Wakeworld by Kerry Schafer

like a poison. In that dream, where the dragon had been about to consume her, he had been complicit. And there was the other thing that he had done. Still, the jealousy boiled. “If you wanted something from me, you should have come without your boy toy.”
    “His name is Zee.”
    “We’ve met. I have no idea what you think I can do for you.”
    “We’re interested in your dreams,” Zee said. “Maybe you remember something about a Key.”
    “I don’t—I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He tried to push past Vivian, but Zee blocked his path.
    “You need to leave my house.”
    “I think you do know something about the Key, Jared. All you need to do is tell me where it is.”
    “I’m calling the cops.” Jared pulled out his cell phone, but Zee knocked it from his hand, casually, like a cat batting at a piece of string, and sent it sailing across the room.
    “It doesn’t really look like a key. More like a cylinder, made out of black stone.” Vivian was no longer shaking. The golden eyes burned, for all the world as though there were flames behind them. The pattern on her neck had darkened and spread down her arms and onto the backs of her hands.
    Panic built inside him. They were here to kill him. In the dream they were both killers, and now they had come to exact revenge for the crimes he had committed. In a dream.
    Vivian put her hand on his arm, her face puckering as though there were something slimy on his sleeve. “Let’s go.”
    “Go where?” The panic was alive now, beating at him, and he tried to twist away from her but Zee was right there, blocking him.
    A door appeared where no door should be, right in the middle of the sitting room. It was green, with a brass knob. For one thing, he would never have such a plebeian-looking thing in his house. For another, it hung in the middle of the air, not connected to anything.
    But Vivian opened it with her free hand, and through it he saw not the couch and the other side of his sitting room, but a thick forest with old-growth trees.
    “You’re going to show us what your dream self did with the Key,” Zee said.
    Jared wanted to say that he didn’t know what they were talking about but didn’t trust himself to speak, let alone to formulate a believable lie. Because everything they said was true. The minute that strange door opened, the dream memories seemed more real than this scenario playing out in his living room.
    And if those dream memories were true, if what he’d written off as nightmare was real, then he was in the sort of trouble from which there would be no coming back.

Seven

    Z ee wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting to find on the other side of the door, but it wasn’t this. The part with the trees was all right, even vaguely familiar. What was unexpected was the sudden weight of memory that didn’t belong to him.
    He knew full well that he’d never stood in a forest that looked anything like this one, populated by fairy-tale trees older than any tree had a right to be. Vines wrapped around their trunks; sheets of gray-green moss hung down over their branches. The undergrowth was thick and impenetrable, save for one path wending its way between the massive trunks. He caught himself expecting the sudden appearance of Ents.
    Jared twisted his arm free of Vivian’s grip and began puking up his guts into some bushes. Zee watched without sympathy, entertaining the image of his sword at the man’s throat. One swift cut and whatever the asshole had done to hurt Vivian was avenged. Except that dead Jared was of absolutely no use to anybody, and it probably wasn’t fair to punish a man for what he’d done in his dreams, asshole or not.
    “What is it?” Vivian asked, her hand on his arm, gray eyes wide with concern, and Zee realized that he had forgotten to hide his own distress.
    “It feels like I’ve been here before; done things here before. But that isn’t possible.”
    “The Warlord,” she said, matter-of-fact.