“There.” Zee pointed to the far end of the garden.
A chicken scratched in the dirt on the narrow path in front of her, blocking her way. Its neck was too long, and it was yellow like a canary. Vivian didn’t think she’d ever seen a yellow chicken, but then her experience was pretty much limited to what she bought in the grocery store, mercifully feather free. Dreamworld. It figured.
Jared’s warning saved her. Instead of shooing it with her foot as she might have done, she flapped her arms and kept her distance. The chicken squawked and came at her in a flurry of wings and extended claws. Poe stepped between her and the attacker, his own neck extended, hissing.
And then Zee was there. A silver flash and the chicken’s head hit the earth, while the body continued to run around in meaningless circles.
Vivian managed to get her breath back, taking in Zee with the sword in his hand, the body of the chicken now careening through the garden, and the head lying at her feet. The eye staring up at her focused in. The pupil contracted, the position shifted. The beak snapped open and closed, revealing a double row of sharp teeth.
She couldn’t take her eyes off the horrid thing or bring herself to walk past it. “It’s not dead,” she said.
Zee came up to stand beside her. “You’re the Dreamshifter.”
Right. There had been something in the books about changing the contents of a dream. Vivian concentrated. She pictured the chicken head as belonging to a real, ordinary chicken. Just a beak. A normal eye. White feathers. No teeth. And the thing on the ground in front of her changed to match what was in her mind. She performed the same thing for the body still running around, giving it white feathers, and then laying it down on the earth, still.
She shivered. The thing was now dead, needed to be dead, but she was the one who had stopped its heart with her thoughts. This was a power she wasn’t sure she wanted to possess. Only in dreams, she reminded herself. Which was small comfort, but she would take whatever she could get.
“Can you do the rest of them?”
It seemed possible. Vivian turned her mind on the rest of the flock, focusing on plain white feathers, normal-sized necks, beaks with no teeth. Exhilaration flooded through her. Power. Dreams weren’t so scary after all—not if she could shift the contents into something harmless. She picked out one chicken and made it a rooster—gave it the long tail, turned its feathers red and green and gold, and then for fun added a blue topknot.
She grinned at Zee, but he wasn’t looking at her. His eyes were scanning the horizon, still searching for something she couldn’t see. But she felt supercharged and no longer afraid. If some new nightmare thing came along, she could shift it. They could do this. Get the Key and the spheres and fix the mess that began long before her birth.
“Which are the potato plants?” she asked.
“City girl,” Zee said. “You’ve never seen a potato?”
“Well, potatoes, yes.”
He pointed. “Those plants.”
She followed the path through the middle of the garden to the plants he’d pointed out. Gareth followed, sullen and silent, with Zee behind him, ever watchful. Vivian glanced back at the cottage to see Jared framed in the open window, watching.
The moment of euphoria she’d felt after shifting the chickens faded. She wanted only to secure the Key and the dreamspheres and get the hell back home. Potato plants, thank all the gods, were not all conjoined and woven together like the other vegetables in the garden. Each stood alone in a little mound of earth, so it was easy enough to count four rows back and four plants over.
“Should have brought a shovel,” she said.
Zee grinned and lifted an eyebrow. She smacked the back of one hand to her forehead. “Right. One shovel coming up.”
Not so strange, really. Lucid dreaming, only here the things were real. She pictured in her mind the implement she wanted—a spade, with the sharp rounded end and a smooth wooden handle, splinter free. It appeared in her hands, solid and real. She dug awkwardly into the dirt at the base of the plant she wanted.
“Here,” Zee said. “Let me.”
She stepped back and watched as he grabbed the base of the plant with one hand and thrust the spade into the earth at the edge of the mound with the other. In one smooth movement he brought a clump of earth and roots up into the light, including five or six fist-sized potatoes. “Shame to waste them,” he said, but he tossed them aside and kept digging. Two more strokes and the spade clanged against something solid.
Vivian sank down onto her knees, plunging her hands into the bottom of the hole. Her fingers found a rectangular shape, hard and smooth. She scrabbled at it, trying to get a grip. At last she pried it loose from the dirt and lifted it into the light. A box, plain, wooden, without ornamentation. There was no catch or lock, and it opened easily, revealing a cylinder carved from black stone. The Key. Her Key.
A shadow crossed the sun.
Poe hissed.
The rush of power struck her like a blow. Before she could shout a warning Zee was already in motion, turning to meet the five men who flowed over the fence. There was a subtle wrongness about the way they moved, as though they were not limited by flesh and bone. Their skin was gray, the sockets of their eyes empty, save for a glowing spark of red. Each wielded two blades, black as death, ten shadow blades against Zee’s one.
Gareth, standing closest to the fence, fell before he could run or scream, blood spurting from a gash at the base of his throat. Vivian felt weighted, as though somebody had filled her feet and brain with iron. She must do something but couldn’t think what that might be.
The men were almost on her and she was going to die, standing here stupidly with the Key in her hands.
Zee stepped between her and the attackers, sliding into a smooth and deadly rhythm. Vivian watched him parry the blows, the ring of sword on sword an assault to her own senses, still unable to think what to do.
Something was here, powerful enough to turn her brain to mush. Nothing moved, other than the fighting men. Jared was still visible in the window, watching, too far away for her to be able to read his expression, but she knew there would be no help from him.
A lurch in the rhythm of the swords, a cry, the thud of something heavy hitting the earth. Her heart convulsed in an agony of fear, but it was one of the attackers who had fallen. The death dance resumed, Zee still on his feet. He fought brilliantly, but there were too many.
She had to help him, had to fight this heaviness that immobilized her.
Shift them, change them. If she could eliminate even one of them, it would help Zee. A moment later one of the men held only sticks in his hands, futile against Zee’s sword. There was time for fear to cross his face, and then he was dead. Two down. She turned her mind to the next, hope springing up in her breast. They could do this, she and Zee. She would disarm them, he would kill them. The third man fell after his weapons just vanished, leaving his hands empty. And then the fourth, without her having done a thing. Zee and his last opponent stood a distance apart, studying each other, holding off before making the final move.
Dead bodies lay sprawled in the dirt, limbs tangled in vegetation. Blood spattered Zee’s face and clothing, and it wasn’t all the blood of his enemies. An ugly laceration ran from shoulder to elbow of his right arm. He’d shifted the sword to his left hand. His breath came too hard and he moved slowly, as though gravity had increased its pull on him.
The gray man didn’t even look tired. He spun his swords up into the air and caught them. White teeth flashed. Vivian shifted his swords to sticks, but they shifted back before Zee could make a move.
The man whirled, the two blades dancing. Zee blocked and parried one, but the second got past him and traced a line of crimson down his side.