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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Dedication

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

Contents

Copyright

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Author’s Note

Dreams’ Dark Kiss Glossary of Terms

About the Author

Chapter One

“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.

Ciaran shivered. Her reaction as much from the danger she remained trapped beneath as from the sudden cold. An arctic breeze iced over her ears, drifting snowflakes caught on her eyelashes and she dislodged them in rapid blinks. Her hands and knees went numb, gravity forcing them to crunch through the icy layer of snow now covering what had been prairie moments before. Then he came, loping majestically across the tundra. A huge husky—he stood a full meter at the shoulders with a coat of luxuriant white and gray. The coloring matched the monster imprisoning her, but the husky—damn near a wolf—and the man it represented were the monster’s polar opposite. Her psychopomp abilities came in handy in the Dreaming, where she could read a soul on sight. Too bad she couldn’t do the same in real life.

Ciaran spared a quick glance over her shoulder and sighed. The nightmare creature remained frozen around her; its presence more malignant than any she’d ever encountered.

A heavy paw landed on her other shoulder, and she turned back to a wolfish grin. The husky seemed like an old friend. He must have agreed, because he nodded once, twice, then licked her face back to glowing warmth. Ciaran sighed, knowing he couldn’t be more than a friend, and for reasons she still couldn’t fathom, she couldn’t accept his help either.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, tilting her head back to gaze into cerulean eyes. “You’re not the one.” The big dog nodded again, licked her one last time and vanished into a torrent of wintry white.

Intuition served as the only evidence she hadn’t completely lost the plot. Refusing help while trapped in the doggy-style love grip of a mutated hyena said otherwise. Ciaran chose to trust herself and bore that in mind when the ground abruptly dropped away.

She had but hadn’t left the monster’s clutches. Her awareness split into two parts: one trapped beneath a nightmarish attack, the other floating above the Tower of London. She’d come home to England. Well, at least she’d come to a stop above it.

One look down cured her of doing so a second time. If she fell from this height, she’d go splat bye-bye. Dream or no. Fantastic. No matter what her intuition said about the next spirit animal to offer his aid, she was going to say, “Yes, thanks. I’ll have some of that.”

The raven’s caw interrupted her thoughts. He circled her several times, his wingspan nearly as wide as she was tall. Until then it had never occurred to her to call a raven beautiful, but he was and he knew it. Ciaran read the pride in his black-diamond eyes and the way the moon glinted off his dark, iridescent plumage validated his opinion of himself.

Her throat rebelled against the no rising from it. This time she really couldn’t afford to be picky. The monster had begun to move again, ever so slightly, at her back. Both her heart and body plummeted like stone.

She splash landed, and her surroundings shifted. Cool waters enveloped her, and old fears rushed forward to war with instinct. Ciaran hated the ocean. Any ocean. She also despised seas, lakes, rivers and kiddie pools. They freaked her out one and all, and she flailed. Her arms and legs pumped against the resistance of the undertow. Salt water filled her mouth on a gasp.

This nightmare just wouldn’t stop.

She whirled beneath the waves, discombobulated, but no bubbles escaped her lips to guide her to the surface. Which way was up? She couldn’t think, but she could…breathe. She could breathe? How? No answer came but intuition sang safe, and calm washed over her body.

The panic receded, and she studied the waters. The Dreaming had a way of hiding or revealing information depending on what you needed to know during the course of any given dream. Ciaran knew without a doubt she was in the Pacific Ocean—someplace tropical—because the Dreaming, much like fate, had deemed the knowledge useful. Just as easily she could have been left unaware and forced to figure it out.

Knowing where she’d landed helped, as did the clearness of the water; it allowed a sightline to infinity. Seeing her surroundings in such clarity comforted her, and a new reality dawned… She felt more at home beneath these waves than she had moments before in the skies above London. How could water ever feel like home?

The dolphin nudged her with his bottlelike snout. His sudden arrival should have come as a shock. Instead her intuition purred. In a matter of moments—transitioning seamlessly—his presence became as natural as inhabiting her own skin.

He whistled in greeting, burst into a downward spiral and paused beneath the waves, at her feet. A beat. Then looping between her legs, he swam upward until she straddled him.

“Whoa!” Ciaran giggled.

The rising dolphin fit himself snugly in the juncture of her thighs, lifting until her head broke water. Then moving away, he rose above the waves for a face-to-face.

His sleek body measured at least three meters with smooth, silvery gray skin she couldn’t resist touching. The man this animal represented had to be amazing.

“Hope you don’t mind,” she said, smoothing her palms over every bit of him within reach.

The dolphin’s hazel eyes smiled back into hers. She swore he laughed before diving back into the depths. Startled, she reached out for him. He returned in a graceful leap, filling her empty arms. Then, without warning, a lithe arch sent them hurtling across the ocean for the ride of her life.

Sea spray sparkled in the sunlight as though it were fairy dust made of salty, liquid enchantment. In this realm, sun and magic tasted as real as brine. Ciaran could see why people surfed. The thrill of uniting with a wave and riding it at breakneck speed was incomparable. She clung to the dolphin’s dorsal fin and breathed, “yes,” into his ears between peals of mirth.

The decision made, she accepted her choice changed things. Although she might not like what it meant when the—

Time lurched forward. The dolphin and the sea evaporated. Her awareness snapped back to the monster. Claws raked denim, dragging her kicking and screaming back into imminent danger. A sudden burst of anger burned behind her eyes. What about her made males of all species want to take advantage?

* * *

Keoni surfed the dreamscape with an urgency fueled by more than duty. Shooting through a barrel of illusion, he watched the wave curl over him. It broke in a frothy spray of fantasy, propelling the big Hawaiian at speeds impossible to reach in the Waking World.

Not fast enough. Not today. Other days he’d scoffed at his Somnian brothers and their less fun, more strenuous modes of transport. Today it’d be nice to perceive the dreamscape as Archer did. The leader of Keoni’s dream-guardian squad flew on air currents created from the world’s imaginings. They’d lift his human body high or bend to the demands of his raven’s wings.

Surfing: fast. Flight: faster.

Keoni needed speed; he had finally been chosen by a dream-guardian woman. She was only a fledgling of their kind and would need time to learn Somnian ways, but he’d be damned if he’d begin his new life nursing her through a major spirit wound. It took a long time to recover from that kind of injury, and his sparrow—such a beautiful spirit—was in too fragile a state. Previous hurts already weighed heavily on her soul. He couldn’t allow the bane to heap more pain on her. Keoni wasn’t sure how much more she could handle. He didn’t plan on finding out, and he definitely wasn’t fool enough to let the nightmarish creature destroy her.

A slow smile momentarily lit his face. His new woman had come to him that morning in her spirit-animal form, a beautiful sparrow. Sweet as sunrise. Unfazed, she’d perched on his shoulder and surfed an idealized Hanalei Bay at his side. The waves climbed as high as thirty feet, but his manu li’i, his little bird, hadn’t budged. Excited twittering and singing were the closest she’d gotten to complaint. Until she remembered the bane hunting her and the creature’s attack had shattered those delicate first moments of the meeting of their souls. He’d have to find her before the bane destroyed her mind or, worse, killed her.

The water roughened at the outskirts of the dreamscape, where imaginings thinned. Not far now.

He hadn’t expected her to be this near the border. She’d gotten stuck in the dark lands beneath yet in between. Bad trouble. The Wastelands were no place for a fledgling Somnian. Not even psychopomps, as she had been before today, were safe there. No wonder the bane had caught and pinned her. His little bird didn’t have the skill or the power she needed to survive the dreamscape. Not yet. He didn’t know how she’d made it this far. Psychopomps traveled across the dreamscape the way a plane flew over land—their destination the Otherside. Even as a fledgling Somnian—a neo dream guardian—she’d normally have passed the four trials: hear the call, manifest what is needed, transform your surroundings or yourself and create an untraceable exit, before the ability to walk the dreamscape and Wastelands kicked in.

When it came to the dreamscape, psychopomps were limited to the pathways of the souls they accompanied. Somnians didn’t have that problem and could also enter the Wastelands without restriction—if they were drunk, high, or seeking a preview of hell. They did not deal with the Otherside. Keoni shuddered. Death was not a dream guardian’s domain. His woman somehow had the run of all three realms. Highly improbable. Obviously she was special.

A wail for help ricocheted through his head, collapsing his thoughts. His manu li’i needed him. No time for thinking. He gave instinct total control.

Calling on Somnian vision, he reached out to harness several speed fantasies drifting through the dreamscape: the teenager skimming the clouds in a fighter jet, the middle-aged housewife driving her way to NASCAR glory, the seven-year-old girl one stroke from Olympic gold. Each imagining yielded to his will. Reforming, they melded into a burst of pure liquid velocity.

The resulting surge crested in a tidal wave of dream, the force so great, a lesser surfer would have broken beneath it. Keoni merely shifted his center of gravity. Moving with it, he waited until he reached the point where the dreamscape met the outskirts of the Wastelands, and executed a forward aerial flip. He broke through the barrier between living hopes and fears of death, landed and glided along the dust on bare feet before coming to a graceful stop.

Not wasting a moment, he approached the bane from behind. His senses seized each detail of the predicament his little bird had gotten into. Realization of the creature’s intent caused his lip to curl in a disgusted snarl.

“Wat doing?” he growled, his Hawaiian pidgin accent thick in outrage.

* * *

Ciaran sensed her hero’s arrival a millisecond before his snarl split the air. A corded band of steel slipped between her and the monster and ripped the nightmare away. She gasped, falling forward, dust mixing with saliva to muddy her face. Twisting at the waist, she watched the man lock with the nightmare in mortal combat.

He wrangled one well-muscled arm around the monster’s neck; the other arm he held firmly pressed to his side. Locking one hand onto the opposite wrist, he created a choking vise. The monster reared back on its hind legs in an attempt to flip the man over onto his back. He dug in his heels. The monster matched his strength. The combatants contorted into half-crouching, half-standing positions, fighting to attain the upper hand. Each yanked the other forward and back.

Ciaran froze, gobsmacked. Her eyes widened, and she lost all cognitive ability. To her credit, she didn’t gape until her hero caught her eye and threw her a wink-smile combo. Wow. Her cheeks warmed. Truly cinematic.

Was she actually blushing? He shouldn’t be flirting while battling a thing right out of the worst nightmare she’d never been crazy enough to have. But he was, and he was good at it.

Wrenching his body sideways, he snapped the monster’s neck with a mighty crack. Ciaran winced.

Cocksure he’d finished the creature off, the man tossed the body away—like so much rubbish for the heap. His gaze, however, never left her. The corpse became a prism of light and faded, reabsorbed by the Dreaming. The smile remained. It brightened moments later when he held out his hand to help her up. She took it hesitantly.

An electric jolt shot from each of their bodies and met in the middle, exploding in their own big bang—pure creation energy. Breathless, they gawked at one another. His eyes warmed, and his mouth turned sensual before his sweeping gaze set her body ablaze.

“Damn. You feel that?” he asked in a rolling baritone.

Something in his heavily accented voice enveloped her heart in a soothing balm. Ciaran swallowed.

Bowing in gentlemanly fashion, her hero helped her to her feet, his fingers lingering over hers in a caress. Never one to back down, she returned his steamy look.

Sudden recognition dawned. His eyes remained the same as they’d been in his spirit-animal form.

“Dolphin,” she said, speaking for the first time. “You’re my dolphin.”

“Keo.”

His voice lilted through her.

“No.” Not quite right. She searched her mind for the name she somehow knew to be more authentically his. It came to her as though a memory. Keh-oh-nee. “Your name is Keoni.”

His gaze focused on her mouth, and he swayed almost imperceptibly.

“Keoni”—a beat—“Keoni?” Ciaran reached out and laid her fingertips on his upper arm. The warm, solid flesh beneath them made her fingers tingle.

Dear Lord, her mind had run amok tonight—from the worst of nightmares to the deluxe suite of dreams. Hot, steamy deluxe suite—

“Tell me again,” he said, his gaze still on her mouth, his expression fast approaching dreamy.

“Your name is Keoni. I’m KEER-en.”

The big man’s entire body shuddered as though he shook free of whatever hold her voice had over him. Spooked by the heat he sparked within her, Ciaran snatched her hand back. He laid his fingers over the spot where hers had been.

He regarded her, the skin around his eyes crinkling at the corners.

“The brahs, my friends, call me Keo. For family it’s Keoni. So yeah, you’re right. And I like how you already call me yours.”

The slow smile returned, the scar slashing across his chin enhancing it somehow.

Ciaran hid her embarrassment by letting her sightline drop to his big, bare feet, then let it travel up his lovely calves. Baggy board shorts cut off the view from there, picking up again at his sculpted belly. Shirtless, long and lean with broad shoulders, a swimmer’s waist, and toffee-hued skin—Keoni was truly the stuff of dreams.

A riotous mane of sable waves—sun-bleached near golden at the ends—crowned his dark head and shaded hazel eyes. Eyes that held the glow of good humor within their depths.

Dead sexy. Target locked. Boom ting! He had her. How apropos he pronounced his nickname KO.

He’s seriously a knockout punch.

Undaunted by her silence, Keoni lifted her hand, turning the palm sideways to wrap her arm around his neck. A feat he had to bend to accomplish. He repeated the motion with her other arm, then slid his calloused hands around her waist.

“You like, manu li’i?”

Before she could answer, he lifted her off her feet, leaned in and stole a kiss. A deep one. The kind of mind-blowing, body-blazing lip-lock she’d have to call and tell her Mum all about when she woke up in the morning. So good, so perfect…so hot, it…it…it annoyed the hell out of her. On the verge of spitting fire for reasons she didn’t want to face, she yanked free. Dropping to the ground, she shoved him with all the strength in her diminutive body.

Clearly dazed, Keoni toppled right over, sending a cloud of blood-colored dust shooting into the air, blanketing them both. Ciaran set her shoulders for a fight, but Keoni’s apparent surprise at crash landing in the dirt wrought a chuckle from deep within his chest.

Chapter Two

Ciaran expected anything but laughter in response to the shove. Yelling, an answering shove, perhaps a smack to the cheek; those she could deal with and remain righteously angry. His amusement shamed her. Keoni had been wrong to kiss her without permission but she’d been wrong not to tell him so rather than pushing him down. Flashing a contrite expression she held out a hand to help him up. He reached out to accept without comment.

Her personality had begun to change in some very nasty ways recently. Ciaran knew she needed to get a handle on her volatile emotions before she no longer recognized herself and others stopped wanting to be around her.

“I apologize,” she whispered as Keoni’s fingers clasped her own. Once again the touch of his skin to hers caused a reaction. The Wastelands shifted beneath them, red dirt giving way to the ephemeral fluff of unformed dreamscape. Ciaran tried to pull back but the weight of the big Hawaiian yanked her down. The pair sunk quickly through whorls of dust and dreamscape mist until they were falling against the backdrop of sunset skies.

Ciaran freaked out with all the effects: screaming, clutching his hand in hers while the other hand flailed, cutting deals with God. On the flipside, Keoni looked peaceful. Too peaceful for a man falling fast enough to blur the skies. That’s what tipped her off: he was having a laugh.

A sharp upward tug and the shoop of a parachute being deployed drew Ciaran’s gaze overhead. There was no visible sign of a chute but they’d slowed considerably. While she and Keoni were still headed down, they weren’t in any danger and the landmass below hadn’t gotten any closer during the ride.

Funny boy.

Her gaze landed on Keoni’s smiling lips and she quickly sought diversion from the memory the sight of his mouth called to mind. Glancing downward she was met with pure comedy. Keoni had donned a ridiculously huge pair of parachute pants. Fully rounded like some great white blimp, the pants made him look like a fantastical crossbreed of MC Hammer and a genie. Can’t touch this. Ciaran goggled at the absurdity of the scene. Keoni lifted one eyebrow, then the other and repeated—waggling them in an imitation of misplaced arrogance.

She couldn’t help but giggle before she realized the pull of gravity should mean she’d be hanging by his hand, not dropping at the same rate he was.

“You didn’t?” she said, suspecting he had made an equally silly spectacle of her. She wasn’t wrong. Keoni had dressed her in a skirt voluminous enough to match his pants, the bell of the garment billowing to form her parachute. He was totally mad and the look on his face said he relished his insanity.

Ciaran relaxed and shyly let go of his hand. He released hers slowly, tipping his head to one side as he pointed to their surroundings. New wonders awaited her. Keoni had filled the sky with all manner of flying sea life: softly fluorescent jellyfish, Japanese koi with wings of streaming ribbon, purple whales puffing golden clouds through their blowholes and iridescent manta ray in flocks like geese. Ciaran marveled at it all.

“You’ve never explored the dreamscape?” he asked.

“No, I’m confined to the path the soul I’m escorting has chosen. We call it the Last Hurrah and that’s all I’ve known until today.”

“It’s different for you now.”

“Why now?”

“You’re becoming a Somnian.”

“Not sure what that is but I assure you I’m a psychopomp.”

“You called for us and we heard you. You can’t still be a psychopomp.”

“Why?”

He was clearly taken aback. Apparently he expected her to take his word for why she was no longer a soul conductor but hadn’t considered his reasoning himself. Brilliant.

“Becoming a dream guardian is a step up. It doesn’t make sense you’d still be stuck in psychopomp mode,” he said.

“Stuck?”

Ciaran narrowed her eyes. Here’s another man who thinks he’s the great authority. Keoni must have sensed her mood because he threw up his hands in surrender.

“K’den, you’re a psychopomp,” he said, yet didn’t bother pretending he believed it. “You’ve never seen a creature like the one that attacked you then, yeah?”

She wanted to focus on the conversation. She really did, especially with her safety in the balance, but it was hard to concentrate with the wind roaring past her ears louder than a toddler’s whisper and the imagined threat of the ground rising up to break her limbs.

“Maybe we could stop the steady plummet?” She pointed down. “I appreciate learning from falling but it’s a bit scary.”

“Falling’s not so bad,” he said, stacking the words with a wealth of meaning completely unrelated to the effects of gravity. His tone and expression suggested a whole other kind of falling.

The world flip-flopped, the land below them snapping into place above their heads and the sunset sky turning wrong side up below them.

“Amazing,” she said.

“Now touch your toes.”

Ciaran shot him a questioning squint of the eyes. What would she want to touch her toes for?

“What,” Keoni said, “you scared touching your toes will add extra plummet?”

Shaking her head Ciaran obliged him and bent to touch her fingertips to her feet. He did the same. Nothing happened. After several seconds—more than a sufficient show of patience, she figured—Ciaran looked askance at Keoni, her fingers still wrapped around her toes.

“Let your legs fall,” he said.

“What? That’s just silly. How can I let—” Ciaran unwittingly released the position so she could tease him. Whoa. Rather than her upper body rising up, her legs dropped below setting things to right side up and leaving her to drift on air currents. Keoni followed suit. “Floating is okay?” he asked.

“Floating is good.”

He nodded in response and the man looked entirely too good to keep staring at. She needed something else to think about or, better, an exit. Ciaran reached out to her body hoping she’d wake up. She didn’t. Once again something, perhaps the power of the Dreaming itself, cut her off from returning to consciousness in the Waking World—the same as it had been with the monster. Before she could follow her musings to a conclusion she grasped something else.

“You asked if I’d seen the monster before. I didn’t think I had but now I’m thinking it’s possible. At the least I’ve seen something like it.”

“Before today?”

“Yeah, pale flickers in vague predator shapes. They always appear at the corner of my vision and bring on a sense of being hunted. Not a comfortable sensation at all.” Ciaran wrapped her arms around herself to ward off the sense of foreboding dallying with her. “Had the same feeling right before the beast struck. At first I thought it was the black dog—”

“Black dog?” Keoni perked at the mention.

“Yes, but he’s my friend. He frightened me at first but I’m certain he’s not the problem.”

“How can you be?”

“The black dog showed up after the flickers, by a week or so, and he always lets me see him.”

Keoni reached out and laid a hand on her shoulder, rubbing her arm. “How long have these pale flickers been stalking you?”

She laughed nervously, seeking levity. “You make it sound like they’re homicidal fans and I’m the celebrity in question.”

“I misled you, manu. They’re worse than stalkers and you were the object of one’s lust. No doubt you noticed what the bane was trying to do to you.” He didn’t say it with any cruelty, more like he wanted to make sure she understood the dangers.

She’d noticed. She couldn’t help but be aware when the thing had a plonker the size of a wooly mammoth’s. Ick. Perhaps she should cut back on watching the National Geographic Channel. The images in her head weren’t pleasant and brought out the sarcasm in her reply—a defense against mounting fear.

“Didn’t notice at all. I only go for pork daggers twice the size of that monster’s.”

Keoni rolled his eyes in unleashed amusement.

In truth, Ciaran was more grateful to Keoni then he knew. Had he come to the rescue any later the creature would have laid her bare and, well, she refused to think past that point…

“How long?” he asked again.

“Two weeks. You think the monster and these flickers I’ve been seeing are related as well, don’t you?”

“Banes. The creature that attacked you is called a bane. Yeah, I do think they’re related.” He stroked his chin. “Two weeks is about the time period it takes to transition from human, psychopomp or whatever into a fledgling Somnian.”

A huff drew his attention to her face and he amended his statement. “I know you don’t think you’re a Somnian but I’ve got to tell you—”

“Where do you get off telling me anything about myself? You don’t know me.”

“No, but I want to. You gonna let me?”

She swung herself roundabout to face away from him. Not easy to do while floating on air—which added to her annoyance. “I only want to wake up.”

Ciaran tried once more but failed to awaken. Something still had her blocked from consciousness. She closed her eyes for a few moments, working to behave a bit more like an adult. No luck of that with Keoni around. He floated past her in a reclining position, his head propped up by a bent arm—her own personal Cheshire cat.

“Until you’re able to wake up, let me show you the dreamscape. Just in case you ever fall off the psychopomp path again and I’m not around.”

She folded her arms tightly across her chest, closed her eyes once more and took a deep breath.

The whisper of his suddenly thickened accent tickled her earlobe. “What else you gonna do, manu?”

She whipped around to find the big Hawaiian floating beside her. In his reclined pose their mouths were only two fingers from one another’s. Her lips parted and his curved into a half smile. She took two more deep breaths and leaned in, stopping short of contact but close enough to lick his bottom lip if she extended her tongue. “What am I going to do?” She paused and answered her own question. “Kick your ass.”

He laughed, flipped and jogged back six paces. Ciaran hadn’t noticed they’d touched down. The dreamscape was truly phenomenal. Or perhaps it was the man who was amazing. One side of her wanted to find out; the other really didn’t want to know.

Around them a verdant tropical jungle, replete with looming palm trees, sprang into life.

“You want my ass? Come get it.” Keoni’s voice retreated through the fat green leaves, almost lost to the calls of birds. She shouldn’t chase him. Ciaran knew it but she couldn’t help herself. With all the emotions wearing her down tonight, a romp through the jungle seemed just the respite she needed.

“You must be worried,” she said to the flora and fauna because the Hawaiian was no longer in sight. “You landed so you could run.”

He chuckled from somewhere to her right. “I had to.” Keoni’s voice teased her from the left this time. “I can float but I can’t fly.”

Ciaran turned. “You’re going to learn not to mess me about,” she said to what she figured was his general direction. Somehow he’d already gotten behind her.

“Bumbye. Bye.” The sound of his footsteps went crashing through the trees.

Ciaran spun and yelled after him. “What does bumbye mean?” No answer came. “Bugger!” The chase had begun.

She tracked him through ever-changing terrain. Pitfalls popped up without warning: mudslides, quicksand, a barrel of monkeys. He was truly having a laugh but no matter what trail he dreamed up she never got hurt or even dirty—just annoyed. It wasn’t long before she stopped beneath a vine-covered tree to plan a new strategy.

Sudden silence enveloped the clearing. Mere seconds passed before a mounting buzz shattered the stillness. Lush greenery parted and what had to be a prehistoric wasp zigged toward her. Ciaran froze, hypnotized by the sword-sized stinger the massive insect pivoted to impale her on. She must have blacked out…or something. Her awareness returned to a resounding metallic clang! Ciaran opened one eye and dropped her arms from the criss-cross she’d thrown up in front of her body and opened the other eye. The bong sound continued to resound through the jungle and the wasp lay at her feet having fallen on its back, its stinger broken off at an angle perpendicular to its black and yellow body. As she watched its legs spasmed in time with stuttering wings.

Keoni stepped out from behind a wide tree trunk across the clearing. “Nicely done.”

“Thank you once again.” Ciaran bent over to catch her breath.

“Wasn’t me. You defended yourself.” He made his way over to her, coming to a stop beside the downed wasp. The insect blurred and dissipated. “I just didn’t see what weapon you used.”

“I didn’t.”

Keoni sighed pleasantly. “You did and whatever the weapon was it was big, black and made of metal. Like a shield.”

“I didn’t realize I could create things out of the dreamscape.” A thought occurred to Ciaran. “If you can kill predators this easily why didn’t you get rid of the bane the same way?”

“I dreamed the wasp up, manifested it, but the banes exist of their own accord.”

“Oh,” she said, then balked. “This entire business was a training exercise, wasn’t it?”

He had the nerve to chuckle. “Yeah. I’m proud of you.”

She crossed the meter or so between them and gave him her most menacing glare. The effect was likely lost on him. She’d need a chair to stand on if she were going to curse at him eye to eye.

“You don’t get to be proud of me. You, great hulking—”

“Idjit,” said a male voice behind her.

“Yes, idiot,” she said to Keoni. Turning she got a look at their visitor. Well, now it was certainly becoming obvious why “man of my dreams” was a cliché in the Waking World. The new guy sported a buzz cut and wore a cinnamon-hued motorcycle jacket over a white T-shirt. If the barbwire tattoo wrapping around his neck didn’t warn you to pump your brakes and dodge the bad boy, the sardonic set to his rugged First Nations features certainly did. “Thank you…”

“Jay,” he said, and as though an afterthought added, “The palomino. We’ve met.”

Ciaran shaped her mouth into a silent O.

“Howzit brah, why are you here?” Keoni said with exasperated pleasure.

“Lots of banes on the move, big man. Just wanted to make sure you two were getting along…okay.”

Keoni looked from his friend to her and back. “You wanted to see what she looks like.”

Jay shrugged and walked over to stand beside him. They both looked down at Ciaran. A bit intimidating but she had to admit hugely titillating. “Thanks for holding her in the dreamscape long enough for me to get the chance,” Jay said.

Keoni’s eyes widened. He shook his head no as subtly as he could but Ciaran had already caught on to his reaction. Not that it mattered. Jay hadn’t seen Keoni’s signal and continued. “It can’t be easy keeping her here. She’s crazy powerful for a newbie and from what I saw catches on quick,” he said, finishing up a more effective damning of Keoni than Keoni would have likely accomplished on his own.

Ire churned just below the surface of Ciaran’s skin. These men and their need for control—it was too much.

“You’re the reason I can’t wake up. What else have you done?” she asked with deceptive calm. Vexed beyond reason or reasonable explanation, Ciaran aimed a kick at Keoni’s shin. She woke up mid-swing and missed.

Chapter Three

The Man and the Beast, each, hated lovers and dreamers with vehemence. Lovers were fickle, and dreamers teased; both were cruel, both were edible and devouring them made more sense than not. The Beast ran its tongue over multiple rows of razor teeth, and the Man licked his lips.

The Man and the Beast were both rapacious. Though they hungered for very different pursuits. Neither sought flesh. Or they both did. Keeping these things straight was getting more and more difficult…but they didn’t eat flesh. No. They merely required it. Yes. The Man and the Beast were certain of this. They were not anima— Well, perhaps they were, but purely in the figurative sense. What they made of the flesh they acquired was…well, beastly. So the term animal suited them. They liked it that way. Or they despised it. The Man scratched the Beast behind the ears and ran the opposite hand through his hair. Keeping these things straight was getting more and more confusing.

The pair descended the stairs. The Man ran his hand over the banister, laying claim to every inch of wood along the slide down. All hail the conquering lairds of the lair.

He stopped to straighten a photo in the gallery of family portraits and candid snapshots decorating the stairwell wall. A whim struck, and he kissed the glass with a loud mwah. Aww, who didn’t love a nuclear family? No reason not to kiss them all. And he did. He had a certain flair for the dramatic and gave the photos all the frenzied adoration of a tween snuggling a rock star’s sweat towel. A progressively louder series of smacks resounded through the home as he poured on the melodrama.

In one picture the family plummeted past the camera on a roller coaster. The matriarch wrapped herself around the daughter as if to say “save me!” All four screamed their laughter. The Man kissed this image two times, jumped up and down and clapped his hands in glee. The Beast rose on its hind legs and spun round twice. Yippee. The good times were over. This family had gone boom! Bye-bye. The pair cackled. Boom. Nuclear. They cracked themselves up.

The coup had been an intimate affair, the players limited to the Waking World members of the horde led by the family matriarch. Yay for surprises. With Mommy at the helm, Sonny Boy, Baby Girl and Dear Ole Dad surrendered like the punk bitches they were and the home became a spoil of war, passing into the Man and the Beast’s possession.

Yum. Possession. The word tasted of power and force. The Beast rolled a long pink tongue over its sallow maw, savoring the last remnants of the heady flavor.

Sonny Boy, Baby Girl and Dear Ole Dad had stopped whimpering. Sad enough the screaming had ceased an hour before, but the Man and the Beast had particularly enjoyed the whimpering and had begun to descend the stairs in hopes of aiding in an encore.

Aid. Now that word tasted foul.

Foul as the Somnians who lived to come to the rescue and, on top of that, counted as lovers and dreamers—the perfect nemeses for both the Man, whose lip curled, and the Beast, who snarled. The bastards would come soon. The pair sneered in unison. They couldn’t help it. Dream guardians took the joy out of murder and mayhem. Prudes, the lot of them. At any rate, the guild would’ve sensed the family in peril by now. Help was on the way. The Man hid an expression of gleeful anticipation behind an upraised hand, and the Beast snickered. Dream guardian rats to the trap. Easy.

Too easy to trick foolish lovers like the Somnian who stank of fish guts and arrogance. The Beast especially wanted to kill him. The musky scent of its bloodlust spiked the air. The Man liked that aloha bastard even less—the Hawaiian who had dared to kiss her. The Delectable.

A red-cloaked figure stepped forward to greet them at the foot of the stairs. The hood obscuring her face shifted forward with her curt nod, a confirmation she had already broken all but her daughter as the Man and the Beast had asked. They wanted to watch her dismantle the mind of the little girl and were glad Mommy would allow them the thrill. The bitch worked efficiently.

Who knew such ruthlessness had been hidden beneath the veneer of domesticity all those years. Certainly not Dear Ole Dad, who lay strewn half on, half off the living-room couch. His transition had already begun. If werewolves existed, they’d likely resemble Dear Ole Dad at midturn, pale fur sprouting and a maw reshaping the jawline.

Reaching inside the hood, the Man stroked Mommy’s cheek to communicate his pleasure in the job she’d done. Light caught her eyes, and he paused. If he and the Beast didn’t rule here, they might have been afraid. The change intensified her blue eyes and rimmed them in vibrant red, the same shade of crimson as her cloak. Most of the horde bore unnaturally blue eyes, but the addition of the red was…unsettling. He and the Beast liked that. Plus, the matriarch was ruthless.

The Man wound a lock of her now slate blue hair around his thumb and forefinger. Lovely. They would’ve enjoyed taking turns mounting Mommy if their desires warranted. But they did not. They longed for the Delectable.

The pair’s minds returned to the tiny psychopomp woman—his clanswoman and flame to both his and the Beast’s desire. Sweet Delectable. The Man moaned at the image, and the Beast panted. The Delectable, the little bird and sweet precious, belonged to them alone. The Beast wagged its tail, and the Man rubbed the flat of his palm over the tightening in his groin.

Neither the Man nor the Beast could remember when they’d first scented the Delectable. They did not like the foulness of memory clogging their minds in the now. Memory was pain and the Man and the Beast preferred to cause harm, never to relive their own.

Whenever she had appeared on their radar, it must have happened after they’d become a team. No. Her existence had come to the Man only in the Beast’s memories, the remembrances of when it had stalked the plains of the dreamscape. Yes. The Beast’s recollections did not burn the way the Man’s did and having recognized the Delectable as clan—possessing the same accursed affliction as the Man—required the Beast’s rather talented snout to sniff out. Further, the Beast had made the connection between the Man’s scent and that of the woman they would both come to desire. Yes. The Beast must have found her in the Dreaming when she had been merely a psychopomp and the Man and the Beast were still courting one another, still locked in the getting-to-know-you stages of their partnership.

The Man considered himself, the Beast and the Delectable to be a fortunate culmination of events. When the Man had awoken to the power his cooperation with the Beast brought, and had shared the entirety of Beast’s knowledge, he’d accepted what singular entities they were. The understanding of the Delectable’s similarity to the Man and her value to their cause spoke to their subconscious selves from within memory. Perhaps the past was not so terrible. The Man and the Beast decided not to test their new theory. Pain seethed at the edge of their awareness and they would not have it spoiling their plans. No. Not plans. Party. Yes.

How much more would they enjoy murder and mayhem when the Delectable was theirs? Only today, they had gotten a vicarious taste of her. One of their minions had come close to claiming their prize. The Man and the Beast had controlled the underling, known what it knew, orchestrated its movements and hungers. They’d held her beneath them while she’d scrambled and prayed. The pleasure of the memory took the Man, and his hand continued to move unconsciously. The Beast crept closer to his side. Had they known the Delectable was a neophyte Somnian, they would have wooed her differently and wouldn’t have trusted merely directing their minion to isolate her in the Wastelands where, as a dream guardian, she could call on the rat-bastard Hawaiian for help and he would hear her.

Eh, the Man and the Beast knew they were being dishonest. The Beast hacked—the idea of deceit a figurative hairball in its throat. The Man coughed at the back of his hand in a delicately foppish manner.

Had their Delectable not begun the transition into a Somnian they’d never have had access to her in the dreamscape, free of the protections inherent to psychopomps. And, sweet bonus, there would be more and better chances to have her now her unique power signal—part soul conductor, part dream guardian and part kin—glowed beacon-bright in the Waking World. The Man and the Beast could track their nemeses, the Somnians, anywhere in the two worlds, and as a clanswoman the Delectable had a discernable flavor, different from other dream guardians. They knew they should be grateful to the Somnians for this. The Man decided to thank them with death. The Beast agreed. It was only fair.

Anticipation turned the flow of their thoughts. The small pack the Beast had ruled in the dreamscape had grown continuously and they’d begun to build a Waking World horde as complement. The next time they caught the Delectable alone, they hoped she would run or cry in terror. They hoped she would run and cry. Such emotions would salt the feast of her body and make it ever so much more delicious.

The Man moaned and gazed down at his hand. His thumb stroked the tip of his penis, his fist pumping in quick, sharp pulls. Soooo good. So helpless. The Beast humped his leg in a jerky rhythm matched to the pace of his hand. He kicked it away with a bark of laughter. The Beast cackled but turned its ministrations to the floor.

The family matriarch reached for his hardened phallus with one hand and bent to see to the Beast with the other. The Beast dodged, and the Man knocked her hand away. She whimpered beneath the red cloak, but even her distress failed to excite the pair. Inclining her head, she looked askance. It reminded the Man of a dog, and he petted the top of her head as he strode past her on his way to the kitchen. The Beast quit humping the carpet and followed. They both sighed. Too bad Mommy couldn’t slake their desires. Neither he nor the Beast knew why, but they only “got it up” for the Delectable. The Beast nipped at the Man. Correction: They could always get it up but they desired only the Delectable. They’d need to find her again soon. Their minions would sniff her out in the Dreaming, if she returned there, and the Man and the Beast would follow her trail in the Waking World. Yes. There would be other, more delicious opportunities. The Beast snickered, and the Man did the same.

Chapter Four

The kick Ciaran aimed at Keoni’s shin flipped the duvet off the bed instead. Searing pain composed of images shot through her mind: a pair of shadows in the shapes of a man and a monster, a red-cloaked abomination called “Mommy” and a mushroom cloud devouring souls, not bodies.

The imagery ached and burned as if etching its likeness onto her brain cells. She drew her legs up to her chin and buried her face between her knees. As abruptly as it started, the pain stopped. Ciaran’s gaze darted left, then right. She didn’t want to move in case the pain returned. It didn’t. She sat up, crossed herself and gave thanks for her return to the Waking World. It was over, she assured herself, hoping she hadn’t fallen back on delusions.

Morning sun drenched the southern-facing bedroom. She squinted to take in her surroundings.

Where…?

She’d escaped to Atlanta. Right.

Her current digs were aptly titled the Diamond Suite, the entire space decorated in varying textures of creamy white—faux fur, stone, raw silk—with touches of khaki to keep it interesting. Not a choice she would have made, but as a very grateful guest, she couldn’t argue with the pure decadence of the room. Not when it could hold her entire flat twice over and, if sold on eBay, the custom-molded clear acrylic bed would pay her mortgage for half a year at least. She’d looked it up.

Ciaran in Wonderland, she mused, throwing her legs over the side of the bed and stretching the kinks of the night away. Cool air reacted with the sheen of moisture on her skin. She shivered, pulled the spread up off the floor and wrapped it back around her.

The psychopomp journey of the night before reasserted itself in a shock of images, bright and slashing. Events shouldn’t have gone down the way they had. The Otherside was always ominous. It was the land of pure spirit. The jump-off point to death. But last night she had crossed over into something else entirely. She suspected—though she couldn’t explain why—if the beast had succeeded in mating with her, the result would have been…a very real pregnancy!

Ciaran jerked the back of a hand over her mouth to keep from retching. Rushing to the bathroom, she leaned over the sink and rested her forehead against the mirror. After several minutes, the nausea subsided.

The Otherside had never posed a threat to her as a psychopomp. She conducted souls to the great beyond, escorting them through one Last Hurrah along the way. That was the job. What happened last night occupied unknown territory. What if it happened again? For the foreseeable future she’d be knocking back Red Bull cocktails to induce insomnia. Until she figured out a way to protect herself, sleep was off the menu.

Feeling better, she lifted her head and winced. Nice.

Whatever happened to reciprocity? She had been willing to give her ex-boyfriend, Raphael, her everything. All the love and care she’d been saving for the One. In return, he had given her his fists.

Her fingers explored the bruised area around her left eye without pressing too hard against the broken blood vessel streaking the white. Her tongue touched the cut through her swollen lip. In concert, the injuries formed a beacon; clear reminders love didn’t live there anymore.

Tsking, Ciaran turned on the faucet and got out her toothbrush.

When her family had learned what Raphael had done, some had wanted to dispose of him. As in Authorities Found Bits and Pieces of a Man in the Thames Today. The others wanted him in jail. Caribbean Brits were fiercely protective of family.

Both options scared her. Raphael had grown up with a criminal element—to say it nicely. She worried he or his friends would retaliate. After all, the bastard knew where her mum lived. So instead of seeking justice, vigilante or otherwise, Ciaran assuaged her family with assurances she’d given as good as she’d gotten. And she had. Raphael had beaten her as though she were a man, so she’d fought back like one.

Bashed him in the balls, too.

Ciaran flashed herself a self-satisfied look in the mirror. She hoped she’d done permanent damage. Served him right if he shot blanks from now on.

She placed one hand on her hip and pumped the other fist punk-rock-style—just another badass chick protecting the world from demon spawn. Yeah, right.

Finished cleaning her teeth, she followed with a quick swig of mouthwash, took out her anti-acne cleanser—no need to be spotty and scared—and gently lathered her face.

Delusions of grandeur aside, maybe not notifying the police had been a mistake. In every mirror, the shadow of the girl she’d once been confronted her. She’d lost her imagined demon-slayer edge, and only faint memories remained. Raphael played the role of supervillain, an incubus draining away her power, and she didn’t know if she’d ever get it back. Bastard.

Ciaran turned and stormed back into the bedroom, snatching up the book she was reading, Om, Words of Power, and her robe as she headed toward the stairs. Once she’d wrapped the fluffy fabric around her she tucked the book beneath an arm. Such an interesting read—the idea sound had the ability to create or destroy, just as music recalled memories and affected mood.

Ciaran believed it. She’d seen the power of sound firsthand with Raphael. In the early stages of their relationship, she’d averted his nasty moods by singing certain songs to him, a feat even her cooking hadn’t accomplished, and if the compliments her family and friends consistently offered were true, her meals were amazing. But her voice seemed near supernatural in its power of suggestion.

It went both ways, though. Her acerbic wit easily lacerated friends and foes as often as her voice healed them. She couldn’t help it. Biting retorts were second nature. She’d never been one to back down…not…before…never before.

Ciaran faltered at the top of the stairs. Woozy, she reached for the railing to keep from tumbling down. Maybe what happened with Raphael was her fault. Her smart mouth had pushed him too far. As suddenly as the possibility entered her mind, her mood took another violent shift. Damn Raphael for the doubt. The physical pain meant nothing next to what he’d stolen. Her self-esteem lay cut in shreds, uncertainty dogged her every move and tears fell at the tiniest provocation.

She screamed, dashed offending tears from her eyes and stomped down the stairs.

The anger was the worst part. The shame and embarrassment of being labeled one of those women produced a bomb in the pit of her stomach so volatile, anything could set her off. Ciaran recognized the problem but couldn’t stop. She hated being angry, which pissed her off even more.

Her bare feet touched down in the soaring foyer. Ignoring the cold marble floors, she marched to the front door and whipped it open with a bang.

Georgia sunshine and the immaculate lawns of the gated community greeted her. The acidic edge of her anger melted away. Who knew people lived this way? Each house—yeah, right, more accurately palace—sold for millions and was worth every quid.

Right about now she needed the safety of barriers in her life. Secretly, she’d have exchanged her soul for the peace those tall iron gates provided. Not to mention the security of the guards at each entrance.

Thank goodness her favorite frequent guest to the hotel she managed had offered the property as a favor. Otherwise the sanctuary of the Buckhead estate would be a daydream. She sighed. She certainly would have fallen apart in the most spectacular of ways if her client hadn’t carried such great affection for her and her hotel’s five-star service. She needed this place. Needed it desperately.

Ciaran walked down to the gate at the bottom of the driveway, where the morning paper awaited her. Yet another of the hotel-style amenities accompanying her stay, each morning she found the paper neatly tucked into the two-sided mailbox built into one of the brick columns on either side of the stone drive.

An opalescent Aston Martin DBS partially blocked the driveway on the opposite side of the gate. She mentally added the rare, luxury vehicle to her all-time wish list. Behind the wheel of a car like that she could work off some serious frustration.

As she neared the mailbox, the refrain of a familiar song surrounded her. A ballad whose title and lyrics she couldn’t quite recall. Where was it coming from? Perhaps the DBS’s driver was playing it…and…she wished…they’d turn the dreadful thing off. Something in the melody pulled at her heart as though in sympathy for a friend.

A shiver lifted goose bumps along her arms and neck. The melody set her teeth on edge and left a bitter aftertaste in her mouth. Its notes didn’t carry the joy of love at all but instead had her bristling to shield her mind from its promise of sinister intent. Curiouser and curiouser.

Ciaran grabbed the newspaper and started toward the house. The presence of a spirit—cold and sharp—more oppressive than the ache in the song, turned her back. The Aston Martin’s owner got out for a look around, and the familiar melody escaped the open door to hit Ciaran full blast. Although the song filled her with unease, it was easier to ignore now she’d seen him.

He was tall, even taller than Keoni. Of course, everyone appeared tall when compared to her whopping five feet three inches. But if Keoni stood six-three, this guy had to be six-eight or six-nine. His colorless skin placed him in albino territory, and his complementary-hued hair, barely golden enough to earn the label platinum blond, flowed well past his shoulders. Ciaran took in the ivory turtleneck matched to an immaculately tailored gray wool overcoat, and shuddered again. Brrrrrr. His bearing was regal, chilling—one of an ice king.

He must have sensed her presence as well, because he turned his cool blue stare on her. Cool was too mild a term. Frosty fit better. Then he sneered. And it was beastly, full of things long dead, and his eyes reflected the same. She’d chosen the perfect nickname. Ice King.

Oh lovely. Ciaran simply wasn’t in the mood for any serial-killer shenanigans. If this guy moved into the neighborhood and went on a rampage, she’d cut him up in pieces too little for a CSI investigation, before burying him in the back garden… Well, she would if she could find her old confidence again. She blew out a harsh breath in frustration. Men were seriously beginning to get on her nerves.

The Ice King quirked a brow at her, then scanned the area a moment more before getting back into the car. As he drove off, Ciaran pulled the collar of the robe up to her chin and wrapped her arms around herself for warmth.

“Whatever he’s looking for, I hope he finds it in the Bermuda Triangle and gets lost,” she mumbled, heading back inside.

She closed the door and shivered. This time she felt the cold marble the moment her feet touched the floor. Glancing to the side of the entryway, she spotted the woven silk runner she had kicked into a pile the night before. The thing was pretty but, without traction underneath, often sent her sailing across the room and nearly through a wall. Which was how it had ended up crumpled and out of the way. Still, it kept her toes from freezing.

Of course, there were other reasons for the chill seeping into her bones. After locking eyes with the Ice King, she imagined a volcanic eruption would feel as frosty as a London winter. Ciaran tucked the newspaper beneath her arm and bent to make quick work of setting the sunset-hued runner back in proper order. She needed a hot shower, fast.

Climbing the stairs, she shook out the newspaper for a look. Wallace Flint’s death had made the front page. …passed away quietly in his sleep at his Texas home. Ciaran smiled. Quietly? Not likely. He’d gone out with a bang, sailing through the air in the little red convertible of his dreams. Huzzah!

She took a moment to savor the memory of the TV star’s elation. No matter how scary things got, she knew she would eventually find her way back to psychopomp duty. Her day job was great but not nearly as fulfilling. Plus, what she did for the dead balanced out the danger. She just didn’t want to get dry humped by nightmare hyenas in the bargain. She’d have to find a way to deal with the creature if she ever came across it again.

The robe dropped to the bedroom floor in a heap of aqua fleece. Ciaran giggled at the little pastel lamb it made. Inside the bathroom, she turned on all three shower jets, filling the room with a rainforest mist. A sprinkle of mango oil topped off the effect. Showers were best when the whole bathroom steamed up with the fragrance of the Caribbean.

On a sidelong glance at the mirror, Raphael’s face rippled into view, his self-satisfied leer reflected in her bruises. Ciaran ignored the specter of boyfriend past and worked her curly black hair into a French braid. When she glanced back, Raphael’s face became Keoni’s. She sucked her teeth and shooed him away. “Where were you when I needed you, Mister Dream Man? Nowhere in the real world, only in my dreams.”

Ciaran almost had her white baby tee over her head when she heard wails. She yanked the shirt back into place and listened. Her ears twitched, the sound so distant, it might not have been real. But there it was again. Somewhere in the Dreaming, a little boy screamed. Not good. The same mocking cackle she’d heard during the night rang on the heels of his cries. Bad. Real bad.

The how and why she could suddenly hear events in the Dreaming while still awake were forgotten in Ciaran’s frantic haste to get to the boy.

She would have to go to sleep.

Not likely with her heart ready to rattle out of her chest. Regardless, she’d have to try.

Closing her eyes, she blocked out the hiss of the shower and recalled the way power buzzed through her on those nights she phased into psychopomp dreaming. The serenity of those moments provided guidance as she forced her heart rate to slow and entered a state close to meditation.

Someone needs me, someone needs me, someone needs me, echoed in her mind. The transition began, but it was different this time. She didn’t fall asleep to slip quietly into the Dreaming. Instead she forcefully projected herself outward. The sensation rocked her as nothing she’d ever experienced—the pins and needles of a sleeping limb turned internal. Everything she was hurled through a kaleidoscope tunnel. Not consciousness alone or a spirit animal, but an imprint of her soul. Great God! She wasn’t dreaming this time around. She’d completely left her body while still awake.

What had happened to her last night? This was not the way of a psychopomp. Maybe Keoni was right about her becoming a Somnian.

The sensation of pushing through a fog thick as cotton and the dizziness of her stomach dropping to her knees preceded her return to the dreamscape. Finally the fog cleared, parting in a rolling curtain. The black dog greeted her, jumping to press dexterous front paws into her thighs. Its glowing yellow gaze held hers for a moment; then the dog bounded away. The fog closed in behind the retreating tail.

Brilliant. On her own and back among nightmares.

Chapter Five

Keoni waited, gliding through the dreamscape on bare feet in the same manner he skimmed water on his board in the Waking World. Ciaran didn’t return. Either she’d woken up, or that sweet little body of hers concealed even more surprises than he knew and she could hide herself within the fabric of the Dreaming. He’d never encountered someone of her unique makeup before. Of course, if she could hide herself, she never would have been caught by the bane. Things weren’t adding up.

Calling on his power of imagining, he reshaped the dreamscape around him into his version of Hanalei Bay. The half-moon-shaped beach on the North Shore of Kauai was a boss spot to surf—especially in winter. Dreamscape fog churned, billowing upward and out, manifesting white sand and a rise of the sheer rocky cliff above it. Keoni’s mind began to clear. He needed to ride Hanalei’s waters. He needed to think.

Newly formed waves rose to accommodate him. He nodded in anticipation, the curve of his lower lip revealing his excitement as he pushed off to meet the challenge of the surf he’d created. Now he could think.

No doubt Ciaran had begun to take on Somnian powers. This was clear from her availability as a mate, but also in her ability to call out to him and his brahs. Somnians picked up on the distress of dreamers; dreamers did not call out to them. The Waking World had no idea the Dream Guardian Guild existed. Ciaran could call on them because she’d become one of them without a doubt—a newbie, but definitely one of their own.

True, yet Keoni remained at a loss to explain the confusion of powers she’d displayed. Especially when she hadn’t shown the most basic of Somnian defenses and changed the dreamscape around her to help fend off the bane. Any dream guardian would have done so instinctually, which said she was more psychopomp than Somnian. And the contradictions came full circle. He knew she couldn’t still be a psychopomp. Unless it was possible to be both…

Talk about a hard rub. What entity could survive the double workload?

Nothing about his little bird made sense and the only thing he knew for certain was she couldn’t defend herself well enough to be set loose in the dreamscape outside the protection of a psychopomp journey. The image of her returning alone and with limited knowledge of defending against a bane attack bothered him.

Another conundrum, banes attacked Somnians all the time; fledglings even more often. But normally the creatures’ intent was to kill, to thin the ranks of their dream-guardian nemeses. He had never seen any of the creatures’ three forms—the beneficent howlers, the rapacious banes, or the demonlike ankou—try to mate their prey. It was lolo.

Keoni’s board hit the beach. He trotted a few steps onto the sand before he flipped his board and paddled back out.

Of course, the descent from howler to ankou epitomized crazy. In their true forms, the howlers were indeed nightmares, but they were things of obsidian beauty, huge lupine beings necessary to human development. Whether people knew it or not, howlers forced mankind to face their phobias and helped them learn to fight for themselves. The nightmares became rapacious only when tainted by hunger for fright. When a howler began to feed on fear, it turned bane. The banes distorted the human mind through tortures built of terror. If allowed to devolve unchecked, banes took root within the human heart and mind and eventually hijacked the host body, entering the physical realm to become ankou. An old-school power play if ever he’d seen one.

That’s where the dream guardians came in. Somnians did their best to exterminate the creatures at the bane stage, because once they perpetrated a hostile takeover of a human being, they transformed flesh into living horrors worse than serial killers and mass murderers. Ankou—the death bringers, demons that ripped people to shreds and fed on the destructive energy.

A wave broke over Keoni, and he shot through the barrel it formed, trailing a hand along the water wall behind him.

Banes were strange, twisted things, but in this case he’d witnessed one lusting after Ciaran. His manu li’i was special—in some really disturbing ways. He and the rest of his Somnian brahs recognized it the moment her distress call went out. Each of the alpha bachelors—Jay, Alexi, Archer and Keo—had responded to her cry for aid and the mating imperative held within.

Pride expanded his chest. She had chosen him, had even intuited his true name. But when he should have been able to hold her in the Dreaming, she had popped out of her own accord, which should never happen. No psychopomp or fledgling on any level should have been able to break the hold of a pro dream guardian. But she had.

Wings fluttered at his ear, and he gazed upward. The sound hadn’t been made by a bird; it was an alert. Sure enough, Archer’s symbol, the head of a raven, the wings sweeping around and over to form a circle, projected against the backdrop of dreamscape clouds. He and his brahs had been summoned.

He swept his senses over the dreamscape one last time. Where are you, manu? No response. Not even a blip. He sighed in resignation. His first instinct said Archer could wait, but he knew better. His squad leader’s call couldn’t be denied. Keoni would have to wait for Ciaran’s return to the Dreaming to settle things between them anyway.

Calling his power to him, he dissolved his illusion of the bay, and waves pulsed to life at his feet. He turned and shot forward on the crest, glancing back at Archer’s symbol. The brah definitely had style. You’d have thought he was Batman. Heh, come to think of it Batman’s creator, Bob Kane, very easily could have seen Archer in a dream and based the iconic character on him. Stranger things had happened, and Archer was old, older than any human could be, and every other dream guardian was most definitely human. Archer? Who knew.

Keoni chuckled. The dreamscape became a blur around him, coalescing to reform in various scenes. To his left, two little black girls played patty-cake in a field of flowers, the brims of their hats filtering sunlight. Ahead and to the right, a boy wizard mourned the loss of his gray-bearded mentor. Something moved at the edge of his vision, and he turned in time to see an image of the Caped Crusader swing over Gotham’s rooftops. The array of images from books were always a sure sign the Somnian home base was nearby.

More vignettes shaped the iridescent substance of the dreamscape, each of them a beloved moment from a book, any book ever read by a dreamer or dreamed by a writer. He’d reach the Libros Arcanum in four, maybe five more scenes. Keoni rubbed his hand through his hair and shook his head. He had no idea why Somnians chose such pretentious names for things. It wasn’t even proper Latin. Libros Arcanum. He scoffed. Why not call it what it was? The Secret Library or, mo’ bettah, the Big Ass Library—BAL for short. Heh. The BAL: home to the Dream Guardian Guild, and basically the Somnian Embassy.

The end of his musings brought him to stop at the stone steps leading into the big-ass library in question. The Libros Arcanum, every library in existence or that had ever existed—all and none simultaneously. The pair of griffin statues standing guard at either side of the front steps shook free of their stone facades. Springing to life, they bounded circles around Keoni. Not to be denied, they dipped their heads beneath his hands and lifted, forcing him to pet them. The Hawaiian patted their feathered crests and furred flanks. One jumped up and laid its front paws on his shoulders.

“Easy,” he said, amused by their antics and impatiently swishing tails. He knew what they wanted, and materialized the comic books from memory. Flipping one to each, he chuckled as the pair gulped their treats in single snaps of their beaks. They’d befriended him because he fed them the tastiest morsels, Alce, the gilded griffin, preferred Marvel while Keythong, the agate stone one, craved DC Comics.

The griffins’ rapturous enjoyment of their snacks reminded Keoni he’d need to eat soon. Hopefully Archer only wanted to touch base and the squad didn’t have a mission, so Keoni could return to the Waking World for some grinds. He had a hard time focusing when he didn’t eat, and his stomach did not like to wait.

Keoni left the griffins and thoughts of food behind, taking the steps two at a time. Before he reached the top, the studded bronze doors swung open in anticipation of his arrival. He stared into the nothingness. Churning clouds of raw dreamscape flickered before him, internally lit by bursts of lightning. You had to know where you were going when dealing with the Libros Arcanum. Otherwise you’d step off the stone entry, drop into unformed imagination and never stop falling.

“For Whom the Tale Tolls,” he said, and the library leaped to fulfill his request. The clouds became modular and began to fold and flip into new shapes. The movement reminded Keoni of a grid that decided to expand into a cube and then, just as suddenly, the interior of a bar.

With the basic structure of the library’s pub in place, the lines softened into the curving backs of chairs and archways. Iridescent building blocks took on wood tones and grain or thinned into glass. The hum of the patrons rose as they faded into view and solidified.

“What’s up, big man? You’re late,” Jay said, leaning back into one of the square leather couches and throwing his feet up on the matching ottoman. Keoni flopped down into the armchair, facing his friend.

“I’m never late, always right on time.”

The Mohawk snorted with good humor in response and brought a bottle of water to his lips. Keoni glanced at Alexi, the other occupant of the two-person couch. The pale-haired man leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees, completely oblivious to Jay and Keoni’s conversation. Keoni shook his head. He’d used the term two-person couch ’cause he refused to call it a love seat as long as those two occupied it. Keoni threw an arm over the back of his chair and scanned the bar. A wild array of characters both real and imagined filled the place, but no sign of their leader. Archer either hadn’t made it yet or remained out of sight for reasons of his own.

Keoni turned back and almost laughed at the intent expression on Alexi’s face. He could have slapped the man and Alexi wouldn’t have taken his gaze off whichever of the pub’s servers held his attention. No worries there. Their squad of four bachelors—scratch that, now only three remained single—frequented For Whom the Tale Tolls to watch the girls. Well, no need to lie to himself. Neither he nor his brahs did a lot of watching. They weren’t the kind of men who sat on the bench. They ran a lot of game, and the ladies loved to play along.

An image of Ciaran, her hands on her hips in disapproval, quickly sobered Keoni. No more sexy barmaids for him. He sighed good-naturedly. He wouldn’t miss them but hoped Ciaran wouldn’t mind his coming to the bar to hang out with the brahs.

Any place you could find within a book, you could visit in the Libros Arcanum. But For Whom the Tale Tolls was a singular convention found only here, and it boasted the baddest barmaids ever written, dreamed or drooled over—bar none. Sexy librarian barmaids in colorful eyeglasses; hair pulled back in buns; white dress shirts unbuttoned one button too many and tucked into pinstriped pencil skirts.

A nervous tremor ran through Keoni’s gut just thinking about it. Shit. His bachelor status had only changed an hour or so ago, and guilt already played the monkey on his back. It almost felt wrong to think about the stilettos and the…

“Look at the ass on her,” Alexi said, tilting to one side. “That’s enough wiggle to make a man’s leg jump.” In illustration, Alexi’s leg bobbed up and down several times, and he added a woof of appreciation.

“Put the dog away until we know what needs doing,” Jay said, not bothering to ogle the servers. He was the least likely to hook up, in the dreamscape or the Waking World. Jay didn’t often have the patience for women or wooing.

Keoni leaned back in his chair, crossed his arms and exhaled. He was losing his desire to look too. Ciaran had his sex drive trussed up and focused solely on her. One of the sexy librarians leaned over him, and he jumped. Actually jumped. The woman gave Keoni a strange look. “You doing all right, Keo?” she said before placing his usual drink order on a coaster.

Shit. Newly mated man guilt was unconscionable.

Jay worked so hard to hold in his mirth, his faced screwed up with the effort. Reconciling Jay’s Billy Badass style with the boyishness of his expression still proved tough for Keoni, even after their many years of friendship. Especially knowing the reason for the tattoo and what it hid.

On the flip side, Alexi didn’t have Jay’s tact and doubled over in shoulder-shaking amusement. His spiky white hair danced with the movement. Alexi was the youngest among them, and he loved living—balls out—but he respected life more and bore a weakness for the underdog. His willingness to sacrifice himself for the smallest needs of others would probably cost Alexi his life one day, but Keoni knew his friend well enough to know he wouldn’t mind a bit.

Keoni gave them the stink-eye while swirling the contents of his glass. The menacing stare continued long enough for them to catch the point before his usual grin lit his face. His brahs straightened in their seats, humoring him.

Heh, classic dog-and-pony show. He downed his drink. The cocktail of one part pineapple juice, three parts rum and a twist of lime chased away any remaining embarrassment, and the warmth spreading through his chest caused him to signal the barmaid for another.

“If the girl’s got you paranoid twisted this soon, why didn’t you bring her with?” Alexi asked, a knowing glint filling his cerulean eyes. He grabbed a handful of bar nuts, settled back onto the couch and popped them into his mouth one at a time. “You’re scanning the dreamscape for her as we speak.”

Truth. But Keoni would be damned if he’d confirm it.

Jay chimed in on the tail of Alexi’s comment, tag-team style. “You’re missing the whole issue, Xi. This big idjit lost his new woman, and he can’t stand not being there to rescue the damsel.” Jay manifested a huge strand of pearls around his neck and clutched them with a swoon. Alexi caught him and frantically fanned Jay’s face with the Southern belle-style fan he’d dreamed up. The two struck a tableau, paused, then both the fan and the pearls dissipated as Keoni was treated to a round of guffaws.

Jay continued, “Never mind she’s back in the Waking World safe as houses.”

Fraudulent smart-ass. If it weren’t for Jay showing up and outing him Ciaran would still be with Keoni. He opened his mouth to inform both those clowns that based on what he’d seen, Ciaran could very well be in danger and might need him. Archer’s voice cut off the opportunity.

“Much as I’d enjoy psychoanalyzing Keo’s issues, we don’t have the time.”

Empty space one minute and Archer filled it the next. He leaned over the armchairs, one hand clasping the back of each. Black smoke wisped at the cuffs and collar of his greatcoat, then settled into cloth and stitch. Every now and then Keoni wondered if the coat lived. As ridiculous as a sentient garment sounded, the thing was not made of materials found in a fabric stor— Wait. What?

“’Ey, whachu mean issues?” He threw his hands wide, his accent returning full force. He could never stop the pidgin from sneaking back into his speech when he got emotional. “I got issues?”

Silence met the question; silence and three looks of complete disbelief. Alexi might’ve had a tick up his nose. Jay studied the tin ceiling. Archer sighed and walked around the only empty seat in their grouping. He made himself comfortable—his back remaining I-beam straight—leaned on the chair arm and studied Keoni. Their squad leader’s black-on-black eyes held the quality of his raven’s plumage, taking on green or blue luster depending on the light. His jaw worked in an effort Keoni recognized as preamble to making a decision.

“I’ll say it, but we don’t have the time to discuss. Understand?”

Not many men could get away with Archer’s tone of superiority in reference to Keoni. He’d usually dismiss their presence on the earth. But this was Archer, and Archer was his brother. Whatever he had to say, it was truth.

“We worry your need to be there for everyone is going to get you killed. It’s not possible for a man to take care of everyone in his life at all times. It splits your focus and makes you vulnerable.”

Keoni’s lips thinned into a hard line. Did they think him a liability? Even knowing why he acted the way he did? “Bodda you?”

“I’d be bothered if you die,” Archer replied, his accent as impossible to place as ever. Wherever he hailed from he meant what he’d said: there’d be no discussion today. To prove it, he turned away from Keoni to address the squad as a whole.

“The guild has been monitoring some fairly aberrant ankou behavior. A pack has sprung up in Atlanta—”

“Pack?” Jay said incredulously, asking the question they’d all leaned forward to hear answered. “Ankou don’t do packs.”

“I know this.” Archer lifted a hand to accept his drink from a barmaid. “Thus the use of the term aberrant.” He thanked her with a nod and a slight smile. The woman lingered, entranced.

She had to be a new hire. The other straight women and those of the male servers—a bunch of Clark Kent, professorial types—whose preferences ran to men had grown accustomed to Archer’s foreign—as in not quite human—beauty.

“Thank you, sweetheart,” Keoni said, breaking the spell. The woman hustled off, a bit dazed but looking pleased about it.

Archer turned his nod of thanks to Keoni, rolled his shoulders and continued. “They’re forming packs, yet they’re not attacking. Instead they hide out in homes, businesses and homeless camps.”

“Waiting.” Alexi drained his beer in one swallow and placed the empty bottle with its mates.

Their leader nodded. “It’s why we haven’t sensed them for extermination as we normally would. If it weren’t for the abomination of their latest psychic tortures, we wouldn’t know now. I’d share some of the psychic impressions we squad leaders have received with you but, trust, you don’t want this stuff mucking up your mind.”

Running a hand over his forehead, he used the other to remove an elastic band from the inside breast pocket of his greatcoat. He slipped it over his head and back to hold his shoulder-length hair from his face. “The other squad leaders and I suspect someone’s manning the works. They’ve been on the move, so we haven’t confirmed but we’re scanning ATL for them now.”

Jay’s excitement seemed to buzz in the air around him. “But we’ll be the ones sent to take them out once they’re located?” he said,  hopeful anticipation reshaping his face.

“We’ll be the ones going in,” Archer said, “but it’ll be to contain them, gather info and ascertain whether they’re evolving, and if so, just what they’re evolving into. We need to study them this time, Freefall.”

Archer’s clarification of their mission and pointed use of Jay’s nickname did nothing to deaden the frenetic energy surrounding Jay. His reckless abandon had earned him the tag Freefall. All jump. No parachute. Case in point, the time Jay had decided to take on an ankou in his Waking World body—mostly powerless. He’d won, but it’d taken four broken beer bottles and two weeks to heal afterward. Keoni shook his head. Alexi might have been willing to die for what he believed in, but Jay—Keoni quelled the thought of losing his best friend—Jay stalked death.

“And your new mate,” Archer said, drawing Keoni’s attention. “Did she seal the path behind her?”

Keoni reflected back on the moment Ciaran had popped out of the dreamscape. A dream guardian or psychopomp’s sealing the Dreaming after an exit meant the difference between their Waking World safety and the banes trailing them through a direct line to their brain. Once the banes had locked on, they’d ambush you whenever you entered the dreamscape. With the ankou, it led to much worse.

Keoni understood the need for the question, but had Archer’s mouth tightened at the mention of Keoni’s new mate? He wasn’t sure what he’d seen, but there was something wrong there—something off-kilter enough to file away for later examination.

“Yeah, she did. Pretty much on autopilot.”

This time a hint of appreciation lifted the corner of Archer’s mouth in complete contradiction. Definitely off-kilter.

“I figured as much. It’d come naturally to her as a psychopomp. Couldn’t be certain her emerging Somnian abilities hadn’t thrown it off, though.” Archer inclined his head to one side, apparently thinking things through.

“My only worry is, if they’ve organized both here and in the Dreaming, they’ll be able to triangulate her position using—”

Black smoke erupted from the greatcoat. No, instead the coat transmuted into smoke—puffed out in distorted spires. Narrowed eyes preceded Archer’s command.

“Move!” he barked. Then went astral.

Chapter Six

Keoni fell in line behind Archer, hurling his kami into the kaleidoscope tunnel between the Dreaming and the Waking World. He’d always pictured going astral as flipping open the closures on a guitar case, allowing the instrument within to come to life. There was usually a beauty to it, a certain sense of peace. But this time around, the abruptness of the act doused him in the spiritual equivalent of cold water.

Fighting in the Dreaming using nothing but the power of your mind was a hard rub. Projecting an astral version of yourself—your kami—into the Waking World, encompassing all the abilities of your dream form but imbued with enough power to hold physical sway, was three or four clicks down the line. The two things were related yet wildly disparate; a comparison between strumming a guitar and fending off the attack of a hatchet murderer—with your bare hands. Both could be called handling an ax, but the latter took precedence on the meet-your-maker scale. And just to establish a baseline, the Somnian version of strumming a guitar could kill you at your best.

Keoni’s inner light flickered in response to a soft rumbling. He’d forgotten to eat. Again. He groaned, and his empty belly grumbled, the world infamous never-ending gullet. The only stomach capable of reaching across time, space and the Dreaming to make its displeasure known. Feed me, it growled, going Audrey II, the singing, man-eating plant from Little Shop of Horrors.

More grumbling. More flickering.

Horrific just about covered the amount of food Keoni could put away too, if his tutu’s complaints and well-aimed broom swipes bore any witness.

Keoni could deal with his grandmother, but he’d pay for the empty stomach he’d left at home. First with the cost of breaks in concentration, and second from the power drain. The usual fatigue accompanying the kami form was going to be a bitch to recoup from with no fuel to burn. All Somnians dealt with the bone-weariness of returning to their bodies after going astral, but none of the others had the never-ending gullet to contend with.

Think about something else…

Keoni shifted his body weight and flowed from one side of the multihued tunnel and back. The trip between worlds took seconds, but those seconds stretched, giving Somnians lots of time to think. It had to be part of the grand design—to peace them out before battle.

When Keoni thought about it, the others had their own issues to contend with: Jay with his suicidal tendencies and Archer—heh—Archer tended to sing in his sleep. They could hear his voice in the background while they battled. Those impromptu soundtracks were how they’d learned he spoke a fourth or fifth language, which likely explained his “where the hell are you from?” accent.

Keoni chuckled, and the presence of Alexi’s and Jay’s kamis resonated behind him. Without extending his senses, he knew Jay had chosen to bring up the rear. The idea he might have to literally save their asses one day appealed to Jay with the same intensity the need to protect the squad by going in first compelled Archer.

An echo of panic tugged Keoni’s awareness away from his brahs. A soul’s ache tethered to its body by a strand as tenuous as spider silk. He veered slightly left from the path Archer had chosen; Keoni figured on entering the Waking World somewhere near his squad, but at a different point. Archer would be pissed, but Keoni needed to answer the call. He only hoped to arrive in time.

Surging forward, the Hawaiian brought his right hand up, perpendicular to his body. His fingers splayed against the final membrane cementing reality to dreaming. The rubbery texture pressed back, buoyant, alive. He synced with it, sending the force of his will down his biceps, through the forearm and out in five points of blue-white light. The membrane responded, folding outward into the Waking World in the five petal-shaped sections emanating from his four fingers and along the path of his lifeline.

Now he’d just need to project his kami from the tunnel and into the living room spread out before him. Excitement mixed with anxiety hit his bloodstream. The anxiety flared a warning and slowed his progression. Acrid bloodlust and perversion thickened the air, and he hadn’t even stepped out into the Waking World yet.

This shit does not feel right.

K’den, okay, he’d follow Archer’s orders on two levels and go against the squad’s modus operandi of bursting through the fabric of reality and jaw jacking anything moving. It wasn’t easy to squelch the compulsion. They always busted in and jaw jacked anything moving. His squad was good at it, and he wanted to slay the woman-shaped figure cradling the child by the fireplace and the other two creatures he sensed in the room so badly his hands balled into fists. Going in recklessly wouldn’t help. He hoped to save the child and he didn’t have much time left. Trust the universe to supply an instance dependant on urgency but necessitate he go slow.

Keoni hadn’t arrived in time once before. Being late again was not an option.

He reached out, feeling the last remnants of the child’s soul beckon him. She had all but been extinguished, and if he rushed at the creature imprisoning her, she might be lost.

Strobing on the walls of the tunnel, painted across the back of the sofa and on the carpet, caught his attention, and he looked down at the source of the light. His fisted hands pulsed in sharp relief against the backdrop of reality. Aznuts. Ridiculous. The photonegative effect of his kami illuminated his astral form from within, transforming blacks to white light and shadows to gradated blue glow. When a strobe-light effect hit, it reflected overabundance of emotion. He’d have to find a way to harness the feelings.

He tried. It didn’t work. Too eager and unable to control the emotions a moment longer, Keoni stepped into the suburban home anyway.

Extending his left arm behind him, he turned his fingers counterclockwise and willed the five-petal opening to knit back together, sealing the path behind him.

Cacophonous battle sounds filled his ears. Past the opening from the dining room, adjacent to the room he occupied, he could see into the kitchen and through to the backyard. Archer, Jay and Alexi had harnessed their spirit energy—they sent heads rolling, broke spines and wreaked general havoc on eight ankou. Something must have gone wrong. His brahs had abandoned all efforts to observe the ankou. They probably had Jay to blame or maybe to thank. Either way their group MO remained intact.

Archer had nailed it. The ankou were amassing as a pack. Keoni hadn’t seen more than two band together before, and then only when a couple had somehow been taken over at the same time.

At least he needn’t have worried about startling the inhabitants of this room. His primary target, the female ankou holding the girl, still hadn’t stirred from her place by the fire. If the roar of his brahs stomping her pack mates to mud pies hadn’t fazed her, he doubted his arrival could.

With an arm as leverage he vaulted the plaid couch and landed soundlessly on the other side. An inch or so more to the left and he’d have tripped over the victim lying half on, half off the sofa. The victim, a man, was close to turning full ankou. Pale khaki fur covered his flesh and his face had grown decidedly hyenalike.

It needed to be dealt with now. A growl escaped Keoni’s lips unbidden. He didn’t have the time to stall or bemoan the fact Somnians were blunt instruments when it came to ankou, exterminators at best. Useless to dream of saving lives the way he once did. Killing banes weighed heavy on the good fun scale. They were nightmares that had grown grotesque. Keoni viewed taking banes out no differently from squelching a bad idea. Every ankou, however, had once been a person in pain—a living soul. And no, his pangs of conscience did not assuage the risk of letting the creatures live, never had.

A quick kill or when this thing—no longer a man—awoke as an ankou, it would attack. Keoni wouldn’t allow its revival to hinder his mission. He needed to save the girl.

Decision made, he kept his eyes on the still unmoving figure by the fireplace and split his attention between the little girl cradled to its breasts and the quickly transforming creature at his feet.

He dropped to one knee, pressing it into the prone figure’s back. His fingers stole around the furry neck and jerked, snapping the spine in a concise strike. The bones broke in a two-part crack.

Cold, yeah, but he’d learned to set the coldness of such things aside long ago. There was nothing left of the man. Even if there were, nothing could have been done for him. Years ago Keoni had hoped to find a way to save those taken over by ankou, dreamed of—even prayed for—a solution. None had come. Dream guardians didn’t possess the philanthropic ranking of howlers or pyschopomps or any of the others. Mercy lay in eradication.

He’d keep telling himself that.

Low to the ground, Keoni crept to a second ankou-possessed body. It rested in a slumped but upright position on the nearby love seat. This victim had been a teenaged boy, a younger version of the man whose neck Keoni had just broken. No doubt the peach fuzz on the boy’s chin had brought him pride before his possession. Now it competed with thick tufts of ankou fur.

Lips set in a hard line, Keoni had to wonder at the justice. This straggly precursor to manhood was all the boy got? No. He and his brahs or the other dream-guardian squads should have caught the ankou pack while they were in bane form and confined to the Dreaming; they could’ve prevented this family from suffering these atrocities.

But then, should’ve didn’t rank in the world of a Somnian. He pushed emotion aside. Good thing the job had made him practical. Doing what he could would have to suffice.

A quick tug on the leg and the body plopped onto the cushions. The boy’s neck emitted the same sound as his father’s when the bones broke. But the sound was not the reason Keoni winced.

Silence. The red-cloaked figure remained oblivious. If he didn’t know an ankou hid beneath the hood, the scene would appear cozy—a mother comforting a child.

He crept closer unnoticed. What dark work prevented the creature from sensing a mortal enemy stalked from only a foot away?

Keoni slowly rose above the love seat to check on the squad’s progress. Only three ankou remained. Good. He had time before the brahs sought him out.

Stretching his senses while watching for any movement, Keoni reached out to the child and somehow connected with her. Only a strand still held her spirit to her body, but as he slipped deeper, he became entangled in the intersecting threads of her mind, fears of failure and of ridicule, woven into the spider’s web of a single nightmare. Mists like those found in the dreamscape, but grayed and viscous as slime folded over Keoni, sucking greedily at him until he’d been completely entombed in the child’s terror.

A heartbeat, two, and the red cloak began a slow slither along the lines of the web. It reached out for him, the hem forming a tongue to taste his skin. Licks of fire met each flicker of the cloak’s edge. Keoni cursed it, straining at the web but the strands held. The cloak eased back, waving in the air, a crimson cobra with its hood extended. It darted forward, snaking around his chest in layer after layer, inching toward his head. When it finally covered his face, the true horror of the night played out, projected film-style onto the wrappings over his eyes. The little girl shared her story.

Her name used to be Emma. She and her mother had sewn the cloak as a special project. They’d taken joy in their work and excitement from imagining the costume on the stage. Phantom echoes of their laughter rang through Keoni. The sound twisted more cords of nightmare around his struggling limbs and choked off his connection to everything else. Only Emma remained… She had won the lead in her school’s production of Little Red Riding Hood. The role thrilled and terrified her, but her mother assured her she’d be great. “The best Riding Hood evah,” and Emma believed, unable to see past her mother’s smiles into the pit of fear warping the woman’s every thought.

Keoni lay paralyzed at the center of the web, the cloak squirming over his face and chest, stealing energy where it lapped his kami.

A third consciousness wove its way into the threads tying Keoni to Emma’s fractured mind.

Mommy spent her nights in terror—never able to turn her thoughts from the evening news and all the misfortunes befalling families each day. She worried constantly, and her anxiety gave a bane on the hunt an opening. It dug its claws into her soul and in time chewed its way into the Waking World. By then Mommy had become a twisted pit of affections, and she perverted so easily. So deliciously well.

A fourth mind had joined the fray.

Craziness. Too many minds rushed Keoni’s. The little girl, her mother and now the bane all commingled into a single twisted consciousness. Keoni could hear the bane’s voice. An actual vocalization of its intent. He hadn’t known banes wielded voices within the minds of their victims—snarled sounds made of howling winds and dank places. Keoni’s jaw hardened. An overload of thoughts converged on him at once. The sound repulsed him.

He began to struggle again but the cloak wrapped tighter, pulling him back down into numbness. They weren’t done with him yet.

The ankou who had once been a loving mother, Mommy, knew her family so well it hadn’t taken long to change them, to usurp their minds and through them build bridges to the Dreaming. Soon her perfidy birthed three more ankou into the Waking World. Ankou born of her family’s flesh.

Lastly, to prove their hopes were gone, she wore Emma’s cloak. Twisting a symbol of motherly love, sewn for her daughter’s greatest triumph, into the child’s destruction.

Keoni had been wrong, and he cursed himself for a dumbass. He hadn’t seen the lure or the trap. No part of Emma remained. Mommy had tormented her child into nothingness.

His stomach growled. It reached through the thickened mist, reconnecting him to the Waking World and causing the beasts’ hold over him to waver. His revulsion did the rest. He burst free of the crimson bindings and the web. He’d never bemoan his insatiable hunger again. Awareness returned, and he found himself back in the living room, crouched before the red-cloaked ankou. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, but the gesture couldn’t chase away the foul taste on his tongue.

Ohana, family, meant everything to Keoni. The ones you loved were to be cherished, protected, not tossed aside as barter for safe passage against your fears. Why would a mother do this? A blur washed over his eyes as if they’d been dilated. When his vision cleared, he discovered his hands closed around the red-cloaked ankou’s neck, tightening without his control. The creature clasped his forearms with its claws to no effect.

Sweeping the room, Keoni realized neither of the females had the power to drag him inside a nightmare. There had to be a stronger creature binding him, the little girl and Mommy together. That was the great thing about the kami form. It tired out the dream guardians, leaving their corporeal forms exhausted when they awoke, but it made taking out ankou an easier job. Holding a dream guardian in kami form inside a nightmare took more power than the average ankou could muster.

And there it was. From somewhere behind him the power of a creature Keoni hadn’t sensed before blipped to life on his mental radar. It was on the stairs, if his senses could still be trusted. He didn’t get the chance to turn and test the theory. The creature who had once been Emma bulged. Her body unfurled, billowing forth from her mother’s lap to take on new proportions. Fur of palest green expanded to cover a hulking new body.

Keoni drew back and coldcocked the creature before it could complete its transformation. The force of his spiritual energy sent it spinning to land butt down in the fireplace. The flames puffed out; the stink of scorched fur marked their passing and darkness took over the room, save his kami’s glow.

“No way I was gonna stand here watching while you hulked out.” Keoni scoffed. “This is not an action flick.”

Only protagonists in movies stood around waiting for their enemy to power up and go on a hero-stomping rampage. Lolo. If there was ever a good time to punch an opponent in the face, it was midtransformation when they weren’t expecting it. Kapow. Surprise, bitches!

Both Emma and Mommy snarled. The motion jarred the cowl from Mommy’s head. It slid back in a slow reveal. With one side of her face lit by the bluish glow of his kami and the other swallowed by darkness Keoni could clearly see why her family had fallen so quickly. He’d never witnessed a more finely wrought nightmare—the face of a were-hyena with double rows of sharp yellow teeth set into the maw and vivid blue eyes rimmed in red. As good a nightmare as any howler had ever devolved into.

Jay’s whoop erupted into the living room. Having taken out the rest of the pack, the other three members of his squad rushed in to find him.

The red-cloaked ankou rose to engage, but the other presence—the one with the real power—swooped in from the stairs. The pulse of energy hurled Keoni through a bay window. He crash landed on the front lawn. Glass and bits of wood pelted him. The presence sped over him fast enough to leave tread marks and blew down the road. Keoni made out the outlines of Mommy and Emma pulled in a third, indistinct ankou’s tow. Streetlights popped, shooting out sparks in the trio’s wake.

Three blue-white streaks rocketed past, kicking up the dust and debris of the bay window’s demise. Archer paused only long enough to calmly remind the sprawled Keoni to “move” before bolting out of view.

The moment the Hawaiian tried to rise and follow, a weight slammed into his chest, pinning him to the grass.

“Ciaran?”

Her scent surrounded him, staying his hand. By degrees he forced the ball of dream-made water oscillating against his palm to release. He’d formed the weapon to protect himself, but this was not an enemy.

The black dog sprung from his chest and toward the path it had opened between the Waking World and the Dreaming. Keoni pushed up on one elbow. “What the hell are you that you can open a path between worlds?” The dog didn’t have an answer. It watched him for a millisecond, then bounded back and pounced on him for a second time.

Keoni knew he must look the “big idjit” Jay always accused him—and everyone else—of being, but nothing in the two worlds made sense today and he was confused. Confused, nonplussed and thoroughly perplexed. Whatever worked best. This shit was not right.

The animal on his chest leaned forward to stare into his eyes. It had the look of a howler, but no. Howlers were lupine, and this bore the characteristics of a domesticated canine. Maybe a Samoyed but in reverse with a fluffy coat of spun onyx rather than the creamy white Samoyeds were known for. Gazing back, he saw Ciaran reflected in the dog’s solid yellow orbs. She was back in the Dreaming, and dammit, if she wasn’t a magnet for trouble.

The black dog leaped off his chest for a second time. Rolling backward to pitch forward, Keoni sprang to his feet and raced the animal into the dreamscape. He spared a final glance over his shoulder, following the trail taken by the escaped ankou and his brahs after them.

No time for indecision.

He’d have to trust his squad wouldn’t need him. There was no way he could project his kami back into the Waking World from the Dreaming and find them quickly enough if they did. His faith in them didn’t allay his guilt, but as Archer had said, a man couldn’t protect everyone in his life at all times, and right now his manu li’i needed him. She’d become family too.

Chapter Seven

Ciaran faced the monster…the bane. The little boy she’d come to save lay pinned to the ground beneath the creature. It regarded the boy with such intensity it didn’t notice her arrival. Saliva dripped from the maw, and its psychotic human eyes stared a hole into the child’s chest.

The bane’s head twisted so far left it nearly spun round, then turned right to the same degree, the move calculated to terrify. Extending a slimy pink tongue, the creature licked a target on the boy’s chest. The forked appendage recoiled, and the bane sneered perversely. Suddenly its head reared back, then rushed forward, the jaws wide, intent on biting deep.

Ciaran launched into motion faster than she’d known possible. Doubt clouded her mind as she moved. Would her fists be enough to fell the bane, or would she be sacrificed to its hunger? She steeled herself, remembering the woman she had been before Raphael. Strong—maybe a bit arrogant—her skills in the kitchen a source of pride.

A surge of emerald energy lit through her veins. Flowing from her heart chakra, it blossomed into twelve radiant petals, then expanded through her right arm. Cold iron filled her hand where the power coalesced. She closed her fist around the comfortable weight and without looking brought the implement crashing into each feral eye in rhythmic succession. The melodic clang! clang! preceded an astonished howl of pain. The bane scuttled back a few meters, wiping at its eyes with a clawed paw.

When it came to bashing heads, nothing beat a cast-iron skillet. Thank god Keoni had tricked her into learning to manipulate the dreamscape when he had. Otherwise she’d be defenseless and crying for mummy. Ciaran spun the heavy black pan in her hand. Damage in the kitchen or damage in the Dreaming, she knew how to use a skillet.

Yeah, how do ya like the taste of that?

Ciaran turned back to the boy and went down on her knees to inspect him for injury. He sniffled, blinked back tears and hurled himself at her. His plump arms clamped around her neck. She used her free hand to soothe him, cooing while mentally scanning him for mental trauma and spirit wounds. Her eyes remained on the bane.

It shook its head violently, seeming to clear its vision. Scanning the area, it found and focused on her. The monster snickered, all signs of pain gone. It retreated farther and made wickedly slow circuits around Ciaran and the boy, but it only had eyes for her.

Oh wonderful, this monster wanted to hump her too. The horrible things could at least offer her a pretty word and a good meal before getting all frisky.

A shadow glimmered at the edge of her vision. If she cut her eyes in just the right way, she’d swear the black dog stood at her side. A turn of her head revealed nothing there.

His face filled with terror, the boy began to wail again. Ciaran held him tighter but kept an eye on the beast. After several agonizing moments, it lifted its shaggy head and emitted a bone-chilling call, the sound a convergence of snicker and howl. Faster than her mind could register, other banes began to exit the fog and join their pack mate. Lascivious sneers transformed slobbering maws the moment the monsters spotted Ciaran.

The boy’s wails turned to screeching. He scrambled in Ciaran’s arms, and it was all she could manage to hold on to him. She continued to coo, adopting a calm she didn’t feel. No need for them both to shit themselves. But her efforts to soothe weren’t doing the trick, and his frightened clamber forced her to keep both arms firmly around him, making it difficult to guard them against attack.

Ciaran whispered softly, slid her arm beneath the boy’s bottom and lifted so she could stand. From this position, she could spin to face off with the beasts, and the child could watch her back. Well, he could if he stopped screaming long enough to tell her when to turn round. There had to be some way to calm him. She searched her memory and found a song she and her mum used to sing when she was about his age, five maybe six years old. Perfect.

If I had the wings of a dove

The banes tightened their circle. The boy whimpered but stopped screaming.

If I had the wings of a dove

He calmed enough to lean back and look into her face. Freckles dotted his nose. Bright green eyes peered at her before filling with alarm. “Behind you,” he whispered and pointed.

Continuing to sing, Ciaran spun and dropped the edge of the skillet onto the oncoming beast’s skull.

I’d take flight, fly away

“Nice one,” the boy said in response to the blow. He relaxed enough to snuggle against her neck.

Kids were easy? Yeah right.

And fi-i-i-nd solace

The banes halted their advance. They swayed in time to her voice. Lulled. Their eyes glazed over, huge, shaggy heads rocked in time to the music, and their expressions took on a far-away look.

Ciaran took note of the effect the song had on her enemies and began again. The child’s weight became less substantial in her arms as his breathing steadied. She could feel the pathway to the Waking World reopen within him and knew he would return safely to his bed soon.

More concerned with her own safety now the boy knew the way home, Ciaran regarded the hypnotized banes while continuing to sing the song over and over.

Pop! The child disappeared as though the channel had changed on a very old television. Though she’d expected his departure, the abruptness of it shocked her into silence. The banes snapped out of their lull and lunged.

Ciaran pushed her awareness toward her body. Shrouded in dreamscape fog, it slumped vacant in front of the bathroom mirror. Damn, it looked creepy draped over the sink like an unmanned marionette. Electric shocks of foreboding struck her system. What if something or someone took possession of her body and used it, used her, in the truest sense? Fear of losing her corporeal form brought a rush of nausea to her throat, and the sensation shaped itself into a set of shadowy figures. A man and a monster, not unlike the ones she faced now.

Time. To. Wake. Up! Please work. Please work. Please work. She reached for herself, the substance of her spirit stretching—close, closer, so close—before snapping back in place to face the charging horde.

No.

No! Anger, hot as acid, hit her system.

“Fine,” she said, through clenched teeth. “C’mon then, boys. If this is how it is, let’s have at it.”

She started singing again and, knowing it wouldn’t be enough, she brought the skillet into play, bashing the banes in their snouts in a style she’d read worked for repelling sharks. Each clang of skillet on skull rang in time to Ciaran’s melody. Pain-filled yelps met cast-iron blows, and courage fueled reawakened self-esteem.

The black dog exited the fog, startling Ciaran as it ran several circuits at her feet. Monsters scampered out of its path. The dog continued to run, tongue lolled to one side, body flattening in airborne lopes resembling flight. Completing a seventh loop, oblivious to the banes around it, the dog disappeared back into the mist on the opposite side from its entrance.

“Your disappearing act is getting old fast,” Ciaran yelled after it.

Out of nowhere, Keoni landed beside her in a huge splash of water. It drenched her from head to foot. A guppy on dry land, Ciaran gaped, swiping her free hand across her face. As unhappy as she was about the super-soaking, his presence reassured her, and she bit back an expletive.

His arrival had the opposite effect on the banes. Their demeanor changed. Bestial, bordering on lewd, leers transformed into distorted snarls as they began circling, their hackles raised. When it came to Keoni, they had a whole new intent in mind. Clearly they wanted blood.

Ciaran stole a glance at her hero. He wore a puzzled expression. It gave her pause. She wanted to ask what was wrong—beyond a bunch of nightmares prowling for a mate—but the big Hawaiian wasn’t in a talking frame of mind. He grabbed her wrist, urging her into a back-to-back stance with the motion. From there, slight movements of his body led her to rotate with him, perfectly in sync. His close proximity caused the affinity she’d had for him earlier to reawaken, and she almost heard his mind working.

Was it possible for him to be as confused about all this as her even with his superior knowledge? His mind opened to her more fully. Apparently banes weren’t normally so versatile. The first beast had yearned to devour the boy’s fears, the pack had appeared in a mating frenzy, and now, in a complete one-eighty, they had adopted murderous fury.

Ciaran hadn’t envisioned a nightmare as a malleable thing. Not in the sense a nightmare of falling could suddenly become a killer clown at your bedroom window. Each bad dream was meant to have only one purpose, be based on one fear. But these banes were different. She’d guess feeding on the totality of human phobias lent them infinite emotions and motivations to pull from.

Keoni continued to spin with her. She moved with him, using the movements of his body as a guide. They waited—for what she wasn’t sure. Moments felt like hours.

Ciaran stared out at the attackers. They still “wanted” her in a sexual sense. She read their objective through their eyes. Similar to the way she gleaned the dream of the Last Hurrah from the souls she accompanied to the Otherside.

“Kill the male…shred and claw…the woman…mate and breed.”

The woman in question tightened her fingers around her weapon of choice. Mate and breed? Not bloody likely.

“Don’t worry, manu,” Keoni said, his voice light and lyrical. He glanced quickly over his shoulder. “I’ll keep you safe.”

“I’ll keep myself safe.” Ciaran lifted the cast-iron pan and spun it in her grasp. “I’ve got my skillet.”

His responding bark of laughter startled her. She glanced over her shoulder to see the banes had taken his amusement as an opportunity. They sprang for the kill.

Two nightmares leaped at Keoni’s throat in unison. He grabbed each by the neck and slammed them together. Spines broken, their heads lolled to either side like rag dolls. Tossing them away, he brought a fist down in the center of the next attacker’s skull. Its neck compressed into its chest cavity. Ciaran heard each vertebra shatter in a domino chain.

She instinctually turned back around to meet her own barrage of banes. A symphony of clang! ca-clang! bang! bong! clang! sounded as the frying pan connected time and again.

“Damn, she’s doing serious damage with her frying pan. A frying pan.” Keoni shook his head. “Women.”

Ciaran rolled her eyes—unintentionally eavesdropping. He’d soon be on the receiving end of her skillet with any more chauvinist nonsense… His stomach growled. Loudly. Earthquake loud. Amusement transformed her expression. All right, maybe she’d need to use her skillet the way it was meant and help him out with a meal. She would too. If they ever escaped the Dreaming.

One particularly shaggy bane sought to take advantage of Ciaran and Keoni’s pause. When would they learn? Keoni bent backward. Bending his knees, he pitched his body at an impossible angle, parallel to the ground. Ciaran was grateful for how his balance kept him from toppling and crushing her while they continued to fight.

She bowed forward, matching him, and sent her skillet out in a wide arch. The heavy pan broke bones, taking the legs from under several attackers. Turning the pan sideways, she brought the edge down—one, two, three—between each set of ears. Whack-a-mole quick.

The shaggy bane flew over the synchronized pair, landed, and rebounded for a second leap. Keoni stood. Ciaran rose with him to face off with the bane. She steeled herself, staring it down in a game of chicken. It leaped again. Close. Closer. Oh shit. She ducked at the last second. The beast smashed face-first into Keoni’s fist. Its maw crumpled beneath the force, and the big Hawaiian took out two more of its pack mates before the body hit the ground.

“That’ll learn you,” Ciaran said, mimicking her American cousins.

Keoni chuckled but kept her moving with him as he surveyed the battlefield. They’d made quick work of the beasts. Bane corpses faded all around them. The bodies turned to prisms, slowly reabsorbed by the Dreaming. As they diminished, they left the sweat-tinged and burning stench of fear behind. Keoni nodded, revealing his satisfaction with the job they’d done.

Adrenaline kept Ciaran’s breaths coming in huffs. “You’ve got a serious white-knight thing happening.”

“Bodda you?”

There was his damn fabulous accent again—deeper than it had been earlier.

She turned to face him.

“Um…no. I’m not bothered. Just an observation. Thanks. I didn’t get to say that before.”

He smiled, somehow sarcastic and endearing at the same time. His eyes continued to scan the thick fog, but something in his stance said he was fully in the moment with her. “Before you knocked me on my ass or before you tried to kick me?”

Oops. He’d noticed.

“Before I knocked you on your arse. What’s happening with your accent?”

Keoni inclined his head questioningly.

Dammit. Gorgeous bastard. Justin Timberlake didn’t have a chance of bringing sexy back. Keoni had it on lockdown.

He smirked, stoking the fire. “I go into da pidgin when I’m excited or angry. Otherwise I use classic American English dressed up or down to fit the sitch.”

“Shit,” Ciaran breathed.

Keoni reached out with one arm, maneuvering her to reassume their back-to-back positions. In the same motion he came around to see what she’d seen.

“Shit,” he echoed her, but his swear held giddy anticipation.

Ciaran didn’t find the situation at all amusing. More banes melted out of the fog, nearly double the count they’d just put down. In seconds, they were surrounded.

“This is lolo, manu. No way these banes should be on after you like this.”

“What do they want?”

When he answered his voice held an edge of soothing excitement, but fear seeped in at the edges of her courage. She already knew the answer. Still, delusional as ever, she hoped he would disabuse her of the notion.

“They want to mate you.”

She huffed in annoyance. “I got that part. Why?”

Despite her tone, he gazed down at her tenderly. “I don’t know what it is about you, sweetheart, not fah dem anyways, but I’m about to make it clear. You already have a mate.”

Huh?

“Wait.” She ducked beneath one of his arms to look up at him as he prepared to reengage the enemy. “What?”

Mate? Had that been the big change in her life she’d sensed when she said yes to his help? These Somnians took rescuing a girl way too seriously. A toothless man had pulled her out of the path of a bus once. Was he her forever-and-for-always-snookums too? The hell.

A sixteen-petal blossom of blue light radiated from the chakra at Keoni’s throat and manifested in the palm of his right hand. Designed for defense, it spiraled and spun itself into a ball of pale blue water. He didn’t bother looking down at it, not even when the sound of waves breaking on the shore emanated from his outstretched hand. Instead he smirked wickedly at his opponents, beckoning them with the other hand. Banes launched themselves at the pair in a barrage of claws and teeth.

Moving as one entity in two bodies, Ciaran and Keoni swayed, bent and twirled in a lethal dance, taking out masses of banes with lyrical precision. The monsters kept coming.

* * *

The Hawaiian sent great bursts of water at the beasts, ripping holes through them with bazooka blasts of water. He enjoyed the game of bane slaying, loved the sense of contentment in doing what he was born to do. Loved the feel of the woman at his back more. She moved as an extension of him, following his lead without hesitation. Damn, he was beginning to enjoy the sound of her frying pan as it smashed bane skulls and bones.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Ciaran yelled over the din of growls, splashes and clangs. “But I can’t wake up.” She kicked a beast beneath the chin, sending it flying back in the opposite direction.

“It’s the banes. They have dampener fields, an’ this many of them combined are strong enough to affect even my powers.”

He snatched a leaping bane out of the air, sent a mini-tsunami through its abdomen and used the corpse to beat back more beasts. Others he destroyed with water blasts before the first body faded in his grasp.

“We’ll be okay.” He said the words with his usual lightness. He didn’t want to upset her, but in truth he was beginning to worry. Greed and power thirst normally kept banes from forming pack bonds. Normally. Nothing about this sitch was normal.

He caught Ciaran’s hand, flicked her away from him, pulled forward and bent with her at the waist while two attackers sailed over their heads. Keoni glanced over his shoulder as the banes crisscrossed in midair.

What was going on? Howlers mated. Banes never did. So why were these nightmares so intent on his manu li’i? He hadn’t missed the physical signs of their eagerness. The idea of one of the beasts taking the woman at his back turned his stomach and brought him as close as he’d ever been to anger.

Shit. He dropped into a crouch, pivoted and swept Ciaran into his arms as he stood. Razor-sharp claws raked his left calf. Better him than her. He sent a wave crashing around his feet. The force caught several beasts and washed them away. As quickly as he and Ciaran cleared them, new banes arrived to fortify the ranks.

Keoni slowed, working hard to catch his breath. Every strike siphoned off more energy and he’d already gone astral on an empty stomach this morning. They needed backup. Clearing his mind as best he could, he sent a distress call to his brahs. He knew they were busy hunting ankou but he was just as sure they’d miss him if he died here. The signal bounced off the inside of his skull and flayed his psychic center. He went down in pain, somehow managing to hold on to Ciaran.

Ka-clang. Bong. Clang. Ciaran’s skillet whirled through the air. Nice one. She did her best to fend off the creatures, but her fighting skills weren’t on his level.

“What happened?” she asked, concern lacing her voice.

He gritted his teeth against the pain and sent another wave flooding past them to take out several enemies. “Tried…” he heaved. “Tried to call…to…call my brahs. Something blocking…can’t project or get help…”

“Oh well. Pray,” Ciaran said with deceptive calm, but there was no mistaking her accelerated heartbeat thudding in his ears.

Sensing danger, the Hawaiian looked up to see nine sets of claws and teeth raining down on them…

Whoosh.

They lifted off the ground in a gentle, liquid rise. Ciaran’s anxiety invaded Keoni’s awareness with such force, he fought the instinct to slam his eyes shut as he watched hers squeeze closed. The world went soft. Sound muted. She opened her eyes and blinked. Keoni kept an eye on her while keeping track of their attackers through a blue lens.

“What happened?” Her thoughts stuttered inside his mind.

Banes leaped and bounced off the edges of the sphere, growling as they rebounded.

“What’s going on?”

Keoni floated up to her, giving her his best expression of reassurance as their eyes met, in hopes his calm would stem the insistent whine of her confusion. Ciaran opened her mouth to echo the questions he read in her mind, but her voice was lost to a trail of quickly rising bubbles. Sudden realization of what the sphere was transformed her face, ripping a scream from her throat.

Keoni sent calm directly into her brain without effect. He had submerged them in a huge swirling globe of water, his version of a force field. Judging by her screams, she was afraid of water. But, it made no sense. When their spirits had first met, she’d swum with him through a dreamscape Hanalei Bay. This was a bit different, sure. Earlier had been spiritual, an extension of Keoni’s mind and soul, but it hadn’t been different enough to cause this level of reaction. How could they grow together when she feared the very form of his power?

“Get me out!” she screamed, her voice a long gurgle as water poured down her throat. and she flailed with greater panic. Keoni reached out to hold her, but a burst of energy pitched him back. The force invaded his mind to such a degree it blended her feelings with his own. Thousands of tiny pinpricks stung her skin. He experienced the itch and burn along her hands, arms and back as it swept wildfire across his own. Her face stretched, and her fingers fused together as her fingernails grew by inches, curving toward her palms. Her body puffed and expanded.

Keoni floated inside his force field, the banes forgotten. The power emanating from Ciaran’s body left him awestruck. She’d transformed, not taken spirit form but become something else, and facilitated an exit along with it. But this wasn’t a normal pathway from the Dreaming to the Waking World. This was a gaping hole in the membrane between the two.

Through the haze obscuring her mind, Keoni read one thing clearly. She could not leave him behind. Ciaran grabbed him by the shoulders and raced away as fast as her arms would carry them.

* * *

Their powers were not enough. The Beast hungered for more and the Man did too. The first vestiges of anger assaulted them. They hated their anger. No. They despised it. Yes. There was no confusing the fact. The Man and the Beast preferred to laugh and dance and do nasty things to good people…while laughing or dancing. Or both. The Man shrugged, rolling the burden of his pique off his shoulders, and the Beast panted. Anger evaporated fun.

The pair lay on their backs, luxuriating in the plush comforter covering the hotel bed. Sunlight made the brocade fabric shimmer beneath them, highlighting the pattern of fleur-de-lis and ornate scrolls. After the disappointment they’d endured in losing the Delectable and many of their minions afterward, they deserved the comforts of the high-end suite. Mommy’s credit card had paid for it. Yay, Mommy. Membership seriously had its privileges, and the Man and Beast were worthy. Or they weren’t and they’d enjoy it anyway. No confusing that either or the thrill of driving the luxury car they’d stolen. But these thrills were only temporary. They desperately needed to be with the Delectable again.

Desperation did not sit well on the Man’s tongue. The Beast liked it even less. But what to do now the aloha bastard and his rainbow coalition of buttheads had killed every member of the Waking World horde but two and cut the Man and the Beast off from their goal?

The Man reached out to the Mommy to help her find the right rhythm in the bobbing of her head in his lap. She was a handy surrogate. He and the Beast relished the suckling noises she made. It calmed them and allowed them to think. The Man placed a finger to his chin and tapping lightly, struck a scholarly pose. The Beast, somehow, did the same. Everything they did they did with flourish. Otherwise what was the point?

What to do? What to do? It took so long to fill the ranks of a good horde and the ankou were not a species but a series of anomalies, psychic wounds turned to flesh. The pair recognized their problem. What they and their minions were could not be sustained. So much depended on corrupting human souls and avoiding being slain by dream guardians. So few ankou were made. They did not breed as the humans or manifest from the Dreaming as the howlers did. The ankou were body thieves. Not even the combined powers of the Man and the Beast could change their numbers in any truly significant way. Certainly they were strong enough to push any humans on the verge of turning into an ankou over the edge, but they could only push, not compel the transformation.

The problem had been insurmountable until they’d gotten a nose full of the Delectable in the Waking World. Relishing the scent-memory, the Man pushed Mommy’s head down as far as it would go and used pressure to slow its rise. Ahhh, so much better deep and slow.

The Delectable’s scent had let the Man and Beast understand what she was. And now they would acquire her and become a race. The ankou would become more than anomalies with her beneath them. Sweet Delectable. She would be their means, the back on which the Man and the Beast built an empire. The Beast agreed, and the satisfaction of the decision climaxed within the warmth of the mouth encasing the Man.

He moaned. The Beast’s tail thumped happily as it struck the comforter. Sweet satisfaction. They’d just need to go back to the Delectable’s hideout, defile her sanctuary, kill her Somnian and claim their prize. The idea tasted good. Murder and mayhem would be fun again. They liked that. No. They loved it.

Chapter Eight

“Wings? Dear God, why do I have wings?”

Keoni woke with Ciaran’s thoughts reverberating through his head. She perched on the glass partition separating the shower from the rest of the bathroom and flapped her wings maniacally.

He yawned, pushing himself off the tiles on the foreign bathroom floor. Thick, fragrant steam enveloped him. His little bird broke through the mango-scented cloud, zipped past his head and circled the room in crazed loops.

Wow, she’d come back from the Dreaming in sparrow form. Aznuts! She’s come back from the Dreaming in sparrow form? He jumped to his feet.

Shape-shifting in the dreamscape, fueled by the power of the Dreaming, was one thing. Dreams were easy to transform. With a little imagination anything was possible in the dreamscape, but physical metamorphosis was something far more. A lost power. He’d never heard of a psychopomp who could shape-shift and the Somnians didn’t have the ability either. Keoni didn’t even want to deal with how she’d ripped a hole in the dreamscape and transported his physical form from Hawaii to wherever the hell they were now.

Worse, she’d mostly closed the tear behind them but hadn’t completed the task—likely because she’d been terrified. Freaked out or not, no telling what kind of shenanigans would ensue if they left a gaping hole between the two worlds.

Keoni reached for the rip where it floated, framed in the opening of the shower, and laid his splayed hand against it. The pale blue of his Somnian ability shot out from his fingertips and lifeline. Securing the frayed edges of the breach by digging in with his nails, he rotated his hand to the left until the pathway between worlds closed completely.

Ciaran returned to her perch on the shower’s enclosing glass to stare down at him.

“Ridiculous.” Manu was a shape-shifter, and he couldn’t guess what else. He laughed. No wonder he and his brahs found her irresistible: power fed power.

Ciaran clearly took exception to his amusement. She flew at his face, batting him with her wings and twittering in anger. Feathers filled the air. Her frantically whirring brain was nearly impossible to read.

“Easy, ipo,” he sighed and took a deep breath. Perhaps what she’d call the queen’s English would be a better way to go. “Sweetheart, you’ve got to calm down, or we won’t be able to figure this out.”

She continued to fly agitated circuits around his head. He extended a finger and commanded, “Come to me.” She squawked, balking at the demand. “Yeah, yeah. I know. Come to me anyway.” She flew several more loops in defiance before landing on the finger he offered.

Lifting his hand, he brought her to eye level. Ciaran blinked, inclining her head from side to side. One. Two. Three. She unleashed a stream of indignant twittering, reflecting the stream of expletives in her mind.

“I got that part too,” Keoni said, “but you chose me, so you get the Brahma bull and the horns.” Her answering chirp said bullshit.

He chuckled while checking her out. Pretty little thing. Bronze feathers and a fluffy white breast complemented bright eyes—eyes that indicated he wasn’t going to get away with his chauvinist antics. He gazed back into that brilliant stare. “Breathe, ipo, sweetheart.”

After a few moments, Ciaran’s tiny chest puffed and deflated slowly as she brought her breathing under control.

“Remember who you are,” he said, his voice steady. “Your human form is your most natural state, so it should be easy to return to it. You just have to remember who you are and your body will follow suit.”

At least returning to his body after going astral worked that way. His voice sounded sure. He wasn’t. She’d kick his ass if she figured it out. But he hoped reclaiming her human shape would be the same for her as returning to his body was for him.

Ciaran slowly opened herself more fully to reveal the doubt. “I feel like half the girl I used to be. And I don’t want to—I won’t go back to hiding out in someone else’s mansion.” Her wings fluttered as if an outward sign of internal conflict, but then… He allowed her to see herself through his mind’s eye. To feel the beauty he saw in her, things she had never seen in or believed about herself—and suddenly she longed to become the woman whose image she saw reflected in his eyes.

Before either knew it, he held her naked body cradled against his chest, their thoughts and gazes still entwined. Keoni’s line of vision swept her face finding the bruises. The features of his face turned fierce.

“Who hurt you?” The placid tone belied the violence vibrating beneath the surface of his skin.

“My ex.”

He lowered his forehead to rest against hers. “Show me.”

She squirmed in his arms, resisting the imperative in his voice.

Keoni refused to be denied. “Show me.”

Giving in, she opened her mind to his, allowing him full access to the memory of her last night with Raphael. The argument. The surprise of the first punch, disbelief at the second, and anger when the third opened her lip. Keoni witnessed it all, relived the ensuing fight, the pain of each blow, and the cold reality: Raphael didn’t love her.

His pretty bird was a fighter. She’d scratched the guy’s face raw, bit and slapped, kicked him in the balls, but she had been no match for the stocky man—wider at the chest than Keoni. Raphael had tossed her around her apartment with as much regard as yesterday’s trash. And soon the only question had been whether she’d still be breathing when he left her.

Their foreheads parted, and Keoni slid his face across her cheek. Continuing the motion, he nuzzled her neck soothingly. Ciaran breathed slowly, reveling in the feeling of his arms around her, his skin on hers, and the care he sent flooding into her senses. The shock of his tenderness overwhelmed her. Keoni hurt more for her than she hurt for herself. She cried out, touching her cheeks. The pain he’d absorbed on her behalf wounded her so deeply she’d begun to cry.

“Look at me,” she whispered.

Her eyes searched his, and she saw the same things she always saw within them, his perennial joie de vivre, pride and honesty. Instant heat flooded her body. Without considering consequences, she grabbed his face in both hands. Her tongue licked along the scar on his chin and up to taste his lower lip. Hesitating only to wonder at how the imperfection enhanced his beauty, she kissed him with everything in her.

Mmmmm. She leaned back to look at him. He grinned. Gorgeous bastard. He had an arsenal of smiles, each one designed for a different kind of damage. This particular expression promised body-rocking sex. It shattered her resolve to stay away from men. She heard it crumble as she devoured him lips, tongue and all.

Keoni carried her to the shower, returning every hungry kiss along the way. Before stepping inside, he dropped her legs but kept one arm around her waist. The contact of their bodies remained unbroken while he chucked off his baggies. She sighed into his mouth as the swim trunks slid to the floor.

Ooooh sweet damn, the man had his entire hard length pressed against her stomach, raw silk and sculptured stone. It could have been another delusion—she couldn’t actually hear her resolve crumbling—but she’d swear he spanned the space from bikini wax to belly button and she loved it. So much so, she swore when he lifted his head to look at her.

Nooo, her mind wailed. Don’t give me time to think. If she pondered where his kisses led she’d kick him in the short and curlies and run screaming.

“I don’t want to hurt you, manu.”

Keoni licked the curve of his lower lip, his breathing harsh and deep.

“In my state of mind, I could sex you black and blue.”

All right, then. Her heart rate sped up with excitement Apparently she’d be on the receiving end of a good, hard tumble. Clever boy, she didn’t mind at all. Ciaran pressed her lips to his throat, making sexy little noises to fuel his passion. When his erection jumped against her belly she knew she’d taken away his self-control, and mentally crossed it off the list of options available to him.

He gently placed her on her feet. “Can you take it rough, manu?”

“Oh hells yes,” she said, grabbing his face and pulling him down for more snogging.

Keoni groaned into her lips, his expression strained. “Easy,” he muttered as much to himself as to her. “Keep pressing me and I’ll flip you over and our first time will end before either of us gets to enjoy it.” He caressed her cheek with the back of one hand. “And, ipo, I really want to savor this.”

Ciaran flashed him a naughty look and nipped the tip of his nose. “Dammit, woman. I’ve got to get you ready before…” His train of thought ended in another groan.

Taking each of her hands, he eased them from his face, sliding them down to rest on his chest. Ciaran opened her mouth to protest the break in kissing, but Keoni placed one finger to her lips. His eyes promised more and better. “Mo’bettah.” Without breaking their locked gazes, he reached for the scented body wash she favored. Soaping his hands, he nipped playfully at her lips and earlobes.

Completely mesmerized by the depth of his hazel gaze, Ciaran lost track of the big Hawaiian’s hands…until the sudden, soapy heat of him working magic between her legs made her back arch. She grasped his arm and shoulder to keep from falling.

Keoni was quicker and moved his free hand to the small of her back. There was no need to worry about falling with him around. He pressed his lips to her forehead and chuckled in affirmation. She didn’t need to worry about anything with him around. She pulled back, gave him a wide-eyed look of warning and burst into giggles.

Something in her smile must have struck Keoni. A shudder passed over him, his gaze trained on her mouth. Ciaran studied his face. Her laughter had disrupted the rhythm he’d found in teasing her bud with his fingers. Lovely. She relished her ability to ruffle him.

Tightening one arm around her waist, he lifted her into position. Then used the other to guide her legs to hang straight down. Her instincts spurred her to wrap her legs around his waist, but it wasn’t what he wanted.

“Not yet, manu.”

He slowly slipped himself straight through the V of her legs, sending hot shock waves through her folds. The soap lubricated the skin of her thighs, allowing him to glide back and forth in sweet torture. As each stroke parted her, his tip hit her bud and made it sing. The veins in his shaft rippled past, continuing the delirium. Ciaran vibrated as the friction forward and back brought her to the edge.

Keoni eased her grip on his hair and pressed her arm to the tile behind her. Letting go, he ran his fingers up her arm, stopping to intertwine them with hers. He sighed into another deep kiss and shifted his arm, arching her back more to give him easy access to her breasts.

“Damn you’ve got the perfect surfer-girl body.” He dipped his head to swirl his tongue over her breasts and teased the tips with his teeth, all the while sending her mental images of how badly he wanted to take her out on his surfboard. To show her his world—for real this time.

Ciaran had to work hard to keep from wrapping her legs around his hips. Any change in position would end the delicious motion between her folds and over her pleasure center and she didn’t want it to stop. His free hand slid down her hip to keep her legs closed tight, increasing the pressure and friction to the point of overload. She came in waves of pleasure so intense, they wiped her mind blank.

Disentangling his fingers from hers, Keoni used both hands to lift and wrap her legs around him. Ciaran’s body kept convulsing in pleasure as he entered her in one thrust.

“Ahhh.” He groaned deep in his throat.

His thumbs rested on her stomach while his fingers wrapped her waist and spanned her back. He controlled her rhythm with the placement of his hands. Matching her pace to his, he brought her near abandon every time his balls bounced against her backside.

Ciaran cried out with each thrust. They sent sparks through her, the force and pressure almost too much. Too good. She was the anvil, molten metal to Keoni’s skilled blacksmith, and he worked her well.

She claimed him as her own, transforming him as much as he did her. Every stroke molded them both into something new, entirely of their own making. The light of their joining enveloped them; emotions and pleasure pulsated around them. Her hand shot out to grasp the uppermost showerhead while the fingernails of the other scraped the tiles, seeking purchase.

They came simultaneously, her muscles convulsing and releasing to take every ounce he had to give. He gave willingly and took masterfully. He bit her shoulder as throes of passion washed over them, then laid his forehead against her chest, neither able to catch their breath, barely able to move.

“Uh-oh,” he said, panting, “look what you did.”

Sighing softly, Ciaran turned in the direction of his gaze. Why had the top showerhead stopped working? She opened her hand and groaned. The metal was mangled, pressed into the shape of her clasped fingers like silly putty.

“How’d I do that?”

He smirked.

“We’re strong together, but you’re stronger than you should be. Guess it’s the shape-shifter in you.” She waved him off, her focus elsewhere.

“Ohhhh,” she groaned, “I can’t afford to replace anything in this house!”

“I can. So you can… Somnians are real good at playing the stock market.”

Both her brows lifted. “Insider trading?”

“Yeah.” He chuckled, his finger tapping third-eye territory. “Deep inside.”

The movement of his body incited hers to resume its convulsive rhythm. Keoni’s head dropped back to her breasts.

“Oh shit, ipo,” he ground out. His hands gripped her shoulders to still her, and she bit her bottom lip to conceal her glee, high on power and pleasure.

Chapter Nine

“I’m not a were!” Ciaran hurled at Keoni while scrambling eggs as though they’d done her wrong.

“I didn’t say you were.” Keoni laid the phone down on the quartz countertop. He’d just finished a call to Archer requesting tickets for two back to Kauai, and had also explained about Ciaran, the banes’ focus on her and her newly discovered abilities. Archer in turn informed him they’d lost the all-too-powerful ankou pack leader and the two females with it. The banes’ strange behavior towards Ciaran had to be linked to the sudden rise in ankou numbers. Banes and ankou were linked by nature, and neither Keoni nor his squad leader believed in coincidence. Archer’s final assessment had been a warning. “Guard your woman and watch your back.”

Keoni checked his concern. They’d be headed to his home soon and from there to the guild where he and the brahs could protect her.

He regarded Ciaran in the third such thorough examination. The bruising and cuts were completely gone. Healed during their lovemaking. He knew he was good, but wow, sexing his woman’s injuries away was one for the record books.

“You’re a shape-shifter.” A sly eyebrow lift. “Totally different animal.”

“Oh ha. Yeah, you’re hilarious.”

He exhaled good-naturedly. “Fo’ shua.”

Ciaran mouthed for sure, mocking him. He ignored her, shaking his head at how quickly her mood could swing from wind to gale. It pissed her off their minds were still connected. His laid-back mood pissed her off. Everything pissed her off.

He kinda liked it.

“There aren’t supposed to be any of you left. Shifters died out centuries ago, and if not, you shouldn’t be a Brit. Shifters were from South American, Asian, Africa—”

“Hullo, brilliant boy. I’m British, but of Caribbean descent,” she said, holding her hands out to either side. “Ta-da.”

Keoni snorted in reply.

“My family hails from Dominica. Where the moon turns Cheshire cat and grins.” Ciaran said the last with great pride.

“Thought you said you weren’t a shifter,” he said, turning on the charm of his killer smile.

Ciaran busied herself scooping ham from the skillet and onto a plate. “Don’t go into the light,” she mumbled.

“Wha—”

“I said I’m not, but I can follow the flow of logic, and I’ve obviously got African heritage.”

She sure did. He tilted his head to regard her in appreciation. The heritage she spoke of gave her skin the most amazing pecan bronze color he’d ever seen. He considered himself a lucky, lucky man—even though she was mean as hell.

He smirked, leaning back on the stool across the island from her. My bronze bundle of fury. If she didn’t watch it he would start calling her tita, the Hawaiian slang for tough girl.

Ciaran slapped his plate down in front of him and turned to grab the coffeepot. Keoni managed an amused “mahalo,” while she filled his cup and gave him the glare. “You’re welcome.” A beat. “Don’t call me tita.”

He lifted an eyebrow, amused.

She returned to cooking, apparently forgetting he could pick off her thoughts as easily as she had his. “Smile #234 of the Keo Arsenal, codename ‘Boyish Charm,’ locked and loaded,” she mused while he eavesdropped. As if worried he would completely disarm her, she turned her attention to finding a weapon.

If manu planned on going toe to toe with him he’d be happy to oblige her. A sparring match was a perfect ploy for Keoni to continue her training.

The door to the mudroom stood open, just off the kitchen. A complete array of gardening tools waited at the ready. “I could hit him with the spade?” she thought. “But you spay or neuter animals.”

Keoni blanched, she continued. “Jesus! Neutering him would be a crime against all things good and holy. X.” She mentally crossed the spade off the list of possibilities and Keoni gave silent thanks for small favors.

Moving on, Ciaran considered the Cape Cod weeder. Her jaw worked with the effort and Keoni couldn’t determine whether or not to run while she weighed the efficacy of each gardening tool. He caught his lips between his teeth to keep from laughing out loud at her plans to do him harm. He wouldn’t let it go too far, but once again he found himself enjoying the workings of her mind.

Ciaran’s forehead furrowed and smoothed. “Wait a minute. The weed whacker.” A fiendish glee lit her eyes. “Score.”

She looked to Keoni, caught his expression and reassessed. “Smile #234 powered up to level two.” A pause. “Has he…?”

He gifted her with a wink.

“Yeah. He’s read my mind.” She scowled. “Shut it. You’re oversmiling.”

He conceded her point but then again. “Things are starting to make sense.”

The scent of the pineapple-glazed ham steak drew his attention. She might eventually kill him, but thank the creator for a woman this badass who could cook too. Keoni turned his plate to take the feast in from various angles. He’d disregard the baked beans and eggs to focus on the ham, slices of tangy mango, home fries, buttery biscuits and peach butter she’d placed before him. He shrugged. He guessed beans with breakfast was a British thing, but he’d be damned if he’d eat an egg. Yeech. Whoever came up with that shit should be shark bait. Especially when there was fruit and pig to enjoy.

Silence broke him out of his food stupor. Ciaran glared at him with one hand on her hip and an impatient turn to her lips.

“How? How does any of this make sense?”

He dug in to his food, answering between swallows and sounds of appreciation.

“K’den, okay, you know how the banes work. Right?”

“I picked it up from your mind. They’re nightmares gone bad who become something worse if they make it into the Waking World?”

“Ankou.” Keoni nodded, popping a piece of biscuit slathered with peach butter into his mouth. He took a minute to relish the flavors, eyes closed. “Ipo, you got good grinds. That brok’ da mout!”

“What?” she said, barely concealing a blush.

He tilted his head in a you-know-what-I’m-saying gesture. He was sure she knew exactly what he meant. Why she continued to feign ignorance was beyond him. “I called you sweetheart, said you cook well, and it was delicious,” he said drily.

“Good sex, kind and appreciates my cooking… I’ve got to put an end to this.”

Keoni lowered his head to hide a flash of disappointment. She’d almost realized she could get used to him, and it scared her.

“Once the banes eat their way through the human heart and into the Waking World, they become ankou—a bane in a human host body—and way more powerful.”

Ciaran brought her plate around to his side of the counter as he explained. “The ankou feed on unresolved psychological issues, fears, doubts, but lucky for us they’re cut off from the Dreaming once they’re here. You get me?”

The curve of his jaw tightened into a firm straight line. He turned his face away from her and stared out at nothing…yet he’d finally begun to see clearly. Speaking the words aloud made several things evident. One ankou, the one he’d encountered at the suburban family home, appeared to have developed the ability to strike both here and in the Dreaming using the banes remaining there. Understanding hit and hit hard. If his suspicions held true, things would get real bad, real fast. The need to protect his family, both by blood and through the bonds of love, welled up in his chest. Unconsciously he reached out to the guild, the source of Somnian power, seeking to bolster his strength through the connection.

Keoni had hoped to spend a few quiet days with his life mate. He’d planned to train her to use her new Somnian powers. It wouldn’t take much energy, as advanced as she’d shown herself to be and he badly needed to recuperate from all they’d been through. Weariness eroded his few remaining reserves. Thank God she’d fed the never-ending gullet or he would be useless right now.

He studied Ciaran’s face again. She deserved the full truth. He sighed.

“Ankou consume things we normally overcome without nightmares. Momentary fears. Like, ‘Whew, I almost got hit by that car!’ or ‘What if something happens to my kid?’ or an array of buried issues the howlers haunt us until we work through: the cruel mother, the better-than-us brother, insecurities, rejection…abuse.”

Keoni absently picked up his plate and utensils and took them around to the sink. He paused for a long beat before turning to her with the most serious expression he’d ever worn. “They already bend human minds through the use of fear, but if the ankou steal your genes by mating with you they could create a Waking World bloodline, and I suspect they could do a lot more.”

“Why haven’t they become a species before?”

“Probably because they’re greedy loner bastards and territorial too. It never would’ve occurred to them to mate and establish themselves as a legit species…before. Which is why I’m sure they’ve evolved. We raided a house earlier this morning where they’d begun to amass as a pack. The guild had sensed a change in the banes, and there were ankou we weren’t able to track, but today it became clear they have a leader. They—” He paused. “Shit.”

She stared at him questioningly.

“Think about it, ipo. If the ankou are organized enough to have chosen a leader, you’d make a perfect queen bee. The last shifter, who’s also a psychopomp? If an ankou powerful enough to reign over the others—one who can also trap and kill a Somnian as strong as me—mates with you and produces shape-shifting offspring, their gratification would double.”

Keoni shared with Ciaran what he’d experienced earlier in the day—unleashing the memory of the red-cloaked ankou and the hulking monster a little girl named Emma had become.

He could tell the horror facing them had begun to dawn on her.

“Imagine Jack the Ripper, Manson, the BTK Killer created from old magicks, unleashed on the streets wielding custom-made psychic tortures, not just generic fears, and able to take any form. They’d flay minds while ripping bodies to shreds. And they’d breed.”

* * *

Ciaran shut her eyes.

Demons do not dream, my chile…

The Letang women, her family, passed down a rhyme from mother to daughter.

…but dare not close your eyes.

A warning turned heritage. It had lost its urgency, but blood knew value, thus it survived.

For while they do not tarry sleep…

Her cousins knew nothing about it. They shared a grandfather, but her grandmother belonged only to her.

…from dreams…

She bore the name of her first ancestor. As did her mother, her grandmother and each woman in their line. A name passed down with the rhyme so they would never forget, be ever vigilant, always ready.

…they may yet rise.

She bore the blood and the name. Ciaran Cora’Delieye Letang.

Keoni spoke in an awed rasp. “You are the scion of Cora’Delieye, Mad Mother of Shifting Magicks. The progenitor of shape-shifters. Wow.”

“Don’t call her that,” she snapped. “She wasn’t mad. You should know now.”

How could he still think her ancestor had been insane now they both understood what she had been and what Ciaran was as a result? Men. Damn them.

She couldn’t think. Cora’Delieye had never been real to her. Just family lore. Her heart stilled and plummeted to her feet. She moved around the counter in a daze. Each step an ordeal until she stopped short of bumping into Keoni’s chest.

He placed the flat of his right palm on her head. The weight and the warmth of it radiated into her. In many cultures, the gesture was a pledge of protection. She couldn’t be bothered with whether it meant the same to him. It didn’t matter. She didn’t want a man’s hands on her. She wanted to strike first—before being struck…

Keoni moved his left hand in gentle circles at the small of her back.

“If they get you, ipo, forget vampires, werewolves, and all the fairy-tale bullshit we’ve ever heard. We’re talking real demons walking the earth, and I don’t know what could stop them.”

Oh God.

Terror coiled within Ciaran’s womb. Keoni was right. They were talking real end-of-days type beasts walking the earth with her cast in the role of Lilith, mother of demons.

Horror intermingled with the anger hidden in the pit of her stomach. The volatile cocktail of emotions bubbled, and she bit her lip to hold back quickly rising bile. Again and again it happened. Once more she’d been used with prejudice to be broken and discarded. Where were her choices?

Keoni pulled her into the circle of his arms and laid his cheek where his palm had been, atop the crown of her head. Concern laced his voice. “We’ll go straight back to Kauai and I’ll call the brahs in to help protect you while I train you…”

A familiar melody played in Ciaran’s head, the same tainted love song she’d heard outside the house when she’d gone for the morning paper. It drowned Keoni’s voice in icy notes. His words made no sense. His voice fell short of the distant place inside her mind where she had retreated.

“I’m not going with you.” The words cut through whatever he’d been saying.

He paused. The warmth of his cheek lifted from her head, and more cold seeped in.

“You have to. It’s not safe for you here. You’re half-Somnian, half-psychopomp and real vulnerable. They could come for you at any time. When you brought us here from the Dreaming, you didn’t completely seal the path behind you. I know you were scared but you can’t make those kinds of mistakes with what we’re facing.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Her voice sounded flat and devoid of feeling even to her own ears. She was sick of being a puppet to the whims of this man or the other. No matter the species, they all wanted something, and she was just a tool to be utilized. No one loved a hammer. No one cared for a screwdriver. When the job was done they were tossed aside until needed again.

Flares of fury boiled in her stomach while the sinister melody threatened to drive her mad. She pulled away from Keoni and covered her ears against the tumult.

“It does matter, ipo…”

Ciaran blocked him out. When would it stop? Would it end when she became the mother of a demon onslaught unseen since the dawn of the great texts—the Old Testament, the Torah, the Koran? Would destiny finally grant her reprieve after she’d wrought hell on earth?

The chemical reaction within her reached critical, and all the fear and anger she’d held on to since she’d become a psychopomp exploded in a mushroom cloud of rage: the terror of those first soul-conductor missions when she was a child who had no business accompanying souls to their final destinations; the uncomfortable looks on people’s faces the few times she’d slipped and revealed how and when someone had died long before the news reported it; the helplessness of a tiny woman with a spirit too vast to contain yet not strong enough to turn the tide of Raphael’s fists; and the newly awakened shape-shifter who stood at the precipice of a demon uprising as a modern-day Lilith.

Always the victim. Always the tool.

Ciaran pushed away from Keoni so violently, it sent her hurtling backward. He didn’t budge.

There was an alternative. She could strike first; rip and shred; wound and kill. The opposite of a victim, she could do the hunting and the hurting. Ease the pain. Stop it cold. Be the death of the ankou. Rather than give them life, she could make the choice to shroud herself in their blood.

A strangled sound escaped Keoni. He closed his hands around her upper arms in a grip heavy as manacles. He must have been eavesdropping on her thoughts again. His concern barely registered, and still she resented it. Served him right to see things as she was beginning to.

“You’re no death bringer, ipo. You are sanctuary and comfort.” He rested his forehead against hers and took a deep breath. “I believe it’s why you are a convergence of so many powers. Don’t let the ankou change you.”

Ciaran couldn’t believe his nerve. Don’t let them change me, but let you rule me. Yeah, ’cause you controlling me is completely different.

She brought her hands up between them and spread her arms in ferocious swipes to either side. The movement broke Keoni’s hold and he took a step back.

“When do I get to choose? You’re telling me the ankou hold my life in their grasp.” She screamed in frustration. The piercing sound dug furrows into Keoni’s brow but she couldn’t be bothered. “The Dream Guardian Guild forces a mate on me, and you order me around under the guise of protection. No! I won’t stand for it. I want to choose. My life on my terms. It should be on my terms!” She stamped her foot. “I don’t want this. I want to kill them all! And I. Don’t. Want. You.”

Keoni took a step toward her, the jovial man replaced by a wall of barely concealed emotion. “You. Chose. Me!” His eyes burned. “Somnian males are chosen, we don’t do the choosing. You think we wanted to parade ourselves before you, peacocks spreading our feathers in hopes of your acceptance? You think men like us designed it this way?” His incredulous snort bounced off the kitchen walls. “Dancing around like gnarly wahine at the luau?”

Ciaran stood before him, her chest rising and falling with reserves of unspent rage. Keoni took no notice and leaned down, touching his nose to hers.

“Do you? Huh?” He shook his head, crossing his arms and tucking his hands beneath them. “I was your choice. Whether you realize it or not, you sent out a mating imperative with your distress call. You didn’t have to. You could have just asked for help. We’d have been there. Don’t you understand? You, your subconscious or whatever wanted a life mate, and you wanted me bad. Something deep inside you wants to be loved, manu. All you have to do is let me.”

She stared back at him. Dark emotion swirled inside her aura, clouding her thinking, and she said what she supposed she must to protect herself. “Fuck you.”

The man growled and reached for her. She snatched the frying pan from its place on the stove. Keoni knocked it aside, sending it sailing across the room so fast she could only gape at her empty hand. Bang. A cabinet door dislodged and slid to the floor, crushed by the rocketed pan.

She screamed and rushed him. He took her by both shoulders and lifted her off the ground while she kicked and screamed a stream of expletives cruel enough to gut punch him in a one-two combination.

She knew the words wounded him. She didn’t care.

Keoni managed to set her down on the countertop and push himself between her legs, putting an end to her barrage of kicks. Ciaran pushed against him until he imprisoned her arms by firmly pressing them to her sides.

She heaved with the exertion, making the mistake of meeting her man’s gaze. Hurt darkened his eyes.

Agonizing moments passed before Keoni spoke.

“You testing me, tita? Huh? ’Cause you can stop now. I’m not gonna hurt you, hit you, curse you, belittle, demean, or do anything to make you even a little uncomfortable. None of it. I’m a man, tita. A real one. And I know it’s not what you’re used to, but you better get acclimated real quick. Unless you’ve decided to live a half life, cut off from one another in a warped version of what life mates are meant to be, you’re gonna have to cut this shit out.”

He walked a furious path around the granite island and came back around. Placing his big hands on either side of her, he leaned in. Ciaran opened her mouth, then shut it, her eyes filling with tears.

“That choice enough for you? You wanna keep this up? Fine. We’ll live in separate houses, neighbors with visitation rights. ’Cause I won’t live my life fighting with you. No matter how much I need you.”

“Fine,” she said.

“Fine?” A humorless snort punctuated the question.

“Fine.” Keoni turned away and stared out the window above the sink. Without warning, he whirled back to face her. “No. Not cool. Why’re you so angry with me, tita?”

“Because.” Her jaw trembled, and she lowered her eyes, unable to face the intensity of his gaze.

“What?”

Because I’m not good enough. Because I’m rude. Because it’s always my fault. Be—

“—’cause you’re too perfect, and I’m scared.”

Her sobs broke the confession into pieces. Keoni exhaled sharply; a variety of emotions seemed to wash over him: shock, puzzlement, compassion… Finally he threw back his head and laughed.

Ciaran began to bawl in earnest. Her shoulders shook with the force of the release. Keoni grabbed her face in both hands and kissed her so tenderly, it scored her with shame. More shameful, she shed her fight and armor, offering him everything she’d been holding back. All the love and care she’d saved for the One.

She had hoped to give it to Raphael but, in truth, never had. She’d never laid herself bare for that bastard the way she’d opened up for her joy-filled Hawaiian. Never known reciprocity until now, when she finally grasped what her spirit had known surfing a dreamscape bay at Keoni’s side. He was the One. And he’d already given her his all.

She returned his kisses, raining them over his mouth, cheeks, scar, and forehead, each interspersed with a thank-you. His happiness fueled her. His hands made her flesh burn for more. Their minds and spirits suffused, and she still wanted more. Keoni was happy to oblige.

Ciaran dipped her head to kiss the center of his chest then licked between his pecs, beneath his chin, along his jawline, and up to the junction of his jaw, neck, and left ear. His moan let her know she’d found his spot, and she used her teeth and lips to tease it while she shucked his multihued board shorts—and only clothing—down his gorgeous legs and to the floor.

His erection leaped between them, and she leaned back to give him her sexiest smile. Keoni raised an eyebrow and ripped her tiny, hot pink sleep shorts right off her. She gasped, playfully swatting his chest. He shrugged, making a show of letting the tattered garment slip from his fingertips and onto the countertop. Raising the other eyebrow, he lifted one of her legs to rest on his shoulder, running his hand seductively along her thigh.

Her turn to give a saucy look. It stuck midway, and humor melted into mindless ecstasy as he slid his index and middle fingers into her welcoming heat and used his thumb to work her clitoris into a throbbing frenzy.

“Oh. My. Damn,” she breathed in staccato rhythm.

Reaching down, she sought to pleasure him manually, needing to give as good as she got. The broad tip of his penis jumped in her hand. He answered with a twist-twirl-press maneuver. Her fingers clutched his sable locks, and her back arched as far as humanly possible.

“You can’t touch me right now, manu,” he said into her ear. The impassioned tone of his voice rippled through her.

Ciaran responded by grabbing his shaft with both hands, her mouth returning to the sweet spot beneath his ear. He cursed, grabbed her hands and sank deep inside her.

“Damn this man is so good, so thick… Ooh damn, oh damn, oh damn.”

She curled her body to rest her forehead against his chest and peered down. She wanted so badly to see the joining of their bodies. The sight of his length pistoning in and out of her doubled the sensations, drawing sharp cries of pleasure from her diaphragm, the sound fluttering in her throat. They were beautiful together.

Keoni gripped the edge of the counter. Ciaran’s hand dived beneath her lifted leg. Cupping his balls, she followed each stroke and retreat, hoping to amp his pleasure until he went mindless.

“Shit, manu! Keep doing that…”

He slipped his hands beneath her T-shirt. The pads of his thumbs found her nipples, and he continued his hard pumping motion. Ciaran loved every bit of it, making sounds she knew would fuel his passions to the brink. He leaned in to rest his head on her right shoulder. Passionate nips brought goose bumps to the skin there.

“Oh shit,” Keoni said.

She was his now, of her own volition. She’d chosen to give herself to him as surely as she’d chosen him as her life mate. They sought to imprint themselves onto one another’s very souls, each branding their scent into the other’s flesh and making sure neither of them ever forgot whom they belonged to.

Ciaran chose to reward him simply for being him. She curled the fingers of one hand deeper into his hair and tugged his head up for a face-to-face. Locking eyes with him, she watched and waited, squeezed his balls with the other hand then ran a finger between them and toyed with the base of his shaft. He came so hot and fast, he shouted the bliss of it and filled her body with life.

Keoni’s curse turned into a low moan.

Her body made him wait only a millisecond before it began to pulse and release around him, kicking off another orgasm for her and emptying his sac in wave after wave of ecstasy.

Chapter Ten

“Was it necessary to rip my knickers off me?” Ciaran squeezed Keoni’s fingers, intertwined with hers, and led him toward the stairs. They’d have to bathe in her second favorite shower since they’d kind of destroyed the first.

“You’re the one who bent the showerhead.”

“Yeah, but you made me…and stay out of my head.”

A sound smack landed on her naked backside.

She tossed him a saucy glance over one shoulder and struck a pose. Keoni chuckled, inclining his head in an obviously appreciative perusal of her half-clothed state—a teeny T-shirt on top and bare on the bottom.

He whistled on a long, slow exhale. “It was definitely necessary to rip them off you.” His expression turned philosophical as he stroked his chin. “I’d regret it if I hadn’t.”

She snorted. “Hullo, what’s happened to your accent?”

Keoni shook his head. “I’ve been speaking in Hawaiian since breakfast. You just didn’t notice. Faker.”

“Faker?”

He nodded. “You’ve understood me since we met. You just had to be difficult.” A beat. “Faker.”

They spent a few more minutes in pleasant banter. Ciaran welcomed the reprieve from worry it provided. One look at her man and she knew he needed a break from the madness as well. Nothing could erase the weight of foreboding bearing down on the pair but at least they could enjoy a smattering of calm before the world sailed to hell on roller skates.

She clucked her tongue in time with a sudden doorbell chime, squeaked and jumped behind Keoni. Ciaran wasn’t certain she could be seen from the front door but she wasn’t certain she couldn’t be either. Of course, whoever had rung the bell stood square behind the intricately carved door, unseen, so there was hope her modesty would survive. Curious. The guard at the front gate normally called in guests and deliveries.

Keoni pulled her back into the kitchen, body blocking her as they moved.

Ciaran’s confusion cleared. “I think it’s the gardener,” she said. “He probably forgot his keys to the shed and mudroom.”

“You want me to let him in?”

“No!” She pressed a hand against his chest. “You great hulking half-naked man, you’ll likely scare the geezer into fainting.”

Keoni licked his lips and flattened them between his teeth, holding back laughter. “Then we’ve got a problem.”

The doorbell chimed again. The beginnings of a headache crowded the edge of Ciaran’s awareness. Her thinking slowed to sluggish. The melody hadn’t left her all morning. Why couldn’t she get the thing out of her head?

Keoni came to her rescue once again. He divested himself of his shock wave-patterned, yellow, blue and orange board shorts and held them out for her to step into. She obliged, and he secured them at her waist, pulling the drawstring tight.

“Stay out of sight, please,” she said, rubbing her temple.

He nodded. “Where the hell is the music coming from?”

“You hear it too?”

“Started about an hour ago. It’s driving me nuts. I know this song but it doesn’t sound—”

“Right,” Ciaran said. “It’s been grating on my nerves all day.” Two more chimes. She laid the fingertips of one hand on his chest. “Let me take care of the gardener, babes. Then we’ll figure the rest of this out.”

* * *

The little woman in the large, colorful baggies exited the kitchen cautiously enough to give him pause. Apprehension tensed Keoni’s muscles. If only the song would relent enough to let him think. No doubt he received it secondhand, directly from Ciaran’s mind rather than hearing it himself, but where was it coming from?

He closed his eyes, envisioning an indigo bloom sprouting from his psychic center. As he meditated, the blossom’s twin petals unfurled between his brows, peacing him out. Their psychic abilities were one of the few things the Somnians retained in the Waking World: telepathy, elevated strength and healing.

The song solidified in Keoni’s third-eye, the perversion of its meaning so intense it had nearly been obliterated, leaving behind tainted chords. The notes struck his mind in discord. Snatches of lyrics ebbed and flowed in churning waves.

…force the tears that aren’t falling…bleed so they know you still strive…

He surfed the chords through swell and lull, tracking the melody to its source.

His eyes snapped open, and he launched into motion, yelling for Ciaran to stop.

* * *

The icy notes of the distorted love song continued to rise in volume. Ciaran’s temples throbbed, synchronized with the beat of it. Her bare toes caught the edge of the floor runner, its silky texture comforting beneath her. The thing had been a nuisance since she arrived but just then it warmed her feet, a barrier between her and the cold floor.

A black shadow flickered at the edge of her vision. She jumped but relaxed when she recognized her imaginary friend. The black dog padded silently at her side. He had never appeared to her in the Waking World. Nothing from the Dreaming ever had, but so much had changed recently, perhaps her new powers allowed it to come to her. She hoped. She prayed the answer was simple.

“You here to look after me? Actually going to help this time?”

The dog angled his head as if affronted by her question.

Keoni yelled for her from the kitchen.

“In a minute!” she shot back to him.

The shadow-dog turned to regard her but continued toward the door, matching her strides. Time hitched. Glowing yellow eyes fixed on her face, and an ache similar to the healing of an old wound—stretchy but good—bombarded her consciousness. All…right.

Realization dawned. Had the dog? Yes, it had brought Keoni to her when the banes had her surrounded. She should have realized before. Her fingers slipped through the animal’s ruff when she reached out to stroke it. The dog was but wasn’t there and its thicker-than-air substance intimated fur and flesh. “My apologies, pup,” she said. “You done good.”

Keoni yelled her name again, this time from much closer. She turned in order to give him fits for his impatience and threw the door open. “What?”

Ahn-koooou, Keoni mouthed, reaching down to grab the carpet runner beneath them.

Whipping back around, Ciaran prayed the man had lost his mind. Wrong. The Ice King stood at the door, the most heinous smirk possible splitting his face near in two and revealing vividly pink gums. His too-blue eyes glared down at her, inhuman in their intensity.

Well fuck me. He really is an ankou.

The Ice King reached for her, but she quickly glided back and away, her face registering the shock of moving without initiating it. The runner worked as a conveyer belt. Keoni made swift fist-over-fist tugs to bring her to him.

Time caught and slowed to a tenth its regular pace.

The Ice King’s arm elongated, chasing her across the slick stone floors. Her mind shouted for Keoni to hurry as the fiend’s reach gained on her. The big Hawaiian made one final tug, and she flew backward.

“He’s one of you,” Keoni yelled.

What? Ciaran couldn’t focus. The Ice King’s talons distended and closed with a sharp, clicking slice, taking a line of skin from the tip of her nose.

Keoni caught her midflight, flipped her like luggage, and tucked her beneath his left arm. All this while running pell-mell—in slow motion—for the kitchen.

Ciaran guarded their backs, her vision blurred from the jostling. Keoni connected with her and shared the image of two female ankou entering behind the Ice King. All three creatures loped after them.

The smaller of the two females wore a crimson cloak and nothing else. Her blue-gray hair floated behind her in a glossy mantle; matching lashes framed blue eyes rimmed in sickly red. Eyes conveying all too clearly, whether Ciaran became the ankou queen or not, the crimson-cloaked ankou would one day take her head. Ciaran dubbed her Evilena the Red.

Funny how the mind will focus on anything to keep from panicking.

The larger of the two stood as tall as the Ice King but twice as wide. Naked. Yellowed fangs filled the creature’s mouth, and her claws caught the light in ivory glints. Corn silk tresses erupted from her head in a wild mass of cowlicks, and her brutish visage earned her the moniker Abominable Snowbitch.

* * *

Keoni slid into the kitchen and set Ciaran on her feet. The three ankou rounded the door behind them. The same presence he’d sensed back in Mommy and Emma’s house filled the room. Regret at his inability to save the child burned in his chest. The Ice King, as Ciaran called him, was going down.

Keoni went straight for the cooking utensils, grabbing two ten-inch knives. The watered-steel blades had the look of mini-machetes, and they’d cut clean through bone.

“Oooooh, Damascus chef knives,” Ciaran said, popping up from the other side of the island with a medium-sized black skillet. She gestured toward the blades. “I didn’t know they had those!”

Keoni jerked in disbelief. Slow motion or no, the ankou contingent was almost on them. Still, he spoke with calm. “Aznuts, manu. What the hell did you grab a skillet for?” He threw up both knives and shook them. “Waking World.”

She gave him her now-infamous glare, punctuating each word with an agitated index finger. “I’m going to whoop those bitches’ asses with this skillet.”

He shrugged in response. Women.

The ankou who had once been Emma bounded over the center isle, barreling into Keoni. The force sent him flying back and into the sink. Ciaran goggled at the size of the creature. Keoni didn’t blame her. It was tough to accept the child had been transformed into such a perversion. It wasn’t possible. He knew that for a lie even as he worked to reconcile himself to the fact he’d have to kill Emma. Keoni had no such trouble plotting Mommy’s death. A mother who could do this to her child deserved to be exterminated.

* * *

Ciaran turned away from Keoni’s battle with Snowbitch in time to catch Evilena square in the forehead with cast iron. A ringing bong! met the blow. Evilena snickered, completely unfazed. Well, that settled it. She wasn’t going to whoop this bitch’s ass with this skillet. Ciaran dropped the pan on Evilena’s toe, dipped beneath the creature’s arm and flung herself into the mudroom.

The Ice King stood in silent vigil, enjoying the show. He reminded Ciaran of a lion. He watched as the females in his pride did the heavy lifting. Ciaran and Keoni telepathically shared one goal, to wipe the sneer off his face and make him eat it, and Ciaran knew exactly what weapon she wanted to use.

Seconds later, she had to smirk at Evilena’s response to her exit from the mudroom. The electric whirring of Ciaran’s latest weapon had stopped the monster cold. Evilena turned her head to one side in a marked effort to make sense of what she saw. Ciaran lunged, forcing the monster back.

Weed-whacker time. Demon-slayer Ciaran powered to level two.

Whap, whap, whap! Whap! Whap! The centrifugal motion of the gardening tool’s cutting string sliced weeping welts on Evilena’s arms and face. Quickly sprouting fur lessened the effect, but the gardening tool held the creature in a stalemate.

This was one nasty bitch. Ciaran gave thanks the monster couldn’t delve into her mind in the Waking World. Keoni had assured her they didn’t have the power yet. He must’ve been right, and it was the reason they needed to add someone like her—a psychopomp and a shape-shifter—to their mix. Lord only knew what horrors Evilena could wreak with more than generic fears at her disposal. The ankou had to be stopped.

* * *

For Keoni, ivory claws deflected knives at every turn. When a blow landed, it had little effect. A thick coat of fur the color of honeydew melon now shielded Emma’s flesh, and part of him still didn’t want to hurt her. The child’s image remained a prohibitive force within his mind. He spun low with an out-sweeping leg. The maneuver took the balance from under the creature. She hit the floor heavily enough to shake the entire kitchen.

Keoni moved in, seeking to capitalize on the advantage. Emma lifted her legs and fought him off with the clawed toes on her feet. Damn, she was dexterous. He dove to the side, barely missing getting skewered on a furry limb. The ankou spun on her back, break-dancer-style, and struck Keoni on the arm with a downward sweeping ankle. The blow bruised to the bone. He dropped the knife in that hand but managed to slash the creature across the chest with the other when she lunged for the kill.

Dammit, it couldn’t be helped. Nothing of Emma remained, he reminded himself again. He had to end her.

A second swipe. She caught the blade, her head skewed to regard him as she broke it off at the handle. Blood poured from her palm and pooled around the discarded weapon.

Unable to use his left arm, Keoni swung with the right. Emma caught his fist at the wrist, sank the claws of the other hand into his side and lifted him high over her head.

* * *

Ciaran watched in awestruck horror. Time slowed to a greater degree. Her heartbeat drowned out all sound but the insistent melody. It continued to play, a soundtrack to their destruction. The ankou holding Keoni pitched back and hurled him at the Ice King. The master ankou moved from his relaxed pose against the far kitchen wall and positioned himself. His talons elongated, finding the perfect angle to impale the plummeting man.

Driven by pure emotion, Ciaran instinctually shifted her hand into a jaguar’s paw, tossed the weed whacker aside and gouged three bloody furrows into Evilena’s chest with her claws, all the while bellowing neither a no, a scream nor a plea, but rather a piercing amalgamation of the three. Vapor burst through the Waking World in bright puffs of Dreaming, sudden as popping corn. Reality shifted, and all five combatants were transported back to the dreamscape by the sheer force of Ciaran’s will.

Chapter Eleven

Ciaran’s voice surged forward in ripples of sound made palpable. The sound waves hit the Abominable Snowbitch full force. She vaporized in a rain of pink mist. A fine spray of liquid red coated Ciaran and Evilena. Mortified, Ciaran dropped the newly materialized skillet, which had appeared within her grasp the moment she’d returned to the Dreaming.

The Ice King snarled. He turned in angry, jerky movements, taking in the change in environment, apparently enraged at finding himself back in the dreamscape. He stalked the couple, then paused to sniff the air. Lifting his head, he cackled the call of the banes.

Keoni caught a dreamwave, hung a three-sixty and raced toward Ciaran.

The blood on her skin appeared to seep into her pores, constrictive and suffocating.

Wrong.

So wrong to destroy any creature so utterly. To eradicate a presence to the point death itself could not claim it. Emma, the scared little girl the Abominable Snowbitch had once been, was gone. Not dead. Not anything.

Ciaran ran her hands over her face, succeeding only in spreading the blood around. She glared at the offending limbs. Raphael’s hands had been covered in blood in this same manner when he’d left her. After the beating he had wiped them on her clothes…she tried to do the same to no avail. How could one reconcile such violence as she’d committed? The memories Keoni had shared with her of the child struck full force and she doubled over from the pain.

The gift of voice as a tool for destruction? Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

She’d fight. Oh hells yes, she’d fight, but she would never again betray her blessing. It was commensurate with cooking to poison, loving to destroy. And it wasn’t her.

Evilena the Red grasped Ciaran’s head between furry palms. Here in the dreamscape, the creature would have the ability to flay the mind in the moments it laid unprotected, and one as perverted as Mommy wouldn’t miss the opportunity.

* * *

Keoni dropped between them, knocking Mommy loose. Ciaran fell to her knees, obscured by mist but safer where she lay. Keoni called on the dreamscape to erase the blood from his woman’s skin, never dropping his gaze from the red-cloaked ankou. Ciaran’s pain vibrated within his marrow and his soul ached for the torment her first killing caused her. She shouldn’t have had to kill anything. Not his manu li’i. She was comfort and sanctuary not a death bringer. From this point forward he’d be her sword.

He stood, squared off with his opponent and raised an eyebrow. The creature paused. Keoni hurled a mini-tsunami blast straight through the ankou’s stomach. The creature’s body swirled, spiraling in an upright whirlpool. The macabre motion built fantastic torque. Blam! It blew and whirled back in the opposite direction, sending limbs flying to the four winds. Mommy’s torso imploded shortly after, disappearing from existence with a soft ploop.

Ciaran recovered her skillet and rose with it firmly in hand. Keoni looked to her. She nodded. Good, she could go on.

Hordes of pallid hyena-like banes bounded in, responding to the Ice King’s call, and huge lupine shadows with eyes of burning magma pounced upon the monsters.

The howlers had come.

The obsidian nightmares left prisms and the stench of fear in their wake wherever they shredded bane throats. They exterminated with savage ease, putting an end to their corrupted brethren with expediency enough to put dream guardians to shame.

When all the banes lay dead and fading, Keoni and Ciaran turned from the carnage to face off with the Ice King. The howlers fanned out to encircle the three combatants. Tossing their lupine heads, the howlers turned their backs, one by one, in a domino effect. In a ring, they stood guard against further interference from the outside and awaited the final showdown.

The melody returned full blast, permeating the dreamscape around them. Keoni watched the Ice King but stole glances at Ciaran. Her gaze lingered on the howlers. “How beautiful. How frightening,” she thought.

Keoni didn’t disagree. The howlers, beings of nightmare and darkness, were as much the truth as dreams and light. Just as much a form of goodness, they terrified in their perfection.

Alone at the center of the ring, the master ankou swayed in time to his tainted ballad. His straight platinum hair danced about his shoulders as he moved. Slowly, the features of his face softened, flattening in places, protruding in others. His ears and fingers elongated into smooth points, the fingers resembling tentacles, and his fur retreated to leave lacquered, white skin.

He stood before them in a new form, evolved and alien. Fascinating. Not in the same way the howlers were fascinating, but in a deadly sense as duplicitous as the devil.

Keoni winced against the deafening cacophony of the Ice King’s song. Ciaran swayed against him.

One moment, utter stillness. The next the ankou’s fingers shot out in telescopic tentacles, aimed for Ciaran’s mind alone.

“C’mon then,” Ciaran said. “Let’s have at it.”

Keoni grabbed her free hand and squeezed. “Together?”

“Together.” She nodded.

He attacked. She defended.

Keoni’s water blasts melted the tentacled fingers shooting from the Ice King’s hand. They grew back as quickly as he pruned them. Ciaran’s skillet stopped all and any attacks seeking to slip beneath their guard. To no avail. They lost ground the longer they fought. The pair had been battling and loving for what seemed like days. There wasn’t much left they hadn’t already given.

Tentacles enveloped arms and legs, burning frostbitten trenches into flesh. Where they lingered they sucked away life force.

A ferocious snap of the wrist twined the Ice King’s fingers around Keoni’s neck. The creature’s insidious cackle rang across the dreamscape while he delighted in shaking Keoni until he went limp. Redoubling, the tentacles wrapped Keoni’s face and, after reaching his forehead, delved into the inner places of his mind…

* * *

The image of the Ice King split into two figures within Keoni’s mind, a man and a beast. The Beast bowed with flourish and in the manner of a show pony—one paw raised the other held straight before it—the Man did the same. The pair couldn’t resist a show and there were things they wanted the Somnian to see. No. Not see, understand. For they were superior and he should know before they feasted on his soul.

The howlers, and the banes and the ankou after them, knew something mankind had yet to figure out. Fear did not haunt modern man as it had their ancestors. No, the man of social networking and goal-based incentives was hounded by deep wells of unresolved past. The kind psychiatrists and talk-show hosts received exorbitant fees to expose but not quite heal. Modern man ran from his issues.

If faced with a choice between their worst fear and a splashy death off the face of a cliff, the average human would fricassee an alligator or dragon. They’d readily kick Dracula or Sister Grace Anathema’s ruler-wielding ass rather than drop off the cliff. No matter how much they feared any of the above, certain death wouldn’t be an option. But if faced with their darkly guarded issues: the night visit of that uncle who’d never married but had a special affection for children; the perpetual squeak of their cousin’s wheelchair after the accident they’d caused; the guilt of not being there in time. If made to stare these ghosts of their pasts down, most people would take the cliff and thank God for the splat at the end of the ride.

The howlers worked with this in benevolence. The banes exploited it, and the ankou fed upon it.

The Man sneered and the Beast snickered. They knew him now. As a Somnian, and one of the best, Keoni had long since dealt with his fears—call it a prerequisite. Still he was human and all humans had issues. The Ice King, also known as the Man and the Beast, whichever suited, wielded the power to turn issues into agony. They relished it. No. He adored it.

* * *

The boy who would one day become the dream guardian stood in his grandmother’s yard in Kauai. They pounded poi together. He took helping the women seriously. After all, they were only women, and he was the man of the family—the delight of their days, or so they said. Keeping up with the schedule of a supposed man had gotten harder lately. He hadn’t slept in so long, dogged by nightmares he feared might come true as so many of his dreams did.

The rattle of the little white pickup truck drew his attention, the sides speckled with rust like sun-dappled rock exactly as he’d seen it… When? Where had he seen it? He wiped the sweat from his eyes with the back of a hand. Foreboding rose in the pit of his stomach. The truck was the same as it had been… No!

He grabbed the machete at Tutu’s feet and ran. Following the road for a pace, he broke off. Stones cut the soles of his bare feet, but the path he’d chosen was the shortest and he could not falter.

Leilani. Leilani! He stumbled. Falling onto the quiet beach his sister had claimed as her private place. The machete sliced his chin open, and sand filled the cut.

Leilani’s belongings lay strewn across the beach. Her beloved boogie board broken in ragged pieces.

Gone.

It had taken only moments and she was gone.

His big sister, the one who had taught him to smile no matter what, had disappeared just as he’d seen it in his nightmares. He hadn’t run fast enough. Hadn’t been man enough to save her.

The boy—who would never see his sister again—vowed he’d be a boy no longer.

The Ice King cackled and forced the memory to begin again, imprisoning Keoni in a perpetual loop of unresolved past…

* * *

Ciaran cried out Keoni’s name. Worry for him took her concentration away from the fight. The fingers of the ankou’s other hand snaked around the cast-iron pan and entered Ciaran’s third-eye in five points of vapor.

Rollicking through her mind, the Ice King sought a nightmare to cull or some issue to exploit. Instead the mind melding unveiled the dark secret the Ice King had hidden…the man at the core. The man who the Ice King had once been formed his foundation, and Ciaran could read anyone’s dream of the Last Hurrah as easily as the morning paper. She was still a psychopomp and those abilities allowed her to know the Ice King as intimately as he knew her nightmares. Her powers connected to the ankou through the man who had given it an unlife infused with pain.

The love song was the key. The Man had truly loved a woman once, and it had been their song. When his lover rejected him, he couldn’t bear the emotion the melody evoked, yet was compelled to listen to it again and again. He’d tortured himself with the tune and it perverted his mind. He became a stalker, bereft and in paradox, embarrassed. He pinned his entire life and sanity on one more of her kisses. It never came, and he retreated into himself over hundreds of restless nights. A howler was born and unlike any howler before it turned bane the moment it came forth from the mists of the dreamscape. This was the Beast.

Ciaran began to sing unconsciously. Starting with the verse the Man inside the Ice King hated most.

And you can’t force the tears that aren’t falling,

Or the truth that your eyes make a lie.

Eventually the bane had returned to its maker’s dreams and driven him mad with nightmares and the song. Always the song.

It had been easy. The bane knew the man better than anyone, and soon the Beast had eaten through its maker’s heart and entered the Waking World oozing vengeance like pus. Yet love remained woven into the Man’s frame, longing as well, and he wanted a mate—unheard of for an ankou. It sought a partner to fulfill the promise of the love song and its hunger for revenge. When it found Ciaran, it knew its dream would be complete.

“The world will suffer in truth,” the Ice King told her. And suffer because his heart lay broken.

As she fell further into the consciousness of the man inside the Ice King, deeper truths materialized before her. Oh God. Ciaran suddenly understood what Keoni meant by “he’s one of you,” and how the master ankou had been able to extend his arm the length of a hallway.

Brilliant.

The plan worked on so many levels, it blew her mind. Strategy and selective breeding at their finest. The man inside the Ice King did not bear the blood of Cora’Delieye as she did but he was a shifter all the same.

It seemed so obvious now. The man’s girlfriend rejected him because to her he’d been a shape-shifting freak. He’d disgusted her, and through some warped reasoning he’d fixated on Ciaran, a woman who by virtue of species shouldn’t reject him. For the Beast, she was just as perfect. She descended from a bloodline going back to the Mother of Shifting Magicks. Bonus, she possessed psychopomp abilities. The Man and the Beast would be able to take revenge on mankind at the deepest and most intimate level.

Diabolically brilliant. Awful. Twisted and mad.

The tainted love song reached crescendo.

Tears coursed down Ciaran’s cheeks. No one would believe it. The master ankou, who strategized a demon uprising to end the world, had started off as a daydream inspired by a song. All this horror had sprung from heartache. At the same time it was nothing new. How many wars throughout history had been fought under the banner of some twisted sense of love? There had been a face to launch a thousand ships. Would a betrayal to birth a thousand demons be so different?

She wept for the man gone mad, for the futility of it, but she continued to hold the Ice King in her thrall as she sang its song. Imbuing the melody with the original intent, she brought the ankou to its knees.

Hide away so the world, it can’t see me,

’Cause it’s clear now they don’t understand.

She physically beckoned Keoni to find him already at her side. Her mind touched his. How did you escape the memory?

He shrugged. “I’m your man, manu. Think I’d leave you to face this alone?”

She loved him.

All of sudden Ciaran knew she loved the big, goofy Hawaiian. She almost squealed for the joy of it. Would have if the song she sang hadn’t been the only thing between them and being consumed.

What an amazing man she’d been blessed with. He was completely knackered, worn out from the fights, the lovemaking, dealing with her shit, astral projecting to save a family and Lord only knew what else. He desperately needed rest and still hadn’t left her side. Hadn’t complained. God love him, he’d only lost his temper once.

If they survived, she’d make loving her worth his while. She’d need to earn his love, of course, but first things first.

“I need your help.” She sent images of what must be done. He balked, comprehension dawning.

“No. Destroy him.”

“I won’t. I won’t eradicate another being. Not again.”

“Then I’ll end him for you, maki die dead. Extra dead.”

Her sharp intake of breath momentarily interrupted the song. She resumed it, mentally pleading with him.

“But I can save him, Keo. His soul at the least.”

Keoni drew a stuttering breath. Could she? “You can save him?”

She nodded and continued to sing.

* * *

He didn’t dare believe it. Not after all these years of hoping, even praying, for a means of saving the ankou possessed.

Keoni’s lips drew into a firm line. Ironic. He had escaped the memory tortures of the Ice King only because of his fears. Pitted against the guilt dogging him since boyhood, the fear of losing Ciaran superseded all. If they lost today, so be it. It wouldn’t be because they hadn’t left their all on the battlefield. And it definitely wouldn’t be because he put the illusion of manliness before the fruition of his dreams. Save the world or die. What did manhood amount to if he couldn’t do whatever needed to be done? Even in the face of emasculation.

Great gulps of air expanded his chest. He couldn’t refuse. Not when the apocalypse threatened. Not when he was so close to saving a life rather then exterminating it. Maybe he and Ciaran couldn’t completely save the Man today, but they would figure it out. He knew it. And he wouldn’t refuse under any circumstances anyway, not when his life mate did the asking.

“Never repeat this to anyone,” he said, lacing his tone with mock grudging. “You got me?”

She shot him a brisk nod. Pride brightened her face.

Keoni roared his frustration but dipped into the nearby Dreaming anyway.

“A womb?”

“Of sorts. You’re the king of dream-made water, and I need to take him back.”

He powered up full blast. Calling on Somnian ability, he reached out and harnessed several visions drifting through the Dreaming around them: the tiny Asian woman in her third trimester, stroking her belly and reading the poems of Rumi to her unborn child; the older lady in the doctor’s office, praying this next fertility treatment would take; the wife doing the happy dance in her bathroom because her husband had gotten the job done and the home pregnancy test said yes. Keoni took these visions as his own, manifested a swirling globe of dream-made water, and infused it with each hope of motherhood.

Incredible.

Emotion overwhelmed him, and he used it, topping off the dream-womb with a rhythm as soothing as a mother’s heartbeat. Satisfied, he enveloped the dazed master ankou and lifted the creature in a swirling sphere of genesis.

Ciaran shared the full force of her gratitude and, yes, her love.

* * *

Her turn. Panic rose in her throat. Breathe. She choked on several ragged breaths. She could do this. This water was created by her man. It wouldn’t hurt her. Couldn’t drown her. Her chest heaved. C’mon, luv, she told herself. No risk, no glory. Before she could change her mind, Ciaran squared her shoulders and sang the Ice King’s song backward.

Drawing on the soul’s seven energies, she brought them, her chakras, into alignment up the center of her body. They blossomed in seven multihued blooms: red at her solar plexus for past impressions, earthly emotion in orange at her womb. Spiraling upward, the golden bloom of personal power and perseverance sprung from her belly. Followed by the emerald blossom of love and the blue of expression. Her energies pulsed, producing indigo at her third-eye, and finally one thousand violet petals of faith sprung from her crown. The power coalesced into a white light of pure truth.

The surge of kami emanated outward. Blinding in its power. The howlers had been wise to turn away. The blast transformed Ciaran into the sparrow and she flew, one goal in mind.

With each beat of her wings, she drew nearer to the Ice King and used her power to remind him. Taking him back. Back from master ankou to bane. Back to the brokenhearted man and the howler he’d made. And further and further back, until she entered the water-womb, flying straight through the Ice King, past the Beast and into the dying man at the core. Uncovering his Last Hurrah, she unfurled her wings. The force split the stolen flesh in two. It peeled away in layers, exposing the man’s spirit. He expanded and stretched, taking on a pose eerily similar to Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Blood sprang from the body in two directions and flowed into a crimson river.

In the end, the Man dreamed a simple dream, one of release from the Beast devouring his soul. Ciaran returned to her human form and offered him her hand. He took it and together they turned, stepping over the remains of his ruined flesh. As always, the Dreaming had provided, and the red river served as a gateway to the Otherside—something red and something to cross over. By the time Ciaran’s second foot landed, the Man had taken the final leg of his journey alone.

She turned and began the song again; this time singing her own truth from the depths of her heart. For Keoni. She sang for him so he’d know and never doubt how far they’d both come.

Hide away so the world, it can’t see me,

Cause it’s clear now they don’t understand.

My facade’s ready made to be broken,

Maybe then you will see what I am.

Maybe then you will know who I am.

The couple closed the gap between them. Keoni feathered his fingers over her hair and face—and shared his awe in her accomplishment of such a feat.

“No Somnian has ever saved a soul trapped within an ankou. You, manu li’i, my woman, my wife, are amazing.”

He crushed her to his chest. Moments passed, interrupted by his chuckle. “You brahs on Hawaiian time?”

Confused, Ciaran pulled away just enough to tilt her head at Keoni. He nodded behind them.

The howlers opened the ring they’d formed and began to pad off in every direction.

From overhead came the raven’s caw; he descended in looping circles and alighted, soft as the proverbial feather. His wings curled around him, clothing the long-haired man in an iridescent black suit under a matte black greatcoat.

Hooves stirred the mist, echoing across the dreamscape. The palomino emerged. He tossed his mane and slowed to a trot, his hide transforming into cinnamon gold suede pants and motorcycle jacket.

Out of nowhere, the husky skidded to a halt and rose to become a man resplendent in a creamy cashmere turtleneck, gray jeans and matching snow boots.

Alexi folded his arms over his chest and arched a snow-white brow. “Uh, Keo? You’re in the Dreaming. You can put clothes on at will.”

Keoni grumbled, covering himself in a T-shirt and his favorite pair of board shorts. A match to the ones he’d given Ciaran. “If you brahs weren’t late, maybe I would’ve.”

Ciaran’s gaze darted from one Somnian to the next. Wow. “Keoni,” she said out of the corner of her mouth, “do you guys come in ugly?”

The man at her side stroked her back and extended a hand in the raven’s direction. “Do you even need to ask, manu? Look at Archer.”

They all did. Jay and Alexi both shook their heads in distaste and murmured, “Yeech.”

Ciaran tried but couldn’t hold back peals of mirth at their antics. Archer was by far the most beautiful man she had ever seen. He stepped forward and taking Ciaran’s hand placed a kiss on the back of it.

“Yes, well, we can’t all be the delicate flower Freefall is,” he intoned drily, but his gaze held a certain warmth as it lingered on her face.

Jay snorted, setting off more mirth.

“Don’t think I forgot,” Keoni said, his tone a blend of amused and dead serious. “Me and manu almost died. Where were you, brahs?”

Jay raised his hands in mock defense. “It was the howlers, man. They regulated on us and wouldn’t let anything through their ring.”

Keoni nodded, placated for the moment.

“I’m tellin’ you,” Jay said, “we can puff out our chests all we want, but the howlers—they’re the true Lords of the Dreaming.”

The group turned to regard the few newly dubbed Lords of the Dreaming still in sight. A smaller, darker-than-black shadow turned away from the pack and loped over to Ciaran. She lit up, recognizing the glowing yellow eyes—not quite as intense as the burning magma of the others—immediately.

“It’s my nightmare.” She fell to her knees, wrapped her arms around the black dog’s neck and grinned up at Keoni. “The one who brought you to me when I needed you!”

She hugged the animal to her, and it returned her affection in a thorough face licking. “He’s my own personal howler. He guides me,” she said to Keoni and nearly smothered the creature against her breasts.

“No. Not gonna happen. We’re not keeping him.”

Ciaran gave her man the glare. “Humph.”

Chapter Twelve

Styx, Ciaran’s big black nightmare of a dog, rolled over onto his back and sought a more comfortable position at the foot of the bed. She’d considered calling him Fenrir, but naming your personal issues after the beast that swallowed the sun and kicked off Armageddon surpassed even her levels of ballsy.

If she’d gone that far, she might as well have named him Doomsday and cheered while he beat Superman to death. Ugh! Since their minds and spirits had entwined, Keo and his comic books had turned her into a geek.

Ah well.

In the end, she’d decided if she were Charon, the black dog would be her river Styx. They’d already crossed several souls over in the last week or so, and Styx had a way with children. He’d also be an asset when she started looking for other shape-shifters. She’d save those plans for later. She smiled wolfishly. They’d been kicking major bane ass. Her demon-slaying dreams had come true.

“Whachu so happy about, ipo?”

She threw her leg over the big man lying beside her in the bigger bed and wrapped her arms around his neck. He yawned, resting his cheek against the crown of her head.

“Where in the dreamscape were you?” she asked.

“Me, the brahs and some howlers went to see Raphael. Heh, he’s gonna need therapy.”

“Not nice, babes. Not nice at all.” She bit back a squeal of pleasure.

“Not my fault he wets the bed. And it’s a lot nicer than what I want to do to him. You want me to go visit him in person instead? Make him maki die dead?”

Her expression took on a sassy slant. She licked her bottom lip, peering at him through thick lashes. “I’m more concerned with what you’re going to do to me in person.”

Keoni shot Ciaran a smoldering sidelong glance and ran a hand over her thigh. She purred into the curve of his neck.

Smack! He slapped her backside. Noisy but painless. She sat up, dislodging their sheets. He rolled out of bed and quickly donned his board shorts.

“I owe you more dirty lick’ins later, but right now the sea is calling.”

Ciaran sputtered for several seconds. “A spanking? I’m not going in for a spanking. I want some lovin’.”

Keoni shook his head. “You know I’m kidding about the lick’ins.” He tucked his surfboard—always nearby—beneath his arm and leaned over for a kiss. Pulling away far too soon, he touched his nose to hers. “Don’t give me the glare. I love you, but payback’s a bitch, tita.”

He spun on his heel, ran through their open patio doors and directly onto the beach. Ciaran eavesdropped on his thoughts and reveled in his pride when the sight of his homeland, sun dancing on waves, brought him up short. “No island can match Kauai’s beauty first thing in the morning. No woman can match Ciaran.”

He had it made.

The woman in question grumbled and slumped back on the bed with a happy sigh. Styx flopped across her stomach. Minor consolation. Listening out, she caught Keoni’s parting shot on the breeze.

“Fuck me, huh?” Ha-ha, ha-ha. “Not today.”

Author’s Note

For those who may not have recognized it the Ice King’s theme works well with “Iris” by the Goo Goo Dolls. Great song. It inspired me because I needed a love song that could be interpreted in a variety of ways both positive and negative. The actual lyrics are beautifully vulnerable when read one way and down right scary when read another.

The reason I chose a song as my villain’s catalyst at all is because some of my best and worst memories are tied to music. “Love Me Still” by Chaka Khan and Bruce Hornsby reduces me to a sobbing idiot. At one point in my life I truly wondered if those most important to me loved me still. On the flip side “Tiny Dancer” by Elton John transports me to Thanksgiving 2008. My mother, her dog, Kingsley, and I sang it, (yes, the dog too) full throttle, off-key, all glee, as we sped down I-95 to visit my sister. You should see the grin on my face right now. (I have a thing for grins.)

You must have those moments too. Music intimately tied to your memories. It’s why I knew you’d understand a song so immersed in emotion it represents a journey from the precipice of love to the core of vengeance. An extreme case? Oh most definitely <grin>, but I hope you can dig it.

~S!

Dreams’ Dark Kiss Glossary of Terms:

ankou: noun \ ahn-koo \

A human being who has been possessed by a bane (below) and utilizes nightmares to torture and/or kill.

See also: howler

bane: noun \ beyn \

The tainted form of a howler (below), these pale shaggy beasts stalk the Dreaming (below) in search of victims to pervert in an effort to become ankou.

Ciaran: proper name \KEER-en\

Wannabe demon-slayer and resourceful—“where there’s a frying pan there’s a way”—heroine.

chakra: noun \ chuhk-ruh \

One of seven points of spiritual energy down the center of the body according to yoga philosophy. Each point is related to a color, an emotion, and is visually represented by a bloom with a certain number of petals.

the Dreaming: noun \ dreem-eng \

The second of the two worlds forming all of existence; the Dreaming is comprised of the dreamscape, the Wastelands and the Otherside (all below).

the dreamscape: noun \ dreem-skeyp \

The plane on which the act of dreaming takes place, shared by all dreamers. See also: the Dreaming

howler: noun \ hou-ler \

Beneficent nightmares who help to drive human development through confrontation with fear. See also: bane and ankou

Keoni: proper name \ Keh-oh-NEE \

In a word: Hawt! (i.e. emphatically hot).

See also: dreamy, steamy, funny and delicious.

Last Hurrah: noun \ lahst \ • \ huh-rah\

Final journey a soul takes, in the company of a psychopomp, before crossing over to the Otherside (below).

Libros Arcanum: noun \ LEE-vros \ • \ ahr-kay-nuhm \

The great, secret library of the Dreaming; all libraries and none simultaneously. Houses the Dream Guardian Guild.

Also known as: LibrosArc, Big Ass Library

psychopomp: noun \ sahy-koh-pomp \

Person who guides or conducts souls to the Otherside; e.g. Charon, Hermes.

Also known as: soul conductor

the Otherside: noun \ uhth-er-sahyd \

Land of the afterlife.

See also: the Dreaming

Somnian: noun \ som-nee-uhn \

Evolved human being who protects mankind as they sleep.

Also known as: dream guardian

spirit animal: noun \ spir-it \ • \ an-uh-muhl \

Avatar or spiritual representation of a person’s essence, projected into the dreamscape via an animal form.

three realms: colloquialism \ three \ • \ relms\

Slang term used to reference the dreamscape, the Wastelands and the Otherside succinctly.

See also: the Dreaming

two worlds: colloquialism \ too \ • \ wurlds\

Slang term used to reference the Waking World (below) and the Dreaming as one.

Waking World: noun \ weyk-eng \ • \ wurld \

World of reality.

Also known as: waking life

the Wastelands: noun \ weyst-lands \

Hellish landscape between but simultaneously beneath the dreamscape and the Otherside.

See also: the Dreaming

About the Author

Shirin Dubbin is a megalomaniac prima donna…um, ok…not really. She’s actually a closet wallflower with an addiction to laughter whose alter ego is the orange, ass-kicking geek. Besides being a voracious reader and lover of storytelling, she hosts D.C.’s Fantastic Forum, a show celebrating comics, sci-fi and fantasy.

When not working in graphic design she’s lost in writing: screenplays, novels, graphic novels and stage plays—all of which she adores, but her favorite genre to write is Urban Fantasy with romantic edge. Shirin’s first novella, “Keeper of the Way,” debuted in 2009 and she was overjoyed (and more than a little surprised) with the great response to the “modern Fae trapped in Washington, D.C., tale.”

Culturally, she’s half American, half British and very southern; right down to the accent and love of grits—they’re great with shrimp…try it! Government reports show a residence in D.C., but Shirin spends most of her time on the astral plane and is certain she’s seen you there.

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ISBN: 978-1-4268-9099-4

Copyright © 2010 by Shirin Dubbin

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