Free Dreams’ Dark Kiss by Shirin Dubbin Page A

atrocities.
    But then, should’ve didn’t rank in the world of a Somnian. He pushed emotion aside. Good thing the job had made him practical. Doing what he could would have to suffice.
    A quick tug on the leg and the body plopped onto the cushions. The boy’s neck emitted the same sound as his father’s when the bones broke. But the sound was not the reason Keoni winced.
    Silence. The red-cloaked figure remained oblivious. If he didn’t know an ankou hid beneath the hood, the scene would appear cozy—a mother comforting a child.
    He crept closer unnoticed. What dark work prevented the creature from sensing a mortal enemy stalked from only a foot away?
    Keoni slowly rose above the love seat to check on the squad’s progress. Only three ankou remained. Good. He had time before the brahs sought him out.
    Stretching his senses while watching for any movement, Keoni reached out to the child and somehow connected with her. Only a strand still held her spirit to her body, but as he slipped deeper, he became entangled in the intersecting threads of her mind, fears of failure and of ridicule, woven into the spider’s web of a single nightmare. Mists like those found in the dreamscape, but grayed and viscous as slime folded over Keoni, sucking greedily at him until he’d been completely entombed in the child’s terror.
    A heartbeat, two, and the red cloak began a slow slither along the lines of the web. It reached out for him, the hem forming a tongue to taste his skin. Licks of fire met each flicker of the cloak’s edge. Keoni cursed it, straining at the web but the strands held. The cloak eased back, waving in the air, a crimson cobra with its hood extended. It darted forward, snaking around his chest in layer after layer, inching toward his head. When it finally covered his face, the true horror of the night played out, projected film-style onto the wrappings over his eyes. The little girl shared her story.
    Her name used to be Emma. She and her mother had sewn the cloak as a special project. They’d taken joy in their work and excitement from imagining the costume on the stage. Phantom echoes of their laughter rang through Keoni. The sound twisted more cords of nightmare around his struggling limbs and choked off his connection to everything else. Only Emma remained… She had won the lead in her school’s production of Little Red Riding Hood . The role thrilled and terrified her, but her mother assured her she’d be great. “The best Riding Hood evah,” and Emma believed, unable to see past her mother’s smiles into the pit of fear warping the woman’s every thought.
    Keoni lay paralyzed at the center of the web, the cloak squirming over his face and chest, stealing energy where it lapped his kami.
    A third consciousness wove its way into the threads tying Keoni to Emma’s fractured mind.
    Mommy spent her nights in terror—never able to turn her thoughts from the evening news and all the misfortunes befalling families each day. She worried constantly, and her anxiety gave a bane on the hunt an opening. It dug its claws into her soul and in time chewed its way into the Waking World. By then Mommy had become a twisted pit of affections, and she perverted so easily. So deliciously well.
    A fourth mind had joined the fray.
    Craziness. Too many minds rushed Keoni’s. The little girl, her mother and now the bane all commingled into a single twisted consciousness. Keoni could hear the bane’s voice. An actual vocalization of its intent. He hadn’t known banes wielded voices within the minds of their victims—snarled sounds made of howling winds and dank places. Keoni’s jaw hardened. An overload of thoughts converged on him at once. The sound repulsed him.
    He began to struggle again but the cloak wrapped tighter, pulling him back down into numbness. They weren’t done with him yet.
    The ankou who had once been a loving mother, Mommy, knew her family so well it hadn’t taken long to change them, to usurp their