The peyote had taken her to the border of reality and dream, had tipped her over the edge, and she hadn’t been back very long. Her usual rigid control was weakened. Against her will she slid into a dream memory so vivid it was flashback. It possessed her, held her, pulled her under.
It is dark but this is no barrier. Vivian’s eyes can see like a cat’s, into all of the shadowed and unlit corners. She is hunting. Her prey has taken to its heels. She waits. She is faster, her senses better tuned. Let the frightened thing run a little, let it experience what it thinks is deep and abiding terror and then she will show it what fear really means.
Enough waiting; she begins to follow. Her movements are ponderous and slow at first; it takes time to get the momentum up so that her heavy body will increase in speed. Flying is easier, but her prey is on foot and so she proceeds, alternating her poison-clawed feet, faster and faster. She can smell the sweat and the heat, the blood and the fear. No matter where the hunted one might hide, tonight she will search it out.
As if sensing this, her prey stops at last and makes a stand.
There is a clearing in a grove of trees. Somewhere nearby there is a door; it is closed and locked. The door is insignificant. What matters is the woman at bay, her big gray eyes in a face so white it is bloodless.
Vivian opens her dragon jaws, scenting both the clear, sweet wind and the agitated blood.
The gray eyes stare into hers, hopeless and dull, done with trying to escape. She strikes, engulfing flesh and bone, her teeth tearing, crunching, swallowing the hot salt of blood. She is sated, leaving nothing but a pendant shaped like a flightless bird; strong wings lift her skyward and there is no regret, no moment of sorrow for the one who has been consumed . . .
“Vivian?”
She shuddered, pressed her hands against the rough bark of the log to remind herself that she still had hands. Within, the dragon stirred and stretched its wings in a movement that reverberated through every cell in her body.
Jung believed that every character in a dream is a part of yourself. If there was any truth to this at all, the battle with the dragon-self ended with no more Vivian. The dragon was hungry; the woman was tired.
“Vivian?” Weston said again. There was acknowledgment in his voice; maybe he could see that she was slipping away.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen when I shift,” she said, as though he could follow all of her thoughts and knew where they had carried her. “I think I can get the door open. But I may not remember you.”
“Yes.”
“If I don’t—remember myself—promise me you’ll take care of Poe, and look for a man named Zee—”
Her voice broke and she turned her face away. For just a minute she let herself remember Zee as she had first seen him, sitting at the counter in the bookstore with a ray of sunlight illuminating his face. She remembered his eyes—clear agate rimmed in umber—looking into hers with that first shock of recognition, the collision of Dreamworld and Wakeworld vibrating between them like a plucked string. Whether he still lived or not, she was about to take an action likely to separate them forever.
She was about to voluntarily become that thing, the monster, that she had hated, feared, and run from all her life. The thing that she had also, against her will, longed and wished for. She was shaking now in good earnest, not with fear but with recognition, at long last, of this desire. All of her life she had been endlessly responsible—the caretaker, the protector and healer. The wounded child within had bided its time, all the while nurturing rage. It wanted to burn and destroy, to fly free and unencumbered, to eat what it wished and sleep where it willed.
The dragon heat flickered and flared and she focused her attention on that, building it, letting it grow and spread. Her senses deepened. She could hear Weston’s heartbeat, as well as Poe’s, smelled the heat of their flesh, and beyond that the trail of a deer that had passed in the night.
Prey.
Saliva welled in her mouth. Her body turned inside out, expanding, hardening, and this time she did nothing to hold it back.
A new awareness sang through her, a web of minds made up of a whole constellation of dragons. For the first time she truly understood the structure and hierarchy that made up the voices she had heard so clearly in Surmise. The individual dragon belonged to a Flight. Each flight belonged to a Consensus. And at the head of all there was one presence, stronger than all the others, that imposed order and structure and exacted punishment for those who strayed too far.
Vivian felt the will of this creature pulling at her, calling. All she needed to do was open a channel and the connection would be crystal clear. She resisted, and as she did so became aware of other, fainter signals scattered throughout the Dreamworlds and Between. Rogue and solitary entities, dragons without a governing body who performed their own will and went their own way. She understood now that the dragon on Finger Beach had been one of these. Mellisande had been ripped away from the others against her will, cut off by the web of enchanted silver with which Jehenna had bound her.
The voices that had been muffled since Vivian had been shut out of the Dreamworld and Between were clear again now, like radio channels. A little experimentation with focusing and she realized she could tune in or out, even to the overall command of the Queen, and for the moment she shut them off.
Distant memory said there was a reason she was in this place, this forest, that there was a task she needed to do, but she couldn’t remember what it was, or why it would matter. The sky was calling. She unfurled her wings, stretched them high, scented the air.
“Vivian,” a creature on the ground said. A two-legged. Afraid but standing his ground. “You are Vivian,” he said, and memories stirred of herself as also small and naked and two-legged. She lowered her head on the long neck to see him better, watched the blood flee his face, smelled the sweat on him turn to fear. He smelled also of blood and smoke, but there were other scents not far away, other bodies of heat bigger and better to eat.
Her wings moved, lifting her above the earth, above the trees.
“Vivian!” the man-creature cried again. His voice tugged at her, but he did not have the right or the power to command her, no strength of will that she should have to listen to him.
She wafted her wide wings, feeling the air flow around her, watching the wind blow back the man’s hair. He bent over to shield his face from the wind and dust and then she was so high above him that even to her eyes he was tiny. In the keen cold of the upper air her body was no longer heavy and awkward, but aerodynamic and free flowing.
She swooped and soared, lifting into a spiral and diving down toward the green earth so that it rushed up toward her, the trees, the grass, the stones, in a kaleidoscope of color as she flipped onto her back and then upright again. Almost brushing the tops of the trees with her belly, she watched the branches bend and sway.
From the man she still sensed fear and she dove down and shot a blast of fire toward him, teasing, just to watch him duck and stumble backward. The flames missed him, but a tree blazed up like a huge torch.
Then she was up and away, traveling fast and far over the forest. Her vision, crystal clear, showed her nests and birds and small moving things and then a larger four-footed creature.