Spliced

Indi looked around the forest. Was this a dream? Or a nightmare?

It seemed peaceful enough, and so real. She pinched herself. Yup, definitely very real.

“I guess pinching yourself to check if you’re dreaming was just an old wives tale,” she said aloud to no one. There was no reply. The forest remained silent apart from the odd twitter of a bird or the rustle of the gentle wind.

Now what? Did she just wait for the dreamweaver to show up? Or should she walk around?

She stood still for a couple of seconds before deciding that waiting would be far too boring. So she picked a direction and started walking.

She’d gone barely a 100 metres when she thought she saw something out of the corner of her eye. There! A movement among the trees. But when she turned to look directly where it had been, there was nothing there. She shook her head and with a furrowed brow and a cautious step, she kept moving.

A few metres on there was another flash of something dark, just off to the right. A large shape, she was sure of it. But once again when she turned to look it was gone, and this time she wasn’t sure how it was hiding, for it had seemed far too big to be able to fit behind the trees, and there wasn’t much in the way of undergrowth in this part of the forest. The towering evergreens over her head suffocated anything else that tried to grow here.

She started moving again, faster this time. Pine needles crunched softly under her low-heeled boots.

A sixth sense told her something was following her. She spun once more. This time, standing among the trees, she saw a large wolf. Its coat was a jet black and its eyes were bright green.

For several seconds the two of them just stood staring at one another, then it turned and loped away. Indi waited but it didn’t seem like it was coming back and the feeling of being watched vanished with it. She turned and kept moving forward.

The forest barely changed and she started to wonder if it was infinite. Perhaps she should climb a tree and get a look around? Easy in theory, but a quick glance about, showed that was going to be much more difficult in practice. None of these trees had branches low enough and Indi had no idea how you were supposed to climb just the trunk of a tree.

She vaguely remembered a rule from school about what to do if you ever got lost in forest. You were supposed to hug a tree. Indi hadn’t understood what the hugging the tree part was supposed to do but she’d liked the idea of it so she’d never questioned it. It hadn’t been until much later that she’d realised that it was just a way to ensure that kids stayed where they were. It was easier to remember than ‘stay put.’ Still, the idea of hugging a tree was comforting in a way, it made her view of the forest far friendlier. At least it did until the howling sounded. There were two wolves at least, but far apart from one another. She paused and listened. It almost sounded like they were having a conversation. That thought was enough to calm her. It was perfectly natural, just creatures of the forest going about their business. One had already seen her and he hadn’t bothered her.

She wasn’t sure how far she’d gone when he showed up. Wolf, on all fours. She recognised him, or his dream duplicate she supposed, since he couldn’t possibly be here right? Unless he was dreamwalking too?

She knew it was him, although she didn’t know how. He looked like Wolf but then a lot of wolves looked like him. His fur was a touch lighter than that of the wolf she’d seen earlier and his eyes were brown rather than green. She wondered if the wolf she’d seen earlier had been a werewolf too? Or just an image from her mind?

She knew some of the things in here were real, like the dreamweaver, and she knew that some of the things in here could hurt her, but so could the mind, and belief played strange games when it mixed with magic.

“Wolf?” she asked as he approached. She wasn’t afraid. Nothing had tried to hurt her yet and he was too familiar.

He stopped before her. He was panting as if he had been running very fast. Then he gave what appeared to be a nod.

She waited for him to shift and when he didn’t she briefly reconsidered if it was him or not. But then she noticed the small pack he was wearing and she remembered that he couldn’t shift with his clothes. She turned her back to him.

She waited for what seemed like ages to her, but in reality was barely enough time to get changed, then she spun to face him.

But it wasn’t Wolf that stood before her anymore, at least not the Wolf she knew.

Gold-red eyes glowed back at her from behind a snarl lined with white and red paint. Streaks of colour coated the otherwise brown fur of the giant wolf that stood before her. It had grown almost four times in size and it’s face was drawn on exactly like that of circus clown.

Indi screamed, and then she ran.

Sometime earlier, back at his cabin, Wolf had been waiting for the spell to take effect, when suddenly Indi had vanished from the table.

“Ah, shit!” For a moment he’d held his breath hoping it was just his imagination or that she would reappear in a second or two. When she didn’t immediately come back, he leapt off his chair and got to collecting up the ingredients for a locator spell, hoping that she hadn’t gone very far. He compromised accuracy in favor of range and cast a spell that would give a direction or at least tell him if she was still on this plane of existence. As far as he knew, a body couldn’t just disappear into the dreamworld, but dreamwalkers could perform a form of teleportation. It was usually quite difficult and Wolf doubted that Indi had managed that on her first time dreamwalking, except if it wasn’t that then he had no idea what else it could be.

Locator spells were his specialty and he barely needed to glance at the book in order to perform this one. He was almost done when he reconsidered the spell he’d chosen. If she’d teleported herself via the dreamworld then it was unlikely that she’d gone far, in which case she should be close enough by for a more accurate spell. But it was too late to change his mind now. He had other ways of narrowing in on her location though.

On a blood-drawn rune before him, he spun a stick of obsidian and watched its movement slow until it settled toward east. It slowed quickly, which meant she was close.

He didn’t waste time with a second spell, instead he stripped his clothes off and shoved them into his travel sack. It fit tightly on him in wolf form and loosely in man form.

Once outside his cabin, he transformed into his four-legged self. Once he reached the rear and east-facing side of his cabin he paused to sniff the air. He caught the scent of a rabbit but not much else. No sign of Indi, which meant, while she was close, she wasn’t that close. He had other noses in the forest though, all he had to do was ask.

He sent up a blood-curdling howl, the sort that made witches latch their doors and windows and night, but which to a werewolf simply meant, ‘is anyone listening?’

He got a reply a few moments later, two in fact, one to the east and one to the west. He wasn’t surprised about the one to the west. It was in that direction that his pack’s cave lay, near the sea nestled among a denser forest than here, just north of the James’s farm, but south of the desert plains.

He sent his next question up in another howl. He described Indi and was even more surprised when he got at immediate and affirmative reply back from the wolf to the east. This time he recognised the timber of the voice. It was his own son, Jade. It was school hours, but that did not matter so much to the wolves. Most wolves grew up outside of witch society. If they went to school at all, it was usually just high school, and only so they could better understand the witch world. Wolf had fought his own parents tooth and claw to be able to go at a younger age. He had liked school, had liked the witches and magic, but he was the exception. Even his own kids only attended half their classes. Not every place allowed such inconsistent and disruptive behaviour. Wolf’s parents had had to ship him halfway across the continent to live with another pack in order to attend school. They were basically his own pack now, especially given they were also his ex-wife’s pack.

A few more howls and Wolf knew exactly where Indi was and that she was still in one piece. He raced through the forest, passing by Jade’s dark form on the way. The youngster carried a live rabbit between his teeth now, undoubtedly a present for Katrina and one of her spells.

Normally, Wolf might have stopped to give Jade a warning about the dangers of spell-casting, but right now, in an ironic twist of events, he was more worried about the effects of his own wayward spell-casting to stop for what only would have been a repeat of previous conversations anyway.

He found Indi not long after. She seemed fine and unworried. She even recognised him, and he was surprised with how happy that made him. He confirmed that it was indeed him with a nod, and then she turned, no doubt to give him privacy to shift.

He shifted and changed quickly, knowing her impatience would probably not let her keep turned away for long.

He’d half done up the button’s on his un-ironed half-stained shirt when she turned around to face him. He was about to speak when he noticed the look on her face. She wasn’t looking at him like she was happy to see him. Instead she looked terrified.

Then she screamed, turned, and sprinted as fast as she could away from him.

Thinking there was something terrifying behind him, Wolf turned, but he could see nothing but empty forest. He stared after her, watching as she nearly tripped over roots to get away from him.

“What?” he asked the empty forest in a confused tone.

Then he took off running after her, not bothering to shift form this time. Indi wasn’t that fast.

“Indi!” he called as he got closer. “Indi, stop. Why are you running?”

He made several more attempts at getting her to stop but she kept running. After a couple of glances back she eventually seemed to slow. Finally she came to a panting stop and she turned to face him with a wary look in her eyes.

He held up his hands and approached her slowly.

“Wolf?” she asked, as if she wasn’t sure it was him.

“Yeah, it’s me.”

Her eyes searched the nearby forest.

“What’s wrong? What happened?” he asked.

She started to take a deep breath as if to explain. For a moment the air seemed to get caught in her throat and Wolf worried he was going to have to run all the way back to his cabin for her inhaler. Then she sighed and resumed breathing normally. She still looked nervous.

“I... I don’t know. I think it was part of a nightmare... except this isn’t like what I expected at all. It’s so much more real.”

Wolf frowned. “You’re not dreaming, Indi.”

“I’m not?” She looked unsure.

“No.”

“So, what did I see before then?”

“I don’t know.”

“How do I know I’m not dreaming and you aren’t just my imagination?”

Wolf scratched his chin. He hadn’t had this problem before. And the difficult thing here was that Indi hadn’t dreamwalked before so how did he explain to her what it was supposed to feel like.

“Um...” He swallowed.

Indi, at least seemed to be calming down though. She peered at him cautiously. “You’re not going to turn into that thing again are you?”

“That thing?”

“Mmm...”

“Look, why don’t we go back to the cabin? Maybe familiar territory will help.”

Indi considered it and then nodded slowly. “Okay.”

She seemed disinclined to walk ahead of or even close to him though so Wolf took the lead. He glanced back every so often just to check she was still following. She regularly and nervously checked the surrounding forest as they walked and she kept her distance from him but she did follow him all the way back to the cabin.

Once they were both inside, and he was a safe distance on the other side of the room, she cautiously walked along the bookshelves, glancing warily between the contents there and Wolf.

“I thought it would look different,” she announced finally.

“It doesn’t look different because you’re not dreaming,” Wolf replied.

“That’s exactly what a dream Wolf would say though,” Indi insisted.

Wolf groaned. This was going to be harder than he thought. “Why would dream Wolf say that?”

“I don’t know. Why wouldn’t dream Wolf say that?”

Wolf studied her. She seemed serious and her breathing had gotten faster again. Perhaps he should call Amanda? But no, he could handle this. He just needed to explain to her what had happened in a logical manner. Logic always worked on Indi.

“Okay, look.” Wolf took a seat on his stool, hoping it might help her relax a little more. “You teleported. That’s what happened. I don’t know why but sometimes dreamwalkers can do that. The dreamworld lets them shift through space somehow, from one location to another. You know how dreamwalkers can move items through dreams. It’s a whole transport industry, you know that right, Indi?”

She nodded.

“Okay, well that’s what you did.”

“Why would I do that? I remember falling asleep... at least I think I fell asleep. I don’t know... I teleported?”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“But, I saw... I saw that thing.”

Wolf wasn’t sure what she had seen but whatever it was it didn’t matter. What mattered was convincing her that she wasn’t still dreaming. “It was probably just a remnant,” Wolf said, completely making up his answer on the spot. “Like a memory of your brief period in the dreamworld. Just an image that got pulled through with you.” For all he knew, maybe that was the truth.

“Just a remnant...” She considered it. “So the spell didn’t work? I didn’t manage to lure the dreamweaver in? Or any bad dreams?”

“No. And teleporting via the dreamworld is actually quite inefficient so we probably burned up all the energy we put in.”

She looked a lot calmer now. She even took a seat at the other end of the table.

Wolf turned toward his teacup cabinet. “How about I make us a cup of tea and we call it a day?”

Indi nodded.

Wolf turned his back on her.

Just as he was reaching for the cupboard, he heard her scream and the clatter as a stool fell to the floor.

He turned back to find her curled up in the corner, her shield up, and waving one of his spell preparation knives at the empty air.

“No! Stay back.” She swiped at nothing and then she whimpered. “I wanna wake up now. Wolf? Please! How do I wake up?”