Jenn returned unscathed and sat down by the fire. “I dreamed about a dragon,” she offered. “Blacker than night.”
“Dragons aren’t black,” he said automatically, then nearly bit his tongue out for acknowledging that there might be such creatures in the world.
She responded as though it were a rational conversation. “That’s what made the dream so weird. All of the movie and book dragons are green, with maybe purple and red mixed in, or brown. The ones in Pern were bronze and green and gold. Anyway, this black dragon just looked at me, and I thought maybe I shouldn’t look back—all of the books say not to look a dragon in the eye, of course—but I did. And it was like it was talking to me in my head. Which isn’t really so weird, I guess; everything talks in dreams.”
His belly tightened at her words and he looked up at the sky, almost certain a dark shadow had fallen over the world. Nothing different about the darkness, though. The sky continued to lighten in the east. A last lingering planet shone bright just above the tree line.
“What did it say?”
She frowned. “I can’t remember. What if it was important?”
“I doubt it. I’ve got no use for dreams, girl. That’s what comes of marshmallows at bedtime. Wake your grandfather—we need to be moving.”
The three of them ate almost in silence. When they were done, they stowed away food and cooking gear and hoisted the pack up again on a rope between two trees. They checked their guns, packed up ammunition. Morgan extinguished the fire and led them out. Timing was everything, and he guided his little party along at a calculated pace.
He had to get them to precisely the right spot and through into the Dreamworld during that short window of time just past dawn when it was light enough to walk without tripping over their own feet, but still dark enough that they wouldn’t notice a door in the middle of the wilderness.
People tended not to see what was right in front of their eyes if it didn’t fit with what they knew of the world. And the location where he opened the doorway was strategic. A red rock bluff butted directly up against it on the right, a cluster of bushes on the left. If you didn’t happen to look at the air too closely around you, it was easy to pass right through and into the Dreamworld without pause. But he always took precautions, just to be sure.
When he’d first started guiding hunting parties here, he had experienced guilt, easily silenced beneath the weight of his rage. He hated both the Dreamworld and his ability to access it. This dream was a so-called gift from the Guardian, given to him at his initiation in the Cave of Dreams. He wanted no truck with it, but on the other hand, living in Wakeworld required hard cold cash and the Dream was at least good for that. Hunters would pay good money for a shot at something slightly unusual, and this dream was lousy with creatures. Bears and wolves predominated, but stranger beasts had been sighted.
He’d seen one or two of the creatures the Indians named Shunka Warakin, one of which had been shot and ended up in a museum well before his birth, which meant he wasn’t the only one who had played around in this Dreamworld.
Hunters he guided out here all signed an agreement not to tell where they’d been, or who brought them. Sure, they were likely to talk anyway, but he didn’t worry about that overmuch. If the authorities came looking for the place, or the wolves or bears that were taken from here, all just a little “off” from regularly occurring species, they would never find the door. The rare beast that had managed to escape into the forest stayed pretty well hidden.
At the same time, folks were willing to pay extra for the opportunity. He had permitted rumors of Sasquatch sightings to judiciously leak into the community. Bigfoot hunters paid even better than the average sportsman. Truth was, he’d had a few glimpses of the big beasts in the dream landscape, including one too-close encounter that left him wary, but although he saw them often enough, they always slipped out of sight and left him well alone.
Of dragons there had never been a sign. The creatures had powers of their own, and doors were never a barrier to them, but they tended to keep to the Between and he’d never seen one in Wakeworld or Dreamworld before.
He was in the middle of wondering what had drawn a dragon to the forest, when they stumbled onto the kill. It was just light enough to see what they’d almost stepped in. A few feet to left or right, and they would never have noticed. Not that there was much left to see—fur, a few bones, bloodstains on the grass. A black circle surrounded it all, the grass turned to ash. There were footprints too, four craters in the blackened earth, each as big as the girl.
“Holy mother of God,” Carpenter said, surveying the damage.
Jenn walked up to the edge of the black ash, sniffed the air. “Smells a bit like sulfur.”
“You’ve outdone yourself, Morgan—this is a huge and rare beast. How do we track it?” The other man’s voice held a note of awe.
“We don’t. What the hell do you suppose that thing is? You really want to have your granddaughter anywhere near it?”
“Maybe it’s aliens,” Carpenter said. “Spaceship could make a circle like that, landing. Makes more sense than anything else.”
“Whatever it is, it could come back,” the girl said.
Morgan couldn’t help liking the kid. She was matter-of-fact, stayed calm. He felt a sudden need to get her the hell out of here and back to safety. “We should go back,” he heard himself saying. “I’ll refund your money.”
“Buck up, man. Never took you for a coward.” Carpenter strode forward and Morgan ground his teeth together to keep himself from saying anything he’d regret. Get in, let the kid get an animal, get out. Sooner the better.
“Right about here, I think.” Carpenter came to a stop close to the bluff where Morgan always called a halt.
“Yep. Good memory.” He pulled the blindfolds out of his pack. “Put these on, if you would.”
Jenn rolled her eyes. “Are you for real?”
“You go in blindfolded or not at all. That’s the rule.”
“Oh, fine.” She tied the strip of fabric over her eyes and Morgan adjusted it, then checked Carpenter’s.
“All set? Great. Form a train. Here we go.”
With everybody touching and their eyes covered, it was an easy thing to open both doors and lead them into the Between and then immediately into the Dreamworld. To disguise what he had done, he led them forward about twenty paces, asked them to duck down low and mind their heads for another ten, and then gave permission to remove the blindfolds.
“Great territory here,” he said, gesturing at the subtly changed terrain that lay ahead. “I’ve never once brought somebody in that didn’t find some sort of trophy. Dangerous and strange things, too, so keep your wits about you.”
The horizon was light now, clear and beginning to be blue. In the plains the sun would be rising but not here, where mountains thrust their bulk between land and sky. The landscape was only dimly visible, leached of color like a black-and-white movie. All as it should be, and yet Morgan’s gut churned with an alarm he didn’t understand. Something was off-kilter and wrong.
The dream felt dark.
Despite what his eyes showed him—the normal progression of dawn—he kept expecting to see nothing but black. Every time he blinked he found himself surprised to see light. Here, through the doorway and into dream, all of the extra senses he tried to keep closed down were wide open.
Instability in Dreamworld was dangerous beyond words, but he would need something tangible to call off the trip. Carpenter had paid a couple of grand for this expedition. And the girl was primed—had probably been pumped up for this one hunting expedition since she could talk. Neither of them was going to go back because he had a bad feeling.