Chapter 9

W olf is there, waiting, when I transition into The Dreaming. You did it, he says.

I know him, now. Caleb?

He woofs, shaking his head. Caleb is in The Waking . He leans against my legs, and his fur is warm and soft and his weight is comforting. I knew you could do it.

How are you here? I ask.

I'm a shifter. As if that says it all.

But you ARE Caleb?

Another bark, a yip this time. Here, I am *WOLF*.

There's a brief flash of amber light, and I feel maya spark and swell all around me, feel mana surging. I taste the magic. And then there's Caleb, the man, standing before me.

Standing? We're in The Dreaming. What is he standing on? It's hard to see his feet—darkness swirls around his ankles, shadows eddying. There's a sourceless glow coming from everywhere and nowhere, a dim, faint haze.

He's naked. And by the Blood, he's beautiful. Every muscle is mammoth and perfectly defined. Razor sharp. Heavy and hard. Yet, as he takes a swaggering step toward me, he moves with lithe, predatory grace.

You impress me, Sparrow, he murmurs, stopping close enough that I have to peer up at him. I'm not short, but he towers over me.

How did you do it? I ask.

The corner of his lip curls in a smirk. I lied. I never broke out of mage-cuffs. No one ever has .

Then why could I?

His eyes flick over me—and somehow, I have a body, a physical form. My own form, as I would appear in The Waking. Naked, of course, as seems to be my new normal. His eyes pause at my breasts and linger there, a visual caress that leaves me shuddering and shivering.

You are Vaer. You are what has never been. Mage-cuffs were designed to contain the magic of vampires, fae, and shifters. You are not either or both of your heritages. I think you are able to withstand the pain in a way no other immortal could, and your magic is just…too much for the cuff's magic to contain. That's my theory.

So you didn't KNOW what would happen? Or if I even COULD get out of them?

Of course I didn't KNOW . But I believed in you. And I was right.

Why? You don't know me.

His palm grazes my cheek, so big it nearly engulfs my entire face. I DO know you. I've watched your dreams your whole life. Fed on them. I have tasted your mana night after night. I knew you before I ever laid eyes on you.

Yet you still delivered me here, to these people.

I owed it to my pack. They are innocent, yet they suffer for me—for you.

You left the moment we arrived. I thought they were going to release them when you gave them me.

A bark of laughter—it sounds more like a dog's whuff than a man's laugh. They were never going to release them. Had I stayed, I'd be in a cell as well, and no good to anyone.

Then…what's your plan?

You.

Me? I shake my head, and I feel hair move at my chin. I'm out of the cuffs, but…the ward is still there, and I don't think I can break that.

A worry for later, Sparrow. For now, go back up, into the shallows, and rest. I will guard your sleep .

Caleb…this place…is it real?

It is The Dreaming.

A nudge, and the firm ground beneath my feet dissolves and my form is shrouded in shadows, and darkness swallows me, and I sleep the dreamless slumber of true rest.

"Maeve?"

I blink and see Grandfather—Aeldfar—in the same chair, on the other side of the ward. "Oh. Hi."

He smiles, lifting his chin at me. "You did it, I see."

I look at my hands—the black rings and the silver chain connecting them are gone, only a grayish smear on my belly remaining where it rubbed off from my wrists. "Yeah, I did."

"Well done. I knew you could do it."

"Has anyone else ever gotten out of them?"

He shakes his head. "No. Definitively no."

"Oh."

"Time is shorter than ever. The Tribunal has voted to execute you—I voted no, of course, but I was the lone dissention."

"I thought you said they'd take a long time to make a decision!" I say, shooting to my feet.

His eyes meet mine, full of compassion and concern—and even paternal love. "They did. The vent burst and the subsequent massacre was over a month ago."

I fall back to the cot. "What? A month ?"

"You were comatose for three and a half weeks. And you've been on that cot, eyes open, not moving, not breathing, for more than a week."

"I…I thought a day, at most two or three. A fucking month ?"

"The execution will likely be scheduled soon. I'd say you have another week, perhaps two." He sighs. "I hate to put any more pressure on you, but I fear I must. The cause, out there…it's splintering without you. It is becoming a repeat of The Mortals' War. Tribunal forces have already clashed with mortal peacekeeping units from the UN, and the government in the United States is struggling to deal with the riots happening in every major city in the country, and more and more immortals are coming forward, which is causing chaos in every industry, in every city and state and country across the globe, but more so in the US."

"Who is rioting? Why?"

A shake of his head. "It's hellishly complex, Maeve. Mortals are discovering they've been lied to for the last two hundred years, and they're angry. Immortals are sick of living in the shadows, sick of fearing the Tribunal, sick of the Treaty, sick of watching their loved ones fade away. We do not die of age or illness, Maeve, but we develop what is known as age sickness. Exhaustion and existential fatigue set in, and we become age-sick. We cease wanting to live, and so we just…fade away and die, even though no other natural cause can touch us. That is what has been killing most immortals over the last two hundred years. It's why we will go extinct if you do not escape and take your place at the head of this revolution and show the world the way forward. You must give it shape. You must give it a leader."

" How , Aeldfar? It took a fucking week to figure out those cuffs. There's not a snowball's chance in fucking hell I'll be able to get past this ward in time—if I can at all. It zapped me unconscious just for reaching out for my mate."

Aeldfar doesn't answer for a moment or two. "Maeve, my precious child. You are capable of far, far more than you even suspect. You must be creative and bold."

I shake my head. "The bloodmate sickness…" I whisper. "I'm trying to fight it, but…it's bad, Aeldfar. I hear them. I feel them. I need them, but I can't reach them. It's hard to think."

"Try to rest, dear one."

"What if I lose another week while sleeping?"

He lifts a shoulder. "You are fae—you do not sleep. It is…more like meditation. It's a trance state more than anything. Scientifically, you do enter REM—or a version of it, at least—but it's not sleep as mortals would recognize it. My point is, you require rest." He rises to his feet and waves a hand to dismiss the chair. "You might try some simple exercises, as well. Begin learning some elementary control over your prana, now that you've vanquished the cuffs. You cannot use magic to reach beyond the ward, but you can perform glamours within it. Seek to learn control."

"Like?" I prompt.

He sighs. "My time is short, but…" he waves his hand again, and the chair reappears. He sits on the edge of the chair, posture straight, chin high, hands on his knees. "Attend me."

I take that to mean follow along, so I sit on the edge of the cot and mirror his posture. "Okay."

He inhales deeply, closing his eyes. "Listen to my voice. The only things that exist are my voice and your prana." I close my eyes and breathe in slowly, deeply, and then it out. "Your prana is a pool or a lake. Deep, and still."

"Mine is more like an ocean, and it's never still. It's always boiling and turbulent."

"Because you have never learned control. That is the first lesson, then. Your prana is you. It is not in you, or part of you—it is you. Prana manipulation—or glamourworking—is all about precision and control. You can only rely on your mother's spirit in moments of dire emergency or intense emotion, it seems. This is a weakness which you must overcome through practice."

I turn my gaze inward. My prana is a golden-white ocean, endlessly deep and perpetually turbulent. I've always seen it as exactly what he said it is not : a thing within me, something that is a part of me, but separate.

But if my mind is turbulent, and my prana is me, then…

"You're saying I need to find inner peace?"

He snorts. "Call it what you will. Inner peace? Perhaps that is too trite, too simple. You must learn to control your thoughts and emotions. You must learn stillness—to be still is not the same as to be at peace. Breathe. Just breathe. Picture your prana as a placid lake—or ocean. If the most you can achieve is a relatively calm sea, then that is a success. Calm the storm, Maeve. I sense your emotional distress—I see it. Of course you feel thus, with all you have experienced. But to wield your maya with control and precision, you must exert your will upon your mind, body, and spirit. To put it as the Elders would say: your prana, mana, and rakta must be in harmony so that your maya will respond to your instructions."

"Sounds an awful lot like Eastern Mysticism, Aeldfar."

"They borrowed from us. They took our practices and exercises and adapted them to fit mortal beliefs, but the system of belief as you recognize as Eastern Mysticism originated as a means of learning, teaching, discussing glamourworking."

"I suppose that fits with everything else I've been told."

"Quite. Your first lesson is to find the stillness. Second, simple conjurations." He snaps his fingers. "Watch me, child."

I open my eyes and watch.

He holds his right hand out in front of himself, palm up. "Picture a simple object. A flower, a teacup, a hairbrush—something simple and familiar."

"Oh, I know this one! Andreas taught me this."

I close my eyes and focus; I breathe in and out slowly, imagining the surface of the ocean within to be calm and still—immediately, I feel the difference. I pull a thin, small stream of prana and hold it in my hands—mental hands, and physical. I hold in my mind's eye a red rose. I focus on the details: the green stem and leaves, the thorns, the silky crimson petals, the scent of it. I concentrate on the prana, picturing it becoming solid in my hands, taking on the shape and form and reality of the rose in my mind's eye.

Something warm shivers through me—a sense of rightness, of completion, and I open my eyes: in my hand I hold a red rose.

Aeldfar nods, smiling. "Very, very good. Now, dismiss it. Do the reverse of the conjuration. Dissolve it and return your prana to its source."

I do so—the reverse is trickier. Now that the rose exists, it does not want to return. The prana wants to remain in its physical state. I exert my will upon it, keeping my mind still while focusing on the image of the rose dissolving, becoming granules of light, particulates of prana that swirl upward in a helical stream and flow back into me and become one with the ocean within.

"Excellent," Aeldfar says. "Now practice that process until you can conjure the rose without effort and dismiss it with equal ease."

He demonstrates. A simple roll of his wrist, palm down, a flourish, palm up, and a rose appears, hovering above his open hand. He closes his fingers with an abrupt snap, and the rose winks out of existence.

"Wow," I say. "You made that look easy."

He snorts. "That's the point. It should be. Eventually, you should be able to do things like this."

He flourishes his hand again, and the rose appears, spinning in the air. He flexes his pinky, and then his ring finger and then his middle, and then his pointer, all in a swift, smooth, repeating gesture, as if he's rolling a pair of small steel balls around his palm. The rose spins faster, glows white, and becomes an apple, complete with a curved bit of stem and a pair of leaves. Another flourish of his fingers, and it morphs into a tarantula, huge and hairy, jaw snapping, forelegs tasting the air; flourish—the tarantula becomes a book, a dog-eared paperback laying open on his hand; flourish—pages ripple, flap, flutter, a glow obscures its form, and then it becomes a dagger with a long, curved blade and a wicked tip, a gold handle wrapped with silver wire and giant glittering ruby set in the pommel.

He tosses the dagger from hand to hand, flips it and catches it by the blade, flips it again, catches it, spins it on his palm—it spins faster and faster, begins to glow, and then vanishes in a stream of golden-white prana.

"The conjured object…is it real?" I ask. "Like, the spider. Was it real? Alive?"

"Of course it was real. But did I create life? No. We do not know the answer to your question. Is there a very confused spider out there somewhere? Perhaps. Did I conjure a memory of a tarantula and make it real? Perhaps. If I had set the thing down and let it run away, it would continue to exist in this world as a spider. It would eat, mate, molt, and die. But I can say definitively that I did not create it. We cannot conjure higher mammals, for example. A spider seems to be the limit, for me, at least—and every glamourist I've ever met. Anything larger and more complex and the glamour just breaks down. Where does it come from? We do not know." He rises once more and dismisses his chair. "I must go. Practice, Maeve. Practice till you are sick of it, and then practice until it is second nature. Conjure anything and everything, but be sure they are simple objects. Do not attempt anything moving or living, yet."

"I feel like I'm so far behind, Aeldfar. There is so much to know, and I know nothing."

"That you understand your own ignorance is the first step to learning, dearest child. master the conjuration." His gaze meets mine, abruptly intense. "And rest. Perhaps you will find the answers you seek in The Dreaming."

He leaves then, and I spend the next several hours practicing—conjuring the rose and dismissing it until I can do it almost as smoothly as he did.

I practice until my brain aches, but even then I do not stop. because if I do, I'll hear Caspian.

He whispers my name. Chants it. His voice echoes in my head, banging on the walls of my mind like a moth trapped in a lampshade. The pain in his voice is like a knife slicing my soul into ribbons. I cannot make out his words, other than my name. It sounds like he's caught in a fever dream, whimpering, murmuring, muttering.

The moment I tune in to his voice, his pain overwhelms me and floods through me.

"Cas?" I whisper.

BANG!

I'm flung bodily across the cell to smash into the wall, pinned there by the force of the ward's magic, pressure crushing me, collapsing my lungs and bruising my bones, breaking them.

The ward does not relent.

I turn inward—fighting the chaos of anger and pain in my mind. Soothe the storm. Calm the seas.

I hit the ground with a thud, groaning and gasping.

My left arm is broken in three places, bone protruding from the skin, agony lancing through me.

I have to heal it. Can you heal yourself? I don't know, but better to try. If my body heals itself, it will use blood, which is in short supply—better to use prana.

I grasp my wounded arm, keening through gritted teeth as the pain hits at the touch, excruciating, dizzying. I fight the turmoil within, forcing my prana to be still. Picture the prana flowing in a thin, dense stream into my arm, coating it from the inside out until it glows golden-white. Picture the bone retracting, straightening, knitting. The skin mends, blood flowing in reverse. Bit by bit, I imagine the breaks correcting.

I feel the warmth of rightness, a kind of metaphysical click of something slotting into place. Opening my eyes, I look at my arm.

Healed.

Jubilant, I shout in triumph…

But it's short-lived.

Dizziness washes over me—darkness rises within me.

What?

No. No.

My ocean of prana is ebbing, sloshing, angry.

Why?

Darkness swallows me.