“Psychopomp,” all three of them said at once.
“Do what now?” Skylar asked.
Brain.
Explode.
Skylar grasped my arm, looking up at me with excitement. “What is that, King?” He turned back to my gran. “Do I get one?” He pointed at Duchess.
Gran smiled. “I’m sure you will, dear. You’ll need a baby like this to help those lost souls torturing their victims in their sleep.”
His hold on me tightened painfully, head whipping back my direction. “Do what now?”
Elyse hummed from his other side. “Rosie and I had a nice little chat while you were out here. We’re both a little concerned with your lack of knowledge. You’ll be an instrumental part in keeping Kingston linked back to this world, as he will keep you linked back to the natural plane, but what you do while the victimized sleep will save them.”
Skylar’s whole body pushed into me like he wanted to climb into my lap. “I’m lost.” I kinda wanted him to. This was heavy stuff.
“Tell him about your dream last night, King,” Pops said.
Even as I said, “Do I have to?” I knew that I did. Gran kept going off on rabbit trails on our drive over, so she’d said enough for me to realize that my job as a Dreamwalker served the same type of purpose that Chance did here on his property and with other spirits he ran across.
The main difference being that, for the most part, he helped souls cross over as they were ready. Here and there, he’d have to vanquish evil like he’d done to the old owner of his home and the girl in the pond.
From what Gran said, I’d be facing down those who sounded like they’d been damned from the start and somehow maintained a connection to the living through an in-between in others’ sleep while not being able to haunt us like Buck or Harry or even my Pops.
Turning on the log, I skipped over the scary lady completely and told him some guy I didn't know was dreaming about him last night.
His face went through such a complicated range of emotions that I couldn’t decide if he was happy or mad, freaked out or excited, or maybe a little bit of all of them.
He waited patiently until I was done. “So you’re telling me that you’ve evolved from seeing things from the past to walking in real, live people’s thoughts as they’re dreaming?”
“It’s a little more complicated than that, son,” Pops said, causing a faint pink to dust Skylar’s cheeks. We all watched him fight to squash a small grin before Pops continued.
“There are levels of sleep, and it’s easy for someone to achieve goals, desires, or even hidden fantasies when they’re in a certain area of their mind when they fall asleep. That’s when a person’s guard comes down the most, and their spirit is the most open, so their actions in their dreams are actually what they want in their natural body, enacted in the spirit realm.”
Skylar’s jaw dropped. “That sounds scary. So you’re saying, we like, low-key die when we’re dreaming?”
Pops shook his head slowly, and a little unconvincingly, in my opinion. “No. Not really. But it’s like a place where your soul goes to work out its connection to the greater good…the goddess, the Universe, God, or whatever it is you believe.”
“Oh. Okay, did you know that?” Sky asked Elyse. She put her finger to her lip to silence him, then nodded at Pops to continue.
“It’s a place where your mind can recover, recalculate, escape reality, or begin weaving new ones. Hope happens in that place and, if you’re connected enough to your beliefs, can begin to manifest on this plane.”
“Okay, this is wild. Isn’t this wild?” Sky asked, looking up at me with wide eyes. “That’s not in any of the books Elyse bought me.”
She and Gran snickered, but Pops continued. “When a person encounters an entity stuck somewhere between death and accepting it, when they’re trapped in that realm where the living go during their rest, they’re a nightmare.”
This time, I gasped. Nightmare was an understatement. That lady spooked me out more than any horror movie ever had.
Pops frowned at me sadly. “From what we gathered over the years, it’s like, they’ve lost all sense of their humanity, so they’re angry and torture those they encounter who still have a chance at the life they’ve lost.”
Sklyar waved his hands around, like he needed the world to stop so he could catch up.Boy, did I get that. Then his lips curved down in disgust as his nose scrunched like he’d smelled something foul.
“So are you saying some yahoo we don’t even know was dreaming about me last night? That’s why I was there, right? Because whoever’s dream you were in had me there with him?”
I’d been shoving that unpleasant thought aside, but him asking point-blank brought me back face-to-face with the truth. Someone, a man, had been dreaming about redoing their home with Skylar—mySkylar. Nodding, I said, “That seems to be the case if we believe my grandparents.”
“Ew. I don’t like that at all. Not even a little bit.”
