“I’m talking about the way you look at her!” my mother said, and I heard Xavier take a breath, but Zoe cut him off cold. “Like she’s filthy inside, Xavier. Like she should be ashamed.”
He paused before saying, “She’s carrying a monster’s child.”
My hand stifled my gasp and I drew back in the hallway, as I imagine my mother did in their bedroom. Then, in a new voice, she said, “Well, like mother, like daughter, I guess.”
I heard a crack then, an open palm ricocheting off bare flesh, and my mother’s surprised cry before an almost unearthly length of silence. Then, slowly, silently, almost deadly…
“There is nothing wrong with my daughter.” And she said it like I belonged to her alone. And though I was sixteen again in the dream, I carried with me the knowledge that Xavier was not my father. And deep down he must have known it.
“Zoe!”
His call had me rushing to hide in the portico of the adjoining hallway just before my mother appeared, and I watched from there as she strode away, seeing her with new eyes. It was like the bandages Greta had peeled away hours earlier had really been blinders, and in this dreamy reenactment I didn’t just see the sheen of tears on her cheeks, I saw the determination beneath them, and the hands clenched into able fists at her sides.
“Zoe!” Xavier followed, stopping right in front of the bisected hallway, giving me a clear glimpse of the bewilderment and anger muddling his normally composed face. The part of me that knew I was dreaming wanted to laugh. I’d forgotten all about this argument. She’d been gone the next day, and that’s what I’d been focused on. But it all made sense now, and my dreaming self did laugh as I continued to study Xavier’s confusion.
He heard me.
Xavier’s head swiveled as if it was ratcheted on his neck, eyes finding me squatting in the dark like twin lasers fixing on a target. I froze awkwardly, smile dying on my face as his chin lowered and his top lip lifted in a sneer, and I swallowed hard. I didn’t remember this part.
“Think it’s funny, little Archer?” he asked, in a voice throatier than his own, one raspy with age and power. He pivoted stiffly to face me, and I fell back, hampered by my belly…though I knew this was a dream and I was no longer pregnant. I wasn’t even there.
But those eyes remained fixed on me, colder and darker than I’d ever seen them, and they followed my frantic backpedaling pitilessly. I scrambled away as he began to stride toward me, each of his steps faster, crisper, than the last, but then my back was cornered, the stunted hallway dead-ending into a laundry chute, and I had nowhere to hide.
I took a large breath, intending to wake myself up—because I knew this wasn’t real; it hadn’t happened this way, and it wasn’t happening now—but a fat palm slapped over my mouth, and I tasted blood as my teeth cut into my top lip. I felt like a butterfly pinned to a board. I struggled, my limbs wheeled, the baby tumbling madly in my belly, but my head was immobile beneath that iron-straight arm. Then the hand shifted and my head was lifted, forcing me to look in his face.
There was a summer during my childhood that I remember being particularly hot. I took refuge one day beneath a giant pepper tree, brushing aside the long flowing branches to enter a shaded chamber, the spicy scent of those living limbs heavy on the searing air. I was just about to lean back on the peeling bark of the old tree when I saw the cicada shells dotting the trunk. There were dozens of them, all empty dead husks marking where life had once been lived.
That’s what it was like looking into Xavier’s face. All life had been extinguished in that giant shell of a man, and death itself stared back at me from those black orbs. I had time to wonder if his skin would crackle and crush into dust beneath my fingers, like those cicada husks had, but then Xavier’s bullish features began to contort.
It was as if a giant invisible hand was pressing putty; his mouth and nose switched places, swirling grotesquely on his face, and his eyes and brows slipped to the sides of his face, ears disappearing altogether. Then the putty thinned, tearing high along his cheekbones and forehead, and peeling away to reveal blood, muscle, and finally gleaming white bone.
His eye sockets were black pools, dark and swirling and alive with something that could only be called unyielding rage. “So are you going to pick up where your mother left off, Archer? Will you come after me too? Think you’re ready to take me on?”
He poked me in the belly with his free hand, and I gasped against the palm still clenched against my jaw. The bony finger poked again, and this time I felt it in my gut, separating my intestines, scraping precariously close to my unborn child. The jaw of his skeletal smile click-clacked gleefully as I struggled beneath his invasive touch.
“Because I’m ready for you. Oh, yes I am.” He was getting riled up now, and smoke escaped through the bone of his nose to make my eyes tear, as embers flew from his mouth. “Ajax tells me you’re strong, as strong as Zoe even, but I can smell you on the winter wind, and do you know what you smell like to me?”
His finger stirred inside me, scratching and grating, making me whimper, and when he leaned closer, his breath reeked of minerals and the deep, fiery core of the earth. He opened his mouth and I nearly gagged on the rot of his blackened soul. “Prey.”
And I jerked awake, gasping for air, nearly choking as the powdery scent of Greta’s room mingled with the scent of the grave. “Fuck,” I rasped, gulping for air. “What the fuck?”
My hands went protectively to my belly, and I looked down, past the glyph that had lit on my chest, glowing through my skin as hotly as it had during my run-in with Ajax. The heat was lessening now, though, and that was reassuring, as was the smooth, flat skin on my belly, unmarked by violence or pregnancy, or anything more alarming than the imprint of the sheets I’d been tangled in. I was about to breathe a sigh of relief when something wormed inside my gut. It felt like a finger, or a piece of one, was still lodged there. I screamed and backed up, head cracking against my headboard as an explosion of laughter boomed inside my skull.
Then the room was silent, but for my ragged breath and the fading volley of the laughter. I cursed again, and pressed one hand against my belly, the other against my face. I must have bit my lip while dreaming because I came away with blood there, but at least this time nothing moved inside me.
I glanced at the gilded clock beside Greta’s bed, 9:18, and rubbed at my eyes. Surely the headache behind my sockets was just because I’d slept in late. And the sheets were tangled and soaked for the same reason. Because I wasn’t going crazy.
And the Tulpa, I told myself on another steadying breath, had not just entered my dreams.
18
One of the lovebirds whistled as I swung my feet out of bed and made my way on shaking legs to the wardrobe mirror. There was a note attached to its beveled edge, a flowery scrawl on scented paper. I’m off to work for the day. Make yourself at home. Warren will come for you at ten. G.
I yanked it down before studying my reflection in the mirror. There was a clump of dried blood by my temple, sticking out from my blond tresses like a spot on a Dalmatian, but I picked it free, then leaned forward and pulled down the lower lid of my right eye. Bloodless. Perfect. Whole. Other than the new wound on my lip, I had totally healed. And even that, I saw, was already smoothing over.