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Being back in New Brunswick is fine. Familiar. Cold, in a way it wasn’t before. Loud, too. Crowded.
For a while there it was just Rose and Lyta, after they lost Hector and then Mom. Now there’s Jed and the baby and all their friends besides, and it feels like home again some days, and Rose can tell herself that she got what she wanted even though she’s the most stressed and overwhelmed she’s ever been in her life and it’s been that way since the day her mother died. So for the most part it’s good, great.
Unity’s estate is paying for Rose’s grad school and most of hers and Jed’s living expenses until she gets a solid job or becomes a world-famous author, whichever comes first. In the meantime she’s an assistant at the local library. She loves it more than she’d thought possible and she has a new posse of old ladies who have unanimously declared themselves warriors in defense of Rose’s claim to Unity’s estate. She learns at minimum three new facts about Kincaid Sugar daily.
Her first novel, Into The Night, was just sent to the publishing house. It might suck. Sometimes she thinks it does and sometimes she thinks it really, really doesn’t. Lyta likes it but Lyta isn’t a writer and she has a whole baby and Rose knows for a fact she isn’t focusing on the, like, finer details of Rose’s craft. Understandably.
And they found Jed. So. Everything is really, really good.
She tells herself this as she silently drives Jed home from a parent-teacher conference that she spent half the time crying at.
It’s raining, fat drops pelting the windshield, and the wipers squeak along and bounce because Rose keeps forgetting to buy new ones and she wouldn’t know how to install them anyway. Jed stares out the window, quiet as he’s been all evening. She wonders if he’s watching the raindrops race by the glow of blurry street lights, the way she used to, the way kids do. She wishes she could just ask him and receive an answer instead of a shrug or an eye roll or a glare or a flinch. She thinks about other things instead.
She thinks about Unity. She’s been doing that a lot.
She wishes the drive home was longer. She could use more time to stew and to project parental disappointment and also to be out of the rain. Alas, it’s minutes before she’s turning on to their street, seconds after that she’s pulling into the parking lot in front of their building. There’s an enormous pothole along the gutter, hidden by a torrent of mud-brown water, and Rose grimaces when her trusty/shitty old car stutters through it. Jed laughs. It isn’t funny.
Someone’s parked in Rose’s spot. She pulls up behind the lifted pickup just to stare in uncomprehending outrage. She does so for a second too long apparently, because Jed rolls his eyes and opens his door, letting in a gust of wet and cold. “I’ll meet you inside,” he says, yanking his sleeve from Rose’s sudden death grip and slamming the door on her.
“Jed,” she says, too quietly, and to no one at all.
Her eyes still feel sticky and stinging, and they threaten to tear up again while she stares at the door. She blinks until she calms down. She finds a new spot around back of the building. She won’t remember tomorrow when she leaves for the library and she’ll be mad all over again, so she backs into the spot to make it a little easier for herself. Her elderly neighbor Candy will notice she isn’t in her place and ask her about it in the elevator tomorrow. Life is exhausting.
She sits there after she parks, hands on the steering wheel, sallow light glinting on her ring. Unity was so young, just so little when forces beyond human understanding picked her to play their games with.
Rose bundles herself up as much as she can, taking special care to cover her hair before she ducks out into the rain. Her boots kick up oily mud and water, and a hereto undiscovered hole means the toes of her left sock are quickly soaked. The glaring yellow light in the back vestibule flickers and the automatic door stutters like it might not let her in at all. It does. Slowly. She drips water all the way to the elevator. Jed must not have wanted to go up with her.
The elevator dings a full two seconds after it’s stopped and the doors have opened. Rose thinks the delay might be getting worse but she’s not certain who to tell or if it matters at all. Last time she brought it up to Lyta she’d gotten a weird look. So it’s probably not important.
The upstairs hallway is warm, at least, and well-lit, and muddy footprints tell her that Jed made it inside safely. She steps in those footprints on her way to the door because she thinks it looks better if only one of them made a mess. She digs for her keys in her jacket pocket. The door opens before she finds them. “Thanks,” she says, but Jed has already ducked back inside.
Rose shucks her coat over the welcome mat, toes off her boots, and drops her keys in the stand beside the door before she realizes the TV is on. “Jed,” she snaps. “Absolutely not. Homework.”
They’d ordered pizza for dinner because Rose didn’t think she’d have time to cook and clean up before they had to leave for the conference. Jed didn’t put the leftovers away like she’d asked him to. It’s probably fine. Rose moves the pizza to a smaller container, slips it in the fridge, crushes the box and sets it beside the trash can. The TV is still on. “Jed, I’m not telling you again.”
Rose retreats to her room to dig through her dresser for something comfy to wear. They’ll be up for a while, making up on Jed’s missing work. Thank god it’s Friday and she doesn’t have to be at the library until early afternoon. She should get some coffee brewing. Does she have any from this morning? Yes, but she made it the day before. It’s probably fine.
She watches Jed skulk to the kitchen table from behind the bookshelves. He sets his backpack down heavily on the floor. Satisfied that he’s getting started, she dips into the bathroom.
She strips her blouse and her jeans, her wet sock and the dry one too, slips into ratty sweatpants and a tie-dye hoodie. A glance in the mirror confirms that she looks really fucking tired. Consistency is key when raising a child. She sits on the lid of her toilet with her head in her hands for about five minutes.
Jed goes to counseling every Wednesday. At her worst Rose wishes it was every day.
When Rose leaves the bathroom, Jed has his papers and school supplies spread out on the table, but he’s scrolling on his phone. “Jed.” She just sounds like she’s begging now.
Jed rolls his eyes but pockets his phone, props his elbow on the table and leans sullenly on his hand. He stares blankly while Rose pulls out her chair. The knob of his elbow is ashy. He’s not moisturizing like he should be. She’ll get on him about that later. “What’s the point? I’m never going to catch up.”
“That’s not even close to what Miss Alderson said.” Rose yanks one of his folders to her with more force than is strictly necessary. It’s labeled Language Arts in a shaky child’s shaky script. “She said you’re brilliant. You just need to apply yourself.”
“She said I’m a disruption, and a troublemaker, and that I’m holding others back.”
“You can do all that and still be brilliant. Or whatever. I don’t know. Let’s do your fucking homework.” She doesn’t want Jed to be holding others back, obviously, but he’s kind of going through it and has been for most of his life, and some oblivious white lady doesn’t get to decide that he’s a lost cause. She should have said all that at the meeting. “What are we starting with?”
They start with math, which Jed doesn’t really need help with at all. He has the kind of brain that’s built for spatial reasoning, Lyta said once. It means he understands all the architecture stuff she talks about much easier than Rose does. Rose just has to sit there and make sure he doesn’t get distracted while he works through worksheet after worksheet on pre-algebraic bullshit. Rose does not like math.
She wonders what subjects Unity would have liked, if she’d been able to figure it out. Maybe she got some cosmic equivalent of an education in her dreams. Maybe she would have been a better teacher than Rose, if they had been able to live with her after all. Does Sussex get much colder than New York? They’d have gotten used to it either way.
Half an hour in Jed gets antsy and starts complaining about being hungry again. Rose reheats some pizza in the oven and has to keep glancing over to make sure he hasn’t taken his phone out. She serves up the pizza and by the time he’s caught up on his math work he’s also inhaled two massive slices and is asking for more. Honestly, if it works, she’s not complaining.
Mrs. Alderson had had a lot to say to Rose, too. Saccharine sympathy and derisive pity and really, is there no one else who can help you?. Echoes of Jed’s social worker, Mrs. Rubio. Rose’s own doubts, too. She’d cried like a baby instead of going off like she should have. Maybe she’ll go back and—what? Prove that she’s so incredibly unbothered that she just had to come back and say how unbothered she is?
“Okay, time for language arts,” Rose wipes pizza grease from her fingers and slides the folder towards Jed.
He, predictably, throws his head back with a groan. “This stuff isn’t due until Monday, what’s the point—”
“The point is that you can’t be trusted to do it on your own, and I have other things to do besides sit here all weekend. So it gets done tonight.” With that she starts clearing away the new dishes that she probably won’t get to until morning. Language arts is Jed’s worst subject. She’s fighting the way her voice wants to rise and grate with frustration. “If you’d just do your work, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
Did Mom ever get this angry? Rose doesn’t think so. Their dad did, absolutely, and never for any good reason. The dishes crash in the sink. Her hands are shaking and Unity’s ring catches her eye. She doesn’t hear a pencil moving. “Jed.”
Another beat, and then soft scribbling. Rose breathes out long and deep. “Thank you.” She takes one of Mom’s old mugs down from the cupboard and pours herself a cup of cold coffee, microwaves it for long enough that surely whatever microbes get into two-day-old coffee must be decimated. Or very angry. She leans against the counter and sips and enjoys a moment of peace before she has to actually check what it is that Jed’s working on.
There’s a knock at the door. Jed’s head whips up, then drops again. It’s probably Lyta. Rose sets her coffee down and scrubs one hand across her face. She’d love to sit and vent but the last thing they need right now is a distraction. “Hey, Lyta, now’s not really a good time—” Rose opens the door, and Dream of the Endless is standing in the hallway, wreathed in black.
She stares for a second.
Then she slams the door shut and locks it, throws her back against it, spreads her arms out like he might squeeze through the hinges. Rapidfire questions in her head, panic making her ears ring, Jed’s chair scraping away from the table, the smell of ozone settling over microwaved coffee, the taste of it gone sour on her tongue. “What the fuck do you want?”
A long pause. “I wish to speak with you for a moment.” So muffled she shouldn’t be able to hear it. Another beat, shaken by Rose’s rattling breath. She presses against the door like that could keep him out. Jed can’t have known who she’s seen, but he’s poised in his chair like he’s ready to take flight. “About what happened.” Rose jerks her head at Jed to tell him to hide. He just sits and stares. Dream’s voice, when he next speaks, is much softer. “I owe you some answers, Rose Walker.”
It grabs her attention, snatches her from her terror. She stares sidelong at the door like she could see him on the other side. “Is it Dream?” Jed asks. “Or the nightmare guy?”
“Either is acceptable,” says Dream, louder.
“Shut up a second,” Rose tells them both. She thunks her head back against the door and squeezes her eyes shut. Dream tried to kill her. He took Hector away. He threatened Lyta’s baby. He used Rose to hunt down his Nightmare and he taught her so much in the process, secrets of the universe no one ever gets a chance to know. If Unity knew Rose had an opportunity to unravel a few more mysteries, what would she want Rose to do? What risks would she want Rose to take? “Answers about what?”
“Yourself, primarily,” Dream responds. She hears the rustle of clothing, imagines his familiar stance with his arms dangling awkwardly at his sides. “Your heritage. And. Why I did. What I did.”
“I don’t really care why you did what you did,” she tells him. She thinks of Lucienne, impersonal and horrible and wise in the way ancient things are, I had to convince him it was necessary in the first place. “How do I know you’re not here to finish the job?”
Rose feels the frame of the doorway creak, like Dream is leaning his shoulder on it. He’s quiet for a long time. Rose glances to where Jed sits rooted at the kitchen table. She wants to tell him again to hide, but she knows he wouldn’t listen. “That story is over,” Dream says. “I have no cause to harm you. And. I do not want to.”
What any of us wanted was never part of the discussion. “Is Matthew with you?”
A brief, almost surprised pause. “I told him to wait outside. I had thought you might prefer the privacy.”
Rose doesn’t answer. Believing at least that he won’t barge in without permission, she walks to the living room window and looks outside. The night crept in when she wasn’t paying attention, and the rain slowed to a steady drizzle that dampens and grays the light of street lamps and cars. Matthew is busy hopping and splashing in puddles collected on the sidewalk.
“Matthew? The talking raven?” Jed asks, jumping up from his seat to join Rose at the window.
“The very same,” Dream says, even though no one is talking to him.
Rose stands there, arms crossed, teeth grinding while she thinks. Matthew has never seemed anything less than good-intentioned. Mind-bendingly normal. Aside from Gilbert, he’s the only dreamthing Rose can see reason to trust.
Matthew defended both Dream and Lucienne the last time he and Rose spoke. His loyalty to the King of Dreams is unquestionable. And Gilbert—utterly unique, sweet, sincere Gilbert—was one of Dream’s Major Arcana. Strange, beautiful beings made by his own hands. Terrifying things, a wolf’s grin and her mother’s voice. Dream is the king in her story. He tried to kill her.
But she knows that Unity needed these answers.
Rose looks to Jed. “What do you think?” she asks. He stares at her with wide eyes. He knows the story—it’s just as much his as it is hers, their great-grandmother, their history. “If I let him in, I want you to go to your room. I could get some answers, then tell him to get lost.”
Dream says nothing, though he presumably can hear her.
“Do you trust him?” Jed asks. “He really won’t hurt us?”
Rose doesn’t answer. Dream does. “I swear I will do no harm to you nor your sister, Jedediah Walker.”
That sounds binding, and if she knows one thing about the Dream King, it’s that he is bound. “I trust that he’ll keep his word,” Rose says, quietly.
“Let me stay, then,” Jed pleads. Rose never wants to be apart from him again. “I have questions, too.”
There’s no real arguing with that, is there? Rose takes his hand, dry and abruptly tense, and squeezes it until he relaxes. “Be careful,” she whispers. I know you remember how. She ducks her head to meet his eyes, brings her free hand up to hold his cheek like he never lets her do. “I’m right here with you, okay?”
A heartbeat, then Jed nods.
Together, hand-in-hand, they walk back to the door. Rose looks at Jed one more time, one last check in, before she unlocks the door. Then she takes two steps back, bringing Jed with her. “Alright. You can come in.”
The doorknob turns, the hinges creak, and Dream of the Endless slips inside, slow and deliberate and painfully mundane. He looks different in the real world, jeans and a peacoat and strange uncertainty. He closes the door gently behind him, finally skitters his gaze up to catch Rose and Jed. “Rose Walker. Jedediah.”
Rose squeezes Jed’s hand and neither of them say anything.
Dream clasps his hands in front of him. “Perhaps. Firstly. An apology is in order.”
Rose glances at Jed, who looks back at her, brows drawn in consternation. Dream nearly couldn’t get through to executing her, he was so busy apologizing. “I’m not really interested.”
“Understandably,” Dream dips his head. “Nevertheless. It is the proper thing to do.”
He stares at her expectantly, so Rose says, “like, okay then,” far more rudely than she perhaps would have if the situation wasn’t so weird. Jed looks at her like she just cussed out Cthulhu.
Dream looks a little unnerved, which is pretty gratifying. He unclasps his hands, takes a fortifying or exasperated breath, looks smaller than he ever did in his cavernous throne room. “Might we sit?”
There are exactly three chairs circling the little kitchen table, which pisses Rose off a bit at this moment. “Fine,” she says. She watches Dream walk past them to the table and releases Jed’s hand, nudging him in the same direction before she retrieves her coffee from the kitchen counter. It’s still passably hot. Hopefully it’s offensive to drink caffeine in front of the personification of sleep.
Dream occupies the seat neither of them had been sitting in. Jed doesn’t sit until Rose does. He watches Dream wide-eyed, silent, while the King of Dreams pulls a completed math worksheet closer to himself. “I interrupted your schoolwork.”
“That’s okay,” Jed says quickly.
Dream’s lips twitch in an almost-smile. “Yes, I’m sure.” He slides the worksheet back towards Jed, taps the third problem with his finger. “Are you certain about this one?”
“I was,” Jed mumbles, glowering so intently at the paper that he misses Dream’s smirk. Rose doesn’t miss it. She glares at him and he either doesn’t notice or is ignoring her. Jed only takes a couple seconds to figure out his mistake, scribbles out his answer, and slides it back to Dream.
“Very good,” Dream says. Rose thinks they will finally get to that apology, but instead Dream nods to the notebook open in front of Jed. She just now notices that the page is covered in doodles and decidedly not his language arts assignment. “Were you struggling with a composition?”
Jed doesn’t answer beyond a morose shrug. He goes abruptly tense when Dream half-rises from his chair to scoot it closer. Hands straining on her mug, ready to douse him with lukewarm coffee should the need arise, Rose watches as Dream then settles in again, elbows up on the table and leaning in over the notebook.
Jed looks at her, then back at Dream’s bowed head, then down at the notebook, then at her again, his shoulders high and stiff. Rose reaches across the table to give his hand a reassuring squeeze.
“It’s an interesting prompt,” Dream says, and before Rose can ask how he can see that, he taps the words, and they transcribe themselves neatly onto the header of the blank page opposite. Write a short story (three to four pages) about a conversation between a human and a legendary creature of your choice. Do not skip lines. Rose stares at the paper and feels a prickly wash of unease down her spine.
“It’s too hard. It doesn’t tell me anything,” Jed sinks back in his seat and crosses his arms over his chest, still glaring warily.
“I believe you are supposed to do the telling,” Dream smiles, maybe. “If I may, I’d urge you against conversing with any faerie, real or imagined. Even depiction can invite meddling.”
Jed’s eyes narrow. “You’re shitting me.”
“I shit you not,” Dream says.
“How did you do that? We’re not in the Dreaming.” Rose taps the paper, as though she could make the words disappear again. Maybe she could, if she was still the Vortex.
Dream hums, as though considering. He leans back from the table, rests his hands in his lap. “Written language is of the Dreaming. Lucienne would be able to explain better than I.”
“Right,” Rose blinks, considering that. “And Lucienne is your…?”
“Librarian,” Dream says, which answers nothing at all. He is quiet then, in preparation—somehow, Rose knows that, can read something of him. “Dreaming encompasses a great many things. Beautiful and terrible things. Impactful and mundane. There is truth to all whimsicality, and wisdom to be found in nightmares.” Rose just stares. “I fear you’ve seen only the darkest side of the Dreaming. Both of you. And though the darkness is important. It’s not all there is.”
Jed has terrible nightmares. Rose has, in fact, been blaming Dream for them. She doesn’t feel better knowing that they’re important.
When there is no response, Dream takes a breath. “Lucienne told me you’d attended her banquet. That you were frightened.”
Jed looks at Rose, wide-eyed. When she told him about the party he’d laughed it off as just a dream, which seemed like such an idiotic thing to say that she considered grounding him for it. She allows herself some vindictive satisfaction now. “You tried to kill me.”
“Yes. I did.” Dream’s shoulders lift on a sigh. “I will never do so again. And. I am sorry that it was ever necessary.”
Rose takes a strategic sip of room temperature coffee and keeps the mug cradled in her hands. “I hear it’s not something you like to do. Killing.”
“It is not.”
Rose nods and hums. Jed has gone tense again, leaning closer to her. “Seems like you keep doing it anyway. Hector, the Collectors. Gault and the Corinthian, I assume.”
Dream’s jaw tenses, but otherwise he remains still, more casual than she’s ever seen him, an awkward skinny white guy sitting at her kitchen table with power to shred minds and worlds apart. “I have my responsibilities. You are not expected to understand.”
“Right. Okay,” Rose smiles and doesn’t mean it. “You can’t come in here, offer up an apology and an explanation, then act like you can’t be bothered to even—own up to the shit I watched you do. Like—”
“Rose,” Jed’s voice is very small.
Rose stops. She sips her coffee.
Dream, to his credit, appears chastised. His eyes fixed on the table, brows furrowed, his lips part like he has something to say, but it seems to die on his tongue. Rose wonders if he regrets this visit yet. He smells a bit like an electrical fire, she realizes, or else there’s a bigger problem in their apartment building than the King of Dreams.
“Hector was already dead, and his presence in the Dreaming was a danger to all realms. And I am sorry,” Dream begins and then hurries along ahead of Rose’s rekindled rage. “I realize now that I was. Impatient. And. Cruel. In how I handled the matter. If I could change it now, I would.”
Rose traces her finger through a ring of coffee that’s managed to manifest on the table. Eventually she nods.
“The Collectors were delusioned. Poisoned by a Dreaming that ran wild in my absence.” That absence is another thing she will need explained. “I did not kill them. I took their delusion away. What they did after that was not my responsibility.”
Rose isn’t sure she agrees with that, but she’s exhausted just thinking about it. Jed is beginning to look queasy from the conversation—or maybe just sleepy. It’s gotten to be pretty late.
Dream looks at Jed when he speaks, gently now. “I did not kill Gault,” he says. “I was harsh with her at first. But in the end I fulfilled her wishes. She is a dream now, and she visits children like you.”
Jed’s eyes well with tears. He blinks rapidly to try to hide them, but his chin is trembling. “I don’t sleep very good,” he mumbles. “Can’t she visit me, too?”
Rose’s heart hurts like it’s cramping. She watches Jed scrub one forearm over his eyes and breathe whistled, congested little huffs through his nose. He never tells her about his nightmares or the things that happened to him. She reaches for him and when he doesn’t flinch she takes his hand in hers.
Dream leans his elbows on the table again, ducks forward to catch Jed’s eyes. Hunched, purposely making himself smaller, the King of Dreams doesn’t look half so intimidating. “I know your sleep is troubled,” he speaks very softly now, softer than Rose has ever heard, and with reluctance she can see him again as the kind teacher who guided her powers. “You’ve survived much, Jedediah Walker. You can survive bad dreams, too.”
Jed sniffles. Rose wishes he’d get angry with Dream, the way he does with her. “But it’s not fair.”
“Perhaps not,” Dream blinks like a cat, slow and soothing or judgmental. He is quiet for a long moment. “My son said much the same when he was your age. He thought that being mine should mean certain privileges, allowances.” Jed stares directly at him now in surprise, and Dream keeps his head and voice low. “It would be a travesty for me to take your nightmares from you. You must be allowed to face what you’ve been through. And you deserve somewhere safe to do it.”
It makes Jed feel better, and that’s what matters. Even if Rose can’t help but feel like the King of Dreams is talking out his ass.
She holds Jed’s hand while he sniffles and nods, then excuses himself and leaves for a moment to clean his face and abandons Dream and Rose to an awkward, terrible silence.
Is she smelling gasoline now? The neighbors will be calling any minute.
Jed returns with a tiny, shy smile, and Rose wants to pull him onto her lap the way she did when he was very little, but she settles for touching his shoulder when he sits back down. She looks back at Dream then. “You said you have a son. And I keep hearing that me and Jed are kin of yours. Are we…?”
“No, you are not my descendants,” he shakes his head slowly, then continues, carefully, like he’s fighting to hide some unpleasant emotion. “My sibling, Desire, is the one who sired a child with Unity Kincaid.”
Rose nods. Squeezes Jed’s shoulder. Feeling queasy herself now, close to boiling over, enraged and grieved and thinking of how young Unity was when she fell asleep, how young she was still when she awoke.
Jed doesn’t know that part of the story—the child born while Unity slept part. His eyes are wide and wondering, his arms all prickled with goosebumps like this is the coolest thing he’s ever heard in his life. “Are we like you?” he breathes. “Do we have powers? Like, besides when Rose ate everyone’s dreams?”
Dream’s eyes flicker to Rose, like he expects her to share in his amusement. She’s busy feeling sick. “Of a sort,” he says. “You, and any descendants of your own, are under my protection.”
“What does that mean?” Rose asks, with a flare of anxiety.
“Nothing, at the moment,” Dream makes a placating gesture with his hand. “Only that, being of Endless blood, you will naturally invite attention from beyond mortal understanding. I am swearing to protect you, both of you, from any meddling.”
Rose stares blankly for three long seconds. “That’s supposed to make me feel better?”
For the first time, true frustration flashes on Dream’s face, almost petulant disbelief that makes him look very young. “Yes. It is.”
Rose snorts and leans back in her chair, drags her hands over her tired eyes, drops them and looks at Jed, who looks desperately confused and also very sleepy. “Jeddy, why don’t you go get ready for bed?” she murmurs. At his outraged look, she shakes her head, as sternly as she can manage. “I’ll be fine. Go to bed.”
Jed looks at Dream then, whose eyes haven’t let Rose. Slowly he drags them away, over to Jed, and he gives a slow, gentle nod. “Good night, Jedediah Walker. Sleep well.” As though on cue Jed’s jaws stretch in a huge yawn, and without another word he scoots back from the table and leaves for his room, leaving his school supplies scattered.
Rose taps her fingernails on the table. “Did you make him do that? Just now?”
Dream opens his mouth, then closes it. “I. Thought it was what you wanted.”
What was the point of any of this? They will never understand each other. “How do you feel, personally, about your sibling raping Unity?”
Some measure of comprehension, then, falls upon Dream, in the slumping of his shoulders, the fluttering of his eyes and then the falling of his gaze. He rests his elbows up on the table and he looks at Jed’s drawings, idly traces smeared graphite and leaves it crisp in his finger’s wake. “If I answer, will you try to listen?”
It occurs to Rose that the two of them may be having very similar experiences tonight. It’s an aggravating thought. “Yeah. I’ll listen.”
Dream takes a deep breath. Rose wonders if he even needs to do that. “It is forbidden for the Endless to interfere in the lives of mortals. My sibling knows this, but my sibling is Desire. They cannot help but want what is not for them.” The bitterness there is almost sympathetic. “What they did was wrong. But you must understand—when Unity slept, she dreamed, and in her dreams she lived, and she grew.”
He stops, and he appears deeply conflicted on how to continue. Eventually, “I must apologize. The mores of your modern world are somewhat lost on me, sometimes, and I do not always know. How to explain these things. Tactfully.” A shaky breath. “Her dreams, and her feelings therein, were real.”
Rose was all dreams once, for a brief moment. She thinks she understands him.
He doesn’t seem so certain, tense like he expects her to kick him out any second. “To me, the violation was in using a mortal for personal gain, and I do condemn it. Otherwise. The. Consent. Was there.”
Rose sits in silence for long seconds. “So, she loved them? Your sibling?”
Dream nods. He hasn’t looked up from the table this whole time.
“And did Desire love her?”
Now Dream does look up, almost in surprise. “Yes,” he says immediately. “Of that, I have no doubt.”
It’s all so strange. Listening to him now, largely stripped of kingly bearing and just sitting at her kitchen table, trying to explain the lives and priorities of gods. She isn’t so angry anymore. Not with him, at least.
Dream’s eyes fall back to the table, like he’s waiting for her anger, his mouth pressed into a thin anxious line, fingers motionless now. Rose releases a breath she feels she’s been holding since he walked into her home. “You really didn’t want to kill me, huh?”
To her surprise, tears well in the Dream King’s eyes, so quickly she thinks it might be a trick of the light, except that his voice is strained when he speaks. “It is unnatural. For me. To take an innocent life.” He grits his teeth, blinks a few times, and his composure returns, like a lake freezing over. “I have had to do it too often. Vortexes cannot be allowed to persist.”
“And you’re the one who stops them,” Rose finishes. Her eyelids feel heavy, from his voice or the late hour or exhaustion. She rests her chin in her hand. “Can you really not help Jed? Was that bullshit?”
“I am helping him,” Dream says, calmly, eyes narrowed at her now. “You of all people should understand the power of nightmares, Rose Walker.”
Yeah, well. It seems like bullshit. “So he hates me and you’re giving him nightmares. Great family foundations.”
A short, bright pause, a shift of Dream’s demeanor, a sudden softening in all the room’s electricity. “He does not hate you,” Dream murmurs, with such gentle confusion it makes Rose’s eyes sting, and she blinks rapidly, and she hopes he thinks she’s just holding back a yawn. “Why would you think that?”
Rose opens her mouth to say something, can find nothing that won’t hurt coming out, scoffs and slumps back in her seat. The King of Dreams just stares at her. “I abandoned him.”
“You were a child, Rose Walker,” he says, very slowly and deliberately, in a way she’d imagine stops people from arguing.
“I was old enough,” Rose sniffles and strikes away the tears in her eyes before they can fall. He’s seen, he knows it’s happening, and it doesn’t feel as wrong as she’d think, to cry in front of him. “I left him there with our fucking dad. And I didn’t look for him until I was alone.”
“Until you had the resources to do so,” Dream tilts his head. “He doesn’t blame you. He certainly doesn’t hate you.” He is silent for a long moment, and Rose takes the moment to pull herself back together, but she still feels all jittery with caffeine and nerves and exhaustion. Vis a vis nothing, Dream says, “I was captured. Held prisoner. For over one hundred years.”
Rose stares and then says, perfunctory, “I’m sorry that happened to you.”
Dream’s eyes get all narrow and crinkly like he and Rose are sharing a joke. “I find I’m relieved to be able to tell someone,” he says, and before she can figure out if that was a joke, he’s moving on. “The man who bound me did so unintentionally. He was seeking my elder sister, Death.”
Rose can see now how this story might be relevant. Death is family, too. Bitterly, Rose supposes that’s not wholly unsurprising. She’s somewhat distracted by the minute tremble in Dream’s fingertips before he closes his hands. He continues, haltingly, tightly controlled and somehow paler in the face. “I was not harmed. But I was. Stripped. And put on display. And watched.”
That’s fucking awful, Rose doesn’t say, because he knows that, obviously, and because she doesn’t know why he’s telling her this, but she knows it isn’t to elicit sympathy.
Dream gathers himself, straightens in his seat, glances up to meet her eyes. “My sister, Death. In this modern age she appears to humans as a young Black woman.” He swallows hard. “There were times, in my captivity, when I would think about her. And I would be so unfathomably grateful that she was not in my position. Because it would have been so much worse.” Finally, he sighs, and he uncurls his hands, lets the tips of his fingers brush Rose’s across the table. “Jed cannot articulate this yet. But he feels much the same way.”
Rose pulls away from him, pushes herself from the table and to her feet. Overwhelmed, she turns from him, and she staggers with muffled footsteps across the room to look out the window at the purple-gray night, no different than how it began. “I don’t know how to help him.”
“What more could you possibly do?” Dream sounds amused, if exasperated, and like he hasn’t moved from the table. “He is safe, and he is loved. The rest is up to him.”
Should she be angry? She doesn’t know, she doesn’t know, she doesn’t know, God, none of this was ever explained to her. “Will I see you again?” and she doesn’t know why she asks that, either. “Was this a one-time thing?”
Dream’s presence has a feeling, and now it feels surprised, and it smells like nail polish. “It doesn’t have to be,” he says, quietly. “I have my responsibilities, and I cannot be away from my realm for long. But if you call me. I will answer.”
Condensation gathers on the windowsill whenever it rains and Rose isn’t sure how to fix it or if it’s even the type of issue that can be fixed, or needs to be fixed, or if it’s her responsibility at all. She draws her finger through the gathered drops, traces a heart, a star, a smiley face. “I think I need to go to bed.”
“I am inclined to agree,” Dream says, and he definitely sounds amused now. There’s a rustle of fabric. “If you should encounter Lucienne again. Do let her know that I made no conscious effort to terrorize you further.”
Rose snorts, then cackles. “She made you do this?”
“She did no such thing,” Dream goes on the defensive so easily. “She makes irrefutable arguments. That is all.” A slow, easy pause, and then, “Rose Walker. I do promise to keep you and Jed safe. I recognize you have little reason to believe me. I only…” A rare stumbling, so strange that Rose is tempted to turn around. “No matter. Sleep well, Rose Walker. And have mercy on yourself.”
There’s a shift of sand, the release of some pressure, and the apartment returns to normal. A glance down at the street sees Matthew also disappearing in a whorl of sand. She turns back to the table, tidies up Jed’s work into neat piles, clears away her coffee mug and wipes away what she spilled.
Slipping into bed, the last thing Rose thinks about is Unity, what she might have made of all this. The question is too difficult and Rose falls asleep before she can come up with an answer beyond the vague, immaterial inkling that perhaps Unity knew it all already.
Rose wakes the next morning to find Jed at the kitchen table, scrawling in his notebook, illustrating his tale of a conversation with the King of Dreams.