The Nothing: A Book of the Between (2 page)

“Can you walk?” Callyn’s solid bulk appeared out of the murk.

Vivian nodded, clutching Poe more tightly to her chest. Zee was right beside her and she could make out the shape of the dragon just beyond him.

“Come, then.”

The Giant turned and strode away, vanishing almost at once into the swirling sand. Vivian tried to follow, bent over, hands clutching the penguin. The wind pushed her back. She couldn’t see, couldn’t keep her eyes open.

And then Callyn was back. “Sorry. Try again.” This time, she moved slowly ahead, acting as a windbreak. Vivian could manage to stay upright and stumble forward, shielded a little from wind and the scouring sand. She risked a glance over her shoulder to see Zee behind her, steadying himself on Godzilla’s shoulder. All right, then. They could manage. All she had to do was focus on taking one step at a time and finding the way to shelter.

One slow step after another. The wind an empty howl, the blowing sand a torment. An ordeal surely sufficient to keep mind and body fully occupied, and yet there was just enough space left for her to worry about what it all meant.

The total obliteration of the Dreamworld had been sudden, the consequences swift and alarming. Vivian was certain that the shift in the Between was a direct result. In her mind she’d had a vague understanding that the dreamspheres Aidan had destroyed in the Cave of Dreams meant the deaths of Dreamworlds. But knowing something theoretically was very different from a physical experience of the thing. A whole world had been wiped out of existence. Anybody in it—whether denizens of Dreamworld or dreamers in Wakeworld—had been wiped out along with it.

Her mind reeled at the significance of that and she stumbled. Would have fallen if Zee’s hands hadn’t steadied her from behind. Callyn stopped and turned back, the three of them forming a huddle with their heads at the center.

“We can’t keep this up too much longer,” Zee shouted. “Any suggestions?”

Vivian shook her head. Entering a Dreamworld would have been her only offering, and that was now more dangerous than continuing through the Between.

“There used to be an intersection up ahead,” Callyn shouted. “Keep going. Hopefully, it’s still stable there.”

Vivian saved her breath, nodding acquiescence, and they set off again, plodding forward one slow step at a time, the wind and sand trying to devour them as if it were a living thing.

WESTON’S LAST MEMORY was of burning.

Eyes closed, he could still see the black dragon towering over him, feel the crushing weight of a talon pinning him to the ground. Beneath him, gravel and stone. A sharp spike piercing the wall of his chest and the poison burning its way into his blood, spreading through his body, heating him to the point of incineration.

A dragon spiking meant certain death, and he was as certain as he’d ever been of anything that he had died. He was equally certain that hell wasn’t a room full of shelves upon shelves of books. As for heaven, his sins and failures weighed too heavily upon him to make heaven seem possible.

He sat in a comfortable armchair with his feet propped up on a coffee table next to a half-played game of chess. A glass of water and a bottle of ibuprofen sat beside the chess board. Two empty armchairs faced him on the other side of the table. His head pounded with the too-rapid rhythm of his heart and his entire body felt bruised and sore.

If he wasn’t dead, then where was he? What was he doing here?

The room was very dark, lit only by a streetlamp that shone through two large plate glass windows. Outside, snow drifted down in large fluffy flakes that heaped and drifted on the sidewalk and an empty street. There were painted words on the window, meant to be read from the outside, and it took a minute to turn them around and decipher their meaning:

A TO ZEE BOOKS.

Which explained a great deal, though not everything. He’d been here before. The store belonged to Vivian’s lover, Zee, and if Vivian had found a way to save Weston’s miserable existence, it made sense that she would bring him here.

He rubbed his aching head and then touched the place between collarbone and ribs where the dragon claw had spiked him. His fingers found a sore place, scabbed over but healing. That at least was real, then, but he also wanted to believe the dragon had been masquerading as his long-lost little sister and then had shifted to Vivian’s body, and had claimed to be pregnant with Zee’s child.

None of that could be right. He stretched out his muscles, one at a time, feeling like he’d been stampeded by a herd of buffalo. Hell, he thought, moving his feet from the table to the floor and testing them there to see if they would be likely to hold his weight, he’d been in the Between. Maybe everything had happened. Or nothing. Maybe he’d been dreaming for years, a modern Rip Van Winkle, dozing in a bookstore chair. It was a relief to find that although there were a twig and a dried leaf in his beard, there was no hundred years’ growth.

Nothing moved outside, except for the ever-falling snow. Irrational fear crawled cold over his skin. Maybe all the humans were dead and gone. Plague, or rapture, or some creature escaped from the Between. He calmed himself with logic. The darkness outside meant an hour somewhere between midnight and dawn. Likely the people were all just home in their beds, a good place to be on a snowy night like this one.

A rustling above his head startled him and he looked up to see only shadows and the twisting shapes of some of Zee’s hanging sculptures.

The sound came again.

Weston picked up a book sitting on the coffee table in front of him, weighing its use as a weapon. It was a solid, oversized hardcover, perfect for his purposes. Keeping his breathing shallow and light, he waited. When the fluttering came again, he flung the book up into the darkness. It struck something metallic with a jangle before crashing down to the floor.

Something whooshed over his head and he ducked, both arms up in self-defense.

Again the thing came at him, but this time, he only swatted at it with his hand.

“Goddamn bird. If I woke up in hell, you’d still be with me. Where are the rest of them?”

The raven landed on the table in front of him, stirring the pages of the books with its wings, knocking over chess pieces lined up for a game, sending a loose paper skittering up and onto the floor. Weston bent to retrieve it. When he lifted it to the light, he caught the shape of his own name and got up to carry the paper into a clearer light.

It read:

Weston, I brought you home, as promised. You’ve more than fulfilled your end of the bargain. Aidan’s gone into the Forever but we’re shut out. Long story, but I’m off to ask the Sorcieri for help. Be well.

Vivia
n

Well hell.

She’d gone off without him, then, dumped him off like a bad penny. The raven fluttered up onto his shoulder and poked an inquisitive beak into his beard, but he didn’t bother to shoo it away. When he’d made the bargain with Vivian—to help her get back into the Between—he’d fully intended to finish up the suicide attempt she’d interrupted.

Somewhere along the strange journey, he’d stopped wanting to die. When this had happened, he wasn’t clear exactly. Maybe all of the brushes with death had cleared it out of him, that or the dragon poison. He also had no desire to go back to his old life, leading hunting parties into Dreamworld in search of trophies they would never have found in the usual locales. He’d become accustomed to companionship and a common goal.

He didn’t question the decision to drop him off here. Obviously, he’d been unconscious, since he couldn’t remember a damned thing, and would have been a dead weight and a danger to drag along. Still. To his own great surprise, he discovered a strong desire to be part of whatever came next.

Wakeworld had nothing for him. He had no ties to any living being, apart from the infernal raven. Unless he went back to his guided tours, he had no way of making a livelihood, and he had no idea of where else to find work in the modern world.

Which left him with only one recourse.

Making a door was an easy thing now, but he needed to take some thought as to where it should open. He had now idea how to get to the Sorcieri, and Vivian and Zee would be well on their way. No point going back to the place he last remembered; it would be empty.

Hopefully. That dragon abomination could still be hanging about. That was unlikely, though, and it wasn’t like he had anything better to do. There had been Giants in plenty down on the plain in front of the Black Gates. The note Grace had left for him in her empty coffin had said she was hanging out with the Giants. So, maybe he could go there. It should be easy enough to follow their tracks.

Closing his eyes, he conjured an image of his last view before losing consciousness. A vast plain spread out across a valley floor, studded with Giants in formation. Dragons darkening the sky high above a snowcapped mountain. The Black Gates, monstrous and looming even from a distance.

When he opened his eyes, the door hung neatly in the center of a shelf of books. It was of rough, unfinished wood, built of planks split by hand, and barred with a band of iron. It opened easily to his touch, and he paused for a moment, looking out into a place familiar but changed.

Same flat plain, empty now of both Giants and dragons. Same wind keening over it, raising eddies and swirls of dust. But something had changed; something felt wrong. In the depths of his bones, at a cellular level, he felt it. An unsteadiness, as though what had once been solid and real was now about as substantial as mist. He felt that if he set foot through the door, the whole thing might disintegrate and take him with it.

A banging behind him made him jump nearly out of his skin. He spun around in the midst of an adrenaline surge to see a man on the other side of the glass door, thudding with a fist. It took a minute to also see the car, parked right up in front of the store windows, and that the man was in uniform and had a familiar face.

Brett Flynne, deputy.

Weston didn’t have much love for lawmen, in fact, he’d spent an extraordinarily long life avoiding them. He took a step through the doorway. He could smell the dust on the wind, overlaid with the hot stone scent of dragon and something else he couldn’t define. Even from this distance, the Black Gates emitted a vibration he could feel throughout his body, part summons and part warning. After years of refusal, for the first time, he truly felt the allure of the Between.

Another step. Before he pulled the door closed behind him, he looked back over his shoulder.

Men have died for such hesitations.

The deputy stood with both hands flat against the glass. His face was caught in an expression between fear and loss, the eyes desperate with hope. His lips moved in the shape of a single word.

“Please.”

Weston stretched one hand out into the Between, letting the sun shine through his fingers and throw a dark shadow on the ground. Again he felt the echo of wrongness course through him. With a sigh. he closed the dream door and went to let Deputy Flynne in out of the cold.

A flurry of snow, the sharp, cold smell of the north, made Weston shiver as he stood with the door open, waiting.

“Where’s Vivian?” Flynne asked, not bothering with formalities. A heavy dusting of white already covered his shoulders.

“Traveling.”

“You mean she’s gone through that door.”

“Well, not that one in particular. Why?”

“Can you take me to her? You can open the doors like she can.”

Weston shivered in a wind so searching it seemed to be a thing alive and suggested, “Why don’t you come in and talk about it?”

Flynne did so, shaking snow out of his hair, and strode directly over to the door still hanging in the middle of the book store. “Take me to Vivian. I need to talk to her.”

“Wait up a minute. The Between is a pretty big place. It’s not like we just walk through that door and there she is.”

“There’s got to be some way to reach her. Don’t you have some sort of—I don’t know—magic communication device or something?” Flynne looked haggard, and Weston bit his tongue on a sarcastic response.

“Maybe I can help you.”

Keen eyes looked him up and down, obviously doubtful of his ability to do much of anything. Weston granted that this was fair, given that his appearance had never been in the well-groomed category and recent events had left him worse for wear. Besides, he’d spent his whole life resisting his calling of Dreamshifter, which meant he had a fair bit of knowledge but very little practical ability.

“You’re sure we can’t—”

“I’m sure.”

“So, where were you heading, then?”

“Nowhere that you want to go. Look—I’ll be honest. I know where she was headed, but that doesn’t help much since I haven’t a clue how to get there. Unless you’re prepared to venture out for a year and a day, and maybe never come back, I wouldn’t advise the attempt.”

Flynne stared him down with an implacable expression. When the silence became pressing, Weston raised his hands in a gesture half surrender, half futility. “Think of it like this. Every dream ever dreamed—well, not every dream, maybe, but every different type of dream, is connected to a different world, just as real and complex as this one. And each one is set into yet another world, the space we call the Between, that winds in and out among them as a connector. She could be anywhere. If we figure out which world she’s in, even then we have to find her.”