senses, blunting the reach of her psychopomp ability to return to her body. The effect left her crippled as surely as handcuffs and a blindfold.
She fought more desperately, punctuating each jab and blow with mental stabs at the monster’s hold on her. The rhythm of punch, prayer and plea mimicked an SOS.
Time slowed, rippled and came to a jerking halt. Realizing she’d been granted a reprieve, Ciaran tried to extricate herself from the thing’s grasp but couldn’t. Someone had pressed Pause on the remote and the monster had frozen in place, leaving her clamped between its body and claws. Tears threatened, but she didn’t have time for self-pity. What the hell was going on? This whole ordeal was way outside normal psychopomp territory.
The earthy scent of tilled soil thickened the air, and the ground shifted beneath her splayed hands. In the distance, the peaks flattened, pounded by an invisible mallet. Tall prairie grasses in brown and green sprouted in all directions, patches pushing up between her fingers.
She heard the fall of hooves before she saw the beautiful palomino, his coat glistening with vigor. He rose on hind legs and whinnied, making it clear he had come in response to her distress call. She’d seen spirit animals like him before. This was not a true horse but a kind of avatar, the purest representation of a man. In the past, Ciaran had crossed a few souls over in their spirit-animal forms. The ability to translate oneself into such pure symbolism was a sign of a highly evolved soul.
She should have been relieved, but she swallowed her acceptance of help before voicing it. As much as she wanted aid, taking it from him wasn’t right. She knew it in a way she couldn’t explain, as though this decision would change her entire life—even in the Waking World. This choice meant forever. A prescient chill climbed her spine.
Of course,
Ciaran rationalized,
I could die right here, right now, and my hesitance wouldn’t matter.
She waited for her intuition to acquiesce.
Ahem, I could die right here, right now.
One…two…three. The stallion wasn’t the right one. Whatever that meant.
Damn her intuition.
Her heart pummeled her ribs, railing against the decision, but she shook her head no. The palomino’s hooves clip-clopped, reconnecting with the earth. Then he galloped off, tossing his mane as the prairie disappeared in his wake.